Search results for ""Author Nicholas Mosley""
Dalkey Archive Press Serpent
Jason is a scriptwriter working on a film about Masada--the fortress where a thousand Jews killed themselves rather than be taken prisoner by the Romans in A. D. 73. He doubts that a film both honest and popular on such a subject can be made, and, while en route to the production site (Jason, producers and stars in first class--his wife and child in tourist), a dispute about the film and a crisis aboard the plane forces Jason to look at his life, his art, and the world around him in several different ways at once.
£9.15
Dalkey Archive Press Rainbow People
In his final novel, Rainbow People, Nicholas Mosley offers us the distinctly twenty-firstcentury story of a holy family. A man, a woman, and a child walk together along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea, near the border between Greece and Macedonia. They watch as a film is made about the refugee crisis on the beach. While the mother and father, joined by the filmmaker, contemplate the meaning of the crisis, the limited powers of art, the greater powers of fear and faith, the child explores, plays, and constantly transforms before their eyes. Months later, the family travels from their home in England to Calais, France, where an enormous refugee camp called “the Jungle” has sprung up. Here, in this unlikely place, the child shows the adults a graceful way to face the future. Mosley’s Rainbow People is a masterful, powerful book about borders, politics, and hope.
£9.99
Dalkey Archive Press Time at War
Aged twenty, and with no war experience, Nicholas Mosley found himself in charge of a platoon of men positioned along the Italian front during the Second World War. With his father in prison on charges of treason, he had enlisted primarily in an effort to improve his family image. But the war left Mosley a radically changed man: he had gone in out of personal convenience, and left with a sense of greater purpose. Saved from death by one of his men, holed up in barns and trenches and tents, and marching across Europe, Mosley found in war a certainty that eluded him in peacetime. "War is both senseless and necessary, squalid and fulfilling, terrifying and sometimes jolly," he writes. "This is like life. Humans are at home in war (though they seldom admit this). They feel they know what they have to do." In an interview conducted between 1977 and 1978, Nicholas Mosley said, "When I was young William Faulkner was my great love, not just because of the density of style, but because he seemed to be dealing with the question not of what will happen next but what is happening now. The first Faulkner novel I read was The Sound and the Fury, which I got hold of when we liberated a POW camp in Italy in 1944 and I liberated the Red Cross Library. I was about twenty.... What in god's name, after all, was I doing aged twenty in Italy in a war?"
£9.99
Dalkey Archive Press Experience & Religion: A Lay Essay in Theology
"Religion," this book begins, "is a mistrusted word now," and Nicholas Mosley, in this engaging meditation, seeks to repair that trust. Rather than trying to convince or compel the reader to accept his beliefs, he describes how religion functions in the modern world. Elsewhere, Mosley has written, "There is a subject nowadays which is taboo in the way that sexuality was once taboo, which is to talk about life as if it had any meaning." In this book, he describes religion as the source of that meaning. Despair is the fashionable attitude, but it is one Mosley, here and in his many novels, rejects in favor of a cautious optimism. He writes not to persuade, but to explain a worldview that is refreshing for the hope and intelligence it contains.
£9.15
Dalkey Archive Press Imago Bird
This vivid and strikingly witty novel examines the contradictions between the public face and the private experience. Nephew to the prime minister of England, eighteen-year-old Bert tries to make sense of the grown-up world around him, a colorful crowd of television personalities, politicians, young Trotskyites, pop stars, and eccentric relatives. With the help of his laconic psychoanalyst, Bert questions the relation between exterior and interior reality, while Mosley himself questions art's ability to convey these different realities. Both Bert and Mosley triumph over these challenges by the end of this engaging and innovative novel.
£9.15
Dalkey Archive Press Look at the Dark
A retired academic and writer is becoming a media celebrity of sorts, appearing on various talk shows to voice his controversial views on human nature and war. While in New York to make such an appearance, he becomes the victim of a hit-and-run--set up by the CIA? the FBI? terrorists?--and ends up confined to a hospital bed. This forced inactivity allows him to reflect on his life--the work he has done, the women he has known--as various people from his life gather around him, including both his first and second wives. Reminiscing about his past while dealing with his present, the man begins to see his provocative ideas about fidelity, sin, and grace play themselves out in a virtuosic way that could only be conceived by Nicholas Mosley.
