Other books that might interest you

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  The Ice Palace - 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. 
   
  One of Fitzgerald’s short story gems is ‘The Ice Palace’. A Southern girl wants ‘to live where things happen on a grand scale’.  She is engaged to a Yankee but on their visit to The Ice Palace attraction life reveals a very different destiny for her.

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  Grocery Shopping with My Mother...

  Kevin Powell

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  When Kevin Powell's elderly mother became ill, he returned home ever week to take her grocery shopping in Jersey City. Walking behind her during those trips, Powell began to hear her voice, stories, and language in a new way—and examined his own healing while praying for hers. 
   
  Grocery Shopping with My Mother originated as social media posts about these visits and evolved into a breathtaking collection of thirty-two new poems, crafted like an album, plus four bonus tracks celebrating a great love of wordplay.  
   
  Culturally rooted in the literary traditions of Ntozake Shange and Allen Ginsberg, Powell’s poems honor the likes of V (formerly Eve Ensler), bell hooks, and Sidney Poitier. 
   
  Grocery Shopping with My Mother dives into the complexities of relationships and contemporary themes with honesty and vulnerability. Creatively and spiritually inspired by Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life, Powell’s poems shift in form and style, from praise chants to reverential  
  meditations to, most importantly, innovative hope.

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  Sparks of the Everyday - Poetry...

  Anthony Anaxagorou

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  Sparks of the Everyday: Poetry Ireland Introductions 2022 is an anthology of poetry from Poetry Ireland, the national poetry organisation. This anthology features the very best of Ireland's emerging poets for 2022, as chosen by Anthony Anaxagorou, award-winning poet, essayist, publisher, and poetry educator, along with renowned Irish-language poet Aifric Mac Aodha. In addition to a pair of superb poems, each poet provides an insightful prose piece on poetry, or on life, or on the overlap between poetry and life. Featuring Róisín Leggett Bohan, Meg Mulcahy, Pádraig Ó Cuinneagáin, Helen Fallon, Karson Lafferty, Caitríona Lane, K.S. Moore, Charles Lang, Art Ó Súilleabháin, Patrick Hopkins, Amy Abdullah Barry, Brian Ó Tiomáin, Phil Kingston, Jess McKinney, and HK Ní Shioradáin, along with author photos plus a superb cover image from artist Geraldine O'Neill. Quality poems and prose from Poetry Ireland: connecting poetry and people.

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  Why I Was Late

  Charlie Petch

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  With kitchen-table candour and empathy, Charlie Petch’s debut collection of poems offers witness to a decades-long trans/personal coming of age, finding heroes in unexpected places.   
  Why I Was Late fuses text with performance, bringing a transmasculine wisdom, humour, and experience to bear upon tailgates, spaceships, and wrestling rings. Fierce, tender, convention re-inventing—Petch works hard. And whether it’s as a film union lighting technician, a hospital bed allocator, a Toronto hot dog vendor, or a performer/player of the musical saw, the work is survival. Heroes are found in unexpected places, elevated by both large and small gestures of kindness, accountability and acceptance. No subject—grief, disability, kink, sexuality, gender politics, violence—is off limits.  
  A poet so good at drag they had everyone convinced that they were a woman for the first forty years of their life, Petch has somehow brought the stage and its attendant thrills into the book. Better late than. And better.

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  Fuente Ovejuna

  Lope de Vega, Adrian Mitchell

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  A cruel conqueror has captured the Spanish city of Fuente Ovejuna. As his reign of terror builds, the townspeople look within themselves to find the courage to overthrow him. The eminent Spanish playwright Lope de Vega based his best-known play on a historical incident that took place in 1476. Written in the early 17th century, the play remains a timely meditation on honor and selflessness in the face of oppression. 
    
   Recorded at the DoubleTree Guest Suites, Santa Monica in June 1993. 
    
   Directed by Robert Robinson 
   Producing Director: Susan Albert Loewenberg 
    
   An L.A. Theatre Works full-cast recording starring: 
   Christine Avila as Laurencia 
   Ivonne Coll as Jacinta and Queen Isabel 
   Héctor Elizondo as Commander Fernándo Gómez de Guzmán 
   Jorge Galván as Mengo 
   Carlos Gómez as Frondoso 
   Peter A. Jacobs as Captain Flores and Master Rodrigo Téllez Girón 
   Marabina Jaimes as Pascuala 
   Jonathan Nichols as Barrildo and Cimbranos 
   Al Rodrigo as Leonelo, King Ferdinand, and Soldier 
   Ruben Sierra as Esteban  
   Sam Vlahos as Sergeant, Alonso, and Alderman  
    
   Associate Producer: Robert Robinson  
   Technical Director: Raymond Guarna  
   Second Engineer: Jim Machowsky  
   Technical Advisor: Leo del Aguila  
   Music Director: Gerald Sternbach  
   Guitar performed by Ricardo Gomez

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  Useful Junk

  Erika Meitner

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  A master of documentary poetry, Erika Meitner takes up the question of desire and intimacy in her latest collection of poems.In her previous five collections of poetry, Erika Meitner has established herself as one of America’s most incisive observers, cherished for her remarkable ability to temper catastrophe with tenderness. In her newest collection Useful Junk, Meitner considers what it means to be a sexual being in a world that sees women as invisible—as mothers, customers, passengers, worshippers, wives. These poems render our changing bodies as real and alive, shaped by the sense memories of long-lost lovers and the still thrilling touch of a spouse after years of parenthood, affirming that we are made of every intimate moment we have ever had. Letter poems to a younger poet interspersed throughout the collection question desire itself and how new technologies—Uber, sexting, Instagram—are reframing self-image and shifting the ratios of risk and reward in erotic encounters.With dauntless vulnerability, Meitner travels a world of strip malls, supermarkets, and subway platforms, remaining porous and open to the world, always returning to the intimacies rooted deep within the self as a shout against the dying earth. Boldly affirming that pleasure is a vital form of knowledge, Useful Junk reminds us that our selves are made real and beautiful by our embodied experiences and that our desire is what keeps us alive.

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