Search results for ""The New Menard Press""

People everywhere have found themselves faced with a global pandemic, during which we have learned to cope with sickness and all that accompanies it: isolation, immunity, loss of control, and recovery. Yet while no longer taboo, illness remains an unpopular theme in literature. In her essay, On Being Ill Virginia Woolf asks whether illness should not receive more literary attention, taking its place alongside the recurring themes of “love, battle and jealousy”. The subtle complexities of Woolf’s essay will no doubt continue to be resonant for a new generation of readers today. In this collaborative volume, authors, translators and illustrators have come together from Great Britain, Ireland, the United States and the Netherlands to represent past, present and future thinking about illness. Noteworthy contributions to this edition are Deryn Rees-Jones’ preface to Woolf’s essay from 1926 and the introduction to Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals of 1980. Against these, the voices of contemporary authors resonate as they contemplate the interactions between sickness and literature. Readers are able to begin the book at the end, or might happily start in the middle, as every contribution is a unique, personal piece which offers poignant observations of the world of illness from within. Writing, as well as reading, about illness, is a form of love.

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Music has a way of minding our brains, and Mind the Music explores the effects that it has on our cognition, emotion, and behaviour. As well as into the fabric of our culture, music is woven into the fabric of our humanity – but where does it come from, and how does it help us to learn?Intuition and improvisation turn out to be critical to understanding our own embodied cognition. We have hunches in a way that computers do not.But as technology takes over what were once human tasks, there is a temptation and even tendency to enjoy our creature comforts while neglecting our natural faculties. So how do we re-learn the ability to improvise, to help us find our place in the nexus of human and machine?Mind the Music is a reminder that it is important to keep your brain active, and an argument for the glory of intuitive choices. It dares you to improvise and dance to the music of the mind.

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In 2005, Menard Press brought out a book to celebrate the seventieth birthday of the distinguished publisher, T.G. Rosenthal: Life in Books. Copies of the limited edition of three hundred copies were privately distributed to his family and friends and those of the contributors. The roster of thirty nine contributors include Joan Bakewell, John Banville, William Boyd, David Cairns, Margaret Forster, Gunter Grass, David Lodge, Nicholas Mosley, Peter Porter, Brian Rix, Salman Rushdie, Ben Schott, Clive Sinclair, Gore Vidal and David Whitaker. The frontispiece reproduces a portrait of Tom Rosenthal by Paula Rego, a previously unpublished pastel painting.

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Eleven year old Simeon Isherwood is locked inside himself - can neither walk nor talk. When he undergoes a radical new gene therapy, it seems as though he can finally make contact with the world. But Simeon, used to the tranquility of his inner world, finds himself in agony, the anxiety of new sensations and experiences catching the attention of a mysterious entity - a being god-like and aloof from humanity, which to heal the pain of a young mind it sees as its offspring.When it does, the results are catastrophic.

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Wind, Tide and Oar takes us deep into the ever flowing dialogue between sailor, boat and the elements. Exploring what it means to sail 'engineless', this unique anthology accompanies the film of the same title, offering a diverse range of first-hand seafaring narratives. These collected works address such themes as tradition, sustainability and self-knowledge, as well as adventures, dreams and ideals. We are invited to experience what it is to be in harmonious movement with the natural world and gracefully subject to its whims.

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In Little Estuaries, Daniel Kramb goes in search for what’s fleeting between the shores. Amid a constantly shifting sense of what can be seen, sensed, experienced, the poet probes the estuary as sphere: an opening up, a possibility. Whittled down, like sea to stream, his poems emerge, in their own distinct form, estuary-shaped on the page. Intricate, at times playful, always open, these unassuming, small pieces reach beyond the confines, always returning to what’s undeniable, as body. Silt-smeared and salty, this is poetry not on landscape, but through it: formed not by what exists, but from what’s washed up within.

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This is the third edition of Augustus Young’s selected versions of Dánta Grádha, a collection he made more than fifty years ago. The original translations, from a manuscript in the British Library, were first published in 1916 by the great Celtic scholar T. F. O’Rahilly (1882-1953) under the title Dánta Grádha: An Anthology of Irish Love Poetry. These personal love lyrics represented a last flourish of the Gaelic tradition before it lost its literate tongue.

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The Credit is an opera without music. The first Act recites the story of Hugh, a successful product of Jesuit education, who returns to school as a celebrity on prize-giving day. The occasion is clouded, if not spoiled, by the uninvited presence of a certain Doc McGuiness, a dodgy business associate. The event is seen through the arias of Brother Jim, the janitor and sacristan, who brings into play ideas about language and learning development, to exemplify Pascal’s maxim, ‘We do not content ourselves with the life we have in ourselves and in our being, but desire to live an imaginary life in the minds of others, and for this purpose we endeavour to shine’. Act two begins with the reported death of Hugo in Venice. Clearly implicated, Doc McGuiness and his moll Fleur hide out in seaside Chioggia until things die down. Drugs and alcohol make their life a surreal one, as Venice and environs transmogrify into a skeleton for a danse macabre.Act three: the action moves onto the hill-town of Cioccolato where Hugo owns a bean factory. Vector and Velocity, young Harlem refugees and erstwhile students at the University for Strangers, while exploring the lower depths, come across a body and don’t report it to the police. They sit at the feet of a living statue of Dante Alighieri, and exchange pre-rap palaver and white substances with him. Doc and Fleur arrive posing as tourists, and Dante offers his services as a guide, and all descent down to the underground location of Hugo’s factory, where they find the aforesaid body, buried but not quite dead. The party set about cutting Hugo out when an earthquake hits the town.The prosody is syllabically based ottava rima, gradually segueing into rhyming free verse with occasional ballads. The illustrations are by John Parsons. The Credit was first published as two books in 1980/85 by Menard Press/Advent Books. This edition is heavily revised.

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