Vagabond Voices – förlag

Andres, an Estonian peasant, purchases a smallholding in a marshy part of the country, which the novel is named after. He takes his young wife, and an incident with their cow sets the tone for a life of struggle in which the family grows and gradually lifts itself out of extreme poverty. They don’t only have to strive against the elements, but also against their neighbour Pearu, a wily and ruthless man. This Tolstoyan epic amongst the peasantry and the restless city (in volumes 2 – 4) tells the story of how Tsarist Estonia developed into the First Republic through the experiences of a family and in particular the partly autobiographical character of Indrek, who leaves the land to get an education at the end of this volume. This monumental work by Estonia’s greatest writer is a European classic which has for too long been neglected in the English-speaking world.

White Shroud (Balta drobule, 1958) is considered by many to be Lithuania's most important work of modernist fiction. Drawing heavily on the author's own refugee and immigrant experience, this psychological, stream-of-consciousness work tells the story of an emigre poet working as a bellhop in a large New York hotel during the mid-1950s. Via multiple narrative voices and streams, the novel moves through sharply contrasting settings and stages in the narrator's life in Lithuania before and during WWII, returning always to New York and the recent immigrant's struggle to adapt to a completely different, and indifferent, modern world.Skema uses language and allusion to destabilise, drawing the reader into an intimate, culturally and historically specific world to explore universal human themes of selfhood, alienation, creativity and cultural difference. Written from the perspective of a newcomer to an Anglophone country, the novel encourages an understanding of the complexities of immigrant life.

In the beginning the page was blank and without form, and the scribe sat in front of it, a world forming inside his head. The world grew large, spilling out of him and on to the page. The scribe shaped the world into an island. He named it Fagero, and populated it with an assortment of likely and plausibly unlikely characters, and saw that it was good for his purposes.The people of Fagero were often divided against each other but united in their appreciation of their happy little island. Then the dead bodies began to arrive: hordes of them, washing ashore with no identification and no one to claim them.The island was changing, and the small-town quirkiness becoming less restrained. And the bodies kept arriving, forcing Fagero's inhabitants to confront the unhappy truth that, even on their remote island, the world's horrors and injustices could not be ignored. This was prescient at the time of writing and is sadly relevant in 2016, the year of this English translation.A Happy Little Island is an elaborate tale told with style and intelligence.The number and variety of Sund's Dramatis Personae make Fagero the perfect stage for an encounter between common humanity and the insularity and fear of change that affect all cultures.

Levas Ciparis, the anti-hero of this masterly critique of life in the late Soviet Union, is a man alone and he desperately wants to belong. He is obstructed in this quest by his own innocence and decency, which occasionally cause him to act with absurd inflexibility. In fact, the irresolvable tension between moral probity and necessary compromise is one of the many themes of this novel: "Yes, I truly did believe that if I took up the work of the Komsomol, I would, being an honest, sufficiently pure, persistent person, most certainly be capable of changing and enriching that community." In part, the first-person narration describes the process of being disabused of that delusion. Ciparis is dead and writes letters to his estranged friend Tomas Kelertas, with whom he has something of a love-hate relationship, which became more obsessive after their estrangement. The randomness of life does not always work against Ciparis, as he recounts his experiences from sickly child in a basement flat to his final moments in Leningrad when all options fall away. The system can work in his favour - primarily through a marriage that gains him a father-in-law who is a powerful, intelligent and utterly corrupt politician at the very top of the Soviet regime in Lithuania - but ultimately there is no place for him in that society or perhaps anywhere. Memoirs of a Life Cut Short is full of ideas, doubts and insightful observations on human behaviour borne along on a helter-skelter plot.

