Search results for ""Colenso Books""

This composite journal of the Covid Years is made up of the writings, artwork and photographs of twenty-seven contributors, whose ages at the time of writing or creating ranged from seven to over eighty. Most of them were in the UK but there are also contributions from Greece, Italy and the USA. The dated entries run from March 2020 to January 2023. Responses to the strange and disturbing years we have lived through range from the sorrow and anger of bereavement through calm reflections and gentle humour to mockery and bitter satire directed at some of our political leaders. It includes memorial tributes to two contributors who died during these years, and it is dedicated to all the staff of the NHS for their extraordinary devotion under incomparable difficulties. Colenso Books will donate any profits from the sale of this book to charities which benefit the UK National Health Service and its staff.

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A collection of eleven short stories embodying the impact on the rural population of a mountainous district of nortwestern Greece of the events of the Second World War and the Greek Civil War that followed.

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An impressive and unusual first novel by Leslie Retallick, whose previous publications have all concerned the history and buildings of Torquay. His knowledge of the town underpins this novel which might, technically, be classified as science fiction, but it feels nothing like it. It is set in Torquay in the Aprils of two different years: 1898 and a year in the second decade of the twenty-first century; but the realistic sense of place and the lively, natural and often amusing dialogue allow the reader to feel equally at home in both years. Sixteen-year-old Matt and his uncle, Connor, whose ‘own time’ is ours, find themselves ‘flipping’ backwards and forwards between these two Aprils, while remaining in the same location on the edge of Torquay. In 1898 they become involved with a wealthy widow, Maria Debbon, and her three children, endangered by political scheming in connection with their family origins. Connor and Matt form emotional attachments to Maria and her elder daughter Helen respectively – relationships which are handled with insight and delicacy. The event at the heart of the novel – the destruction by fire of the Debbons’ mansion on the night of 29th–30th April 1898 – has affinities with the burning of two other literary mansions: Thornfield Hall in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Manderley in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (also a West Country novel). Without making it explicit, Before The Fire offers a subtle and ingenious answer to the question: If we could go back in time, could we change the past? The book has forty-three black-and-white illustrations, mainly positioned between chapters. Some were created by the author; others are his photographs of Torquay today; but the majority are from his extensive collection of old photographs and postcards of Torquay.

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Two novellas by the Corfiot Author Konstantinos Theotokis (1872–1923), translated by the renowned translator form German and Greek J. M. Q. Davies, depicting the the harsh conditions of the urban working class and rural peasants in Corfu in the early years of the twentieth century.

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First English translation of a Greek novella first published in 1920 by the Corfiot author Konstantinos Theotokis. A tragi-comedy of Corfiot village life.

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The Synaxarion of the monastery of the Theotokos Evergetis: Indexes

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One hundred pracrical texts of perception and spiritual discernment from Diadochos of Photike.

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A selection of the poems of Sappho and other Ancient Greek authors translated into English verse by Theodore Stephanides, with facing Greek texts from editions which correspond closely to the translations. There is a substantial introduction and extensive notes by the editor, Anthony Hirst.

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A collection of eighteen short stories whose main focus is the experience of growing up black or mixed race in small towns in England’s West Country.

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An extremely varied collection of poetry mostly written in the period May 2021 to October 2023. The second part of the title, "at the road side" is, according to the Introduction, “a metaphor for where an ageing man feels himself to be in relation to the deteriorating world situation”. Included are several poems responding to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and towards the end of the book to the Israeli bombardment of Gaza. There are autobiographical sketches from the distant past, humorous and even silly poems, accounts of several dreams and their connection to reality, some anti-Christian poems, and as an appendix a nine-page piece of literary criticism in verse attacking Wordsworth's Ode on "The Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood". Many poems use constrained verse forms such as tanka and haiku and the 23-syllable 4-line stanza that Hirst has been using since the 1990s.

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Life Term is a psychological thriller about a six-year-old boy who is sexually assaulted by a man on a riverbank. Many years later, whilst working as a psychiatric nurse, he seeks his revenge. However, despite a successful subsequent career in journalism and publishing, the shame and guilt lives with him until there is some resolution. On one level, Life Term is a page turner, which tells an absorbing story with twists and turns till the end. On another, it is about crime and punishment, revenge and redemption and about the borderline between good and evil.

