Bøger udgivet af 1889 Books

Mistaking You for a Shower of Summer Confetti, Michael Glover's first book-length poem, is a reverie by turns casually whimsical, oblique, impassioned, mocking and dismissive. The speaker addresses an absent partner, trawling through their lives together, asking questions that will forever remain unanswerable about places, incidents and people that drift into his consciousness. Is this the remnants of an old love or an old enmity that he is striving to resurrect?Michael's words offer up a range of possible meanings to the paintings. David's paintings illuminate the words, and the spaces between the words. The combination of word and image makes for an enriching partnership.

Elsie has two feet in the 20th century. Smith has one foot in the 19th. Their marriage, founded on physical attraction, is built on sand as all around them the earth of Europe also starts to quake. Prised apart by emotional conflict and the loss of two children they are flung apart by the most violent physical conflict in human history. The question is whether they can survive, together or at all.

Dark clouds gather over Europe again, and the winds of war blow.Liselotte, growing up in 1930s Germany, faces the horrors of unfolding events. 500 miles away in Darnall, Josephine has her own struggles with death, poverty and identity.They make it through the war and meet years later at a Sheffield nursing home where Mrs Broadhead is a resident. But do they ever discover just how much they have in common?Perhaps the reader can work it out!

Did you know the first cup final at England's new national stadium built in the 1920s was between Downside FC and Wildwood Town in front of 100,000 spectators ? No ? Then read on."Sadness hung about him like a foggy halo. It pervaded and permeated the man, seeming to exude from his clothes and mingle with the rain that dripped from the almost unbelievable hat he carried his hand. He had come out of the black night like a visitant from another world.'My name, gentlemen,' he said in an accent strongly Scottish, 'is McPhee - Angus McPhee.' "So opens the novel. The directors of Downside F.C. - the worst team in the country - are taken aback by this strange character presenting himself for the post of trainer. Having no alternative they give him a try, but the dastardly manager, Horace Ovens, hates him, and bankruptcy threatens the club. But is there more to this eccentric ex-Tommy than meets the eye. He sets out to lick the team into shape and turn its fortunes around.Stanley Horler was the father of the football novel, The Great Game/McPhee is probably his best work.

Based on the true story of PC John Higgins - a "pretty policeman" whose evidence convicted twelve ordinary men for what was a victimless crime. He gained their trust and was invited to their private party. On Higgin's evidence they felt the full weight of the law and were treated worse than murderers. But was he really undercover, or was it just a cover-up? To bury deep and shameful desires and protect the Police's reputation? This is a carefully researched tale of love, temptation and betrayal in Victorian England, told from the point of view of Higgins, his wife Annie, and of his close friend Bill Kilroy, who spent the rest of his life in a lunatic asylum. It is gritty, lyrical and moving.

David Vassall's father was an ex-England international centre-forward, so when David starts at Repington, there are high expectations for the school football team. In his trial match, however, despite having some natural talent as a footballer, he "funks" - chickens out of tackles - a big taboo in school culture.Vassall is villified - and falls foul of the bully Birtles. The irrepressible, charismatic McPhail, however, see more to the situation and takes Vassall in hand.Without a decent centre-forward, the house and school team look set to decline. Will the bullies, or Vassall and his few good friends, prevail?Stanley Horler was the father of the football novel, On the Ball! is one of his best.

There are many more words than you could ever wish to use! I taunt you with those words. I bellow them out into the air within your hearing in order to humiliate you. That is why you avoid me, because I burden you with so many words, heaping them upon your head, or flinging them after you as you hurry away from me, fine, well-turned, latinate, polysyllabic, Miltonic words of the kind faithfully and carefully stowed away only in dictionaries. That is where I live my rich and fulfilling life, within the pages of many dictionaries, with my torch and my eyeglass, digging ever deeper into dictionaries, preferably the old ones. I spend whole days together down there, a deep-cast miner of words. Clothes mean nothing to me. Abluting this body means nothing to me - let it stink to high heaven! I have no time for such irrelevancies. There is too much steady accumulation to be done, and each day offers me twenty-four hours only in which to do it. What am I to do with these words now that you have refused to listen to me, now that you have left me here to my own devices? The question is an irrelevance. I do not need to justify this pursuit. When they are all present in front of ¿ and behind and beside ¿ me, I need do nothing but admire their magnificence as they stretch away and away from me. These words speak for themselves.Can you describe these seven hundred and ninety-four paragraphs as a collection of stories each of that length? Or are they more glimpses into the thoughts and feelings of other people: fleeting moments in complicated, or simple, lives? In modern jargon, might they be called prose poems?No two readers will interpret them the same, and probably not as the author envisaged - but isn't that the point? Doesn't fiction take on a life of its own once you set it free?It is perhaps a book more for dipping in and out of than one to read end-to-end, and depending on your mood, the weather, the day of the week, you will see something different, something new, and something outside of the story itself.

