A Theatre for Dreamers

Author: Polly Samson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1526600579
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 369

Book Description
THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 'Delicious' Nigella Lawson 'Clever and beguiling' Guardian 'Sublime and immersive' Jojo Moyes Erica is eighteen and ready for freedom. It's the summer of 1960 when she lands on the sun-baked Greek island of Hydra where she is swept up in a circle of bohemian poets, painters, musicians, writers and artists, living tangled lives. Life on their island paradise is heady, dream-like, a string of seemingly endless summer days. But nothing can last forever. 'A surefire summer hit ... At once a blissful piece of escapism and a powerful meditation on art and sexuality' Observer 'Heady armchair escapism ... An impressionistic, intoxicating rush of sensory experience' Sunday Times 'If summer was suddenly like a novel, it would be like this one. Immaculate' Andrew O'Hagan

Perfect Lives

Author: Polly Samson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1632865505
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 209

Book Description
In an English seaside town, lovers and children, men and women weave in and out of each other's lives and stories. A mother is tormented by her daughter's tattoo; another only pretends to love her baby. A wife stalks her husband and his new lover; a broken egg through a mailbox tells a story that will not go away; the cat thinks he knows best. Threaded throughout are longings for love and poignant disappointments, surprising pleasures and temptations. Some will fall but some, like the small boy at the circus who sees his babysitter fly past on a trapeze wearing little more than a blue bra and spangles, will retain their feeling of awe. The stories in Perfect Lives are rueful, knowing, witty, poignant, bashful, bold. Polly Samson's genius is in the nuance.

Featherhood

Author: Charlie Gilmour
Publisher: Scribner
ISBN: 1501198505
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Book Description
“I loved every single page.” —Elton John “The best piece of nature writing since H is for Hawk.” —Neil Gaiman In this moving, critically acclaimed memoir, a young man saves a baby magpie as his estranged father is dying, only to find that caring for the mischievous bird saves him. One spring day, a baby magpie falls out of its nest and into Charlie Gilmour’s hands. Magpies, he soon discovers, are as clever and mischievous as monkeys. They are also notorious thieves, and this one quickly steals his heart. By the time the creature develops shiny black feathers that inspire the name Benzene, Charlie and the bird have forged an unbreakable bond. While caring for Benzene, Charlie learns his biological father, an eccentric British poet named Heathcote Williams who vanished when Charlie was six months old, is ill. As he grapples with Heathcote’s abandonment, Charlie comes across one of his poems, in which Heathcote describes how an impish young jackdaw fell from its nest and captured his affection. Over time, Benzene helps Charlie unravel his fears about repeating the past—and embrace the role of father himself. A bird falls, a father dies, a child is born. Featherhood is the unforgettable story of a love affair between a man and a bird. It is also a beautiful and affecting memoir about childhood and parenthood, captivity and freedom, grief and love.

A Theatre for Dreamers

Author: Polly Samson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1526600595
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 369

Book Description

A Theater for Dreamers

Author: Polly Samson
Publisher: Algonquin Books
ISBN: 1643751506
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 347

Book Description
“Sublime and immersive . . . If you wish you could disappear to a Greek island right now, I highly recommend.” —Jojo Moyes, #1 bestselling author of Me Before You “This gorgeous, glimmering summer read is itself perfect summer: irresistible and deep, Samson's lyric sentences pulling you into unforgettable sunlight and shadow.” —Amy Bloom, New York Times bestselling author of White Houses It’s 1960, and the world teeters on the edge of cultural, political, sexual, and artistic revolution. On the Greek island of Hydra, a proto-commune of poets, painters, and musicians revel in dreams at the feet of their unofficial leaders, the writers Charmian Clift and George Johnston, troubled queen and king of bohemia. At the center of this circle of misfit artists are the captivating and inscrutable Axel Jensen, his magnetic wife Marianne Ihlen, and a young Canadian ingenue poet named Leonard Cohen. When eighteen-year-old Erica stumbles into their world, she’s fresh off the boat from London with nothing but a bundle of blank notebooks and a burning desire to leave home in the wake of her mother’s death. Among these artists, she will find an unraveling utopia where everything is tested—the nature of art, relationships, and her own innocence. Intoxicating and immersive, A Theater for Dreamers is a spellbinding tour-de-force about the beauty between naïveté and cruelty, chaos and utopia, artist and muse—and about the wars waged between men and women on the battlegrounds of genius. Roiling with the heat of a Grecian summer, A Theater for Dreamers is, according to the Guardian, “a blissful piece of escapism” and “a surefire summer hit.”

