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Beckett’s relationship with British theatre is complex and underexplored, yet his impact has been immense. Uniquely placing performance history at the centre of its analysis, this volume examines Samuel Beckett’s drama as it has been staged in Great Britain, bringing to light a wide range of untold histories and in turn illuminating six decades of drama in Britain.
Staging Samuel Beckett in Great Britain by Trish McTighe and David Tucker
Ranging from studies of the first English tour of Waiting for Godot in 1955 to Talawa’s 2012 all-black co-production of the same play, Staging Samuel Beckett in Great Britain excavates a host of archival resources in order to historicize how Beckett’s drama has interacted with specific theatres, directors and theatre cultures in the UK. It traces production histories of plays such as Krapp’s Last Tape; presents Beckett’s working relationships with the Royal Court, Riverside and West Yorkshire Playhouse, as well as with directors such as Peter Hall; looks at the history of Beckett’s drama in Scotland and how the plays have been staged in London’s West End. Production analyses are mapped onto political, economic and cultural contexts of Great Britain so that Beckett’s drama resonates in new ways, through theatre practice, against the complex contexts of Great Britain’s regions.
With contributions from experts in the fields of both Beckett studies and UK drama, including S.E. Gontarski, David Pattie, Mark Taylor-Batty and Sos Eltis, the volume offers an exceptional and unique understanding of Beckett’s reception on the UK stage and the impact of his drama within UK theatre practices. Together with its sister volume, Staging Samuel Beckett in Ireland and Northern Ireland it will prove a terrific resource for students, scholars and theatre practitioners.
Staging Beckett in Ireland and Northern Ireland by Trish McTighe and David Tucker
This is the first full-length study to focus on Samuel Beckett’s drama as it has been staged in Ireland and Northern Ireland.
While Beckett’s relationship with his native land was a complex one, the importance of his drama as a creative force both historically and in contemporary practice in those regions cannot be underestimated. The volume brings to light unexamined and little-known productions, for example Beckett’s drama in the Irish language, Druid Theatre Company’s productions, and Beckett at Dublin’s Focus Theatre, as well as previously unpublished archival materials. Leading scholars, such as Anna McMullan and Anthony Roche, and renowned dramatic interpreters of Beckett’s work, such as Barry McGovern, explore Beckett’s drama within the context of Irish creative theatrical practice and heritage, and point towards the theatrical and performance legacies that follow in its wake.
Production analyses are mapped on to the political, economic and cultural contexts of Ireland and the North so that readers are invited to experience Beckett’s drama as resonating in new ways, through theatre practice, against the complex and connected histories of these lands.
David Tucker is a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Sussex and currently teaches at the University of Oxford, UK. He is the editor of British Social Realism in the Arts since 1940 (Palgrave, 2011).
Trish McTighe is Lecturer in Theatre at the University of Birmingham. Previously, she lectured at Queen’s University, Belfast and was an AHRC post-doctoral researcher on the Staging Beckett Project at the University of Reading (2012-2015).
Staging Beckett in Great Britain
Editors: David Tucker, Trish McTighe
Published: 19-10-2017
Format: Paperback
Edition: 1st
Extent: 288
ISBN: 9781474240161
Imprint: Methuen Drama
Bloomsbury Publishing
Staging Beckett in Ireland and Northern Ireland
Volume editor: Trish McTighe, David Tucker
Published: 19-10-2017
Format: Paperback
Edition: 1st
Extent: 288
ISBN: 9781474240543
Imprint: Methuen Drama
Bloomsbury Publishing
More titles on Beckett to be published soon:
∗ The Making of Samuel Beckett’s ‘Malone Dies’/’Malone meurt’ by: Dirk Van Hulle, Pim Verhulst
∗ Beckett’s Creatures. Art of Failure after the Holocaust by: Joseph Anderton
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Jorge Luis Borges was one of those very rare creators who changed the face of an art form—in his case, the short story. His work has been paid the ultimate honor of being appropriated and imitated by innumerable writers on every continent of the world.
The seventeen brief masterpieces of FICCIONES explode the boundaries of genre, offering up labyrinthine libraries, a fictional encyclopedia entry that spawns an entire world, a review of a nonexistent writer’s attempt to re-create Don Quixote word for word, a man with the disabling inability to forget anything he has ever experienced, and other metaphysical puzzles.
