February New English Literature books

• Last Words: The Public Self and the Social Author in Late Medieval England
  
  Last Words: The Public Self and the Social Author in Late Medieval England: PR255 .S63 2019
  Author(s): Sebastian Sobecki
  Oxford : Oxford University Press 2019.
  
  No medieval text was designed to be read hundreds of years later by an audience unfamiliar with its language, situation, and author. By ascribing to these texts intentional anonymity, we romanticise them and misjudge the social character of their authors. Instead, most medieval poems and manuscripts presuppose familiarity with their authorial or scribal maker. Last Words: The Public Self and the Social Author in Late Medieval England attempts to recover this familiarity and understand the literary motivation behind some of most important fifteenth-century texts and authors. Last Words captures the public selves of such social authors when they attempt to extract themselves from the context of a lived life. Driven by archival research and literary inquiry, this book reveals where John Gower kept the Trentham manuscript in his final years, how John Lydgate wished to be remembered, and why Thomas Hoccleve wrote his best-known work, the Series. It includes documentary breakthroughs and archival discoveries, and introduces a new life record for Hoccleve, identifies the author of a significant political poem, and reveals the handwriting of John Gower and George Ashby. Through its investments in archival study, book history, and literary criticism, Last Words charts the extent to which medieval English literature was shaped by the social selves of their authors.
  
  
• The Voices of Medieval English Lyric: An Anthology of Poems ca 1150–1530
  
  The Voices of Medieval English Lyric: An Anthology of Poems ca 1150–1530: PR311 .K55 2019
  Author(s): Anne L. Klinck
  Montreal ; McGill-Queen's University Press [2019]
  
  What was the medieval English lyric? Moving beyond the received understanding of the genre, The Voices of Medieval English Lyric explores, through analysis, discussion, and demonstration, what the term "lyric" most meaningfully implies in a Middle English context. A critical edition of 131 poems that illustrate the range and rich variety of lyric poetry from the mid-twelfth century to the early sixteenth century, The Voices of Medieval English Lyric presents its texts – freshly edited from the manuscripts – in thirteen sections emphasizing contrasting and complementary voices and genres. As well as a selection of religious poetry, the collection includes a high proportion of secular lyrics, many on love and sexuality, both earnest and humorous. In general, major authors who have been covered thoroughly elsewhere are excluded from the edited texts, but some, especially Chaucer, are quoted or mentioned as illuminating comparisons. Charles d'Orléans and the Scots poets Robert Henryson and William Dunbar add an extra-national dimension to a single-language collection. Textual and thematic notes are provided, as well as versions of the poems in Latin or French when these exist. Adopting new perspectives, The Voices of Medieval English Lyric offers an up-to-date, accessible, and distinctive take on Middle English poetry.
  
  
• Early Modern Asceticism: Literature, Religion, and Austerity in the English Renaissance
  
  Early Modern Asceticism: Literature, Religion, and Austerity in the English Renaissance: PR428.R46 M34 2020
  Author(s): Patrick J. McGrath
  Toronto ; University of Toronto Press [2020]
  
  Challenging contemporary perceptions of the ascetic in the early modern period, this book explores asceticism as a vital site of religious conflict and literary creativity, rather than merely a vestige of a medieval past.
  
  
• Poetics of the Pillory: English Literature and Seditious Libel, 1660-1820
  
  Poetics of the Pillory: English Literature and Seditious Libel, 1660-1820: PR441 .K49 2019
  Author(s): Thomas Keymer
  Oxford ; Oxford University Press 2019.
  
  On the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695, Thomas Macaulay wrote in his History of England, 'English literature was emancipated, and emancipated for ever, from the control of the government'. It's certainly true that the system of prior restraint enshrined in this Restoration measure was now at an end, at least for print. Yet the same cannot be said of government control, which came to operate instead by means of post-publication retribution, not pre-publication licensing, notably for the common-law offence of seditious libel. For many of the authors affected, from Defoe to Cobbett, this new regime was a greater constraint on expression than the old, not least for its alarming unpredictability, and for the spectacular punishment--the pillory--that was sometimes entailed. Yet we may also see the constraint as an energizing force. Throughout the eighteenth century and into the Romantic period, writers developed and refined ingenious techniques for communicating dissident or otherwise contentious meanings while rendering the meanings deniable. As a work of both history and criticism, this book traces the rise and fall of seditious libel prosecution, and with it the theatre of the pillory, while arguing that the period's characteristic forms of literary complexity--ambiguity, ellipsis, indirection, irony--may be traced to the persistence of censorship in the post-licensing world. The argument proceeds through case studies of major poets and prose writers including Dryden, Defoe, Pope, Fielding, Johnson, and Southey, and also calls attention to numerous little-known satires and libels across the extended period.
  