"My sight if fades and fading faded forms reveals; ageing looks beyond its age to shrivelled centuries beyond decades." The presbyopic poet cannot focus on "the self as subject", but only on what is distant. This collection of poetry attempts to detach the writer from the obsessions that have dominated poetry for so long: sentiment, love, feelings and the autobiographical in general. To completely dispose of these would be dogmatic, and Cameron argues that some of the greatest poets are both presbyopic and myopic. "And yet he fell apart, and headstrong held to that one truth, while falling and parting for his way, his lonely way of wanting justice for the damned." This poetry is unfashionably but unashamedly political and philosophical. Cameron continues to express in another form the contempt he feels for utilitarianism in general, and in particular its crude and extreme variety, as peddled by neo-conservative politicians and their intellectual bag-carriers. At the same time, he attempts to invent new poetic forms.Inspired by some Italian poets (especially Eugenio Montale), he uses metre and some rhyme, but then breaks it up by introducting enjambement and internal rhymes as well. There are English influences too: most surprisingly Rudyard Kipling's "Mary Gloster" in part inspired "Zarathustra's Last Interview", the longest narrative poem in this collection. "We thank thee Lord for having made us free to rule the world and liberate its inner need to be so much more like us." This poetry is unashamedly anti-imperialist. "That war with wings of death does twist and crush and kill the flimsy leathered bag of flesh and bone and liquid life that spills upon the sands, requires no second telling." This poetry is unashamedly anti-war. "Only this empty moment which I spectate is in my clasp; amongst this fractured stillness, something knowable comes close and just eludes the closing fingers of my mind's grasp" This poetry is for those who have more doubts than certainties.

Klaus, the core work in this collection, is a a novella that recounts the last days of Klaus Mann's life, while referring back to the trials of the Mann family (Klaus being Thomas Mann's son) and Klaus's own autobiographical novel, Mephisto, one of his better known works partly because it was banned in West Germany for decades for its portrayal of his ex-lover Gustaf Grundgens, before being turned into an Academy Award-winning film. Massie's novella attempts to unlock Klaus's relationship with his father, his former lover and his art. Klaus is an appropriate follow-on from Surviving (Vagabond Voices, 2009) in that writing is a major theme. With his usual thoroughness disguised by concision and a masterly light touch, Massie sets about examining how human relatinoships and artistic endeavour interact, and this book also goes back to those "public" themes that dominate so much of his other works of fiction set in the twentieth century. The novella alone would make this collection worthy of note, but the short stories will also fascinate the many who know Massie's work and admire it. They come from his long writing career and have been published under one cover for the first time.Klaus and two other stories has just been written, while there are others from the nineties, the eighties and even the seventies.

With one exception, these short stories were written for this collection, and they tentatively look at different themes such as compassion, passivity and their opposites, which are not, of course, original themes, as none exist. The stories are told in different keys, and some characters appear in more than one story. The subject matter also shifts from the social to the political, and the tone becomes increasingly pessimistic.An Algerian immigrant worker in Italy invents a novel way to redistribute wealth, a female academic finds the path to success to be less difficult than she expected, a high-flyer in the financial markets perceives the glories of a selfish existence, a dying writer considers how he abandoned relationships to follow his art, a dead man rejects the tediousness of heaven, a thug is haunted by his selfish instincts, an essayist pronounces and an authors kills off his character. The plot in one short story distinguishes it from all the others: “A Dream of Justice” is the scenario for a one-state solution in Israel-Palestine, and examines how this might play out. This, it is suggested, is not just a “least worst” solution; it is also the only one in which people can go through the process of rediscovering their common humanity, albeit a process that is long and generational. The Middle East also appears in the form of guest workers and the “Secret War” in Oman.

The still surface of a sea is both menacing and calmly beautiful: a perfect metaphor for this reflective novel. The narrator’s unassuming, thoughtful voice dampens but cannot conceal the forces driving his story of love and war and the boundless suffering of innocents.The narrator is a young historian, preoccupied with a case on trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague. The prosecution argues that the Serb defendant played an active part in the incarceration and later death by arson of a Muslim family during the Balkan civil war. As witnesses are cross-examined and scrutinised by the narrator, perspectives on the accused shift between the extremes of a crazed killer and a pitiable man of peace, deranged by abnormal pressures.But we gradually learn that the present-day trial does insufficient justice to the past. While the narrator tells us through long flashbacks about his love for the possible war criminal’s daughter, we come to understand more of the agonies suffered by everyone touched by the crucial incident — this murder of an extended family. The connection between his trial reports and his recollections is inexplicable at first, but gradually open up yet another perspective on the case of his beloved Ana’s father.The love affair is moving and utterly believable: charming at first, then intense and finally ripped apart by the conflict between the past and the present. The darkness inside Ana, so young and pretty and happy, stems from a wartime incident in which she, too, was violated. The end, which cannot be revealed, is an exquisite balance between bitter realism and forgiveness: Nicol Ljubic’s book is an outstanding achievement in human as well as literary terms.

