Search results for ""Parthian Books""

Twenty-first century women have it all. We can do what we want, when we want and with whom we want. Can't we? This book is a collection of life stories by women in their 20s to 70s. It is about how we live: our desires, discontents, ambitions and commitments.

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Features poems about settling, building and planting in a country where the author is a stranger. His chosen forms - lyric, ode, sonnet, eclogue, elegy, epithalamium - point to an engagement with British tradition.

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Features poetry of ten poets, each with an American background and an active, creative engagement with Wales. This title deals with the 'matter of Wales' and the 'matter' of being Welsh-American, developed through divergent poetics and perspectives. It features Jon Dressel, Denise Lever, William Greenway, and William Virgil Davies.

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Presents a comic drama, where four international experts converge at a luxurious Cardiff hotel to each bid to save a language on the verge of extinction. As personalities clash and opposites attract, the decision on which language should be saved becomes impossible to make.

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A collection of poetry, prose, visual art, and photography, this volume reflects the Cardiff-born author's unique style and use of language as he deals with themes such as war, hijacking and suicide, and drugs and pop music.

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This volume includes the plays Little Sister, Giant Steps, and Killing Kangaroos."

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Men Alone is a meditative vision from a unique voice that explores the many often confounding permutations of modern masculinity

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When a local common is threatened with development, one poet explores its secrets, discovering extraordinary natural treasures and wonderful people fighting to defend them. Can they save this uncommon common?

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This collection brings together leading voices from female writers, artists, commentators and academics to reflect on how devolution has affected them and altered our political and social landscapes. Here,a series of creative and personal responses explore the true impact of devolution on the lives of women living and working in Wales.

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Set in Zimbabwe during the early 2000s, amidst a backdrop of political turmoil, Fox Bites is a dark coming-of-age horror fantasy about pain, loneliness, and stepping back from the abyss.

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Texts from Gorwelion will be made available as digital contributions to events at the 26th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties COP26 in Glasgow, 1-12 November 2021, representing voices from the UK and India in uniting the world to tackle climate change, where the book will also be launched and available to buy. * Produced in collaboration with Sustainable Wales/ Cymru Gynaliadwy Gorwelion follows on from Sustainable Wales' initial project 'Our Square Mile', created to help us imagine the future.

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These sensual stories by prize-winning author John Sam Jones reveal lucid prose and complex lives. Moving through city steam rooms, rugged North Wales mountains and estuaries facing other places. Risky sex, new romance and easy understanding, a mortgage on a semi or keeping a lid on it all for the sake family, status and belief...

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Gwyn Thomas was born, the last of twelve children, into a Rhondda mining family in 1913. After a childhood marked by the strikes of the 1920s, he went off to study Spanish at Oxford University and in Madrid, where he met the poet Federico Garcia Lorca and witnessed the turmoil which would lead to the Spanish Civil War. On his return, amidst the economic mire of the 1930s and his own burgeoning teaching career in Barry in the 1940s, he picked up his pen and began to write. For more than forty years, until his death in 1981, as novelist, screenwriter, master of the short story, and prizewinning playwright, Gwyn Thomas delivered compelling and comedic portraits of his world of South Wales. His creative genius earned enduring fame on both sides of the Atlantic and on both sides of the European Cold War divide. As a provocative and insightful broadcaster, he embraced the possibilities of radio and television, whilst leaving his hosts and guests alike in fits of knowing laughter. This landmark biography, enriched with unrivalled access to private papers and international archives, tells the remarkable story of one of modern Wales's greatest literary voices.

