Search results for ""Parthian Books""

From Rhondda heroes chasing the American dream to rioters staking a claim in their society In the Frame is a powerful alternative history of twentieth-century South Wales, offered from the personal viewpoint of cultural historian Dai Smith.

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A collection of poetry from Norman Schwenk.

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Peter Lord surveys the evolution of the visual culture of Wales from the Renaissance to the end of the twentieth century in this new, single-volume history.

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In Ponty is it? Daryl Leeworthy journeys from the isolation of Llanwonno to the unmarked border between the true metropolis of Wales and that southern pretender, Cardiff, and on the way learns what brings him back to his hometown every time he tries to leave and what now really keeps him there.

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Landeg White's Living in the Delta adds new poems to a selection from his nine previous collections published over a period of forty years. Ranging from the West Indies, Southern and West Africa, to Britain, Portugal and latterly the UAE, they are characterised by abundance, lucidity, variety, and mastery of form.

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The Undressed is a poetry collection inspired by a cache of antique nude photographs of women. King studied the photographs ranging from the 1840s to the 1930s and attempted to return voices to these mostly anonymous women lost to history.

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Noah, a debt collector and investigator in his late twenties, is slowly putting away enough money to get out of the murky world of solicitors, bankers, bent coppers and cheating wives for good. [...] but then comes the job that changes everything.

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The Scrapbook is a novel about memory, and the unreliability of memory. It's about the tangled, often dysfunctional, bonds of family. And it's about absence and the power that a void can exert over a person's life.

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Landscape and nature take centre stage in this practised collection. Here we have a bird's - or perhaps moth's - eye view of the natural world and the ways in which we interact (and often fail to interact) with it.

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A vision of contemporary Dubai from the perspective of a variety of expats from different parts of the world, telling tales of hardship and the high-life, paranoia and alienation, cruelty and love.

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A collection of poetry as you have never seen it before, these short, experimental works blur the boundary between prose and poetry.

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Whether you're a lifelong "Jack" or a recent convert to the "beautiful game", this collection of essays is an introduction to the fascinating history of Welsh Football.

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Cadillac Temple is Norman Schwnk's first collection since The More Deceived: poems about love and lovers (2005). Born and educated in the USA, he came to Wales from Sweden in the 1960's.

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Featuring research by some of established critics in the field of Welsh writing in English, this title aims to engage in an informed way both with the Welsh literary past and with contemporary writing, looking towards the future and outwards towards the rest of the world.

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Tells the stories of twelve disabled women, ten from Wales and two from the West of England.

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A work by the author of "White Star" and "From Empty Harbour to White Ocean".

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Presents sixteen stories of rural Midwest America: smalltown secrets, the powerful silences that bind families, and seven shades of female friendship.

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An English translation from an acclaimed Welsh writer, this romantic fantasy novel won the 1992 Welsh National Eisteddfod Prose Medal.

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Creating a stirring collection, these poems capture the strength and fragility of the moments of lovethose instances of decision, reflection, loss, and longing."

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A compelling thriller, The Volunteers is also an engrossing reminder of the conflict between moral choice and political loyalty, for through his obsessive pursuit of justice Redfern finally encounters the truth about himself.

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The works of poetry, prose and essays offer a snapshot of the concerns and preoccupations shared by young writers from a region with a rich literature that rarely reaches English-language readers and at the same time confirms the vitality of the bilingual Welsh literary scene.

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A reliable and clean source of water is essential for any community, so it is easy to understand how important wells were for pre-modern peoples. More complex is the mystical relationship humans have developed with these sites, which are imbued with a sacredness that predates Christianity. Holy Wells of Wexford and Pembrokeshire is a series of five chapbooks celebrating holy wells in two regions with common ancestry and history. Since at least the Bronze Age, sea travel between these two lands has meant cross-fertilisation of traditions and common names associated with wells of both regions. Of significance is the long-standing friendship between two early Christian saints: David, who became the first Bishop of St Davids; and Aidan, born in Ireland, who spent time in Wales and then founded monasteries in Ireland, including at Ferns. In Oilgate, Wexford, there is a well dedicated to David and, at Whitesands near St Davids in Pembrokeshire, there is one named after Aidan. Each of the five books approaches the subject from different perspectives and mediums, including fiction, poetry and essays as well as photographs and prints.

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From a humble background in Barry, where his father was a butcher and local politician in the formative years of the new town, Cyril Lakin studied at Oxford, survived the First World War, and went on to become a Fleet Street editor, radio presenter and war-time member of parliament. As literary editor of both the Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Times, Lakin was at the centre of a vibrant and radical generation of writers, poets and critics, many of whom he recruited as reviewers. He gained a parliamentary seat and served in the National Government during World War II. The different worlds he inhabited, from Wales to Westminster, and across class, profession and party, were facilitated by his relaxed disposition, convivial company, and ability to cultivate influential contacts. An effective talent-spotter and catalyst for new projects, he preferred pragmatism over ideology and non-partisanship in politics: a moderate Conservative for modern times.

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Widely acclaimed for its warm humour, lyricism and honesty, as well as its accurate evocation of the 30s, this has become a classic. In this autobiographical novel, Abse interweaves public and private themes, setting the fortunes of a Jewish family in Wales against the troubled backcloth of the times.