A Nazi war criminal’s son and a Holocaust survivor’s daughter decide to get married in the pleasant, middle-class conformity of sixties Argentina. When the two families come together, Becky’s blind father recognises the voice of the former SS officer, and sets off a chain of events that to varying degrees damage everyone at that meeting. Franz has to discover the real past of his distant father, who is kidnapped by Mossad agents and taken to Israel for trial. The action shifts to that country, and then to England.Allan Massie uses this drama to explore a wealth of ideas concerning such themes as guilt, retribution, identity, power, political motivation, memory and above all, as the title implies, the effects of brutal conflicts and war crimes on the following generation. Massie does not dwell on the savagery of the crimes, but forensically analyses the scar they leave in history, suggesting that, post Holocaust, we inhabit a different moral world — a world in which we can no longer ignore the enormity of the crimes of which we are capable.

Elspeth, a young Scottish actress, is selected by the elusive impresario Lord Coak for an acting career on the Caribbean Island of Barbados. She is briefly feted by the island community, but a tempest kills her lover and destroys the theatre in which she is to star. She is obliged to take on a supposedly temporary and ambiguous role at Lord Coak's plantation home. The closed environment of the estate is stifling, but it institutionalises her and gives her a degree of status. Dolan's plot takes some unexpected twists, but Elspeth is never free from the constrictions of working for an enterprise whose founding principle is racism. An oppressive sense of eventlessness pervades. Lord Coak's grand plan to modernise the estate cannot be implemented without social reform, but the resulting suspension of lives could also be seen as the human condition: our dreams can never be realised. Another catastrophic event breaks the spell and divides the community, many of whom leave in search of a more enlightened society and in so doing become a mythical people. However Elspeth and the reader remain locked into Lord Coak's estate, which starts rapidly to decay.

Elspeth Baillie, a young Scottish actress, is chosen by enigmatic impresario Lord Coak for an acting career on the Island of Barbados. At first feted by the colonial gentry, her life in the Caribbean does not go according to plan. Elspeth is obliged to take on a temporary and ambiguous role in the closed world of Coak’s remote sugar plantation. Dolan’s plot is full of unexpected twists as Elspeth becomes ever more a prisoner of a venture whose founding principle is white supremacy. Captain Shaw, the factor, sets about building a New Caledonia that brings Elspeth and her compatriots nothing but a sense of timelessness and loss. A series of catastrophic events and rash historical mistakes finally breaks the cycle.Elspeth is left trying to make sense of her own life and youthful ambitions among a shipwrecked people dreaming of home. Linguistically rich and narratively hypnotic, Dolan’s novel asks what makes a Nation. Bloodlines? Language? History? Or some ideal for the future? Elspeth’s hopes for a new world, full of drama and passion, collides with the all too real drama and elusive loves of colonial life.

This is a collection of eleven short stories whose common theme is the heroism of our flawed lives. It explores the arduousness of people’s lives and covers such diverse subjects as human solidarity, generational change, single parenthood, domestic violence, the tragic complexity of revolution, police brutality, artistic hubris, and the limitations of rationalism.In “The Hat”, a polish Jew on the run in Eastern Europe goes down to a town in search for food and, noticing the large number of German soldiers on patrol, hides himself in a funeral procession. But he stands out as the only mourner without a hat. As he walks along, another man places his hat on the fugitive’s head: an example of man’s humanity to man.In “Living with the Polish Count”, the young Soviet Republic struggles to keep foreign and reactionary forces at bay and in so doing loses the morality that initially inspired them.In “The Selfish Geneticist”, lunch in a smart restaurant exposes the rift between two academics, both dogmatic and contemptuous of others, but one more strictly rational and the other more influenced by his human emotions.