  
• Early British Drama in Manuscript
  
  Early British Drama in Manuscript: PR646 .E37 2019
  Author(s): Tamara Atkin, Laura Estill
  Turnhout, Belgium : Brepols Publishers [2019]
  
  This collection of essays examines medieval and early modern drama in the context of a rich and varied manuscript culture. Focusing on the production, performance, and reception of dramatic documents made in Britain between 1400 and 1700, the essays in this book shed new light on the role of dramatic manuscripts in a range of different social and literary spheres. From extant manuscripts of England's mystery cycles to miscellanies kept by seventeenth-century readers, the documents discussed in this volume reflect a culture of producing and using drama in ways that have been overlooked by the recent critical focus on drama and print by theatre historians and literary critics. By showing the various continuities, exchanges, lendings, and borrowings between medieval and early modern scribal practices, as well as between manuscript and print practices, this volume interrogates accepted critical narratives about the way that drama has been historicized.
  
  
• Adapting Bestsellers: Fantasy, Franchise and the Afterlife of Storyworlds
  
  Adapting Bestsellers: Fantasy, Franchise and the Afterlife of Storyworlds: PR830.F3 G45 2019
  Author(s): Ken Gelder
  Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press 2019.
  
  This Element looks at adaptations of bestselling works of popular fiction to cinema, television, stage, radio, video games and other media platforms. It focuses on 'transmedia storytelling', building its case studies around the genre of modern fantasy: because the elaborate storyworlds produced by writers like J. R. R. Tolkien, J. K. Rowling and George R. R. Martin have readily lent themselves to adaptations across various media platforms. This has also made it possible for media entertainment corporations to invest in them over the long term, enabling the development of franchises through which their storyworlds are presented and marketed in new ways to new audiences.
  
  
• Articulating Bodies: The Narrative Form of Disability and Illness in Victorian Fiction
  
  Articulating Bodies: The Narrative Form of Disability and Illness in Victorian Fiction: PR878.B63 H56 2019
  Author(s): Kylee-Anne Hingston
  Liverpool : Liverpool University Press 2019.
  
  Articulating Bodies investigates the contemporaneous developments of Victorian fiction and disability's medicalization by focusing on the intersection between narrative form and body. The book examines texts from across the century, from Frederic Shoberl's 1833 English translation of Victor Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris to Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes story "The Adventure of the Crooked Man" (1893), covering genres that typically relied upon disabled or diseased characters. By tracing the patterns of focalization and narrative structure across six decades of the nineteenth century and across six genres, Articulating Bodies demonstrates that throughout the Victorian era, authors of fiction used narrative form as well as narrative theme to negotiate how to categorize bodies, both constructing and questioning the boundary dividing normalcy from abnormality. As fiction's form developed from the massive hybrid novels of the early decades of the nineteenth century to the case-study length of fin-de-siècle mysteries, disability became increasingly medicalized, moving from the position of spectacle to specimen.
  
  
• Fierce Bad Rabbits: The Tales Behind Children's Picture Books
  
  Fierce Bad Rabbits: The Tales Behind Children's Picture Books: PR990 .P65 2019
  Author(s): Clare Pollard
  [London] : Fig Tree an imprint of Penguin Books 2019.
  
