I started and finished A Sense of Direction in one evening; I couldn't really stop thinking about it, so I couldn't put it down. I found it...
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This book is not only an exceptional work of scholarship, but also an intriguing narrative liberally sprinkled with dry humor and deliciously unusual (and unusually delicious) recipes that you CAN make at home. Bon appetit!
"When Elizabethan splendor was passing into Jacobean twilight"
A gracefully written and invaluable introduction by the translator and novelist Patrick Gregory (who knew Bryher) provides entrance to this welcome reprinting of "The Player's Boy." This smart, tight little novel tells the story of a time of turbulent transition as seen through the eyes of a young theatrical apprentice in the heady, muddy, dangerous world of 17th century England. A tale of one young man's tangled journey to maturity (if not wisdom), this is historical fiction of the highest order, scrupulous and haunting.
Bryher's talent is to take the reader inside the world she writes about, showing, personalizing the impact outside forces (what becomes known as "history") have on ordinary and unsuspecting lives. It is James Sands' voice - at once antique and modern - that tells not only a tale of backstage life, with all its byzantine intrigues, but also one of life choices, of compromises and consequences, of external events and intrusions and political plottings that take him away from the theatre but never let him leave it. "The Player's Boy" is an unorthodox bildungsroman with a resolution as unexpected as it is inevitable.
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Egg Pies, Moss Cakes, and Pigeons Like Puffins: Eighteenth-Century British Cookery from Manuscript Sources by Vincent Dimarco
edlk, August 31, 2007
This book is not only an exceptional work of scholarship, but also an intriguing narrative liberally sprinkled with dry humor and deliciously unusual (and unusually delicious) recipes that you CAN make at home. Bon appetit!The Player's Boy by Bryher
edlk, March 3, 2007
"When Elizabethan splendor was passing into Jacobean twilight"A gracefully written and invaluable introduction by the translator and novelist Patrick Gregory (who knew Bryher) provides entrance to this welcome reprinting of "The Player's Boy." This smart, tight little novel tells the story of a time of turbulent transition as seen through the eyes of a young theatrical apprentice in the heady, muddy, dangerous world of 17th century England. A tale of one young man's tangled journey to maturity (if not wisdom), this is historical fiction of the highest order, scrupulous and haunting.
Bryher's talent is to take the reader inside the world she writes about, showing, personalizing the impact outside forces (what becomes known as "history") have on ordinary and unsuspecting lives. It is James Sands' voice - at once antique and modern - that tells not only a tale of backstage life, with all its byzantine intrigues, but also one of life choices, of compromises and consequences, of external events and intrusions and political plottings that take him away from the theatre but never let him leave it. "The Player's Boy" is an unorthodox bildungsroman with a resolution as unexpected as it is inevitable.