Search results for ""Parthian Books""

This arresting series of documentary photographs shows the life and landscape of five small settlements in South Wales. These communities in the Afan Valley, after the pit closures, had to deal with high levels of unemployment and found themselves with severe adjustment problems.

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It was a period of Welsh politics that has become etched in the collective memory. The rise of a Welsh independence movement and the first Plaid Cymru Member of Parliament. The Labour Party searching for a way forward in political climate that was riven with dissension and eventual rancour.

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Norman Schwenk's new collection, Book of Songs , brings together poems and song lyrics of many varieties: love songs and ballads, dance and battle songs, satires and laments; there is a march, a lullaby, a hymn, a rock-and-roll song, a Christmas carol, a birthday song, a cowboy song, and even a song for a klezmer band.

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Tattoo is narrative, signifier, art work, more. In this rich collection Kate Noakes explores the cultural meanings and stories permanently etched on our skin.

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A candid account of rural Breton living, Lessons in Impermanence reveals the development of a very personal philosophy, as Jane and her family embrace the difficulties and triumphs of their alternative lifestyle with wit and humour.

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An origami crane in remembrance of Hiroshima. A father's faded old photograph of his 1970s pre-marital sports car. Youths congregated at a bus stop. These are just a handful of the themes touched upon in Michael Oliver-Semenov's deeply personal and introspective first poetry collection.

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The horizon is a blue streak across the pale sea, giving the trick of land close enough to sail to. Pearl imagines a packet ship surging to another world with two passengers safe in the bows, their hands joined together.

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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.

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Burrard Inlet is the body of water that divides Vancouver's North Shore from the rest of the Lower Mainland. In this collection of award-winning stories, Tyler Keevil uses that rugged landscape as a backdrop for characters who are struggling against the elements, each other, and themselves.

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Cheval 6 presents a selection of the writing submitted by the talented young entrants to this year's Terry Hetherington Award, and includes new work by previous winners.Some of these writers are appearing in print for the first time; others have already begun to make their mark on the literary scene.

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A report relating to the project to bring to view unpublished manuscripts, notebooks, letters, diaries and papers that the academic writer and novelist Raymond Williams left in part discarded or neglected.

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Parthian's 'Bright Young Things' series continues with its first collection of poetry by young writers in Wales From representations of urban life and drug addiction to critically acclaimed verses from the stage, this book distills diverse and innovative poetry into Ten of the Best, the brightest of what's on offer by young poets in Wales today.

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Fiction, poetry, photography and reportage written and produced by writers, editors and readers of a fresh generation. This book showcases young writers in an innovative, experimental and quality anthology. It features writers, workers and wanderers from Wales and beyond.

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The DOVE Workshop was set up by a group of women from the local Miners' Support Group with a purpose to save their communities. This book celebrates DOVE Workshop's achievements through the achievements of those who have participated in the venture - without their support the aspirations of the women in 1984-85 would not have been realised.

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Juana knows how to deal with harsh reality. She has no other choice. Growing up in the post-war Spain of the 1950s means a life of poverty, hunger, and gruelling work. Juana leaves the home she has known all her life and heads to Barcelona to look for employment.

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Donahaye's debut collection of poetry is subdivibded into three sections, Deceits, The Natural World and Natural Processes.

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A play which deals with art, life and the appropriation of both by the unscrupulous.

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Featuring 14 short stories, this collection examines the positive and degenerative influence of the creative spirit on both people's behavior and their relationships with others.

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This work contains three stories which are by turns, emotional, dark and intriguing. The first is "Love in Plastic", the tale of Harold who coats the interior of his house in disinfected plastic and then regestates, the second "Glissando on an Empty Harp", and the third "Blue Heron in the Womb".

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An elegiac and poetic sequence of stories following the progress of a young girl through childhood and adolescence on the fringes of the Badlands in Alberta, Canada.

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As much about learning a language as it is about nature, this dignified and nuanced memoir of the author's stay on the remote Hokkaido island in the far north of Japan evokes what is cultured and cultivated, and yet also honours the wild; the untranslatable.

