Bøger udgivet af Reed Independent

'You have the stigmata, ' his grip firming when she tries to pull her hand away. 'So have I. The scar across my eye, you see.'--------------Take a hermit, innocent, Christ-like, withdrawn, foreign-looking, non-English-speaking; then place him where the innocent are getting raped in an insular community. The result is awful predictability amid cries of 'no more!'. But the rapes continue until the rapist is caught.Remove a hermit, innocent, Christ-like, withdrawn, foreign-looking, non-English-speaking, to the desolate mainland. Let the child of the rapist follow (why?) to the desolate mainland where the neighbours are a half-witted man and his fighting cock of a sister. Add a city detective on the pry, an abattoir, a sometime nightclub entertainer and her squatter husband. Minds on the edge rubbing against each other. Double, double, toil and trouble.In Me, the Old Man Bill Reed demonstrated his skill in portraying inhumanity and its often-insanity. Readers of Stigmata will not be disappointed with this follow-up work.-----------------Originally a well-known and widely-performed and award-winning playwright, Bill Reed began writing fiction in his late thirties. Stigmata was his fourth novel and became the winner of the FAW Australian Natives Award in 1981. To date he has written thirteen novels, including 1001 Lankan Nights, books 1 and 2. He has worked as a publishing director and journalist in Australia and overseas, including Canada, Britain and the Subcontinent. During that time, he became Publishing Director of two major Australian publishing houses, but now mostly resides in Sri Lanka.-----------------'.... It's that interaction of innocence and inhumanity that so chills the blood... like certain Samuel Beckett novels, it could have left the reader feeling suicidal but, in fact, the final effect is one of driving elation' Jill Neville, review, Sydney Morning Herald.

A collection of mainly award-winning or hightly-commended short stories from national competitions. Extinction is forever, give or take a day. And there's always Redemption trying to take that one precious minute of your time.

Blurb (Act I) PARSONS: I'm beginning to feel what his friends must have gone through when they were really seeing him off. The longer they wait, the more improbably it is that the bloody plane will ever leave. They mouth platitudes to each other about every man having the unimpeachable right to die at home. They don't look into each other's eyes knowing that not one of them has even bothered to tell the old boy about pipe dreams, tobacco smoke delusions. What they mean, really, is that they can't wait any longer to get him off their hands. Blurb (Act 2)SURROUND MONOLOGUE: I didn't care. I had my ticket in my hand in the plane. I would have had my ticket in my hand if they hadn't taken it off me before I got on. That's not the point. It's as good as having your ticket in your hand when you're sitting in the plane and they haven't turfed you off because if they haven't turfed you off then that means you must have had a ticket in your hand to be able to be there on the plane. And what I've got a right to expect is a bit of help from someone coming up and saying Siggie. Someone to come up and say my name. It's a tremendous bit of help when someone remembers your name when they come up and say, Siggie. It's terrible when someone comes up and opens his mouth to speak but says nothing.Blurb (Act 3)As a director, I was immediately impressed by the inherent theatricality of the play... of what constitutes a theatrical event. In this work that gives us not just a play but an experience of the struggle for creation. (Peter Batey, Artistic Director, SATC)---------------Bill Reed is an Australian playwright, novelist and short-story writer.

'Life's a real cow of a thing!'You can take five locals virtually locked out of their Outback pub by a bunch of city-slickers up from Sydney who, deep into the grog, start offering money for the best local yarn. You could take it that these five, gathered around Pop, are used to being virtually locked out of their pub even in the best of times, and have their own jealously-guarded places out on the back porch. So you might wonder why they have their backs up this day.The answer to all their resentment is not so much being kept out from their local by the up-'emselves city-ites, but is mainly because what tomorrow is going to bring is more than a man can bear... Tomorrow, the bulldozer is coming to tear down their beloved drinking-hole. And it's not the extra half-a-block walk to the next pub as you might think; it's the principle of the bloody cow of a thing... one of their own mates is going to be driving the bulldozer! If that's not total sacrilege, then it's still enough to drive a man to drink that he can't afford until next payday.And if that wasn't enough to get on a bloke's goat, the cold beer's running out on this last of all days to end days because of the great gutzing of the city slickers inside. How about that for coming the ruination of the environment? To come the raw prawn worse, what with all the city-slicker money being bandied about, Shirl the barmaid is turning her own tap off for the locals and turning it on for the Sydneysiders. Even the sacred bottle stash for tomorrow's breakfast isn't sacrosanct from their own selves' thieving hands. How desperate can a human being get? It's obvious as to what must be done: that tenner being put up inside by the city drongoes for the best yarn has to be collared.------------------'You'll hear shaggy dogs, yarns and bullsh as old as the hills and as warm as an outhouse's brick.' The Playbox Theatre

