Xstabeth

Author: David Keenan
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781609457341
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 128

Book Description
A transcendent love letter to literature and music, Xstabeth is an exciting new work from a writer who, book-by-book, is rewriting the rules of contemporary fiction. Aneliya's father dreams of becoming a great musician but his naivete and his unfashionable music suggest he will never be taken seriously. Her father's best friend, on the other hand, has a penchant for vodka, strip clubs, and moral philosophy. Aneliya is torn between love of the former and passion for the latter. When an angelic presence named Xstabeth enters their lives Aneliya and her father's world is transformed. A short, stylish novel with a big heart, humor, Xstabeth moves from Russia to Scotland, touching upon the pathos of Russian literature and the Russian soul, the power of art and music to shape reality, and the metaphysics of golf while telling a moving father-daughter story in highly-charged, torrential prose.

This Is Memorial Device

Author: David Keenan
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 0571330843
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 243

Book Description
SHORTLISTED FOR THE GORDON BURN PRIZE 2017ROUGH TRADE BOOK OF THE MONTHLRB BOOK OF THE WEEKCAUGHT BY THE RIVER BOOK OF THE MONTHSHORTLISTED FOR THE COLLYER BRISTOW PRIZE This Is Memorial Device, the debut novel by David Keenan, is a love letter to the small towns of Lanarkshire in the west of Scotland in the late 1970s and early 80s as they were temporarily transformed by the endless possibilities that came out of the freefall from punk rock. It follows a cast of misfits, drop-outs, small town visionaries and would-be artists and musicians through a period of time where anything seemed possible, a moment where art and the demands it made were as serious as your life. At its core is the story of Memorial Device, a mythic post-punk group that could have gone all the way were it not for the visionary excess and uncompromising bloody-minded belief that served to confirm them as underground legends. Written in a series of hallucinatory first-person eye-witness accounts that capture the prosaic madness of the time and place, heady with the magic of youth recalled, This Is Memorial Device combines the formal experimentation of David Foster Wallace at his peak circa Brief Interviews With Hideous Men with moments of delirious psychedelic modernism, laugh out loud bathos and tender poignancy.

Monument Maker

Author: David Keenan
Publisher: White Rabbit
ISBN: 1474617115
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 816

Book Description
A ROUGH TRADE BOOK OF THE YEAR CONCRETE ISLANDS NO. 1 BOOK OF THE YEAR 'In a dizzying gyroscopic vortex of inner archeology, David Keenan sifts through spiraling past lives to unearth his provocative vision of the future. A colossus of imagination' LENNY KAYE 'Visionary and prismatic, gloriously hallucinatory although grounded in the material, Monument Maker's grand sweep takes in distant historical subterrains, a shimmering summer of the present, the transient, the eternal, the profane, the divine' WENDY ERSKINE 'I sometimes think David Keenan dreams aloud. His prose has the effortless enigmatic, unsettling quality of dream' EDNA O'BRIEN 'A masterpiece' WILLIAM BASINSKI Is it possible for books to dream? For books to dream within books? Is there a literary subterranea that would facilitate ingress and exit points through these dreams? These are some of the questions posed by David Keenan's masterly fifth novel, Monument Maker, an epic romance of eternal summer and a descent, into history, into the horrors of the past; a novel with a sweep and range that runs from the siege of Khartoum and the conquest of Africa in the 19th century through the Second World War and up to the present day, where the memory of a single summer, and a love affair that took place across the cathedrals of Ile de France, unravels, as a secret initiatory cult is uncovered that has its roots in macabre experiments in cryptozoology in pre-war Europe. MONUMENT MAKER straddles genres while fully embracing none of them, a book within a book within a book that runs from hallucinatory historical epics through future-visioned histories of the world narrated by a horribly disfigured British soldier made prophetic by depths of suffering; books that interact with Keenan's earlier novels, including a return to the mythical post-punk Airdrie landscape of his now classic debut, THIS IS MEMORIAL DEVICE; whole histories of art and religion; books that are glorious choral appendices; bibliographies; imagined films; tape recorded interviews; building to a jubilant accumulation of registers, voices and rhythms that is truly Choral. Written over the course of 10 years, MONUMENT MAKER represents the apex of Keenan's project to create books that contain uncanny life and feel like living organisms. It is a meditation on art and religion, and on what it means to make monument; this great longing for something eternal, something that could fix moments in time, forever.

