Search results for ""Author Christoph Keller""

Russian Stories rounds up marvellous short stories by all the Russian heavyweights, including Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekhov, Bulgakov, Babel and Nabokov, and continuing up to contemporary writers such as Tatyana Tolstaya and the recent Nobel Prize winner, Svetlana Alexievich. There is no similar one-volume collection of the best of the Russian greats in English. Women writers are particularly well represented and predominate in the last fifty years; also included is a story by the recently rediscovered Teffi, who was widely hailed a century ago in Russia as 'the female Chekhov'.

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''Fascinating ... compelling ... very funny'' Sunday Times''A defiant call to arms ... affecting ... lingers long in the memory after its final page'' Morning Star''A skilful act of literary witness, sharp, moving and funny'' Joanne Limburg ''Christoph Keller ... ranks among the great Swiss writers'' Neue Zürcher ZeitungMost stories of disability follow a familiar pattern: Life Before Accident. Life After Accident. For Christoph Keller, it was different: his childhood diagnosis with a form of Spinal Muscular Atrophy only revealed what had been with him since birth. SMA III, the ''kindest one'', allows those who have it to live a long life, and it progresses slowly. There is no cure. By the age of 25, he had to use a wheelchair some of the time. ''There were two of me: Walking Me. Rolling Me.'' By 32, he could still walk into a restaurant with a cane or on somebody''s arm. At 45, ''Rolling Me''

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From Li Bai's 'Bring in the Ale' to Ted Kooser's 'Beer Bottle'; from Robert Burns's' John Barleycorn' to Carol Ann Duffy's 'John Barleycorn' (no, you are not seeing double), the poems collected here attest to humankind's long and joyous (mostly) relationship with the world's most popular alcoholic beverage. A surprising number of authors, and perhaps some surprising authors, have added their tributes to the brew. Here, to name but a few, we find Charles Baudelaire, John Betjamen, William Blake, Bertolt Brecht, Raymond Carver, Amy Clampitt, Emily Dickinson, Benjamin Franklin, Robert Graves, Langston Hughes, Eric Idle, E. Nesbit, Flann O'Brien, Frank O'Hara, Sylvia Plath, Arthur RImbaud, Rumi and Hank WIlliams, all rather less than sober. Unsurprisingly, 'Anon.' is widely represented, in particularly exuberant spirits. There are recipes, and hangovers (inevitably); there's singing ... a hymn to NInkasi, ancient Sumerian goddess of beer, Prohibition protest songs and old English drinking catches; there is philosophy (of a sort), and consolation. Whether pulling up at the celestial bar in Keats's 'Mermaid Tavern' or at the grittier, jazzier one in Carl Sandburg's 'Honky Tonk in Cleveland, Ohio', lovers of beer and poetry are sure to find something to celebrate in these pages.

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'Fascinating ... compelling ... very funny' Sunday Times'A defiant call to arms ... affecting ... lingers long in the memory after its final page' Morning Star'A skilful act of literary witness, sharp, moving and funny' Joanne Limburg 'Christoph Keller ... ranks among the great Swiss writers' Neue Zürcher ZeitungMost stories of disability follow a familiar pattern: Life Before Accident. Life After Accident. For Christoph Keller, it was different: his childhood diagnosis with a form of Spinal Muscular Atrophy only revealed what had been with him since birth. SMA III, the 'kindest one', allows those who have it to live a long life, and it progresses slowly. There is no cure. By the age of 25, he had to use a wheelchair some of the time. 'There were two of me: Walking Me. Rolling Me.' By 32, he could still walk into a restaurant with a cane or on somebody's arm. At 45, 'Rolling Me' took over altogether.Intimate, absurdist and winningly frank, Every Cripple a Superhero is at once a memoir of life with a progressive disorder, and a profound exploration of the challenges of loving, being loved, and living a public life - navigating restaurants, aeroplanes, museums and artists' retreats - in a world not designed for you. Threaded throughout are Keller's own photographs of the unexpected beauty found in puddle-filled 'curb cuts', the pavement ramps that, left to disintegrate, form part of the urban obstacle course. Those puddles become portals into a different, truer city; and, as they do, so this book - told with humour and immense grace - begins to uncover a truer world: one where the 'normal' is not normal, where disability is far more widespread than we might think, and where there always exist, just alongside our own, the lives of everyday superheroes.

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The definitive introduction to the work of 'the bravest of us . . . the universal poet' (Alice Walker)For the poet and activist June Jordan, neither poetry nor activism could easily be disentangled from the other. Her storied career came to chronicle a living, breathing history of the struggles that defined the USA in the latter half of the twentieth century; and her poetry, accordingly, put its dazzling stylistic range to use in exploring issues of gender, race, immigration, representation and much else besides.Here, above all, are sinuous, lashing and passionate lines, virtuosic in their musicality and always bearing the stamp of Jordan's irrepressible personality. Here are poems of suffusing light and profound anger: poems moved as much by political animus as by a deep love for the observation of human life in all its foibles, eccentricities, strengths and weaknesses.With a foreword by Pulitzer Prize winner Jericho Brown, The Essential June Jordan allows new readers to discover - and old fans to rediscover - the vital work of this endlessly surprising poet who, in the words of Adrienne Rich, believed that 'genuine, up-from-the-bottom revolution must include art, laughter, sensual pleasure, and the widest possible human referentiality.'

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