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Tending Grief: Embodied Rituals for Holding Our Sorrow and Growing Cultures of Care in Community
By Camille Sapara Barton. 2024
&“Camille Sapara Barton is a gift to all of us. ... This is what emergent strategy looks like at the…
precipice.&” —adrienne maree brown, author of Pleasure ActivismAn embodied guide to being with grief individually and in community—practical exercises, decolonized rituals, and Earth-based medicines for healing and processing lossWe live in a culture that suppresses our ability to truly feel our grief—deeply, safely, and on our own terms. But each person&’s experience is as unique as the grief itself. Here, Camille Sapara Barton&’s take on grief speaks directly to the ways that BIPOC and queer readers disproportionately experience unique constellations of loss. Deeply practical and easy to use in times of confusion, trauma, and pain, Tending Grief includes rituals, reflection prompts, and exercises that help us process and metabolize our grief—without bypassing or pushing aside what comes to the fore. Sapara Barton includes exercises that can be done both alone and in community, including:Altar practices to honor and connect with ancestors known and unknownLocating, holding, and dancing your griefSharing circles for processing communal lossWater, fire, and nature-based ritualsHonoring the survival utility of numbness—and knowing when it&’s time to release itPeer support and integrationHerbal medicines and plant-based healingSapara Barton honors each and every experience: The loss of displacement from homelands, from severed lineages and ancestral ways of knowing. The grief of colonization and theft. The deep heaviness that burrows into our bodies when society tells us our bodies are wrong. Practical tools and rituals help readers feel into their grief, honor what comes up, and move forward in healing.Written specifically to center and hold the grief of BIPOC readers, Tending Grief is an invitation to reconnect to what we&’ve lost, to find community in our grief, and to tend to our own suffering for our individual and collective wellbeing.Sorry for Your Trouble: The Irish Way of Death
By Ann Marie Hourihane. 2021
The Irish do death differently.Funeral attendance is a solemn duty - but it can also be a big day out,…
requiring sophisticated crowd control, creative parking solutions and a high-end sound system. Despite having the same basic end-of-life infrastructure as other Western countries, Irish culture handles death with a unique blend of dignified ritual and warm sociability.In Sorry for Your Trouble, Ann Marie Hourihane holds up a mirror to the Irish way of death: the funny bits, the sad bits, and the hard-to-explain bits that tell us so much about who we are. She follows the last weeks of a woman's life in hospice; she witnesses an embalming; she attends inquests; she talks to people working to prevent suicide; she follows the team of specialists working to locate the remains of people 'disappeared' by the IRA; and she visits some of Ireland's most contested graves. She also explores the strange and sometimes surprising histories of Irish death practices, from the traditional wake and ritual lamentations to the busy commerce between anatomists and bodysnatchers. And she goes to funerals, of ordinary and extraordinary people all over the country - including that of her own father. 'I had joined a club,' she writes, 'the club of people who have lost someone very close to them.' And then, with her family, she sets about planning a funeral in the middle of a pandemic.Sorry for Your Trouble sheds fresh, wise and witty light on a key pillar of Irish culture: a vast but strangely underexplored subject. Rich, sparkling and eye-opening, it is one of the best books ever written about Irish life.___________________________'A beautiful, insightful reflection on a very, very peculiar country's approach to the oddest experience of them all' RYAN TUBRIDY'Hugely moving and illuminating. All of life, somehow, is here' TANYA SWEENEY, IRISH INDEPENDENT'Moving, comforting and funny' BUSINESS POSTSons + Fathers
By Sons Fathers. 1997
SONS & FATHERS brings together a remarkable array of politicians and world leaders, writers and musicians, cultural icons and actors…
in this collection dedicated to fathers. A moving, fascinating and often funny collection of portraits, this anthology includes contributions from Bono, Paul Auster, Bob Geldof, George Clooney, Bill Clinton, Hanif Kureishi, Graydon Carter and Sting, to name a few.SONS & FATHERS tells the stories behind some of the great men of our age through their relationships with their fathers. From writing about memories and special moments, to open letters addressed to their fathers, these essays give readers an insight into otherwise private relationships. Including images and illustrations from the contributors, this exceptional anthology makes a wonderful gift and is highly collectable.Silence Of The Heart: Cricket Suicides
By David Frith. 2001
