Parthian Books strana 2 z 3

In this atmospheric novella, the mysterious Plankton Collector visits members of a family torn apart by grief and regret. he comes in different guises. For ten year-old Mary, he is Mr Smith who takes her on a train journey to the seaside. Her mother, Rose, meets him as Stephen, by her son? s graveside. Rose? s youngest, Bunny, encounters him as the gardener. For husband and father David, meanwhile, the meeting is with a love from his youth. And long-lost Uncle Barnaby takes the children for a week? s holiday during which their parents begin a reconciliation. All visitors are manifestations of the Plankton Collector who teaches those he encounters the difference between the discarded weight of unhappy memories and the lightness borne by happiness recalled.

The slate quarries were walking distance; they'd have a smoke, a party in an abandoned hut, try and climb something. A small culture emerged of punks, nutters, artists and petty thieves, crawling up abandoned rock, then heading to the disco at the Dolbadarn. These were the Slateheads. The people in these interleaving worlds - the punk dole dropout star- climbers; the Victorian quarrymen pioneers; the Welsh-speaking grandson of a ropeman, abseiling in to bolt sport climbs like Orangutang Overhang in the Noughties, Lee and his mates slogging west today - all are polished like nuggets in this 360 Degrees view over patience, pride, respect, thrill, movement, the competing claims of home and agency, and above all, a belief in second chances.

Catherine Haines' lively account of student life is enriched with literary, philosophical and existential questions. As the Cambridge Weight Plan spins out of control, a post-graduate's academic subject, 'the mind-body problem', goes through an existential phase to become 'extraordinary morality' rather than a mental health problem. The iron will with which Catherine imposes on herself ever more onerous conditions is awe-inspiring. The author is clearly fiercely intelligent, as we can see from the way she exposes the ugly truth behind historical depictions of women with eating disorders andindeed the way society frames abstinence from food as an ally of virtue. However, starving her body means that Catherine also begins to starve her brain. Incisive literary criticism of Hamlet descends into feverish noodlings about Einstein's theory of relativity. Her descriptions enfold the reader in the hideous illogic of the anorexic. This is a rigorous, philosophical case for regarding an eating disorder as pilgrimage, a personal exorcism, the kind which writers perform on paper while ghting with demons, fears, fate and death, an exorcism which, while painful, is also saving.

'Up Here' by Tristan Hughes won the O M Henry award. 'Seal Skin' by Tyler Keevil, Winner of the Writers' Trust of Canada Journey Prize. 'Flamingos' by Gail Hughes. Art designed and illustrated by Catrin Menai. With an afterword by Tyler Keevil. Tyler Keevil was born in Edmonton, raised in Vancouver, and moved to Mid Wales in his twenties. He began his career by writing stories and novels about the life he knew on the West Coast of Canada. His works include No Good Brother, Fireball and Burrard Inlet. The story in this book, Sealskin, won the Journey Prize, Canada's most prestigious short story honour. He now lives in South Wales with his wife Naomi and their two children. Tristan Hughes was born in Atikokan in northern Ontario and grew up between Canada and Ynys Mon, an island off the coast of Wales. After completing his education in the UK he began writing short stories, winning the Rhys Davies award, and since then he has published award-winning novels set both in Wales and Canada. The story in this book, Up Here, won an O. Henry award, an annual prize awarded to the best stories published in north America. He is a reader in creative writing at Cardiff University. Gail Hughes was an adventurer and linguist. She settled in Bangor, north Wales after travels in Europe and the Middle East. She began writing stories about her childhood and adolescence in southern Alberta, Canada in the 60s influenced by Alice Munro and Katherine Mansfield. They were published to critical acclaim as Flamingos, a year before her death in 2001. Catrin Menai is an artist and writer from North Wales. Her practice explores the relationship between landscape and self, layering poetic fragments, correspondences, and archival materials across time, place, and language. Her work has been exhibited at Mostyn and The Turner House, published in the Artes Mundi Journal and Poetry Wales, and translated in collaboration with Literature Across Frontiers. Currently, she is studying a PhD at the Aberystwyth School of Art and the National Botanic Gardens of Wales, focusing on nature restoration past and present. She is the daughter of Gail Hughes.