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Poems on the craft, the risks and the subversive power of poetry, selected by the translator in conjunction with the author from the the Greek Collected Edition of Andonis Fostieris’ poems published in 2021 (Apanta ta Poiimata 1970–2020). A bilingual edition with the Greek text from that edition and facing English translations by Irene Loulakaki-Moore. In her Introduction the translator writes:- If Fostieris draws the reader’s attention to the alphabet, its sounds and the processes of syllabification, reading and writing, in other words to the “materiality of the text” and the “mechanisms of writing”, it is because, like many poets of his generation, he is suspicious of the ways in which vocabularies create descriptions of the world and ourselves, instead of adequately or inadequately expressing them. The socio-political, economic and intellectual developments in Greece and elsewhere in the 1970s rendered obsolete previous generations’ search for the “lost centre” and the grand narratives that validate it. Unlike the Modernist poet-authority, Fostieris, does not stand in the centre of his creation, like a unique owner of truth and sole creator of meaning… Fostieris’ poetics surpasses Modernism and marks a turn towards the Post-modern, constituting a new approach to the role and function of contemporary poetry, while it also proposes a coherent conceptualization of the role of language and its relation to the truth… One could say that Fostieris and the poets of his Generation attempted what Surrealism (another avant-garde movement which met with a great deal of resistance in Greece) had attempted: the secularization of inspiration… The transformation of inspiration after the Surrealists made available for everyone what had been the privilege of the poet-initiate, in line with Lautréamont’s injunction: “Poetry should be made by everyone. Not just by one.” With his “prolonged hesitation between sound and meaning” (Paul Valéry) Fostieris wants to bring the written word closer to the mental experience, the feeling or the thing in itself. He does not deny the referential function of language, he only exhibits his suspiciousness towards the authority that says, “my language is true”. By doing so he cleverly abstains from imposing on the readers his version of meaning, inviting them instead to join in the game of signification.

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Collected poems written between 1963 and 2020, most of them published here for the first time.

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Largely a facsimile edition of the original 1991 publication with revised preliminary pages, including a new Foreword by the editor and translator. In Greek and English.

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The first half of the book is devoted to the poetry of Yannis Ritsos and includes several of his longer poems in their entirety. In the second half are selections of mainly shorter by poems by the other five poets, although it includes Gatsos' long poem "Amorgos".

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A selection of mainly late poems by Lawrence Durrell which were not included in COLLECTED POEMS 1931-1974, but appeared only in prose works and have not been collected before. Poems drawn from SPIRIT OF PLACE, SICILIAN CAROUSEL, THE AVIGNON QUINTET and CAESAR'S VAST GHOST. Edited by Peter Baldwin.

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The Usurpers, Willa Muir's fourth novel, was written in the early 1950s and was based on the diaries she kept in Prague in the period 1945-1948, when her husband the poet Edwin Muir was the Director the British Institute in Prague, the lecturing and teaching arm of the British Council there. Under the guise of Utopians in Slavomania, The Usurpers offers acute, humorous and sometimes acerbic observations on relations among the British themselves in Prague (the city is never named) and between them and their Czech friends and those in the Czechoslovak establishment who were suspicious of the British presence, and depicts, largely through the actions and conversation of its characters, a deteriorating political environment in which the lives of many Slavomanians and even some of the Utopians are increasingly under threat in the lead-up to the Communist coup of February 1948. The Usupers was ready for publication in 1952 and was submitted to a number of major UK publishers under the pen-name Alexander Cory. The publishers were nervous. There was some concern about libel suits and perhaps also about the political sensitivity of the contents. Then, when she was publicly revealed to be the author, Willa Muir withdrew it. The typescript, from which this edition has been prepared, has long been in the care of the Library of the University of St Andrews and over the years a number of critics and Willa Muir enthusiasts have read it, among them Jim Potts, who brought it to the attention of Colenso Books and who has provided the Introduction. The non-publication of the The Usurpers in the 1950s may have been partly due to political pressure, at a time when the UK government’s grant-in-aid to the British Council was being called in question.