  'An enlightening, perceptive analysis of the books that build us' Sunday Telegraph, 5 star review. What is The Tiger Who Came to Tea really about? What has Meg and Mog got to do with Polish embroidery? Why is death in picture books so often represented by being eaten? We've read Green Eggs and Ham, laughed at Mr Tickle and whetted our appetites with The Very Hungry Caterpillar.But what lies behind the picture books that make up our childhood? Fierce Bad Rabbits takes us on an eye-opening journey in a pea-green boat through the history of picture books. From Edward Lear through to Beatrix Potter and contemporary picture books like Stick Man, Clare Pollard shines a light on some of our best-loved childhood stories, their histories and what they really mean. Because the best picture books are far more complex than they seem - and darker too. Monsters can gobble up children and go unnoticed, power is not always used wisely, and the wild things are closer than you think. Sparkling with wit, magic and nostalgia, Fierce Bad Rabbits weaves in tales from Clare's own childhood, and her re-readings as a parent, with fascinating facts and theories about the authors behind the books. Introducing you to new treasures while bringing your childhood favourites to vivid life, it will make you see even stories you've read a hundred times afresh. 'A gem, thoroughly enjoyable. Pollard has managed to dissect all our favourite stories with her scalpel, while leaving their magic intact' Spectator 'When I read Fierce Bad Rabbits, I thought, why has no one written this book before? But Clare Pollard has done so superbly - it is perceptive, illuminating, scholarly but at the same time entertaining. It should be essential reading for every thinking parent' Penelope Lively 'This book is a happy way to reconnect with old friends' Times 'Delightful . . . as good a guide as you can hope for' Harper's Bazaar
  
  
• Spenser and Donne: Thinking Poets
  
  Spenser and Donne: Thinking Poets: PR2364 .S69 2019
  Author(s): Yulia Ryzhik
  Manchester : Manchester University Press 2019.
  
  This edited collection of essays, part of The Manchester Spenser series, brings together leading Spenser and Donne scholars to challenge the traditionally dichotomous view of these two major poets and to shift the critical conversation towards a more holistic, relational view of the two authors' poetics and thought.
  
  
• Charlotte Smith and the Sonnet: Form, Place and Tradition in the Late Eighteenth Century
  
  Charlotte Smith and the Sonnet: Form, Place and Tradition in the Late Eighteenth Century: PR3688.S4 Z826 2019
  Author(s): Bethan Roberts
  Liverpool : Liverpool University Press 2019.
  
  An Open Access edition of this book will be made available on publication. This book offers the first full-length study of Charlotte Smith's Elegiac Sonnets and clarifies its 'place' - in multiple ways - in literary history as a work celebrated for 'making it new', yet deeply engaged with the literary past. It argues that Smith's sonnets are constituted by three intertwined concerns: with tradition, place and the sonnet form itself, whereby the subjects of Smith's sonnets - across birds, rivers, the sea, plants and flowers - are bound up with the literary context in which she wrote. Charlotte Smith and the Sonnet shows that Smith's verse engages more deeply with tradition than has hitherto been realised and revises our understanding not only of Smith's career but also of the sonnet in eighteenth-century England. The book also illuminates Smith's place in posterity, as a popular poet - influencing figures ranging from Wordsworth and Coleridge to Constable - who was subsequently obscured in literary history. It reveals the complex processes underpinning Smith's reception and paradoxical position from the late eighteenth century to the present day, and shows that the appropriation of place itself was an important way in which aspects of literary tradition have been negotiated and understood by Smith, her predecessors, contemporaries and successors.
  
  
• Walter Besant: The Business of Literature and the Pleasures of Reform
  
  Walter Besant: The Business of Literature and the Pleasures of Reform: PR4108.A9 W35 2019
  Author(s): Kevin A. Morrison
  Liverpool : Liverpool University Press 2019.
  
  In the 1880s and 1890s, Walter Besant was one of Britain's most lionized living novelists. Like many popular writers of the period, Besant suffered from years of critical neglect. Yet his centrality to Victorian society and culture all but ensured a revival of interest. While literary critics are now rediscovering the more than forty works of fiction that he penned or co-wrote, as part of a more general revaluation of Victorian popular literature, legal scholars have argued that Besant, by advocating for copyright reform, played a crucial role in consolidating a notion of literary property as the exclusive possession of the individuated intellect. For their part, historians have recently shown how Besant - as a prominent philanthropist who campaigned for the cultural vitalization of impoverished areas in east and south London - galvanized late Victorian social reform activities. The expanding corpus of work on Besant, however, has largely kept the domains of authorship and activism, which he perceived as interrelated, conceptually distinct. Analysing the mutually constitutive interplay in Besant's career between philanthropy and the professionalization of authorship, Walter Besant: The Business of Literature and the Pleasures of Reform highlights their fundamental interconnectedness in this Victorian intellectual polymath's life and work.
  
  
• Byron in Context
  
  Byron in Context: PR4383 .B97 2020
  Author(s): Clara Tuite
  Cambridge, United Kingdom : Cambridge University Press 2020.
  
