Search results for ""Vagabond Voices""

From the inmates of Shotts prison, an accretion of voices not unlike the sounds erupting from the fiddles, flutes and guitars of musicians you might find playing in a Glasgow bar, only these disparate voices are not musical. Instead, a finely tuned array of words expressing thoughts and emotions procured from their writers’ time in prison: “Porridge, a breakfast people make in pots./ But I’m doing porridge here in SHOTTS.” In one of the prose pieces, a grandfather pretends to his visiting grandson that he’s a secret agent on his final mission signalling to the reader his retirement from crime; in another, there is the ongoing concern for an elderly father at home with senile dementia: “... he’s ducking behind the curtain ... I don’t know if I can cope with this today.” Haiku and longer poetic forms capture the interminable frustration of being inside and the effect this has on the human psyche: “Go off the rails/End up in the cells/Apply for bail/Application fail// Back to jail/howl and wail.” One reflection on the emotional difficulty of being transgender in a system that does little to offer support adds poignancy to an anthology that is already thrumming with humour and attitude.

Read more less

Levas Ciparis, the anti-hero of this masterly critique of life in the late Soviet Union, is a man alone and he desperately wants to belong. He is obstructed in this quest by his own innocence and decency, which occasionally cause him to act with absurd inflexibility. In fact, the irresolvable tension between moral probity and necessary compromise is one of the many themes of this novel: "Yes, I truly did believe that if I took up the work of the Komsomol, I would, being an honest, sufficiently pure, persistent person, most certainly be capable of changing and enriching that community." In part, the first-person narration describes the process of being disabused of that delusion. Ciparis is dead and writes letters to his estranged friend Tomas Kelertas, with whom he has something of a love-hate relationship, which became more obsessive after their estrangement. The randomness of life does not always work against Ciparis, as he recounts his experiences from sickly child in a basement flat to his final moments in Leningrad when all options fall away. The system can work in his favour - primarily through a marriage that gains him a father-in-law who is a powerful, intelligent and utterly corrupt politician at the very top of the Soviet regime in Lithuania - but ultimately there is no place for him in that society or perhaps anywhere. Memoirs of a Life Cut Short is full of ideas, doubts and insightful observations on human behaviour borne along on a helter-skelter plot.

Read more less

The narrator is an urbane, cynical and egocentric Italian journalist with little interest in the truth, though not as shabby as his companion, a professor of politics. The journalist meets people across the spectrum of ideas, and the book concerns not just political events, but how people interrelate within a social context, Scotland's place in Europe and how Europeans interpret each other. The Italian encounters a range of Europeans: a Ukrainian nationalist, a Russian religious guru, an eccentric Estonian, an Algerian refugee, a Lithuanian, a dying man and many Scots from different walks of life. The narrator falls in love with a Scottish campaigner. Beneath the urbane veneer, he's a complex mix of the old-fashioned and the fashionable, and the relationship soon encounters problems. The Italian, like Voltaire's Candide, starts with a mindset incapable of bringing him either understanding or lasting contentment, and ends the book with some understanding and awareness, insufficient for the elusive happiness we all seek but sufficient for a perfectly acceptable human existence.

Read more less

The Spit, the Sound and the Nest is a novel in three parts set in distinct, unnamed locations over a winter, a day and a week. Each part revolves around a small group of central characters forced to depend on one another when faced with unexpected circumstances. In all the stories the past weighs heavily on the present. The Spit opens with runaway teens Felix and Luc lost on a dark, snowy night in a small town. A couple offers them work and a place to stay. By winter's end the four face life-changing decisions. In The Sound, a woman who has chosen to live in isolation questions her decision when a girl shows up at her door dripping wet and carrying a newborn baby. In The Nest, sisters Alice and Edna struggle to make sense of adult lives and cruelties after the housekeeper tells them their parents have died in an accident.

Read more less

Fifteen years ago, Tommy Hunter committed a terrible crime. Now pursued by his own bad memories and the attentions of his criminal companions of the past (as well as the present-day curiosity of the boys and girls in blue), Tommy is trying to put his family back together by the unlikely means of kidnapping them with the added allurement of a bag of stolen money. Moon Country is a wild and woolly Scottish Western, a family road movie, a slightly insane hermeneutic treatise on nationhoodand belonging, and a definitely lunatic quest for personal redemption. It's also pretty funny. It is quite unlike anything you've ever read before.Peter Arnott has squared the circle by combining the demotic, the entertaining, the literary and the chaotic all within a surprisingly ordered structure. This is a book that stays with you once you've finished reading it: the many connections continue to emerge.

Read more less

This first and only work of non-fiction by the author of two novels, two collections of short stories and a collection of poetry, has an accessible and conversational tone, which perhaps disguises its enormous ambition. It not only deals with the origins of language to argue its centrality to humanity and the naturalness of bilingualism and multilingualism, but examines how writing and printing built on that centrality to develop the "social mind" - the sum of knowledge within any given society. More recent technological changes have undermined the importance of language in society, and could possibly damage psychological health and society at large. All the arguments are couched in a sceptical approach, and the author principally wants to initiate a debate rather than give a defining analysis of a complex subject. Each chapter is introduced by a short story that illustrates the argument of that chapter.