But the true measure of Borges’s greatness lies in the fact that his fictions—elaborately paradoxical, postmodern, and intellectually delicious as they are—managed to return the short story to the realm of the fabulous and the uncanny from which, as parable and fairy tale, it originally came.
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) was an Argentine poet, essayist, and author of short stories. His most notable works as a key literary Spanish-language figure of the twentieth century include Ficciones (Fictions) and El Aleph (The Aleph). He received a BA from the College of Geneva. He was also appointed the director of the National Public Library and professor of English literature at the University of Buenos Aries in 1955. During his lifetime, Borges received the first Prix International Formentor Prize which he shared alongside Samuel Beckett in 1961. He also received the Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society in 1971.
Ficciones
By Jorge Luis Borges
Introduction by John Sturrock
Part of Everyman’s Library Contemporary Classics Series
Category: Literary Fiction | Fiction Classics
Hardcover
(1993)- 192 Pages
ISBN 9780679422990
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)
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Lammersneeuw
Waarom moet hij die de slagorde van leugens
durft te tarten uw woede velen? Behoorlijk
grof van korrel is uw gevoel voor realiteit,
mijnheer. Ik stel slechts in vraag en misdoe
niets. Wist u dat in Schotland sneeuw in april
lambing snow wordt genoemd? Te wedden
durf ik van niet. Zie je nou wel? Zinnig slot.
Bert Bevers
Bert Bevers is a poet and writer who lives and works in Antwerp (Be)
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# Rasheed Araeen, Paki Bastard (Portrait of an Artist as a Black Person), 1977, courtesy the artist
The Van Abbemuseum will stage Rasheed Araeen: A Retrospective, the first comprehensive survey of the artist. The exhibition, spanning 60 years of work, presents a body of work that has had a profound influence on generations of artists, writers and thinkers.
Rasheed Araeen: A Retrospective is structured across five chapters: from his early experiments in painting in Karachi in the 1950s and early 60s, his pioneering minimalist sculptures carried out after his arrival in London in 1964, key pieces from the 70s and 80s following Araeen’s political awakening, his nine panel cruciform works from the 80s and 90s and a selection of his new geometric paintings and wall structures. Alongside this, material relating to Araeen’s writing, editorial and curatorial projects will be presented as part of an expanded artistic practice that in its scope and ambition continues to challenge the formal, ideological and political assumptions of Eurocentric modernism.
Publication:A monograph, edited by Nick Aikens and published by JRP Ringier in collaboration with Van Abbemuseum, MAMCO, BALTIC and Garage includes new essays by Aikens, Kate Fowle, Courtney Martin, Michael Newman, Gene Ray, Dominic Rhatz, John Roberts, Marcus du Sautoy, Zoe Sutherland and Kaelen Wilson-Goldie and an extensive conversation between Aikens and Araeen.
# Rasheed Araeen, The Reading Room, 2017, steel and glass tables, wooden stools, and copies of Third Text journal, courtesy the artist
Following the Van Abbemuseum Rasheed Araeen: A Retrospective will travel to MAMCO, Geneva, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead and Garage Centre for Contemporary Art, Moscow.
The exhibition is supported by Mondriaan Fund and Stichting Promotors van het Van Abbemuseum. The publication is generously supported by Aicon Gallery, New York, Grosvenor Gallery, London and Rossi Rossi, Hong Kong
exhibition
Rasheed Araeen
A Retrospective
02/12/2017 – 25/03/2018
spanning 60 years’ work
Curators: Nick Aikens
van abbemuseum eindhoven
# van abbemuseum eindhoven web
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Zelfportret met schijnbeeld
Vannacht was ik een Bolognezer. Een ieder
die mij op de Piazza Verdi passeerde deelde
ik zebravinkjes uit, ontelbare zebravinkjes.
Wat een geluid maken die vogeltjes. Het lijkt
het hardste marmer te kunnen doordringen.
Uit alle ramen van de universiteit staken
gezichten met vraagtekens. Ik weende niet.
Bert Bevers
Bert Bevers is a poet and writer who lives and works in Antwerp (Be)
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When I founded the Cabaret Voltaire, I was sure that there must be a few young people in Switzerland who like me were interested not only in enjoying their independence but also in giving proof of it.
