You can buy Leeds Playhouse, A Tale of Two Theatres here with free worldwide delivery from Blackwell’s.

Leeds Playhouse, A Tale of Two Theatres
by Dave Stannard

The book
This captivating book blends personal anecdotes, in-depth research and behind-the-scenes stories to take readers on a comprehensive journey through the history and transformation of one of Yorkshire’s most acclaimed cultural institutions. 

Dave Stannard’s compelling storytelling, grounded in his meticulous research, reveals the struggles, political wranglings and triumphs that have shaped the Leeds Playhouse over five decades, starting with the idealistic vision of a few individuals who dreamed of a ‘people’s theatre’. From its humble beginnings in temporary accommodation to its evolution into the West Yorkshire Playhouse, and then into the newly revamped Leeds Playhouse, Dave Stannard offers a fascinating insight into the theatre’s past and present, and points to its potential futures.

Whether you’re a history buff, an arts ideologue or simply curious about the evolution of a beloved institution, this book is a must-read. Embark on an enthralling journey and discover the enduring legacy of this iconic theatre.

The writer
Dave Stannard’s first memory of going to the theatre was when, as a boy, he queued up with his parents outside the New Theatre (now Noel Coward Theatre) in London’s West End. This started Dave’s love of theatre which has continued ever since. Throughout his career as a teacher and youth worker, Dave organized countless theatre trips for children and young people, sharing his enthusiasm and inspiring the next generation of theatre lovers.

Dave combines his love for writing and theatre to craft a meticulously researched history of the Leeds Playhouse. Drawing from both thorough research and personal observations, he provides a comprehensive account of the theatre’s evolution. This book is not just a valuable resource for theatre scholars but also an engaging narrative that will captivate anyone interested in the development of the arts in Leeds and West Yorkshire. Dave’s engaging style ensures that this history is accessible and intriguing, offering a vivid portrayal of one of Yorkshire’s most cherished cultural institutions.

Key selling points

    • The only full history of Leeds Playhouse

    • Meticulously researched and with detailed personal knowledge

    • Engaging and readable within an imaginative structure

Buy Leeds Playhouse, A Tale of Two Theatres by Dave Stannard

Category: Non fiction
ISBN: 9781910981306
Paperback
Available worldwide through all good bookshops and online.
Price: £19.99
Number of pages: 470
Release date: 23rd September 2024

You can buy Dangerous Caprices here with free worldwide delivery from Blackwell’s.

The only difference between a caprice and a lifelong passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer
Oscar Wilde The Picture of Dorian Gray

Nora Iuga created her title from this half-remembered quotation.

Already at the age of 67 when Iuga brought out this collection, her typical subject-matter of love and sensuality and relationships had extended to include leave-taking and death – as well as language itself. Writing has a redemptive effect, and is sometimes the only way out of despair: her ‘ballpoint pen is equal to god’.

This collection encompasses elements of surreality, captivating the reader with unexpected imagery. There is wistfulness, too, but Iuga is never bitter, and an undertone of irony is ever-present.

Nora Iuga is one of Romania’s most important, productive and original writers and translators. Her poetry in Romanian is accessible; exuberantly life-filled; sensual; sexual.

To date, Iuga has published several novels and fifteen collections of poems including the award-winning Opinii despre durere, ‘Opinions on pain’ (1980). Nora Iuga is also an acclaimed translator of over thirty books by German-language authors. In her long life she has accrued multiple awards in Germany as well as in her homeland where she has achieved national treasure status – Romania’s Grande Dame of literature.

Dangerous Caprices, excellently translated by Adam J Sorkin and Diana Manole, is published by Naked Eye Publishing. You can buy Dangerous Caprices here with free worldwide delivery from Blackwell’s.