  George Gordon, the sixth Lord Byron (1788-1824), was one of the most celebrated poets of the Romantic period, as well as a peer, politician and global celebrity, famed not only for his verse, but for his controversial lifestyle and involvement in the Greek War of Independence. In thirty-seven concise, accessible essays, by leading international scholars, this volume explores the social and intertextual relationships that informed Byron's writing; the geopolitical contexts in which he travelled, lived and worked; the cultural and philosophical movements that influenced changing outlooks on religion, science, modern society and sexuality; the dramatic landscape of war, conflict and upheaval that shaped Napoleonic and post-Napoleonic Europe and Regency Britain; and the diverse cultures of reception that mark the ongoing Byron phenomenon as a living ecology in the twenty-first century. This volume illuminates how we might think of Byron in context, but also as a context in his own right.
  
  
• The Making of Poetry: Coleridge, the Wordsworths, and Their Year of Marvels
  
  The Making of Poetry: Coleridge, the Wordsworths, and Their Year of Marvels: PR4483 .N53 2020
  Author(s): Adam Nicolson
  New York : Farrar Straus and Giroux 2020.
  
  Brimming with poetry, art, and nature writing—Wordsworth and Coleridge as you've never seen them before June 1797 to September 1798 is the most famous year in English poetry. Out of it came Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and “Kubla Khan,” as well as his unmatched hymns to friendship and fatherhood, and William Wordsworth’s revolutionary songs in Lyrical Ballads along with “Tintern Abbey,” Wordsworth's paean to the unity of soul and cosmos, love and understanding. In The Making of Poetry, Adam Nicolson embeds himself in the reality of this unique moment, exploring the idea that these poems came from this particular place and time, and that only by experiencing the physical circumstances of the year, in all weathers and all seasons, at night and at dawn, in sunlit reverie and moonlit walks, can the genesis of the poetry start to be understood. The poetry Wordsworth and Coleridge made was not from settled conclusions but from the adventure on which they embarked, thinking of poetry as a challenge to all received ideas, stripping away the dead matter, looking to shed consciousness and so change the world. What emerges is a portrait of these great figures seen not as literary monuments but as young men, troubled, ambitious, dreaming of a vision of wholeness, knowing they had greatness in them but still in urgent search of the paths toward it. The artist Tom Hammick accompanied Nicolson for much of the year, making woodcuts from the fallen timber in the park at Alfoxden where the Wordsworths lived. Interspersed throughout the book, his images bridge the centuries, depicting lives at the source of our modern sensibility: a psychic landscape of doubt and possibility, full of beauty and thick with desire for a kind of connectedness that seems permanently at hand and yet always out of reach.
  
  
• Geoffrey Hill's later work: Radiance of apprehension
  
  Geoffrey Hill's later work: Radiance of apprehension: PR6015.I4735 Z93 2019
  Author(s): Alex Wylie
  Manchester : Manchester University Press 2019.
  
  An exploration of the later work of Geoffrey Hill, often described as ‘the greatest living poet’ in his lifetime. This book reads, interprets, evaluates, and sets in context the work of Hill’s prolific later period from 1996 to 2016, the year of his death.
  
  
• The Monsters and the Critics: And Other Essays
  
  The Monsters and the Critics: And Other Essays: PR6039.O32 M66 2006
  Author(s): John Ronald Reuel Tolkien
  London : HarperCollinsPublishers 2006.
  
  A collection of seven essays by J.R.R. Tolkien arising out of Tolkien's work in medieval literature
  
  
• Bird Summons: A Novel
  
  Bird Summons: A Novel: PR6051.B68 B57 2020
  Author(s): Leila Aboulela
  New York : Black Cat 2020.
  
  In her adventurous new novel, New York Times Notable author Leila Aboulela delivers a lively portrait of three women who embark on a journey of self-discovery while grappling with the conflicting demands of family, duty, and faith. When Salma, Moni, and Iman—friends and active members of their local Muslim Women's group—decide to take a road trip together to the Scottish Highlands, they leave behind lives often dominated by obligation, frustrated desire, and dull predictability. Each wants something more out of life, but fears the cost of taking it. Salma is successful and happily married, but tempted to risk it all when she's contacted by her first love back in Egypt; Moni gave up a career in banking to care for her disabled son without the help of her indifferent husband; and Iman, in her twenties and already on her third marriage, longs for the freedom and autonomy she's never known. When the women are visited by the Hoopoe, a sacred bird from Muslim and Celtic literature, they are compelled to question their relationships to faith and femininity, love, loyalty, and sacrifice. Brilliantly imagined, thoughtful and wise, Bird Summons confirms Leila Aboulela's reputation as one of our finest contemporary writers.
  