£9.99
Dalkey Archive Press Children of Darkness and Light
In Children of Darkness and Light, Mosley takes on what for most novelists has been the most challenging of subjects: a novel directly concerned with religious belief. A middle-aged, burnt-out journalist is sent to the north of England to do a story about the possible appearance of the Blessed Virgin to a group of children, though this may be a rumor initiated by the government to cover up a nuclear disaster. Or both. Out of such conflicting possibilities, Mosley invents a sinister world where nothing is what it seems to be. And as Mosley's narrator moves through the possibilities of half-truths, lies, conspiracies, and betrayals, he himself creates a parallel crisis in his personal life wherein he and his wife are trying to destroy their marriage or save it, or - as we come to expect in Mosley novels - do both at once. And behind all this is the possibility that the narrator - half philosopher and half would-be saint - is little more than a middle-aged man trying to justify his irresponsibility and infidelity behind a shield of wit and irony.
£9.99
Dalkey Archive Press A Garden of Trees
"When you have put your trust in shadows there is nothing that is real. Have you found this?" Returning to London from a trip to the West Indies, an aspiring writer encounters a bewitching trio of friends whose magic lies in their ability to turn any situation into fantasy. Previously out of place in the world, the narrator falls in love with the young brother-sister pair of Peter and Annabelle, as well as the older, more political Marius. Reality soon encroaches upon the foursome, however, in the form of Marius's ailing wife, forcing the narrator to confront the dark emptiness and fear at the heart of his friends' joie de vivre. In this, his second novel--written in the '50s and never before published--Nicholas Mosley weighs questions of responsibility and sacrifice against those of love and earthly desire, the spirit versus the flesh.
£15.99
Dalkey Archive Press God's Hazard
Paradoxes of Peace continues the meditation of Mosley's Time at War, at the end of which he wrote that humans find themselves at home in war because they feel they know what they have to do, whereas in peace they have to discover this. But what should inform them--custom? need? duty? ambition? desire? Forces pull in different directions--fidelity versus adventurousness, probity versus fun. During the war, Mosley found himself having to combine fondness for his father, Oswald Mosley, with the need to speak out against his post-war politics. In times of peace, his love for his wife and children, too, seemed riddled with paradoxes. He sought answers in Christianity, but came to see organized religion as primarily a social institution. How does caring not become a trap?
£11.99
Dalkey Archive Press Paradoxes of Peace: Or, the Presence of Infinity
Paradoxes of Peace continues the meditation of Mosley's Time at War, at the end of which he wrote that humans find themselves at home in war because they feel they know what they have to do, whereas in peace they have to discover this. But what should inform them--custom? need? duty? ambition? desire? Forces pull in different directions--fidelity versus adventurousness, probity versus fun. During the war, Mosley found himself having to combine fondness for his father, Oswald Mosley, with the need to speak out against his post-war politics. In times of peace, his love for his wife and children, too, seemed riddled with paradoxes. He sought answers in Christianity, but came to see organized religion as primarily a social institution. How does caring not become a trap?
£9.99
Dalkey Archive Press Uses of Slime Mould: Essays of Four Decades
Including pieces on Gregory Bateson, William Faulkner, Philip Pullman, Sir Oswald Mosley's politics, religion and stammering, this diverse collection gathers essays written by Nicholas Mosley over the past forty years. Resembling the behaviour of slime mould - a strange organism made up of separate amoebae that temporarily form a single pillar which then bursts in order to scatter its seeds across the forest floor - the ideas found in these essays converge and disperse, crossing over into other disciplines, and creating a unique way of looking at the world, one echoed in Mosley's fictional writings.
£9.99
Dalkey Archive Press Catastophe Practice
In his recent novels--including his award-winning Hopeful Monsters--Nicholas Mosley has investigated the patterns that govern our mental and emotional lives and the possibilities that we have for change, and nowhere has he explored such themes with greater concentration than in Catastrophe Practice. A unique book whose characters and concerns are the basis for the other four novels of the Catastrophe Practice Series - Hopeful Monsters, Imago Bird, Judith, and Serpent-- Catastrophe Practice is remarkable both in its form (three plays with prefaces and a novella) and in its ability to convey the complexities of thought. Drawing upon catastrophe theory to examine the discontinuities in human personality and our tendency to progress suddenly rather than smoothly, the six characters of Catastrophe Practice struggle to disrupt traditional ways of being. These characters (and the author) feel that conventional ways of interpreting the world have become destructive--conventional language, conventional feelings, conventional situations--and try to find a way to realize genuine experience.
£9.99