Like The Death of Men, one of Massie's great novels, Surviving is set in contemporary Rome. The main characters, Belinda (the heroine of the Massie's second novel, The Last Peacock), Kate, an author who specialises in studies of the criminal mind, and Tom Durward, a scriptwriter, attend an English-speaking group of Alcoholics Anonymous. All have pasts to cause embarrassment or shame. Tom sees no future for himself and still gets nervous "come Martini time". Belinda embarks on a love-affair that cannot last. Kate ventures onto more dangerous ground by inviting her latest case-study, a young Londoner acquitted of a racist murder, to stay with her. There is another murder, but this is not a murder mystery. What matters is the responses of the characters to the catastrophe. The atmosphere of Rome is lovingly evoked. The dialogue, in which the characters reveal themselves or seek to avoid doing so, is sharp and edgy. Allan Massie dissects this group of ex-pats in order to say something about our inability to know, still less to understand, the actions of our fellow human beings, even when relationships are so intense.It is also, therefore, impossible or at least difficult to make informed moral judgements of others. This is an intelligent book that examines human nature with a deft and light touch.

“The separateness of lives once joined appalled him, like the sun dipping behind a black cloud …”How well do we know other people — even when we all belong to a small expat community in a foreign capital? Allan Massie’s edgy and disturbing study of English-speaking alcoholics living in Rome examines this great literary theme — and does much more besides. A knife keeps all bodies at a distance, unless and until …This is a story of corrupting power (a common theme in Massie’s work), the random nature of violence and indeed most other things, and, of course, the emotional effort that we, and particularly alcoholics, have to put into just surviving. In this, his latest of many novels, the well-known Scottish writer with his own experience of living in Rome in the seventies, uses all his considerable literary skills to examine yet another theme: literature itself. Books circulate in the narrative as do literary pretensions, which have met with varying degrees of failure. The now sober Tom Durward, who achieved a degree of success as a scriptwriter while drowning himself in booze and oblivion, reflects on writing:“What a sad business … excavation really … He’s a murderer, yes? – a killer, and you’ve invited him here, actually to stay with you in your apartment, and you say you’re not mad. My poor sweet, you’re raving.”The broken people who inhabit this stark and inventive novel live their intense and meaningful relationships a few steps removed from the noise and bustle of the host community that surrounds them — a sympathetically portrayed backdrop whose “noises off” remind the reader of a steadier, less isolated world beyond the central characters whose obsessions we follow through a vibrant, fast-paced and compelling dialogue. The words and thoughts of these characters in most cases reveal not so much self-interest as the total isolation of the human self, but the author’s acute analysis is mitigated by moments of tenderness and humour.

On 16 October 1943, the German army tore 1,056 Jewish Italians from their homes, from their lives and loves, from their routine and familiar objects, and from their home city of Rome. The author of this book was not amongst them, because his father had prepared their flight. He was a Jewish boy of seven on the run and moving from house to house. He would never again see Rachel, the little girl who sat next to him at school. He was a "lucky" one, but as his story unfolds, it becomes clear just how harsh, lonely and terrifying that relative "luck" turned out to be. It took over sixty years for Renzo Modiano, a successful novelist, to write about this disturbing childhood experience. His school report issued in 1943, the twenty-first year of the short-lived "Fascist Era", contains the contemptible bureaucratic classification "of Jewish race" immediately after his name. The enormity of this crime is known to us, but the day-to-day horrors and fears of being on the run from absurd and arbitrary legislation and diktat and also the kindness and solidarity shown by exceptional individuals are perhaps less known.Modiano's tale adds another dimension to Europe's most shameful moment, but it is also a call for us to remember and learn from history.

