No Pie, No Priest

No Pie, No Priest
Author: Harry Pearson
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 173
Release: 2023-06-08
Genre: Sports & Recreation
ISBN: 1471198316

Writer Harry Pearson takes a warm and witty journey around Britain in pursuit of the lost folk sports that somehow still linger on in the glitzy era of the Premier League and Sky Sports to find out how and why they have survived and to meet the characters who keep them going. When Victorian public schoolmasters and Oxbridge-educated gentlemen were taming football, codifying cricket, bringing the values of muscular Christianity to the boxing ring and the athletics field, games that dated back to the pagan era clung on in isolated pockets of rural Britain, unmodified by contemporary tastes, shunned by the media and sport’s ruling elites. Here they remain, small, secret worlds, free from media scrutiny and VAR controversies, wreathed in an arcane language of face-gaters, whack-ups, potties, gates-of-hell and the Dorset flop; as much a part of the British countryside as the natterjack toad and almost as endangered. No Pie, No Priest! travels through Britain in search of the nation’s traditional rural sports, seeking out the championship of Knur and Spell (a Viking forefather of golf) on the West Yorkshire moors; watching Irish Road Bowling in County Armagh (once a surprising interest of England cricket captain Mike Brearley), Popinjay at Kilwinning Abbey in Ayrshire, the Aunt Sally competitions of Oxfordshire, and taking in world championship Stoolball (often considered the dairymaid’s form of cricket) and Toad-in-the-Hole in West Sussex. No Pie, No Priest! combines sports reporting, travelogue and history, and features a cast of bucolic eccentrics and many deeply impenetrable regional accents.

The Far Corner

The Far Corner
Author: Harry Pearson
Publisher: Abacus
Total Pages: 221
Release: 2013-06-06
Genre: Travel
ISBN: 034913975X

A book in which Wilf Mannion rubs shoulders with The Sunderland Skinhead: recollections of Len Shakleton blight the lives of village shoppers: and the appointment of Kevin Keegan as manager of Newcastle is celebrated by a man in a leather stetson, crooning 'For The Good Times' to the accompaniment of a midi organ, THE FAR CORNER is a tale of heroism and human frailty, passion and the perils of eating an egg mayonnaise stottie without staining your trousers.

Grave Reservations

Grave Reservations
Author: Cherie Priest
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2022-07-19
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1982168900

"Meet Leda Foley; Devoted friend, struggling travel agent, sometime psychic. When Leda, proprietor of Foley's Flights of Fancy, books Seattle PD Grady Merritt on a flight back from Orlando, she does not expect it to change her life. When Grady watches the plane he was set to travel on catch fire while he remains safely in the airport, he seeks out Leda, and despite her rather scattershot premonitions, he enlists her help in investigating a cold case he just can't crack. But Leda has her own reasons for helping: her fiancé Tod was murdered under mysterious circumstances several years ago. Her psychic abilities weren't good then, but now she's been honing them at her favorite bar's open-mic nights, where she draws a crowd klairvoyant karaoke-singing whatever song comes to mind after holding other patrons' personal effects. With a rag-tag group of bar patrons and friends, Leda and Grady set out to catch a killer--and find that the two cases that haunt them may have more in common than they think"--

The Enchanted Wanderer

The Enchanted Wanderer
Author: Nikolai Leskov
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 610
Release: 2014-01-14
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0307388875

Nikolai Leskov's writing exploded the conventions of nineteenth-century Russian fiction. Here is the other Russia, mythical and untamed: an uneasy synthesis of Orthodoxy and Old Believers, a land populated by soldiers and monks, serfs and princes, Tartars and gypsies—a vast country brimming with the promise of magic. These seventeen tales, some rooted in the oral tradition, others cast as sophisticated anecdotes, are all told in the voices of storytellers addressing their audience—allowing us, as readers, to join a group of listeners. Innovative in form and rich in wordplay, the narratives unfurl in startlingly modern ways. The great gift of this new translation allows us to hear all the nuances of Leskov’s brilliant language.

The Old Priest

The Old Priest
Author: Anthony Wallace
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Total Pages: 184
Release: 2013-09-12
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0822979209

The Old Priest is a book of transformations. From the cigar-smoke-and-mirrors world of casino life, to the collection's title character morphing into a goat-man before the narrator's eyes, to a family drama upended by a miniature dinosaur in the backyard, Anthony Wallace writes about life-changing events. The characters seek to escape their earthly boundaries through artifice and fantasy, and those boundaries can be as elegant and fragile as a martini glass or as hardscrabble as an Indian reservation. In these eight vividly detailed short stories we encounter cheating husbands, neurotic housewives, out-of-control teenagers, desperate gamblers, deluded alcoholics, and a host of others who would like a chance at something more. Some face the consequences of their actions, while others simply begin to see what they've been missing all along. Through wry, ironic prose—and what feels like firsthand experience—Wallace describes a comic and often misguided search for self-knowledge in the most unlikely locations—like the Emerald City, a low-rent gambling den where a cocktail waitress dressed as an X-rated Dorothy offers gamblers more than a Scotch on the rocks; or the Bastille Hotel-Casino, where a dealer dressed as an eighteenth century footman deals five-dollar blackjack to a reminiscing Holocaust survivor. Occasionally a real demon appears, but the collection is mostly about personal demons and the possibility of exorcising them. The stories in The Old Priest have to do with time and memory, and they convincingly open out beyond ordinary daily time to reveal something else—the present moment, perhaps, but a larger, more mysterious conception of it.