  
• H(A)PPY
  
  H(A)PPY: PR6052.A64876 H37 2017
  Author(s): Nicola Barker
  London : William Heinemann 2017.
  
  *WINNER OF THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE 2017* *SHORTLISTED FOR THE GORDON BURN PRIZE 2018* *LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2018* A GUARDIAN BOOK OF THE YEAR A TELEGRAPH BOOK OF THE YEAR AN INDEPENDENT BOOK OF THE YEAR From the internationally acclaimed, Man Booker-shortlisted Nicola Barker comes a new novel, a post-post apocalyptic story that overflows with pure creative talent. Imagine a perfect world where everything is known, where everything is open, where there can be no doubt, no hatred, no poverty, no greed. Imagine a System which both nurtures and protects. A Community which nourishes and sustains. An infinite world. A world without sickness, without death. A world without God. A world without fear. Could you...might you be happy there? H(A)PPY is a post-post apocalyptic Alice in Wonderland, a story which tells itself and then consumes itself. It's a place where language glows, where words buzz and sparkle and finally implode. It's a novel which twists and writhes with all the terrifying precision of a tiny fish in an Escher lithograph – a book where the mere telling of a story is the end of certainty.
  
  
• I Am Sovereign
  
  I Am Sovereign: PR6052.A64876 I36 2019
  Author(s): Nicola Barker
  London : William Heinemann 2019.
  
  'One of the funniest, most finely achieved comic novels, even by her own standard ... I think it’s a masterpiece.' Ali Smith ‘I think Nicola Barker is incapable of a dull page. [Her work] is unified by its spirit of adventure.’ Kevin Barry 'She really is a genius.’ Guardian ‘Life-affirming hilarity – Evelyn Waugh on ecstasy.’ Nell Zink Charles, a forty-year-old boutique teddy bear maker and wearer of ironic t-shirts, is trying – and failing – to sell his small, characterless house in Llandudno. His estate agent Avigail, whose name is definitely not Abigail, is trying – in vain – to rein in Charles’s most unhelpful eccentricities, especially his repeated recounting to prospective buyers of a failed burglary that took place twelve years ago. When Wang Shu and her daughter Ying Yue view the house, Wang Shu is mysteriously struck by a falling oyster shell – the first in a series of seemingly innocuous events distort the reality of the characters’ lives and cause them to question their very existence. As religious epiphanies bump up against declarations of love, the characters begin to sabotage the fictional world they inhabit, causing our entire understanding of the book – and of the boundaries between fiction and real life – to be radically upended. A tour de force that twists the novel into new shapes, I Am Sovereign sees Nicola Barker at her most joyful, provocative and riotous.
  
  
• From There to Here: Selected Poems and Translations
  
  From There to Here: Selected Poems and Translations: PR6053.A714 A6 2019
  Author(s): Ciaran Carson
  Winston-Salem, NC : Wake Forest University Press [2019]
  
  Ciaran Carson's shape-changing genius shines across the volumes included in From There to Here: Selected Poems and Translations. The explosive long lines of his earliest work move to the formal skill and inventive imagination of the middle period, while the concentrated stanzas and intellectual intensities of the volumes after the year 2000 continue his development. In recent years Carson's renditions of Rimbaud's Illuminations as well as his translations and responses to the French poet Jean Follain have added yet another dimension to his art and to the act of translation. It seems that with each volume Carson re-casts himself, much as Yeats did throughout his storied career. This selection takes us on an exceptional journey as the poet "initiates a constellation / from which blossom countless others."
  
