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Find out morePatrick McGuiness is a professor of French and Comparative Literature at Oxford University and a Fellow of St Anne's College where he has taught since 1998. He lives in North West Wales. Carcanet publishes his poetry and he has won an Eric Gregory Award, the American Poetry Foundation Levinson Prize in 2003 and Poetry Business Prize in 2006.
The socialist state is in crisis, the shops are empty and old Bucharest vanishes daily under the onslaught of Ceaucescu's demolition gangs. Paranoia is pervasive and secret service men lurk in the shadows.
A young woman has been murdered, and a neighbour, a retired teacher from Chapleton College, is arrested. An eccentric loner - intellectual, shy, a fastidious dresser with expensive tastes - he is the perfect candidate for a media monstering. In custody he is interviewed by two detectives: the smart-talking, quick-witted Gary, and his watchful colleague, Ander. Ander is always watchful, but particularly now, because the man across the table is his former teacher - Michael Wolphram - whom he hasn't seen in nearly 30 years. As the novel proceeds, we watch Wolphram's media lynching as ex-pupils and colleagues line up to lie about him. In parallel, we read Ander's memories of his life as a young Dutch boy in 80s England. Another outsider, another loner in a school system rife with abuse and bullying, Ander has another case to solve: the cold case of his own childhood. Though it deals with historical abuse and violence in schools, and the corrupt power of the popular media, Throw Me to the Wolves is mostly about childhood and memory. A perceptive and pertinent novel of our times, beautifully written and psychologically acute, it manages to be both very funny and - at the same time - shatteringly sad.
Winner of the 2014 Duff Cooper Prize Winner of the 2015 Welsh Book of the Year Award Shortlisted for the 2015 James Tait Black Memorial Prize Shortlisted for the 2015 PEN Ackerley prize Longlisted for the 2014 Thwaites Wainwright Prize Let me take you down the thin cobblestoned streets of the Belgian border town of Bouillon. Let me take you down the alleys that lead into its past. To a town peopled with eccentrics, full of charm, menace and wonder. To the days before television, to Marie Bodard's sweetshop, to the Nazi occupation and unexpected collaborators. To a place where one neighbour murders another over the misfortune of pigs and potatoes. To the hotel where the French poet Verlaine his lover Rimbaud, holed up whilst on the run from family, creditors and the law. This exquisite meditation on place, time and memory is an illicit peek into other people's countries, into the spaces they have populated with their memories, and might just make you revisit your own in a new and surprising way.
The socialist state is in crisis, the shops are empty and old Bucharest vanishes daily under the onslaught of Ceaucescu's demolition gangs. Paranoia is pervasive and secret service men lurk in the shadows.
Once 'the Paris of the East', Bucharest in 1989 is a world of danger, repression and corruption, but also of intensity and ravaged beauty. As Ceausescu's demolition squads race to destroy the old city and replace it with a sinister Stalinist Legoland, its inhabitants live out communism's dying days not knowing how or where things will end. In 'The Last Hundred Days' a young English student arrives in Bucharest to take up a job he never applied for and whose duties are never made clear. He finds dissidents, party apparatchiks, black-marketeers, diplomats, spies and ordinary Romanians, all watching each other as Europe's most paranoid regime plays out its bloody endgame.
The poems in Jilted City inhabit in-between-places, when a border is being crossed, a word is slipping into another language, when memory is translating loss. From 'Stations where the train doesn't stop' in 'Blue Guide', following a train journey through Belgium, to 'City of Lost Walks', English versions of a dissident Romanian poet whose 'poetry fails to register except in the form of an omission', McGuinness explores transition and translation, the afterlife of absences. Wit and paradox are at the heart of a collection that finds unforeseen connections between place and displacement.
This is a comparative and interdisciplinary book exploring a variety of perspectives on the artistic culture of France, and its neighbours, in the period 1870-1914. Part One centres on France, and assembles essays on the prose, poetry and painting of Symbolism and Decadence, on avant-garde dance and performance, on women's writing and on early cinema. Part Two explores the relations between France and several cultures in which the debt to France was amply and originally repaid-ranging from the Anglo-Celtic Rhymers' Club to the Italian Crepusculari . The essays consistently point beyond the late nineteenth-century and into the twentieth, as they explore the multiple beginnings-as well as the false starts-that characterize the period. All foreign language quotations are translated.
This is a study of one of theatre's quietest but most radical innovators. The playwright, poet, and essayist Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949) has been called the prodigal father of the Theatre of the Absurd. Admired by writers as diverse as Mallarme and Yeats, Artaud and Strindberg, Chekhov and Jarry, Maeterlinck was the most celebrated avant-garde playwright of his day. By 1900 he had given theatre a new set of bearings: 'static theatre', 'the theatre of the unexpressed', and 'the tragic of the everyday'. He had, according to Rilke, relocated theatre's centre of gravity, replacing action with inaction, events with the eventless, and dialogue with a semantics of silence as expressive as any of Symbolism's most sophisticated poetic constructions. The author of the supreme Symbolist play, Pelleas and Melisande, and of haunting, minimalist dramas of waiting (L'Intruse, Les Aveugles, Interieur), Maeterlinck laid the foundations for the most revolutionary theatre of the twentieth century. Opening with a chapter on Maeterlinck's Symbolist and decadent beginnings, and proceeding by way of comparative readings of Maeterlinck and contemporary Symbolist dramatic theory (with particular attention to Mallarme), Maurice Maeterlinck and the Making of Modern Theatre provides close readings of the one-act plays, and his seminal theories of static theatre and the theatre of waiting.
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