When the fascist government collapses in Italy, Renzo Modiano is almost seven years old. The war is over, his mother tells him. At last, thinks Renzo, they will get their radio back.On 10 September 1943 the dining table is crowded as ever, but the family eat in silence. When the meal is finished Renzo’s father speaks:“Children, we have to leave the flat now. We won’t be able to stay together. We must leave immediately because the Germans are entering Rome and they’re taking the Jews.”Less than two hours later, the Modianos are fleeing the capital, having abandoned their dirty dishes on the tablecloth.Renzo’s story is a neglected fragment of the Holocaust. He tells of the Jews who evaded the horrors of death camps and gas chambers, and had to strive day in, day out for survival in Nazi-occupied Italy. It is the story of a young boy on the run, gradually learning the unthinkable reality of those words, “They’re taking the Jews.”But the story is not without glimpses of hope and joy. In rural Italy a communal meal provides a lesson in humanity he never forgets; the bravery and sacrifices of family, friends and strangers affect him in profound ways. Told with spontaneity and charming honesty, this vivid memoir offers a different perspective on the Jewish plight, showing us just how perceptive naive eyes can be.

Thumbnails is a collection of short stories or “micrograms” in which Gregory Norminton once again experiments with form, using his stylish and witty prose to examine the nooks and crannies of our distracted lives. Witty and thought-provoking, the stories are brief but clear sketches very different people and places in very different times.Taken as a whole, the collection is an exercise in storytelling, proving that narrative can be found in the most unlikely packages. Sexual love flourishes briefly in a retirement home; British soldiers in eighteenth-century America give a very dubious gift to the natives; a Portuguese naturalist loses his life’s work to Napoleon; a grief-stricken father searches the Australian outback for signs of an extinct lizard; Mephistopheles answers his critics and explains the real origins of Shakespeare’s Hamlet; a roguish life is reduced to endnotes in a biography; an Anglo-Saxon bard despairs of his vocation — these are just a few of the premises that run through the book. Myth, social comedy, tragedy and speculative fiction follow one another in tales that vary widely in form and content — united by the task of conveying a complete narrative with the greatest possible economy.

A twelve-year-old schoolchild was arrested at his school and questioned by an anti-terrorist police squad, because he was organising a picket of the offices of his member of parliament, who happened to be the current prime minister of Great Britain. He was protesting against the closure of a youth club. Starting with this absurd example of over-zealous anti-terrorist legislation, Kerr, who has a nose for both the absurd and the shocking, develops his concerning arguments about the gradual erosion of our human rights, particularly in Great Britain and the United States. He backs up his arguments with plenty of examples, including legislation introduced under the American presidents since Reagan, including Barack Obama. He also examines the various philosophical movements that have either enhanced or undermined human rights, and he never loses sight of the social and political forces in play. This is essential reading for anyone interested in these disturbing developments in the fundamental law of our countries.

A twelve-year-old schoolchild was arrested at his school and questioned by an antiterrorist police squad, because he was organising a picket of the offices of his member of parliament, who happened to be the current prime minister of Great Britain. He was protesting against the closure of a youth club. Starting with this absurd example of overzealous antiterrorist legislation, Kerr, who has a nose for both the absurd and the shocking, develops his concerning arguments about the gradual erosion of our human rights, particularly in Great Britain and the United States.He backs up his arguments with plenty of examples, including legislation introduced under the American presidents since Reagan, including Barack Obama. He also examines the various philosophical movements that have either enhanced or undermined human rights, and he never loses sight of the social and political forces in play.This is essential reading for anyone interested in these disturbing developments in the fundamental law of our countries.

William Templeton is awoken from his dead life as an alcoholic by the murder of his mother. He has no memory of when he last visited her, and no sense of what their relationship might have been. He feels the need to reacquaint himself with the world: he stops drinking and embarks upon the long convalescence that is the story of this book. It is the story of one man’s struggle against alcoholism. It is witty and it is painful. It is a story of wasted lives, flawed relationships, and the horrors of old age, but through it all, humour and hope rebalance the drudge and misery.Who is William Templeton?He was once a son and a brother, a respected colleague and renowned peacekeeper. He became a husband and then a father. He was a keen birdwatcher.Gradually, he was erased by drink.William Templeton has become Willy, shacked up with Mrs McLehose, his malevolent landlady. Together they live in self-imposed banishment, bound together by their endless thirst and shrunken prospects. But when his mother is brutally murdered, dim fragments of William Templeton re-emerge.Fleeing McLehose’s squalor, he takes a dead end job guarding an abandoned farm in deepest Lanarkshire. In even greater exile, Templeton realises that before he can heal first he must dry out.Peter Gilmour’s portrait of the convalescent is immersive and unflinching. As Tempelton stumbles from one circumstance to the next, submitting to fate or fortune, we are spared few of his thoughts. The world around him is scrutinised, each relationship, whether intimate or fleeting, dissected. While William deconstructs, we begin, gently and often quite beautifully, to piece him together. From the blankness, a genuine, enduring character is revealed.

