Biting the Bullet

Arthur, Chris

Saint Andrew Press

In his latest collection, Hummingbirds Between the Pages, prizewinning Irish essayist Chris Arthur muses on subjects ranging from Charles Darwin’s killing of a South American fox to the carnal music sounding in a statue of the Buddha, from how Egyptian seashells contain echoes of World War II to a child’s first encounter with death. Whether he’s looking at skipping stones, old photographs, butterflies, the resonance of a remembered phrase, or being questioned at an army checkpoint during Northern Ireland’s Troubles, what gives these unorthodox meditations their appeal is the way in which—with striking lyricism—they tap into unexpected seams of meaning and mystery in our everyday terrain. Arthur explores the moments that have left him spellbound, tying his own experiences as a young boy from Ulster who saw his first hummingbirds in London to the wonder felt by early settlers to America who sent pressed hummingbirds across the ocean to the communities they had left behind. Through rumination on the seemingly quotidian, Arthur’s lyrical prose exposes new layers of possibility just beneath the surface of the expected.

Hummingbirds Between the Pages (21st Century Essays)

Literature & Fiction

Essays & Correspondence

Mad Creek Books

Chris Arthur is a master of the essay form. His three previous collections (published in the USA), Irish Nocturnes, Irish Willow and Irish Haiku, have received widespread critical acclaim. His essays are intensely personal meditations on family, history, place, time, language, and loss. All of them are rooted in the northern landscapes where he grew up. Words of the Grey Wind gathers together ten of the best of Chris Arthur's essays to showcase the extraordinary emotional depth and lyrical range of a unique voice in Irish writing.

Words of the Grey Wind: Family and Epiphany in Ulster

Blackstaff Pr

How do you read a girl's bare feet, a fallen fuchsia blossom, or the act of throwing a gun into a reservoir's deep water? In this book, critically acclaimed essayist Chris Arthur continues his experiments with this fascinating and flexible literary genre, using it to fashion fourteen exquisitely crafted readings whose lyricism suggests poetry as much as prose. Sometimes reading is meant literally and books are the point of focus; sometimes it's meant metaphorically with the objects and events around us being read. But whether he's considering child prostitution in Paris, Flann O'Brien's great comic novel At Swim-Two-Birds, a whale's tooth, a bayonet, or the poems of Seamus Heaney, common to all of Chris Arthur's readings is a search for the meanings that lie behind the superficialities of ordinary discourse. Winner of the Monroe K Spears Essay Prize, the Akegarasu Haya International Essay Prize and several other awards, this is Arthur's sixth essay collection. His previous books include Words of the Grey Wind, On the Shoreline of Knowledge and Irish Elegies. Visit www.chrisarthur.org to find out more about the author and his writing. "Few writers today can rival Chris Arthur in his mastery of the traditional essay, that endangered and slow-moving literary species which manages to survive despite the competing pressures of 24/7 journalism and the incessant clamor of everybody's infallible opinions. More interested in the glance than the gaze, the spark than the fire, Arthur - like so many great essayists - takes creative advantage of our strangest faculty: the wandering mind. I found Reading Life enchanting and invigorating, chock-full of those wonderful and surprising insights that come only from an inspired divided attention." - Robert Atwan, series editor, The Best American Essays "Arthur is proof that the art of the essay is flourishing." - Publishers Weekly "The essay, in Chris Arthur's hands, proclaims its outsider status, its subversive momentum, its effortless inclusivity and freedom from trammels of the imagination, attaining an embodiment which is civilized, idiosyncratic and rare." - Times Literary Supplement "The deliberation with which he writes recalls a woodcutter, polishing his creations until they give off a deep, burnished glow." - Belfast Telegraph

Reading Life

Negative Capability Press

The carefully crafted, meditative essays in On the Shoreline of Knowledge sometimes start from unlikely objects or thoughts, a pencil or some fragments of commonplace conversation, but they soon lead the reader to consider fundamental themes in human experience. The unexpected circumnavigation of the ordinary unerringly gets to the heart of the matter. 
Bringing a diverse range of material into play, from fifteenth-century Japanese Zen Buddhism to how we look at paintings, and from the nature of a briefcase to the ancient nest-sites of gyrfalcons, Chris Arthur reveals the extraordinary dimensions woven invisibly into the ordinary things around us. Compared to Loren Eiseley, George Eliot, Seamus Heaney, Aldo Leopold, V. S. Naipaul, W. G. Sebald, W. B. Yeats, and other literary luminaries, he is a master essayist whose work has quietly been gathering an impressive cargo of critical acclaim. Arthur speaks with an Irish accent, rooting the book in his own unique vision of the world, but he addresses elemental issues of life and death, love and loss, that circle the world and entwine us all.

On the Shoreline of Knowledge: Irish Wanderings (Sightline Books)

Biographies & Memoirs

University Of Iowa Press

"These nocturnes are rooted in the same parts of Ireland as I am. They took shape where I was born and grew up. Inevitably, they derive much of their tone and colour from the places, people and events that constitute my background. To the extent that writing has a voice, they speak with the same ac-cent whose inflection and intonation mark every word I utter...The ground covered in them...belongs to the human tribe...even if the universal issues are addressed in an Ulster accent; even if the points of departure are often minutely local..." ©1999 Chris Arthur .

Irish Nocturnes

History & Criticism

The Davies Group, Publishers

Hidden Cargoes

Eastover Press LLC

The process of globalization has been accelerated by rapid developments in communication technology. Behind the political and economic issues raised by the globalization of communication lie important ethical and religious questions, such as, for example, the effect of our constant exposure through the media to the reality of human suffering far away, and the effects on religions and religious people of how the media portray faith.

The Globalization of Communications: Some Religious Implications

Religion & Spirituality

Religious Studies

World Council of Churches

The New Dialectic and Marx's Capital (Historical Materialism Book Series, 1)

This book both argues for, and demonstrates, a new turn to dialectic. Marx's Capital was clearly influenced by Hegel's dialectical figures: here, case by case, the significance of these is clarified. More, it is argued that, instead of the dialectic of the rise and fall of social systems, what is needed is a method of articulating the dialectical relations characterising a given social whole. Marx learnt from Hegel the necessity for a systematic development, and integration, of categories; for example, the category of 'value' can be fully comprehended only in the context of the totality of capitalist relations. These studies thus shed new light on Marx's great work, while going beyond it in many respects.This publication has also been published in paperback, please click here for details

The New Dialectic and Marx's Capital (Historical Materialism Book)

Business & Money

Economics

BRILL

This book argues that the dialectic of Marx's Capital has a systematic, rather than historical, character. It sheds new light on Marx's great work, while going beyond it in many respects.

Politics & Social Sciences

Philosophy

Brill Academic Pub

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