Bøger af Ian Patterson

One of the most horrific innovations of the twentieth century was the deliberate strategy of total warfare--the obliteration of entire civilian populations. The first and in many ways the most striking use of this extreme measure came nearly 70 years ago when the ancient Basque hilltop town of Guernica was destroyed by the bombs of the German Condor. Ian Patterson begins with a graphic account of what happened in Guernica on April 26, 1937, and its place in the course of the Spanish Civil War. This event focused the spotlight of media attention on the town of Guernica, and established Picasso's painting as the most famous modern image of the horrors of war. Yet Picasso's Guernica was only one of a huge number of cultural artifacts--paintings, films, novels, poems, plays--to explore the idea of indiscriminate death from the air. From the Blitz to Hiroshima to the destruction of the World Trade Center to daily carnage in Darfur and Iraq, war has been increasingly directed against civilians, who constitute an ever larger proportion of its casualties. Patterson explores how modern men and women respond to the threat of new warfare with new capacities for imagining aggression and death. An unflinching history of the locationless terror that so many people feel today, Guernica and Total War will engage anyone interested in the survival of cultures amid the disasters of war.

A lonely undergraduate unravels when she reads her flatmate's diary; three backpackers start going 'troppo' in the wastes of the Australian Outback; an alcoholic doctor threatens to destroy all the household furniture after the death of his father. These are just some of the characters in Ian Patterson's penetrating new collection of stories centred about the West of Ireland and its complex diaspora. Old hatreds are revealed in a twenty-first century melting pot, a veterinary assistant decides that true independence takes a heartless act, and friendships are made and broken as a gang of boys go looking for trouble on a summer's afternoon. This comic, poignant, and sometimes startling collection is a fresh contribution to the rich tradition of the Irish Short Story.

Ian Patterson's Shell Vestige Disputed presents poems which take great pleasure in the mystery of language and the amenability of meaning. Patterson writes with a clear focus on the stress and intonation of words and phrases, crafting complex and puzzling poems which are reminiscent of Prynne and the English surrealists. Shell Vestige Disputed is a collection full of beauty and surprise.