  
• Ducks, Newburyport
  
  Ducks, Newburyport: PR6055.L54 D835 2019
  Author(s): Lucy Ellmann
  Windsor, Ontario : Biblioasis [2019]
  
  SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2019 BOOKER PRIZE Baking a multitude of tartes tatins for local restaurants, an Ohio housewife contemplates her four kids, husband, cats and chickens. Also, America's ignoble past, and her own regrets. She is surrounded by dead lakes, fake facts, Open Carry maniacs, and oodles of online advice about survivalism, veil toss duties, and how to be more like Jane Fonda. But what do you do when you keep stepping on your son's toy tractors, your life depends on stolen land and broken treaties, and nobody helps you when you get a flat tire on the interstate, not even the Abominable Snowman? When are you allowed to start swearing? With a torrent of consciousness and an intoxicating coziness, Ducks, Newburyport lays out a whole world for you to tramp around in, by turns frightening and funny. A heart-rending indictment of America's barbarity, and a lament for the way we are blundering into environmental disaster, this book is both heresy—and a revolution in the novel.
  
  
• Sacred Weather: Atmospheric Essentialism in the Work of John Mcgahern
  
  Sacred Weather: Atmospheric Essentialism in the Work of John Mcgahern: PR6063.A2176 Z65 2019
  Author(s): Niamh Campbell
  Cork : Cork University Press 2019.
  
  Is there such a thing as essential Irishness, something which can be experienced, invested in, and politically weaponised? Sacred Weather proposes to take this idea seriously, or literally, by proposing an objective correlative to 'Irishness' in certain atmospheric effects - or Stimmung - as these are depicted in literature, art, and film. By filtering the concept of pure pleasure, through recent writings on Marxist and affect theory by Antonio Negri, as well as the eco-critical writings of Timothy Morton, this work develops atmospheric essentialism as a theoretical template through which Irish Studies might radically, creatively, and imaginatively reconsider the idea of Irishness as an experience in itself. It does this by applying and expanding upon the operations of atmospheric essentialism in the work of the Irish novelist and short-story writer John McGahern and, in this way, proposing an equally radical intervention in current considerations of, and consensus on, the work of this writer. The readings are original, risky, and intended to start conversation.
  
  
• Elric of Melniboné and Other Stories
  
  Elric of Melniboné and Other Stories: PR6063.O59 E6 2013
  Author(s): Michael Moorcock
  London : Gollancz 2013.
  
  Gollancz is very proud to present the author's definitive editions of the saga of Elric, the last emperor of Melniboné. Michael Moorcock and his long-time friend and bibliographer John Davey have collaborated to produce the most consistent and coherent narrative from the disparate novels, novellas, short stories and non-fiction about Elric. From his early life in Melniboné all the way through to his final days, these seven volumes will be the definitive telling of the albino prince's story. Elric is one of the great creations of modern fantasy, and has inspired legions of imitators. If you know his story already, then this definitive edition will finally let you read the entire saga in the author's preferred order. If you've never experienced the chronicles of the albino with the soul-sucking sword, then this is the perfect place to start.
  
  
• Reading Graham Swift
  
  Reading Graham Swift: PR6069.W47 Z74 2020
  Author(s): Tomasz Dobrogoszcz, Marta Goszczyńska
  Lanham : Lexington Books [2020]
  
  This collection of essays on Graham Swift’s fiction brings together the perspectives of renowned Swift scholars from around the world. Authors look at the swift’s oeuvre from different interpretative angles, combining a variety of critical and theoretical approaches. This book covers all of Swift’s fiction, including his novels and short stories; special emphasis, however, is on his most recent books. By approaching Swift’s work from a number of perspectives, the volume offers a synthetic overview of his literary output. In particular, it searches for thematic and formal continuities between his early and more recent fiction, and attempts to emphasize its new developments and interests.
  
  
• Spliced
  
  Spliced: PR6103.R433 S65 2019
  Author(s): Timmy Creed
  [London] : Samuel French [2019]
  
  ''Timmy Creed's explosive one-man show...this intense production fearlessly tackles Irish masculine stereotypes.'' SUNDAY TIMES Timmy plays hurling, the fastest field sport in the world. He loves it. He hates it. Honest, brave and hard-hitting, Spliced is a visceral account of his struggle to become an individual outside of the sporting institution that raised him. He wants to talk about identity, masculinity and mental health in a sports club. From one of Ireland's exciting up-and-coming writers comes a fun, fierce, site-specific show with thrilling music and video.
  
  
• A Thousand Ships
  
  A Thousand Ships: PR6108.A9686 T46 2019
  Author(s): Natalie Haynes
  London : Mantle an imprint of Pan Macmillan 2019.
  