'Cass Butcher Bunting' begins with an explosion and a cave in down a mine shaft. Three miners are trapped there; Cass, the local golden boy, Butcher, the mentally-heavy, stay-at-home product of a small mining community, and Bunting, the old-timer, the 'humpy'.The setting of the action deep in the bowels of the earth places so-called civilised man back in a primordial situation, in a closed-off cave, his only mental and moral buffer lying in having to fall back on his ownself, his own primitiveness -- and where he can only play out his own tragedy as death becomes increasingly inevitable. Man's fundamental inhumanity to man is a major theme explored in this play. The exchanges between Cass and Butcher and their varying reactions to each other can be seen as subtle revelations of aspects of this inhumanity in a situation as extreme as imaginable. Bunting's ravings are reminders that in the modern world this selfsame inhumanity is most often expressed in cruelty. Unarguably it is in the face of this impending end that man, with nothing more to lose, can step out from behind his everyday mask and reveal his needs and his weaknesses, acknowledge and accept his failures. Between the simple social comment suggested by one reviewer as a 'powerful exposé of a small community' and the consideration of death ('it's simply about dying') put forward by the playwright lie a number of layers of meaning which the individual member of the audience or reader will find for himself.(Mary Lord, convener, Alexander Playwriting Competition, Monash University)--------------Bill Reed is an award-winning novelist, playwright and short-story writer who lived within the Australian literary and publishing worlds. He now lives outside its gates, mainly in Sri Lanka

You would have to wonder why a Rhodes Scholar, a VC winner and a Commissioner of Police named his son Frank E. R. Stein by way of a ha-ha 'monstrous joke'... or why he cackled derision every time his eyes lit upon the boy; or why he showered more affection on his adopted son, Costas, the otherwise offspring of a Mr Bigs of organized crime.And as the well is so poisoned such is the quest Frank Stein must make to seek revenge for the gangland killing of his crusading crime-fighting half-brother. At least it is a way to presuppose the kingpins presumably coming for him too; after all, even as a joke, it's not how you bow out, but how you get stuck in.Rape, assassination, shocking intrusions of a vicious crime world... it's all there for a tragic and hilarious story to unfold before Frank Stein, assisted(?) by his own side comprising of a woman in search of an international bestseller and an indigenous brother who survives writing sports reports without going to any games when all he needs is a deaf, dumb and blind rich white sort to tide him over. And, yes, haunting over all is a shadowy guardian Chinese toughie, as well as his ubiquitous father from his wheelchair. One has to ask: what have the famous father's shocking WW1 experiences to do with the resulting mayhem? What has be done to his sons? What did the Nip bullet the old boy finally coughed up after forty years look like, even as a metaphor?Underlying the rich gallery of these and other grotesques, there are the wit and the pace and the bawdry of Crooks. In the real-life crime parlance of 'a pushover to put down', this book won't disappoint crime buffs.--------------------about the authorOriginally a well-known playwright, Bill Reed began writing longform fiction in his late thirties. To date he has written thirteen novels, including the so-called noteworthy '1001 Lankan Nights, books 1 and 2'. He has had eight plays professionally staged. He has worked as an editor and journalist in Australia and overseas before finally putting his feet up in Sri Lanka.