Read more less

A fantastic evocation of life and learning in a dream sequence: Jerome, who has to sit an exam and suffers from toothache, enters a nighmarish library in which everything conspires to frustrate his desperate attempts to revise. Cavazzoni creates an entire world in this dream, whose absurd perhaps comments on the more muted absurdity of reality. The library contains geological and natural realities that plague the organic matter of which the books are made, demonstrating or at least suggesting the futility of human learning. In some parts of the building the books have turned into peat. Cavazzoni admits that his books pushe the novel to its very limits - "like outpourings of the maniacal," he says. "That's how they come to me, you must understand."

Read more less

Hanuman's Travels, which was shortlisted for the Russian Booker in 2010, translated into German and French, and put on the German stage, is the picaresque tale of two asylum-seekers, one a Russian Estonian man (the narrator) and the other an Indian (the protagonist), and about their daily lives in a Danish refugee camp and on the road in the late 1990s. While they are waiting to go to the Danish island of Lolland, which is said to be a paradise, the two companions in misfortune survive in any way they can. Among scams, big and small disgraces, humiliations and lies, a map is gradually drawn - a detailed map of itineraries where the hopes and the fears of thousands of marginal people flounder and intertwine. Andrei Ivanov was inspired to write this novel by his own vicissitudes as a stateless person living in Denmark. Their struggle at times engenders dismissiveness and even intolerance, but also humanity, courage and the wisdom born of experience and resignation.

Read more less

An anthology of three collections bringing three poets together around the subjects of birth and war. The styles of these poets differ, but their imagery and intensity echo each other.

Read more less

A work in three parts, Things Written starts with aphorisms in "How Not to Be a Ruminant", shifts to essays in "Weights and Counterweights", and concludes with poetry in "By the Metre". Some arguments appear in more than one section, and include nationalism, class, free will, religion, literature and the arts, but the theme of human relationships runs through the entire book, and is most closely examined with reference to the ideas of Martin Buber in a long essay entitled "Cats and Dogs, and Other Things We Cannot Understand". The back cover carries the following: "WARNING: This is a non-genre product and end-users may encounter forms and ideas to which they are allergic. Vagabond Voices Publishing Ltd, its board of directors, shareholders, parent company and/or subsidiaries advise end-users that they read this book entirely at their own risk."

Read more less

Set in Latvia still under Tsarist rule just before the First World War, Gold is higly topical and describes untrammelled free markets not only push working people into greater poverty, but also degrade the humanity of the wealthy. In fact the book is all about high society and the nouveau riche in the capital city Riga. A classic novel.

Read more less

The Last Woman Born on the Island is an exploration of the past and the present, and a celebration of the landscapes, both physical and emotional, that make up our lives. What are the colours of the language or languages we speak, and how do they infl uence the ways we live? Much of this collection is set in the author’s homeland of Scotland. Some poems contemplate the history and traditions of the Highlands and Islands – from the HMS Iolaire disaster off Lewis in 1919 to the knitting of Eriskay ganseys, from the legend of the White Cow at Callanish stone circle to herring girls at the start of the twentieth century. Others consider Scottish languages and parlances, the country’s wildest and most beautiful landscapes, and the effects of tourism on the culture of the Hebrides. Is there is a diff erence between something lost and something merely forgotten? How do we fi nd what we don’t know we ever had? And what is belonging to a place, let alone to two places? In one long poem, the author stands between her home country and her adopted country of France, letting her feet talk us through the places they have been. Who is the last woman and where is the island?

Read more less

Siblings is the story of ten children, nine of whom are brought up by the eldest who, apart from being the narrator, is keen, capable and obedient to his parents. He has been taught to care for the other nine but also to control them. When the parents are dead and he is in charge, they try to resist him but it is not easy, such are the bonds that tie them together. This is set in a time of generational change from a strict and disciplined society, in which the acquisition of skills is crucial, to a society that is more relaxed (at least for those who don’t have such an elder brother), deskilled and drawn to consumerism. This novel is not just about the claustrophobic nature of the nuclear family; it is also about the interdependence of the powerful and the powerless, but in the end that bond has to be broken as the reader will discover.

Read more less

Catullus wrote on a wide variety of subjects - love (for both women and men), friendship, enmity, bereavement, the joy of homecoming and of drinking wine... And his poems display many moods: from romantic passion to bitter disillusionment, from teasing humour when a friend doesn't acknowledge his unwellness to sharp satire for a bad poet who thinks he's a good one, from grief expressed with a light touch at the death of his sweetheart's sparrow to total desolation on the death of his brother. All the poems have an apparent simplicity and straightforwardness of expression: like Roman frescoes and mosaics, they seem to speak directly to us.

