Search results for ""Author Nicholas Royle""

The shadow line' is a term Royle uses to describe the faint line on the top edge of the text block that allows him to see whether a book on a shelf contains an inclusion those items inserted into books and long forgotten.The shadow line is a constant reminder of how Royle started to think of books as more than just the printed stories or information they contain. He is always looking for shadow lines when scanning the shelves of second-hand bookstores, charity shops, hotels, Little Free Libraries and Airbnbs.He's no longer only looking for books that are just books. He's looking for the book that contains a hand-drawn map of an unnamed town in Ireland that he can try to identify so he can read the book while walking the streets depicted on the map. He's looking for the book that contains a 1957 delivery note for an address in Bristol, so that he can send the book, complete with delivery note, to whoever lives there now and invite them to welcome it back into its former home.He''s also

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This book reflects on the figure of veering to form a new theory of literature. Contrary to a widespread sense that literature has become increasingly irrelevant to our culture and everyday life, Royle brilliantly traces a strangely compelling 'literary turn'. Starting with an 'Advertisement' (which literally means a 'turning towards') like an 18th-century novel, he explores images of swerving, loss of control, digressing and deviating to form this new theory of literature. Royle's study ranges from Montaigne to Stephen King, from the 'dance of atoms' in Lucretius to the 'human veer' in Don DeLillo. With wit and irony he investigates 'veering' in the writings of Jonson, Milton, Dryden, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Melville, Hardy, Proust, Lawrence, Bowen, J.H. Prynne and many others. Veering provides new critical perspectives on all major literary genres: the novel, poetry, drama, the short story and the essay, as well as 'creative writing'. It proposes a new term for understanding post-1960s cultural and intellectual history: 'the literary turn'. It transverses different disciplines and discourses including verse, vertigo, the dinameu, detournement, transversality, environmentalism, the linguistic, the ethical and the political turn.

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William Shakespeare (1564-1616) is perhaps the most famous as well as strangest and most inventive poet and dramatist of all time. Although dead for hundreds of years, he is everywhere - in books and movies, in love and war, in the public world of politics and the intimacies of everyday speech. What makes his writings so persistently powerful and fascinating? The most effective way of exploring this question is to focus on what (as far as we are able to determine) he actually wrote. Nicholas Royle conveys the richness and complexity of Shakespeare's work through a series of unusually close readings. His primary concern is with letting the reader experience - anew or for the first time - the extraordinary pleasure and stimulation of reading Shakespeare. There are extracts from some of Shakespeare's most popular plays, including The Merchant of Venice, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra.

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Editor’s Choice, The BooksellerA mix of memoir and narrative non-fiction, White Spines is a book about Nicholas Royle’s passion for Picador’s fiction and non-fiction publishing from the 1970s to the end of the 1990s. It explores the bookshops and charity shops, the books themselves, and the way a unique collection grew and became a literary obsession. Above all a love song to books, writers and writing.

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This is the first book-length study of the uncanny, an important topic for contemporary thinking on literature, film, philosophy, psychoanalysis, feminism and queer history. Much of this importance can be traced back to Freud’s extraordinary essay of 1919, ‘The Uncanny’ (Das Unheimliche).As a ghostly feeling and concept, however, the uncanny has a complex history going back to at least the Enlightenment. Royle offers a detailed account of the emergence of the uncanny, together with a series of close readings of different aspects of the topic. Following a major introductory historical and critical overview, there are chapters on literature, teaching, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, film, the death drive, déjà vu, silence, solitude and darkness, the fear of being buried alive, the double, ghosts, cannibalism, telepathy, madness and religion.

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This book provides a wide-ranging and up-to-date critical introduction to the writings of Hélène Cixous (1937-), focusing on key motifs, such as dreams, the supernatural, literature, psychoanalysis, creative writing, realism, sexual differences, laughter, secrets, the ‘Mother unconscious’, drawing, painting, life writing, telephones, non-human animals, telepathy and the ‘art of cutting’. There are close readings of Shakespeare, Brontë, Shelley, Poe, Carroll, Freud, Woolf, Joyce, Beckett and Derrida, for example, alongside in-depth explorations of her own writings, from Inside (1969) and ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ (1975) up to the present. Royle’s book will be useful to students and academics coming to Cixous’s work for the first time, but it will also appeal to readers interested in contemporary literature, creative writing, life writing, narrative theory, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, trauma studies, feminism, queer theory, ecology, drawing and painting.