For The Good Times

Author: David Keenan
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 0571340539
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 369

Book Description
LONGLISTED FOR THE GORDON BURN PRIZE 2019 SHORTLISTED FOR THE ENCORE PRIZE 2020 Sammy and his three friends are country boys from Armagh, the disputed borderlands of a country cannbalising itself. They love sharp clothes, a drink, and a night on the town singing Perry Como's classics. Their dream is a Free State, and their methods for achieving this are uncompromising. Heading for Belfast - ground zero of the Troubles - they find themselves in the incongruous position of running a comic book shop by day. Their clandestine activities belong in the x-rated pages of graphic fiction: burglary, blackmail, extortion, torture, and murder. No criminal act is too taboo for these boys. But when punk rock arrives and the hard edge of the decade starts to reveal its true paranoid colours, Sammy finds himself increasingly isolated. Camaraderie and loyalty is the fuel of a terrorist cell. When those virtues prove faulty, the game is up - and Sammy's world starts to radically shrink. For the Good Times shouts and sings with visionary intensity and gallows humour. It is not just a book about the IRA, but an exploration of what it means to 'go rogue', and the heartbreak and devastation that commitment to 'the cause' can engender. It unpacks any dewy-eyed romance associated with the Troubles, and establishes David Keenan as one of our generation's most fearless and entertaining literary stylists.

The Towers The Fields The Transmitters

Author: David Keenan
Publisher: White Rabbit
ISBN: 1474620728
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 54

Book Description
A businessman experiences a breakdown when he arrives in the town of St Andrews on the east coast of Scotland in order to audit a military air base. Obsessed by his estranged daughter, who he believes is walking the streets at night, the unnamed businessman starts to look to art and ritual in order to redeem this new reality, even as time itself appears out of joint, as old WWII fighters appear in the skies and his twin brother, his double or personal daemon, wreaks havoc in his name. The Towers The Fields The Transmitters is a magical novel that channels the surreal paranoia of Kafka, Burroughs, Bolaño and Philp K. Dick, while asking big questions about the nature of art, its ability to re-frame reality, and its moral culpability in aestheticizing suffering and despair. Written in a high-octane style and with a visionary sleight of hand that digs deep textual tunnels between Xstabeth and itself, The Towers The Fields The Transmitters is the next stage in Keenan's radical re-thinking of the possibilities of the modern novel.

Smoke Hole

Author: Martin Shaw
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing
ISBN: 1645020967
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 145

Book Description
"With potent, lyrical language and a profound knowledge of storytelling, Shaw encourages and illuminates the mythic in our own lives. He is a modern-day bard." – Madeline Miller, author of Circe and The Song of Achilles At a time when we are all confronted by not one, but many crossroads in our modern lives—identity, technology, trust, politics, and a global pandemic—celebrated mythologist and wilderness guide Martin Shaw delivers Smoke Hole: three metaphors to help us understand our world, one that is assailed by the seductive promises of social media and shadowed by a health crisis that has brought loneliness and isolation to an all-time high. Smoke Hole is a passionate call to arms and an invitation to use these stories to face the complexities of contemporary life, from fake news, parenthood, climate crises, addictive technology and more. Shaw urges us to reclaim our imagination and untangle ourselves from modern menace, letting these tales be our guide. More Praise: "I can still remember the first time I heard Martin Shaw tell a story. The tale that emerged was like a living thing, bounding around, throwing itself at us there listening. I had never heard anything like it before." – Paul Kingsnorth, Booker shortlisted author of The Wake "Martin Shaw’s work is so very beautiful. A new animal. His love of images is deep and contagious." – Coleman Barks, author of The Essential Rumi "Through feral tales and poetic exegesis, Martin Shaw makes you re-see the world, as a place of adventure, and of initiation, as perfect home, and as perfectly other. What a gift." – David Keenan, author of Xstabeth "Shaw has so much wisdom and knowledge about the old stories, it emanates from his pores." – John Densmore, The Doors