Read more less

The narrator is an urbane, cynical and egocentric Italian journalist with little interest in the truth, though not as shabby as his companion, a professor of politics. The journalist meets people across the spectrum of ideas, and the book concerns not just political events, but how people interrelate within a social context, Scotland's place in Europe and how Europeans interpret each other. The Italian encounters a range of Europeans: a Ukrainian nationalist, a Russian religious guru, an eccentric Estonian, an Algerian refugee, a Lithuanian, a dying man and many Scots from different walks of life. The narrator falls in love with a Scottish campaigner. Beneath the urbane veneer, he's a complex mix of the old-fashioned and the fashionable, and the relationship soon encounters problems. The Italian, like Voltaire's Candide, starts with a mindset incapable of bringing him either understanding or lasting contentment, and ends the book with some understanding and awareness, insufficient for the elusive happiness we all seek but sufficient for a perfectly acceptable human existence.

Read more less

Since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, the image projected of Northern Ireland in the mainstream media is frequently that of a newly prosperous, modern, post-conflict society - a rare example of a successful peace process. Promoted as a great place to live and work, the garden seemed to be getting rosier by the day, that is until the Stormont Assembly collapsed in 2017. Written to coincide with the twentieth anniversary of the GFA, this book argues that the seeds of recent problems were sown in the 1998 agreement. The fiasco of a Renewable Heating Incentive that overpaid participants, the lingering whiff of corruption, communities in crisis and growing poverty are all symptoms of the inherent failings of the supposed settlement. Current difficulties are more than teething problems arising from the transition from war to peace and neo-liberalism; they're the first instalment of a deeper crisis in a northern Irish state and society, which has never properly addressed the corrosive nature of sectarianism. Rather than ridding Northern Ireland of sectarianism, neo-liberalism, operating in the absence of armed conflict, has been able to accommodate and, in some instances, create a new form of sectarianism. The GFA has led to a profound democratic deficit. This book focuses on the nature of the North's new sectarian political class who are the principal beneficiaries of the GFA, but attention is also drawn to the labour movement, the plight of precarious and migrant workers, and the undermining of third sector autonomy. Behind the latter is the continuing suffering within communities still impacted by the long period of armed conflict and the evolution of republicanism and Unionism-Loyalism.

Read more less

"The fact of the matter is Joseph Kirkland was afraid. Afraid of not being Saved. Afraid of being Saved. Afraid of the transformation that would occur the moment he uttered those words, Jesus! God! I want you to come into my heart!" Blessed Assurance is a coming-of-age novel. It is set against the backdrop of a small close-knit evangelical community in the fictional Scottish village of Kilhaugh during a fog-bound December in the late nineteen-sixties when the Cold War was on the brink of turning hot. The story takes place over six soul-searching days in the life of Godfearing dog-thief and pyromaniac, eleven-year-old Joseph Kirkland, and his godless, devil-may-care best friend, Archie Truman, as the perpetually guilt-ridden Joseph attempts to put right what he believes to be the most terrible of lies. It is peopled with colourful characters, peppered with moments of tenderness, tragedy and occasional surreal humour. At its heart though, Blessed Assurance is an exploration of family, friendship, faith, loneliness and grief, and the compromises that sometimes have to be made to remain part of our community.

Read more less

Set in the 1960s, Nakedness is the tale of a young man who has just completed his military service and gone straight to Randava to surprise Marika, the beautiful woman with whom he’s been corresponding for some time. The two have never met in person however, and when the young man arrives at her door, he quickly becomes entangled in a bizarre mystery: Marika claims that she has never written to him; in fact, she appears to be involved with someone else. And none of her flatmates will admit to sending the letters. Humiliated, he prepares to return to Riga, but is convinced by one of Marika’s flatmates to stay a little longer – a decision that throws him even deeper into the web of conflicting relationships he has unwittingly entered. Each clue he uncovers only makes things more confusing, and eventually the young man’s own secrets and mendacity are also revealed. The nakedness that results from being deprived of our deceptions can be unpleasant, but it may be a necessary part of growing up and facing the world. Skujiņš is an original stylist capable of deploying acute psychological observation as well as clever and often witty imagery, and Uldis Balodis has managed to retain this in his excellent English translation. This novel will introduce the reader to a different world precisely because of the writing and the freshness of the dialogue, and not so much for the society it depicts, which resembles in some ways the mass society that also existed in Western Europe at the time, reminding us that even in those more hopeful times, the human condition was still a struggle with desires, ambitions and the image of ourselves we wish to project.

Read more less

Throw a stone in Edinburgh or Glasgow today and you'll hit a poet. The Scottish spoken word scene has exploded, reaching a level of popularity last seen in the late 1970s, another era, coincidentally, when the issue of Scottish self-determination was in the air. A generation of poets has emerged who have grown up in an age of change, political and technological, with the internet providing them not only with new ways of sharing writing - through their websites, podcasts, Twitter - but also in some cases with a subject too. The Sound of Youngish Scotland is the first attempt to capture the spirit of a diverse scene where every poet is their own movement - from McGuire's hilarious, Beat-inflected deconstructions of sexuality to MacGillivray's mystic tales of Scottish cowboys, equal parts MacDiarmid and McCarthy; from William Letford's building-site tales to Russell Jones' sci-fi poetry. It's a scene where you are just as liable to encounter ancient gods as you are video game characters. The Sound of Youngish Scotland features forty poets, mostly under-forty who have made Scotland their home. It's a survey, a yearbook, a celebration and a promise of things to come.

