Search results for ""author paul kingsnorth""

'Like Robert Macfarlane re-written by Cormac McCarthy.' Telegraph'Beckett doing Beowulf.' London Review of Books One thousand years from now, the sole inhabitants of a small island - a group no larger than an extended family - are living in a post-civilised world. They are perhaps the Earth's only human survivors.But lurking outside their isolated community is a figure in red, an emissary from another way of life: a virtual place of refuge and security, of escape from the dangers of a newly wild world. The visitor calls it Alexandria. A work of radical and matchless imagination, Paul Kingsnorth's new novel is a mythical, polyphonic drama driven by elemental themes: of community versus the self, the mind versus the body, machine over man; whether to put your faith in the present or the future.Set on the far side of the climate apocalypse, Alexandria completes the Buckmaster Trilogy, which began with Kingsnorth's prize-winning The Wake.

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It could turn out to be the biggest political movement of the twenty-first century: a global coalition of millions, united in resisting an out-of-control global economy, and already building alternatives to it. It emerged in Mexico in 1994, when the Zapatista rebels rose up in defiance of the North American Free Trade Agreement. The West first noticed it in Seattle in 1999, when the World Trade Organisation was stopped in its tracks by 50,000 protesters. Since then, it has flowered all over the world, every month of every year. The 'anti-capitalist' street protests we see in the media are only the tip of its iceberg. It aims to shake the foundations of the global economy, and change the course of history. But what exactly is it? Who is involved, what do they want, and how do they aim to get it? To find out, Paul Kingsnorth travelled across four continents to visit some of the epicentres of the movement. In the process, he was tear-gassed on the streets of Genoa, painted anti-WTO puppets in Johannesburg, met a tribal guerrilla with supernatural powers, took a hot bath in Arizona with a pie-throwing anarchist and infiltrated the world's biggest gold mine in New Guinea. Along the way, he found a new political movement and a new political idea. Not socialism, not capitalism, not any 'ism' at all, it is united in what it opposes, and deliberately diverse in what it wants instead -- a politics of 'one no, many yeses'. This movement may yet change the world. This book tells its story.

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We see the signs around us every day: the chain cafés and mobile phone outlets that dominate our high streets; the disappearance of knobbly carrots from our supermarket shelves; and the headlines about yet another traditional industry going to the wall. For the first time, here is a book that makes the connection between these isolated, incremental local changes and the bigger picture of a nation whose identity is being eroded. As he travels around the country meeting farmers, fishermen and the inhabitants of Chinatown, Paul Kingsnorth reports on the kind of conversations that are taking place in country pubs and corner shops across the land - while reminding us that these quintessentially English institutions may soon cease to exist.

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Paul Kingsnorth was once an activist, an ardent environmentalist. He fought against rampant development and the depredations of a corporate world that seemed hell-bent on ignoring a looming climate crisis in its relentless pursuit of profit. But as the environmental movement began to focus on 'sustainability' rather than the defence of wild places for their own sake and as global conditions worsened, he grew disenchanted with the movement that he once embraced. He gave up what he saw as the false hope that residents of the First World would ever make the kind of sacrifices that might avert the severe consequences of climate change.Full of grief and fury as well as passionate, lyrical evocations of nature and the wild, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist gathers the wave-making essays that have charted the change in Kingsnorth's thinking. In them he articulates a new vision that he calls 'dark ecology,' which stands firmly in opposition to the belief that technology can save us, and he argues for a renewed balance between the human and nonhuman worlds. Provocative and urgent, iconoclastic and fearless, this ultimately hopeful book poses hard questions about how we have lived and should live.

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What kind of man am I? I wonder what I think about that now that I have spent a year here, watching the layers peel off, stripping myself back . . .Beast plunges you into the world of Edward Buckmaster, a man living alone on a west-country moor. What he has left behind we don't quite know; what he faces is a battle with himself, the elements and with the animal he begins to see in the margins of his vision. A creature that will become an obsession . . .

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From the legends of King Arthur embedded in the rocky splendour of Tintagel to the folklore and mysticism of Stonehenge, English Heritage sites are often closely linked to native English myths. Following on from the bestselling ghost story anthology Eight Ghosts this is a new collection of stories inspired by the legends and tales that swirl through the history of eight different English Heritage sites. With this evocative collection English Heritage brings new voices and fresh creative alchemy to our ancient historical sites and our story-telling heritage. Also contained is essay by James Kidd on the importance of myth to our landscape and our fiction, and an English Heritage survey of sites and associated legends. New legends for modern times; sprung from our ancient lands, stories and stones.

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