Cricket has an alarming suicide rate. Among international players for England and several other countries it is far above the…
national average for all sports: and there have been numerous instances at other levels of the game. For thirty years, celebrated cricket author David Frith has collected data on this sad subject. Silence of the Heart is his compelling account of over a hundred cricketers - involving top names from the past hundred years - who have taken their own lives, with an explanation of factors that led to their premature deaths. Can the shocking rate of self-destruction among cricketers be reduced? Can those who run the game do something to save its participants from this dreadful fate? These are among the questions addressed within this catalogue of biographies. But the key question is whether cricket itself is to blame for its losses - or is that this summer game attracts people of a melancholic and over-sensitive nature? Stoddart, Shrewsbury, Gimblett, Bairstow, Trott, Iverson, Robertson-Glasgow, Barnes . . . There remains a sense of disbelief that these high-profile cricketers killed themselves. And many more cases are examined in this extraordinary book, which comes crammed with detail, is not devoid of humour, and must rank among the most intricately researched volumes in cricket's extensive library.With a foreword by former England captain Mike Brearley, now a psychotherapist, Silence of the Heart is a startling investigative narrative covering the phenomenon of cricket's unduly high level of suicide.The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet and Fanny's First Play
By Dan Laurence, George Bernard Shaw. 1909
‘A tearing, flaring, revivalist drama’ was how Desmond MacCarthy described The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet. Set in America’s Wild West…
and aptly subtitled ‘A Sermon in Crude Melodrama’, this single-act play concerns the conversion of a horse thief desperate to ‘keep the devil’ in him and die game. Published in 1909, it brought Shaw into conflict with the Lord Chamberlain of England, who banned it on the grounds of alleged blasphemy, and it was twelve years before the play was performed in a London theatre. In an interview Shaw commented, ‘I am sorry that Fanny’s First Play has destroyed the cherished legend that I am an unpopular playwright … for the first time I have allowed a play of mine to run itself to death … And the worst of it is it will not die.’ First performed in 1911, the play is a delightful farce in which Shaw debates some of his favourite subjects: middle-class morality, marriage, parents and children and women’s rights. And, deliberately concealing his authorship, Shaw took the opportunity to satirize contemporary drama critics who, he claimed, ‘do not know dramatic chalk from dramatic cheese when it is no longer labelled for them.’Isidlamlilo / The Fire Eater: A play
By Neil Coppen, Mpume Mthombeni, Kira Erwin. 2024
Isidlamlilo / The Fire Eater is a one-woman play inspired by the true story of a woman who served as…
a political assassin in the build-up to South Africa’s first democratic elections. Zenzile Maseko, the protagonist, is a 60-year-old grandmother living in a women’s hostel in Durban. Falsely declared dead by the Department of Home Affairs, she finds herself cast into a Kafkaesque nightmare that forces her to confront her past. Flown in on the wings of the Impundulu (the lightning bird), in Zulu folklore a shapeshifting bird associated with witchcraft and the harbinger of storms and death, Zenzile’s story weaves a magical and terrifying tapestry. She draws on myth, religious symbolism and traditional beliefs as she shares the realities – at times brutal, at times forgiving – of survival in South Africa. Her story touches on what it means to live through political violence, the transition to democracy, the brutality of inequality, health epidemics like HIV/AIDS, patriarchy, and the apathetic bureaucracy of government departments. Ultimately, Isidlamlilo / The Fire Eater offers a critical and unflinching look at the eddying cycles of violence and revenge that play out across generations. Yet it is most of all a story about regeneration and redemption that speaks to both the country’s haunted past and its present-day complexities.Written with pathos and empathy, this playscript will appeal to teachers, high school learners, and tertiary students in theatre, drama and English studies.Selected Short Plays
By George Bernard Shaw. 1987
This selection comprises: "THE ADMIRABLE BASHVILLE" "HOW HE LIED TO HER HUSBAND" "PASSION, POISON AND PETRIFACTION" "THE GLIMPSE OF REALITY"…
"THE DARK LADY OF THE SONNETS" "OVERRULED" "THE MUSIC-CURE" "GREAT CATHERINE" "THE INCA OF PERUSALEM" "O'FLAHERTY V.C." "AUGUSTUS DOES HIS BIT" "ANNAJANSKA, THE BOLSHEVIK EMPRESS" "VILLAGE WOOING" "THE SIX OF CALAIS" and "CYMBELINE REFINISHED".Selected Poems and Letters
By Arthur Rimbaud. 2004
A phenomenonally precicious schoolboy, Rimbaud was still a teenager when he became notorious as Europe's most shocking and exhilarating poet.…
