Publisher: Nick Hern Books
His life. In her hands. A shattering play about one woman's unspeakable decision. hang premiered at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in 2015, in a production directed by the author, and featuring Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Claire Rushbrook and Shane Zaza.
This 136-page introduction is a selection of poetry and prose from The Truth Is - a 560-page volume of "satsangs," or truths, from renowned Indian guru Sri H. W. L. Poonja- distills the essence of Poonja's teachings in a shorter, more portable collection.Show book
LibriVox’s Short Poetry Collection 034: a collection of 20 public-domain poems.Show book
The Damon Runyon Theatre Hour. Damon Runyon is acknowledged as one of the great writers to come out of twentieth century America. Runyon's short stories are almost always told in the first person by a narrator who is never named, and whose role is unclear; he knows many gangsters and has no job that can be gleaned from his musings, nor does he admit to any criminal involvement; He’s a bystander, an observer, an average street-corner Joe. Runyon described himself as "being known to one and all as a guy who is just around". That line seems to say a lot about Runyon and his life. It was like you were with him on some street corner hustle or some shady dive and he was filling you in on all the angles, all the gossip, all of life. He was who so many people wanted to be with……or so many people wanted to be. Of course, the cliché about newspapermen and writers is that they are heavy drinkers, chain-smokers, gamblers and obsessively chase women with a sideline in the gathering of stories and facts and actually getting something written just before the deadline hits. That seems like Damon Runyon and his life summed up in one sentence. His stories became legendary ways of looking that bit differently at America, of soaking up the atmosphere of a glamorous and rip-roaring age and distilling it into black and white type or, in our case, The Damon Runyon Theatre Hour.Show book
A gripping play about the nature of violence. 15-year-old Kerry and her mum have moved to a council estate. Kerry hates it. She hates her mum's new man too. But when she meets a boy in the playground and asks him to do something about it, she finds herself adrift in a landscape of physical brutality, drugs - and, eventually, love. 'Marvellously mature and dramatically engrossing' - Guardian 'Hypnotic ... a shimmering, wistful evocation of lost innocence' - The TimesShow book
Read by the author, John Cooper Clarke.'Nothing short of dazzling' – Alex TurnerDr John Cooper Clarke's dazzling, scabrous voice has reverberated through pop culture for decades, his influence on generations of performance poets and musicians plain for all to see. In WHAT, the original 'People's Poet' comes storming out of the gate with an uproarious new collection, reminding us why he is one of Britain's most beloved writers and performers. James Brown, John F. Kennedy, Jesus Christ: nobody is safe from the punk rocker's acerbic pen – and that's just the first poem.Hot on the heels of The Luckiest Guy Alive and his sprawling, encyclopaediac memoir I Wanna Be Yours, the good Doctor returns with his most trenchant collection of poems yet. Vivid and alive, with a sensitivity only a writer with a life as varied and extraordinary as Cooper Clarke's could summon, WHAT is an exceptional collection from one of our foremost satirists.Show book
The author of The Stuntman melds myths ancient and contemporary among the raspberries, wolves, and taconite mines of Minnesota’s Iron Range. Songwriter and poet Brian Laidlaw follows up The Stuntman with another collection that fuses the stories of two fabled couples: the mythical Narcissus and Echo, and Bob Dylan and Echo Star Helstrom, subject of the song “Girl from the North Country.” But where The Stuntman focused on Narcissus, The Mirrormaker takes its primary inspiration from Echo, drawing on ecocritical readings of American history and interrogating the masculine logic of resource extraction. In these poems, Laidlaw explores themes of history and celebrity, love and longing, myth and meaning, in a landscape both ravaged and redemptive. He pits romantic obsession against self-obsession—”The first time I saw the moon / I thought it was my idea” —and asks whether a meaningful distinction can ever be drawn between the two. These themes are explored further in a companion song suite, written by Laidlaw and recorded with a longtime collaborator from the Iron Range, that accompanies this book via download. Sharp, searching, and ecstatically musical, The Mirrormaker is a genre-expanding exploration of boom and bust—in mining economies and in young love. “Laidlaw is a futuristic country poet-singer in the other side of the century’s mirror, where consumption, celebritifying, and commodification rule as the earth rots from the inside out . . . living proof that the bard is still with us.” —Gillian ConoleyShow book
