Bøger udgivet af Odd Volumes

From the preface: 'This is a book which synthesizes a lifetime of reflection on the origins of the modern world. Through forty years of travel in Europe, Australia, India, Nepal, Japan and China I have observed the similarities and differences of cultures. I have read as widely as possible in both contemporary and classical works in history, anthropology and philosophy.' Prof Macfarlane is also the author of The Culture of Capitalism, The Savage Wars of Peace, The Riddle of the Modern World and The Making of the Modern World, among many others. This is the third book published by Odd Volumes, the imprint of The Fortnightly Review.

The Swiss poet, Pierre Chappuis, and his translator, John Taylor - a native Iowan and an accomplished a poet in his own right - combine to create a dual narrative of time and place. The differences are obvious - Iowa and Switzerland are half a world apart in more ways than one - but the similarities are often surprising. The result is, as the University of Chester's Ian Seed observes, 'a reading experience like no other.'Pierre Chappuis lives in Neuchâtel where he has long taught. John Taylor is a contributing editor of The Fortnightly Review and lives in Angers.

Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) was a German philosopher, essayist and critic whose work has grown in relevance and importance in the 75 years since his death by suicide on the French-Spanish border as Nazi invaders drew near. In his possession: a mysterious suitcase, now lost. The University of Chester's Alan Wall examines many of the recent contexts for discussions of Benjamin and offers detailed explanations for the overdue resurgence of interest in this important writer. Alan Wall studied at Oxford and teaches at the University of Chester. For the past several years, he has been writing about Benjamin for The Fortnightly Review. The aim of this collection of essays is to use some of the key concepts of Walter Benjamin in order to describe aspects of contemporary culture and politics. The chapters in this volume: - Part One: Uneven and Combined Development - Part Two: Texting: Ancient and Modern - Part Three: Bad Reading Habits -Part Four: Spadefuls of Meaning -Part Five: Walter Benjamin and Aby Warburg -- Photographs of Heaven, Photographs of Hell - Part Six: The 'Canonicity' of Kafka - Part Seven: Baudelaire, Allegory and the Aura - Part Eight: Benjamin's Angel and His 'Theses' - Part Nine: Benjamin and Surrealism - Part Ten: Benjamin and the City fortnightlyreview.co.uk/odd-volumes/

This is Oswald Sickert's delicate examination of two middle-class, late-Victorian characters - an ambitious writer and his wife, a freshly liberated woman - and their rather modern relationship. It has been more than a century since this book first appeared (in 1894, in Unwin's 'Pseudonym Library' - where Sickert's pseudonym was simply 'Oswald Valentine') but the anxieties of modern lives lived in a period of transition will be quite familiar to most twenty-first century readers. Oswald Valentine Sickert was the younger brother of Walter Sickert, the famous painter and student of Whistler. The Sickerts were a very well-connected family. Their home was the social hub of an influential circle of artists and critics, and Cambridge-educated Oswald was the family favorite. Among his friends were Edward Marsh and Bertrand Russell.

This book contains the following pieces, all published first in The Fortnightly Review: Essayism and Modernity - William Blake. - Therianthropes and vents. - Constellations. - Pattern recognition and the periodic table. - Extremities of perception in an age of lenses. - Demotic ritual. - Science and disenchantment. - The self-subversion of the book. - Newton's prisms. - The Janus face of Metaphor. - Clues and labyrinths. - Ruin, the collector and sad mortality.

For more than 50 years, Peter Riley's creative and critical voice has given shape and substance to modern English-language poetry as a prize-winning poet and editor and writer of imaginative prose. For the last few years, he has served as poetry editor of The Fortnightly Review, whence these critical notices come. Denise Riley, John Burnside, Peter Hughes, Alistair Noon, Andrew Jordan, Sandeep Parmar, Kelvin Corcoran, Anthony Barnett, Barry Tebb, Ed Dorn, Barbara Guest, Joseph Ceravolo, James Schuyler, Simon Smith, Carherine Hales, John Welch, Anthony Mellors, Andrew McMillan and Robert Duncan are among the more than two dozen poets surveyed here. About Peter Riley Peter Riley is a former co-editor of The English Intelligencer, the former editor of Collection, and the author of fifteen books of poetry - and some of prose. A recipient of a 2012 Cholmondeley Award for poetry, his latest book is Due North (Shearsman Books 2015), which has been shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2015. After many years in Cambridge, he now lives in Yorkshire. 'Coming under the scrutiny of Peter Riley's mind is to feel the weight of a lifetime's commitment to Anglophone and French-language poetry, to encounter tastes formed by long questioning, reflecting, and understanding, and to hear, as good poets and readers must, how judgment of success in composition is no respecter of blanket denigration, sacred cow, or cult reputation. It is to be understood by an expert. Allowed the space by The Fortnightly Review to explore a host of ideas on his art, in direct engagement with others' contributions, Riley remains his own man. Reading these review-essays is to be apprised through sustained inquiry of benefits and challenges in a broad swathe of recent poetry. Where product placement, measurable usefulness, compliance and craven correctness are prevalent, his critical intelligence is essential to such a society's real culture.' - Peter Robinson