Sometimes, after a night match, once the crowds and players have gone and the floodlights snap off, they come out once more: swaying crowds on the terraces looking on expectantly, silently applauding at long-gone players in oversized shirts and shorts, passing and running, chasing the ball across the pitch. People, for whom it meant just as much as it does to us today. They dissolve back into darkness. Then the nightwatchman starts on his rounds.The nightwatchman (or woman) guards not just the football ground but also the soul of the club that is at the heart of the town, and has done so for a century or more. They preserve and tell the stories that make the club more than just a football team on the road to nowhere: stories of deaths and births, of tragedy and joy echoing down the years - the ghosts of the past that will never leave this sacred place. Charlie Truckle's tenure is coming to an end - what will happen to the Town's legacy then?

The best poetry takes your mind to unexpected places. But is it the poet's quirkiness that carries you there, or your own?These poems are too good to be just for children - grown-ups will enjoy reading them aloud to children for their own sake, as well as for the reaction they provoke. Or why not just read them to yourself? They will challenge and stimulate, make you laugh and make you wonder.Come along with us: who's fastest, you or the wind? Or can you keep up with how fast life runs? What is the symbolism of that chocolate house? Did the poet even know, or is that for the inner child to decide? Ruth Dupre's marvellous paintings make it a visual feast too.

Alice falls in love with rakish Harry at too young an age. When the inevitable pregnancy follows, they find themselves in a precarious position. Harry expects to get on with whatever he wants, job or no job, and for Alice to bear the burden of making ends meet and a rapidly expanding family.She battles to hold it together and to hold on to her family. Something has to give - in the end it is her mind. But this is pre and post-war Britain where Harry's "carrying on" is normalised but Alice - sensitive and artistic of temperament - has her inability to cope medicalised. She is consigned to institutions away from the public gaze, and subject to experimental medical intervention.She is strong, she is a survivor, but is it all too much?Based on her mother's true story, Mary Steele brings people and their history to life with her poetic and evocative writing.

Sally-Ann has never been further from home than Scarborough. She is suffocating in her parents' house, fed up with their old-fashioned rules and bored with her job. Then Terry comes in to the library where she works to look at maps for his "trip around the world."'What's your name?' he asks her. 'Zita,' she lies. But becoming Zita is not so simple.Susan Day deftly leads you into Sally-Ann/ Zita's life and adventures, her coming of age, discovery of life's unpredictabilities and growing old. Her skilful depiction of the characters brings them to life and you'll miss them and wonder about them when you've turned the last page.

If there was any justice in this world, The Good Lion would be regarded as a classic of mid-century English Literature: one of the best coming of age novels, and Doherty would be held up as a remarkable working class writer, alongside, if not better than Sillitoe, Waterhouse, Barstow and Storey. The Good Lion is in fact a far more accomplished piece of writing than Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, a better study of coming-of-age masculinity and emotional conflict than This Sporting Life, and yet it has been forgotten.It follows the story of Walt Morris, setting out on a life of his own, with his looking-after-number-one outlook on life: he is a "good lion" ¿ a lion that kills a deer not being a "bad lion." Set against the backdrop of post-war Sheffield (although the city is never named), Walt tries to work out for himself the problems of living in the age of the hydrogen bomb, the cold war and satellites, and comes to realise that his good lion philosophy has flaws as life and relationships mould him into an adult.

On holiday in France, during a particularly warm spell, the exotic bugs descend. Many would reach for the citronella candles, or worse - the fly-swat and toxic aerosols to go on a killing spree like some insecticidal maniac. Not so an artist like Ruth Dupré. Instead she recorded their characters, their quirks, their oddities, in ink onto delicate Japanese paper.Coming to these pictures later, Michael Glover was taken back to those heady summer days, and this collection of poems - of artfully chosen words about those wingers, leapers and creepers - was the result. Each poem is accompanied by one of the original monoprints.Wingers and Leapers and Creepers is a homage to all bug-life: the true rulers of the world, upon which we, and all life on Earth, depend. Perhaps we can learn to love them a little more...

The Trapper they called him,that man Joseph Tredinnick,late of Porthcothan Bay, Cornwall- and, my god,what an inhospitable spot that was in those days!This is a dark, Gothic tale about a Cornish misfit by the name of Tredinnick: a rabbit trapper by trade, and a trapper of souls. It is part horror story, part phantasmagoria - you will be dragged against your will to witness his descent into madness, and start to question what is real and what is not.