Böcker av Michael Kelly

Michael Kelly (1762-1826) was an Irish singer and composer who studied music in Italy and performed all over Europe. He later joined London's Theatre Royal as both performer and composer. Volume 1 of his 1826 autobiography is a charming and event-filled account of his early life and musical training.

Kept in a bird-coop by his parents, Sunny McCreary endured a childhood of neglect, abuse and being bullied by pigeons, only to find it was all downhill from there. In the course of the most painful life ever, he survived tragedy and maiming, a savage convent school education, being pimped out in pink-satin hot pants, a degrading addiction to helium, and having a baboon's arse grafted onto his face. Then things got really bad. More horrible than A Child Called It, more heartrending than Ugly, more repulsive than the Alastair Campbell diaries, My Godawful Life is the misery memoir to end all misery memoirs and the feel-bad book of the year. "e;At last, a book to satirise the endless parade of misery memoirs. I seized upon this like manna from Heaven ... A glorious overload of dysfunction."e; Sue Baker, Publishing News

For decades, aesthetics has been subjected to a variety of critiques, often concerning its treatment of beauty or the autonomy of art. Collectively, these complaints have generated an anti-aesthetic stance prevalent in the contemporary art world. Yet if we examine the motivations for these critiques, Michael Kelly argues, we find theorists and artists hungering for a new kind of aesthetics, one better calibrated to contemporary art and its moral and political demands.Following an analysis of the work of Stanley Cavell, Arthur Danto, Umberto Eco, Susan Sontag, and other philosophers of the 1960s who made aesthetics more responsive to contemporary art, Kelly considers Sontag's aesthetics in greater detail. In On Photography (1977), she argues that a photograph of a person who is suffering only aestheticizes the suffering for the viewer's pleasure, yet she insists in Regarding the Pain of Others (2003) that such a photograph can have a sustainable moral-political effect precisely because of its aesthetics. Kelly considers this dramatic change to be symptomatic of a cultural shift in our understanding of aesthetics, ethics, and politics. He discusses these issues in connection with Gerhard Richter's and Doris Salcedo's art, chosen because it is often identified with the anti-aesthetic, even though it is clearly aesthetic. Focusing first on Richter's Baader-Meinhof series, Kelly concludes with Salcedo's enactments of suffering caused by social injustice. Throughout A Hunger for Aesthetics, he reveals the place of critique in contemporary art, which, if we understand aesthetics as critique, confirms that it is integral to art. Meeting the demand for aesthetics voiced by many who participate in art, Kelly advocates for a critical aesthetics that confirms the power of art.

Michael Kelly's startling debut collection, featuring tales of dark miracles and terrible wonder, originally published in 2007, is now reissued with a striking new cover and new afterword. In vivid prose, Kelly scratches beneath the surface of the mundane to reveal worlds of beauty and pain, terror and transcendence. "These stories are daerk, yes, yet they shine with the empathy and beauty Kelly has instilled in them. Wonderful stuff!" - Craig Davidson, Author of Rust and Bone.

Whilst a cure for HIV/AIDS continues to elude scientists, the number of HIV/AIDS cases continues to increase. Education becomes the key to curtailing the spread of the disease. Education and HIV/AIDS in the Caribbean describes the impact of HIV/AIDS on education in both the global and Caribbean contexts and outlines the lessons to be learnt from the global experience.