Read more less

'Fault line: 1) a line on a rock surface or the ground that traces a geological fault. 2) a divisive issue or difference of opinion that is likely to have serious consequences.' Poet Gerry Loose's fifth collection maps the 'fault line' dividing man from his environment, centring in this instance on the Faslane submarine base on the eastern shore of Gare Loch in Argyll and Bute, home of the UK's nuclear arsenal. The incongruity of the area's natural beauty coupled with weapons that could reduce it to dust at the push of a button has inspired a book-length poem that probes the delusions of the political and military classes. Loose explores the landscape surrounding Faslane, his hymns to its beauty only throwing into sharper focus its fragility. He describes a land poisoned by the 'deterrent' meant to protect it. In so doing, Loose has reinvented nature poetry for the 21st century, reconnecting with a radical tradition Burns, Byron and Shelley would have recognised and celebrated.

Read more less

"My sight if fades and fading faded forms reveals; ageing looks beyond its age to shrivelled centuries beyond decades." The presbyopic poet cannot focus on "the self as subject", but only on what is distant. This collection of poetry attempts to detach the writer from the obsessions that have dominated poetry for so long: sentiment, love, feelings and the autobiographical in general. To completely dispose of these would be dogmatic, and Cameron argues that some of the greatest poets are both presbyopic and myopic. "And yet he fell apart, and headstrong held to that one truth, while falling and parting for his way, his lonely way of wanting justice for the damned." This poetry is unfashionably but unashamedly political and philosophical. Cameron continues to express in another form the contempt he feels for utilitarianism in general, and in particular its crude and extreme variety, as peddled by neo-conservative politicians and their intellectual bag-carriers. At the same time, he attempts to invent new poetic forms. Inspired by some Italian poets (especially Eugenio Montale), he uses metre and some rhyme, but then breaks it up by introducting enjambement and internal rhymes as well. There are English influences too: most surprisingly Rudyard Kipling's "Mary Gloster" in part inspired "Zarathustra's Last Interview", the longest narrative poem in this collection. "We thank thee Lord for having made us free to rule the world and liberate its inner need to be so much more like us." This poetry is unashamedly anti-imperialist. "That war with wings of death does twist and crush and kill the flimsy leathered bag of flesh and bone and liquid life that spills upon the sands, requires no second telling." This poetry is unashamedly anti-war. "Only this empty moment which I spectate is in my clasp; amongst this fractured stillness, something knowable comes close and just eludes the closing fingers of my mind's grasp" This poetry is for those who have more doubts than certainties.

Read more less

Two young men, Raoul and Niko, who have little in common other than their isolation, escape across a wall of mist from a town about to become a crazed utopian experiment only to encounter a series of dreamlike dystopias, apparently in parallel. Perhaps unconsciously Utopia reflects the key themes of the generation coming of age: the environment, the impossibility of finding a job, the fragmentation of society, a troubled hedonism. The novel is also highly original and contains cubes, corridors, robots, biological columns (a metaphor for the constraints the system places on us), an ugly green and sensitive woman born out of a huge flower – and as in Botticelli’s Birth of Venus the west wind blows gently into her hair – and many other powerful imaginings.

Read more less

Corrado Alvaro's Fear in the World was published a decade before Orwell's 1984, but is not well known outside Italy, perhaps because of the timing of the publication just before the Second World War. Alvaro had visited the Soviet Union as a journalist, but was probably motivated to write this dystopian novel by aspects of modernity that concerned him, particularly the use of fear for political purposes, not only in the Russia. He is interested in the psychology of fear and the extent to which individuals and the crowd participate in their own regimentation. The names of countries, cities and leading political figures such as Stalin are never referred to, but as in the works of Orwell, they are clearly there from the descriptions: the author was writing in a Fascist country against a Fascist censor and had to cut his cloth accordingly. This is a dark novel, not quite as dark as 1984, but it is more claustrophobic. The feel of inevitability is there from the first page, and it is experienced as we do in real life. The imagined takes us closer to where we really are. There is a love affair at the core of this novel, which is the cause of their problems, or quite possibly perceived by the lovers as the cause and therefore became the cause. The modern Leviathan appears to be a well-oiled machine, but towards the end it becomes clear that this is merely an appearance of efficiency and omniscience, but appearances can be powerful. Alvaro is particularly interested in how the state uses quasi-religious mechanisms and rituals to assert its power. The central character returns to the country after a long period abroad, and see things initially through foreign eyes, living a life similar to the one Alvaro did when in Russia. He is not a natural rebel, and very much wants to fit in, but it seems difficult to achieve. The regime boasts that it has an ally in history, but destiny is elusive, however much the characters feel that they are driven by it.

