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Love Song to Lavender Menace
In 1982, two friends Bob and Sigrid opened their new radical lesbian, gay and feminist bookshop, 'Lavender Menace' on Edinburgh's Forth Street. On the eve of the shop's 5th birthday, sales assistants Paul and David take a look back at its origins, in this funny, moving play. Cast your mind back to 1982 - Margaret Thatcher sends the British Fleet to the Falklands, Channel 4 comes to the living room and Prince William is born. But this play has nothing to do with all that. This play is about activism, community and fighting for acceptance with words, music, humour and heart. The play looks back at 1982, as Bob and Sigrid open their shop. A trailblazing venture that began life in the cloakroom ...
Along Heroic Lines
A selection of new and revised essays from eminent scholar and critic Professor Christopher Ricks. Christopher Ricks brings together new as well as substantially augmented critical essays across a wide range. Several derive from his term as the Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford, when his inaugural lecture engaged with the illuminatingly puzzled relations between poetry and prose. Comparison and analysis (the tools of the critic, as T.S. Eliot insisted) are enlivened by imaginative pairings: of Samuel Johnson with Samuel Beckett, of Norman Mailer with Dickens, of Shakespeare with George Herbert, or of secret-police surveillance in Ben Jonson's Rome with that of Carmen Bugan's Romania. Along Heroic Lines devotes itself to the heroic and to 'heroics' (Othello cross-examined by T.S. Eliot; Byron and role-playing; Ion Bugan, political protest and arrest). This knot is in tension with the English heroic line (Dryden's heroic triplets, Henry James's cadences, Geoffrey Hill's concluding book of prose-poems and how they choose to conclude). All alert to the balance and sustenance of alternate tones that prose and poetry can achieve in harmony.
The Critic in the Modern World
The Critic in the Modern World explores the work of six influential literary critics—Samuel Johnson, William Hazlitt, Matthew Arnold, T.S. Eliot, Lionel Trilling and James Wood—each of whom occupies a distinct historical moment. It considers how these representative critics have constructed their public personae, the kinds of arguments they have used, and their core principles and philosophies. Spanning three hundred years of cultural history, The Critic in the Modern World considers the various ways in which literary critics have positioned themselves in relation to the modern tradition of descriptive criticism. In providing a lucid account of each critic's central principles and philosophies, it considers the role of the literary critic as a public figure, interpreting him as someone who is compelled to address the wider issues of individualism and the social implications of the democratising, secularising, liberalising forces of modernity.
Wilf
My story is about love... No, it's about loss... No, it's about love and loss and pain and loneliness... But it's funny! Calvin is going to completely revolutionise his life. Escape his abusive boyfriend, detonate his inner sex bomb, see (and shag) the world. Yes, he's going to change things, and everything will be wonderful, and he's going to be so happy. Definitely. Finally. Right? Together with Wilf, a rusty Volkswagen Polo which, like Calvin, has seen better days, they hit the road on a wild ride of dodgy Airbnbs, greasy takeaways, anonymous graveyard sex and banging 80s power ballads - ending up somewhere they never imagined they'd go. But is Calvin breaking free, breaking down, or just breakdancing in hot pants? This riotous and heartfelt new play from James Ley (Love Song to Lavender Menace) takes audiences on a hilarious and unapologetic ride through Scotland as Calvin and Wilf attempt to escape loneliness, cope with mental illness and learn to love themselves, with the help of one another. This edition was published alongside the production at Traverse Theatre for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in August 2022.
Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles
“The great poems, plays, novels, stories teach us how to go on living. . . . Your own mistakes, accidents, failures at otherness beat you down. Rise up at dawn and read something that matters as soon as you can.” So Harold Bloom, the most famous literary critic of his generation, exhorts readers of his last book: one that praises the sustaining power of poetry. "Passionate. . . . Perhaps Bloom’s most personal work, this is a fitting last testament to one of America’s leading twentieth-century literary minds."—Publishers Weekly “An extraordinary testimony to a long life spent in the company of poetry and an affecting last declaration of [Bloom's] passionate and deeply unfashionabl...
The Ego Plays
Includes the plays Spain, I Heart Maths and Up The theme of self-indulgence unites the three plays in The Ego Plays collection. At the heart of each is a gay man asking a lot of questions... about himself. These questions range from scientififIc and philosophical musings to angst-ridden pleas for enlightenment. They come from men who have become so trapped in their own situations that they can no longer successfully connect with the outside world. Up is a play about despair, I Heart Maths is a play about love and Spain is a play about moving on. Together they present the cognitive processes of three men who have allowed personal problems to grow to monstrous proportions. In each of these plays excessive self analysisleads to the main characters taking desperate measures, though frequently also leading to humorous consequences. But while these plays are comedies, exploring the perils of taking oneself too seriously, they are not intended to be cruel. Instead they set their characters free by making their worst fears come true and then taking them somewhere new.
The Living Sea of Waking Dreams
From the acclaimed Booker Prize-winning author comes a dazzling novel of family, love and love's disappointments Anna's aged mother is dying. Condemned by her children's pity to living, subjected to increasingly desperate medical interventions, she turns her focus to her hospital window, through which she escapes into visions of horror and delight. When Anna's finger vanishes and a few months later her knee disappears, Anna too feels the pull of the window. She begins to see that all around her, others are similarly vanishing, yet no one else notices. All Anna can do is keep her mother alive. But the window keeps opening wider, taking Anna and the reader ever deeper into an eerily beautiful story of grief and possibility, of loss and love and orange-bellied parrots. Hailed on publication in Australia as Richard Flanagan's greatest novel yet, The Living Sea of Waking Dreams is a rising ember storm illuminating what remains when the inferno beckons: one part elegy, one part dream, one part hope.
Place/Culture/Representation
Spatial and cultural analysis have recently found much common ground, focusing in particular on the nature of the city. Place/Culture/Representation brings together new and established voices involved in the reshaping of cultural geography. The authors argue that as we write our geographies we are not just representing some reality, we are creating meaning. Writing becomes as much about the author as it is about purported geographical reality. The issue becomes not scientific truth as the end but the interpretation of cultural constructions as the means. Discussing authorial power, discourses of the other, texts and textuality, landscape metaphor, the sites of power-knowledge relations and notions of community and the sense of place, the authors explore the ways in which a more fluid and sensitive geographer's art can help us make sense of ourselves and the landscapes and places we inhabit and think about.
The Australian Face
The Sydney Review of Books is Australia's leading space for longform literary criticism. Now celebrating five years online, the SRB has published more than five hundred essays by almost two hundred writers. To mark this occasion, The Australian Face collects some of the best essays published in the SRB on Australian fiction, poetry and non-fiction. The essays in this anthology are contributions to the ongoing argument about the condition and purpose and evolving shape of Australian literature. They reflect the ways in which discussions about the state of the literary culture are constantly reaching beyond themselves to consider wider cultural and political issues. The Sydney Review of Books ...
