John Burnside

In Persian myth, it is said that Akbar the Great once built a palace which he filled with newborn children, attended only by mutes, in order to learn whether language is innate or aquired. As the year passed and the chidren grew into their silent and difficult world, this palace became known as the Gang Mahal, or Dumb House. In his first novel, John Burnside explores the possibilites inherent in a modern-day repetition of Akbar`s investigations. Following the death of his mother, the unnamed narrator creates a twisted varient of the Dumb House, finally using his own chidren as subjects in a bizarre experiment. When the children develop a musical language of their own, however, their gaoler is the one who is excluded, and he extracts an appalling revenge.

A Chamber Novel

The Dumb House

A young girl, Liv, lives with her mother on a remote island in the Arctic Circle. Her only friend is an old man who beguiles her with tales of trolls, mermaids, and the huldra, a wild spirit who appears as an irresistably beautiful girl, to tempt young men to danger and death. Then two boys drown within weeks of each other under mysterious circumstances, in the still, moonlit waters off the shores of Liv's home.Were the deaths accidental or were the boys lured to their doom by a malevolent spirit?

A Summer of Drowning

Winner of both the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Prize, Black Cat Bone is the first American publication of the poetry of John Burnside Before the songs I sang there were the songs they came from, patent shreds of Babel, and the secret Nineveh of back rooms in the dark. Hour after hour the night trains blundered through from towns so far away and innocent that everything I knew seemed fictional: --from "Death Room Blues" John Burnside's Black Cat Bone is full of poems of thwarted love and disappointment, raw desire, the stalking beast. One sequence tells of an obsessive lover coming to grief in echoes of the old murder ballads, and another longer poem describes a hunter losing himself in the woods while pursuing an unknown and possibly unknowable quarry. Black Cat Bone introduces American readers to one of the best poets writing across the Atlantic.

Poems

Black Cat Bone

Ever since George Lister's chemical plant shut down, the neighboring woods that once teemed with life has become the home to strange, sickly plants, and when a young boy named Leonard and his friends realize that boys from their school are vanishing after venturing into the poisoned woods, they alone are willing to confront the forces of evil that are destroying their once-happy town.

A Novel

The Glister

Havergey (Little Toller Monographs)

It is 1999. Kate Lambert, a grieving, semi-alcoholic film student, invites an elderly woman to take part in an oral-history documentary. The woman, Jean Culver, declines, but makes her a bizarre counter-offer: if Kate can stay sober for four days, she will tell her a story. And if she can stay sober beyond that, there will be another, and then another, amounting to the entire history of one family's life. Though still shattered by the death of her father, and by the desultory abuse imposed by Laurits, her enigmatic collaborator and erstwhile lover - Kate is soon drawn into a Scheherazade-like matrix of tales, some painfully final, some still unfinished, in which Jean gradually offers a heartbreaking account, not only of one family, but of the American century itself, from World War II to Vietnam and the Weather Underground. A profound, mysterious, deeply moving novel - a meeting of love and grief, like water on arid soil - Ashland & Vine is the story of an unlikely friendship that transcends time, age and the limits of narrative to reveal the unexpected grace that comes of listening to another's history, while telling, as carefully as we can, what we know of our own.

Ashland and Vine

Wallace Stevens

In this series, a contemporary poet selects and introduces a poet of the past. By their choice of poems and by the personal and critical reactions they express in their prefaces, the editors offer insights into their own work as well as providing an accessible and passionate introduction to some of the greatest poets of our literature. Wallace Stevens was born in Pennsylvania in 1879. Harmonium, published in 1923, became a landmark in modern American poetry with its startling imagery and meditations on art, reality and imagination. It was followed by Ideas of Order, The Man with the Blue Guitar and Other Poems, Notes toward a Supreme Fiction, Transport to Summer and The Necessary Angel. Stevens died in 1955.

À l'ombre de l'usine chimique abandonnée, dans l'Intraville hantée de bandes d'enfants sauvages et d'adultes malades ou lâches, dans l'indifférence générale, des écoliers disparaissent. La police les considère comme des fugueurs. 
Leonard et ses amis vivent entre terreur et fascination pour la violence. Pour Leonard, si on veut rester en vie, il faut aimer quelque chose. Plein d'espoir et de passion, il aime les livres et les filles. 
Derrière tous les ingrédients d'un thriller, le lecteur est bouleversé par la beauté de l'écriture, la grâce et le mystère d'un texte rare. Une expérience littéraire extraordinaire. 

