Ian Sansom

I don’t recall if I saw my first gunman in my childhood nightmares or on my childhood streets. There were plenty in both and they looked very much like each other. So begins Reggie Chamberlain-King’s introduction to The Black Dreams, a thrilling and compelling collection of specially commissioned stories that explore the emotional geography of growing up and living in Northern Ireland. The fourteen stories gathered here criss-cross coast, border and city as they map a ‘strange’ territory of in-between states and unstable realities in which understanding is unreliable. Obsessions, death and rebirth, violence, sexuality, retribution and apocalypse are all part of the rich fabric of The Black Dreams. Bringing together some of Northern Ireland’s finest writers, along with some of the best new talents, The Black Dreams celebrates and extends the rich tradition of the weird, surreal and dream-like in Northern Irish writing. It is also a powerful act of imagining and storytelling – a vibrant, vivid and exhilarating exploration of a world we cannot, or choose not, to see. Contributors: Jo Baker, Jan Carson, Reggie Chamberlain-King, Aislínn Clarke, Emma Devlin, Moyra Donaldson, Michelle Gallen, Carlo Gébler, John Patrick Higgins, Ian McDonald, Gerard McKeown, Bernie McGill, Ian Sansom, Sam Thompson

One poet, his poem, New York City, and a world on the verge of change.W. H. Auden, a wunderkind, a victim-beneficiary of a literary cult of personality, became a scapegoat and a poet-expatriate largely excluded from British literary history because he left. And his poem, "September 1, 1939," was his most famous and celebrated, yet one which he tried to rewrite and disown and which has enjoyed--or been condemned--to a tragic and unexpected afterlife.These are the contributing forces underlying Ian Sansom's work excavating the man and his most celebrated piece of literature. But Sansom's book is also about New York City: an island, an emblem of the Future, magnificent, provisional, seamy, and in 1939--about to emerge as the defining twentieth-century cosmopolis, the capital of the world.And so it is also about a world at a point of change--about 1939, and about our own Age of Anxiety, about the aftermath of September 11, when many American newspapers reprinted Auden's poem in its entirety on their editorial pages.More than a work of literary criticism or literary biography, this is a record of why and how we create and respond to great poetry.

This is a book about a poet, about a poem, about a city, and about a world at a point of change. More than a work of literary criticism or literary biography, it is a record of why and how we create and respond to great poetry.

`Beautifully crafted by Sansom, Professor Morley promises to become a little gem of English crime writing; sample him now' Daily Mail Join Morley, Miriam and Sefton on another journey into the dark heart of England in the fifth instalment of Ian Sansom's County Guides.

This is a playful and provocative collection of 365 extracts sourced from the British Library's collections. Selected to challenge and inform the reader, each excerpt is accompanied by the unique shelfmark number of the source publication. Encompassing a wide range of great works in literature, poetry, essays and letters, historical and scientific treatises, and including beloved and popular authors as well as controversial writers, each extract will encourage enquiry and stimulate the imagination. Beautifully designed and illustrated with the Library's collections, with one extract for every day of the year, this book can be read as a thought to start the day or can be dipped into for inspiration at random.

This is a book about a poet, about a poem, about a city, and about a world at a point of change. More than a work of literary criticism or literary biography, it is a record of why and how we create and respond to great poetry.

With nationalism and the far right on the rise across Europe and North America, there has never been a more important moment to face up to what we, in Britain, are doing to those who seek sanctuary. Still the UK detains people indefinitely under immigration rules. Bail hearings go unrecorded, people are picked up without notice, individuals feel abandoned in detention centres with no way of knowing when they will be released. In Refugee Tales III we read the stories of people who have been through this process, many of whom have yet to see their cases resolved and who live in fear that at any moment they might be detained again. Poets, novelists and writers have once again collaborated with people who have experienced detention, their tales appearing alongside first-hand accounts by people who themselves have been detained. What we hear in these stories are the realities of the hostile environment, the human costs of a system that disregards rights, that denies freedoms and suspends lives.

ââ?¬Ë?Beautifully crafted by Sansom, Professor Morley promises to become a little gem of English crime writing; sample him nowââ?¬â?¢ Daily Mail

'Beautifully crafted by Sansom, Professor Morley promises to become a little gem of English crime writing; sample him now' Daily Mail Welcome to Westmorland. Perhaps the most scenic county in England! Home of the poets! Land of the great artists! District of the Great lakes! And the scene of a mysterious crime...

