Search results for ""parthian""

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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Beginning with his departure from New York to Istanbul, the author discusses a journey, not so much between contrasting cities as 'between different versions of the same city', to a place that is exotic and familiar, spanning West and East, past and present, where cultures and histories intersect.

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A first English translation of 30 Welsh short stories featuring work by many of the leading young writers working in the Welsh language. Contributors include Aled Islwyn, Aled Lewis Evans, John Emyr, Meleri Roberts, Meg Elis, Angharad Price, Manon Rhys and Sioned Puw Rowlands.

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In 53 BC, Roman and Parthian forces collided in a confrontation that would reshape the geopolitical map and establish a frontier between East and West that would endure for the next 700 years. From the initial clash at Carrhae through to the battle of Nisibis more than 250 years later, Roman and Parthian forces fought a series of bloody campaigns for mastery of the Fertile Crescent. As Roman forces thrust ever deeper into the East, they encountered a civilization unlike any they had crossed swords with before. Originating in the steppes of Central Asia, the Parthians ruled a federated state stretching from the Euphrates to the Indus. Although Rome’s legions were masters of the battlefield in the Mediterranean, the Parthians refused to fight by the rules as Rome understood them. Harnessing the power of the composite bow and their superior manoeuvrability, the Parthians’ mode of warfare focused exclusively on the horse. They inflicted a bloody defeat on the legions at Carrhae and launched their own invasion of Roman territory, countered only with great difficulty by Rome’s surviving forces. The Parthians were eventually thrown out, but neither side could sustain a permanent ascendancy over the other and the conflict continued. Packed with stunning artwork, including battlescenes, maps and photographs, this title examines the conflict through the lens of three key battles, revealing a clash between two armies alien to each other not only in culture but also in their radical approaches to warfare.

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In the mid-first century BC, despite its military victories elsewhere, the Roman Empire faced a rival power in the east; the Parthian Empire. The first war between two superpowers of the ancient world had resulted in the total defeat of Rome and the death of Marcus Crassus. When Rome collapsed into Civil War in the 40s BC, the Parthians took the opportunity to invade and conquer the Middle East and drive Rome back into Europe. What followed was two decades of war which saw victories and defeats on both sides. The Romans were finally able to gain a victory over the Parthians thanks to the great, but now neglected, general Publius Ventidius. These victories acted as a springboard for Marc Antony's plans to conquer the Parthian Empire, which ended in ignominious defeat. Gareth Sampson analyses the military campaigns and the various battles between the two superpowers of the ancient world and the war which defined the shape and division of the Middle East for the next 650 years.

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I.B.Tauris in association with the Iran Heritage Foundation Decline and Fall of the Sasanian Empire has been acclaimed as one of the most intellectually exciting books about late antique Persia to have been published for years. It proposes a convincing contemporary answer to an age-old mystery and conundrum: why, in the seventh century ce, did the seemingly powerful and secure Sasanian empire of Persia succumb so quickly and disastrously to the all-conquering armies of Islam? In her bold solution to this enigma, Parvaneh Pourshariati explains that the decentralized dynastic system of the Sasanian ruling hierarchy in fact contained the seeds of its own destruction. This confederacy, whose powerbase relied on patronage and preferment, eventually became unstable, and its degeneration sealed the fate of a doomed dynasty.

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Inspired by a report into the systematic abuse of children at a Welsh-language comprehensive school during the 1980s, this work deals with father figures and family life.

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Translated by Jayde WillEeva Park began as the author of mood poems depicting nature, and has said that she mixed feeling and thought in her poetry, while her prose is a mixture of understanding and memory. This original collection, translated by Jayde Will is an exploration of values, real and imagined incorporating the best of Park's work from the last three decades. Freefall 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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Continuing the Parthian New Welsh Short Fiction series, this work is an anthology of contemporary Welsh writing with 55 short stories from the best of new short fiction. Writers include Leonora Britto, Sian Preece, Anna Hinds, Alun Richards, Meic Stephens, John Sam Jones and Lloyd Rees.

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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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Since 1996, Sam Adams's Letter from Wales' column has been appearing in PN Review, one of the most highly-regarded UK poetry magazines, offering insight and appreciation of Welsh writing, culture and history. This landmark volume collects these letters a quarter century of work.

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Minnie Pallister's life was so fantastic that not even a thriller writer could imagine it. A feminist, pacifist and socialist, she was twice accused of sedition in the First World War before travelling to Nazi Germany in late 1938 and 1939 to rescue Jews, helping bring them to Britain at the outbreak of the Second World War.