Scintillation

Something like happy

Bernhard Robben

Der neue Burnside - einzigartig, verstörend poetisch. Nach Glister sieht man die Welt mit anderen Augen. John Burnside hat gleich mit seinem ersten auf Deutsch erschienenen Roman Leser und Kritiker fasziniert. Jetzt kommt Glister - ein schockierend ehrliches Buch über Vereinsamung und moralische Verwahrlosung. Erst verschwindet ein Junge spurlos, dann weitere. Doch niemand scheint beunruhigt. Schon lange kümmern sich die Erwachsenen nicht mehr um ihre Kinder, zu sehr sind sie mit sich und ihren Sorgen beschäftigt. Einst lebten sie in einer blühenden Stadt - doch dann siegten Egoismus und grenzenlose Gier. Nun ist alles vergiftet und ohne Hoffnung. Ist es da nicht verständlich, dass die Jungen, die noch eine Zukunft sehen, einfach abhauen? Man will diese Version glauben und geht zur Tagesordnung über. Nur der Polizist Morrison hat etwas Schreckliches gesehen - und schweigt. Denn er hat seine Seele längst verkauft. Doch die Kinder der Stadt sind ruhelos. Der 15-jährige Leonard weigert sich, seinen verschwundenen Freund Liam verloren zu geben. Er macht sich auf die Suche nach der Wahrheit. Burnside gelingt mit Glister etwas Unvergleichliches: Indem er eine vor Spannung vibrierende Geschichte erzählt, hält er einer innerlich erkalteten Gesellschaft den Spiegel vor und schenkt ihr gleichzeitig mit Leonard die Hoffnung auf eine bessere Zukunft. Dieser Roman ist unwiderstehlich, anrührend, verstörend poetisch - und ganz ohne Beispiel.

Roman

Glister

John Burnside's territory is the no man's land of threshold and margin, the charmed half-light of the liminal, a domestic world threaded through with mystery, myth and longing. In this collection he develops those themes looking at the place of the individual in the world and the idea of home entwined with the lure of absence.

Selected Poems

In his tenth collection of poems, John Burnside begins with an interrogation of the gift song and moves on through explorations of time and place, towards a tentative and idiosyncratic re-ligere, the beginnings of a renewal of the connection to, and faith in, an ordered world.

Gift Songs

In this exquisite, haunting book, John Burnside describes his coming of age from the industrial misery of Cowdenbeath and Corby to the new world of Cambridge. This is a memoir of romance - of lost love and the love of being lost - darkened by threat, illuminated by glamour. The old Scots word 'glamour' means magical charm, and the first time he was played I Put a Spell on You, John Burnside thought he had never heard a more beautiful song - it was an enchantment, a fascination that would turn to obsession. Implicit in the song were all the ambiguities that intrigued him - love, possession and danger - and this book is an exploration of the darker side of glamour and attraction. Beginning with memories of a brutal murder, the book follows the author through a series of uncanny encounters with 'lost girls', with brilliant digressions on murder ballads, voodoo, acid and insomnia, and a cast that includes Kafka and Narcissus, Diane Arbus and Mel Lyman, The Four Tops and Screamin' Jay Hawkins, and time spent lost in the Arctic Circle, black-and-white films and a mental institution. Ending with the tender summoning of the ghost of his dying mother as she sings along to the radio in her empty kitchen, I Put a Spell on You is a book about memory, about the other side of love: a book of secrets and wonders.

I Put a Spell on You

Betörend - verstörend: John Burnsides neuer Roman entführt in eine Welt zwischen Fantasie und Wirklichkeit Hoch oben im Norden, wo im Sommer das weisse Licht alle Konturen verwischt, ertrinken auf rätselhafte Weise junge Männer. Hat, wie es die Sage behauptet, die rotgewandete Waldfee Huldra ihre Hand im Spiel? Gelingt der stillen Liv die Lösung des Rätsels, oder verliert auch sie sich in einer Zwischenwelt aus Fantasie und Realität? In seinem neuen Roman erzählt John Burnside von unheimlichen Begebenheiten und folgt der Poesie einer betörenden Landschaft. John Burnside, geboren 1955 in Schottland, ist einer der profiliertesten Autoren der britischen Gegenwartsliteratur. Der Lyriker und Romancier wurde vielfach ausgezeichnet. Zuletzt erschien im Knaus Verlag sein autobiographischer Roman "Lügen über meinen Vater", für den er den Corine-Belletristikpreis des ZEIT-Verlags erhielt.

In hellen Sommernächten

POETRY TEXTS & ANTHOLOGIES. Lucid, tender, and strangely troubling, the poems in "The Asylum Dance" - which won the Whitbread Prize for Poetry in 2000 - are hymns to the tension between the sanctuary of home and the lure of escape. This is territory that Burnside has made his own: a domestic world threaded through with myth and longing, beyond which lies a no man's land - the 'somewhere in between' - of dusk or dawn, of mists or sudden light, where the epiphanies are. Using the framework of four long poems, "Ports", "Settlements", "Fields" and "Roads", the poet balances presence with absence; we are shown the homing instinct - felt in the blood and marrow - as a pull to refuge, simplicity, and a safe haven, while at the same time hearing the siren call from the world beyond.

