From the preface:
 'This is a book which synthesizes a lifetime of reflection on the origins of the modern world. Through forty years of travel in Europe, Australia, India, Nepal, Japan and China I have observed the similarities and differences of cultures. I have read as widely as possible in both contemporary and classical works in history, anthropology and philosophy.'
 Prof Macfarlane is also the author of The Culture of Capitalism, The Savage Wars of Peace, The Riddle of the Modern World and The Making of the Modern World, among many others.
 This is the third book published by Odd Volumes, the imprint of The Fortnightly Review.

The Invention of the Modern World

History

MACFARLANE, ALAN

Europe

Odd Volumes

Helen (Odd Volumes)

Literature & Fiction

Sickert, Oswald Valentine

Literary

For more than 50 years, Peter Riley's creative and critical voice has given shape and substance to modern English-language poetry as a prize-winning poet and editor and writer of imaginative prose. For the last few years, he has served as poetry editor of The Fortnightly Review, whence these critical notices come. Denise Riley, John Burnside, Peter Hughes, Alistair Noon, Andrew Jordan, Sandeep Parmar, Kelvin Corcoran, Anthony Barnett, Barry Tebb, Ed Dorn, Barbara Guest, Joseph Ceravolo, James Schuyler, Simon Smith, Carherine Hales, John Welch, Anthony Mellors, Andrew McMillan and Robert Duncan are among the more than two dozen poets surveyed here.About Peter Riley: Peter Riley is a former co-editor of The English Intelligencer, the former editor of Collection, and the author of fifteen books of poetry - and some of prose. A recipient of a 2012 Cholmondeley Award for poetry, his latest book is Due North (Shearsman Books 2015), which has been shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2015. After many years in Cambridge, he now lives in Yorkshire. 'Coming under the scrutiny of Peter Riley's mind is to feel the weight of a lifetime's commitment to Anglophone and French-language poetry, to encounter tastes formed by long questioning, reflecting, and understanding, and to hear, as good poets and readers must, how judgment of success in composition is no respecter of blanket denigration, sacred cow, or cult reputation. It is to be understood by an expert. Allowed the space by The Fortnightly Review to explore a host of ideas on his art, in direct engagement with others' contributions, Riley remains his own man. Reading these review-essays is to be apprised through sustained inquiry of benefits and challenges in a broad swathe of recent poetry. Where product placement, measurable usefulness, compliance and craven correctness are prevalent, his critical intelligence is essential to such a society's real culture.' - Peter Robinson

The Fortnightly Reviews: Poetry Notes 2012-2014 (Odd Volumes)

Riley, Peter

History & Criticism

'I have now given shape, though clumsily--so clumsily that, in the past, I would not have divulged them like this--to these pages begun immediately after the 21st of April, 2001, and dragged around like a burden for three years, the burden of an unsatisfactory draft, of an unfulfilled promise. Now published, despite everything, because of the impulse of friendship that they originally signified; and because of what they wanted to say and say again, before I will assuredly no longer be able to do so.'--Philippe Jaccottet Philippe Jaccottet is the prize-winning, Swiss-born French poet who, in 2014, became only the third poet (after René Char and St. John Perse) to enter Gallimard's Pléiade list while still living and working. "Truinas, April 21, 2001" is Jaccottet's meditation on his long friendship with another essential French poet, André du Bouchet (1924-2001), provoked by Du Bouchet's funeral -- 'an event that evokes memories of their first meeting a half-century earlier, their literary affinities (notably their common literary admiration for the poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin), the particularly vivid perceptions of the natural surroundings of Du Bouchet's house in the south of France, and, not least, the doubts--scruples--about the very possibility of writing truly and honestly about death.' -- John Taylor

Truinas: April 21, 2001

Biographies & Memoirs

Jaccottet, Philippe

Memoirs

Literary and speculative essays, many resembling truth, on the paranormal and other imaginative topics - ranging from Madame Blavatsky to make-believe musicians - by Fortnightly Review columnist and novelist James Gallant. "James Gallant writes about some of the most intellectually challenging and inherently fascinating subjects imaginable: the UFO phenomenon, occult materializations and the like. His suggestion that invasions of occult influences become especially likely in disorderly societies like our own-in the gaps, in the interstices of what we think of as the real but which is in fact a social construction, and a wobbly one at that-is compelling." - Jeffrey J. Kripal, J. Newton Rayzor Professor of Religion, Rice University, author of Secret Body: Erotic and Esoteric Currents in the History of Religion

Verisimilitudes: Essays and Approximations

Gallant, James

Consciousness: (with Mutilation)

Howell, Anthony

Pedraterra & Angleterre: Two Fictions

Science Fiction & Fantasy

Rudolf, Anthony

Fantasy

These eighty-one stories were arbitrarily fashioned during a single year. Michelene Wandor, a playwright, poet, fiction writer and cultural critic, invited family members, friends — and some passing acquaintances — to give her four random words. These quartets signal each story as a kind of riddle: the solution in the title, the clues, Marple and Poirot-like, embedded in each brief narrative. Punning, witty, scholarly, off the wall, each with its unique punchline, the pieces go beyond flash fiction and poetry, into freed association, with unpredicted and unpredictable motifs. The language becomes and is becoming: transformative and serendipitous in the writing and the reading.\nMichelene Wandor is a playwright, poet, fiction writer and cultural critic. She has taught creative writing for more than three decades, currently as tutor for the MA at Lancaster University.

Four Times EightyOne: Bespoke Stories

Wandor, Michelene

Short Stories & Anthologies

'A volume of belles-lettres'...\n'Igor Webb has written a light-touch (but not light-weight) book. With its knowingness, self-awareness and deconstructive focus, its anti-genre or non-genre composition, its un-self-defensive irony, it could only have been written now, yet it is sweetly old-fashioned: this fine critic and memoirist has produced a collection of essays, a volume of belles-lettres, like some of the books by Huxley and Edmund Wilson. It does not seek to be integrated and yet it is a whole thanks to the projection of a charming and seductive voice, whether writing about his friends, Robert Hass and Philip Roth, or a childhood favourite, such as Captain Hornblower, while taking in Dickens, the Brontes and James Bond en route — or the pandemic in journal form. Webb has produced an instructive and entertaining book that is deeply serious and yet does not take itself seriously.' — Anthony Rudolf\nAlso by Igor Webb: Christopher Smart's Cat: 'Marvelous...inventingly told, full of intelligence, funny, often with a novelistic flair...as much like a literary miscellany as a memoir, with both genres having equally impressive heft.' — Philip Roth

Buster Brown's America: Recollections, Reveries, Reflections — and incorporating This Old Writer: A Journal of a Plague Year.

Webb, Igor

After a career of some fifty years, John Matthias pays homage in this book to a wide range of poetic masters, early teachers, friends, places, curiosities, fictions, and facts in a hybrid volume including several styles of verse and two essays. Ian Pople in Manchester Review has called Matthias “a kind of mid-Atlantic treasure," and Guy Davenport declared him “one of the best poets in the USA.”\nMatthias, an editor and teacher, as well as a prolific poet, has written some forty books of poetry, translation, scholarship, and fiction. His most recent volume is a book-length version of his memoir, “Living with a Visionary,” which was widely read when it appeared in The New Yorker. That account of his late wife Diana's struggle with Parkinson’s finds a companion here in “Hacheston Halt,” about the poet’s early visit to Diana’s house in Suffolk.

Varieties of Homage

Matthias, John

Poetry

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