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Alys Morgan was admitted to hospital on the 19th of April, with an unexplained sickness which had rendered her too weak to move. The next day she was diagnosed with Covid-19 - though staff understood her symptoms as little as the virus itself. This is one woman's account of a pandemic no-one seemed prepared for - from the bed of a north-Wales hospital struggling to care for its multiplying patients. It's a story of mothers and daughters, isolation and survival, love and loss. But most of all, it's a testament to everything we owe those providing care - and comfort - on the new front line.

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A 20th anniversary edition with a foreword by peter finch cardiff cut is witty, obscene, defiant; an anarchic joycean monologue steeped in the city of cardiff. neither truth nor fiction taken from real life or what seemed for an instant

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Hymns Ancient & Modern, New & Selected Poems, brings together the best of Brookes from four books and booklets, published from the early 90s: 43 Poems, The Dresden Cantata, Book, and More Last Poems and some new editions. Brookes handles with confidence and purpose poems both as neat and revealing as a mathematical equation, and poems that trip down the page on their rhymes. His subjects are as various as the world, often funny, in all the senses of the word, always unsentimental, each carefully observed and valued, whether a noisy cafe, model boats on a lake, or a neighbour dying in a hospital bed.

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Sliced Tongue and Pearl Cufflinks explores fractured connections of self, family and home, laying bare the devastating impact of traumatisation against language and identity in its unflinching quest to communicate the brittle reality of everyday life at the edge. The destructive forces of suicide, insomnia, self-harm and abuse are given order through the creative drive of poetic forms. At the heart of this collection are a daughter's fraught relationships with her half Japanese father, who survived three years as a POW in Czechoslovakia, and a mother who grew up in National Socialist Germany, and whose unspoken traumas haunted the fabric of family life.

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Edward Thomas and Wales offers a fascinating re-evaluation of Thomas's writing. Bringing together for the first time the prose and poetry centred in Thomas's ancestral land of Wales, it explores the `Welshness' of Thomas's work and of Thomas himself.

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In his role as Political Editor for ITV Cymru Wales, Adrian Masters was there for that pivotal moment at Gresford and at other crucial points throughout the campaign. This is the account of a unique eye-witness to an extraordinary moment in political history.

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Joao Morais's contemporary debut collection of stories beats paths through a capital city from street food markets and art galleries to the park and the pub. From illegal raves to prison visits, Morais turns his unflinching beam on the quickened pulse of urban living: spliffs, fights, and hearts spark as relationships and power struggles are tested. Often comic, sometimes tragic, these stories detail the moments in their characters' lives when everything changes and their hearts beat faster.

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The book speaks to the poet's own (young) generation about how technology affords new ways of expressing love, while nostalgically evoking times before Facebook and selfies. However, nature-versus-technology is not the primary theme here. In fact, most poems focus on how human beings are entangled with technology, and on how they jointly influence all aspects of being in the 21st century.The butterfly, a symbol of change and fragility, sounds a note of caution about using technology to reinvent love and quintessentially human values. To find the ways in which love can survive in a high-tech world, one might need to look again at nature and its laws. The poet tries to catch those subtle harmonies that are often missed when "human" and "technological" are counterposed too exclusively, as Either/Or.There are 55 poems in the collection, written in a variety of metrical and stanzaic forms, but mostly in common metre, analogous to sung music. The poems are accessible on a first read, with layers that invite a re-reading and re-thinking of what it means to love and be loved in the digital age.

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Paris (2013) is William Roberts' most ambitious work to date and can best be described as a contemporary historical novel. It concerns an extended family of Russian emigres struggling to survive in Paris and Berlin during the inter-war years of the last century and examines the difficulty of holding on to one's identity in exile. As the waves of political and ideological turmoil impinge directly on the fate of the characters, we see some of them adapt and flourish despite the hostile environment whilst others are destroyed. Referencing European and Russian prose, both Realist and Modernist, the style nevertheless is that of a quintessentially Welsh sensibility; with a rich mosaic of linguistic influences such as the Mabinogion, 16C, and 17C Classical Welsh language writers, as well as 21C Welsh dialect and slang. The result is a highly innovative hybrid style, which gives the novel its unique voice.Paris, whilst ostensibly a historical novel, examines themes of crucial contemporary relevance: migration, exile, displacement, and identity. Crossing borders, whether from choice or necessity, is a central feature of the novel.Roberts explores the experience of 'the Other', which in this case, is what it means to be a Welsh speaker. He extrapolates the Welsh condition of internal exile: loss of language, loss of culture, loss of identity to a European, historical setting in order to force his Welsh readers to confront their own predicament from a different historical perspective.