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A reliable and clean source of water is essential for any community, so it is easy to understand how important wells were for pre-modern peoples. More complex is the mystical relationship humans have developed with these sites, which are imbued with a sacredness that predates Christianity. Holy Wells of Wexford and Pembrokeshire is a series of five chapbooks celebrating holy wells in two regions with common ancestry and history. Since at least the Bronze Age, sea travel between these two lands has meant cross-fertilisation of traditions and common names associated with wells of both regions. Of significance is the long-standing friendship between two early Christian saints: David, who became the first Bishop of St Davids; and Aidan, born in Ireland, who spent time in Wales and then founded monasteries in Ireland, including at Ferns. In Oilgate, Wexford, there is a well dedicated to David and, at Whitesands near St Davids in Pembrokeshire, there is one named after Aidan. Each of the five books approaches the subject from different perspectives and mediums, including fiction, poetry and essays as well as photographs and prints.

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A reliable and clean source of water is essential for any community, so it is easy to understand how important wells were for pre-modern peoples. More complex is the mystical relationship humans have developed with these sites, which are imbued with a sacredness that predates Christianity. Holy Wells of Wexford and Pembrokeshire is a series of five chapbooks celebrating holy wells in two regions with common ancestry and history. Since at least the Bronze Age, sea travel between these two lands has meant cross-fertilisation of traditions and common names associated with wells of both regions. Of significance is the long-standing friendship between two early Christian saints: David, who became the first Bishop of St Davids; and Aidan, born in Ireland, who spent time in Wales and then founded monasteries in Ireland, including at Ferns. In Oilgate, Wexford, there is a well dedicated to David and, at Whitesands near St Davids in Pembrokeshire, there is one named after Aidan. Each of the five books approaches the subject from different perspectives and mediums, including fiction, poetry and essays as well as photographs and prints.

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Famous for his prose memoir The Autiobiography of a Super-tramp, Davies is best-known as a poet for 'Leisure', a hymn to living slow and having 'time to stand and stare'. Saints and Lodgers offers an introduction to the wide range of Davies's poetry which lies beyond his famous reputation.

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A reliable and clean source of water is essential for any community, so it is easy to understand how important wells were for pre-modern peoples. More complex is the mystical relationship humans have developed with these sites, which are imbued with a sacredness that predates Christianity. Holy Wells of Wexford and Pembrokeshire is a series of five chapbooks celebrating holy wells in two regions with common ancestry and history. Since at least the Bronze Age, sea travel between these two lands has meant cross-fertilisation of traditions and common names associated with wells of both regions. Of significance is the long-standing friendship between two early Christian saints: David, who became the first Bishop of St Davids; and Aidan, born in Ireland, who spent time in Wales and then founded monasteries in Ireland, including at Ferns. In Oilgate, Wexford, there is a well dedicated to David and, at Whitesands near St Davids in Pembrokeshire, there is one named after Aidan. Each of the five books approaches the subject from different perspectives and mediums, including fiction, poetry and essays as well as photographs and prints.

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Strange Animals is collection of experiences - its thread is the author's journey from childhood home to settling across an ocean, moving through the vagaries of modern love as she travels to new cities and a newfound maturity, whilst contemplating the end of youth and what one loses and gains in the process. Throughout these journeys, strange animals appear in the poems, challenging and disrupting both the author's and the reader's experience, asking questions and forcing us to both see and to look at life in curious new ways. A Canadian grandchild of Dutch and Hungarian immigrants, Emily Vanderploeg explores issues of language, ritual, death and identity in poems about her family which open the collection in a close intimate space, which is then ruptured as she and the poems travel to Wales and elsewhere, physically and emotionally, leading us to look at the world through the experiences of animals as people and people as animals, culminating in a sequence of poetry as Tarot - leaving the reader with a fortune told, but more questions than answers.

