Böcker utgivna av Parthian

Polar bears and Arctic explorers, the lore of the loup-garou, the mischief of the Mari Lwyd, fighter-jets in desert skies: William McClure Brown's mind travelled many paths to celebrate story-making and the power of the unexpected in vivid imagery. Born to Scottish parents in Canada in 1953, as a teenager he knew painters in the Toronto scene and began to evolve his own creative language. From 1977 he was based in London and south-west England before settling in Wales in 1990. While he exhibited internationally he was admired most in his close community of fellow artists. He found inspiration in Devon, northern France, Galicia, North Africa, the South Wales valleys and the Inuit communities of Hudson Bay. He collaborated with painters and poets, learned Welsh, made public art, held residencies in schools, and created images for Gorky's Zygotic Mynci. William Brown died in 2008, age 54. This is the first book to explore the full range of his startling, audacious work.

Since 1996, Sam Adams's 'Letter from Wales' column has been appearing in PN Review, one of the most highly-regarded UK poetry magazines, offering insight and appreciation of Welsh writing, culture and history. This landmark volume collects these letters - a quarter century of work.

Minnie Pallister's life was so fantastic that not even a thriller writer could imagine it. A feminist, pacifist and socialist, she was twice accused of sedition in the First World War before travelling to Nazi Germany in late 1938 and 1939 to rescue Jews, helping bring them to Britain at the outbreak of the Second World War. In between, having reached national prominence in the labour movement, in which she was considered the best woman orator, and with a Parliamentary career beckoning, she was struck down by an illness which cruelly robbed her of speech. Suffering years of paralysing infirmity, which reduced her to the edge of penury, she eventually recovered to become a successful journalist with the Daily Mirror and the Daily Herald. Fearless and principled and always challenging, not least in advocating gender equality, Pallister was initially barred from a position with the BBC because of her socialist politics, and later twice banned by the Corporation, first for her pacifist then her feminist politics. An outstanding broadcaster who became for a time a household name, she was a regular contributor to Woman's Hour and an advocate of women's rights.

Let's face it, there is only one Ponty. Pontypridd: birthplace of Tom Jones and the Welsh National Anthem, and home to what was once the most famous bridge in the world. With their penchant for gossip and addition to frothy coffee and chips, Ponty people have acted, played, swum, worked, and written their way into the history books, and always with their unique brand of humour. In Ponty is it? Daryl Leeworthy journeys from the isolation of Llanwonno to the unmarked border between the true metropolis of Wales and that southern pretender, Cardiff, and on the way learns what brings him back to his hometown every time he tries to leave and what now really keeps him there. Whether perfecting the art of eating a custard slice, braving the bus up and down car infested valleys, or trying not to lose his shoe in hilltop mud, Leeworthy takes in the sights, the sounds, and the smells of this strangely compelling but universal place.

From Ö zgü r Uyanik, novelist and film director, comes a debut collection of audacious, darkly wry and compassionate short stories. Driven by universal themes of desire, mortality, loss and yearning, each story evokes both the melancholy and the hope inherent in all stages of life, from childhood through to maturity. Artists, writers, lovers, killers: all types of men walk these pages along the streets of the European cities of Cardiff, Istanbul, London, Paris, Odessa and Lisbon. All seeking to find a way to belong in the world.

With science fiction tropes recalling Philip K. Dick, Kurt Vonnegut and more recently Olga Ravn's The Employees, philosophical reflections in the vein of Dostoyevsky's Notes From the Underground, and its postmodern form, The Last Day is a testament to the depth and creativity of Welsh literature. Its translation into English is long overdue.

The short novel by Petar Andonovski, The Summer Without You, tells a complex story of three men enmeshed in a love relationship. It is a novel about the internal struggles, about alienation between partners, about the enduring search for truth. But it is also a novel about family and provincialism.

Everybody had written it off as waste ground. But when a planning application is made to build houses on this wild and green patch of Gower common, something magical emerges. From the star-nose of the polecat and the bold zigzags of adders to the delicate yellow blooms of a bog asphodel glade, this small patch of common land has revealed dozens of unexpected wonders. Hiding beneath the bracken is a wet heathland, brimming with bog plants, fed by layers of nutrient-rich peat and supporting scores of species, a vanishingly rare habitat in the UK. Using her nature poet's eye for detail and treading in the footsteps of the original poet of the commons, John Clare, Howells brings to life the story of this threatened land. Her poems ring with passion for this wild place, recording the many rare plants and animals that will be lost if the common is developed. She asks important questions about land use, about what commons mean to us today in a Wales with its eyes on Future Generations, and about who - or what - gets to own and enjoy green spaces. Above all she takes us on a journey of discovery, into the miniature rainforest of this little, almost-forgotten place.

Gwyn Thomas was born, the last of twelve children, into a Rhondda mining family in 1913. After a childhood marked by the strikes of the 1920s, he went off to study Spanish at Oxford University and in Madrid, where he met the poet Federico Garcí a Lorca and witnessed the turmoil which would lead to the Spanish Civil War. On his return, amidst the economic mire of the 1930s and his own burgeoning teaching career in Barry in the 1940s, he picked up his pen and began to write. For more than forty years, until his death in 1981, as novelist, screenwriter, master of the short story, and prizewinning playwright, Gwyn Thomas delivered compelling and comedic portraits of his world of South Wales. His creative genius earned enduring fame on both sides of the Atlantic and on both sides of the European Cold War divide. As a provocative and insightful broadcaster, he embraced the possibilities of radio and television, whilst leaving his hosts and guests alike in fits of knowing laughter. This landmark biography, enriched with unrivalled access to private papers and international archives, tells the remarkable story of one of modern Wales's greatest literary voices.

This unique memoir in verse offers a series of snapshots about religion and sexuality. In verse because it's how Bell remembers: snapshots in words strung along a line, which somehow constitute a life. Snapshots of another time from now, but from a time which tells us about how Bell got here. Not the whole story, but her story.

A vision of contemporary Dubai from the perspective of a variety of expats from different parts of the world, telling tales of hardship and high-life, paranoia and alienation, cruelty and love. The locations switch from parties at mansions to high-rise apartment blocks, taxi interiors to gyms, featuring an array of characters that span the city''s wide social spectrum.