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Hannah Lavery's Unwritten Woman is a bold and lavish call for us to see the woman in the stories we read and tell ourselves. From her search for the story, in her home city, Edinburgh, through her chilling re-telling of Robert Louis Stevenson's Jekyll & Hyde, elevating the women in that classic tale from being written between the lines, to the woman of colour, shouting from the sidelines of our cultural landscape.
'No problem here pal. None at all.ʼ In the early hours of the morning, thirty-one-year-old Sheku Bayoh set out to walk home from his friend's place after watching a boxing match. Just hours later, he had lost his life in police custody. Lament for Sheku Bayoh is a poetic expression of grief for the human behind the headlines and a non-apologetic reflection on racism in Scotland today. 'Timely and necessary' The Stage, 5 Stars
From Hannah Lavery, Edinburgh's Makar. 'Speaks to and for the conflicted conscience of Scotland ... with a power and authenticity like perhaps no other' – The Scotsman In a moment that is demanding you to constantly choose your side, how do you find your humanity, your own voice, when you are being pushed to find safety in numbers? Blood Salt Spring is a meditation on where we are – exploring ideas of nation, race and belonging. Much of the collection was written in lockdown and speaks to that moment, the isolation and the traumas of 2020 but it also looks to find some meaning and makes an attempt to heal the pain and vulnerabilities that were picked and cut open again in the recent cult...
“The queer memoir you’ve been waiting for”—Carmen Maria Machado Grace Lavery is a reformed druggie, an unreformed omnisexual chaos Muppet, and 100 percent, all-natural, synthetic female hormone monster. As soon as she solves her “penis problem,” she begins receiving anonymous letters, seemingly sent by a cult of sinister clowns, and sets out on a magical mystery tour to find the source of these surreal missives. Misadventures abound: Grace performs in a David Lynch remake of Sunset Boulevard and is reprogrammed as a sixties femmebot; she writes a Juggalo Ghostbusters prequel and a socialist manifesto disguised as a porn parody of a quiz show. Or is it vice versa? As Grace fumbles toward a new trans identity, she tries on dozens of different voices, creating a coat of many colors. With more dick jokes than a transsexual should be able to pull off, Please Miss gives us what we came for, then slaps us in the face and orders us to come again.
Psychotherapy across distance and time, from Freud’s treatments by mail to crisis hotlines, radio call-ins, chatbots, and Zoom sessions. Therapy has long understood itself as taking place in a room, with two (or more) people engaged in person-to-person conversation. And yet, starting with Freud’s treatments by mail, psychotherapy has operated through multiple communication technologies and media. These have included advice columns, radio broadcasts, crisis hotlines, video, personal computers, and mobile phones; the therapists (broadly defined) can be professional or untrained, strangers or chatbots. In The Distance Cure, Hannah Zeavin proposes a reconfiguration of the traditional therape...
A follow up to the immensely popular #UntitledOne and #UntitledTwo. This year's anthology gives us more of the promising and established names in British poetry who have all shared the Neu! Reekie! bill. Many of the works are new, many are favourites read at the events; all are savoured, sublime, sumptuous voices within poetry already.
Hope is a superpower. Running is Alice's happy place – you might even say it's in her DNA. She's the best runner at her school but is struggling to prove her worth. Jade is slowly coming to realise that prejudices can be found everywhere, even in the most surprising places. Realising that her education is ill-equipped to encompass her own history and heritage, and taunted by bullies at school, she knows it's time to tell her own story. Meanwhile, litter is piling up in the local forest, and all over the world an environmental crisis is looming. Chloe is determined to make a change, starting with the town. Three girls prepare to stand up for what they believe in despite the injustices stacked against them in this new play exploring what it takes to make a difference, the power of friendship, and the importance of believing in your own voice. Co-commissioned by Fuel, Imaginate and Northern Stage. Developed and supported by the Scottish Government's Festivals Expo Fund and Imaginate's Accelerator programme. Protest is published in Methuen Drama's Plays for Young People series which offers suitable plays for young performers and audiences at schools, youth groups, and youth theatres.
Trying to make a home in the midst of an environmental disaster, Caro, her younger half-brother, and High House's caretaker and his daughter fight to stay alive as the rising waters threaten to engulf the whole town.
Winner of an Eric Gregory Award, 2020 Winner of a Somerset Maugham Award, 2020 'The old Shetland fishermen still speak with something like reverence of the forgotten art of steering by the moder dy (mother wave), the name given to an underswell which it is said always travels in the direction of home' Written in English, interspersed with Shetlandic dialect throughout, this eagerly awaited debut collection from Shetland poet Roseanne Watt contains profound, assured and wilfully spare poems that are built from the sight, sound and heartbeat of the land as much as from the sea. In rigorously controlled, concise, and vivid language Watt offers glimpses of the landscape alongside which we find the most complex and mysterious of human experiences.
Young Elizabeth Shand, newly married to the unstable but handsome Hector, finds herself in the social, intellectual and spiritual strait-jacket of small-town life early in the 20th century.