Böcker av Clive Gilson

It's just a regular Saturday morning for Morgan, her inventor dad, and a small, green furry robot bear. It all goes wrong when Mrs. McGonagall pops round to make a macaroni cheese lunch. Can one small bear save Mrs. McGonagall's head from going BANG!This is a Morgan and Bogey Bear story.

A delightful collection of folklore, fairy tales, myths and legends from the rich heritage of tales told across Central Africa.

Folklore, fairy tales, myths and legends from East AfricaThe seemingly simple art of storytelling is incredibly important in African societies. Storytelling helps all societies to understand core elements in their lives such as religion, morals, history, purpose social norms. The collective nature of oral storytelling also helps to cement bonds among generations and family groups, and is significant in the way that it helps people to share experiences and ideas. As with so many cultures the storytellers of Eastern Africa recount tales of heroes and ancestors. These heroes and forebears continue to influence the lives of the living in very real ways.Oral traditions in East Africa cover both prose and verse forms, often portraying mythological or historical characters and can include tales of the trickster character. Storytellers in Africa sometimes use call-and-response techniques to tell their stories. Poetry, often sung, includes narrative epic, occupational verse, ritual verse, and praise poems of rulers and other prominent people. Praise singers, bards sometimes known as "griots", tell their stories with music.In general terms Africa has a hugely rich storytelling heritage. From Timbuktu alone, there are an estimated 300,000 or more manuscripts tucked away in various libraries and private collections, mostly written in Arabic but some in native languages such as Fula and Songhai. Many were written at the famous University of Timbuktu. The material covers a wide array of topics, including astronomy, poetry, law, history, faith, politics, and philosophy.The wonderous thing about such a rich heritage, and such a long history of finding compelling ways to interpret the world, is that it creates a massive melting pot of full of ideas. Just a few of those ideas are what we have here in this small collection. As ever it has been a delight to discover and work with these stories. I hope you enjoy them.

The Insomniac Booth continues many of the themes that first emerged in Clive Gilson's earlier collection of short stories, The Mechanic's Curse. This second collection continues with the investigation of magical realism and the glories of traditional folk and faery tales.As ever, these are intimate tales, focusing on broad but subtle themes and personal recollections. Clive Gilson's stories continue to link recurring themes of fantasy with urban and future decay - splintered glass, dust motes and cracked plaster; the loss of loved ones, of the ability to remember; black and white movies of the mind; shafts of golden light shattered by war; haunted memories and the night darks. There is a poetic lilt to the narrative, that delights in the minutiae of observation, bringing the mundane into the spotlight, giving it a meaning and beauty that is mostly lost on us busy ones; there is the terror of the ordinary, the shadow in the midday sun; and then there is the humour: sharp, cynical, painfully astute. Clive Gilson's stories reverberate in the mind, long after they've been read. They connect us in their telling, because we relate to these deep, dark moments of human emotion that make us who we are. These are, indeed, black and white movies for the mind...