Keep 'Er Lit


Book Description

'This mix of genuine humility and hard-won hubris, of mysticism and technical mastery ... makes Van Morrison quite simply, and quite indisputably, "The Bard of Belfast".' Paul Muldoon If I ventured in the slipstream Between the viaducts of your dreams Keep 'Er Lit is the second volume of Van Morrison's collected lyrics containing one hundred and twenty songs from across his storied career. It contains love songs, work songs, songs about the pains and anxieties of existence, songs of consolation, songs about various kinds of spiritual quest and the realms of the mystical, and songs which deal with healing and reconciliation, both with the self and with others. Then there are the songs of memory and of childhood; songs about the natural world and about the perspectives it can provide on time. Taken together with Lit Up Inside , this volume gives an overview of his fifty-year career, revealing why he is celebrated as one of the most innovative and enduring songwriters of our time.




Keep 'Er Lit


Book Description

As I sit here writing this book, in the Sunshine State of Florida, in the middle of a lockdown because of the Covid-19 pandemic, I can't help thinking about how the world has changed since I ran around the streets of Belfast as a kid all those years ago. And then I think about how I headed to the UK and survived as a groundworker before starting a one-man band construction business after many years of hard work. And about how this one-man humble start-up grew into a multi-million pound group of companies operating in the Southeast of England. Writing this book has not been easy, but I had a lot of encouragement from my friends and family, and having made many mistakes and learnt many lessons the hard way over the years, I wanted to show any young guys just starting off their business careers that anything is possible. If this guy can do it, so can you. I really hope you enjoy this book. I've spent many long days and nights these last few months labouring over a keyboard. The experience has been a great learning curve. If one person learns anything from my story, this book will have been a success.




The Tobacco Keeper


Book Description

First published in Arabic in 2008, The Tobacco Keeper relates the investigation of the life of a celebrated Jewish Iraqi musician who was expelled to Israel in the 1950s. Having returned to Iraq, via Iran, the musician is thrown out as an Israeli spy. Returning for the third time under a forged passport, he is murdered in mysterious circumstances. Arriving in Baghdad's Green Zone during the US-led occupation, a journalist writing a story about the musician's life discovers an underworld of fake identities, mafias and militias. Even among the journalists, there is a secret world of identity games, fake names and ulterior motives.




The Book Keeper


Book Description

In a memoir that’s equal parts love story, investigation, and racial reckoning, Munemo unravels and interrogates her whiteness, a shocking secret, and her family’s history. When interracial romance novels written by her long-dead father landed on Julia McKenzie Munemo’s kitchen table, she—a white woman—had been married to a black man for six years and their first son was a toddler. Out of shame about her father’s secret career as a writer of “slavery porn,” she hid the books from herself, and from her growing mixed-race family, for more than a decade. But then, with police shootings of African American men more and more in the public eye, she realized that understanding her own legacy was the only way to begin to understand her country.




The Secret Keeper


Book Description

A cloth bag containing ten copies of the title.




Maryam


Book Description

Alawia Sobh's acclaimed Arabic novel of the Lebanese Civil War is a rare depiction of women's experience across class, sect, and generation in this region-defining conflict. Rich with everyday detail, uncovering the collusions of ordinary and extraordinary violence, and mixing female voices of different ages and beliefs, Sobh's work is not only an illumination of an important historical period at a new scale. It is also a unique meditation on the nature of storytelling. In The Keeper of Stories, stories struggle to survive the erasures of war and to rescue the sweetness of living, and connect the tellers and their audience in sometimes welcome, sometimes maddening ways. The transformation of pain and love into art is both the subject and substance of this necessary new book, sensitively brought into English by a translator who shares aspects of Sobh's background and worked with the author on the translation.




The Seed Keeper


Book Description

A haunting novel spanning several generations, The Seed Keeper follows a Dakhóta family’s struggle to preserve their way of life, and their sacrifices to protect what matters most. Rosalie Iron Wing has grown up in the woods with her father, Ray, a former science teacher who tells her stories of plants, of the stars, of the origins of the Dakhóta people. Until, one morning, Ray doesn’t return from checking his traps. Told she has no family, Rosalie is sent to live with a foster family in nearby Mankato—where the reserved, bookish teenager meets rebellious Gaby Makespeace, in a friendship that transcends the damaged legacies they’ve inherited. On a winter’s day many years later, Rosalie returns to her childhood home. A widow and mother, she has spent the previous two decades on her white husband’s farm, finding solace in her garden even as the farm is threatened first by drought and then by a predatory chemical company. Now, grieving, Rosalie begins to confront the past, on a search for family, identity, and a community where she can finally belong. In the process, she learns what it means to be descended from women with souls of iron—women who have protected their families, their traditions, and a precious cache of seeds through generations of hardship and loss, through war and the insidious trauma of boarding schools. Weaving together the voices of four indelible women, The Seed Keeper is a beautifully told story of reawakening, of remembering our original relationship to the seeds and, through them, to our ancestors.




Debbie Doesn't Do It Anymore


Book Description

Millions of men and (no doubt many) women have watched famed black porn queen Debbie Dare—she of the blond wig and blue contacts—“do it” on television and computer screens in every combination of partners and positions imaginable. But after an unexpected and thunderous on-set orgasm catches her unawares, Debbie returns home to find her porn-producer husband dead, electrocuted in their hot tub in the midst of “auditioning” an aspiring young starlet. Burdened with massive debt—incurred by her husband, and which various L.A. heavies want to collect on—Debbie must find a way to extricate herself from the peculiar subculture of the porn industry and reconcile herself to sacrifices she’s made along the way. In Debbie Doesn’t Do it Anymore, the creator of the Easy Rawlins series has painted a moving portrait of a resilient soul in search of salvation and a cure for grief.




Lit Up Inside


Book Description

Lit Up Inside contains the lyrics of about one third of the songs that Van Morrison has written over his 50 year career. In this representative selection from the work of one of the most innovative and enduring songwriters of the last century, the reader will find examples of all the features of the world that Van has created through his work: the back streets and mystic avenues; memories of childhood wonder and of adult work; the chime of church bells and the playing of the radio; the generous naming of other artists and the joy of solitude; love and sharp dealing; consolation and grace.




Women who Kept the Lights


Book Description

Hundreds of American women have kept the lamps burning in lighthouses since Hannah Thomas tended Gurnet Point Light in Plymouth, Massachusetts, while her husband was away fighting in the War for Independence. Women Who Kept the Lights details the careers of 32 intrepid women who were official keepers of light stations on the Atlantic, Gulf, and Pacific Coasts, on Lake Champlain and the Great Lakes, staying at their posts for periods ranging from a few years to half a century. Most of these women served in the nineteenth century, when the keeper lit a number of lamps in the tower at dusk, replenished their fuel or replaced them at midnight, and every morning polished the lamps and lanterns to keep their lights shining brightly. Several of these stalwart women were commended for their courage in remaining at their posts through severe storms and hurricanes. A few went to the rescue of seamen when ships capsized or were wrecked. Their varied stories paint a multifaceted picture of a unique profession in our maritime history.