Gordon Williams

George Madruger, professeur américain de littérature, s’installe à contrecœur avec son épouse et sa fille dans une ferme isolée des Cornouailles, coin sauvage d’Angleterre. George est mal à l’aise face à ces rustres peu accueillants et ces derniers méprisent ce yankee trop sûr de lui. C’est un Noël blanc, mais qui commence mal. Sur la lande, Henry Niles, un fou de la pire espèce, un assassin d’enfants, s’échappe de l’ambulance qui le ramenait en prison. Lorsqu’une fillette disparaît au cours d’une fête, la panique est générale dans le village. Quand le bruit court que le prisonnier s’est caché dans la ferme des Madruger, cinq villageois décident de s’y rendre avec un but très clair : assassiner Henry Niles et tous ceux qui voudraient les en empêcher. Huis clos glaçant, Les Chiens de paille, adapté au cinéma par Sam Peckinpah en 1972, est une lecture indispensable pour qui veut réfléchir sur le phénomène de meute et sur la nature de la violence. Un classique du genre enfin retraduit.

Les Chiens de paille

The original novel on which Sam Peckinpah's controversial movie Straw Dogs was based, and the inspiration behind a brand-new movie by Rod Lurie, starring Alexander Skarsgård and Kate Bosworth - due for release in September 2011. American professor George Magruder, his wife Louise and their daughter rent an old, isolated house known as Trencher's Farm in Cornwall, so George can finish writing his book. When George accidentally runs over a convicted child killer on the loose from a mental asylum, he confronts the brutal locals and sets in train a series of violent events that threaten his very survival and that of his family.

The Siege of Trencher's Farm

This is the book Gordon Williams wrote after Straw Dogs. Working in Soho at the time he turned his forensic gaze on the landscape and characters around him. Big Morning Blues evokes the Soho of that era - caught between the summer of love of the late 1960s and the winter of discontent that is to come. Slated by one reviewer for his dark and violent vision of a corrupt and drunken Soho subculture, Williams replied 'Most of the events in this book happened'. First published in 1974 this is a new edition from Reinkarnation. 'A fine book and a funny one ' THE TIMES, 'Gordon Williams is an uninhibited writer in top gear in this novel' SUNDAY TELEGRAPH. Soho Noir at its finest.

Big Morning Blues

Terry Venables

Investigating the death of a man on the underground at Tottenham Court Road, newly established private investigator Hazell becomes involved with a team of con men working a three-card trick. Was the death a case of suicide, or was it murder? Hazell sets out to get to the bottom of the mystery for the poor, grieving widow. But is she so poor? There are so many questions to be answered as he tracks down the gang and encounters their leader, Stanley Collins, a chirpy, little cockney, who has at least two aliases and his finger into more than one pie.

Hazell and the Three-Card Trick

Gordon M. Williams

Hazell and the Three Card Trick

British Theatre in the Great War deals with a theatrical phase customarily dismissed by those charting twentieth-century developments. What becomes clear is that assessment by unsuitable literary criteria has masked the importance of the war years in British theatrical history. In avoiding a texts bias, the book reveals a period of unsurpassed prosperity in which the stage's substantial contribution to the war effort is only one notable feature. That it also saw the commercial theater's absorption of Continental avant-gardeism by way of revue, the last great epoch of music hall, the rise of the Old Vic with a project in opera and Shakespeare, and the unprecedented popularity of opera everywhere--this was surely the most fruitful period of Thomas Beecham's theatrical career--is compelling argument for revaluation. In his reassessment of this period, Dr. Williams extensively examines scripts and press coverage, providing a comprehensive overview from popular pantomime to the specialist work of the private stage as well as discussion of such issues as working conditions and censorship.

A Revaluation

British Theatre in the Great War

That the period also saw the commercial theatre's absorption of continental avant-gardeism by way of revue, the last great epoch of music hall, the rise of the Old Vic with a project in opera and Shakespeare of which we are still the beneficiaries, and the unprecedented popularity of opera everywhere (this was surely the most fruitful period of Thomas Beecham's theatrical career) is compelling argument for revaluation."--BOOK JACKET.

Providing an alphabetical listing of sexual language and locution in 16th and 17th-century English, this book draws especially on the more immediate literary modes: the theatre, broadside ballads, newsbooks and pamphlets. The aim is to assist the reader of Shakespearean and Stuart literature to identify metaphors and elucidate meanings; and more broadly, to chart, through illustrative quotation, shifting and recurrent linguistic patterns. Linguistic habit is closely bound up with the ideas and assumptions of a period, and the figurative language of sexuality across this period is highly illuminating of socio-cultural change as well as linguistic development. Thus the entries offer as much to those concerned with social history and the history of ideas as to the reader of Shakespeare or Dryden.

A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature: G-P

A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature: Q-Z

John J. Winkler

A body of Greek literature collected in an attempt to draw attention to often underrated literary excellence.

Gordon Williams

Books

Your next favorite book is out there