During his brief 5-year reign as the enfant terrible of French literature he produced an extraordinary body of poems that range from the exquisite to the obsene, while simultaneously living a life of dissolute excess with his lover and fellow poet, Verlaine. At the age of 21, he abandonned poetry and travelled across Europe before settling in Africa as an arms trader. This edition sets the two sides of Rimbaud side by side with a sparkling translation of his most exhilarating poetry and a generous selection of the letters from the harsh and colourful period of his life as a colonial trader.Selected Plays (Penguin Modern Classics)
By William Yeats. 1997
The 18 plays are: The Shadowy Waters; Cathleen in Houlihan; The Hour Glass; On Baile's Strabd; The Green Helmet; Deirdre;…
At the Hawk's Well; The Dreaming of the Bones; The Cat and the Moon; The Only Jealousy of Emer; Calvary; Sophocles' King Oedipus; The Resurrection; The Words Upon the Windwo-FPane; The King of the Great Clock Tower; The herne's Egg; Purgatory; The Death of Cuchulain.The See-Through House: My Father in Full Colour
By Shelley Klein. 2020
'A charming account of a daughter, a house and a fastidious dad' Sunday TimesShelley Klein grew up in the Scottish…
Borders, in a house designed on a modernist open-plan grid. With colourful glass panels set against a forest of trees, it was like living in a work of art. Her father, Bernat Klein, was a textile designer whose pioneering colours and textures were a major contribution to 1960s and 70s style.Thirty years on, Shelley moves back home to care for her father, now in his eighties: the house has not changed and neither has his uncompromising vision - or his distinctive way of looking at the world. Told with great tenderness and humour, this is Shelley's account of looking after an adored yet maddening parent and a piercing portrait of the grief that followed his death. 'A sad, funny, utterly fascinating book about families, home and how to say goodbye' Mark Haddon'Original, moving and bracingly honest... often hilarious' Blake Morrison, Guardian'It is strange that grief should produce such a life-affirming book, but it has. Read it for the solace it contains, or for its captivating descriptions. Either way, it's a delight' TelegraphThe School for Scandal and Other Plays
By Richard Sheridan. 1988
The three plays collected in this volume demonstrate Sheridan's unerring ability to create unrivalled comedy out of ingenious plots, witty…
repartee, farcical situations and flamboyant characters. And while he never overtly moralizes, Sheridan uses brilliant comedy to deflate hypocrisy and satirize the manners of his age. In The Rivals, Captain Absolute becomes his own rival for the hand of Lydia Languish - wooing her under another name, while her aunt, the verbally inept Mrs Malaprop, wishes her to marry the real Captain. School for Scandal continues the theme of imposture when Sir Oliver tests his nephews by appearing to them in disguise, and learns that reputation and the approval of society are of little value. And The Critic, featuring the pompous Puff and the arrogant Sneer, is a mocking depiction of the theatre, playwrights and, of course, critics.Saved By The Angels
By Glennyce S. Eckersley. 2002
Saved by the Angels gives warm and uplifting true stories of the extraordinary things that can happen to people (or…
their friends and relatives) if they have a near-death experience. This might include seeing the Angel of Death, having clairvoyant dreams, being aware of special fragrances, strange symbols and coincidences. Glennyce Eckersley, author of the hugely successful An Angel At My Shoulder, has collected many true stories of how angels can affect people's day-to-day lives. As more of us search for greater spiritual fulfilment, they give us hope that we live, not in a purely chaotic world, but in one of harmony, meaning and order.Sarah's Diary: An unflinchingly honest account of one family's struggle with depression
By Sarah Griffin. 2007
'I was fourteen when I found my Dad trying to commit suicide in the garage. Sounds shocking doesn't it? But…
that was part of me, part of living with my Dad'Sarah's Diary is the very personal diary of Sarah Griffin - an ordinary teenage girl learning to deal with the ups and downs of family life. On the outside hers was like any other family, but behind closed doors lay a sad and lonely secret. Sarah's Dad had depression -- a condition we've all heard of but seldom discuss. Beautifully written, brutally honest, Sarah's story is compelling reading.The Rope and Other Plays
By Plautus. 1964
Brilliantly adapting Greek New Comedy for Roman audiences, the sublime comedies of Plautus (c. 254 -184 bc ) are the…
earliest surviving complete works of Latin literature. The four plays collected here reveal a playwright in his prime, exploring classic themes and developing standard characters that were to influence the comedies of Shakespeare, Molière and many others. In The Ghost, a dissolute son who has squandered his father's money is thrown into disarray when he returns from abroad, a theme that is explored further in the comedy of errors A Three-Dollar Day. In The Rope - regarded by many as the best of Plautus' plays - the shipwreck of a pimp and his slaves leads to the touching reunion of a father and his daughter, while Amphitryo, Plautus's only excursion into divine mythology, offers a cheerful account of how Jupiter became father to Hercules.Romeo and Juliet