The Asylum Dance

Several ghosts haunt Learning to Sleep, John Burnside's first collection of poetry in four years - from the author's mother, commemorated in an exquisitely charged variant on the pastoral elegy, to the poet Arthur Rimbaud, who wanders an implausible Lincolnshire landscape looking for some sign of belonging. Throughout the book, the powers and dominions of a lost pagan ancestry emerge unexpectedly through the gaps in contemporary life: half-seen and fleeting, but profoundly present. Behind it all, the figure of Hypnos, the Greek god of sleep, marks Burnside's own attempts to come to terms with the severe sleep disorder from which he has suffered for years, a condition that culminated in the recent near-death experience that informs the latter part of the book. Add to this a series of provocative meditations on the ways in which we are all harmed by institutions, from organised religion, or marriage, to the tawdry concepts of gender and romantic love that subtly govern our personal lives, and Learning to Sleep reveals Burnside at his most elegiac, while still retaining a radical pagan's sense of celebration and cultural independence.

Learning to Sleep

Follows Burnside's hopeless quest for peace and mental security as the ghosts and terrors close in and the illusion of Surbiton falls apart. Unsettling, touching, oddly romantic and unflinchingly honest, this is the story of his search for sanity - but, in its own way, also the true story of an impossible, unmanageable love.

Waking Up in Toytown

My father told lies all his life and, because I knew no better, I repeated them. Lies about everything, great and small, were the very fabric of my world. The lie in the title of astonishing memoir Lie About My Father is born of shame. Traveling around upstate New York in the nineties, John Burnside can’t bear to share the truth about his father during a casual conversation with a hitchhiker. He covers his uneasiness with a lie. It felt natural to do so. His father, abandoned as a baby on a stranger’s doorstep, created a masterful web of deceit to erase this unbearable fact. John, even as a child, represented everything that was wrong with the world and became the recipient of his father’s selfhatred in the form of enraged violence, and worse, petty, cruel belittlement. Growing up in the tough working-class neighborhoods of Scotland and later England, John learned to lie back to his father and, later, about his father.

A Memoir

A Lie About My Father

"Once, on a winter's night many years ago, after a heavy snow, the devil passed through the Scottish fishing town of Coldhaven, leaving a trail of dark hoofprints across the streets and roofs of the sleeping town. Michael Gardiner has lived in Coldhaven all his life, but still feels like an outsider, a blow-in. Now living in self-imposed exile out on the point, Michael feels at one with the sea-birds and the changing light of this ancient landscape yet more distant than ever from the dark, closed community of the villagers. But that is about to change. When Moira Birnie decides that her abusive husband is the devil and then kills herself and her two young sons, a terrible chain of events begins. Michael's infatuation with the fourteen-year-old Hazel takes him on a journey towards a defined fate, where he is forced to face his present and then, finally, his past. Having confronted his own demons he must return, walking in penance and penitence, to be reborn into a world where he was always a stranger. Written with the exquisite clarity and power of a folktale, The Devil's Footprints is the story of a man trying to come to terms with a suspended life, and the fear, guilt and u

The Devil's Footprints

Shortlisted for the 2014 T.S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Prize for Best Collection In this absorbing, brilliant new collection âe" his first since Black Cat Bone âe" John Burnside examines our shared experience of this mortal world: how we are âe~all one breathâe(tm) and âe" with that breath âe" how we must strive towards the harmony of choir. Recognising that our attitudes to other creatures âe" human and non-human âe" cause too much damage and hurt, that âe~weâe(tm)ve been going at this for years: / a steady delete / of anything that tells us what we areâe(tm), these poems celebrate the fleeting, charged moments where, through measured and gracious encounters with other lives, we find our true selves, and bring some brief, insubstantial goodness and beauty into being. He presents the world in a series of still lifes, in tableaux vivants and tableaux morts, in laboratory tests, anatomy lessons, in a Spiegelkabinett where the reflections in the mirrors, distorted as they seem, reveal buried truths. All the images are in some sense self-portraits: all are, in some way, elegies. One of the finest and most celebrated lyric poets at work today, John Burnside is a master of the moment âe" when the frames of our film seem to slow and stop and a life slips through the gap in between âe" and each poem here is a perfect, uncanny hymn to humanity, set down âe~to tell the lives of othersâe(tm).

John Burnside

Books

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