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Winner of the PEN International/New Voices Award 2015 Shortlisted for the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award 2015 Onstage again, you stare down at your feet, imagining you see the bright, painted curves of a pair of clown's shoes...It helps to pretend you are a clown, hidden inside baggy trousers, your true face invisible behind splashes of red lipstick and pale powder...A dazzling, ambitious debut collection from a young talent (shortlisted for the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award and longlisted for the PEN International/New Voices Award), these critically acclaimed stories dip into the shadows and spotlights of life. From the pale waking hours to the darkling places, Clown's Shoes introduces a cast of lost characters trying to find their way, and asking whether everyone really does come salting home in the end? Since the Devil visited the glove maker, she has found herself in the asylum counting out days instead of stitches. At the dog track, hidden amongst the rowdy punters, a woman bets on underdogs, life, and love. Onstage, a desperate mother performs a nightly striptease, whilst, in a small Welsh town, a young Korean immigrant tells her secrets to the sway of the sea.The people who populate the exciting and intriguing world of Clown's Shoes have stories that enthrall the imagination.

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You just know it's going to be one of those nights. She's on the change. I'm on my period. Hormonal teenager and neurotic mother under one terraced roof? My father's got a word for it:Tonypandemonium. Tonypandemonium is the first play by critically acclaimed and Dylan Thomas Prize winner Rachel Trezise. The play debuted in October 2013 on the occasion of the centenary year of the Park & Dare Theatre in Treorchy.

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Ministering to Education is the first book by a former Welsh Government Minister since the creation of the National Assembly in 1999. As Education Minister in the Welsh Government from 2009 - 2013, Leighton Andrews was twice named Welsh Politician of the Year. This is his enlightening, frank and readable account of the education reforms initiated in the early years of Carwyn Jones's period as First Minister, and the complex challenges that still lie ahead to make the Welsh education system as good as any in the world. Offering the inside story on the reform journey Wales embarked upon, Andrews controversially reveals how he deliberately brought the media into the debate on school ranking. He debates the decision to regrade exam results when English Language GCSE exams came under fire in 2012, and the effect such decisions have had in setting the education systems of England and Wales on diverging paths. Student tuition fees was another area where Andrews led Wales in a different direction from England. Following Michael Gove's departure as Westminster Education Secretary, Andrews questions whether Wales or England has fared better and suggests what should happen next. Foreword by Sir Michael Barber.

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It's the summer or 1916 and the Alexandrov family prepare to embark on their annual holiday, accompanied by an army of staff primed to cater to their needs. Teenage, precocious Alyosha Alexandrov has never known anything but a life of privilege. He spends his days avoiding study and pursuing pretty young maids. But Russia is poised on the brink of epochal political upheaval and within a year Alyosha is separated from family, security, and the innocence of youth. Set against the backdrop of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath, spanning the turbulent years from 1916 to 1924, Petrograd is a vast, ambitious novel from an award-winning writer. The first in a trilogy, and winner of the Wales Book of the Year Award (Welsh Language), it tells the compelling, convincing story of the Alexandrov family as they each struggle to adapt to the ravages of war and revolution.

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Beneath the surface of pictures lie the extensive networks of relationships and associations that tie us to them, sometimes in extraordinary ways. In pictures the past lives, and forms the basis of who we will become. The moments at which we come to understand something of ourselves and our place in the world are often anchored in images literary, musical and visual. Through fifteen pictures Peter Lord describes the evolution of his own sense of self, in childhood just after the Second World War, at art college in the 1960s, through the tension between incomers and local people in Wales in the 1970s and 80s, and finally through his exploration of the place they have had in the lives of the artists who created them, their patrons and publics. Writing about the meaning of pictures in their social and political context, Peter Lord was centrally involved in the establishment of the field in Wales in the 1980s, when the prevailing conventional wisdom regarded the nation as being largely devoid of a visual culture. Currently he holds posts researching and lecturing on visual culture at Swansea University.

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Eleanor Brooks presents "Miss", a unique exhibition which brings together just over one and hundred and fifty drawings created by her students at a secondary school in London, with reinterpretations by textile artist Sheelagh Stephens. Here, for the first time, the students' portraits of their teacher - endearing, intriguing and frequently remarkable - are given at last the opportunity to flourish and to reveal 'their innocent truth'.

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The Shape of a Forest is a powerful survey of life and of human experience that spans centuries and the continents.

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Memorable Firsts, the second Nu anthology, contains something for everyone-poetry, short stories, micro-fiction, and non fiction. This edition provides a platform for the most promising up-and-coming Welsh and Wales-based writers, including one of Parthian's 'Bright Young Things' authors and some of the best performance poets in the country. The title piece sets the tone for Nu2 perfectly, as these are the memorable first pieces of a new generation of authors.

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A forced wedding in a freezing country church, where the only sound is the bride's tears: so starts Mary Bicknor's life of misery with the brutish Easter Probert, groom to the oddly assorted Kilminster family. In a tale of passion, violence, cruelty and unexpected tenderness, Margiad Evans conjures a tempestuous and sometimes sinister world of rural and small-town border life in the early twentieth century.

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Mae Cwningen a'i ffrind gorau Hwyaden yn hoffi sgipio a chwarae pel, ond eu hoff gem yn y byd yw chwarae cuddio. Ond un diwrnod yn y gweirdir mae Hwyaden yn diflannu. Beth mae Cwningen yn mynd i wneud? Ymuna a Chwningen a Hwyaden wrth iddynt sboncio a siglo drwy'r cefn gwlad.

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