  This was never the story of one woman, or two. It was the story of all of them... They have waited to have their story told, and I will make them wait no longer.In the early hours of the morning, Creusa wakes to find her beloved Troy engulfed in flames. Ten seemingly endless years of brutal conflict between the Greeks and the Trojans are over, and Troy has fallen. Over the next few hours, the only life she has ever known will turn to ash...The devastating consequences of the fall of Troy stretch from Mount Olympus to Mount Ida, from the citadel of Troy to the distant Greek islands, and across the oceans and sky in between. Arising from this are the individual tales of the women embroiled in the lead-up to and the aftermath of that legendary war, as well as the feud and the fatal decisions that started it all...Powerfully told from an all-female perspective, A Thousand Ships gives voices to the women, girls, and goddesses who, for so long, were kept silent.
  
  
• Bobby & Amy
  
  Bobby & Amy: PR6110.E54 B63 2019
  Author(s): Emily Jenkins
  [London] : Samuel French [2019]
  
  It's the end of the 90s: Take That, Tamagotchis and Pog swaps. When Bobby and Amy meet, hundreds of cows dot across the fields and the sun always shines. But when the cows begin to burn, Bobby and Amy's sleepy Cotswold town faces a catastrophe that will change their home forever. Bobby & Amy explores friendship, heartache, and what happens when our way of life is threatened by those who don't understand it. A dark comedy about foot-and-mouth disease by Fringe First winner Emily Jenkins.
  
  
• For The Good Times
  
  For The Good Times: PR6111.E3453 F67 2019
  Author(s): David Keenan
  London : Faber & Faber Limited 2019.
  
  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.
  
  
• Only a Lodger ... and Hardly That: A Fictional Autobiography
  
  Only a Lodger ... and Hardly That: A Fictional Autobiography: PR6113.A345 O55 2019
  Author(s): Vesna Main
  London : Seagull Books 2019.
  
  A novel in five parts, Only a Lodger . . . And Hardly That puts Vesna Main's power of beautiful observation on full display as she explores how writing stories about one's ancestors is key route to learning about and fashioning one's own identity. While the stories are self-contained, together they form a narrative whole that approaches this age-old idea from five unique perspectives. In "The Eye/I," we meet someone called She, who obsessively tells the story of her childhood and adolescence to an unnamed narrator. "The Acrobat" is a sequence of prose poems, written in the style of magic realism, which tell the story of Maria and her life-changing adolescent encounter with a flying circus performer. The female protagonist of the first section narrates "The Dead," describing the secret life of a grandfather she never truly knew and his unusual habit of sending family members anonymous parcels of carefully chosen books. In "The Poet," she examines four family photographs in order to piece together a story of her other grandfather, the husband of Maria. The final section, "The Suitor," is a first-person narrative told by Mr. Gustav Otto Wagner, an older man who hoped to marry Maria but was ultimately turned down.
  
  
• How Not To Drown
  
  How Not To Drown: PR6113.C373 H69 2019
  Author(s): Nicola Mccartney, Dritan Kastrati
  [London] : Samuel French [2019]
  
  How Not To Drown was first performed on 4 August 2019 at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh. "I don't know why my Dad let me go... I was too young, too weak, to make this journey. I wouldn't have sent me... He wouldn't have sent me unless there was a reason." In 2002, in the turmoil after the end of the Kosovan War, Dritan is sent on the notoriously perilous journey across the Adriatic with a gang of people smugglers to a new life in Europe. He relies on his young wit and charm to make it to the UK. But the fight for survival continues as he clings to his identity and sense of self when he ends up in the British care system. Painful yet uplifting, How Not to Drown shares a story of endurance for a little kid who wasn't safe or welcome anywhere in the world. Award-winning theatre company ThickSkin (Chalk Farm, The Static) returns to the stage with an action packed, highly visual production.
  
  
• All Mod Cons
  
  All Mod Cons: PR6113.U7776 A45 2019
  Author(s): Erica Murray
  [London] : Samuel French [2019]
  
  Finding a house is hard. Finding a place to call home is harder. When their mother dies, Jean and Gary are suddenly back together and getting to know each other all over again. On the surface, things look di erent but it's funny how little has changed. When old friend and useless estate agent Ian offers to help them find a place together, long-buried tensions threaten to derail their already strained relationship. Can they ever escape their pasts? A compelling new comedy-drama exploring our capacity to accept change - in others as well as ourselves - All Mod Cons engages directly with current conversations about our complex relationship with gender, consent, and individual responsibility.
  