I went to Herr Ephraim, the owner of the Meierei, and said, “Herr Ephraim, please let me have your room. I want to start a night-club.” Herr Ephraim agreed and gave me the room. And I went to some people I knew and said, “Please give me a picture, or a drawing, or an engraving. I should like to put on an exhibition in my night-club.” I went to the friendly Zürich press and said, “Put in some announcements. There is going to be an international cabaret. We shall do great things.” And they gave me pictures and they put in my annoucements. So on 5th February we had a cabaret. Mademoiselle Hennings and Mademoiselle Leconte sang French and Danish chansons. Herr Tristan Tzara recited Rumanian poetry. A balalaika orchestra played delightful folk-songs and dances.
I received much support and encouragement from Herr M. Slodki, who designed the poster, and from Herr Hans Arp, who supplied some Picassos, as well as works of his own, and obtained for me pictures by his friends O. van Rees and Artur Segall. Much support also from Messrs. Tristan Tzara, Marcel Janco and Max Oppenheimer, who readily agreed to take part in the cabaret.
We organized a Russian evening and, a little later, a French one (works by Apollinaire, Max Jacob, André Salmon, A. Jarry, Laforgue and Rimbaud). On 26th February Richard Huelsenbeck arrived from Berlin and on 30th March we performed some stupendous Negro music (toujours avec la grosse caisse: boum boum boum boum – drabatja mo gere drabatja mo bonooooooooo -). Monsieur Laban was present at the performance and was very enthusiastic. Herr Tristan Tzara was the initiator of a performance by Messrs. Tzara, Huelsenbeck and Janco (the first in Zürich and in the world) of simultaneist verse by Messrs. Henri Barzun and Fernand Divoire, as well as a poème simultané of his own composition, which is reproduced on pages six and seven.
The persent booklet is published by us with the support of our friends in France, Italy and Russia. It is intended to present to the Public the activities and interests of the Cabaret Voltaire, which has as its sole purpose to draw attention, across the barriers of war and nationalism, to the few independent spirits who live for other ideals. The next objective of the artists who are assembled here is the publication of a revue internationale. La revue paraîtra à Zurich et portera le nom “Dada” (“Dada”). Dada Dada Dada Dada.
Zürich, 15th May 1916
Hugo Ball
(1886-1927)
From Cabaret Voltaire – Issue 1
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More Than Life: Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin on Art is the first book to trace the philosophical relation between Georg Simmel and his one-time student Walter Benjamin, two of the most influential German thinkers of the twentieth century.
Reading Simmel’s work, particularly his essays on Michelangelo, Rembrandt, and Rodin, alongside Benjamin’s concept of Unscheinbarkeit (inconspicuousness) and his writings on Charlie Chaplin, More Than Life demonstrates that both Simmel and Benjamin conceive of art as the creation of something entirely new rather than as a mimetic reproduction of a given. The two thinkers diverge in that Simmel emphasizes the presence of a continuous movement of life, whereas Benjamin highlights the priority of discontinuous, interruptive moments.
With the aim of further elucidating Simmel and Benjamin’s ideas on art, Stéphane Symons presents a number of in-depth analyses of specific artworks that were not discussed by these authors. Through an insightful examination of both the conceptual affinities and the philosophical differences between Simmel and Benjamin , Symons reconstructs a crucial episode in twentieth-century debates on art and aesthetics.
Stéphane Symons is an associate professor at the Institute of Philosophy, KU Leuven, in Leuven, Belgium.
Contributors:
Stéphane Symons (Author)
More Than Life.
Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin on Art
Paper Text – $34.95
ISBN 978-0-8101-3577-2
Publication Date:
September 2017
Page Count: 240 pages
Northwestern University Press
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For fans of Donna Tartt and Megan Abbott, a novel about a woman whose family and identity are threatened by the secrets of her past, from the New York Times bestselling author of She’s Not There
On a warm August night in 1980, six college students sneak into the dilapidated ruins of Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary, looking for a thrill. With a pianist, a painter and a teacher among them, the friends are full of potential. But it’s not long before they realize they are locked in—and not alone. When the friends get lost and separated, the terrifying night ends in tragedy, and the unexpected, far-reaching consequences reverberate through the survivors’ lives. As they go their separate ways, trying to move on, it becomes clear that their dark night in the prison has changed them all. Decades later, new evidence is found, and the dogged detective investigating the cold case charges one of them—celebrity chef Jon Casey— with murder. Only Casey’s old friend Judith Carrigan can testify to his innocence.