Read more less

This is a story of sex, drugs and blasphemy in late seventeenth-century Edinburgh experienced through four viewpoints over fifteen years: Dr Robert Carruth, his wife Isobel, and university students Mungo Craig and Thomas Aikenhead. After participating in the particularly gruesome autopsy of a pregnant prisoner, Robert is unable to consummate his marriage to Isobel. He buries himself in work, and his overzealousness contributes to the demise of a down-at-heel apothecary named James Aikenhead. Fifteen years pass and the apothecary’s son, Thomas, appears at the Carruths’ door seeking recompense for his father’s death. At his side is Mungo Craig, a cunning poet with dubious loyalties. The two insinuate their way into Robert and Isobel’s life, freshly exposing old fault lines in the Carruths’ marriage and subjecting them to dangerous new pressure.

Read more less

Iain Morrison's debut collection I'm a Pretty Circler is experimental without being intimidating; conversational without being casual; and outrageous without shedding tenderness. Within its pages, Emily Dickinson rubs shoulders with drag queens, while nineteenth-century German composers are as likely to be referenced as dating apps. Morrison balances punchy, patterned short poems with longer more conversational or collaged works that explore ways in which sex, class, technology and religion intertwine in contemporary Britain.

Read more less

Against Miserabilism is a love letter, out of the past, to a new generation of radicals. It’s a collection of articles by David Widgery, who, in addition to working as a full-time medical doctor in London’s East End, wrote prolifically on matters of political and cultural importance from the 1960s till the time of his death in 1992. Although his articles were written some time ago, in this collection writers who knew him introduce and update his work for today’s readers. His commentary on healthcare, Black activism and culture, feminism, other civil rights and the political Left remains relevant. His unique viewpoint as a doctor and a politically active Marxist informs all of his writings.

Read more less

As the First World War comes to an end, chaos takes over in much of Europe and even the victors sense that the old certainties have been lost in the massacre. In Latvia it appears that two centuries of Russian rule are coming to an end, but other powers and destabilising factors persist. Pauls Bankovskis's novel examining this most important of years in his country's history reveals how a new republic emerged from disorder and chance, gradually but also erratically. Painstaking in his research, he even walked himself the full length of the escape route to Finland taken by his protagonist. This is the story of a year and its far from unified people. Two different Latvias, almost a century apart, one looking uncertainly to the future and the other uncomprehendingly to the past, inhabit very different eras and use each other to inform their own actions.

Read more less

The universe has never been depicted so intimately, nor the mundane so infused with stellar significance as it is in the poetry of Vicki Husband. This debut collection is as inspired by quantum physics as it is by domestic drama: the shape of the universe is mimed during a game of charades; a woman's domestic arrangements take on a cosmic dimension; a man stands on the corner selling black holes and property on the moon. Her nature poetry stands at an odd angle to her subjects, not merely content to observe or eulogise landscape or animals: she wants to know what police horses patrolling Glasgow's Sauchiehall Street on Saturday night make of the drunken revellers or why jellyfish are flashmobbing a nuclear power station. Her imagination is rooted in compassion, particularly for the elderly and, in one especially moving piece, a man slowly dying from asbestosis. With sympathy, humour and an idiosyncratic eye, Husband reveals herself to be a unique and cherishable talent.

Read more less

"A barrel not of laughs but of contortions, confusions and the occasional dry chortle - and of metre adorned with irregular, sometimes internal rhymes, assonances, alliterations, awkwardnesses and other such trickery unfashionable to the current academic ear, and not a murmur of the poet's inner angst, failed loves or fortitude." This second collection Cameron's poetry contains a wide variety of subjects, not all of which are commonly associated with poetry: a weak man is interviewed by angelsand devils, an Afghan mystic tell us why he became on e, a riposte to Scott's "Breathes there a man with soul so dead", taking the side of the man with a dead soul, the English language, a lesson on Italian viticulture, and another on Italian anatomy amongst others.

Read more less

A digital native and an actual immigrant, poet Theresa Munoz has considerable personal experience of two subjects that dominate the present day: migration and technology. Born in Canada, she came to Scotland to work and study. Her journey echoed that of her parents, Filipinos who migrated separately from the Philippines in 1970, meeting in Toronto where they worked hard to build new lives. The first of these two sequences of poems, "Settle", reflects her family's experience of emigration over several generations. Although she writes of racism and homesickness, her journey has been a happy one and she has a positive take on uprooting herself and settling in another country. The second sequence, "Digital Life", looks at technology through the eyes of someone who grew up as part of the Facebook generation. Whilst she's an immigrant in the real world, Munoz is very much at home online. She finds humour and melancholy in her interactions with Google, Facebook, mobile phones and email, whether it be the frustration felt waiting for someone to text back, the highly stylised way people present themselves on Facebook, or an oddly empathetic relationship with the unvisited twentieth page of a Google search.

