You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
What makes one poem better than another? Do Christians have an obligation to strive for excellence in the arts? While orthodox Christians are generally quick to affirm the existence of absolute truth and absolute goodness, even many within the church fall prey to the postmodern delusion that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder." This book argues that Christian doctrine in fact gives us a solid basis on which to make aesthetic judgments about poetry in particular and about the arts more generally. The faith once and for all delivered unto the saints is remarkable in its combined emphasis on embodied particularity and meaningful transcendence. This unique combination makes it the perfect starting place for art that speaks to who we are as creatures made for eternity.
What makes one poem better than another? Do Christians have an obligation to strive for excellence in the arts? While orthodox Christians are generally quick to affirm the existence of absolute truth and absolute goodness, even many within the church fall prey to the postmodern delusion that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” This book argues that Christian doctrine in fact gives us a solid basis on which to make aesthetic judgments about poetry in particular and about the arts more generally. The faith once and for all delivered unto the saints is remarkable in its combined emphasis on embodied particularity and meaningful transcendence. This unique combination makes it the perfect starting place for art that speaks to who we are as creatures made for eternity.
**SOON TO BE A MAJOR FILM STARRING HELENA BONHAM-CARTER** FROM THE WALTER SCOTT PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF THE GALLOWS POLE COMES A POWERFUL NEW NOVEL A TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR _______________________ 'What a radical thing, these days, to have written a book so full of warmth and kindness ... Gorgeous' - Max Porter, author of Lanny 'Glorious ... Leaves an indelible impression ... A moving and subtle novel in many ways, infused with a love of the minute pleasures in life, and the lasting regrets' – Scotland on Sunday _______________________ One summer following the Second World War, Robert Appleyard sets out on foot from his Durham village. Sixteen and the son of a coal miner, he makes his way ...
____________________ The inspiration for the BBC TV series, directed by Shane Meadows and starring Tom Burke, George MacKay and Thomas Turgoose WINNER OF THE 2018 WALTER SCOTT PRIZE ____________________ 'Powerful, visceral writing, historical fiction at its best. Benjamin Myers is one to watch' - Pat Barker 'Phenomenal' - Sebastian Barry 'Superb' - The Times ____________________ From his remote moorland home, David Hartley assembles a gang of weavers and land-workers to embark upon a criminal enterprise that will capsize the economy and become the biggest fraud in British history. They are the Cragg Vale Coiners and their business is 'clipping' – the forging of coins, a treasonous offence punishable by death. When an excise officer vows to bring them down and with the industrial age set to change the face of England forever, Hartley's empire begins to crumble. Forensically assembled, The Gallows Pole is a true story of resistance and a rarely told alternative history of the North. ____________________ 'One of my books of the year ... It's the best thing Myers has done' - Robert Macfarlane, Big Issue Books of the Year
WINNER OF THE GORDON BURN PRIZEAn unflinching portrait of contemporary Traveller culture by the award-winning author of The Gallows PoleJohn-John wants to escape his past. But the legacy of brutality left by his boxer father, King of the Gypsies, Mac Wisdom, overshadows his life. His new job as an ice cream man should offer freedom, but instead pulls him into the dark recesses of a northern town where his family name is mud. When he attempts to trade prejudice and parole officers for the solace of the rural landscape, Mac's bloody downfall threatens John-John's very survival.
Poems.
'Ben Myers is the master of English rural noir, and with Turning Blue, he has created a whole new genre: folk crime ... this is by turns gripping, ghastly and unputdownable' PAUL KINGSNORTHIn the depths of winter in an isolated Yorkshire hamlet, a teenage girl, Melanie Muncy, is missing.The elite detective unit Cold Storage dispatches its best man to investigate. DI Jim Brindle may be obsessive, taciturn and solitary, but nobody on the force is more relentless in pursuing justice. Local journalist Roddy Mace has sacrificed a high-flying career as a reporter in London to take up a role with the local newspaper. For him the Muncy case offers the chance of redemption.Darker forces are at work than either man has realised. On a farm high above the hamlet, Steven Rutter, a destitute loner, harbours secrets that will shock even the hardened Brindle. Nobody knows the bleak moors and their hiding places better than him.As Brindle and Mace begin to prise the secrets of the case from the tight-lipped locals, their investigation leads first to the pillars of the community and finally to a local celebrity who has his own hiding places, and his own dark tastes.
'One of the most singular, moving and crucial voices of our times' David PeaceIn Male Tears, a debut collection of stories that brings together over fifteen years of work, Benjamin Myers lays bare the male psyche in all its fragility, complexity and failure, its hubris and forbidden tenderness. Farmers, fairground workers and wandering pilgrims, gruesome gamekeepers, bare-knuckle boxers and ex-cons with secret passions, the men that populate these unsettling, wild and wistful stories form a multi-faceted, era-spanning portrait of just what it means to be a man.
Rowan Williams is a complex, creative and versatile thinker. Not only a theologian and church leader, he is also a poet, a translator, a literary critic, a social theorist and historian. His imaginative vision brings together the streams of modern literature, patristic theology, Russian orthodoxy, German philosophy and Welsh piety. In this lucid and elegant guide, Benjamin Myers explores Williams' thought from the 1960s to the present. He shows that Williams has developed an immensely resourceful - and distinctively Christian - response to some of the major social, moral and intellectual challenges of our time.
A Los Angeles Times Book Review Best Book of 1996 'Without books how could I have become myself?' In this wonderfully written meditation, Lynne Sharon Schwartz offers deeply felt insight into why we read and how what we read shapes our lives. An enchanting celebration of the printed word.