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Beloved writer Alfred Gibson's funeral is taking place at Westminster Abbey, and Dorothea, his wife of twenty years has not been invited. Gibson's will favours his many children and secret mistress over Dorothea - who was sent away from the family home when their youngest was still an infant. Dorothea has not left her apartment in years, but when she receives a surprise invitation to a private audience with Queen Victoria, she is shocked to find she has much in common with Her Highness. With renewed confidence Dorothea is spurred to examine her past and confront not only her family but the pretty young actress Miss Ricketts.
When the writer, Oxford scholar and photographer John Jameson visits the home of his vicar friend, he is entranced by Daisy, his youngest daughter. Jameson charms her with his wit and child-like imagination, teasing her with riddles and inventing humorous stories as they enjoy afternoons alone by the river and in his rooms. The shocking impact of this unusual friendship is only brought to light when, years later, Daisy, unsettled in her marriage, rediscovers her childhood diaries hidden in an old toy chest. Inspired by the tender and troubling friendship between Lewis Carroll and Alice Liddell, After Such Kindness demonstrates Gaynor Arnold's extraordinary 'capacity to imagine the truth behind the facts'. With the same assured feel for the Victorian period displayed in her prize-listed debut, Arnold brings to scintillating life an idiosyncratic genius and his timeless muse.
Sparkling with sympathy, style and wit, this debut collection is populated with characters looking for new life. The two desperately optimistic lovers of the title story head out on the road in the first days of release from a rehab clinic. A childless wife is drawn back into the orbit of her charismatic old flame when her best friend asks for her help. In a wartime cafe, a waitress takes a passionate interest in a bookish and haunted stranger. Stretching effortlessly from Paris to inner-city Birmingham, from the present day to the 1940s, these stories explore the daily misunderstandings and self-deceits, the secrets and lies that seep into all our lives. Gaynor Arnold brings the same empathy and social worker's insight to Lying Together that she previously shone on the marriage of Charles Dickens in Girl in a Blue Dress. Versatile and provocative, her new collection confirms the arrival of a natural storyteller with a rich understanding of the human heart.
An anthology of 22 stories set in the West Midlands and written by past and present members of the influential Tindal Street Fiction Group. Some authors ( e.g. Annie Murray, Amanda Smyth, Alan Beard, Gaynor Arnold, Joel Lane, Mick Scully, Mez Packer, Jackie Gay) are published novelists or story-writers. Others like Sibyl Ruth, Charles Wilkinson, Roz Goddard and Polly Wright are better-known as poets or dramatists. Fiona Joseph has written biography, Julia Bell writes teenage fiction and Luke Brown and Kavita Bhanot have both been editors as well as writers. New names included are Kit de Waal, Natalie White, James B Goodwin, Anthony Ferner, Georgina Bruce and Ryan Davis. Thje title story by Mick Scully has been chosen by Nicholas Royle for 'Best Short Stories of 2013'.
The epitome of East Coast glamour, Tiger House is where the beautiful and the damned have always come to play in summer, scene of martinis and moonlit conspiracies, and newly inherited by the sleek, beguiling Nick. The Second World War is just ending, her cousin Helena has left in search of married bliss in Hollywood, and Nick's husband is coming home. Everything is about to change. Their children will surprise them. One summer, on the cusp of adolescence, Nick's daughter and Helena's son make a sinister discovery that plunges the island's bright heat into private shadow.
"The dream space", writes Sheldon Annis, "is the reflective experience of encountering yourself within a museum". In Memory and the Museum, Gaynor Kavanaugh argues that "dream spaces" are the point at which our inner and outer experiences meld. During the museum visit, memory and the present cease to be disparate but fuse into one singular experience. Drawing from such fields as behavioral gerontology, applied psychology, and historiography, Kavanaugh employs research from North America, Australia, and Europe to provide a critical and conceptual exploration into museums and the mind.
This Pivot examines a body of contemporary neo-Victorian novels whose uneasy relationship with the past can be theorised in terms of aggressive eating, including cannibalism. Not only is the imagery of eating repeatedly used by critics to comprehend neo-Victorian literature, the theme of cannibalism itself also appears overtly or implicitly in a number of the novels and their Victorian prototypes, thereby mirroring the cannibalistic relationship between the contemporary and the Victorian. Tammy Lai-Ming Ho argues that aggressive eating or cannibalism can be seen as a pathological and defining characteristic of neo-Victorian fiction, demonstrating how cannibalism provides a framework for understanding the genre’s origin, its conflicted, ambivalent and violent relationship with its Victorian predecessors and the grotesque and gothic effects that it generates in its fiction.
Highlighting neo-Victorian biofiction’s crucial role in reimagining and augmenting the historical archive, this volume explores the complex ethical consequences of a creative movement of historiographic revisionism, combining biography and fiction in a dialectic tension of empathy and voyeuristic spectacle.
Drama Characters: 3male, 2female Interior Set Jimmy and Ian share a flat. Jimmy is "straight"; and Ian is "not". Neither are very "gay". One night Jimmy brings a girl home. He tries to get Ian and his friend to go out so he can have some privacy but Ian refuses. In fact, he gets very angry, leading to a fight. Jimmy's mother comes to visit Ian, and there ensues a mutual sexual attraction, which is consummated. The mother tries to get Ian to go to bed with her again; b