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It is 1984 and a small town somewhere in the east of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic is in the firm grip of totalitarianism. Unruly and sickly Karolína is growing up in an all-female household including her hot-blooded, knife-wielding grandmother. Repelled by her mum’s serial love affairs Karolína runs away and stumbles upon a riding school on the edge of town. There, she befriends Romana, a girl with one leg shorter than the other and Matilda, a rider and trainer who helps the two girls overcome their physical limitations. Together they found a successful trick-riding team and soon it seems that half flags, mills and scales are not the only tricks flashing like blades up her sequinned sleeve as Karolína explores Pink Floyd and smoking, and discovers her knack for seeing deep into others’ souls. The fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989 and the subsequent arrival of capitalism threatens to destroy the riding school. The team has to turn professional. But in a sport of perfect scores is there still room for Romana and Karolína...? The Equestrienne is a poetic, caustic coming-of-age novel about the desire of one young girl to realise her dreams before and after Velvet Revolution; it is a celebration of friendship between women and also a bitter acknowledgement that greed and the desire for power can destroy any relationship.

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Washing my Hair with Nettles describes a natural world that lives as profoundly and passionately as the people who inhabit it. The landscape of her poetry resonates with soul and animism: mountains dream of music, wild creatures heal wounds, and women tread the thin line between modern day reality and traditional myth with delicate respect.

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Fall into the dreamlike realities of absinthe and madness. Here, buildings pursue their own malevolent intents; a grieving father and daughter receive a grisly visitor; a man is unravelled by strange symbolism in a twilit park; and a botanist will stop at nothing to safeguard her borders.

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When Maisie Shergold, art historian, meets Michael Curran, folk musician, on the platform of Paddington Station she falls in love with him instantly. Ignoring the differences in their backgrounds, ages, and personal outlook, she pursues the affair with a single-minded intensity that borders on obsession.

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Little Man examines what it means to be alive. Never boastful of its wares, it is a collection that shows Richard James Jones isn't afraid to get its hands dirty - exploring the frustrations of his craft, strange graffiti on an old shed, or even casting a keen eye to the detritus that washes up on the beach.

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Rhys Davies (1901-78) was among the most dedicated, prolific and accomplished of Welsh prose writers.

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Coming back home from the Far East after years serving in Burma, George returns to South Wales to deal with ferociously Communist self-appointed commissars of the local colliery, and getting enough black market coupons off Jack Bach the butcher's wife to buy a suit and marry beautiful, dark-haired Peggy the Papers.

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Love, lust, loss, art and myth - all find their way into Alan Kellermann's stylish debut collection.

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Focuses on an image from Homer: the great shield which Hephaestus forged for the warrior, Achilles. This work attempts to imagine a shield for the complexities of the current era.

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A novel about growing up in a world unhinged by war; about longing, loss, and the search for home. It is suitable for those with an interest in twentieth century history who would like to find out what it might have been like to be on the other side during one of its major conflicts.

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In 2006 Director Andre Stitt formed a collective of Wales based artists at Trace Install-Action Artspace in Cardiff. Trace Collective have since embarked on a series of projects, resulting in performance work as archives, incorporating experiences of displacement, memory and recalled and reconstituted materials to form a collective performance.

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A collision between the personal and the political; a past affair that might just rekindle and present corruption in 'the party'. Can he persuade her not to cause trouble for the party leadership or will she ignore the feelings she still has for him to bring the leadership down?

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Holy Hiatus sought to examine the ways that artists can draw audiences into different, often unexpected experiences of place through ritual. The temporary, mobile and in some cases, understated nature of the works meant that the impact was often subtle, but the artworks nonetheless created a ripple of effect for audiences.

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A Welsh muscle-boy discovers his ability to escape the past is not as developed as his physique. A murder charge liberates a doctor's wife. An indifferent carer and a dyoing hotelier share a night. A sado-masochistic poet realises the only tortures left are images from his own life.

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These stories, poems, plays, and film scripts from some of Wales' up-and-coming writers feature words of protest and joy, anger and release--all infused with an energy and compassion that offers hope.

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While in Barcelona translating a best-selling Italian book, Blanca identifies so much with the main character - a woman whose husband is unfaithful - that she begins to doubt her own husband. She is compelled to travel to Sicily to meet the book's author and discover where his story came from. But once in Sicily, can she remain faithful herself?

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Fourteen year-old Pierre's mother is dead, and he came a long way to his present life in Camden with his white dad Stevo; from Brussels, via numerous failing and rejecting schools. Ashley Cochrane taught Pierre English, and he thought the boy harmless enough when term started. Ashley's ties with Pierre's family go back a way, and they are bloody.