Tereza and Ivan share secrets. Tereza is now in art school away from the town where she grew up. Ivan is a teacher and artist. Tereza is now nineteen, Ivan is fifty-seven. They have known each other for years. Tereza shares her secrets with her friend Silvia. Ivan does not tell anyone. He constructs memories of Tereza to keep in his bed at night, covering them with sweat and tears. In this minimalist, poetic novella with autobiographical elements, Nicol Hochholczerova weaves a story of obsession and power and how both can lead to damage and separation. Rich with symbolism, its explosive themes - of eating disorder, abusive control and family dysfunction - are delicately handled with honesty and intelligence.

When you come out for the bell aged eighty you have no choice but to employ a late style. This is mine. A mix of deceitfully plain reportage; fictive history and fictional forays into the past; personalised reflections and more shaded perspectives from others; some poetry and polemics; glances of delight at the playfulness of sport and the charisma of personalities; taking a stance, whether orthodox or southpaw, in the courage to live with what you are given no matter what is put in front of you. And the illusion of random repetition, the rat tat tat bam bam, before any change in the angle of attack. But that? s enough bobbing out of reach, jabbing and sliding away with pretty dancing around the ring.

Owen Morgan, an Oxford undergraduate, returns to his family home on the rural north coast of Wales for the summer. Having left for university and completing his first year with a month in Germany, Owen returns as a changed man, altered by his experience of independence, new friendships, and the exploration of desire. While back at home, Owen recovers the feelings he had for his cousin Nest, while he tries to come to terms with his conflicted desires and struggles to align his own selfhood with the push and pull of love.

Philip Burton (1904-95) is best remembered as the schoolmaster responsible for training and transforming his pupil Richard Jenkins into Richard Burton, world- famous star of stage and screen. Together they produced a remarkable symbiosis. The stage-struck Philip Burton was present behind the scenes for the rest of the actor's life, intervening at crucial moments to ensure consummate stage performances in, for example, Coriolanus, Hamlet and Camelot. This biography, drawing upon a number of previously unseen sources, provides a fresh angle on this compelling story. And by placing Philip Burton's story centre stage, a remarkable figure also emerges in his own right. In a life that virtually spanned the twentieth century, he demonstrated resilience and transatlantic triumph against the odds. Like his best-known protege, he was born into an impoverished South Wales mining family. Alongside teaching, he acted, wrote and produced plays and in 1945, with wireless at its height, he became a BBC radio producer. He worked on almost 200 radio programmes, encouraging newcomers and producing work by Dylan Thomas. He wrote scripts for the fledgling television and penned its first 'soap.'Reinventing himself in the mid-1950s, Philip Burton moved to the United States where, after dabbling in the film industry and working as a theatre director, he became the inspirational first director of the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in New York. He took American citizenship and travelled across the States, delivering sparkling Shakespearean lecture-recitals. He published five books, living in Key West, Florida from the 1970s. Philip Burton died in 1995 aged ninety, his expertise and encouragement having enabled numerous aspiring actors and writers to flourish on both sides of the Atlantic.

Bathing on the Roof reclaims the Biblical Bathsheba as an everywoman of the ages, creating a collage of female experience in all its sensual complexity. Whether finding herself living on the streets, arriving in the Garden of Eden, giving birth, or shopping in Beverly Hills, Bathsheba negotiates the edgy boundaries of her relationships with men while navigating the confines of her body. Act-of-God-turned-celebrity diva, Flood likes to make an impression. She wakes up on the wrong side of the bed, makes a Severn Bridge of herself, parties with lightning, pouts for the paparazzi and drowns far more than she means to. Explored through the lens of the media and fame, these poems imagine how Mother Nature might respond to humanity's interference, were she as flawed and determined as humanity itself.

An essential collection, Street Fighting and Other Past Times is a moving study of life, love, memory and loss. A late, but not too late, first poetry collection, from one of the leading literary interpreters of the South Welsh experience.For readers who are interested in both the pre- and post-devolutionary cultural landscape of Wales, this is a crucial addition to the canon of Welsh writing in English, crowning and celebrating a life filled with enriching work at the coal-face of Welsh culture.

