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  Crushed Shells and Mud (NHB...

  Ben Musgrave

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  England trembles in the grip of a devastating epidemic. But in a remote coastal village, quiet Derek waits for love and life to really begin. Then Lydia arrives. She burns brightly, beyond Derek's wildest dreams. And she is hiding something.
  When Derek discovers her secret, they are both propelled into a strange new world of conflicted desire and dangerous loyalties, where terrifying forces test their courage and humanity. But can love survive the fear inside?
  Ben Musgrave's Crushed Shells and Mud premiered at the Southwark Playhouse, London, in October 2015.

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  Winter Dreams - Author of the...

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

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  Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born on 24th September 1896 in Saint Paul, Minnesota into an upper-middle class family. Whilst his mother was pregnant with him, his two young sisters tragically died.  Fitzgerald once said this was when his destiny as a writer was ordained. 
   
  His intelligence and talent was recognised from an early age, with his first story, about a detective being published in the school magazine when he was just 13.   
   
  In 1913 he enrolled at Princeton but his devotion to his own literary pursuits resulted in him leaving and, rather bizarrely, joining the Army.  In 1918, stationed at Fort Sheridan near Montgomery, Alabama he met and became infatuated and then inseparable from Zelda Sayre.  Initially though she refused to marry him but with the success of ‘This Side of Paradise’, the fame and the flow of money enabled them both to begin a gilded life.  For them this was The Jazz Age.  For Fitzgerald he was already an alcoholic. 
   
  He continued to write with great mastery and the titles of his novels and many of his 164 short stories are household names.  The Great Gatsby, often cited as The Great American Novel was published to mixed reviews.  As America moved from the Great Depression to the slaughter of the Second World War his works and himself were seen as far too entwined with the decadent twenties. The world had moved on and he hadn’t.   
   
  Further tragedy was never far from his life. Zelda after years of erratic and now intolerable behaviour was committed to an institution in 1936.  His own sales began to decline and he became a hack for hire in Hollywood, dependent on increasing amounts of booze and the weekly pay check.  His drunken state had often resulted in arrest or hospitalisation, further imperiling his talents.   Despite his contribution to many MGM films he received only one credit. 
   
  The end came all too soon for one of America’s greatest ever writers.  On 21st December 1940, at only 44 years of age in Hollywood, F Scott Fitzgerald succumbed to a heart attack. 
   
  In ‘Winter Dreams’ Fitzgerald carefully unravels the life of a young entrepreneur who, many years before, meets a hauntingly beautiful woman at the summer resort where he caddies.

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  The Poetry of Stephen Crane -...

  Stephen Crane

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  Stephen Crane was born 1st November, 1871 in Newark, New Jersey and was the eighth surviving child out of fourteen.  Incredibly he began writing at the age of four and was published several times by the age of sixteen.   
   
  Crane only began a full-time education when he was nine but quickly mastered the grades needed to catch up and move forward. Although educated at Lafayette and Syracuse he had little interest in completing university and was keener to move on to a career, declaring college to be ‘a waste of time’.  By twenty he was a reporter and two years later had published his debut novel ‘Maggie: A Girl of the Streets’.  In literary circles this was hailed as the first work of American literary Naturalism.  
   
  Two years later, in 1895, he was the subject of worldwide acclaim for his Civil War novel, written without the benefit of any actual war experiences, ‘The Red Badge of Courage’.  It was indeed a masterpiece and his finest hour.  A year later life began its downwards descent when he became embroiled in a scandal which was to doom his career.  In attempting to help a suspected prostitute being falsely charged by a policeman he became the target of the authorities. 
   
  Later the same year en-route to Cuba as a War Correspondent he met the hotel madam Cora Taylor in Jacksonville, Florida.  This was to become the defining relationship of his life.  Continuing his journey, somewhere between Florida and Cuba his ship sank, and he was cast adrift for several days.  Rescued, he returned to cover conflicts wherever they were situated, some as far away as Greece.  For a time he lived in England with Cora, usually beyond their means, befriending fellow writers such as H G Wells and Joseph Conrad.    
   
  His poems, predominantly short and abstract, display another facet of his talent which questions, advises and presents his audience with much to contemplate.  Some are difficult to engage with but with the effort comes the reward. In declining health and beset by money problems, Stephen Crane died of tuberculosis, aged a mere 28 on 5th June 5, 1900, at Badenweiler, Germany. He is buried in New Jersey.

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  Oils

  Stephen Sexton

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  Oils is a gorgeous, beguiling collection of poems where the poise of the delivery belies the emotional, existential turmoil within.
  Through his portraits of an atheist, a pickpocket and a spinach-loving sailor (among others), Stephen Sexton evokes a strange kind of melancholy as he strives to reconcile passion with detachment and profound self-doubt with unwavering love.

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  The Price of Scarlet - Poems

  Brianna Noll

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  A debut collection of poetry combining the scientific and the fantastic with Japanese culture. A honeycomb long vacated by honeybees still possesses an “echo of the swarm, / a lingering song.” Living things are made and make themselves: “My bones came first. / Like long needles, / they knitted muscle / and tendon / and tissue and skin. / Filled themselves / with marrow.” In her debut collection, Brianna Noll fuses the scientific and fantastic, posing probing questions that explore the paradoxes of experience. Interweaving themes of creation, art, and nature, the poet gives voice to animate and inanimate figures such as woolly mammoths, star-nosed moles, cells, mylar balloons, and puzzle boxes. Her vivid poems obscure the line between what is literal and what is figurative. The result is alchemic and ethereal—each verse intricately layered with sharp observation as well as emotional and intellectual exploration and questioning. Collectively, the poems draw significantly on Japanese culture and language in their imagery, with cultural nuances and implications embedded in words and expressions. They tend to be tied, not to subjects, but to ways of seeing and considering the world. Noll’s lyrical voice reflects a curious and imaginative approach that results in tight poems, typically enjambed, which build together into a thoughtful collection. Her work offers ways of seeing and considering the world that exceed our lived experience, begging the reader to consider how far we are willing to go when faced with roadblocks, doubts, and uncertainties.Named one of the best books of 2017 by the Chicago Review of Books Praise for The Price of Scarlet “Brianna Noll’s vivid, haunting collection contains poetry wide-ranging and deep, with a brilliance reminiscent of Marianne Moore, and a similar interest in creation.” ―Lisa Williams, author of Women Reading to the Sea and Gazelle in the House "Brianna Noll is on the find-out committee. Like an Emily Dickinson for the twenty-first century, she rules out nothing. These quiet, powerful poems tells us that the world is connected, that all we need to see those connections is what Noll has in abundance: openness, patience, and an eye for beauty.” ―David Kirby, author of Get Up, Please “The Price of Scarlet doesn’t sneak up on the reader as much as it swallows the reader whole, pushes us out at the other end, more erudite than upon entrance. There’s a certainty in every poem, whether she is investigating the nature of the wind or invoking the Kraken from the deep. This is a remarkable first book of poems. From the first poem to the last these solid poems feel polished to a fine gloss. Read The Price of Scarlet, it will intoxicate you.” ―Today's Book of Poetry

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  Lines Written From Home

  Anne Brontë

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  LibriVox volunteers bring you 13 recordings of Lines Written From Home by Anne Brontë. This was the Weekly Poetry project for October 3rd, 2010.

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