The Summer That Never Was
The Summer That Never Was

Author: Peter Robinson

Publisher: McClelland & Stewart

Published: 2009-01-13

Total Pages: 466

ISBN-13: 1551992671

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While recuperating from the events of Aftermath on a Greek island, Inspector Alan Banks reads that the bones of his childhood friend, Graham Marshall, have been dug up in a field not far away from the road where he disappeared more than thirty-five years earlier. Intrigued by the discovery, and still consumed with guilt because of a related incident he failed to report at the time, Banks returns to his hometown in Cambridgeshire and becomes peripherally involved in the investigation, headed by newcomer Detective Inspector Michelle Hart. At the same time, a few counties away, the case of another missing teenager – the son of a famous model and step-son of anex-footballer, is handed to DI Annie Cabbot. Banks shuttles between the two cases far apart in time but perhaps not so far apart in character. When the lives of both detectives are threatened, Banks searches his own memories for clues, until he is finally forced to confront truths he would rather avoid, and finds that, in these investigations, the boundary between victim and perpetrator, guardian of the law and law-breaker is becoming ever more blurred. A gripping crime novel, set in the present day, The Summer That Never Was is also a gritty and evocative portrait of northern England in the sixties, and an exploration of the nature of memory, the destruction of families, andadolescence.

Selections from the Notebooks Of Edward Bond
Selections from the Notebooks Of Edward Bond

Author: Edward Bond

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2014-03-24

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 147253669X

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In this first volume of notebooks, Edward Bond reveals himself to be one of the finest and most creative minds to have emerged in the twentieth century. Exploring the meeting point between politics and the art of the writer, Bond's notes chart the creative progress of his work and thinking over a twenty-year period, from 1959, when his first plays started to be produced at London's Royal Court Theatre, to 1979, when he had achieved fame as a major writer. While providing a detailed commentary on his plays the Notebooks also contain early play drafts, poems and stories, his thoughts on life, Brecht, art and dramatic method as well as his notes on censorship.

Thom Gunn
Thom Gunn

Author: Michael Nott

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published: 2024-06-18

Total Pages: 501

ISBN-13: 0374721378

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A no-holds-barred biography of the great poet and sexual rebel, who could “give the dead a voice, make them sing” (Hilton Als, The New Yorker). Thom Gunn was not a confessional poet, and he withheld much, but inseparable from his rigorous, formal poetry was a ravenous, acute experience of life and death. Raised in Kent, England, and educated at Cambridge, Gunn found a home in San Francisco, where he documented the city’s queerness, the hippie mentality (and drug use) of the sixties, and the tragedy and catastrophic impact of the AIDS crisis in the eighties and beyond. As Jeremy Lybarger wrote in The New Republic, the author of Moly and The Man with Night Sweats was “an agile poet who renovated tradition to accommodate the rude litter of modernity.” Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life chronicles, for the first time, the largely undocumented life of this revolutionary poet. Michael Nott, a coeditor of The Letters of Thom Gunn, draws on letters, diaries, notebooks, interviews, and Gunn’s poetry to create a portrait as vital as the man himself. Nott writes with insight and intimacy about the great sweep of Gunn’s life: his traditional childhood in England; his mother’s suicide; the mind-opening education he received at Cambridge, reading Shakespeare and John Donne; his decades in San Francisco and with his life partner, Mike Kitay; and his visceral experience of sex, drugs, and loss. Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life is a long-awaited, landmark study of one of England and America’s most innovative poets.

Notebooks
Notebooks

Author: Margaret Rose Thornton

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2006-01-01

Total Pages: 868

ISBN-13: 9780300116823

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Meticulously edited and annotated, Tennessee Williams's notebooks follow his growth as a writer from his undergraduate days to the publication and production of his most famous plays, from his drug addiction and drunkenness to the heights of his literary accomplishments.

A Literary Biography of Robin Blaser
A Literary Biography of Robin Blaser

Author: Miriam Nichols

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2019-09-06

Total Pages: 317

ISBN-13: 3030183270

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A Literary Biography of Robin Blaser: Mechanic of Splendor is the first major study illustrating Robin Blaser’s significance to North American poetry. The poet Robin Blaser (1925–2009) was an important participant in the Berkeley Renaissance of the 1950s and San Francisco poetry circles of the 1960s. The book illuminates Blaser’s distinctive responses to and relationships with familiar writers including Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, and Charles Olson via their correspondence. Blaser contributed to the formation of the serial poem as a dominant mode in post-war New American poetry through his work and engagement with the poetry communities of the time. Offering a new perspective on a well-known and influential period in American poetry, Miriam Nichols combines the story of Blaser’s life—coming from a mid-western conservative religious upbringing and his coming of age as a gay man in Berkeley, Boston, and San Francisco—with critical assessments of his major poems through unprecedented archival research. This literary biography presents Blaser’s poetry and poetics in the many contexts from which it came, ranging from the Berkeley Renaissance to the Vancouver scene; from surrealism to phenomenology; from the New American poetry to the Canadian postmodern; from the homoerotic to high theory. Throughout, Blaser’s voice is heard in the excitement of his early years in Berkeley and Boston and the seriousness of the later years where he was doing most of his living in his work.

The Testing of Barbara Pym
The Testing of Barbara Pym

Author: Emily Stockard

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2023-10-23

Total Pages: 247

ISBN-13: 3031396677

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The Testing of Barbara Pym, a companion volume to The Making of Barbara Pym (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), completes a comprehensive analysis of Pym’s novels and her life, focusing on her complex view of the necessity of change at both the individual and cultural levels. Newly published archival material supports this treatment of Pym’s vision of a changing world – a vision premised upon the principle of continuity, a linking together of past, present, and future. In her novels published from 1955-1980, beginning with Britain’s emergence from post-war austerity, Pym portrays, in an optimistic fashion, several changing aspects of British culture: expansion of the suburbs, acceptance of homosexual men, erosion of the class system, inclusivity in the Anglican Church. But with these changes, new strains emerge as well; the principle of continuity undergoes radical testing and is then emphatically reasserted. Likewise, despite upheavals to established patterns in her life, chiefly the inability to publish her work, Pym persisted in cultivating such elements of continuity as she could, an effort rewarded, while she was in rural retirement, by a return to the publishing world. Thus, in both Pym’s novels and her life, continuity survives the duress of testing circumstances.