Insightful, erotic, morbid, funny and poignant as usual…
Paul B. Roth, The Bitter Oleander Press

The poetics of opposites […] – as carnal as it is original
Jan Wagner, Georg Büchner Award winner

…sensuality of a violent intensity […] reminiscent of William Blake’s Proverbs of Hell
Mircea Cărtărescu

Category: Poetry
ISBN: 9781910981283
Paperback
Available worldwide though all good bookshops and online.
Price: £9.99
Number of pages: 120
Release date: 20th February 2023

You can buy The social decline of the oystercatcher here with free worldwide delivery from Blackwell’s.

Passionate, painful, witty, loving, long-sighted

Sue Vickerman’s eerily prophetic poems describe Nature and the old normal before flood and famine, wildfires and too-close war. Scottish landscapes, seabirds and fresh air provide the setting for innocuous pre-pandemic behaviours: beach-combing, bird-watching, bickering. But the breeze blowing through this volume carries a prescient whiff of decay – an uncanny foretelling of what has come to pass.
The natural world is shifting, changing, not ‘normal’ at all. Everywhere there are portents: the rotting stomach of the boat dragged from the lake; the disused nests that bring down the tree; the oystercatcher’s social decline – it seems even seabirds are in retreat ‘from the encroaching edge of the sea’.
Nowadays all are aware that Nature is the treasure we are losing. These poems from the turn of the millenium are full of foreboding – but who among us did not see the writing on the wall?

This new edition of the second of Sue Vickerman’s five poetry volumes has been revised for current times.

A breathless, breathtaking collection, nature au naturel: poetry refracted in the prism of her beacon eye, as effortless as a fulmar’s flight… Birds given tongue and tangy taste… This riotous palette of colourful, heartfelt, sharply poignant, piercingly topical experience [is] a glorious achievement.
the late Magnus Magnusson

…poems [that] remind those of us who write only in lists how much we need rhythm in our lives… A reminder of what really matters in this hectic world.
Sandi Toksvig

This is passionate, laconic poetry of a distinguished kind. Vickerman is best at the very exact landscape poetry which suggests, and sometimes defines, the emotions with which it is associated. But her versatility is such that she is also brilliant at interiors, like ‘Tate Gallery, Turner’s unfinished room’, aural events (‘Hearing about John Lennon’) and even that bizarre thing student life (‘The rise of the rock dove’). The bird poems need reading and re-reading; the empathy is acute, but don’t let that put you off – these poems aren’t really about birds. And yet they are. Painful, witty, loving, long-sighted – I seem to be running out of adjectives. And no wonder.
the late U.A. Fanthorpe

Buy it with free delivery worldwide from Blackwell’s here.

You can buy The Day Nina Simone Stopped Singing here with free worldwide delivery from Blackwell’s.

a monologue by Darina Al Joundi
translated by Helen Vasallo

‘A stunning manifesto for freedom’ Zybeline

Noun, the heroine of The Day Nina Simone Stopped Singing, has left Lebanon to make a life for herself in Paris. Marseillaise My Way follows Noun’s adventures as she flees her home country and arrives in France, a place she believes to be the most secular country in the world, only to find her freedom threatened there too by soul-destroying red tape and the reality of cultural segregation. After having survived civil war, drug addiction, violent assaults, and enforced incarceration in a mental asylum, Noun embarks on a new struggle: to obtain French citizenship. To the refrain of ‘La Marseillaise’, which she has learnt by heart for her citizenship test, Noun pursues her quest for a new life, calling into question the secular foundations of her new home and paying homage to women freedom fighters from across the Arab world.
A bittersweet tragi-comedy La Théâtrothèque
A beautiful piece, necessary for our times, our politics and our humanity Inferno magazine.
Anyone who remembers The Day Nina Simone Stopped Singing will make a date with Marseillaise My Way Le Monde

Darina Al Joundi is a critically acclaimed actor and writer of Lebanese-Syrian origin. The daughter of notorious Syrian journalist, freedom fighter, political activist and exile Assim Al Joundi, Darina Al Joundi is known throughout the Arab world for her television and film roles, and has also played occasional roles in popular English-language series such as Homeland and Tyrants.