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In these stories gender refuses to be fixed: a dashing travelling companion is not quite who he seems in the intimate darkness of a mail coach, a girl on the cusp of adulthood gamely takes her father's place as head of the house, and an actor and patron are caught up in dangerous game-playing. In the more fantastical tales there are talking rats, flirtations with fascism, and escape from a post-virus 'utopia'. These are stories of sexual awakening, coming out and redefining one's place in the world. Release and a certain heady license may be found in the distant cities of Europe or north Africa, but the stories are for the most part located in familiar Welsh settings - a schoolroom, a provincial town, a mining village, a tourist resort, a sacred island. The intensity of desire, whether overt, playful, or coded, makes this a rich and often surprising collection that reimagines what being queer and Welsh has meant in different times and places.

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From a humble background in Barry, where his father was a butcher and local politician in the formative years of the new town, Cyril Lakin studied at Oxford, survived the First World War, and went on to become a Fleet Street editor, radio presenter and war-time member of parliament. As literary editor of both the Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Times, Lakin was at the centre of a vibrant and radical generation of writers, poets and critics, many of whom he recruited as reviewers. He gained a parliamentary seat and served in the National Government during World War II. The different worlds he inhabited, from Wales to Westminster, and across class, profession and party, were facilitated by his relaxed disposition, convivial company, and ability to cultivate influential contacts. An effective talent-spotter and catalyst for new projects, he preferred pragmatism over ideology and non-partisanship in politics: a moderate Conservative for modern times.

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New fiction from Bethany W. Pope - an LBA-winning author, and a finalist for the Faulkner-Wisdom Awards They were named by the Huffington Post as 'one of the five Expat poets to watch in 2016'. Nicholas Lezard, writing for The Guardian, described their latest poetry collection, Silage, as 'literature as salvation'. Edwardian Florida. The swamplands of Tampa provide a tough but good living for those men hardy enough to brave the weather and the wildness. There are ripe pickings to be had in bird hunting; egret feathers plucked by the sack-full and sent away to adorn rich city-women's hats. Wives for these rough hunters are ordered from catalogues, attractiveness graded by cooking skills and hip-width. When illness sweeps the area and the local minister dies, his widow, his beloved Rose, succumbs to madness. His daughter Joy must struggle to keep them both alive in what has become a skeleton town, rotting into the swamp and abandoned by all but the most ruthless. Rich with visceral imagery, The Hungry and the Lost is a novel in true Southern Gothic style, pitting the worlds of myth and innocence against the rational grip of progress and modernity.

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Head in the Clouds: Memories and Reflections is the long-awaited sequel to Boyd Clack's first memoir, Kisses Sweeter Than Wine. Made up of 100 Facebook posts, the book blends poetry with prose to share tales from the stage, from the Welsh valleys, and from the founder of The League of Middle Aged Destroyed Men.

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Home on the Move explores notions of `home' that are challenged and reshaped by unprecedented migration. The anthology interrogates ideas of home, belonging and language from poetic perspectives. The creative responses are the results of a journey undertaken by two poems about `home': TS Eliot Prize-shortlisted poet Deryn Rees-Jones's poem `HOME' who travelled from the UK via France to Spain and back and Polish poet Rafal Gawin's poem: `DOM. KONSTRUKCJA W PROCESIE SADOWYM' (`Home. Structure on Trial'). Gawin travelled to the UK via Romania and back to Poland and the poem reflects the inspiration of these places. During each journey, the poems were translated by a literary translator and a local film artist.

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For twelve years the Terry Hetherington Young Writers Award has provided a platform for emerging young writers from and living in Wales. In this skillful and diverse collection of stories and poems, we celebrate the very best entries to this year's award.

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Between the Boundaries follows the course of a single year and covers topics that range from the habits of beavers to the progression of Artificial Intelligence, journeying from Wales to Australia with many stops in between. Humorous, thought- provoking and insightful, it sweeps over and beneath the boundaries, both visible and invisible, that cover the world. The author visits a new assessment of the Elizabethan polymath John Dee, and compares the relative claims to accuracy of different portrayals of Dylan Thomas. He goes underground to a former nuclear bunker, now made into an unpeopled data centre, and he dissects the potential future of the BBC. Pivotal moments in history are revisited, and largely-neglected artists remembered. Between the Boundaries is an eclectic personal journey, fresh and wide in scope, of encounters across genres, eras and continents.