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Joel Lane (1963-2013) was one of the UK’s foremost writers of dark, unsettling fiction, a frank explorer of sexuality and the transgressive aspects of human nature. With a tight focus on the post-industrial Black Country and his home city of Birmingham, he created a distinct form of British urban weird fiction. Scar City is one of the final collections put together before his death in 2013 – with his home city of Birmingham as their nucleus, these are intense, haunting and often painful stories from a master of the short form. WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY NICHOLAS ROYLE

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How do you write a novel?Practising novelists and teachers of creative writing reveal their working methods and offer practical advice. Subjects covered range from magic realism to characterisation, surrealism to historical fiction, via perspective, plot twists and avoiding being boring, among many others.This book is forcreative writing studentswriters and readers of novelsteachers of creative writingWith contributions from Leone Ross, Tom Bromley, Jenn Ashworth, AJ Dalton, Nikesh Shukla, Stella Duffy, Mark Morris, Alison Moore, Nicholas Royle, Alice Thompson, Kerry Hudson, Toby Litt, Livi Michael, Joe Stretch, James Miller, Sarah Butler, Will Wiles, Graeme ShimminFeaturingEighteen specially commissioned essaysCreative writing exercisesTop tipsLists of recommended novels

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Best British Short Stories invites you to judge a book by its cover – or more accurately, by its title. This new series aims to reprint the best short stories published in the previous calendar year by British writers, whether based in the UK or elsewhere. The editor’s brief is wide ranging, covering anthologies, collections, magazines, newspapers and web sites, looking for the best of the bunch to reprint all in one volume. Neither genre nor Granta shall be overlooked in the search for the very best new short fiction.The first book of the series includes stories published in 2010 by the following authors: David Rose, Hilary Mantel, Lee Rourke, Leone Ross, Claire Massey, Christopher Burns, Adam Marek, SJ Butler, Heather Leach, Alan Beard, Kirsty Logan, Philip Langeskov, Bernie McGill, John Burnside, Robert Edric, Michèle Roberts, Dai Vaughan, Alison Moore and Salley Vickers.

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The nation’s favourite annual guide to the short story, now in its eleventh year.Best British Short Stories invites you to judge a book by its cover – or, more accurately, by its title. This critically acclaimed series aims to reprint the best short stories published in the previous calendar year by British writers, whether based in the UK or elsewhere. The editor’s brief is wide ranging, covering anthologies, collections, magazines, newspapers and web sites, looking for the best of the bunch to reprint all in one volume.This new anthology includes stories by Julia Armfield, A.J. Ashworth, Iphgenia Baal, Emma Bolland, Tom Bromley, Gary Budden, Jen Calleja, Robert Dewa, John Foxx, Josephine Galvin, Uschi Gatward, Meave Haughey, Hilaire, Alice Jolly, Isha Karki, Yasmine Lever, Simon Okotie, Mel Pryor, Douglas Thompson and Matthew Turner.

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The nation’s favourite annual guide to the short story, now in its tenth year.Best British Short Stories invites you to judge a book by its cover – or, more accurately, by its title. This new series aims to reprint the best short stories published in the previous calendar year by British writers, whether based in the UK or elsewhere. The editor’s brief is wide ranging, covering anthologies, collections, magazines, newspapers and web sites, looking for the best of the bunch to reprint all in one volume.Featuring: Richard Lawrence Bennett, Luke Brown, David Constantine, Tim Etchells, Nicola Freeman, Amanthi Harris, Andrew Hook, Sonia Hope, Hanif Kureishi, Helen Mort, Jeff Noon, Irenosen Okojie, KJ Orr, Bridget Penney, Diana Powell, David Rose, Sarah Schofield, Adrian Slatcher, NJ Stallard, Robert Stone, Stephen Thompson and Zakia Uddin.

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The nation’s favourite annual guide to the short story, now in its seventh year.Best British Short Stories invites you to judge a book by its cover – or more accurately, by its title. This critically acclaimed series aims to reprint the best short stories published in the previous calendar year by British writers, whether based in the UK or elsewhere. The editor’s brief is wide ranging, covering anthologies, collections, magazines, newspapers and web sites, looking for the best of the bunch to reprint all in one volume.Featuring stories by Jay Barnett, Peter Bradshaw, Rosalind Brown, Krishan Coupland, Claire Dean, Niven Govinden, Françoise Harvey, Andrew Michael Hurley, Daisy Johnson, James Kelman, Giselle Leeb, Courttia Newland, Vesna Main, Eliot North, Irenosen Okojie, Laura Pocock, David Rose, Deirdre Shanahan, Sophie Wellstood and Lara Williams.

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Inspired by Giles Gordon and David Hughes’s Best Short Stories series, which ran to ten volumes between 1986 and 1995, Best British Short Stories this year reaches its thirteenth volume.Best British Short Stories 2023 showcases an excellent and varied selection of stories, by British writers, first published during 2022 in magazines, journals, anthologies, collections, chapbooks and online.This new anthology contains stories by Alinah Azadeh, David Bevan, AK Blakemore, Gabriel Flynn, Jim Gibson, Lydia Gill, Miles Greenwood, Kerry Hadley-Pryce, Philip Jennings, Sharon Kivland, Alison Moore, Georgina Parfitt, Gareth E Rees, Leone Ross, John Saul, DJ Taylor, Briony Thompson, Matthew Turner, Mark Valentine and David Wheldon.

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