But Judith is protecting long-held secrets of her own – secrets that, if brought to light, could destroy her career as a travel writer and tear her away from her fireman husband and teenage son. If she chooses to help Casey, she risks losing the life she has fought to build and the woman she has struggled to become. In any life that contains a “before” and an “after,” how is it possible to live one life, not two?
Weaving deftly between 1980 and the present day, and told in an unforgettable voice, Long Black Veil is an intensely atmospheric thriller that explores the meaning of identity, loyalty, and love. Readers will hail this as Boylan’s triumphant return to fiction.
Jennifer Finney Boylan is Professor of English at Colby College and the author of the bestseller She’s Not There, as well as the acclaimed novels The Planets and Getting In. A three-time guest of The Oprah Winfrey Show, she has also appeared on Larry King Live, Today, and 48 Hours, and has played herself on ABC’s All My Children. She lives in Belgrade Lakes, Maine.
“Jennifer FinneyBoylan’s atmospheric thriller Long Black Veil follows a travel writer tangled up in a cold case that has come back to haunt her decades later.” Time magazine, Pick of the Month
Long Black Veil
A Novel
By Jennifer Finney Boylan
Category: Suspense & Thriller
Paperback
Publ. Penquin Random House
Jan 09, 2018 | 320 Pages
Hardcover
Apr 11, 2017 | 304 Pages
new books
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The Board of Trustees of the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade has chosen the Canadian author, essayist and poet Margaret Atwood to be the recipient of this year’s Peace Prize.
The award ceremony will take place on Sunday, October 15, 2017, the final day of the Frankfurt Book Fair, at the Church of St. Paul in Frankfurt am Main. The ceremony will be broadcast live on German public television. The Peace Prize has been awarded since 1950 and is endowed with a sum of €25,000.
In her wide range of novels, essays and volumes of poetry, Canadian author Margaret Atwood has demonstrated a keen political intuition and a deeply perceptive ability to detect dangerous and underlying developments and tendencies.
Margaret Eleanor Atwood was born in Ottawa on November 18, 1939 and spent the first part of her childhood in the forests of northern Quebec, where her father conducted research as an entomologist. During this time, she and her older brother and younger sister were taught at home by their mother. In 1946, when her father took up a position at the University of Toronto, Atwood began attending regular school for the first time. From 1957 to 1962, she studied English and literature at universities in Toronto and Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1963, she got her professional life underway at a market research company, and in 1964, she began working as a professor of literature at various universities.
Atwood started publishing her first poems (see »The Circle Game«) in the early 1960s in what she referred to as a »private printing press«. She then continued to make an increasingly respected name for herself throughout the 1970s with a number of further volumes of poetry. It was at this time in her career that she began to focus on writing novels. Today, she is considered the most important and most successful author in Canada. Her work, which comprises novels, short stories, essays, poetry, stage plays, screenplays and children’s books, has been translated into more than 30 languages.
Atwood achieved far-reaching national and international recognition with the publication of her first work of literary criticism, »Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature« (1972), in which she examined the role of Canadian literature and literary history with tremendous wit and concision. She followed that up with her first two novels, »The Edible Woman« (1969) and »Surfacing« (1972), in which she explored the perception of women’s role in modern Canada.
In 1985, Atwood published »The Handmaid’s Tale«, a dystopian novel in the tradition of George Orwell. The novel depicts a totalitarian society in which women are meticulously oppressed and used as birth machines. By taking up certain social tendencies of her day and following their logic to its latent conclusion, Atwood was able to create a novel of timeless relevance. The Handmaid’s Tale brought her to the peak of her already impressive literary career, and in 1989, German director Volker Schlöndorff even directed a film version. Today, precisely due to its enduring topicality, the novel is back on bestseller lists and experiencing a renaissance in American society under Donald Trump.
After »Cat’s Eye« (1988), which explores the childhood and friendship of two women in post-war Canada, and »The Robber Bride« (1993), in which she examines women’s darker side, Atwood published »Alias Grace« (1996), a historical fiction about a mysterious girl sentenced to life in prison for murder in the mid 19th century. After »The Blind Assassin« (2000), a broad portrait of Canadian society in the 20th century that garnered her the Booker Prize for Fiction, she shifted her focus to themes of ecological devastation and dangerous social tendencies in the post-apocalyptic worlds of her end-of-times trilogy »Oryx und Crake« (2003), »The Year of the Flood« (2009) and »MaddAddam« (2013). Known today for being an author and an environmental activist, Atwood coined the term »speculative fiction« to describe her work, although nothing she describes in her novels is pure invention. She takes a similar approach in her socially critical work »Payback. Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth« (2008), a collection of lectures in which she examines the preconditions and consequences of the global financial crisis. Drawing on facts from cultural history, literature and linguistics, she spotlights the concept of economic and moral guilt found in the economic disaster.