The Lost Art of Losing is a collection of aphorisms by award-winning novelist Gregory Norminton. By turns comic and despairing, jubilant and wry, they present, through fragments, a picture of the mind — and of troubling times.Gregory Norminton transforms the aphorism into something more accessible and personal. Ultimately he uses aphorisms to question everything — including the aphorism itself: "Incessantly we ask the meaning of life to protect us from hearing the perfectly obvious answer." In The Lost Art of Losing, the author analyses the process and the hubris of literary invention, and is brutal in revealing its limitations: "No revelation sparkles brighter than the one scribbled down from sleep, nor looks duller when revisited by the light of day. What we dream is the image of meaning. The object eludes."These aphorisms explore the complex relationship between the self and wider society: "To fear the ill-opinion of others is grossly to overestimate the space we take up in their imagination." Norminton understands that an aphorism relies on the elegance of its thought: "Some birds beat the air as if it were a foe meaning to drag them down. Others seem only to flap their wings in order to keep us from getting suspicious."

A middle-aged judge driven by curiosity and the intellectual challenge of his work, a nervous and neurotic young historian willing to run all manner of risks to uncover the state crimes of the forties, a nerdy, well-educated and good-natured young journalist motivated principally by the desire to enjoy life and not dwell on the miseries of the past, a KGB general once responsible for some of the purges and now an Islamist radical, an inept, capricious and delightfully self-aware Jewish actor, and an Islamic cleric loyal to the Soviet Union, whose murder has so many repercussions, all these carefully constructed characters could be found in any society but Alessandro Barbero has brought them to life in one of the most elusive, unstable and neglected historical realities: Gorbachev’s Russia. And this proves to be fertile ground for Barbero, one that generates endless themes and the opportunity to express his love for Russian literature and culture. Barbero used his skills as a historian to study the reality of that society through its newspapers and journals, and his skills as a novelist to weave a complex plot — a tale of two cities: Moscow and Baku. And throughout, the narrative voice – perhaps the greatest protagonist of them all — represents not the author’s views but those of the Russian public as they emerged from one dismal reality and hurtled unknowingly towards another.First there is the picture of a society on the cusp of unnerving change, one in which it has become possible to say what previously could scarcely even be thought. Then there is the richness of the detail. … Here rooms, journeys, weather, clothes, meals, landscape, tastes, smells, trains, the Moscow underground, the mustiness of archives are all vividly presented. The reader inhabits the world the author has conjured up. Finally, and best of all, there is the talk. Russians are great talkers and the novel floats on a sea of wonderfully varied, expressive and tremendous speech. The characters reveal themselves in their words, spoken or merely thought. (For in a good novel thought is a form of speech when presented dramatically, as it is here.)

Ermanno Cavazzoni admits that his books push the novel to its very limits — “like outpourings of the maniacal”, he says. “That’s how they come to me, you must understand.”Here in The Nocturnal Library, we have the maniacal that we all know from our own dreams: a dreamer’s lack of control and a dreamer’s dogged acceptance of the absurd. Here we have the dream as paranoia and the vain struggle to understand the rules that govern life. Here we have the dream as a bizarre library in which the fragility of human knowledge is emphasised again and again.Jerome, who perhaps represents the archetypal man of learning, is bound up in his world of books and suffers from crippling insomnia. He has to study for an exam, and his troubles are compounded by bad toothache, or at least these are the dominating themes of his dream. The reality of wakefulness only appears in the last paragraph of the last chapter.But this is not primarily a book about dreams. Amongst other things, it is a book about the arrogance and illogicality of power and bureaucracy, and the relationship between the world of intellectual order and the chaos of nature, dominated as it is by mutual disregard and the latter’s inevitable victory in the long term.And above all, this is a book in which fantasy reigns for its own sake and goes wherever the author’s creative impulse takes it. That is how his novels come to him, and you have to understand that! If you do, you will enjoy this exotic book.

