Other books that might interest you

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  Run to Freedom

  Dawn Forrester Price

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  KOFI'S QUEST. KWAME'S ARROW 
  "Run to Freedom" is the first of a trilogy set on an 18th century Jamaican plantation. 13-year-old Kofi is an enslaved African who works in the pickney gang on McDermott Plantation. His father, Kwame, secretly trains him in tribal knowledge and hunting skills and embeds the urge to escape the plantation in Kofi's psyche. Kwame has been covertly meeting the Maroons, planning to escape, join the mountain warriors and provide intelligence to facilitate a successful raid for arms. ammunition and food. Kwame's chief intent is to rescue his family in the chaos of the attack and take them to live in the mountains with the freedom fighters. 
  But something goes horribly wrong: Kwame is captured and killed. Vowing to succeed where his father failed, young Kofi makes an ill-timed attempt to run away: he is captured and punished severely. Though scarred for life as a result of his failed escape attempt, Kofi is undaunted and determined to try again. 
  Will he succeed where his father failed?

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  A Rare Recording of Poet John...

  John Ciardi

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  John Anthony Ciardi (June 24, 1916 - March 30, 1986) was an American poet, translator, and etymologist. While primarily known as a poet, Ciardi pursued etymology, contributed to the Saturday Review as a columnist and long-time poetry editor, directed the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in Vermont, and recorded commentaries for National Public Radio. In 1959, Ciardi published a book on how to read, write, and teach poetry, How Does a Poem Mean?, which has proven to be among the most-used books of its kind. In the following recordings, Ciardi reads "And They Lived Happily Ever After For Awhile," “To Judith, I,” “Happiness,” and “The Lamb.”

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  The Crocodile - Legendary author...

  Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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  Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky was born in Moscow on 11th November, 1821 to distinguished multi-ethnic parents from a Lithuanian background.   
   
  His childhood years were at the family home in hospital grounds which also contained an orphanage, an insane asylum and a cemetery for criminals.  The young Fyodor often disobeyed his father by talking to the ill in the hospital gardens.   
   
  His health was compromised at age 9 when he experienced his first epileptic fit. By the time he was a teenager both parents had died and he was now enrolled in a military academy where he graduated and eventually became a Lieutenant in 1842.  He left military service the next year. 
   
  In 1846 he published his first novel ‘Poor Cow’ to great literary acclaim.  His next was unable to emulate that success but his short stories helped provide an income.  Life as an author was definitely difficult. As he began his next work he was arrested and incarcerated for treason and participation in the political and literary Petrashevsky Circle. Although the case was weak and unjustified he was sentenced to 4 years of hard labour followed by 5 years of military service in a Siberian regiment.  
   
  Despite the undoubted hardships and setbacks in his life, and whether they helped or hindered his writing, his talents produced many exceptional works of literature including ‘Crime and Punishment’, ‘The Idiot’ and ‘The Brothers Karamazov’.   
   
  Dostoevsky’s ability to get under the skin of his characters and show the inner workings of their mind was hugely influential and ahead of its time.  Interwoven with this was the influence of the broader social, spiritual and political forces at work in a person's psyche.   
   
  Fyodor Dostoevsky struggled financially and remained in poor health for much of his adult life.  He died from a lung haemorrhage on 9th February, 1881. 
   
  In the Crocodile a man is swallowed whole and through this Gogol explores themes and ideas that no other author would attempt. Absurdist genius.

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  Girls From the County

  Donna Lynch

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  This book is merely a record of dark events, the kind that you can sometimes move on from, yet can’t help but see in every old house, high school, or crumbling bridge. 
  In the county, eerie stillness can be mistaken for stagnation. In the county, rumination on pain and guilt can be confused with omens and curses. In the county, feelings of claustrophobia stem from understanding what the encroaching darkness brings with it. 
  You’ve heard of country girls, and city girls, but what of the forgotten girls from the in-between space of the county? Confronting the things too wild for urban areas, and too methodically malevolent for the countryside, girls from the county are often dismissed by popular narratives, left to solve riddles of grief and rage for themselves. 
  Known for weaving folk horror with confessional poetry, unflinching true crime approaches with myth and fable, contemporary appetites with gothic literature, award-winning author Donna Lynch has composed a lyrical reconstruction for readers to navigate the lives—and deaths—of girls from the county.

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  Fanboy

  Joe Sellman-Leava

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  A five-star hit at the Edinburgh Fringe, Joe Sellman-Leava's play Fanboy  is a love-hate letter to pop culture and nostalgia.
  It's the story of a thirty-something, self-confessed nerd – obsessed with Star Wars and Nintendo – asking why his generation can't let go of their childhoods.
  Fanboy had a successful run at Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2022 followed by a short regional tour and a week at Soho Theatre in November 2022. It was selected for VAULT Festival 2023.
   

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  Modern Poetry - Poems

  Diane Seuss

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  Diane Seuss's signature voice—audacious in its honesty, virtuosic in its artistry, outsider in its attitude—has become one of the most original in contemporary poetry. Her latest collection takes its title, Modern Poetry, from the first textbook Seuss encountered as a child and the first poetry course she took in college, as an enrapt but ill-equipped student, one who felt poetry was beyond her reach. Many of the poems make use of the forms and terms of musical and poetic craft—ballad, fugue, aria, refrain, coda—and contend with the works of writers overrepresented in textbooks and anthologies and those too often underrepresented. Seuss provides a moving account of her picaresque years and their uncertainties, and in the process, she enters the realm between Modernism and Romanticism, between romance and objectivity, with Keats as ghost, lover, and interlocutor. 
   
   
   
  In poems of rangy curiosity, sharp humor, and illuminating self-scrutiny, Modern Poetry investigates our time's deep isolation and divisiveness and asks: What can poetry be now? Do poems still have the capacity to mean? "It seems wrong / to curl now within the confines / of a poem," Seuss writes. "You can't hide / from what you made / inside what you made." What she finds there, finally, is a surprising but unmistakable love.

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