The Roots of Theatre

Author: Eli Rozik
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1587294265
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 385

Book Description
The topic of the origins of theatre is one of the most controversial in theatre studies, with a long history of heated discussions and strongly held positions. In The Roots of Theatre, Eli Rozik enters the debate in a feisty way, offering not just another challenge to those who place theatre’s origins in ritual and religion but also an alternative theory of roots based on the cultural and psychological conditions that made the advent of theatre possible. Rozik grounds his study in a comprehensive review and criticism of each of the leading historical and anthropological theories. He believes that the quest for origins is essentially misleading because it does not provide any significant insight for our understanding of theatre. Instead, he argues that theatre, like music or dance, is a sui generis kind of human creativity—a form of thinking and communication whose roots lie in the spontaneous image-making faculty of the human psyche. Rozik’s broad approach to research lies within the boundaries of structuralism and semiotics, but he also utilizes additional disciplines such as psychoanalysis, neurology, sociology, play and game theory, science of religion, mythology, poetics, philosophy of language, and linguistics. In seeking the roots of theatre, what he ultimately defines is something substantial about the nature of creative thought—a rudimentary system of imagistic thinking and communication that lies in the set of biological, primitive, and infantile phenomena such as daydreaming, imaginative play, children’s drawing, imitation, mockery (caricature, parody), storytelling, and mythmaking.

How to be Well Read

Author: John Sutherland
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1409039153
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 662

Book Description
'Generous, enjoyable and well informed.' Observer '500 expertly potted plots and personal comments on a wide range of pop and proper prose fiction.' The Times ___________________________________________________________ Ranging all the way from Aaron's Rod to Zuleika Dobson, via The Devil Rides Out and Middlemarch, literary connoisseur and sleuth John Sutherland offers his very personal guide to the most rewarding, most remarkable and, on occasion, most shamelessly enjoyable works of fiction ever written. He brilliantly captures the flavour of each work and assesses its relative merits and demerits. He shows how it fits into a broader context and he offers endless snippets of intriguing information: did you know, for example, that the Nazis banned Bambi or that William Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying on an upturned wheelbarrow; that Voltaire completed Candide in three days, or that Anna Sewell was paid £20 for Black Beauty? It is also effectively a history of the novel in 500 or so wittily informative, bite-sized pieces. Encyclopaedic and entertaining by turns, this is a wonderful dip-in book, whose opinions will inform and on occasion, no doubt, infuriate. __________________________________________________ 'Anyone hooked on fiction should be warned: this book will feed your addiction.' Mail on Sunday 'A dazzling array of genres, periods, styles and tastes... chatty, insightful, unprejudiced (but not uncritical) and wise.' Times Literary Supplement

Dreamers

Author: Volker Weidermann
Publisher: Pushkin Press
ISBN: 1782275061
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Book Description
History that reads like a novel: the story of the writers and intellectuals behind the failed Bavarian Revolution of 1918, by the author of the acclaimed Summer Before the Dark At the end of the First World War in Germany, the journalist and theatre critic Kurt Eisner organised a revolution which overthrew the monarchy, and declared a Free State of Bavaria. In February 1919, he was assassinated, and the revolution failed. But while the dream lived, it was the writers, the poets, the playwrights and the intellectuals who led the way. As well as Eisner, Thomas Mann, Rainer Maria Rilke, and many other prominent figures in German cultural history were involved. In his characteristically lucid, sharp prose, Volker Weidermann presents us with a slice of history - November 1918 to April 1919 - and shows how a small group of people could have altered the course of the twentieth century.

Svalbard Imaginaries

Author: Mathias Albert
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031438418
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 303

Book Description
By drawing on a broad range of disciplinary backgrounds, this book illustrates the immense complexities of Svalbard as a place, point of reference, or social concept. It portrays the multiple, situated perspectives that characterize understandings and imaginings of Svalbard, and brings together contributions from academic fields that rarely interact with each other. Svalbard Imaginaries contributes to a number of research contexts, ranging from a broadly conceived, multi-disciplinary field of ‘Arctic Studies’ to more disciplinary specific debates on how places are reworked at the interstices of various global flows and vice versa. It assembles contributions on imaginaries that cover a wide array of issues, including—but not limited to—Svalbard as a geopolitical site, a landscape, an image, a (mining) heritage assemblage, a tourist destination, a wilderness, a built environment, a site of knowledge production, a site of artistic engagement, and projections of the future. It deliberately assembles analyses that refer to a variety of timescales and covers representations of the past, the present, and possible futures of Svalbard.

The Theatre of Tennessee Williams

Author: Tennessee Williams
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 9780811211369
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 612

Book Description
Theatre of Tennessee Williams Vol. 2. The Eccentricities of a Nightingale, Summer and Smoke, The Rose Tattoo, and Camino Real.