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Kisses Sweeter Than Wine is an honest and absorbing memoir from a man who has emerged as one of Wales’s major cultural figures. Boyd Clack is a man of many talents: a writer, actor, singer, musician, enthusiast, and with this first book picks apart a challenging upbringing in Tonyrefail, his wanderings to Australia, Amsterdam and London, and his experimentation as a young man with drink and drugs and love. This is Boyd’s story, told with candour and perception and skill that will absorb anyone interested in what it was to be young and Welsh – and are now older and maybe a little wiser. ‘Boyd is a brilliant actor and writer, truly unique, a genius by any definition of the word.’ – Rhys Ifans ‘I love Boyd’s unique take on life.’ – Rob Brydon “Awesome and hilarious... I cannot recommend this moving, truthful, funny and endearing roller coaster of a ride enough.” – Eve Myles

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A man's own story from the Rhondda. Jeffrey Weeks was born in the Rhondda in 1945, of mining stock. As he grew-up he increasingly felt an outsider in the intensely community minded valleys, a feeling intensified as he became aware of his gayness. Escape came through education. He left for London, to university, and to realise his sexuality. From the early 1970s he was actively involved in the new gay liberation movement and became its pioneering historian. This was the beginning of a long career as a researcher and writer on sexuality, with widespread national and international recognition. He has been described as the 'most significant British intellectual working on sexuality to emerge from the radical sexual movements of the 1970s'. His seminal book, Coming Out, a history of LGBT movements and identities since the 19th century, has been in print for forty years. He was awarded the OBE in the Queen's Jubilee Honours in 2012 for his contribution to the social sciences.

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In Windfalls, Wild writes of fruit blown down by the wind, of unexpected and unearned gains which renew the beauty and joy of life. Here flying trampolines disrupt trains, apples carpet gardens, the Balloon Girl rises and the red moon sinks. In a city of ups and downs the Handkerchief Tree rare-blooms, fists and knickers are flung, crestfallen angels consider dates, carnivores go hungry, wedding vows are made and a pandemic honeymoon is cancelled. These are also stories of heroines who fall or jump from pedestals, taking risks in a world that is often dangerous for women, but refusing to settle for the conventional. Wild continues to bring us her refreshingly slant world view, whether unpicking the domestic, the political or the environmental.

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This is his first full biography, describing the early years of the Blaenclydach grocer's son, his abhorrence of chapel culture , his bohemian years in Fitzrovia, his visit to the Lawrences in the south of France, his unremitting work ethic, his patrons, his admiration for the French and Russian writers who were his models, his love-hate relationship with the Rhondda, and above all, the dissembling that went into Print of a Hare's Foot (1969), an autobiographical beginning , which proves to be a most unreliable book from start to finish.

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A Fox in the Yard is a remarkable sequence of poems centred around an enduring and hard-earned sense of place, combined with a deep respect of the natural world, its mysteries and our perception of them.

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`Jaio is undoubtedly a very skillful narrator' - Inigo Roque, Gara *Winner of a PEN Translates Award *Bestselling book in Basque at the Donostia-San Sebastianand Bilbao Book Fairs, winning the Euskadi Plata and Zazpi Kale prizes. *Winner: Seventh Igartza Prize, the Beterriko liburua (an annual distinction which readers award the best book in Basque), Hontza, JUUL, and Iparraguirre. Have you ever had the feeling of not truly knowing your nearest and dearest? The precarious balance in the life of Nerea, a thirty-something journalist, breaks down when her mother, Luisa, is hospitalised with total amnesia. Nerea, who feels guilty for not having recognised the symptoms that afflicted her mother, now finds a person almost unknown to her. Luisa is haunted by memories of a romance from her youth and soon Nerea begins to discover that the two women share much more than they believe.Her Mother's Hands is an examination of the deepest human bonds and a beautiful and moving tribute to life. My Mother's Hands is Jaio's debut novel and remains one of the bestselling books in the Basque literary scene in recent years. The novel has been adapted for the big screen, filmed by Mireia Gabilondo, and presented at the Donostia Zinemaldia, the San Sebastian International Film Festival.

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Hey Bert contains poems that speak intensely of the everyday, of nostalgia, friendship and love, the body, the sacred, all seen through Pastore's unique, eccentric filter of spirit animals, pop-culture, dreams and astrology. In the spirit of John Giorno, Anne Waldman, and Julia Heyward, Pastore's work draws from performance art, confessional poetry, mantra, and folklore to create a voice both fiercely contemporary and somehow out of time.

