Barbed Wire And Roses

From the bestselling author of Above the Fold, Dragons in the Forest and The Last Double Sunrise. Like many young and idealistic Australian men, Stephen Conway rushed to enlist in the ‘the war to end all wars’ in 1914. After a hasty marriage, Stephen leaves his new wife with a baby on the way and is shipped to Gallipoli. Very soon, though, the promise of adventure and glory of battle vanish completely as the reality of war sets in. After four nightmarish years, Stephen is the lone survivor of his platoon fighting in the trenches of France’s bloody battlefields. Traumatised and exhausted he inexplicably disappears and the official record of his life comes to an abrupt end – that is until his grandson, Patrick, discovers his diary more than 80 years later. This personal account of the horrors of World War I propels Patrick on a journey to uncover the truth of his grandfather’s fate – which is more disturbing than he could have ever imagined. Set against true historical events, Barbed Wire and Roses deftly brings together past and present, ancestor and descendant, in a gripping tale of war and its aftermath.

Zombies have devoured mankind. And the few survivors would be better off dead because a clan of vampires, bloodthirsty and vicious, have captured the remnants of humanity for livestock. In an apartment building barricaded with wrecked cars, concrete rubble, and snarls of barbwire, the vampires breed lobotomized amputees. Ann, the secret blood slave of the maternity doctor, has evaded this fate, yet her sister Ellie has not. Though she longs to escape, Ann cannot abandon her sibling and unborn niece. But she may have to if she wants to survive. The living dead have found a weak spot in the barricade and are quickly invading the building. Shade, the vampire monarch, defends her kingdom, while Frost, Shade's general, plans to migrate to an island where they can breed and hunt humans. In their path stands a legion of corpses, just now evolving into something far more lethal, something with tentacles--and that's just the beginning.

The name P. K. Page is synonymous with ‘artist’: she won the Governor General’s award for poetry in 1957, was appointed a Companion of the Order of Canada in 1999, and her paintings are found in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Canada and the Art Gallery of Ontario, among others. Her voice is luminous, her focus grounded in reality, and her mastery of poetic form is nigh unmatched in Canadian literature. Selected by Zailig Pollock, the poetry in Kaleidoscope is elegant, technically exquisite and full of marvels, and the chronological presentation reveals Page’s growth as a poet over her long lifetime. This collection is more than a mere re-publishing of previous work; Kaleidoscope includes poetry hitherto unpublished, and Page involved herself with the process of editing certain pieces until her death in January 2010. Kaleidoscope: Selected Poems is the first in a series of volumes to be published over the next ten years as a complement to an online hypermedia edition of the Collected Works of P. K. Page. The online edition is intended for scholarly research, while Kaleidscope offers a beautiful and inspiring text to be enjoyed by those who love and wonder at the achievement of Canada’s greatest poet.

`If not ``a shilling life'', a glance at Who's Who in Canada will give you all the facts. Which are more than impressive. P K Page, born in 1916 and very much with us is, in brief, a phenomenon; a force majeur in Canadian literary and artistic life; a National Treasure. Her work to date, sprung from the praiseworthy ambition of the lavishly gifted, bestows upon us rich decades of protean accomplishment, of widespread honour and renown. Let us however concern ourselves here with the essential fictions - with the beginning in delight and ending in wisdom, as Frost has it, of true poems; with this present testament of imaginative, intellectual and spiritual achievement: The Hidden Room: Collected Poems. `To immerse oneself in these two handsome volumes (elegantly complemented and informed throughout by the drawings and paintings of her ``twin sister, / beautiful as Euclid'', the painter P K Irwin) is to plunge into a deep-freighted, breaking wave of swirled delights and parlous undertows. It is, as with all such translucent ramparts of desire and abandon, best met head-on. This is not to say that one must read consecutively through the some four hundred and fifty pages of poetry and the one dangerous, liminal short story. The ordering of the volumes is credited to Stan Dragland, who ``tackled material spanning sixty years and threaded it together in a manner uniquely his own.'' While the overall drift is chronological, the poems have been so intelligently interwoven that each of the volumes is a realized entity, as each is a reflection of the whole.'

In The Purpose of Futility, Clare Rhoden surveys Australian Great War narratives, demonstrating their particularly Australian features which help to explain the unique and disputed position of the Great War in Australian history.--Provided by publisher

The twenty-seven original contributions to this volume investigate the ways in which the First World War has been commemorated and represented internationally in prose fiction, drama, film, docudrama and comics from the 1960s until the present. The volume thus provides a comprehensive survey of the cultural memory of the war as reflected in various media across national cultures, addressing the complex connections between the cultural post-memory of the war and its mediation. In four sections, the essays investigate (1) the cultural legacy of the Great War (including its mythology and iconography); (2) the implications of different forms and media for representing the war; (3) ‘national’ memories, foregrounding the differences in post-memory representations and interpretations of the Great War, and (4) representations of the Great War within larger temporal or spatial frameworks, focusing specifically on the ideological dimensions of its ‘remembrance’ in historical, socio-political, gender-oriented, and post-colonial contexts.

This text studies America and its habits of nuclear accommodation through the city of Amarillo, the home of Pantex - the final assembly plant for all nuclear weapons in the USA. It provides narratives from the people working at Pantex or living in Amarillo, which reveal their hopes and fears.