Literature Recent Picks

June 2010

The underlined titles will take you directly to our catalogue.
Some featured items are linked via a book cover to a bookseller to enable you to read more information.

The writer's handbook, edited by Dr Barry Turner.
"Completely revised and updated for 2010, this acclaimed companion provides you with the most current and reliable information on the writing industry. From pinpointing contacts in a wide range of publishing houses and literary agencies to information on writing courses in your area; from screenwriting, TV, radio and newspapers to local literary festivals and grants, The Writer's Handbook 2010 is an accurate, practical and easy-to-use resource for all writers. It offers invaluable advice and insight from experts, with articles on book fairs, and branding, as well as discussion on key markets and market trends, and useful hints on approaching a literary agent. Whether you are an aspiring or established writer, or a publishing professional, this is the book that no-one in the writing industry should be without. ." (Amazon.co.uk) NOTE : REFERENCE COPY AVAILABLE

The Methuen Drama book of twenty-first century British plays, edited and with an introduction by Aleks Sierz.
"The Methuen Drama Book of Twenty-First Century British Plays showcases five of the best new plays from the first decade of the twenty-first century. A perfect reminder of the relevance, vitality and innovation of British theatre, this collection represents some of the most exciting plays to emerge in recent years. Joe Penhall's multi-award-winning Blue/Orange (National Theatre and West End, 2000/1) was heralded as 'one of the best new plays in the National's history' (Sunday Times). Set in a mental hospital it provides a riveting exploration of racism, health and power, and was the winner of the Olivier Award for Best New Play 2001. Elmina's Kitchen by Kwame Kwei-Armah (National Theatre and West End, 2003) about gun crime and the struggle to make a living on Hackney's Murder Mile, marked the emergence of a major new writing talent. The play was the first of a tryptch of plays commissioned and produced by the National Theatre. 'An exquisite tragi-comedy for our times' (Herald) Neilson's Realism (Royal Lyceum, 2006) dramatises the everyday life and increasingly bizarre fantasies and thoughts of its protagonist with comic zeal and inspired inventiveness. Gone Too Far! explores a London community divided by race and prejudice. The debut play by Bola Agbaje, it was produced to great acclaim as part of the Royal Court's Young Writers Festival 2007. The first play to be written about the London 7/7 terrorist bombings, Simon Stephens' Pornography tells seven entwining stories of people's lives during the day leading up to the catastrophic event." (Amazon.co.uk)

The possessed : adventures with Russian books and the people who read them, Elif Batuman.
"Literally and metaphorically following the footsteps of her favorite authors, Batuman searches for the answers to the big questions in the details of lived experience, combining fresh readings of the great Russians, from Pushkin to Platonov, with the sad and funny stories of the lives they continue to influence--including her own."(Book jacket)

Are we related? : the new Granta book of the family , edited by Liz Jobey.
"Granta magazine has published some of the best writing about family relationships in the English language. Over the years its writers have dealt with the most difficult, the most important and the most personal relationships of their lives. Granta Books' publication, in 1993, of Blake Morrison's "When Did You Last See Your Father" heralded the huge rise in popularity of the literary memoir, and since then, Granta has carried pieces of non-fiction and fiction about the family from writers including Doris Lessing, Jane Anne Phillips, Hanif Kureishi, Jackie Kay, Helen Simpson, Linda Grant, Orhan Pamuk, Graham Swift, Ian Jack, Justine Picardie, Edmund White, Joy Williams, John McGahern, Jon McGregor, Paul Theroux, A.L. Kennedy, Siri Hustvedt and David Goldblatt. "The New Granta Book of the Family" collects together a stunning variety of pieces about every member of the family." (Amazon.co.uk)

The rough guide to graphic novels, by Danny Fingeroth.
"The Rough Guide to Graphic Novels is the ultimate companion to the expanding world of the “literary comic book”. Written by comic industry insider Danny Fingeroth, it includes the mediums history, from sequential art in Egyptian tombs, through the superhero boom of the 1940s to the birth of the graphic novel movement and the latest online offerings. All you need to know about the best and rest with 60 must-read graphic novels, including the genre-defining Maus and A Contract with God, plus modern classics-in-the-making Fun Home and Alice in Sunderland. The guide profiles the movements legends including Harvey Pekar, Chris Ware, Denis Kitchen and other amazing illustrators, writers and publishers who’ve helped win respect for this once marginalised art form. And everything else you need to know from “how to make a graphic novel” to Persepolis and the latest film and television offerings, manga, documentaries, conventions, books, magazines and websites." (Amazon.co.uk)