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Somewhere near the bleak Head of the Valleys there is a housing estate called Texas-2. Here a vibrant cast of characters, related by blood and dislocated by time, hunt, hate and love each other over the course of a dark yet hilarious narrative. Through this landscape wanders Hank Evans, epileptic and visionary, a lost soul in search of final meaning. Leading to Texas-2 is a riveting account of violent lives and human redemption in a Wales seldom so revealed in all its stark, bizarre reality. Aled Smith has created a brilliant and lively world; a world imagined over two brutal days and rooted in a place that may never be seen in quite the same way again.

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In Phenomena (translated from the Latvian, Paradibas) Eduards Aivars' wry observations transform the mundanity of the everyday into words of quiet, thought-provoking beauty. Following his innovative principle of composition, the collection features many poems with long, expositional titles, which then culminate in a select few words, for example, 'The sad tale of the long-anticipated air pump', or 'The intense, but fleeting urge for domesticity and commitment'. Aivars talks about people, love and the life of a poet in this witty, reflective and unique collection. Phenomena is part of the 'Parthian Baltic' project. The project was launched at the Parthian poetry festival at the Wheatsheaf and the London Book Fair 2018 (focus region: Baltics).

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Fragments of a Jigsaw: Portraits of Artists and Writers of Wales is an unprecedented collection of photos by Bernard Mitchell who has compiled a gallery of notable characters within the Arts community in Wales. Fragments of a Jigsaw: Portraits of Artists and Writers of Wales is based on the on-going Welsh Arts Archive project. The project began in 1966 with a series of portraits of the Swansea friends of Dylan Thomas, including the artists Ceri Richards and Alfred Janes, the poet Vernon Watkins and the composer Daniel Jones. The collection kept growing: since 1990, Bernard Mitchell has added many artists who have since passed away, including, Will Roberts, Josef Herman, John Petts, Ivor Roberts Jones, John Elwyn, David Tinker and Ernest Zobole. The work continues with the artists working today. In 1999, a large exhibition of photographs of artists was held at the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth. Photographs are also held in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery, London, The National Museum of Wales, Cardiff and the Glynn Vivian Gallery, Swansea. This is a unique collection of photo-portraits from the Welsh arts scene.For more information on the Welsh Arts Archive project, visit bernardmitchell. co.uk/welsharts-archive/.

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In What I Know I Cannot Say / All That Lies Beneath, Dai Smith combines a novella and a linked section of short stories to create a dazzling fictional synthesis that takes the reader on a tour of the South Wales Valleys during the twentieth century. Picking up where his 2013 novel Dream On left off, What I Know I Cannot Say follows the life story of Billy's father, Dai Maddox. When Billy's former partner Bran shows up wanting to record Dai's life story to put together a documentary, Dai looks back on his past, remembering his childhood as a destitute orphan, his work as a collier in the mines and the subsequent drifting between menial jobs, alleviated only by reading and drawing; his enrolment in the British Army and participation in the invasion of Italy during the Second World War; and post-war life under socialism, when he was back in the pits and married to Billy's mother, Mona.Moving from the heyday of the pre-mechanised coal industry to the present day, What I Know I Cannot Say presents a moving and vivid panorama of twentieth-century Wales, brought to life by Smith's meticulous attention to historical detail and distinct gift of invoking the smells, sights and sounds of the past. We find ourselves smelling the cordite of ammunition among the ruins of Cassino in 1943, during the invasion of Italy; the damp coal in the mineshafts; the beer-soaked wood of pub floors; the smell of fresh coffee from a modern percolator. Dai's journey is an emotional and moving one, told in gritty, realistic prose.All That Lies Beneath is white-knuckle fiction ride: power, sex, money and ambition all twist through the pages as Smith creates a feast of intellectual and physical provocation in stories that send a shudder of fearful recognition directly through to the reader.

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Beautiful widow Joan D'Silva is at Howrah Station, fleeing Calcutta with her 11-year-old son Errol. Also on the same train is Laxhimi, a notorious hijira prostitute: charismatic, sensual and powerful. They are both running away to Lucknow to escape danger, but soon their lives will become entangled in a web of corruption and blackmail. Who is responsible for the poisoning at the factory? Is it the Workers Revolutionary Movement, the Children of God under the sway of the charismatic Swami Naik, or someone else entirely? If only the police could help. But Detective Inspector Mallothra has based his investigative style on Mickey Spillane novels so it's down to Joan, her friends, and of course Errol, to unmask the perpetrator. With a cast of colourful characters, this new novel by Glen Peters is inspired by his youth in the dwindling Anglo-Indian community. It is a witty, vivid tale of intrigue, immersed in the sights, sounds, smells and especially the tastes of 1960s India.

