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Fear Not
Poet Stephen James Smith's sympathies lie with the addicted and the convicted, often responding to what he finds on life's margins. His sharp-edged forceful language derives from his gifts as a performance poet and his fearlessness in looking into the eye of his subject matter. His poems get their charge, as well as their shape and substance, from his use of demotic rhythms, the vividness of his vernacular and his emotional directness.
The Boy in the Cellar
Stephen Smith is the boy who did not exist. Born out of wedlock in the early 1960s, Steve's parents hid him away from the world by locking him in the cellar...for thirteen years. Starved and beaten, the little boy's world was a darkened room that measured just eight feet by ten with a single makeshift bed, bare light bulb, and a solitary table. Steve would spend his days conjuring up an imaginary world full of monsters he would draw to try and block out the physical and mental torture inflicted on him by his brutal father. Apart from a few admissions to hospital as a result of his 'imprisonment', Steve remained in the coal cellar of the family home where he was deprived of daylight, his childhood, school, and human contact until he'd reached his teenage years. Eventually, he escaped only to fall prey to the instigators of two of the worst cases of institutional abuse in the UK at Aston Hall hospital and St. William's Catholic School. The Boy in the Cellar is a horrifying true story of torture and cruelty, that reveals a human's full capacity to fight for survival and search out happiness and hope.
ADDICT
STEPHEN SPEAKS WORLDWIDE ON ADDICTION 60 second book trailer available in sample or visit www.addictbook.com The most incredible enlightening true story ever told. From an affluent family Stephen aged 14 ran away to become involved in organised crime and immense wealth. As his amphetamine addiction took its toll he ended up living in shop doorways for over five years when a miracle saved his life. This page-turner emphasises not only the true horror of London’s 60’s criminals and drugs but is also an authentic insight into what leads some children into crime and addiction. Translated into 4 languages Addict has become a cult book in many countries.
Twilight Together
'A moving and uplifting record of our nation's lockdown' Sunday Independent The essential book for 2020, capturing the heart-breaking and uplifting stories that made it a year we will never forget In March 2020, the arrival of Coronavirus in Ireland saw our world change overnight. We watched in shock as it spread throughout the world with devastating consequences. We stopped travelling, we worked from home, we celebrated birthdays, anniversaries and new arrivals via our screens. Many also had to grieve from a distance, isolated and alone. But the pandemic also became a time of coming together, of community spirit, of small kindnesses and boundless creativity. We saw frontline workers make extraordinary sacrifices, musicians perform from their front rooms, neighbourhood bingo and open-air film screenings. In Twilight Together Ruth Medjber has captured all of this and more. Visually stunning and deeply moving, she has photographed people all over Ireland at their front window at dusk, each with their own story to tell. Twilight Together is an extraordinary portrait of a pandemic by one of Ireland's most talented photographers and it is an important document for our times.
Dancing in Odessa
Described as 'a rich, reverberative dance with memories of a haunted city' ( LA Times), the poems of the prize-winning debut Dancing in Odessa by Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic, draw on archetype, myth and Russian literary figures. Tightly realised domestic settings are invigorated with a contemporary relevance, humour and torment, and a distinctive, transcendent music. 'With his magical style in English, Kaminsky's poems in Dancing in Odessa seem like a literary counterpart to Chagall in which laws of gravity have been suspended and colors reassigned, but only to make everyday reality that much more indelible. His imagination is so transformative that we respond with equal measures of grief and exhilaration.' The American Academy of Arts and Letters ' Dancing in Odessa by Ilya Kaminsky tops the list because he is one of those rarest of finds in this or any century, a writer who establishes what poetry can be.' The New York Times
The Naked Voice
Focusing not only on the most important technical, but also on the often overlooked psychological and spiritual elements of learning to sing, The Naked Voice allows readers to develop their own full and individual identities as singers
James Fitzjames Stephen
In this important study Dr Smith uses a wide range of primary materials to provide the first modern comprehensive examination of the work, writings and ideas of James Fitzjames Stephen. Stephen's broad rationalist/utilitarian ethical and intellectual stance manifested itself most prominently in law and social and political philosophy. Stephen's turn of mind led him to perceive the substance of literature and religious orthodoxy as of complementary interest and relevance to the social and political mores of Victorian England, making him one of Dickens' and Cardinal Newman's most formidable and trenchant critics. Dr Smith's account is the first to set Stephen's life and thought in its proper Victorian context, and marks a significant addition to the growing literature on the intellectual history of nineteenth-century England.
Cosmocartography
Cosmocartography is the debut poetry collection from multi-award-winning Irish poet Ciarán Hodgers. It investigates a wide range of personal experiences, challenges what it means to belong and documents the journeys we take to understand ourselves, the triumphs and trauma of the stories we carry in us. Ranging in scale from the quiet introversion of meditations on identity to the epic, cinematic movements of the universe, this poetry collection is a love letter to celebration, survival, love and resistance.
The Twin
When his twin brother dies in a car accident, Helmer is obliged to return to the small family farm. He resigns himself to taking over his brother's role and spending the rest of his days 'with his head under a cow'. After his old, worn-out father has been transferred upstairs, Helmer sets about furnishing the rest of the house according to his own minimal preferences. 'A double bed and a duvet', advises Ada, who lives next door, with a sly look. Then Riet appears, the woman once engaged to marry his twin. Could Riet and her son live with him for a while, on the farm?'The Twin' is an ode to the platteland, the flat and bleak Dutch countryside with its ditches and its cows and its endless grey skies. Ostensibly a novel about the countryside, as seen through the eyes of a farmer, 'the Twin' is, in the end, about the possibility or impossibility of taking life into one's own hands. It chronicles a way of life which has resisted modernity, is culturally apart, and yet riven with a kind of romantic longing. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Borstal Boy
'I have him bitched, balloxed and bewildered, for there's a system and a science in taking the piss out of a screw and I'm a well-trained man at it.' So writes Brendan Behan, poet, writer and literary legend, of the episode that coloured his life. Arrested in Liverpool as an agitator for the IRA, he was tried and sent to reform school. He was sixteen years old. The world he entered was brutal and coldly indifferent. Conditions were primitive, and violence simmered just below the surface. Yet Brendan Behan found something more positive than hate in Borstal: friendship, solidarity and healing flashes of kindness. Extraordinarily vivid, fluent, and moving, this is a superb and unforgettable piece of writing. Borstal Boy was adapted into a film in 2000.