Al Joundi is also co-author with Mohamed Kacimi of a novel-length version of The Day Nina Simone Stopped Singing (Actes Sud 2008), translated by Marjolijn de Jager (Feminist Press, 2010), and author of Prisonnière du levant (Grasset 2017), a fictional biography of feminist pioneer May Ziadeh which is currently being adapted into a film.

Available worldwide online and from bookshops.
You can buy it from Blackwell’s here with free delivery worldwide.

SHORT STORIES by Kathrin Schmidt, translated by Sue Vickerman

You can buy It’s over. Don’t go there. here with free worldwide delivery from Blackwell’s.

These are tales of small, damaged lives that unfold towards sometimes deadly ends. Desolate or downright funny, often they are about women: single and lonely, or ordinary and kind, or who neglect their children, or whose children abuse them. Immigrants, the homeless, the sexually abused, the suicidal – these and other aliens populate a ‘left behind’ region where a sense of powerlessness holds sway. Gay, straight, or transitioning, most of Schmidt’s characters are jobless, and mostly middle-aged, or else very old: a senile pedophile grandmother; another whose stinking belches accompany the wartime trauma she hands down to her offspring, for they too must suffer.

Kathrin Schmidt draws us alongside people limited or trapped by circumstances imposed on them, whether by the socialist regime or the one that came after, her stories set variously in the twilight hour of the German Democratic Republic and the post-1989 decade when the GDR was subsumed into the Germany of today. All is not bleak, for adversity generates human kindness and heart-warming responses, even love affairs and comedy. But Schmidt makes her point.

Buy it with free delivery worldwide from Blackwell’s here.

angry and laconic… Kathrin Schmidt at the height of her powers
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
…powerful, bitter, tender, and as always, humour that bites
West Deutschland Radio
tragic and witty, perverse and savage, grotesque and elegiac
Süddeutsche Zeitun

A new English translation by Christina Les of Kathrin Schmidt’s prize winning novel Du Stirbst Nicht

You can buy You’re not dying here with free worldwide delivery from Blackwell’s.

Helene Wesendahl wakes from a post-aneuryism coma paralysed, speechless and devoid of memory. With each re-learned movement, remembered word and returned fragment of forgotten biography, a life comes to light that she scarcely recognises, confronting her with a strange woman who was once herself. Through the awakening heroine’s eyes, we observe her own body (which seems to lead a life of its own as it laboriously undergoes rehabilitation), her fellow-patients, nurses and doctors, the reactions of a complicated family, and the sacrificial commitment of her husband. Helene’s crisis deepens with the gradual realisation that, owing to a passion for a mysterious woman, she was intending to leave this man who now cares so much …

In 2002, halfway through her award-winning career as a writer, Kathrin Schmidt had a stroke and lost her language. You’re not dying is a tale of recovery based on true experience, all the more astonishing for its stylistically dazzling linguistic facility. ‘Kathrin Schmidt is back. Rejoice!’ Wrote Vladimir Balzer in Die Welt. The difficult experience of illness becomes added to Schmidt’s hallmark themes of love, the body, gender and genealogy, historiography and memory.

In 2009 You’re not dying was the triumphant winner of the German Book Prize, pipping to the post the recent Nobel Prize-winner Hertha Muller, who was also shortlisted. Schmidt’s writing career is littered with multiple prestigious prizes for both her poetry and prose.

Schmidt’s writings are framed by her politics. She co-edited a feminist journal in East Berlin in the early years of the united Germany, and represented the United Left faction at round-table discussions at the time of reunification. Before becoming a writer she trained as a psychologist.

• translated into 13 languages – now, at last, into English!
• voted Best Book by German radio & TV platform SWR

Buy it with free delivery worldwide from Blackwell’s here. Otherwise online or from all good bookshops.

