Tag: love

Review | Love in Five Acts, Daniela Krien (trs. Jamie Bulloch) | MacLehose Press

Emerging from a time of great turmoil . . . all depending on your experiences over the past two years . . . Love in Five Acts could either strike a strong chord of recognition, inspire relief at being in a secure relationship, or prompt joy at being single and happy.  

The lives of five very different middle-aged women – Paula, Judith, Brida, Malika and Jorinde – loosely criss-cross over each other in a cat’s cradle of love and loss, desire, infidelity and torment. Luck and happenstance play a central role. Continue reading Review | Love in Five Acts, Daniela Krien (trs. Jamie Bulloch) | MacLehose Press

Review | Dreamtime, Venetia Welby | Salt Publishing

Venetia Welby’s futuristic second novel, Dreamtime, has an altogether different atmosphere and resonance to her first, Mother of Darkness, set in London’s Soho. Both novels, however, feature central characters in crisis seeking to put themselves back together one way or another as they struggle with their instincts and the conscious/unconscious part of their personality. Both are super-charged and simmering narratives with a twist, which suck you right in. Dreamtime is an unusual novel that lingers in the mind.

The Law of contagion

“Nature is not dead but livid. Here she is thriving: alive with seething, uncontrollable rage. A devouring Mother Earth despairing of her children, washing them away with floods and burning them with electricity from the sky. And here are her minions, her monsters of the sea [. . .] A sea full of krakens.”  Continue reading Review | Dreamtime, Venetia Welby | Salt Publishing

BookBlast® 10×10 Tour | Thurs 8 Nov., Waterstones, Manchester, Deansgate | Michael Schmidt, Jane Draycott, Jenny Lewis

The tenth and last talk of this year’s inaugural BookBlast® 10×10 tour, a nationwide celebration of independent publishing is @WaterstonesMCR featuring Carcanet Press which was conceived at Pin Farm, South Hinksey, Oxford, in 1969 by Peter Jones, Gareth Reeves and Michael Schmidt. Carcanet Press primarily publishes poetry. In 2000 it was named the Sunday Times millennium Small Publisher of the Year. 

 bookblast_michael_schmidtOn Thurs. 8 November at 6.30 p.m., Michael Schmidt, a founder-director @Carcanet will chair the discussion @WaterstonesMCR with poets Jane Draycott and Jenny Lewis; talk theme: Claiming the Great Tradition: Women Recalibrate the Classics.

Poet interview HERE Meet Jane in person: Thursday 8 November @WaterstonesMCR. A tutor on postgraduate writing programmes at Oxford University and the University of Lancaster, her published works include Prince Rupert’s Drop and The Night Tree. Her translation of the 14th-century Pearl is a PBS Recommendation and winner of a Stephen Spender Prize for Translation.  Continue reading BookBlast® 10×10 Tour | Thurs 8 Nov., Waterstones, Manchester, Deansgate | Michael Schmidt, Jane Draycott, Jenny Lewis

Review | Ricarda Huch, The Last Summer | Book of the Week

“We aged a hundred years, and this
Happened in a single hour:
The short summer had already died
The body of the ploughed plains smoked.”
Anna Akhmatova

Letter-writing may be a lost art today, since we tend to email rather than sit down and write longhand to a loved one or a friend, however epistolary novels have been with us for centuries  — from Montesquiou’s Persian Letters, Choderlos de Laclos Dangerous Liaisons and Bram Stoker’s Dracula; to Stephen King’s Carrie and Alice Walker’s The Colour Purple — and are still popular. To read personal, private correspondence smacks of voyeurism, (etiquette dictates that to do so is unacceptable), hence the frisson of pleasure it affords. Suspense is created by what is revealed and concealed. The letters are like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, and dramatic irony keeps the reader hooked until the very end: Will ‘it’ or won’t ‘it’ happen? The Last Summer, superbly translated by Jamie Bulloch, is a welcome discovery thanks to Peirene Press.

Continue reading Review | Ricarda Huch, The Last Summer | Book of the Week

%d bloggers like this:
Verified by MonsterInsights