Welcome to Westmorland. Perhaps the most scenic county in England Home of the poets Land of the great artists District of the Great Lakes And the scene of a mysterious crime . . . .Swanton Morley, the People's Professor, once again sets off in his Lagonda to continue his history of England, The County Guides.Stranded in the market town of Appleby after a tragic rail crash, Morley, his daughter, Miriam, and his assistant, Stephen Sefton, find themselves drawn into a world of country fairs, gypsy lore and Cumberland and Westmorland wrestling. When a woman's body is discovered at an archaeological dig, for Morley there's only one possible question: could it be murder? Join Morley, Miriam, and Sefton as they journey along the Great North road and the Settle-Carlisle Line into the dark heart of 1930s England.

Love Miss Marple? Adore Holmes and Watson? Professor Morley's guide to Devon is a story of bygone England; quaint villages, eccentric locals--and murder...Swanton Morely, the People's Professor, sets off for Devon to continue his history of England, The County Guides. Morley's daughter, Miriam, and his assistant, Stephen Sefton, pack up the Lagonda for a trip to the English Riviera. Morely has been invited to give the Founder's Day speech at All Souls School in Rousdon. But when the trio arrive they discover that a boy has died in mysterious circumstances. Was it an accident or was it murder?Join Morely, Sefton, and Miriam on another adventure into the dark heart of 1940s England. A must-read for fans of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, and Charles Todd, there'll be plenty of murder, mystery, and mayhem to confound.

CREAM TEAS! SCHOOL DINNERS! SATANIC SURFERS! Join our heroes as they follow up a Norfolk Mystery with a bad case of â?¦ DEATH IN DEVON.

From the author of The Bad Book Affair comes a witty, personal, and entertaining meditation on the history and significance of paper--an international cultural study and a series of personal reflections on the meaning of this essential product. Let us suppose for a moment that paper were to disappear. Would anything be lost? Everything would be lost.Paper surrounds us. Not only as books, letters and diaries, but as beer mats and birth certificates, board games and business cards, fireworks and flypaper, photographs and playing cards, tickets and tea bags. We are paper people.But the age of paper is coming to an end. E-books regularly outsell physical books. E-tickets replace the paper variety. Archives are digitized. The world we know was made from paper, and yet everywhere we look, paper is beginning to disappear. As we enter a world beyond paper, Ian Sansom explores the paradoxes of the greatest of man-made materials and shows how some kinds of paper, and the ghosts and shadows of paper, will always be with us.Paper: An Elegy is a history of paper in all its forms and functions. Both a cultural study and a series of personal reflections on the meaning of paper, this book is a timely meditation on the very paper it is printed on.

Love Miss Marple? Adore Holmes and Watson? Professor Morleyâ??s guide to Norfolk is a story of bygone England; quaint villages, eccentric locals â?? and murder!

A witty, personal and entertaining reflection on the history and meaning of paper during the (passing) era of its universal importance.

The Bad Book Affair features the magnificently hapless Israel Armstrong - the duffle-coat wearing, navel-gazing Jewish librarian who solves crimes, mysteries, and domestic problems whilst driving a mobile library around the north coast of Ireland.

" Israel's] fish-out-of-water dilemmas and encounters with kooky locals will resonate with Alexander McCall Smith fans." --Publishers Weekly Author Ian Sansom "clearly loves a good laugh" (Washington Post), as his delightful mystery series featuring rumpled, fish-out-of-water, Jewish vegetarian librarian Israel Armstrong indisputably proves. The Bad Book Affair is Israel's fourth hilarious adventure as he tools around Ireland in a rattletrap bookmobile trying to solve the mystery of a missing teenage girl while trying to keep his mess of a personal life in order. Sansom's Mobile Library Mystery series has made a big splash with critics on both sides of "the Pond." The New York Times Book Review loves their "formidable reserves of insight and humor," while the London Times calls Israel "one of the most original and exciting amateur sleuths around."

Israel Armstrong - urban lesehest og vegetarianar frå London - er stranda i avkroken Tumdrum på den nordirske landsbygda. Der køyrer han bokbuss om dagen, mens han om natta er innlosjert i eit omgjort hønsehus hos Devine-slekta. Han mistrivst, og kan ikkje førestille seg at livet kan bli verre. Men det kan det. For då Israel ein morgon parkerer utanfor Dixon & Pickering Stormagasin med bokbussen full av utstillingsmateriell til den lokale supermarknadens hundre års jubileum, er butikken rana og innehavaren borte vekk. Helten vår har akkurat rukket å gni fingeravtrykka sine over heile åstaden i det politiet kjem... Det store forsvinningsnummeret er klassisk britisk hyggelesing; ei varm og humoristisk forteljing med ein skikkeleg antihelt i førarsetet.