John Faulkner - Böcker

This novel of Mississippi hill country life depicts some of the more troubling and unpublicized aspects of the New Deal by tracing the fortunes of the Taylor family, sharecroppers who move to town to work for the "WP and A," the Works Progress Administration.John Faulkner, a one-time WPA project engineer, has much to satirize in this broadly comic novel. First and foremost are the Taylors: exasperating and unemployable, they are unaccountably abiding; hopelessly destitute, they place a higher premium on a new radio than on food and shelter. Faulkner also casts a sardonic eye on the town merchants, who extend credit to WPA workers as quickly as they inflate prices, and, of course, on the WPA itself, an agency that entices naive, desperate country folk with the promise of a dole—only to lay them off and then ignore them.In his foreword, Trent Watts establishes the singularity of Men Working while noting in it echoes of Tobacco Road, As I Lay Dying, and The Grapes of Wrath. Watts also identifies in John Faulkner's tone an ambivalence shared by many southerners who witnessed the changes wrought by "progress" upon their traditional way of life.

For more than six decades John Faulkner has been at the heart of British and Irish music-making, as a singer, songwriter, composer, musician, producer and film-maker. _Storm in My Heart_ is John’s highly personal account of his life in music, from his childhood in wartime London, through his years in the English folk explosion and on to life in Ireland as a significant player in the traditional music scene. In a lifetime’s journey John falls under the influence of Ewan McColl and Peggy Seeger, marries tempestuous singer Dolores Keane, and moves to County Galway where he brings his words and music to the world. He has an international number one success with ‘Lion in a Cage’, his campaigning tribute to the imprisoned Nelson Mandela, whom he subsequently meets. In this honest and witty memoir John recalls his work with Frankie Gavin, Alec Finn, John Prine and others, revealing the dark arts of the Irish music business while revelling in the freewheeling delights of a life devoted to performing. Storm in My Heart is a clear-eyed chronicle by one of Ireland’s finest artists._Storm in My Heart_ includes QR codes to a curated selection of John Faulkner’s best loved music.