Priestdaddy

Priestdaddy
Author: Patricia Lockwood
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2017-05-02
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 069818839X

ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW'S 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR NAMED ONE OF THE 50 BEST MEMOIRS OF THE PAST 50 YEARS BY THE NEW YORK TIMES SELECTED AS A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY: The Washington Post * Elle * NPR * New York Magazine * Boston Globe * Nylon * Slate * The Cut * The New Yorker * Chicago Tribune WINNER OF THE THURBER PRIZE FOR AMERICAN HUMOR “Affectionate and very funny . . . wonderfully grounded and authentic. This book proves Lockwood to be a formidably gifted writer who can do pretty much anything she pleases.” – The New York Times Book Review From Booker Prize finalist Patricia Lockwood, author of the novel No One Is Talking About This, a vivid, heartbreakingly funny memoir about balancing identity with family and tradition. Father Greg Lockwood is unlike any Catholic priest you have ever met—a man who lounges in boxer shorts, loves action movies, and whose constant jamming on the guitar reverberates “like a whole band dying in a plane crash in 1972.” His daughter is an irreverent poet who long ago left the Church’s country. When an unexpected crisis leads her and her husband to move back into her parents’ rectory, their two worlds collide. In Priestdaddy, Lockwood interweaves emblematic moments from her childhood and adolescence—from an ill-fated family hunting trip and an abortion clinic sit-in where her father was arrested to her involvement in a cultlike Catholic youth group—with scenes that chronicle the eight-month adventure she and her husband had in her parents’ household after a decade of living on their own. Lockwood details her education of a seminarian who is also living at the rectory, tries to explain Catholicism to her husband, who is mystified by its bloodthirstiness and arcane laws, and encounters a mysterious substance on a hotel bed with her mother. Lockwood pivots from the raunchy to the sublime, from the comic to the deeply serious, exploring issues of belief, belonging, and personhood. Priestdaddy is an entertaining, unforgettable portrait of a deeply odd religious upbringing, and how one balances a hard-won identity with the weight of family and tradition.

An Anthology of Russian Folktales

An Anthology of Russian Folktales
Author: Jack V. Haney
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 377
Release: 2014-12-18
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1317476905

This anthology gathers a broad selection of Russian folktales, legends, and anecdotes, and includes helpful features that make them more accessible and engaging for English-language readers. Editor Jack V. Haney has selected some of the best tales from his seven-volume "Complete Russian Folktale" collection and added examples of anecdotes and the long 'serial tales' told in the far north.The 114 tales included here represent every genre found in the Russian tradition. They date from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries and come from all geographic regions of the Russian-speaking world. The collection is enhanced by a detailed introduction to the folktale and its types, brief introductions to each grouping of tales, head notes with interesting background for individual tales, and a glossary explaining Russian terms.

Lie of the Tiger

Lie of the Tiger
Author: John Martin
Publisher: John Martin
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2017-04-13
Genre: Humor
ISBN:

The new manager at the Windy Mountain Tasmanian Tiger Museum is not the man-mountain the townsfolk think he is. But he might not be who he says he is either. One thing is certain though in the rheumy eyes of two octogenarians who come to his rescue – the odds have been unfairly stacked against him. That's why they decide to break a silly law. If they can prove the Tasmanian Tiger still exists, despite it having been declared officially extinct, it'll give him a chance to turn the tables. This is the opening book in a series of seven comedic mysteries based on the island of Tasmania at the bottom of Australia. "Great characters. Great fun. Hilarious blend of characters and lies." The silly law has made Windy Mountain a one-dog town, and the two elderly scallywags want to punish the stuck-up former mayor for coming up with the plan. Helping Paddy isn't their only motivation. ​​​​​​​The former mayor has also invested the other old men's life savings in volatile gold-mining shares without their knowledge. Even worse, he’s also secretly invited a 92-year-old Irish priest to join their last-man-standing lottery – and Father O’Boring has a track record of not dying. The whimsical adventures continue with Blokes on a Plane, Whitey and the Six Dwarfs, Blokes in Donegal, Blokes in the House, Who Knew Tasmanian Tigers Eat Apples!, and Who Knew Tiger Sharks Also Eat Apples? Three more books are on the drawing board. Order your copy of Lie of the Tiger now and start laughing along to the Windy Mountain series.