Browse by category
A Lie About My Father by John Burnside
Category: Biography Memoir
This is a moving, unforgettable memoir of two lost men: a father and his child. He had his final heart attack in the Silver Band Club in Corby, somewhere between the bar and the cigarette machine. A foundling; a fantasist; a morose, threatening drinker who was quick with his hands, he hadn't seen his so ...Show more
Ashland & Vine by John Burnside
Category: Fiction
It is 1999. Kate Lambert, a grieving, semi-alcoholic film student, invites an elderly woman to take part in an oral-history documentary. The woman, Jean Culver, declines, but makes her a bizarre counter-offer- if Kate can stay sober for four days, she will tell her a story. And if she can stay sober bey ...Show more
Black Cat Bone by John Burnside
Category: Poetry
Drawing on various sources, this book examines varieties of love, faith, hope and illusion, to suggest an unusual possibility: that when the search for what we expected to find - in the forest or in our own hearts - ends in failure, we can now begin the hard and disciplined quest for what is actually th ...Show more
Gift Songs by John Burnside
Category: Kindergarten
To the Shakers, a good song was a gift; indeed the test of a song's goodness was how much of a gift it was. In their call to "labour to make the way of God your own", Shaker artists expressed an aesthetic that had much in common with the old Japanese notion, attributed to Hokusai, that to paint bamboo, ...Show more
Glister by John Burnside
Category: Fiction
The children of Homeland exist in a state of suspended terror. Every year or so, a boy from their school disappears, vanishing into the wasteland of the old chemical plant. Nobody knows where these boys go, or whether they are alive or dead, and without evidence the authorities claim they are simply run ...Show more
Havergey by John Burnside
Category: Fiction
"Havergey does not feature on any maps of the British Isles. Yet this remote island is as real as any, with its limestone stacks, seabirds and human population - a mixture of utopians and nomads who have settled here to build a new kind of society. When a traveller arrives in this small land, bewildered ...Show more
I Put a Spell on You by John Burnside
Category: Biography Memoir
In this exquisite, haunting book, John Burnside describes his coming of age from the industrial misery of Cowdenbeath and Corby to the new world of Cambridge. This is a memoir of romance - of lost love and the love of being lost - darkened by threat, illuminated by glamour. The old Scots word 'glamour' ...Show more
John Burnside: Selected Poems by John Burnside
Category: Poetry
Over seventeen years and nine collections, John Burnside has built - in the words of Bernard O'Donoghue - 'a poetic corpus of the first significance', a poetry of luminous, limpid grace. His territory is the no-man's-land of threshold and margin, the charmed half-light of the liminal, a domestic world t ...Show more
Learning to Sleep by John Burnside
Category: Poetry
Lucid, lyrical and intellectually profound- this collection of poems resonates with real life and death, but mostly what falls in between- the charmed darkness. Lucid, lyrical and intellectually profound- this collection of poems resonates with real life and death, but mostly what falls in between- the ...Show more
Living Nowhere by John Burnside
Category: Fiction
Corby, the industrial new town built around a vast steel works, draws many to the fires of its furnaces - in the hope of steady work, a better house, a fresh start. Amongst them are Francis Cameron, from Scotland, and his friend Jan Ruckert, the son of Latvian refugees. Alienated, intelligent and curiou ...Show more
On Henry Miller - Or, How to Be an Anarchist by John Burnside
Category: Biography | Series: Writers on Writers Ser.
An engaging invitation to rediscover Henry Miller--and to learn how his anarchist sensibility can help us escape "the air-conditioned nightmare" of the modern world The American writer Henry Miller's critical reputation--if not his popular readership--has been in eclipse at least since Kate Millett's b ...Show more