Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
A Stinging Delight
The third son of a coalminer, David Storey takes us from his tough upbringing in Wakefield, to being 'sold' to Leeds Rugby League Club, to his escape to the Slade School of Art and his life in post-war London. He describes shocking scenes in the seventeen deprived East End schools in which he taught. He documents the childhood death of his eldest brother, addressing much of the memoir to him and exploring how this relates to his own sometimes paralysing depression, which haunted most of his life. And yet, a prolific and celebrated writer, he recalls heady spells in New York, close relationships in the theatre with Joycelyn Herbert, Ralph Richardson and Lindsay Anderson, early success with This Sporting Life, and winning the Booker Prize for his novel Saville.
Saville
Colin Saville grows up in a mining village in South Yorkshire, against the background of war, of an industrialised countryside, of town and coalmine and village.
Home
One works. One looks around. One meets people. But very little communication takes place . . . That is the nature of this little island. As five apparently unrelated characters meet in a seemingly insignificant garden, the autumnal sun shines overhead and everybody waits for rain. What they discuss is superficially anything that can pass the time. What is portrayed is the very essence of England, Englishness, class, unfulfilled ambition, loves lost and homes that no longer exist. Storey's timeless play is a beautiful, compassionate, tragic and darkly funny study of the human mind and a once-great nation coming to terms with its new place in the world.
Life Class
Depicts a crucial day in the life of an art school teacher named Allott, as he aims to lead his class through the processes of discovery that will turn their sketches into artworks, but which instead lead only to troubling scenes and crossed boundaries.
This Sporting Life
A rugby player finds fame and fortune in a bleak mining town, but he cannot outrun the emptiness he feels inside in Man Booker Prize–winning author David Storey’s seminal first novel On Christmas Eve, Arthur breaks his two front teeth. A teammate on the rugby pitch is too slow with a handoff, and instead of catching the ball, Art catches an opponent’s foot right in the mouth. When he regains consciousness, the match is almost over, but he keeps playing regardless. Where else would he go? His entire life, Art has only cared about sports and nothing grabs his attention quite like the lightning-fast violence of Rugby League. He knows it could kill him, but it also makes him feel alive. In this hard-bitten Yorkshire mining town, the warriors of the rugby pitch are treated like gods. Through the aggressive sport, Art finds money, friends, and countless women. But when his lust for violence begins to fade, will he have the courage to leave the game behind?
Pasmore
A teacher oppressed by the futility of everyday life embarks on a dark affair in this extraordinary novel that won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize In his dreams, Colin Pasmore runs an endless race. No matter how hard he pumps his legs, he loses—and not just to other runners, but to every “dullard and idler” in England. Every morning, he wakes up screaming in terror. His life should be joyful; he has a lovely wife, healthy children, and a comfortable job. But as he approaches thirty, Pasmore feels the walls closing in. He must find a way out before ordinary existence suffocates him. In a desperate attempt to escape his routine, Pasmore rents a small room in London, intending to use it for an affair. But adultery does nothing to lessen his burden. As misery threatens to consume his soul, Pasmore will ask himself if any life—even a happy one—is worth living.
The Farm
None
The Plays of David Storey
This is the first comprehensive play-by-play analysis of the drama of David Storey, one of the most acclaimed and innovative, sometimes controversial, writers in the British theatre since World War II. Grouping the plays according to theme, Hutchings demonstrates that the central focus in the drama of David Storey is the devaluation of traditional rituals in contemporary life and the disintegration of the family. A playwright attuned to the poetry in the ordinary, to the profundity, subtle eloquence, and dramatic tension in the mundane, Storey explores the ways people cope, or fail to cope, with complexity, with uncertainty, with constant, bewildering flux. He writes about groups—families ...
A Serious Man
As playwright, painter and novelist, Richard Fenchurch has been both successful and rich, but now, in his mid-sixties, he's beginning to fall apart: again. His daughter plucks him from the squalor of his London house and installs him in the old family home, the mansion where he courted his first wife. Here, in a familiar house and in a changed though recognisable landscape, Fenchurch struggles to keep his grip on freedom and sanity, and allows himself to relax into memory. Time is catching up with him, but it is memory that produces the more startling revelation. Fenchurch's love for his wife was real enough - it was a successful marriage as these things go - but the old surroundings, both the building and the land itself, bring back to him the irresistibly ardent drive of his passionate affair with Isabella, his fiancée's mother. Returning to fiction after fourteen years, David Storey has created both a sharply comic vision of the indignities of age and a delicately erotic evocation of a youthful and dangerous affair.
The Dramatic Art of David Storey
The only book to treat in detail all the plays of contemporary English playwright David Storey, this study focuses on the major themes found in his work: the worlds of madness, work, and the family. Storey's developing technique as a dramatist is closely examined and attention is given to his experimental concerns. In addition, Liebman identifies relationships between Storey's fiction and his drama, highlighting how similar themes and characters appear in both his novels and his plays. The study also includes discussion of contemporary thinking on Storey by scholars, critics, and theatre professionals.
