Tunes of Glory Household Ghosts Silence This volume collects three of the very best works by James Kennaway, the brilliant young novelist and screenwriter who tragically died in a car crash at the early age of forty. Memorably filmed with Alec Guinness and John Mills, Tunes of Glory is a grippingly dramatic exploration of the glamour and the brutality of post-war army life as the tensions and conflicts in the officers' mess of a Highland regiment lead to shame and tragedy. Household Ghosts is a claustrophobic tale of family tension, love triangles and the persistence of the past-one of Kennaway's favourite themes. Set in a country house in Scotland the book is haunted, like the privileged family it describes, by the ghosts of Scotland's own turbulent history. Taken from completed drafts on the author's desk, Silence tells of the accidental meeting and the complex union between a white man and a black woman in times of racial tension and sexual violence. Set in a North American city in midwinter Kennaway's last and brilliantly succinct novel expands into a universal allegory of suffering and death.
Music has been used as a cure for disease since as far back as King David's lyre, but the notion that it might be a serious cause of mental and physical illness was rare until the late eighteenth century. At that time, physicians started to argue that excessive music, or the wrong kind of music, could over-stimulate a vulnerable nervous system, leading to illness, immorality and even death. Since then there have been successive waves of moral panics about supposed epidemics of musical nervousness, caused by everything from Wagner to jazz and rock 'n' roll. It was this medical and critical debate that provided the psychiatric rhetoric of "degenerate music" that was the rationale for the persecution of musicians in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. By the 1950s, the focus of medical anxiety about music shifted to the idea that "musical brainwashing" and "subliminal messages" could strain the nerves and lead to mind control, mental illness and suicide. More recently, the prevalence of sonic weapons and the use of music in torture in the so-called War on Terror have both made the subject of music that is bad for the health worryingly topical. This book outlines and explains the development of this idea of pathological music from the Enlightenment until the present day, providing an original contribution to the history of medicine, music and the body.
In this brilliant book of recollection, one of America's finest writers re-creates people, places, and events spanning some fifty years, bringing to life an entire era through one man's sensibility. Scenes of love and desire, friendship, ambition, life in foreign cities and New York, are unforgettably rendered here in the unique style for which James Salter is widely admired. Burning the Days captures a singular life, beginning with a Manhattan boyhood and then, satisfying his father's wishes, graduation from West Point, followed by service in the Air Force as a pilot. In some of the most evocative pages ever written about flying, Salter describes the exhilaration and terror of combat as a fighter pilot in the Korean War, scenes that are balanced by haunting pages of love and a young man's passion for women. After resigning from the Air Force, Salter begins a second life, becoming a writer in the New York of the 1960s. Soon films beckon. There are vivid portraits of actors, directors, and producers--Polanski, Robert Redford, and others. Here also, more important, are writers who were influential, some by their character, like Irwin Shaw, others because of their taste and knowledge. Ultimately Burning the Days is an illumination of what it is to be a man, and what it means to become a writer. Only once in a long while--Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory or Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa--does a memoir of such extraordinary clarity and power appear. Unconventional in form, Burning the Days is a stunning achievement by the writer The Washington Post Book World said "inhabits the same rarefied heights as Flannery O'Connor, Paul Bowles, Tennessee Williams and John Cheever" --a rare and unforgettable book. BONUS: This edition includes an excerpt from James Salter's All That Is.
Tunes of Glory Household Ghosts Silence This volume collects three of the very best works by James Kennaway, the brilliant young novelist and screenwriter who tragically died in a car crash at the early age of forty. Memorably filmed with Alec Guinness and John Mills, Tunes of Glory is a grippingly dramatic exploration of the glamour and the brutality of post-war army life as the tensions and conflicts in the officers' mess of a Highland regiment lead to shame and tragedy. Household Ghosts is a claustrophobic tale of family tension, love triangles and the persistence of the past-one of Kennaway's favourite themes. Set in a country house in Scotland the book is haunted, like the privileged family it describes, by the ghosts of Scotland's own turbulent history. Taken from completed drafts on the author's desk, Silence tells of the accidental meeting and the complex union between a white man and a black woman in times of racial tension and sexual violence. Set in a North American city in midwinter Kennaway's last and brilliantly succinct novel expands into a universal allegory of suffering and death.
‘The true chronicler of my life, a tall, soft-looking man with watery eyes, came up to me at the gathering and said, as if he had been waiting a long time to tell me, that he knew everything. I had never seen him before.’ This is the brilliant memoir of a man who starts out in Manhattan and comes of age in the skies over Korea, before emerging as one of America’s finest authors in the New York of the 1960s. Burning the Days showcases Salter’s uniquely beautiful style with some of the most evocative pages about flying ever written, together with portraits of the actors, directors and authors who later influenced him. It is an unforgettable book about passion, ambition and what it means to live and to write.
Introduced by Douglas Gifford. Mr Alfred is an elderly schoolteacher dogged by a sense of failure. The rejection of his poetry and his nightly escape to the pub all contribute to his malaise. Perhaps most harrowing is his innocent but obsessive love for Rose, one of his pupils. This ‘affair’ is maliciously reported and he is torn from his familiar job and transferred to an even rougher school. Against a nightmarish background of gang warfare and public desecration the story reaches a frightening climax. This novel provides significant observation of a critical period in the saga of modern, urban youth. But its most striking achievement is in its portrait of Mr Alfred whose values and sensitive nature are so tragically at odds with his environment. ‘A bright book, full of perceptions.’ The Times ‘Skillfully done . . . the strange totemism of city gangs is used to great effect.’ TLS ‘This book has a rough and gutsy authenticity; it is entertaining and perceptive.’ Oxford Mail
Introduced by Edwin Morgan. In this haunting poem from the latter part of the nineteenth century, Scots-born writer James Thomson anticipated the modern age’s nightmare vision of the city as a place of loneliness, alienation and spiritual despair. In contrast to the late Victorian confidence all around him, Thomson dared to face the possibility that the universe was utterly indifferent to human affairs. The strange and dark images in The City of Dreadful Night have become a landmark of modern literature, for the tomb-like streets and empty squares in this memorable poem preceded T.S Eliot’s The Waste Land, and the darker visions of expressionism and surrealism by over forty-five years. Published in instalments in 1874 and then in book form in 1880, The City of Dreadful Night has long been unavailable as a complete text. This exciting new edition is introduced and annotated by Edwin Morgan, long an admirer of Thomson’s work, and a leading modern poet in his own right.
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