Ed: following is the Thomas-Nelson-Australia's 1977 blurb for the original edition, but here annotated, in italics, by the author for this reprint.'Bill Reed's first novel is a celebration of the Australian language. 'Dogod' employs a language that uses our sounds, our national images, our landscapes and our slang to examine our rhythms and forms of speech. Leading back through the images-as-words of Joyce, Carroll, Thackeray and Shakespeare...'(I thought I was the one making with the jokes here?)'... here is a lament for the human condition as it is affected in modern times.'(I lamented a bit over the manuscript too. All I know was it was a neat pile of typescript pages but next morning it had paws marks all over it.)'As a bone to a dog, so are we as toys to the gods. Hence Dog-god - a chaotic deity tossing and pouncing with bestial delight on His/Its favourite human plaything, Jelf. A walking disaster area, Jelf hardly needs Dogod's assistance to attract the natural and unnatural contempt of his associates as he lurches on his apocalyptic journey...'( 'apocalyptic' is first-class; with his allotted dog pass, Jelf travels Economy)'... through Australia's visible and invisible landscapes.'''Dogod' is both funny and profound. It is an examination of the comic-tragedy that is within each of us, and within our society. Its wit, its humour and its deeper purposes are brilliantly sustained. Its challenge is for you the reader.'(At least putting reader, singular, was spot on.)(NB: Also, there's nothing about the plot here. I remember distinctly that there was one - as in Jelf chasing Alyce chasing Quilty chasing Henry chasing a whole host of others or vice versa, while the Australian dream - really doggedly -- chases them all and keeps spoiling the plot like the real hound it is.)---------About the authorBill Reed is a playwright, novelist and short-story wroughtist. He dangles, shaken, hanging from the pelt.

'I not only write books. I am this book. The actual person or persons.'-----------After a flash flood in 1965 an elderly man became trapped down a Sydney parkland storm drain. Children discovered him but did not tell their parents. Instead they fed him a biscuit and a little water once a day for three weeks. When he was finally rescued, the flesh on his legs had become putrescent. He could not remember how long he had been down there.Bill Reed extends this situation to explore the interaction of innocence and inhumanity that is so prevalent in these days of random violence. Here, the old man, like so many others, has come to Australia with all the hopes of regeneration. But the sun has not shone on him very much and his brother and sister have disowned him. He has had to live in sordid hostels and to endure the barbs of a society that pays respect only to the fittest.As his minds drifts, the old man dreams he is back home in Belfast. He has got beyond the smell of his own rotting flesh and the fleas and rats. He no longer feels the cold or works up the desperation to plead with the children to get help. He floats mentally, waiting for the final water-rush of the coming last storm. And as he does so, the author uses himself as a character to the story, as one of the brutalisers, the sheer fact of writing about the old man in this terrible state possibly morally aligning him to the teasing, torturing children. Using Edward Nugent's 'real' writings to give an authentic voice to the old man doesn't help his frame of mind either. ----------------Bill Reed has been involved in writing and publishing for most of his life, in Australia, Britain, Canada and the Subcontinent. He has had nine plays professionally staged and has written thirteen novels, including '1001 Lankan Nights' books 1 and 2. He has won national awards in playwriting, short story and novel categories. He now resides in Sri Lanka.Edward Nugent was born in Belfast in 1900 and migrated to Australia after WW2, eventually living in a Salvation Army home in Adelaide where his major preoccupations were his manual typewriter and his old 'fiddle'. He tragically died in a room fire in 1979, two days after receiving an advanced copy of this book. The quote above here was his verbatim reaction.

If you are a famous-enough author long presumed dead and you keep sending notes to your Publisher through some far-off precocious teenage girl who says she's never heard of you - and the frightening predictions in those notes keep coming true -- then you can't be dead. Can you? For one, the mother of Jimmy Massey knew nothing of you walking into the sea off southern Sri Lanka, or your predictions of the murders of all sorts of priests across Asia and Australasia - nor a thing about the woman-child making them. Nor did she have a clue as to why her little Jimmy, a simple taxi-driver, got slaughtered along with the priest in Cairns Cathedral that Easter. But she did know Dr Valentino Sebastian kept coming and literally sniffing around her tribe people's little chapel, even if she couldn't know what he could do with birthings, seemingly at will. The mother of Jimmy Massey knew that, no matter how much sniffing around her and hers went on, or what all the police and all the nosey-parkers in the world might say, she could see in her mind that-there black shore your notes kept going on about. She could hear the nearing howling. She sensed the coming. But not one thing ever was going to come anywhere near what she held enclosed unto herself as dearly as life itself. Nuh huh. You and all the others can take your prophecies- and predictions-come-true and shove it all..