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Berlin, October 1933. Max Dienst has returned to the city he last knew as a student. He has been asked to cover the elections to the Reichstag. A colleague on the paper mentions the case of Geli Raubal, a young singer from Vienna who died in mysterious circumstances in the flat of her uncle. There is a botched death certificate but is it a hidden murder? Max thinks he may have a story, her uncle is the leader of a growing political party, a man who seeking to change Germany and Europe. Her uncle is Adolf Hitler. Berlin is also the city of his youth when he was in love with a young Russian communist and embroiled in all the new ideas of change and idealism. Ten years later Max is married to Rhiannon and a journalist for a respected newspaper. Rhiannon works at the British Embassy. She is approached by the mysterious Sid Khan, he may have information that would be useful to her husband. Max was a member of the communist party in his youth. Max wants to find the truth in a time when everyone has their own version, but are there secrets that are best forgotten?

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"A world of green: a new and weird world of grim, dark shadows and frenzied activity; of conflicting sounds varying from the roar and thunder of overhead gantries, the sharp, shrill staccato beat of automatic hammers, to the echoing ring of steel upon steel, and the hollow wheezing and thumping of the hydraulic moulding machines".Starting as an apprentice at Bevan's foundry, Ieuan Morgan enters a new and testing world. His colleagues soon turn out to be his tormentors while life at home is not without its challenges. It is hard for the young man to sustain his dreams of one day being a writer, and of a better world. Things have to get worse before getting better so unemployment casts its long shadow over the town. But the lay-offs give the gifted Ieuan time to read and think and on a visit to the fair to meet Sally, a gentle, consumptiveyoung woman from the wrong side of the tracks.With this, his destiny changes course. Written with a deep authenticity born from bitter experience, William Glynne-Jones depicts life in the fictional town of Abermor and especially the daily grind of foundry life, in a workplace fraught with dangers. Farewell Innocence is a heartfelt and affecting account of a young man's rites of passage in hard times.

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"The foundry was working at full pressure. In spite of the dismal conditions - the stifling heat, the silica dust that hung in clouds in the air, the crude ventilation, and the strenuous labour - the men seemed happy and companionable. A certain measure of security had come at last after the long years of unemployment; the dread of the dole was behind them".Life in the foundry is changing Ieuan Morgan, whose hands, once familiar only with the feel of books are now dark, knotted and fiercely strong. He dreams of writing and the day his young love Sally will come home from the convalescence home. When that day arrives Ieuan's life starts to feel complete and marriage only deepens that conviction. But much longed for success with hiswriting brings with it new temptations, when Stella Courtland, the sophisticated editor of a fashionable magazine enters the young man's life.Ride the White Stallion is the sequel to Farewell Innocence, charting the trials and travails of Ieuan Morgan at the foundry and in his family life. It is an account of a young man's creative awakening amid the challenges of domestic penury and downright hard graft. A portrait of an industrial town as well as a convincing character study, Ride the White Stallion is shot through with truth and honesty, twin hallmarks of Glynne-Jones's work.

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Harry Selwyn is a master of detachment - from the realities of the past, from his own ageing body, and from his conscience. Even the sudden death of his wife is not allowed to interfere with the daily routine. He must prepare for tomorrow's race. He must return his ill-fitting trousers to the shop. And death will have to wait.

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A novel that spans the twentieth century and introduces a litany of unforgettable characters, For Those Who Come After is a study in myth-making, of familial bonds, and the destructive tides of enduring love.