A haunting book. […] Kathrin Schmidt is back. We can rejoice! Vladimir Balzer, Die Welt

An outstanding, true novel Meike Fessmann, Süddeutsche Zeitung

a stylistically dazzling book Alexander Riebel, Die Tagespost

A great novel about illness, language and identity […] Kathrin Schmidt is one of the most important authors of her generation in Germany. Literaturen

…gets under your skin Helmut Böttiger, Die Zeit Online

Once again, Kathrin Schmidt proves to be a narrative virtuoso Der Spiegel Online

Breathtakingly accurate, Kathrin Schmidt paints the tedious path back into human existence. Neue Zürcher Zeitung

A compelling novel Michael Opitz, Deutschland Radio

a zinger, a humdinger, a fabulous shock of a novel Katie Derbyshire

Poetry by Jean Stevens

Words

a lifetime’s freight of words
slippery words
words across deep valleys
devoting a life to words
words of help
lost words
magical words
the air full of words
words inside a child’s head
anchoring words
alive with words
a serpent’s words
finished with words
all human words
black-lettered words
grappling with words
all those words that might have been

The poems in Jean Stevens’ latest collection reflect on the joy to be found in words,

working with words, and in managing the nothingness. She revels in their use, at the same time as acknowledging the difficulty of finding words that say exactly what we mean.

There is regret about their use in relationships: a lifetime’s freight of words said and regretted and the weight of words I should have said,along with a wish to share with nature the language vital for living at one with the elements.

Other poems relish the sound of words heard and remembered: Crewe Alexandra, Plymouth Argyle, and an imagined conversation with Sylvia Plath: To hell with men, let’s devote our lives to words, as well as recognising that things said years ago still influence us: that’s not for the likes of you,and lead to a lifetime trying to learn the impossible language.

You can buy a copy of ‘Nothing But Words’ from Bookshop.org here. (We may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops.)

Do Christmas and all the build-up to it affect you emotionally, whether you were brought up in a Christian background or not? As Sue writes,

“Advent was at one time a dour season of prayer, fasting and penitence. For me a distinct melancholy hangs over our grey rainy islands during December’s darkening days. Some people just enjoy the telly and the partying, and others doubtless try to ignore the whole thing. But I think there are also those who, like me, spend the festive season running an emotional gamut. Underlying the commercial clamour there’s a nostalgic sense of loss; a wistfulness – not for how it used to be in Christmases past, but for how it might have been and never really was.

Adventus: the coming. These twenty-five poems reflect on Christmases past and current; on lives lived; on endings of years and of relationships; on beginnings, anxieties, hopes, and an uncertain future.”

Though these poems are perennials, they also serve as daily Advent readings starting from the first day of December.

Naked Eye is delighted to have published this new collection of poems by Sue Vickerman. Read more about Sue Vickerman here.

You can buy a copy of Adventus from Bookshop.org here.
(We may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops.)

What has been written about Adventus:
Brilliant!
Kim Moore

…each turned page is a door into a new and fresh surprise
John Foggin

an excellent piece of work
Steve Whitaker

a tour de force
The Yorkshire Times

Return to the homepage here.

Naked Eye is pleased to publish David Pendletons’s book Kick-off; The start of spectator sports as the first in its Potted Theses series.

“It is to be hoped that David Pendleton’s wonderfully readable and entertaining vision of a past which remains central to the way we still perceive ourselves, will become a staple of sporting history bookshelves.”
The Yorkshire Times

Kick-off charts and analyses the experience of Bradford in relation to the national development of sport in the modern city and how spectator sport, in particular, helped shape personal and civic identities in a bourgeoning industrial community. What took place in Bradford in the latter half of the nineteenth century was nothing less than a sporting industrial revolution, whose effects remain with us to this day.

You can buy a copy of ‘Kick-off’ from Bookshop.org here.
(We may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops.)

Read more about David Pendleton here.

More about the Potted These series here.

Return to the homepage here.

Naked Eye Publishing re-issued Sue Vickerman’s 2003 poetry collection Shag as a guinea-pig to develop the house style for our poetry pamphlet series. Read more about Shag here.

You can buy a copy of ‘Shag’ from Bookshop.org here. (We may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops.)

Return to our homepage here.