Edgelands

Author: Michael Symmons Roberts
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1409028429
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 275

Book Description
The wilderness is much closer than you think. Passed through, negotiated, unnamed, unacknowledged: the edgelands - those familiar yet ignored spaces which are neither city nor countryside - have become the great wild places on our doorsteps. In the same way the Romantic writers taught us to look at hills, lakes and rivers, poets Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts write about mobile masts and gravel pits, business parks and landfill sites, taking the reader on a journey to marvel at these richly mysterious, forgotten regions in our midst. Edgelands forms a critique of what we value as 'wild', and allows our allotments, railways, motorways, wasteland and water a presence in the world, and a strange beauty all of their own.

Edgeland

Author: Jake Halpern
Publisher: Bonnier Publishing Fiction Ltd.
ISBN: 1471406148
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 215

Book Description
The companion novel to the New York Times bestselling NIGHTFALL Thousands of miles due south from the Polar North is is the island of Edgeland. Here, day and night last for 72 hours. And here is one of the natural wonders of this world: a whirlpool thirty miles wide and a hundred miles around. This is the Drain. Anything sucked into its frothing, turbulent waters is never seen again. Wren has spent most of her life on Edgeland, watching people bring their dead to the island's famous bone houses to be blessed and prepared for the afterlife. There the dead are loaded into boats with treasure and sent over the cliff, and into the Drain. Orphaned and alone, Wren dreams of escaping Edgeland, and her chance finally comes when furriers from the Polar north arrive with their dead, and treasure for their dead. With the help of her friend Alec, Wren plans to loot one of the boats before it enters the Drain. But the boat - with Alec and Wren onboard - is sucked into the whirlpool. What they discover over the abyss is beyond what either of them could have imagined.

Nightfall

Author: Jake Halpern
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0698405560
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 373

Book Description
The dark will bring your worst nightmares to light in this gripping and eerie survival story! On Marin’s island, sunrise doesn’t come every twenty-four hours—it comes every twenty-eight years. Now the sun is just a sliver of light on the horizon. The weather is turning cold and the shadows are growing long. Because sunset triggers the tide to roll out hundreds of miles, the islanders are frantically preparing to sail south, where they will wait out the long Night. Marin and her twin brother, Kana, help their anxious parents ready the house for departure. Locks must be taken off doors. Furniture must be arranged. Tables must be set. The rituals are puzzling—bizarre, even—but none of the adults in town will discuss why it has to be done this way. Just as the ships are about to sail, a teenage boy goes missing—the twins’ friend Line. Marin and Kana are the only ones who know the truth about where Line’s gone, and the only way to rescue him is by doing it themselves. But Night is falling. Their island is changing. And it may already be too late.

Edgelands: A Collection of Monstrous Geographies

Author: Erin Vander Wall
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1848884818
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 124

Book Description
This volume was first published by Inter-Disciplinary Press in 2016. We are captivated by the monstrous. The monstrous encapsulates a variety of emotions, actions, behaviors, and re-sponses. In general usage it draws attention to the physicality of bodies, the fear and repulsion that have so often driven societal response, and the marginal status of those defined by such terms. Monstrous geographies draw on the unease and uncanniness at the core of the monstrous while shifting the consideration from bodies to places and spaces, away from corporeality and toward the sites or landscapes within which bodies move; away from the mon-strous form of a creature like the Yeti and toward the environment in which the Yeti thrives, an environment that must be monstrous to produce and sustain such a being. Considering such geographies allows for a nuanced under-standing of the places, both real and imagined, subtle and fantastic, that make up our world.

Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country

Author: Edward Parnell
Publisher: HarperCollins UK
ISBN: 0008271968
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 261

Book Description
SHORTLISTED FOR THE PEN ACKERLEY PRIZE 2020 ‘A uniquely strange and wonderful work of literature’ Philip Hoare ‘An exciting new voice’ Mark Cocker, author of Crow Country

Common Ground

Author: Rob Cowen
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022642426X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 363

Book Description
"Even in our parceled-out, paved-over urban environs, nature is all around us, it is in us. It is us. This is what Rob Cowen discovered after moving to a new home in northern England. After ten years in London, he was suddenly adrift, searching for a sense of connection. He found himself drawn to a square-mile patch of waste ground at the edge of town. Scrappy, weed-filled, this heart-shaped tangle of land was the very definition of overlooked - a thoroughly in-between place that capitalism had no further use for, leaving nature to take its course. Wandering in meadows, woods, hedges, and fields, Cowen found it was also a magical, mysterious place, haunted and haunting, abandoned but wildly alive - and he fell in fascinated love."--Book jacket.