  
• How To Be Brave
  
  How To Be Brave: PR6115.W465 H69 2019
  Author(s): Siân Owen
  [London] : Samuel French [2019]
  
  Katie has gone from a little girl who used to climb trees, ride bikes and go on adventures to an adult who worries about everything. But now Katie is a mum, she must be brave in a whole new way. Determined that her young daughter will never lose the powerful, fierce magic she arrived into the world with, Katie sets off on a mission with the help of a stolen BMX, a policewoman with bad hair and a pigeon in a bag as she rides around Newport to find what she's really made of. By listening to the unheard voices of the city, she begins to discover what the women who have gone before can teach her about how to be brave. Siân Owen's one-woman play is about what we are made of, what we leave behind, and learning to be brave when your world is falling apart.
  
  
• Oligarchy
  
  Oligarchy: PR6120.H66 O45 2020
  Author(s): Scarlett Thomas
  Berkeley, California : Counterpoint 2020.
  
  From the author of The Seed Collectors comes a darkly comic take on power, privilege, and the pressure put on young women to fit in--and be thin--at their all-girls boarding school It's already the second week of term when Natasha, the daughter of a Russian oligarch, arrives at a vast English country house for her first day of boarding school. She soon discovers that the headmaster gives special treatment to the skinniest girls, and Natasha finds herself thrown into the school's unfamiliar, moneyed world of fierce pecking orders, eating disorders, and Instagram angst. When her friend Bianca mysteriously vanishes, the world of the school gets ever darker and stranger. The halls echo with the story of Princess Augusta, the White Lady whose portraits--featuring a hypnotizing black diamond--hang everywhere. She fell in love with a commoner and drowned herself in the lake, and her ghost is said to haunt the dorms. But the girls don't really know anything about the woman she was, much less anything about each other. Hilariously dark, Oligarchy is The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie for the digital age. Scarlett Thomas captures the lives of privileged teenage girls seeking to be loved and accepted in all their triviality and magnitude. With the help of her diet-obsessed classmates, Tash must try to stay alive--and sane--while she uncovers what's really going on.
  
  
• Mavis Gallant: The Eye and the Ear
  
  Mavis Gallant: The Eye and the Ear: PR9199.3.G26 Z63 2019
  Author(s): Marta Dvořák
  Toronto ; University of Toronto Press [2019]
  
  Endowed with a confidant's insights, Marta Dvořák sets up a trailblazing connection between Mavis Gallant's dazzling writing and the whole spectrum of the arts.
  
  
• The Envy of Paradise
  
  The Envy of Paradise: PR9199.4.C8595 E58 2019
  Author(s): Sophie Stocking, Jocelyn Cullity
  Toronto, Canada : Inanna Publications and Education Inc [2019]
  
  In 1858, the British took over the city of Lucknow, paving the way for Queen Victoria's reign over India. But what happened to Begam Hazrat Mahal, the woman of African-Indian descent who had valiantly organized a final key resistance to British rule, and to her ex-husband, Wajid 'Ali Shah, the last King in India, who remained imprisoned by the British? The Envy of Paradise tells their stories. Jocelyn Cullity's English family lived in India for five generations. A sequel to the award-winning Amah & the Silk-Winged Pigeons, her second novel about the takeover of India by Britain is an exquisitely told tale of 19th-century India -- a deep rendering of the moment that India as a country was colonized; a brilliant illustration of Hazrat Mahal's fearless character and the depths of betrayal the last King in India faced.
  
  
• Scarborough
  
  Scarborough: PR9199.4.H468 S23 2017
  Author(s): Catherine Hernandez
  Vancouver, BC, Canada : Arsenal Pulp Press 2017.
  
  A poignant multi-voiced novel about the troubled yet noble lives of urban warriors living in low-income neighborhoods.
  
  
• The Freedom Artist
  
  The Freedom Artist: PR9387.9.O394 F63 2020
  Author(s): Ben Okri
  Brooklyn, New York : Akashic Books [2020].
  
  An impassioned plea for freedom and justice, set in a world uncomfortably like our own, by the Booker-winner Ben Okri.