Read more less

A middle-aged judge driven by curiosity and the intellectual challenge of his work, a nervous and neurotic young historian willing to run all manner of risks to uncover the state crimes of the forties, a nerdy, well-educated and good-natured young journalist motivated principally by the desire to enjoy life and not to dwell on the miseries of the past, a KGB general once responsible for some of the purges and now an Islamist radical, an inept, capricious and delightfully self-aware Jewish actor, and an Islamic cleric loyal to the Soviet Union, whose murder has so many repercussions, all these carefully constructed characters could be found in any society but Alessandro Barbero has brought them to life in one of the most elusive, unstable and neglected historical realities: Gorbachev's Russia. And this proves to be fertile ground for Barbero, one that generates endless themes and the opportunity to express his love for Russian literature and culture. Barbero used his skills as a historian to study the reality of that society through its newspapers and journals, and his skills as a novelist to weave a complex plot - a tale of two cities: Moscow and Baku. And throughout, the narrative voice - perhaps the greatest protagonist of them all - represents not the author's views but those of the Russian public as they emerged from one dismal reality and hurtled unknowingly towards another.

Read more less

Klaus is a novella that recounts the last days of Klaus Mann's life, while referring back to the trials of the Mann family (Klaus being Thomas Mann's son) and Klaus's own autobiographical novel, Mephisto, one of his better known works partly because it was banned in West Germany for decades. This unlocks his relationship with both his father and his former lover, Gustaf, who was a communist before collaborating with the Nazi regime and becoming one of its most celebrated actors. On his return to Germany after the war, Klaus was outraged to see that Gustaf had now switched seamlessly to the post-war regime, and was once more the darling of the theatre world. Klaus, who had been isolated as both a homosexual and an anti-fascist, felt that Germans or rather those Germans in prominent positions were refusing to acknowledge their culpability. His isolation was now complete.

Read more less

This is a collection of eleven short stories whose common theme is the heroism of our flawed lives. It explores the arduousness of people's lives and covers such diverse subjects as human solidarity, generational change, single parenthood, domestic violence, the tragic complexity of revolution, police brutality, artistic hubris, and the limitations of rationalism. In "The Hat", a polish Jew on the run in Eastern Europe goes down to a town in search for food and, noticing the large number of German soldiers on patrol, hides himself in a funeral procession. But he stands out as the only mourner without a hat. As he walks along, another man places his hat on the fugitive's head: an example of man's humanity to man. In "Living with the Polish Count", the young Soviet Republic struggles to keep foreign and reactionary forces at bay and in so doing loses the morality that initially inspired them. In "The Selfish Geneticist", lunch in a smart restaurant exposes the rift between two academics, both dogmatic and contemptuous of others, but one more strictly rational and the other more influenced by his human emotions.

Read more less

Like The Death of Men, one of Massie's great novels, Surviving is set in contemporary Rome. The main characters, Belinda (the heroine of the Massie's second novel, The Last Peacock), Kate, an author who specialises in studies of the criminal mind, and Tom Durward, a scriptwriter, attend an English-speaking group of Alcoholics Anonymous. All have pasts to cause embarrassment or shame. Tom sees no future for himself and still gets nervous "come Martini time". Belinda embarks on a love-affair that cannot last. Kate ventures onto more dangerous ground by inviting her latest case-study, a young Londoner acquitted of a racist murder, to stay with her. There is another murder, but this is not a murder mystery. What matters is the responses of the characters to the catastrophe. The atmosphere of Rome is lovingly evoked. The dialogue, in which the characters reveal themselves or seek to avoid doing so, is sharp and edgy. Allan Massie dissects this group of ex-pats in order to say something about our inability to know, still less to understand, the actions of our fellow human beings, even when relationships are so intense. It is also, therefore, impossible or at least difficult to make informed moral judgements of others. This is an intelligent book that examines human nature with a deft and light touch.

Read more less

With one exception, these short stories were written for this collection, and they tentatively look at different themes such as compassion, passivity and their opposites, which are not, of course, original themes, as none exist. The stories are told in different keys, and some characters appear in more than one story. The subject matter also shifts from the social to the political, and the tone becomes increasingly pessimistic. An Algerian immigrant worker in Italy invents a novel way to redistribute wealth, a female academic finds the path to success to be less difficult than she expected, a high-flyer in the financial markets perceives the glories of a selfish existence, a dying writer considers how he abandoned relationships to follow his art, a dead man rejects the tediousness of heaven, a thug is haunted by his selfish instincts, an essayist pronounces and an authors kills off his character. The plot in one short story distinguishes it from all the others: A Dream of JusticeA" is the scenario for a one-state solution in Israel-Palestine, and examines how this might play out. This, it is suggested, is not just a least worstA" solution; it is also the only one in which people can go through the process of rediscovering their common humanity, albeit a process that is long and generational. The Middle East also appears in the form of guest workers and the Secret WarA" in Oman. Cameron attempts in some of these stories to question the current conformist role of the writer and intellectual in Western society. Certainly since the Enlightenment and, more particularly in England since the Civil War more correctly called a revolution, the writer has been a dissident in society.

