Exploring a wide range of themes, this poetry collection delves into nature, travel, love, and even the unexpected, such as coleslaw and Steven Seagal. The poet seeks empathy in both ordinary and extraordinary moments, blending humor with contemplation of life's mysteries. Through vivid memories and sensory experiences, the work reflects on the significance of everyday events and the profound emotions they evoke.
A completely fresh look at the enmity between Britain and Germany that all but destroyed Europe. Half a century before 1914, most Britons saw the Germans as poor and rather comical cousins - and most Germans looked up to the British as their natural mentors. Over the next five decades, each came to think that the other simply had to be confronted - in Europe, in Africa, in the Pacific and at last in the deadly race to cover the North Sea with dreadnoughts. But why? Why did so many Britons come to see in Germany everything that was fearful and abhorrent? Why did so many Germans come to see any German who called dobbel fohlt while playing Das Lawn Tennis as the dupe of a global conspiracy? Packed with long-forgotten stories such as the murder of Queen Victoria's cook in Bohn, the disaster to Germany's ironclads under the White Cliffs, bizarre early colonial clashes and the precise, dark moment when Anglophobia begat modern anti-Semitism, this is the fifty-year saga of the tragic, and often tragicomic, delusions and miscalculations that led to the defining cataclysm of our times - the breaking of empires and the womb of horrors, the Great War. Richly illustrated with the words and pictures that formed our ancestors' disastrous opinions, it will forever change the telling of this fateful tale.
Kafka's features, and that dreaded word, Kafkaesque, are known to millions who have never read serious literature. Generations of academics and critics have maintained the image of Franz Kafka as a tortured seer whose works defy interpretation. In Excavating Kafka James Hawes reveals the truth that lies beneath the image of a middle-European Nostradamus with a typographically irresistible name. The real Franz Kafka was no angst-ridden paranoid but a well-groomed young man-about-town who frequented brothels, had regular sex with a penniless-but-pretty girl and subscribed to upmarket pornography (published by the very man who published Kafka's first stories). Excavating Kafka debunks a number of key facets of the Kafka-Myth, including the idea that Kafka was the archetypal genius neglected in his lifetime; that he was stuck in a dead-end job and struggling to find time to write; that he was tormented by fear of sex; that he had a uniquely terrible, domineering father who had no understanding of his son's needs; that his literature is mysterious and opaque; that he constructs fantasy-worlds in which innocent everymen live in fear of mysterious and totalitarian powers-that-be. Written with the panache of a supremely gifted comic writer, Excavating Kafka is an engaging and involving reassessment of a major figure of literary modernism that will be welcomed and enjoyed by students of Kafka and by general readers alike.
"A fast-paced tour of 2,000 years of English history, tracing its secret north-south divide and notorious class system"--
James Hawes' fourth novel takes his not-quite-innocent heroine, Jane Feverfew, on a comic journey from the eccentrities of Wales into the unholy Soho movie world.
This fresh, concise and entertaining new history, with more than 100 maps and images, makes sense of Europe's most admired and feared country.
Discovers an England very different to the standard vision. England´s fortress, stubbornly independent, the begetter of parliaments and globe-spanning empires, is riven by an ancient fault-line that predates even the Romans; its fate has ever been bound up with that of its neighbours. For the past 1,000 years it has harboured a class system like nowhere else on Earth
The dazzling debut of a new voice in fiction, this is the funny, unexpected story of a balding, thickening 28-year-old who, having spent the bulk of his twenties avoiding a career in the quasi-black market of London's temp agencies, now finds himself not only without a job, but seriously without prospects. How he solves this problem is the action that propels this witty, acutely observant and captivating first novel.
Franz Kafka’s iconic image evokes bleak visions of bureaucracy, nightmarish transformations, and uncanny predictions of the Holocaust. However, the reality of his life diverges sharply from the mysterious, sickly figure often portrayed. Kafka was, in fact, a well-connected millionaire’s son who indulged in a vibrant social life, including relationships with women and visits to brothels. He held a prestigious state job, earning the equivalent of $90,000 today for a six-hour workday, and remained a loyal member of Prague’s German-speaking elite throughout his life, supported by a strong literary network. Many myths surround Kafka: that he was a neglected genius, lonely, trapped in a dead-end job, tormented by sexual fear, overly honest with women, and burdened by a domineering father. Additionally, his writing is often described as mysterious and opaque, leading readers into bizarre worlds. James Hawes aims to dismantle the critical barriers erected by scholars, biographers, and guides that have obscured Kafka's true persona and the significance of his work. He seeks to reveal the real man behind the myths and the profound impact of his literary contributions, challenging long-held perceptions without reservation.