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In her most autobiographical collection to date, Kate Noakes explores the pain of losing a long-built life and the joys of exploring a new one. This is a howl that ends with a hallelujah.

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The people of the lost English-Welsh border town Goregree are losers and weirdos, sometimes pathetic, sometimes terrible. They all long for something more, but are trapped by poverty, disease, and addiction to a unique local drug.Inspired by the author's hometown of Bridgend, Bad Ideas \ Chemicals follows a group of 20-somethings on a bad night out in a depressed, strange little town. Markham started writing Goregree in his freshman year when Bridgend was in the tabloids for suicides and everyone was telling rotten jokes and a similar vein of gallows humour runs through this nightmarish social satire.One of Goregree's residents, Cassandra Fish believes she is out of this world, wearing her orange film-set spacesuit daily in the hope that her absent parents will return and take her back to her real planet. While she waits for that particular lunar window to open, she accompanies her friends - frustrated musician Francis, the only open mic player in the town and the laddish, volatile Fox - from bar to nightclub to the absurd dangers and darkness of the forest.As the young residents of the town lurch from one disaster to another, the story of Goregree itself comes into focus - a sad, dreamlike, hostile place, plagued with a mysterious bug infestation and haunted by the memories of a oncepromising future. A cracked, distorted mirror held up to the Western world's many abandoned, alienating towns.In the space of a night, the people of Goregree will drink, dance, take bad chemicals, have bad trips, have bad ideas, and do unthinkable things.

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This anthology brings together the winning entries to the Penfro Festival's Poetry and Prose competitions, selected by Rhiannon Hooson and Niall Griffiths.

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Two hundred years ago, Wales was an all but forgotten corner of England. Travelling across its remote uplands between scattered settlements was often a challenge as was entering a land close to home where few people outside its towns spoke English. It was rarely visited without good reason. A Wilder Wales introduces readers to the sheer breadth of experiences these travellers had, through extracts from 35 books, journals and periodicals, written between 1609 and 1831.

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Fern's choices in life and in love are an echo of her mother's, as Iris' are an echo of her own mother's. Three women, three generations: one dark secret. Iris keeps a scrapbook of Lawrence, the lover who went missing years earlier. Fern's father. She defines herself by his loss and soothes herself with gin and the fairytale of this one perfect relationship...Fern, once a 'strange and difficult child' who believed that her dead grandmother's soul lived inside her stomach, reluctantly returns home to the island to take care of Iris. She is tasked with finding Lawrence and in the process she has to confront her own past and memories...Ivy, Iris' mother, had her own cache of secrets; spells she took to the grave. Spells that Fern unearths. The Scrapbook is a novel about memory, and the unreliability of memory. It's about the tangled, often dysfunctional, bonds of family. And it's about absence and the power that a void can exert over a person's life.

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When freak weather hits a Welsh coastal resort a woman's remains are left in the debris. And once identified as a celebrated writer's, someone sets out to explain the mystery of her death...

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Cornwall. 1880. Pearl, Jack and Nicholas play among the fishing boats of Skommow Bay, not understanding the undercurrents beneath their games. As they grow older, the choices they make shape the pattern of their lives. 1936 and everything has changed. The fish have stopped coming and the Pilchard Palace is abandoned. Pearl, exiled in favour of holidaymakers, turns to the memory of her great love, and her greatest loss. She's waiting for her own visitor. Will he come for her? The sea's ghosts are stirring. The past can be more alive than the present...The fictional village in which the novel is set is based on St Ives. The Visitor is a novel steeped in the coast and people of Cornwall. It shivers and flashes with visions as elusive as the fish at the centre of its story.

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