Read more less

Andres, an Estonian peasant, purchases a smallholding in a marshy part of the country, which the novel is named after. He takes his young wife, and an incident with their cow sets the tone for a life of struggle in which the family grows and gradually lifts itself out of extreme poverty. They don’t only have to strive against the elements, but also against their neighbour Pearu, a wily and ruthless man. This Tolstoyan epic amongst the peasantry and the restless city (in volumes 2 – 4) tells the story of how Tsarist Estonia developed into the First Republic through the experiences of a family and in particular the partly autobiographical character of Indrek, who leaves the land to get an education at the end of this volume. This monumental work by Estonia’s greatest writer is a European classic which has for too long been neglected in the English-speaking world.

Read more less

Klaus, the core work in this collection, is a a novella that recounts the last days of Klaus Mann's life, while referring back to the trials of the Mann family (Klaus being Thomas Mann's son) and Klaus's own autobiographical novel, Mephisto, one of his better known works partly because it was banned in West Germany for decades for its portrayal of his ex-lover Gustaf Grundgens, before being turned into an Academy Award-winning film. Massie's novella attempts to unlock Klaus's relationship with his father, his former lover and his art. Klaus is an appropriate follow-on from Surviving (Vagabond Voices, 2009) in that writing is a major theme. With his usual thoroughness disguised by concision and a masterly light touch, Massie sets about examining how human relatinoships and artistic endeavour interact, and this book also goes back to those "public" themes that dominate so much of his other works of fiction set in the twentieth century. The novella alone would make this collection worthy of note, but the short stories will also fascinate the many who know Massie's work and admire it. They come from his long writing career and have been published under one cover for the first time. Klaus and two other stories has just been written, while there are others from the nineties, the eighties and even the seventies.

Read more less

A brilliantly pared-down take on what it means to be employed by a bank, which expresses the alienation and monotony experienced by staff and customers alike, as well as its opaque mechanisms that defy human rationalism. There is both bleakness and wit in this brief but extraordinary novel.

Read more less

In 1916 a young woman, Rahvaema, leaves the forest community where she grew up, and sets off for a century-long adventure whose struggles and sufferings she could never have imagined. She becomes a campaigner for her Surelik language and culture, and in doing this she expands her horizons and is paradoxically drawn away from the language she loves and wants to defend. The novel confronts the personal costs of political activism and questions our ability to mould our future rationally and morally, whilst also suggesting that we have no choice but to attempt just that. A fortuitous coincidence of events allows her to establish an autonomous republic for her people, the Surelikud, but power brings no only opportunities but also compromises and betrayals. She lives too long and thus she lives to see her achievements crumble. The novel has has many themes, but the way progress is used or abused in order to worsen the living conditions of humanity is the primary one. Rahvaema is the first-person narrator but her ideas about progress are not necessarily the author's, but would be understandable in someone coming from her background.

Read more less

Combining pressing geopolitical urgency with a subtle and gentle lyricism, as we have come to expect from Gerry Loose, his new book ranges wide, broad and deep, to settle back home in the Scotland re-inhabited by Sweeney the king, deranged and fleeing humanity, and a lilting nine day walk from coast to coast across Scotland’s heartland. With narratives from Nuremberg, which contrast city and individual citizens with its long and terrible past, and then stories of an island life – not as insular as might be imagined – in a Finland where anything or nothing may happen, with or without a Luger pistol, this book has a quiet insistence on personal experience. A unique take on the naming of endangered species here could be seen as a metaphor for what the ordinary people in these pages – and their would-be leaders – might in turn become. Expressive, formally inventive, Loose’s seventh full collection night exposures lives right into its title: shining light into murky and overlooked corners which some might wish to be kept in the dark.

Read more less

A political thriller set mainly in Estonia during the dying days of the Soviet Union, but also in Russia, Finland and Sweden. It follows a group of young pro-independence dissidents who have an elaborate scheme for smuggling copies of KGB files out of the country, and whose fates are entangled, through family and romantic ties, with the security services who are tracking them. It describes the curious minutiae of everyday life, offers wry observations on the period through personal experience, and asks universal questions about how interpersonal relationships are affected when caught up in momentous historical changes. This sometimes wistful examination of how the Estonian Republic was reborn after a long hiatus speaks also of the courage and complex chemistry of those who pushed against a regime whose then weakness could not have been known to them.

Read more less

A twelve-year-old schoolchild was arrested at his school and questioned by an anti-terrorist police squad, because he was organising a picket of the offices of his member of parliament, who happened to be the current prime minister of Great Britain. He was protesting against the closure of a youth club. Starting with this absurd example of over-zealous anti-terrorist legislation, Kerr, who has a nose for both the absurd and the shocking, develops his concerning arguments about the gradual erosion of our human rights, particularly in Great Britain and the United States. He backs up his arguments with plenty of examples, including legislation introduced under the American presidents since Reagan, including Barack Obama. He also examines the various philosophical movements that have either enhanced or undermined human rights, and he never loses sight of the social and political forces in play. This is essential reading for anyone interested in these disturbing developments in the fundamental law of our countries.

