Search results for ""Vagabond Voices""

This collection of Jidi Majia's poetry in Chinese and Nuosu (a lesser-spoken language in China, though there are around two and a half million speakers) has been translated into the three strands of the Scots language: Lallans by Stuart Paterson, Doric by Sheena Blackhall and Shetlandic by Christine de Luca. These translations will be face-to-face with an English translation by the eminent translator from Chinese, Denis Mair, who will also provide a preface on the context of Jidi Majia's heritage and poetry. Jidi Majia's Scots translators have undoubtedly brought his vitality into alignment with the power of the Scots tongues, as does Denis Mair's excellent and erudite rendering into English. Aimed at two linguistic communities and coming from two linguistic communities at the other side of the planet, this collection presents a perfect symmetry in a globalized world where we need a dialogue not only between the powerful but also and perhaps even more rewardingly between the local and marginalized. The infinite is often to be encountered in the circumscribed.

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This is the journal of Ignatz Himmelsputz, survivor, dwarf and entertainer. It is 1974 and Ignatz lives in Frankfurt with Giselle, who is the singer in his band, his teacher and a transvestite survivor of the Vietnam War. A chance meeting with Hermann, the son of Von Bühler, an SS Officer under whose control he was kept in the Nazi period, triggers in Ignatz a desire to get his story down: how he was forced to be the companion to Von Bühler’s sister who had Down’s Syndrome and how he witnessed the sister’s descent into the hell of the Nazi euthanasia programmes. He writes down his story interspersed with the detail of his struggles in helping Giselle to cope with her own past. He befriends Hermann and finally reconnects with the man who caused him so much suffering and is now a successful Child Psychologist. Together they are forced to confront their pasts… This compelling story of man’s inhumanity to man and the liberating elation of forgiveness, is a worthy parable for the twenty-first century.

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Once upon a time, there was a girl who lived in a house of clocks, a house that ticked like a bomb... Officially, Olive's only been gone one day, but Grace knows she's been lost much longer. Her schoolmate's disappearance forces Grace to recall the dark secrets she and Olive still share - including the one that shattered their friendship four years ago, the one that haunts Grace now. With the adults around her caught up in their own dramas and deceptions, Grace struggles to make sense of her past and present before she too becomes lost. "Three Kinds of Kissing is a modern classic about friendship, loss of innocence and the myriad ways families can self-implode." - Cynthia Rogerson

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Family dinner somehow becomes more mundane after Uncle Colin does a fatal face plant into the plum pudding. A lonely old widower sits at home and participates in conversations he records whilst riding the bus. Curled up like a comma, a woman liesin bed and remembers the exclamation-mark man her partner once was. These brief, vivid glimpses into the lives of others lay bare the ugliness and absurdity - but also the beauty - of existence. In his flash fictions Gary Duncan explores what it means to be human with insight, compassion and humour. Paul Beckman, author of Peek, wrote of this book, "Trigger warning! After you read one, Duncan has you hooked. Don't read this collection in one sitting - parcel these stories out and take time in between to reflect on what just took place. These stories are headshaking original, funny, fascinating, at times chilling, and no subject is sacrosanct - all things a 5-star collection should be. Buy two copies - you won't want to lend your only one out."

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In the beginning the page was blank and without form, and the scribe sat in front of it, a world forming inside his head. The world grew large, spilling out of him and on to the page. The scribe shaped the world into an island. He named it Fagero, and populated it with an assortment of likely and plausibly unlikely characters, and saw that it was good for his purposes.The people of Fagero were often divided against each other but united in their appreciation of their happy little island. Then the dead bodies began to arrive: hordes of them, washing ashore with no identification and no one to claim them.The island was changing, and the small-town quirkiness becoming less restrained. And the bodies kept arriving, forcing Fagero's inhabitants to confront the unhappy truth that, even on their remote island, the world's horrors and injustices could not be ignored. This was prescient at the time of writing and is sadly relevant in 2016, the year of this English translation.A Happy Little Island is an elaborate tale told with style and intelligence.The number and variety of Sund's Dramatis Personae make Fagero the perfect stage for an encounter between common humanity and the insularity and fear of change that affect all cultures.

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Based on real events happening on two days in Ireland and London a hundred years ago, "Shall Roger Casement Hang?" is the story of an interrogation. It is a confrontation between two men that asks fundamental questions about history, the British State, and personal and national identity. For both of them, the stakes get higher and more personal as violent events elsewhere and the revelation of Casement's sexuality change the rules of their struggle. When this conversation is over, one of them will be condemned to death, while the Empire that both men served will never be the same again.In one and the same moment, two sisters with one face, identical twins Isobel and Morag each have a story to tell about family, money, sex, truth and happiness - and about each other. It should be the same story about the same people, but the sisters are as divided from each other as two people can be. The play explores the ways in which they inhabit the world. By giving two very different but connected sides of the same coin, through humour and vitriol, the sisters show us how we think of ourselves and the world around us, and the shapes we get ourselves into in order to survive that world, asking fundamental questions about what matters to us and why.

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Long description: This novel is based on the life of Linnaeus, the eighteenth-century, Swedish enlightenment figure famous for his taxonomy or scientific classification still used in biology. It principally concerns the different ways Linnaeus and his gardener interpret the world around them. The gardener perceives plants for what they are in themselves and Linnaeus for what they are in relation to other things. They never understand each other and the dialogues are wonderfully inconclusive.

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Thomas Mitchell's essays on how to live well were completed in 1913, and reflect a clear mind and a good education, but also confidence about the world and society that were about to be shattered. No doubt some thoughts he expressed would have been impossible to reaffirm five years later. As we commemorate the centenary of terrible and unprecedented conflict, his intelligent voice from the past gives us an insight into how people thought before it and what was lost. This does not mean that Mitchell's ideas are not also an individual's, but it is now the combination of freshness and distance in this previously unpublished prose that makes it so compelling. His style also says much about the education system in Scotland and rural Aberdeenshire in particular, and his background was very similar to that of Lewis Grassic Gibbon. Though they undoubtedly had different politics, they would both have agreed on the importance of society.

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This second volume of A.H. Tammsaare's monumental pentalogy portrays the education of Indrek who emerges here as the protagonist and will remain so throughout the next three volumes. This is a story of moving to the polyglot city and abandoning the countryside which at that time was the heartland of the Estonian language. This new environment is a vortex of prejudices and national rivalries nevertheless held together in practice by a strange and very human tolerance. Here Tammsaare writes with his trademark wit and deep understanding of human nature, and we find ourselves in the company of a vast gallery of larger-than-life characters who jostle, scheme and argue over both trivialities and the great issues of the human condition. They may do the latter out of their own intellectual narcissism or simply for the joy of debate, but the ensuing dialogues rival those of the great Russian novelists. The boarding school is as dysfunctional as any Dickensian one, but it is a great deal more benevolent. Russians, Germans, Poles, Latvians and Caucasians mix with the Estonian majority, speaking in a mix of Russian, German and Estonian, and somehow compromises are nearly always arrived at in spite of, or possibly because of some extraordinary theatrics, in which Mr Maurus must outperform not only all the other characters in the book but very probably all other celebrated headmasters created by European literature over the centuries. Indrek not only has to come to terms with this world so utterly unsuited to his shy and innocent rural upbringing, but he also has to deal with his first encounters with love and death.

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