This first and only work of non-fiction by the author of two novels, two collections of short stories and a collection of poetry, has an accessible and conversational tone, which perhaps disguises its enormous ambition. It not only deals with the origins of language to argue its centrality to humanity and the naturalness of bilingualism and multilingualism, but examines how writing and printing built on that centrality to develop the "social mind" - the sum of knowledge within any given society. More recent technological changes have undermined the importance of language in society, and could possibly damage psychological health and society at large. All the arguments are couched in a sceptical approach, and the author principally wants to initiate a debate rather than give a defining analysis of a complex subject. Each chapter is introduced by a short story that illustrates the argument of that chapter.

“This is a book about language and above all about the value and essentiality of language in our lives. It might therefore be called a book on the “ecology” of language, because human language is in danger of being permanently damaged by the way modern technology has developed over the last century, and this will affect not only our competence in organising ourselves socially and politically, but also our inner selves. In other words, the process of homogenisation we call globalisation is not only damaging our external environment, but our internal one as well. At the same time, we are collectively accumulating an unprecedented mass of scientific and technological knowledge, which in a way we can be proud of, but only if individually and socially we retain our skills to deal with it. I believe the maintenance of our linguistic skills is essential to this task, and therefore the linguistic problem takes its place alongside all the other problems we face – problems with which any reasonably informed person is already fully acquainted.” — “Introduction” (ix)“A deeply reflective, extraordinarily wide-ranging meditation on the nature of language, infused in its every phrase by a passionate humanism.” — Terry Eagleton

Long description: This novel is based on the life of Linnaeus, the eighteenth-century, Swedish enlightenment figure famous for his taxonomy or scientific classification still used in biology. It principally concerns the different ways Linnaeus and his gardener interpret the world around them. The gardener perceives plants for what they are in themselves and Linnaeus for what they are in relation to other things. They never understand each other and the dialogues are wonderfully inconclusive.

A work in three parts, Things Written starts with aphorisms in "How Not to Be a Ruminant", shifts to essays in "Weights and Counterweights", and concludes with poetry in "By the Metre". Some arguments appear in more than one section, and include nationalism, class, free will, religion, literature and the arts, but the theme of human relationships runs through the entire book, and is most closely examined with reference to the ideas of Martin Buber in a long essay entitled "Cats and Dogs, and Other Things We Cannot Understand". The back cover carries the following: "WARNING: This is a non-genre product and end-users may encounter forms and ideas to which they are allergic. Vagabond Voices Publishing Ltd, its board of directors, shareholders, parent company and/or subsidiaries advise end-users that they read this book entirely at their own risk."

Klaus is a novella that recounts the last days of Klaus Mann's life, while referring back to the trials of the Mann family (Klaus being Thomas Mann's son) and Klaus's own autobiographical novel, Mephisto, one of his better known works partly because it was banned in West Germany for decades. This unlocks his relationship with both his father and his former lover, Gustaf, who was a communist before collaborating with the Nazi regime and becoming one of its most celebrated actors. On his return to Germany after the war, Klaus was outraged to see that Gustaf had now switched seamlessly to the post-war regime, and was once more the darling of the theatre world. Klaus, who had been isolated as both a homosexual and an anti-fascist, felt that Germans or rather those Germans in prominent positions were refusing to acknowledge their culpability. His isolation was now complete.

Thomas Mitchell's essays on how to live well were completed in 1913, and reflect a clear mind and a good education, but also confidence about the world and society that were about to be shattered. No doubt some thoughts he expressed would have been impossible to reaffirm five years later. As we commemorate the centenary of terrible and unprecedented conflict, his intelligent voice from the past gives us an insight into how people thought before it and what was lost. This does not mean that Mitchell's ideas are not also an individual's, but it is now the combination of freshness and distance in this previously unpublished prose that makes it so compelling. His style also says much about the education system in Scotland and rural Aberdeenshire in particular, and his background was very similar to that of Lewis Grassic Gibbon. Though they undoubtedly had different politics, they would both have agreed on the importance of society.