Plays. 1, Willy Russell ; with an introduction by the author.
"Breezeblock Park is set on a northern council estate and takes a look at the suffocating effect of possessions and possessiveness: "Trenchantly observed...hilarious, upsetting and somewhat seditious." (Variety); Our Day Out is about a school coach trip, an exuberant celebration of the joys and agonies of growing up - "a Dickensian fairytale...I have rarely seen a show that combined such warmth and such bleakness."(The Times); Stags and Hens "takes place in the gents and Ladies loos of a tacky Liverpool club, where Dave and Linda have decided, unbeknownst to each other to hold their stag and hen parties...a bleakly funny and perceptive study of working-class misogyny, puritanism and waste" (Guardian); Educating Rita: "one way of describing Educating Rita would be to say that it was about the meaning of education...another would be to say that it was about the meaning of life. A third, that it is a cross between Pygmalion and Lucky Jim. A fourth, that it is simply a marvellous play, painfully funny and passionately serious: a hilarious social documentary; a fairy-tale with a quizzical, half-happy ending. (Sunday Times) "(Amazon.co.uk)

One million tiny plays about Britain,Craig Taylor.
"A Wonder Woman and bride-to-be finds herself worse for wear at the end of a hen night; a funeral director's love of Manchester United proves unhelpful when talking to the bereaved; two overly-vigilant mothers wrestle with their paranoia in the queue for Santa's Grotto; a widow recounts her disastrous return to the world of dating and a father realises that his son is growing away from him as he helps him tie his football boots. In these snippets of overheard conversations from across the length and breadth of the country, Craig Taylor captures the state we're in with humour and pathos and perfect timing. Laugh-out-loud funny, and sometimes heartbreakingly moving, these tiny plays in which every one of us could have a starring role are little windows into other people's lives that reveal the triumphs, disasters, prejudices, horrors and joys of twenty-first-century life. Hugely entertaining and utterly addictive, this is book that can be dipped into or feasted upon in one sitting. It will change the way you listen to the world around you, and train journeys will never be the same again." (Amazon.co.uk)

The cinder path , Andrew Motion.
"Andrew Motion's new collection (his first since Public Property in 2002) offers a ground-breaking variety of lyrics, love poems and elegies, in which private domains of feeling infer other lives and a shared humanity - exploring how people cope with threats to and in the world around them, as soldiers, lovers, artists, writers and citizens. The conversational tone and formal variety of these poems both shapes and diversifies their response to loss and its inevitabilities. Here are poems about the last surviving veteran of the trenches; poems which work with found materials drawn from the contiguous worlds of prose; poems which elicit the parallel lives glimpsed in paintings, or the other lives of birds, trees and weather (as of an ordinariness just out of reach). An unemphatic evenness of handling, in the detailing of ordinary destinies, alternates with capacious panoramas of longing and summation, and the collection ends with a remarkable group of directly autobiographical poems about the life and times of the poet's father." (Amazon.co.uk).

The letters of Samuel Beckett. Vol. 1, 1929-1940, editors, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Lois More Overbeck ; associate editors, George Craig, Daniel Gunn.
"The letters written by Samuel Beckett between 1929 and 1940 provide a vivid and personal view of Western Europe in the 1930s, and mark the gradual emergence of Beckett's unique voice and sensibility. The Cambridge University Press edition of The Letters of Samuel Beckett offers for the first time a comprehensive range of letters of one of the greatest literary figures of the twentieth century. Selected for their bearing on his work from over 15,000 extant letters, the letters published in this four-volume edition encompass sixty years of Beckett's writing life (1929-1989), and include letters to friends, painters and musicians, as well as to students, publishers, translators, and colleagues in the world of literature and theatre. For anyone interested in twentieth-century literature and theatre this edition is essential reading, offering not only a record of Beckett's achievements but a powerful literary experience in itself." (Amazon.co.uk)

Sleepwalking in Antarctica : and other poems, Owen Marshall.

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