Read more less

On 16 October 1943, the German army tore 1,056 Jewish Italians from their homes, from their lives and loves, from their routine and familiar objects, and from their home city of Rome. The author of this book was not amongst them, because his father had prepared their flight. He was a Jewish boy of seven on the run and moving from house to house. He would never again see Rachel, the little girl who sat next to him at school. He was a "lucky" one, but as his story unfolds, it becomes clear just how harsh, lonely and terrifying that relative "luck" turned out to be. It took over sixty years for Renzo Modiano, a successful novelist, to write about this disturbing childhood experience. His school report issued in 1943, the twenty-first year of the short-lived "Fascist Era", contains the contemptible bureaucratic classification "of Jewish race" immediately after his name. The enormity of this crime is known to us, but the day-to-day horrors and fears of being on the run from absurd and arbitrary legislation and diktat and also the kindness and solidarity shown by exceptional individuals are perhaps less known. Modiano's tale adds another dimension to Europe's most shameful moment, but it is also a call for us to remember and learn from history.

Read more less

Elspeth, a young Scottish actress, is selected by the elusive impresario Lord Coak for an acting career on the Caribbean Island of Barbados. She is briefly feted by the island community, but a tempest kills her lover and destroys the theatre in which she is to star. She is obliged to take on a supposedly temporary and ambiguous role at Lord Coak's plantation home. The closed environment of the estate is stifling, but it institutionalises her and gives her a degree of status. Dolan's plot takes some unexpected twists, but Elspeth is never free from the constrictions of working for an enterprise whose founding principle is racism. An oppressive sense of eventlessness pervades. Lord Coak's grand plan to modernise the estate cannot be implemented without social reform, but the resulting suspension of lives could also be seen as the human condition: our dreams can never be realised. Another catastrophic event breaks the spell and divides the community, many of whom leave in search of a more enlightened society and in so doing become a mythical people. However Elspeth and the reader remain locked into Lord Coak's estate, which starts rapidly to decay.

Read more less

Gregory Norminton transforms the aphorism into something more accessible and personal. Ultimately he uses aphorisms to question everything - including the aphorism itself: 'Incessantly we ask the meaning of life to protect us from hearing the perfectly obvious answer.' In The Lost Art of Losing, the author analyses the process and the hubris of literary invention, and is brutal in revealing its limitations: 'No revelation sparkles brighter than the one scribbled down from sleep, nor looks duller when revisited by the light of day. What we dream is the image of meaning. The object eludes.' These aphorisms explore the complex relationship between the self and wider society: 'To fear the ill-opinion of others is grossly to overestimate the space we take up in their imagination.' Norminton understands that an aphorism relies on the elegance of its thought: 'Some birds beat the air as if it were a foe meaning to drag them down. Others seem only to flap their wings in order to keep us from getting suspicious.'

Read more less

White Shroud (Balta drobule, 1958) is considered by many to be Lithuania's most important work of modernist fiction. Drawing heavily on the author's own refugee and immigrant experience, this psychological, stream-of-consciousness work tells the story of an emigre poet working as a bellhop in a large New York hotel during the mid-1950s. Via multiple narrative voices and streams, the novel moves through sharply contrasting settings and stages in the narrator's life in Lithuania before and during WWII, returning always to New York and the recent immigrant's struggle to adapt to a completely different, and indifferent, modern world. Skema uses language and allusion to destabilise, drawing the reader into an intimate, culturally and historically specific world to explore universal human themes of selfhood, alienation, creativity and cultural difference. Written from the perspective of a newcomer to an Anglophone country, the novel encourages an understanding of the complexities of immigrant life.

Read more less

Anne Pia's responses to Baudelaire's poetry is not only emotional and intellectual but also linguistic. It comes from her profound love for France's language and culture, particularly when it looks beyond nationhood. As she writes in her passionate and illuminating introduction, "[Baudelaire] luxuriates and furiously dismisses. He rages and yet he speaks soft words. He is tender. He yearns, aches and seductively persuades. A creator of vivid visuals and sublimely evocative music, a conjuror of mist, soft light and of exotic scents, a sculptor and a weaver of tapestry and texture through a mere interplay of words and skilful verse and stanza, Baudelaire - whether jubilant or bitter - is never light-hearted, always honest, intense, disturbing." The challenge Pia set herself was to recreate some of this powerful mix in our English language, which has perhaps ceased to look for inspiration beyond itself since it became so dominant. And she has succeeded in this challenge quite remarkably, drawing the reader into the intimacy of her own intellectual and artistic journey with deep European roots. In this volume we have published the original French poems Pia has chosen and her poetic responses in English, along with her literal translations of the originals. It is a bold move in a "language not of its time", which demands our engagement.

Read more less