In the past several years, Atwood had rounded out her literary oeuvre with a number of works, including »Scribbler Moon«, a novel that will be published no sooner than 2114 as part of the Future Library Project. She also published »The Tent« (2006) and »Stone Mattress« (2014), as well as the novels »The Heart Goes Last« (2015) and »Hag-Seed« (2016). In addition to writing, Atwood continues to be active both politically and socially. In Germany, the latest product of her efforts is a volume of collected essays translated into German and set for publication in November 2017; »Aus Neugier und Leidenschaft« presents the cosmos of Margaret Atwood, including reviews, travel reports, writings on ecological themes and short stories. In May 2017, Atwood joined Salman Rushdie at the head of a campaign to garner support and higher levels of attention for authors suffering persecution and censorship. The campaign involves more than 200 writers and artists belonging to PEN International.
Margaret Atwood lives in Toronto with her second husband, the writer Graeme Gibson. Toronto is also the home of the Margaret Atwood Society, an organization dedicated to international scholarship and discourse on her work, for which she has received several honorary doctor titles.
# More info on website ‘Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels’
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Belijdenis
Je moet niets verbranden. Zelfs geen mieren
als je denkt dat die een oprukkend leger zijn.
Dat heb ik wel gebiecht ja, dat heb ik toen wel
gebiecht. Ego te absolvo a peccatis tuis in nomine
Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti. Amen. Amen.
Ach, die 10 Ave Maria’s en 5 Paternosters
waarmee ik mijn zieltje destijds schoon waste.
Het blonk daarna weer als een ansjovisbuikje.
Nooit echt heb ik me onderworpen aan de sluier
van de dwang. Onrustige biechtelingen waren
er genoeg hoor, bang mokkend in hun eigen
schaduw. Vierduizend mijl dik waren voor hen
de muren van de hel. Zij leerden de beschroomde
tere tinten van berouw nooit kennen. Bleven
verhard in wrede gedachten, grauw als gummi.
Bert Bevers
Eerder verschenen in Digther, Diksmuide, november 2013
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Gedichten
Zonder titel
1
Deze hiërarchie van zichtbaarheid
doemt als een spiegel op uit diepte.
Geen tijd voor afleidingsmanoeuvres:
wie haar kennen moet kent haar.
2
Tot de hoogste macht verheven lijkt
dit vloeien tussen droom en stroom.
De Rijn verwijt niemand ooit iets.
Geen vijand kent water, is de regel.
Bert Bevers
Geschreven voor het poëzieproject in Millingen aan de Rijn, 2014
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1936: Dmitri Shostakovich, just thirty years old, reckons with the first of three conversations with power that will irrevocably shape his life.
Stalin, hitherto a distant figure, has suddenly denounced the young composer’s latest opera. Certain he will be exiled to Siberia (or, more likely, shot dead on the spot), Shostakovich reflects on his predicament, his personal history, his parents, his daughter—all of those hanging in the balance of his fate. And though a stroke of luck prevents him from becoming yet another casualty of the Great Terror, he will twice more be swept up by the forces of despotism: coerced into praising the Soviet state at a cultural conference in New York in 1948, and finally bullied into joining the Party in 1960. All the while, he is compelled to constantly weigh the specter of power against the integrity of his music. An extraordinary portrait of a relentlessly fascinating man, The Noise of Time is a stunning meditation on the meaning of art and its place in society.
Julian Barnes is the author of twenty previous books. He has received the Man Booker Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the David Cohen Prize for Literature and the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; in France, the Prix Médicis and the Prix Femina; and in Austria, the State Prize for European Literature. In 2004 he was named Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture. His work has been translated into more than forty languages. He lives in London.
One of the Best Books of the Year: San Francisco Chronicle
“This story is truly amazing . . . an arc of human degradation without violence (the threat of violence, of course, everywhere). . . . The whole Kafka madhouse brought to life.”—Jeremy Denk, The New York Times Book Review
The Noise of Time
A Novel
By Julian Barnes
Part of Vintage International
Literary Fiction
Paperback
Publisher Penguin Random House
June 2017,
224 Pages
new books
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