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Wikipedia-obsessed cats, deleted tweets, James Franco's mother, west Wales, and Barcelona. Both bleak and joyously optimistic, All The Places We Lived is a collection of disparate, yet inextricably connected stories that are bound by the common threads that exist amongst young people in and out of love with each other and life in the twenty-first century. Whether keenly awaiting an imagined terror attack in a twenty-third floor glass box hotel, wandering Catalonian art galleries, or two AM jogging on pitch-black A-roads, solitude is never a truly concrete experience. There is always someone else: someone to buy a dilapidated rural house with, someone to laugh with, someone to get fired with, someone to fight with, someone to ride bikes with. Richard Owain Roberts has assembled a debut collection of contemporary fiction that is minimalist, confrontational, delicate, and, relentlessly, the absolute unfiltered truth.

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'Tumult and disorder, frustration, wages, strikes, riots, debts - were these to be his world? Ugliness, squalor and meanness was their portion. And yet, and yet ...They had the full tarnished brilliance of life in them. And he began to laugh, with a soft low sound, half caught in his throat.' The second novel in the Rhondda Trilogy - 'the most sustained literary examination of Welsh industrial history ever published and certainly the least ideologically distorted' - A Time to Laugh (1937) is set in a coal-mining valley on the eve of the 20th century. It is set against a background of industrial unrest and social change. The old certainties of pastoral Rhondda have given way to a new age of capital and steam, and life in the Valley has been transformed by strike, riot and gruelling poverty. The central character is Dr Tudor Morris, whose ancient estate has been sold to one of the railway companies opening up the Rhondda for the purpose of extracting coal and taking it down the Valley to the docks in Cardiff. The doctor abandons his class and seeks personal salvation among the poor. Although expressly radical in its sympathy for the working class, the novel also finds a place for local tradespeople, the small shopocracy to which Davies's family (grocers in Blaenclydach near Tonypandy) belonged: they remain neutral, non-political, with their livelihoods threatened, hapless bystanders in the social upheaval of the day. Like Rhys Davies himself, they are mere observers of the strike, which is based on the Haulers' Strike of 1893 and the Cambrian Combine Lock-out, here set in December 1899, that led to the famous Tonypandy Riots of 1910. The novel's emphasis is on collective responsibility rather than personal revolt as depicted in Davies's earlier novels, though he remains wary of Socialist ideology and the mentality it breeds. As for the Communists, they are seen as propagandists rather than the socially vital force they actually were in places like 'red Rhondda'.

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Have you been chosen to chair a group or a meeting for the first time? In the Chair is a practical, up-to-date and comprehensive guide to how to become the successful Chair of any body, whether it's the organisation you work for, a community group or charity, or a public or company Board. What qualities and skills do you need? How should you approach your group and its members? How should you prepare for and conduct meetings? How do you arrive at decisions, and cope with difficult situations and people? Inside you will find invaluable advice on chairing formal Boards and working with Chief Executives, as well as how to approach special kinds of meeting, including formal and public meetings, conferences, appointment panels, bilingual meetings and videoconferences. In the Chair will benefit anyone keen to make participating in groups and meetings a productive and enjoyable experience.

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Dream On is a composite novel: part black comedy and flashlight noir thriller, part meditation on the stories that connect up the frayed wires in the business of living. There's Digger Davies and his one cap for Wales and ultimately untimely death...the award winning photographer whose return home will become a quest for his own forgotten identity and compromised life...the thwarted politician in a hospital bed writing his own obituary...and a beautiful girl caught in time, alive in an old man's memory...

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Wiltshire 1860: One year after Darwin's explosive publication of The Origin of Species, sisters Anna and Beatrice Pentecost awaken to a world shattered by science, radicalism and the stirrings of feminist rebellion; a world of charismatic religious movements, Spiritualist seances, bitter loss and medical trauma. Fetishist of working women Arthur Munby, irascible antiquary General Pitt Rivers, feminist Barbara Bodichon and other historical figures of the Victorian epoch wander through the backdrop of the novel, as Anna's anomalous love for Lore Ritter and her friendship with freethinking and ambitious Miriam Sala carry her into areas of uncharted desire - while Beatrice, forced to choose between her beloved Will Anwyl and the evangelist Christian Ritter, who marked her out as a wife when she was only a child, is pulled between passion and duty. Each is riven by inner contradictions, but who will survive when the sisters fall into a fatal conflict with one another?

