The hilarious mishaps and adventures of Opera Sunderland, starring Godfrey JamesStaging opera can be a chaotic business – as this brilliant five-part comedy drama, written by Fintan Coyle and Tom Miles, shows. Opera Sunderland has a tradition of performing a new work every season - celebrating "its umbilical cord to civilisation". However, when managing director, Dwight Gaggenheim opts for West Side Story over innovative gay opera St Sebastien, th...

Poet Tom Raworth has remained steadfastly independent of literary fashions, movements, and cliques throughout a poetic career spanning 50 years. As When is the first selection of Raworth's writing to address the full scope and range of his work, from the first poem he ever shared with anyone outside his family, "You Were Wearing Blue," to his most recently published poem, "Surfing the Permafrost Through Methane Flares." The collection includes prose work and notational pieces that...

**A blackly comic literary gem in which a broken man confronts a broken world on an uninhabited Pacific island, where a conservation assignment becomes a moral reckoning.“An instant classic.” —The Washington Post • “Excellent ” —The New York Times • “Urgent and lyrical.” —NPR“Beautifully weird, eerie, unexpected — a story for our times.”—Kevin Barry, author of The Heart in Winter**Reeling from tragedy, former jazz musician–turned–schooltea...

"No. 7"—as Carpenter, the youngest of seven children, called himself—was born in Missouri in 1854 and moved west with his family, first to Kansas, then to the settlements near Pikes Peak, and finally, in 1872, to Texas with his elder brother. From the time he made his first cattle drive, he wanted no other life but that of herding longhorns across the free and flat grasslands of the West. His schooling was the trail, the campfire, the saddle. In 1900, after a full and active life, he retired ...

Listen in on award-winning comedian Tom Wrigglesworth’s family phone calls in these five fantastic series‘A keenly observed, comical joy’ Stuart Heritage, The GuardianIn these 24 episodes, Tom Wrigglesworth phones home for his weekly check-in, giving us a funny, fascinating glimpse into his family background and the influences that have shaped his temperament, opinions and hang-ups. As the conversations unfold, Tom takes t...

Techniques on how to gain greater fluidity of movement while playing to improve the quality of the experience are offered in this manual for serious piano players. This book encourages musicians to develop a broader understanding of the involvement of the entire body in playing—and the strains playing places on the body—by focusing on body mapping to increase awareness of the body's function, size, and structure. Ways in which piano, organ, harpsichord, clavichord, and digital keyboard pla...

'For nearly five years I have wanted to write something about the surrealist painter Emil Bafdescu: about his paintings, one of which hangs in a little restaurant in Melbourne, and about his disappearance, which is still a mystery. But this is probably not going to be the book I imagined. Nothing has quite worked out the way I planned.' With the small inheritance he received upon his father's death, Miles has come to Europe on the trail of the Romanian surrealist, who disappeared into a fo...

BBC radio productions of classic works by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Edith Wharton - plus two bonus documentariesAmerican author Edith Wharton is renowned for her merciless satires of marriage and money, set in the upper-class milieu into which she was born. Included here are a superb selection of her novels, short stories and plays, recorded for BBC Radio - as well as two programmes exploring her life and work.The House of Mirth - Bewitching socialite Lily Bart...

This reference text covers the latest developments in biochar materials research, a field which is becoming increasingly popular due to the potential of biochar to replace carbon materials derived from non-renewable sources. Emerging and innovative applications of biochar materials are discussed, and all aspects of the field are covered, from production to applications, including details on the techniques used. There is a particular focus on biochar as a material for composites and sensors...

What does the Bible say about marijuana? If it doesn’t directly address marijuana, how can Christians know what to make of the legalization of recreational cannabis and the advocacy of medical marijuana?In the past, Christians could easily answer the question of whether or not it was permissible to use cannabis by deferring to state prohibitions. We could simply say, “it’s against the law.” Today, that answer is no longer possible. Christians are now forced to do what they should h...

A collection of BBC dramatisations and readings of William Boyd's award-winning novels and short storiesOne of Britain's foremost contemporary writers, William Boyd is renowned worldwide for his bestselling novels, which have been translated into over 30 languages. He has won numerous awards, including the Somerset Maugham Award (for A Good Man in Africa), the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize (for An Ice-Cream War) and the Costa Book Award (for Restl...

He was the greatest Indian warrior of the nineteenth century. His victory over General Custer at the battle of Little Bighorn in 1876 was the worst defeat inflicted on the frontier Army. And the death of Crazy Horse in federal custody has remained a controversy for more than a century.The Killing of Crazy Horse pieces together the many sources of fear and misunderstanding that resulted in an official killing hard to distinguish from a crime. A rich cast of characters, whit...