England's Hidden Reverse

Author: David Keenan
Publisher: SAF Publishing
ISBN: 9780946719402
Category : Electronic music
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
The official biography--for the first time all three artists have allowed access to their vaults.

William Blake Vs the World

Author: John Higgs
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
ISBN: 9781474614368
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
'Fascinating' The Times 'Blakeian in its singularity' New Statesman 'A wonderful adventure' Irish Times 'Rich, complex and original' Tom Holland 'A crisp, ambitious and thoroughly contemporary introduction' Times Literary Supplement Poet, artist, visionary and author of the unofficial English national anthem 'Jerusalem', William Blake is an archetypal misunderstood genius. In this radical new biography, we return to a world of riots, revolutions and radicals, discuss movements from the Levellers of the sixteenth century to the psychedelic counterculture of the 1960s, and explore the latest discoveries in neurobiology, quantum physics and comparative religion to look afresh at Blake's life and work - and, crucially, his mind. Taking the reader on wild detours into unfamiliar territory, John Higgs places the bewildering eccentricities of a most singular artist into context and shows us how Blake can help us better understand ourselves.

The Prisoners of Stewartville

Author: Shannon Felton
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781957537313
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Stewartville. A town living in the shadow of the prisons that drive its economy. Haunted by the ghosts of its past. Cursed by the dark secrets hidden beneath. A town so entwined with the prisons waiting outside the city limits that it's impossible to imagine one without the other, or to ever imagine escaping either. When a teenage boy digs into the history of the town, he discovers a tunnel system beneath Stewartville, passageways filled with dark secrets. Secrets leading not to freedom, but to unrelenting terror. Stewartville. Where the convicts aren't the only prisoners.

Cathedral

Author: Ben Hopkins
Publisher: Europa Editions
ISBN: 1609456246
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 527

Book Description
A sweeping story about obsession, mysticism, art, earthly desire, and the construction of a Cathedral in medieval Germany. At the center of this story is the Cathedral. Its design and construction in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in the Rhineland town of Hagenburg unites a vast array of unforgettable characters whose fortunes are inseparable from the shifting political factions and economic interests vying for supremacy. From the bishop to his treasurer to local merchants and lowly stonecutters, everyone, even the town’s Jewish denizens, is implicated and affected by the slow rise of Hagenburg’s Cathedral, which in no way enforces morality or charity. Around this narrative center, Ben Hopkins has constructed his own monumental edifice, a novel that is rich with the vicissitudes of mercantilism, politics, religion, and human enterprise. Fans of Umberto Eco, Hilary Mantel, and Ken Follett will delight at the atmosphere, the beautiful prose, and the vivid characters of Ben Hopkins’s Cathedral. “Cathedral is a brilliantly organized mess of great, great characters. It is fascinating, fun, and gripping to the very end.” —Roddy Doyle, Booker Prize–winning author of Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha “A varied cast of hugely engaging characters jostle for status, rising and falling according to the whims of pirates and Popes. An immersive, old-fashioned read that rattles along at a cracking pace.” —Richard Beard, author of Lazarus is Dead and The Day That Went Missing “Six hundred pages sounds long, but this deeply human take on a medieval city and its commerce and aspirations, its violent battles and small intimacies, never feels that way. This sweeping work is as impressive as the cathedral at its center.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review, PW Pick