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New York, May, 1950. A warm Spring day and a short, and portly, thirty-five year old Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas, pushes through the plush revolving doors of Harper's Bazaar, in the heart of bustling downtown Manhattan. He was taking a chance on offering 'A Child's Christmas in Wales', a prose piece that had already served him well, but Harper's were not to know that. There, he meets Miss Pearl Kazin, Fiction Editor, highly-educated and out to make her own mark on New York; a woman, vastly different in manner, substance and background to his other New York 'lady-friends', with whom he fell in love, with consequences that were to disturb him profoundly for more than a year. An intense and passionate relationship began on that day. One side of their correspondence has survived, six 'love letters', never before published, sent from Dylan to Pearl. Until these letters came to light Pearl had remained something of a ghost; now, they offer part of Dylan's side of the story.

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When Dorothy set off on a night out with her sister she never dreamt it would lead to a car journey to Baghdad; but that night she met a dark, mysterious stranger - an Iraqi student named Zane- and almost before she knew it they were married and driving to Baghdad in a borrowed car with their baby daughter, Summer. They moved into a house in the suburbs with Zane's family, throwing Dorothy into the maelstrom of Iraqi culture: letters could take weeks to arrive, there were no mobile phones or computers and there was no direct dial facility to the UK - she might as well have been living on the moon. Between Two Rivers is an honest, funny and moving memoir of Baghdad life from the perspective of a young woman from England transplanted into another culture by love.

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Philomena is a born rebel, disillusioned with her middle-class comfort and the expectations of her parents. Nestor is an impoverished African exile with the heart of a poet. When the two meet by chance on the streets of 1960s Bombay, their attraction will change their lives forever. Spanning two continents and following a story of love, loss and politics set against a backdrop of turbulent societies, times and allegiances, God on Every Wind is a powerful debut novel exploring the possibilities and limitations of individual and political revolution.

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A paid assassin called Krink loads up on viper-spit to tackle some uber-thugs; the governor of a prison ship introduces his inmates to haute cuisine; a farmer wakes up after an avalanche in north Wales to find he's the last man alive. The stories in this zany new collection range freely, almost chaotically, from the taiga region of northern Russia to the depths of despair. They are fuelled by a high octane imagination and an uncommon zest for language. A thrilling collection from a stunningly original voice. A journey in stories through a fabulous and fascinating fictional new world.

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Stalking Paloma is award-winning poet Ifor Thomas's follow-up to his Welsh Book of the Year shortlisted Body Beautiful. Central to this collection is an arresting and original sequence exploring the obsessive nature of fandom and its pursuit through social media. Staking out the territories of Facebook and Twitter, Thomas is witness to the interplay of intimacy and alienation which has increasingly come to define twenty-first century life. Elsewhere, his other preoccupations come to the fore: the changing face of Cardiff, negotiations with the past, mortality, and poetry - and the personalities that populate his art. With a love of the noir and a sly, mordant wit, Thomas delivers a performance as entertaining as it is essential.

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Widely regarded as one of the most readable, humorous and poignant autobiographies available today. Goodbye, Twentieth Century incorporates his acclaimed first volume of autobiography, A Poet in the Family, and in this new edition from the Library of Wales brings his life up to the present day and the outset of a new century.

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An artist at heart, Trystan Morgan grows up in his grandmother's valley mining cottage, duty-bound by her deep wish for him to be a preacher. He comes from farming stock and longs to paint the Welsh countryside of his people. But he agrees to study at the city university although his adolescent mind revolts at the social posturing around him. Trystan's journey through the conflicting cultural, social and political values of his country in the mid-twentieth century is bewildering but finally liberating. And through the glittering, crowded, kaleidoscopic images of this bravura novel, the author creates a rich impression of people and place; a Wales which is a landscape of the mind.

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Tai lives in Tremorfa. He likes fishing and the Troll who lives at the bottom of Mrs Griffiths garden. He's never told anyone about the troll. Illustrated by a Welsh International Sportswoman, this is the first in a trilogy of "Troll" books. In an age of I-pods and downloadable movies there is a refreshing air of the simplicity and excitement in a days fishing and pure imagination. This work will appeal to any little boy with a pocket full of shells, pebbles and elastic bands.

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