STEPHEN WIEST, born the day after Pearl Harbor, has worked as a janitor, bartender, Fuller Brush salesman, printer, and gardener for people who like flowers but not dirt. In the late sixties, he was poet-in-residence at The Johns Hopkins University's famed Writing Seminars, under Elliott Coleman. He lives in Rock Hall, Maryland, an old waterman's town on the Chesapeake Bay. Although he has written five books of poetry and four novels, this final version of Screeds is his first publication in twenty-six years, and the first title in the prestigious Fortnightly Review's series of "Odd Volumes."

'Abundance is not about having lots of money. It's about reaching goals.'In your career, in your dreams and aspirations, in your life, reaching your goals is the key to creating true abundance. This sensible guide contains all you need to understand how to create and reach meaningful goals--not only for your finances, but for your life.Here's an idea for you: write down ten things that you want to do in the next year and ask your spouse to do the same thing. Reaching those goals is how you arrive at true abundance. Remember, you're limited only by your own imagination. -- Kendall KingFind your goal! Whatever it is, take action on that one thing now, before you let any more time pass. That's how to reach true abundance. This book, written by a financial expert with years of experience, will guide you along the way."I hope this book will give you a simple blueprint for achieving your most important investment goals as well as your financial goals more generally--that is, for achieving abundance. I'll explain some important steps you'll need to complete to find a financial advisor, as well as how to set your financial goals, because when you set financial goals, at some point you'll be asking yourself, 'What is all this money for?'"Money won't buy happiness on its own, but if you can think about the right way to spend money, if you can find a goal and reach it, you will have discovered the key to true abundance.

These eighty-one stories were arbitrarily fashioned during a single year. Michelene Wandor, a playwright, poet, fiction writer and cultural critic, invited family members, friends - and some passing acquaintances - to give her four random words. These quartets signal each story as a kind of riddle: the solution in the title, the clues, Marple and Poirot-like, embedded in each brief narrative. Punning, witty, scholarly, off the wall, each with its unique punchline, the pieces go beyond flash fiction and poetry, into freed association, with unpredicted and unpredictable motifs. The language becomes and is becoming: transformative and serendipitous in the writing and the reading. Michelene Wandor is a playwright, poet, fiction writer and cultural critic. She has taught creative writing for more than three decades, currently as tutor for the MA at Lancaster University.

These two fables by poet-editor-translator Anthony Rudolf explore richly detailed imaginary landscapes situated far from each other in time and space.Pedraterra: 'As in every country, there are intelligent people and stupid people, good people and bad people, susceptible people and potentially rebellious people. Not all have been brainwashed and some never will be. However, a serious rebellion will be quashed unmercifully. You, a democrat, a sweetheart, a child at heart, a man of gifts, are the most benign version of the stone-touched human imaginable, but you are straitjacketed.'Angleterre: 'The precocious Racine explained to Antoine that he had been writing poetry - in French and in Latin - for about a year but that his way of seeing the world could no longer be contained in poetry and cried out for the broader canvas of a play. If he did eventually write a play, he for one would naturally obey the proprieties.'

'I have now given shape, though clumsily-so clumsily that, in the past, I would not have divulged them like this-to these pages begun immediately after the 21st of April, 2001, and dragged around like a burden for three years, the burden of an unsatisfactory draft, of an unfulfilled promise. Now published, despite everything, because of the impulse of friendship that they originally signified; and because of what they wanted to say and say again, before I will assuredly no longer be able to do so.'-Philippe JaccottetPhilippe Jaccottet is the prize-winning, Swiss-born French poet who, in 2014, became only the third poet (after René Char and St. John Perse) to enter Gallimard's Pléiade list while still living and working. "Truinas, April 21, 2001" is Jaccottet's meditation on his long friendship with another essential French poet, André du Bouchet (1924-2001), provoked by Du Bouchet's funeral - 'an event that evokes memories of their first meeting a half-century earlier, their literary affinities (notably their common literary admiration for the poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin), the particularly vivid perceptions of the natural surroundings of Du Bouchet's house in the south of France, and, not least, the doubts-scruples-about the very possibility of writing truly and honestly about death.' - John Taylor