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A collection of international poetry, which has been chosen by national leaders, prime-ministers and presidents, including Tony Blair, Ariel Sharon and Gerhard Schroder.

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A collection of dramas by contemporary dramatists.

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Vickery is obsessed with the taboos' within society. These plays reflects his obsession and demonstrates how he transposes ordinary people's lives to the stage with relevance.

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Containing selections from the poet's previous five publications, as well as new poetry, this volume is a comprehensive introduction to a poet who writes with humor, pathos, and a gift for observation.

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Claire is a young geologist working in Tunisia. Her partner sends her postcards from a cold flat in London. John is Irish and the wrong religion. She writes back - Tunisia is warm, full of the bright colours of the desert. Claire doesn't mention Ali - she doesn't think John would understand.

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With science fiction tropes recalling Philip K. Dick, Kurt Vonnegut and Olga Ravn, The Last Day is a testament to the depth and creativity of Welsh literature. Its translation into English is long overdue.

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This beautiful, poetic debut novel warn of the dangers of being a quiet person in a loud world and letting magnetic strangers pull your strings. Set on the Welsh coast, Unspeakable Beauty is an unsettling coming-of-age tale.

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Sex, murder, and a devastating, humour mark these three novellas that Gwyn Thomas wrote in 1946. In Oscar, the narrator of death and exploitation fails to fend off the evil that envelops him. InSimeon, the abuse of sexual and family power ends with violent death, and in The Dark Philosophers itself, the grimly humorous philosophers gather in an Italian café to tell the tragic tale of revenge and manslaughter that they engineer.

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This much overdue and generously illustrated monograph traces Isabel Alexander's life, influences and work over her sixty-year career.

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In this clear and absorbing memoir John Sam Jones writes of a life lived on the edge. It's a story of journeys and realisation, of acceptance and joy. From a boyhood on the coast of Wales to a traumatic period as an undergraduate in Aberystwyth, and on to a scholarship at Berkley on the San Francisco Bay as the AIDS epidemic began to take hold before returning to Liverpool and north Wales to work in chaplaincy, education and sexual health. A journey of becoming a writer and chronicler of his experiences with award-winning books and the somewhat reluctant compulsion to become a campaigner for LGBT rights in Wales. The adventure of running a guest house in Barmouth where he eventually became Mayor with his husband, a German academic, whom he had married after a long partnership. Just days after European Referendum they put the business on the market... and then moved to Germany. John is still on that journey.

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A Dirty Broth Early Twentieth-Century Welsh Plays in English Edited by David Cottis With an introduction by David Cottis and Alyce von Rothkirch When Caradoc Evans’ play Taffy was first performed in London, the Western Mail reviewer described it as ‘like a dirty broth which, dished out to the English people, is swallowed with avidity.’ In so doing, it summed up the treatment often given to the tradition of English-language playwriting in Wales – sometimes ignored, sometimes disapproved of, rarely celebrated. This Anthology, the first in a series of three, brings together three plays from the beginnings of Welsh playwriting in English; Change by J. O. Francis (1913), a family drama of the upheavals at the start of the twentieth century, Taffy (1923), a fierce satire on the Welsh social and religious establishment, and A Comedy of Good and Evil (1924) by Richard Hughes, a magical realist fantasy of the dilemmas faced by a country cleric and his wife when they are faced with a literal demon-child. Edited by David Cottis, who also co-wrote the Introduction with Alyce von Rothkirch, this volume shows the earliest stirrings of the English-language theatre in Wales, and the first of many attempts to set up a Welsh National Theatre. It sees the beginnings of the preoccupations and subject matter that were to characterise Welsh playwriting throughout the twentieth century, and to influence later writers such as Emlyn Williams, Dylan Thomas, Diana Morgan, and Jack Jones.

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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 she accompanies her friends on one last great night out to drink, dance, take bad chemicals, have bad trips, have bad ideas, and do unthinkable thing

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"A fitting tribute to the memory of radical Welsh poet Terry Hetherington ... Gives young writers in Wales a wonderful opportunity for recognition" Mike Jenkins Angels in demons slink into sleepy Welsh villages. Whispers of a witch in Cwmgrach. A startling set of wings push through a young girl's shoulderblades. An ancient secret breathes in an Irish heirloom. For twelve years the Terry Hetherington Young Writers Award has provided a platform for emerging young writers from and living in Wales. This year Cheval 13 brings together a variety of the best short stories and poetry from young Welsh writers for the 2020 Terry Hetherington Award, showcasing a startling array of promising new voices in literature.

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