The live-acted shadow play of today uses live actors to evoke fantasy combined with realism to illustrate a fully-rounded play narrated by a storyteller sitting in full audience view.It is not a puppet show. It does not demand actors contort themselves into amazing shapes like trees of elephants. It is a play-behind that theatrically lies in the unfurrowed field between mime and the theatre we conventionally know today. It has hardly, if ever, been attempted in a full play's setting until now.The modern live-acted shadow play can be seen (at least conceptually) to need two directors working in unison - one to conduct how the shadow play portion of the performance can be welded into an amusing and poetic distillation of the storyteller's tale; the other to take care of the overall dramatic interaction between the storyteller and the shadow play behind him or her.Here are 14 pioneering live-acted shadow plays especially written for wholesale professional stage production, or for 'picking-and-choosing' by workshoppers and educators. Three of them are world classics by Gogol, Morton and Runyon especially adapted by Bill Reed; the others are of his own making. Each contains probably a deliberate over-fullness of shadow-play directions, but only to give the director the widest choice of possibilities to get his shadow play to keep pace with the story, even if it's not really practical to wholly keep up with every narrative twist and turn.What each play has in common are elements of the fantastical and the magical threading through the down-to-earth, a blending that only the shadow play can evoke in any sort of encompassing harmony.In its dynamic interplay of shadow acting and voice, the live-acted shadow play of today almost represents a new form of theatrical genre.

'Don't let them cut me up! Bury me behind the mountains!'Fear, violence and race prejudice are themes with which we are all sadly familiar. Bill Reed's three plays-on-a-theme, based on the life and times of Truganinni -- the supposed last Tasmanian Aborigine and, at the end, so socially visible -- develop these themes based on the dispossession and final degradation of the Tasmanian original people. In her own lifetime, Truganinni lived through the devastating years of her people's decimation and virtually sealed off her own bat the last chapter of the massacre of a unique race of people. She witnessed horrific personal and family-clan tragedy and the raw-boned racial society of the time... the killing diseases, the outright butcheries, the set-squares of despise that literally made her people prefer dying to living under the White colony. Yet Truganinni survived to become one of Hobart's most recognisable and colourful characters. She came to enjoy her 'Queen-Victorian' walks through the town's streets as much as her daily pot of ale. She was thought to be the last of her race after the reputed last male William Lanne, or King Billy, died an alcoholic and had his body mutilated in the name of science. It was little wonder she had such dread of dying and pleaded not to be carved up as he had been. For a time her well-wishers kept the promise to keep her remains safe, but within a few decades her body was officially removed from a secret grave and displayed in the Hobart Museum as a specimen alongside the skeletons of 'scientifically-interesting' animals. It was more than 125 years after her death in 1876 that her ashes were scattered on the waters of her beloved Derwent. These three plays offer very different theatrical possibilities: the first is a mime against a background of rhythmic verse; the second is a farce-melodrama; and the third is a tragedy. Either presented singularly or as a whole, they provide, among other things, an excellent vehicle for a varied and dynamic course in drama.

Use your local pool to get fit; to develop your muscles; to exercise while you enjoy yourself, even while pregnant; to help with muscle aches, to free you from general immobility and minor disability or just to help get away from things.

'... the Theatre of the Absurd and the Theatre of Cruelty are even more pervasively embodied in the plays of Alexander Buzo, Thomas Keneally and Bill Reed. In Buzo's case it is Absurdism which is especially apparent; in Keneally and Reed, Artaudian 'myth' and language-in-space...'It was Reed in Burke's Company who pioneered Artaudian techniques in a play of stature. If the play is given imaginative production, it powerfully exemplifies one of Artaud's most famous metaphors. The figures on stage will suggest universal human victims burning at the stake, signaling through the flames.'Professor Dennis CarrollContemporary Australian Theatre, Currency Press-----------------This is a reprint of one of the most successful award-winning plays of Bill Reed. Over the years it has been performed both on the professional and amateur stages around Australia and overseas, and published by Heinemann Educational and also in Currency Press's 'Plays of the 60s'. Bill Reed has been involved in drama and publishing most of his existence in Australia, Britain, Canada and the Subcontinent. He has written nine professionally-produced plays and thirteen novels, including '1001 Lankan Nights, book 1 and 2'. He has won national awards for drama, short stories and novels. He now lives mostly in Sri Lanka.