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The Synaxarion of the monastery of the Theotokos Evergetis: March to August, The Moveable Cycle.

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There is no doubt that this is, to a considerable extent, an autobiographical novel. It is also clear that parts of it are fictional, but it is not possible to define with any clarity the boundary between autobiography and fiction. The author did serve in the US Army in the Korean War as an underage soldier, though he was probably not quite so young as the narrator claims to have been. The author’s second name “Toteras” is his chosen nom-de-plume, formed from two Greek words “to” and “teras”, meaning “the monster”. The novel begins with the narrator’s return from Korea suffering from what we would now call post-traumatic distress syndrome, and finding himself unable to face his family again. He falls in with a young woman who looks after him. This narrative breaks off to be resumed only in the final chapter of the book, and there follow several chapters in which his early life in San Francisco's Greektown is recounted. Conflicting demands — of their families to be Greek and of their school to become Americans — drive him and his best friend to obtain fake birth certificates, enabling them to enlist, at the age of fourteen, in the US army. Between basic training and embarkation for the Far East they take a bizarre trip to Mexico, where they become involved with a rich American couple who need to involve others in their sex-life. The two teenage soldiers are sent to the Mariana Islands where they are occupied in dismantling a World-War-Two ammunition dump. After an explosion which kills some of their colleagues, they are granted leave, and go to Japan to meet up with a sergeant (also of Greek origin) whom they had made friends with in the training camp. Through a series of mishaps they end up being sent to Korea with the first scratch-force of US troops, following the news that the North Koreans had crossed the 38th Parallel, and they are involved in the first US battles of the Korean War, battles in which the US army was repeatedly defeated with immense loss of life. The battles of Osan, the Pyongtaek Bridge and Taejon are described in graphic and horrific detail, and several subsequent battles are referred to. The novel was completed in the early 1990s, but clearly not to the satisfaction of the author, who died in 2009, leaving it unpublished. The surviving typescripts were problematic, almost unpunctuated and full of errors. They have been painstakingly edited over a number of years and some of the material in the early (Greektown) chapters has had to be rearranged to create a coherent narrative and to remove repetition. The style undoubtedly owes something to Kerouac but the content is far beyond his scope, as it brings us face to face with the insanity and the horror of war and the nature of fear; but it is not without humour, and much of the humour has to do with sex. In this the narrator and his buddy are opposites: the narrator a romantic innocent, his buddy precocious and sex-mad. Although, as noted, the narrative of the weeks after his return alone from Korea is resumed in the concluding chapter, there is no conclusion, for we are left with a final moment of dramatic suspension, not knowing what exactly has just happened and with no clue as to what the narrator’s future will be.

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Greek translation of Theodore Stephanides first poetic collecion The Golden Face published in 1965, with the original English text on facing pages.

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A collection of 25 short poems constituting an appeal for peace and understanding between Greek and Turkish communities in Cyprus, with facing translations into Turkish and English. There are biographical notes on the author and the two translators, "In place of a prologue" before the poems, and "In place of an epilogue" and "Plus an essay" at the end; all these items are, like, the poems, in all three languages. The essay develops the theme of the poems in a more direct and explicit manner.

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Three successive drafts of what became the novel TUNC, edited and published for the first time: "The Village of Turtle-doves", "The Placebo: An Attic Comedy" and "Dactyl".

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The scripts of three shadow-plays translated from recollections of mutliple performances in Greek withnessed by Theodore Stephaides in various places in the years 1920–1940. These playscripts are essentially recreations, complete with stage directions.

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The first English translation (by J.M.Q.Davies) of the complete short stories of Corfiot writer Konstantinos Theotokis. Often brutal, occasionally humorous stories of village life in Corfu in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With an Introduction and Notes by the translator.

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Three plays by Greece's most important modern dramatist. The Courtyard of Wonders (1957) and The Four Legs of the Table (1978) explore social issues still with a powerful resonance today from the perspective of the poor and wealthy respectively. Ibsenland, is development of the characters of Pastor Manders and Mrs Alving from Ibsen's Ghosts.

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