An English Guide to Birdwatching

Royle, Nicholas

ISBN 10: 1908434945 / ISBN 13: 9781908434944

Editore: Myriad Editions, 2018

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Dati bibliografici

• Titolo: An English Guide to Birdwatching
• Editore: Myriad Editions
• Data di pubblicazione: 2018
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 1908434945
• ISBN 13: 9781908434944
• Rilegatura: Brossura
• Edizione: 1774610856.
• Condizione: Very Good
• Condizione della sovraccoperta: 46407669
• Firmato: 3/27/2026 11:27:36 AM
• Cataloghi dei venditori:
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  • U
  • 9781908434944

Descrizione articolo

Riassunto

Silas and Ethel Woodlock have retired from the business of undertaking to spend their twilight years by the sea but things are not as easy as they’d hoped, and it’s all to do with herring gulls. Stephen Osmer and Lily Lynch are a glamorous young couple on the London literary scene. While Lily pursues an ambitious public art project about ‘cinematic intentions’, we encounter Osmer’s brilliance as an arts journalist, writing a dangerously provocative essay about social justice and the banking crisis, as well as a diatribe about two people called Nicholas Royle, one a novelist, the other a literary critic.

Nicholas Royle’s magnificent novel combines a page-turning story about literary theft, adultery and ambition with a poetic and moving investigation into our relationship to birds and to the environment. It is exquisitely inventive and very funny, juxtaposing the stuff of scandalous gossip with scathing reports of how the world has gone to hell in a handcart. Playfully commenting on the main story are 17 interlinked ‘Hides’. Beautifully illustrated by artist Natalia Gasson, these short texts — primarily about birds, ornithology and films (including Hitchcock’s) — give us a different view of the themes that fly out of the novel: the messy business of being human, the fragility of the physical world we inhabit and the nature of writing itself.

Compelling, audacious and dazzling in its linguistic playfulness and formal invention, An English Guide to Birdwatching explores the fertile hinterland between fact and fiction. In its focus on birds, climate change, the banking crisis, social justice and human migration, it is intensely relevant to wider political concerns; in its mischievous wit and wordplay, and post-modern (or ‘post-fiction’) sensibility, it pushes the boundaries of what a novel might be.

Nicholas Royle is also the author of Quilt.

Informazioni sull?autore

Nicholas Royle is Professor of English at the University of Sussex. As well as writing fiction, he has published numerous books about literature and literary criticism and theory. These include Telepathy and Literature: Essays on the Reading Mind (1991), Elizabeth Bowen and the Dissolution of the Novel: Still Lives (1994, co-authored with Andrew Bennett), E. M. Forster (1999), The Uncanny (2003), Jacques Derrida (2003), How to Read Shakespeare (2005), Veering: A Theory of Literature (2011), This Thing Called Literature (2015, co-authored with Andrew Bennett) and Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory (5th edition, 2016, co-authored with Andrew Bennett). All his writing is distinguished by playful language and linguistic invention. Despite their appearances, his 'academic' books contain unexpected interiors: Telepathy and Literature ends with a bizarre footnote comprising a short story called 'Telephoning Home'; The Uncanny incorporates several pieces of short fiction ('Exam', 'Chance Encounter', 'A Crowded After-Life'); Veering contains numerous embedded fictions and argues for a new conception of the relations between creative and critical writing. Royle is director of the Quick Fictions app and an editor of the Oxford Literary Review. He runs the popular MA programme in Creative and Critical Writing at Sussex and is also a director of the Centre for Creative and Critical Thought.