Other books that might interest you

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  Old Fashioned Landowners -...

  Nikolai Gogol

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  Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol was born on 1st April 1809 to a father, descended from Ukrainian Cossacks and a mother with a military background in the Ukrainian town of Sorochyntsi, then part of the Russian Empire and rich in Cossack traditions and folklore.   
   
  His father wrote poetry and plays which the young Gogol helped stage at his uncle’s home theatre.  This helped ignite in him a love of literature and blossomed when he attended, what is now, the Nizhyn Gogol State University at the age of 12.  Here he participated in school theatre productions and refined his mastery of his native Ukrainian and also the Russian of his Imperial masters. 
   
  In 1828 he went to St Petersburg and unsuccessfully tried to begin a career as an actor after finding that with no money and no connections the civil service was barred to him. 
   
  Embezzling money from his mother he embarked on a trip to Germany. When the money ran out, he returned to St Petersburg but the experiences were used in a series of stories he contributed to periodicals.  These tales were steeped in his childhood memories of the Ukrainian landscape and peasantry enlivened with the supernatural of its folklore woven with realistic events of the day.  He wrote in Russian in a whimsical, colloquial style with a smattering of Ukrainian words and phrases that provided an authenticity.  Eight stories were published as ‘Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka’.  Seemingly all at once fame and fortune arrived. Gogol was hailed by his contemporaries, including Pushkin, as a pre-eminent writer of Russian literature.   
   
  His success continued with his brilliant plays ‘The Inspector General’ and the comedy ‘The Marriage for the Theatre’, both being highly acclaimed.   
   
  In 1834 he became Professor of Medieval History at the University of St. Petersburg but with little academic or teacher training, failed to adequately fulfil many of his duties and soon resigned this post.  With no obligations and using his earnings from his writing, which now included the impressionistic and immortal ‘Dead Souls’, Gogol travelled around Europe, spending the most time in Rome where he studied art, read Italian literature and developed a passion for opera.  
   
  In the 1840s Gogol became preoccupied with a need to purify his soul and embarked on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. In tandem he fell under the influence of a strict and austere spiritual ascetic who persuaded him to observe strict fasts that, allied with his depression and deteriorating health, contributed to his death on 21st April 1852 at the age of only 43. 
   
  In ‘Old Fashioned Land Owners’ Gogol describes a peaceful setting and a peaceful couple who have grown old together.  But foreboding makes an entrance and life is now a series of cruel twists that breaks everything.

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  Kahlil Gibran's Little Book of Love

  Khalil Gibran

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  Kahlil Gibran’s aphorisms, stories, and poetry on a theme remain among some of those best known to Western readers. His views, however, extend beyond the most-quoted “greeting card” sayings to a wide realm of human emotions and relationships—passion, desire, idealized love, justice, friendship, and the challenges of dealing with strangers, neighbors, and enemies. This little book captures love and life in all of their complexities and nuances.This little volume includes over 90 selections from Gibran’s writings and is divided into four sections:Love’s InitiationThe Veils of LoveAll of Our RelationshipsA Love BeyondThis book, ideal for all gift-giving occasions, is informative, illuminating, and inspirational.Whom Do We Love?When I stood, a clear mirror before you,  you gazed into me and saw your image.  Then you said, “I love you.” But in truth you loved yourself in me.  Love is the veil between lover and lover.

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  Passport

  Richie McCaffery

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  Exploring place and displacement, boundaries and borders, Passport is the second collection by Richie McCaffery, and follows his acclaimed debut Cairn (Nine Arches Press, 2014). In moving to the Belgian city of Ghent, McCaffery finds "What I see and what happens / are two different countries." In a place of dualities and unrealities, the poems find the usual definitions themselves becoming unstable; the old currency that is no longer valid, the postcards home unsent and the present tense ill at ease.
  Written in crisp detail, these fluent poems weigh up whether leaving is a form of running from or coming back to home, wherever that may be. At the heart of this tender and compelling collection, McCaffery writes directly of anxiety, loss and dislocation, asking us to consider what belonging is, and how we find our place in life, in love, and in language.

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  The Flowers of Evil

  Charles Baudelaire

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  Loneliness, temptation, the fragility of man in a soulless new age . . . The controversial, banned masterpiece from the nineteenth-century French poet.   Sparking scandal in France, declared “an outrage to public morals” and “an offense to religious morals” by the Ministry of the Interior, The Flowers of Evil plunged Charles Baudelaire into a controversy that his public image never quite overcame. Nevertheless, the collection has since been lauded as a landmark in literary history and its writer extolled as the first modern poet.   With themes of love, world-weariness, beauty, and death, The Flowers of Evil juxtaposes the sublime with the commonplace. In the section titled “Parisian Scenes” are some of Baudelaire’s greatest poems—“The Swan,” “The Little Old Women,” and “The Seven Old Men”—which give readers an unsentimental view of the City of Light and of a bleak urban existence. As the Wall Street Journal proclaimed, “There is a sense in these angry, eructating late fragments of a man fully releasing himself to what he called ‘the joy of downward descent.’ And where Baudelaire went, modernity tended to follow.”  “The essence of a genius.” —The Guardian  “The profound originality of Charles Baudelaire is to represent powerfully and essentially modern man.” —Paul Verlaine

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  Dynamo

  Luke Samuel Yates

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  What is Dynamo? It is the first full-length collection by an extraordinarily entertaining and exhilarating poet. Over the course of this book, things break down, start again, light up, get stuck. Relationships stagnate, mountains and seas diminish, White nationalists fall over in Blackpool, and a wealthy couple's house disappears one day, leaving them surrounded by their appliances, tanned and eating an egg.
  I'm always listening out for a new poet who can take the deceptively effortless, witty yet ultimately serious chops of the New York School, make it work for this generation and bring the whole thing in to land just outside a British city, losing nothing in transit. And God it's been worth the wait. This is a poetry of exquisite timing, with some of the most satisfying last lines I've ever read. Yates can take an everyday domestic detail and make it sparkle with the mystery of a Raedecker painting. – Luke Kennard

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  Wendy & Peter Pan (NHB Modern...

  Ella Hickson

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  Ella Hickson's version of J.M. Barrie's much-loved story puts the character of Wendy firmly centre stage, in an adaptation that is refreshingly modern but never loses the charm of the original.
  
  
  Winter 1908. Snow is falling across London. Wendy Darling and her brothers sleep peacefully in their bedroom, as their parents bicker downstairs. In a sudden flurry of snow their window blows open, and into their lives tumbles a mischievous boy called Peter, followed by a fractious fairy called Tink.
  
  
  With the aid of a little fairy dust, Wendy agrees to fly with Peter to Neverland, seeing not only the promise of an awfully big adventure, but also the chance to rediscover the key to her parents' lost happiness. Once there, she will give the Lost Boys a run for their money, defeat Captain Hook and his pirate crew, and ultimately, learn what it means to grow up.
  
  
  Commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company, Ella Hickson's Wendy & Peter Pan premiered at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, in December 2013. It was revived by the RSC in 2015.
  
  
  The play will suit any theatre company or youth group looking to stage a classic tale, full of magic, adventure and strong female roles.

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