The High Sierra

Author: Kim Stanley Robinson
Publisher: Little, Brown
ISBN: 0316306819
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 714

Book Description
A “sublime” and “radically original” exploration of the Sierra Nevadas, the best mountains on Earth for hiking and camping, from New York Times bestselling novelist Kim Stanley Robinson (Bill McKibben, Gary Snyder). Kim Stanley Robinson first ventured into the Sierra Nevada mountains during the summer of 1973. He returned from that encounter a changed man, awed by a landscape that made him feel as if he were simultaneously strolling through an art museum and scrambling on a jungle gym like an energized child. He has returned to the mountains throughout his life—more than a hundred trips—and has gathered a vast store of knowledge about them. The High Sierra is his lavish celebration of this exceptional place and an exploration of what makes this span of mountains one of the most compelling places on Earth. Over the course of a vivid and dramatic narrative, Robinson describes the geological forces that shaped the Sierras and the history of its exploration, going back to the indigenous peoples who made it home and whose traces can still be found today. He celebrates the people whose ideas and actions protected the High Sierra for future generations. He describes uniquely beautiful hikes and the trails to be avoided. Robinson’s own life-altering events, defining relationships, and unforgettable adventures form the narrative’s spine. And he illuminates the human communion with the wild and with the sublime, including the personal growth that only seems to come from time spent outdoors. The High Sierra is a gorgeous, absorbing immersion in a place, born out of a desire to understand and share one of the greatest rapture-inducing experiences our planet offers. Packed with maps, gear advice, more than 100 breathtaking photos, and much more, it will inspire veteran hikers, casual walkers, and travel readers to prepare for a magnificent adventure.

Heritage Futures

Author: Rodney Harrison
Publisher: UCL Press
ISBN: 1787356000
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 568

Book Description
Preservation of natural and cultural heritage is often said to be something that is done for the future, or on behalf of future generations, but the precise relationship of such practices to the future is rarely reflected upon. Heritage Futures draws on research undertaken over four years by an interdisciplinary, international team of 16 researchers and more than 25 partner organisations to explore the role of heritage and heritage-like practices in building future worlds. Engaging broad themes such as diversity, transformation, profusion and uncertainty, Heritage Futures aims to understand how a range of conservation and preservation practices across a number of countries assemble and resource different kinds of futures, and the possibilities that emerge from such collaborative research for alternative approaches to heritage in the Anthropocene. Case studies include the cryopreservation of endangered DNA in frozen zoos, nuclear waste management, seed biobanking, landscape rewilding, social history collecting, space messaging, endangered language documentation, built and natural heritage management, domestic keeping and discarding practices, and world heritage site management.

Cyclogeography: Journeys of a London Bicycle Courier

Author: Jon Day
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1910749303
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 123

Book Description
Cyclogeography is about the bicycle in the cultural imagination and also a portrait of London as seen from the saddle. In the great tradition of the psychogeographers, Jon Day attempts to depart from the map and reclaim the streets of the city. Informed by several grinding years spent as a bicycle courier, he lifts the lid on the solitary life of the courier. Traveling the unmapped byways, shortcuts, and urban edgelands, couriers are the declining, invisible workforce of the city. The parcels they deliver keep things running. For those who survive the crushing toughness of the job, the bicycle can become what holds them together.

Soft Estate

Author: Edward Chell
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780953899678
Category : Painting, Modern
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Edward Chell investigates motorway landscapes, linking these with eighteenth century ideas of the Picturesque which were formed at a time when commerce and tourism drove the development of roads and laid the foundations of today's network.Soft Estate features art works by Chell which explore the interface between history, ecology and speed, alongside essays giving new perspectives on how roads and travel have shaped both what we see and how we look at it.'These verges and 'island' hyper-landscapes, pulsing with wildlife, contain worlds where our rapid through-transit alters our sense of scale, which is simultaneously diminished and increased,' says Chell. 'Through making these paintings I've become acutely aware of the visual and metaphorical richness of these fragile, yet self-sustaining and tough environments.'The publication, with foreword by Bluecoat director Bryan Biggs includes essays by curator Sara-Jayne Parsons, artist and academic, Edward Chell and the environmental activist and author Richard Mabey.This publication accompanies the exhibition, Soft Estate at the Bluecoat, Liverpool, December 2013 - March 2014.