Böcker av Michelene Wandor

Michelene Wandor's fifth book from Arc is a book of love poems - and not-love poems. By turns fierce and gentle, passionate and bitter, they push at the boundaries of minimalist language and pack an emotional punch that will remain with the reader long after the book is closed.

These eighty-one stories were arbitrarily fashioned during a single year. Michelene Wandor, a playwright, poet, fiction writer and cultural critic, invited family members, friends - and some passing acquaintances - to give her four random words. These quartets signal each story as a kind of riddle: the solution in the title, the clues, Marple and Poirot-like, embedded in each brief narrative. Punning, witty, scholarly, off the wall, each with its unique punchline, the pieces go beyond flash fiction and poetry, into freed association, with unpredicted and unpredictable motifs. The language becomes and is becoming: transformative and serendipitous in the writing and the reading. Michelene Wandor is a playwright, poet, fiction writer and cultural critic. She has taught creative writing for more than three decades, currently as tutor for the MA at Lancaster University.

Lyrical and narrative, startlingly evocative, elisions and connections, thrilling, satisfying and demanding, the words and poetic shapes travel down and across pages and spaces. The travel metaphor is only a beginning. Original and exciting, this collection resonates in mind and memory.

From fairy tales to the Bible, Jerusalem to Hollywood, Cromwell to the Suffragettes, cafes to graveyards, the reader is taken to iconic times and landmarks, to breathe in the herbs of history. This is a world where whipped cream is not innocent, just as William Morris wallpaper has significance.

In this extensively revised and updated edition of Michelene Wandor's classic work Look Back in Gender, Wandor takes another provocative look at a selection of key British plays from the last fifty years.

Wandor has written the first history of Creative Writing in the UK, analyzing its complex relationship with English and literary theory. Erudite and provocative, the book presents a searching critique of Creative Writing pedagogy, arguing for new approaches. Indispensable for teachers, students and everyone concerned with the future of literature.