This short novel by Petar Andonovski tells a complex story of three men enmeshed in a love relationship. It is a novel about the internal struggles, about alienation between partners, about the enduring search for truth. But it is also a novel about family and provincialism. Told in the first person, it leads us into the love triangle among three former friends. It is an interdependent friendship for at least two of them, the first-person narrator and Vlado, his partner of two decades. The third member, Ivan, wasthe spark that ignited the friendship among them, but ever since they met in university, Ivan has vanished from time to time, usually at the start of summer. His final departure from the intimate friendship among them causes a crisis in the relationship between the narrator and Vlado. During the course of a summer vacation on Crete which Vlado has orchestrated to save their relationship we learn more about the three men, and we meet an assortment of others who, in one way or another, are queering their lives, whether through non-traditional relationships, escape from a mundane everyday life, challenging expectations, and confronting difference.

Beneath the surface of pictures lie the extensive networks of relationships and associations that tie us to them, sometimes in extraordinary ways. In pictures the past lives, and forms the basis of who we will become. The moments at which we come to understand something of ourselves and our place in the world are often anchored in images - literary, musical and visual. Through fifteen pictures Peter Lord describes the evolution of his own sense of self, in childhood just after the Second World War, at art college in the 1960s, through the tension between incomers and local people in Wales in the 1970s and 80s, and finally through his exploration of the place they have had in the lives of the artists who created them, their patrons and the general public.

It is 1984 and a small town somewhere in the east of the CzechoslovakSocialist Republic is in the firm grip of totalitarianism. Unruly andsickly Karolina is growing up in an all-female household includingher hot-blooded, knife-wielding grandmother. Repelled by her mum's serial love affairs Karolina runs away andstumbles upon a riding school on the edge of town. There, shebefriends Romana, a girl with one leg shorter than the other andMatilda, a rider and trainer who helps the two girls overcome theirphysical limitations. Together they found a successful trick-ridingteam and soon it seems that half flags, mills and scales are not theonly tricks flashing like blades up her sequinned sleeve as Karolinaexplores Pink Floyd and smoking, and discovers her knack for seeingdeep into others' souls. The fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989 and the subsequent arrival ofcapitalism threatens to destroy the riding school. The team has toturn professional. But in a sport of perfect scores is there still roomfor Romana and Karolina...?The Equestrienne is a poetic, caustic coming-of-age novel about thedesire of one young girl to realise her dreams before and after VelvetRevolution; it is a celebration of friendship between women and alsoa bitter acknowledgement that greed and the desire for power candestroy any relationship.

It's 1954 and nine-year-old Mira's life is about to change forever. After a typhoid outbreak rages through her town, robbing her of her parents and siblings, the orphaned child is forced to live with her mysterious, depressive Aunt Hana, a figure both frightening and fragile.Gradually, Mira uncovers the secrets of their troubled family history and begins to understand why her aunt is so incapable of trusting herself and the world around her. Deftly weaving two separate timelines, the harrowing reasons behind Hana's reclusive way of life, the guilt she wears as palpably as a cloak, and the tattoo on her wrist, are revealed to Mira. Alena Mornstajnova's gripping novel, which is based on real events, has won numerous awards and been translated into over a dozen languages across the world.

Blending the naturalistic and the fabulistic, these elusive, delicate stories fold fable and fairy tale into the everyday, domestic settings of kitchen, garden, car. Women love, and lose, strange creatures they find by the garden gate; dream dogs are liberated from the icy prison of a fridge; bathrooms bloom into rainforests that souls can lose themselves in forever. Seemingly quotidian routines and unremarkable lives are pierced by Kovalyk's precise, sensual prose, to reveal the magic lurking just beneath the surface of the daily skin of existence.

Kelinu waits for his telegram from the Queen of England. He has a few years to go but he'll wait. His niece thinks he's a fool. He was in the service of the Queen only a year, all those years ago. Times have changed. In these stories people strive to make a place, a living, a life with meaning in a new country or sense in an old one: from zero hour contracts in Bridgend and Munich to scraping a living as a mermaid on the streets of Barcelona. A woman tends a beautiful garden she knows will be taken away from her while another sends her child to a school concert dressed as a dinosaur. A man attends one more demonstration while another explains to his daughter where he is really from. In this diverse and fascinating anthology, writers from across Europe embark on a journey of independence and belonging.