By William Shakespeare. 1967
'Shakespeare invented the human as we continue to know it' Harold BloomSet in a city torn apart by feuds and…
gang warfare, Shakespeare's immortal drama tells the story of star-crossed lovers, rival dynasties and bloody revenge. Romeo and Juliet is a hymn to youth and the thrill of forbidden love, charged with sexual passion and violence, but also a warning of death: a dazzling combination of bawdy comedy and high tragedy. Used and Recommended by the National TheatreGeneral Editor Stanley WellsEdited by T. J. B. Spencer Introduction by Adrian PooleThe Robbers and Wallenstein
By F. Lamport, Friedrich Schiller. 1979
Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) was one of the most influential of all playwrights, the author of deeply moving dramas that explored…
human fears, desires and ideals. Written at the age of twenty-one, The Robbers was his first play. A passionate consideration of liberty, fraternity and deep betrayal, it quickly established his fame throughout Germany and wider Europe. Wallenstein, produced nineteen years later, is regarded as Schiller's masterpiece: a deeply moving exploration of a flawed general's struggle to bring the Thirty Years War to an end against the will of his Emperor. Depicting the deep corruption caused by constant fighting between Protestants and Catholics, it is at once a meditation on the unbounded possible strength of humanity, and a tragic recognition of what can happen when men allow themselves to be weak.Richard III
By William Shakespeare. 1968
'Now is the winter of our discontent Made glorious summer by this sun of York'Shakespeare's final drama of the Wars…
of the Roses cycle begins as the dust settles on England after bloody civil war, and the bitter hunchback Richard, brother of the king, secretly plots to seize the throne. Charming and duplicitous, powerfully eloquent and viciously cruel, he is prepared to go to any lengths to achieve his goal. Richard III shows a man who, in his skilful manipulation of events and people, is a chilling incarnation of the temptations of power in a land shocked by war.Used and Recommended by the National TheatreGeneral Editor Stanley WellsEdited by E. A. J. HonigmannIntroduction by Michael TaylorRichard II
By William Shakespeare. 1969
'Not all the water in the rough rude sea Can wash the balm off from an anointed king'Richard, a vain,…
despotic ruler, listens only to his flatterers. When his cousin Bolingbroke, previously banished, returns to seize the crown, Richard discovers that the throne given to him by God can be taken from him by men. Depicting a tortured and morally ambivalent soul wearing the 'hollow crown', whose illusions are brutally shattered, this tragic history play unravels the idea of kingship. It is also a work of epic lyricism, filled with some of Shakespeare's most intoxicating poetry. Used and Recommended by the National TheatreGeneral Editor Stanley WellsEdited by Stanley Wells Introduction by Paul EdmondsonAeschylus (525–456 BC) brought a new grandeur and epic sweep to the drama of classical Athens, raising it to the…
status of high art. In Prometheus Bound the defiant Titan Prometheus is brutally punished by Zeus for daring to improve the state of wretchedness and servitude in which mankind is kept. The Suppliants tells the story of the fifty daughters of Danaus who must flee to escape enforced marriages, while Seven Against Thebes shows the inexorable downfall of the last members of the cursed family of Oedipus. And The Persians, the only Greek tragedy to deal with events from recent Athenian history, depicts the aftermath of the defeat of Persia in the battle of Salamis, with a sympathetic portrayal of its disgraced King Xerxes.Philip Vellacott’s evocative translation is accompanied by an introduction, with individual discussions of the plays, and their sources in history and mythology.The Pot of Gold and Other Plays
By Plautus. 1965
One of the supreme comic writers of the Roman world, Plautus (c.254-184 BC), skilfully adapted classic Greek comic models to…
the manners and customs of his day. This collection features a varied selection of his finest plays, from the light-hearted comedy Pseudolus, in which the lovesick Calidorus and his slave try to liberate his lover from her pimp, to the more subversive The Prisoners, which raises serious questions about the role of slavery. Also included are The Brothers Menaechmus, which formed the prototype for Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors, and The Pot of Gold, whose old miser Euclio is a glorious study in avarice. Throughout, Plautus breathes new, brilliant life into classic comic types - including deceitful twins, scheming slaves, bitter old men and swaggering soldiers - creating an entertaining critique of Roman life and values.