Other books that might interest you

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  King Hit

  Stephen Oliver, Matt Otley

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  Stephen Oliver's voice resonates with strength and passion. With the highly original music of Matt Ottley this CD transports us across soundscapes of harmony and disharmony, life and death, peace and violence.

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  Adjusted

  Casey Bailey

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  It seems like Casey Bailey has been adjusting all his life. Adapting to the harsh realities of his Nechells upbringing – the drugs, the weapons, the lost friends, the lost hope. Finding ways to assimilate and swallow injustices and ways of being treated that no-one should have to tolerate. Finding a way to make meaning of his life – a way to contribute.
  And to some extent, he succeeded. He made the moves he needed to make and began to find his place. And then 2017 happened – when within a year he lost his mother and became a father and was forced to deal with extreme loss and joy, pride and pain, as life-sized as they get and all at the same time.
  This book is about Casey's journey, and is an attempt to tell the story of this last tumultuous year, when sky-high highs and lows as low as ocean beds combined to form something else entirely; when a whole new raft of adjustments, bigger than any he'd made before, were asking to happen.
  Casey's poetry is up to the challenge of capturing all this. He has an uncanny ability to make simple poetic statements about things which remain resolutely complex. He can capture the extreme highs and the godawful lows of the life of a young man losing big and gaining large. His poems should break under the weight of the joy they contain and the grief they depict. But they don't. They look at their subject with the steadfast glare of one who refuses to be beaten and is resolute in his duty and desire to protect those he cares about most.
  Casey is a glorious performer, whose words refuse to falter in the face of the wild emotions they seek to communicate. But it is here on the page that the true depth of Casey's vision comes through. Lows as clear as crystal – highs as detailed and fragile as hearts made of glass.
  Casey recently had two videos of his work filmed and broadcast by BBC3, each amassing over 200,000 views on facebook.

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  The Georgian Poets

  Rupert Brooke, G.K. Chesterton,...

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  As a poetical movement Georgian Poetry is easy to classify.  It began naturally enough in 1910 when George V ascended to the throne of England.  Edward Marsh, a civil servant, polymath and arts patron decided that the verse of that time needed to be seen in its own right and from 1912 – 1922 set out to publish anthologies. Marsh agreed a deal with the poet and bookseller Harold Munro, who had recently opened The Poetry Bookshop in London’s Devonshire Street to publish the books in return for a share of the profits.   Five volumes spanning some forty poets ranging from Rupert Brooke to GK Chesterton and DH Lawrence were published over the years and remain today the encyclopaedia of this poetical period.  In this volume you will find the best work of the Georgian Poets.

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  A Midsummer Night's Dream

  William Shakespeare

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  A Midsummer Night's Dream is a comedy written by William Shakespeare.    It portrays the events surrounding the marriage of Theseus, the Duke of Athens, to Hippolyta, the former queen of the Amazons. These include the adventures of four young Athenian lovers and a group of six amateur actors (the mechanicals) who are controlled and manipulated by the fairies who inhabit the forest in which most of the play is set. The play is one of Shakespeare's most popular works for the stage and is widely performed across the world.    The play consists of four interconnecting plots, connected by a celebration of the wedding of Duke Theseus of Athens and the Amazon queen, Hippolyta, which is set simultaneously in the woodland and in the realm of Fairyland, under the light of the moon.    The play opens with Hermia, who is in love with Lysander, resistant to her father Egeus' demand that she wed Demetrius, whom he has arranged for her to marry. Helena meanwhile pines unrequitedly for Demetrius. Enraged, Egeus invokes an ancient Athenian law before Duke Theseus, whereby a daughter must marry the suitor chosen by her father, or else face death. Theseus offers her another choice: lifelong chastity while worshipping the goddess Artemis as a nun.    Peter Quince and his fellow players Nick Bottom, Francis Flute, Robin Starveling, Tom Snout, and Snug plan to put on a play for the wedding of the Duke and the Queen, "the most lamentable comedy and most cruel death of Pyramus and Thisbe". Quince reads the names of characters and bestows them to the players. Nick Bottom, who is playing the main role of Pyramus, is over-enthusiastic and wants to dominate others by suggesting himself for the characters of Thisbe, the Lion, and Pyramus at the same time. He would also rather be a tyrant and recites some lines of Ercles. Bottom is told by Quince that he would do the Lion so terribly as to frighten the duchess and ladies enough for the Duke and Lords to have the players hanged. Quince ends the meeting with "at the Duke's oak we meet."

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  Samuel Takes a Break (NHB Modern...

  Rhianna Ilube

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  It is 2019, the Year of Return, marking four hundred years since the first enslaved Africans arrived in America. We are at a slave castle in Ghana. Samuel is our tour guide. It's his job to give tourists a really, really authentic experience of the castle's dark history, and to do it all with a smile. Thank you, Samuel!
  The tourists are Samuel's guests, and they're on a journey of self-discovery. But they're here, standing on soil, blood and bones, asking for a selfie. They want to buy trinkets from the gift shop. Samuel would never want to hurt the tourists. And they would never want to hurt him.
  Rhianna Ilube's Samuel Takes a Break… in Male Dungeon No. 5 After a Long but Generally Successful Day of Tours is a genre-blending play about colonialism, identity and the attempt to preserve the past. It was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Playwriting and the Verity Bargate Award, and premiered at The Yard Theatre, London, in 2024, directed by Anthony Simpson-Pike.

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  The Good Thief (NHB Modern Plays)

  Conor McPherson

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  A 45-minute monologue from the multi-award winning author of The Weir.
  Winner of the Stewart Parker Award.
  Following the misfortunes of a petty criminal whose conscience beats him up when he becomes involved in a bungled kidnap.
  'the writing is terse, lucid and admirably dispassionate' - Irish Times

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