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As much about learning a language as it is about nature, this dignified and nuanced memoir of the author's stay on the remote Hokkaido island in the far north of Japan evokes what is cultured and cultivated, and yet also honours the wild; the untranslatable.
Winner of the 2015 New Welsh Writing Awards: WWF Cymru Prize for Writing on Nature and the Environment Shortlisted for the 2016 Wales Book of the Year: The Open University in Wales Creative Non-Fiction Award 'Eluned Gramich has written the perfect essay - a minutely detailed yet nuanced evocation of place and personalities that is full of ecologically precise imagery and is as attentive to the Japanese language as it is to Hokkaidan landscape.' – Mark Cocker As precise and nuanced as Japanese calligraphy, this memoir of the author's stay on the remote Hokkaido island in the far north of Japan, has at its heart the mountain, Yotei-san, the region's iconic equivalent to Mount Fuji. As much a...
Kelinu waits for his telegram from the Queen of England. He has a few years to go but he'll wait. His niece thinks he's a fool. He was in the service of the Queen only a year, all those years ago. Times have changed. In these stories people strive to make a place, a living, a life with meaning in a new country or sense in an old one: from zero hour contracts in Bridgend and Munich to scraping a living as a mermaid on the streets of Barcelona. A woman tends a beautiful garden she knows will be taken away from her while another sends her child to a school concert dressed as a dinosaur. A man attends one more demonstration while another explains to his daughter where he is really from. In this diverse and fascinating anthology, writers from across Europe embark on a journey of independence and belonging.
"What does it mean to have a connection with someone? You see hundreds of people everyday. Everyday you overhear countless conversations. You pass people by on the street, in the office, in cafes and bars, in hotels and department stores. But what makes one person a stranger, and another a friend, an accomplice, even a lover? This is the question these brilliant short stories try to answer. A traveler shuts himself up in his hotel room ; a teenager stalks her long-lost father ; a journalist interviews a great poet with a dark past ; a woman pursues a doomed liaison with an anonymous man she meets once a month at the casino ... These are just some of the tales exploring the mysteries of human relationships. From the winner of the prestigious Robert Walser First Novel Award and Switzerlands Schiller Foundation Writers Prize, Goldfish Memory is the first translation of Monique Schwitter's form-breaking work. With a contemporary style that's cool, quick and funny, this collection is a refreshing new voice, not to be missed"--Back cover.
Original tales by remarkable writers Hometown Tales is a series of books pairing exciting new voices with some of the most talented and important writers at work today. Some of the tales are fiction and some are narrative non-fiction - they are all powerful, fascinating and moving, and aim to celebrate regional diversity and explore the meaning of home. In these pages on Wales, you'll find two unique short stories. 'Last Seen Leaving' is a gripping account of the days following the disappearance of a local man by award-winning writer Tyler Keevil. 'The Lion and the Star' by Eluned Gramich is a vivid retelling of the Welsh language protests that electrified Cardiganshire in the 1970s and the impact of the protests on ordinary lives.
Nineteen compelling and varied short stories by writers born or living in wals. With widely differing approaches to form and style, this is a confident selection of superb new stories from up-and-coming, established, and award-winning writers.
Recipient of a Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation Award. 'My Falling Down House is a masterpiece' – Anne Janowitz. 'This is a novel for anyone who has had a setback in life; for anyone who ever thought of escaping reality and retreating into the shadowy imagination. A beautiful exploration of identity by a hugely talented writer.' – Eluned Gramich Set in contemporary Japan... it simultaneously speaks to contemporary globalizing society at large. A remarkable achievement.' – Sho Konishi, Professor in Modern Japanese History, University of Oxford. Having lost his job and his home, Takeo Tanaka, a young Japanese man, takes refuge in a dilapidated wood and paper house. He sets himself proje...
When the author is given a small package, containing letters and papers relating to his grandfathers brother, who was killed in Syria during the Second World War, it leads him on an extended personal journey. An exploration of history, imagination and the process of memory, shiftingimperceptibly from autobiography to travelogue, from letters and diaries to official records.
'If the mountains secluded Wales from England, the long coastline was like an open door to the world at large.' – Jan Morris The history of Wales as a destination and confection of English Romantic writers is well-known, but this book reverses the process, turning a Welsh gaze on the rest of the world. This shift is timely: the severing of Britain from the European Union asks questions of Wales about its relationship to its own past, to the British state, to Europe and beyond, while the present political, public health and environmental crises mean that travel writing can and should never again be the comfortably escapist genre that it was. Our modern anxieties over identity are registered...
Original tales by remarkable writers Hometown Tales is a series of books pairing exciting new voices with some of the most talented and important writers at work today. Some of the tales are fiction and some are narrative non-fiction - they are all powerful, fascinating and moving, and aim to celebrate regional diversity and explore the meaning of home. In these pages on Wales, you'll find two unique short stories. 'Last Seen Leaving' is a gripping account of the days following the disappearance of a local man by award-winning writer Tyler Keevil. 'The Lion and the Star' by Eluned Gramich is a vivid retelling of the Welsh language protests that electrified Cardiganshire in the 1970s and the impact of the protests on ordinary lives.