Mostrando resultados por autor "John Fraser" en Todas las categorías

Never before has a president stirred so much controversy, so much anger. But what’s the root cause of this negativity and why are people emotionally disturbed by the 45th president? These are questions that many folks have attempted to answer, but the real reasons have been difficult to pinpoint...until now.

Three stories about The Ends of the Earth by John Fraser Making the world uninhabitable is a prospect facing us all, each has a strategy to hasten or retard – even avoid – it. Such a project would be the greatest exploit of an evolving species – greater than the creation, quicker than biology and a cock-eyed triumph of the good life and its sciences. Most of us alive won’t know if the plan succeeds, so hypothesis is the mode proposed. The people described in these thematically connected tales are precarious, but very human. Extinction would come when the exploration of the planet ...

John Fraser's 'Medusa' is a stunning fable for our times, in which the stories of Medusa, the Gorgon and the French ship Medusa are intertwined to create a Pilgrim's Progress for the 21st century. Medusa is a trip, a bending of the legends. It is a symphonic poem, where at the end, we even hear a few notes of a hymn to joy. The fragments of myth, legend and belief drift round like harmonies that seek resolution. But this mode is post-modern, post-Christian; it is about the end – yet there is no end: it is story. The resulting tale is an apocryphal blast and a literary tour de force that ...

John Fraser’s latest work of fiction follows the refugee Khalil in two related stories, ‘The Refugees’ and ‘Travels with Strangers’. We are all refugees seeking an entry to soCaucasmewhere when we’ve left somewhere else. Our knowledge is a raft that’s carried us on lumpy seas. We can forget all that when we arrive. It doesn’t serve. We don’t, of course, stop being refugees, not ever, but we have a lot of living to do while we’re forgetting where we were before. It’s a commonplace, to say we’re strangers to ourselves – not only when we are alone, but especially when...

Two new tales from John Fraser. These two tales consider basic questions. Life is a test, they say, but life comes to us as unanswered and even unanswerable questions - come to each, but surely we can't respond to all those questions, not with any confidence or authority? It all shimmers, seems uncertain, without a purpose, and yet - the heroine in The Test sees her partner swept away by gunfire, gone for good or ill, unloved and probably unmourned. She sees the solidity of all around her questioned, religions which might seem to give an answer instead propose a self-denial, abnegation ... ...

Good public relations is no longer just icing - it's a strategic imperative more important to your competitive success than even advertising or marketing. This is true whether you're a century-old multibillion-dollar corporation or a penniless startup. In Rethinking Reputation, public relations guru Fraser Seitel and John Doorley, founder of the Academy for Communication Excellence and Leadership at Johnson & Johnson, examine a fascinating new set of case studies.

Two novellas by John Fraser, described by the Whitbread Award winning poet John Fuller, as 'the most original novelist of our time'. Stardust examines the adventures of the journalist, Hadar. At sea, he and the odious Pietro, a banker cum sailor, are marooned by the shipboard scientists whose expedition has lost contact with land. Hadar's lover, Doctor Chin, is the principal in an experiment into the conversion of humans into marine creatures. The mission is desperate, the participants self-destructive in their wish to make world-saving discoveries. The story explores two connected themes -...

John Fraser’s latest novel shows how confessions are less about contrition than about seeking accomplices and pardoners – though there is a nod to various 'confessors' – Augustine, Rousseau. Confessions starts with an invocation to addiction, those who take on that burden, and those who will take it on or share it. The story follows the branches of a family tree, rooted in the life of an alcoholic and his accomplice-therapist, and their descendants. Their children are shown being forced to confess what they – probably – haven’t done, and to perform a personal sacrifice in ...

The Magnificent Wurlitzer is a modern epic, its theme that of the ‘guilty Faust’ on a fantastic, grotesque journey seeking his truth, his Mephistopheles. Its hero James (aka Jay, Jayman, Hopper) treads in the traces of epics from East and West, Gilgamesh, the Ramayana, Götterdämmerung, from jazzman to shaman, sliding from music and religion to seeking order where there can be none, to politicking and leadership of the virtual and the voiceless. Wurlitzer is the machine that plays all music in its own sweet way. It is creation, innovation, improvisation – a farrago-medley of beauty ...

TRUE STORIES - three stories of modern life by John Fraser. True Stories poses the question: What is modern life? Struggling with bureaucracy, getting on, and off, lists? The protagonist, Kochi, and his young - then much older - friends, engage with love, philosophy ... the murder of a lover by the mother of a socialite, the centre of the hero's attention: and her reprisal. We follow them, their adventures, the search for the Great Principle, embodied by a fragile ancient, who dosses down and dies on his first night in Kochi's dwelling. Think, says the Master, but no life seems lived by ...

Where are we? Where are we going? What's in store? In John Fraser’s latest novel, the answer to the question 'how might we prepare for catastrophe?' comes in the last section of four thematically linked examples. In The Colours of Air: many characters live in an apartment, a mocrocosm – intellectuals from Sartre to de Beauvoir, security experts, émigrés and refugees, traditionalse from the country, all involved in strategies of survival. In the end, the question becomes to survive, what must be jettisoned, what has irrevocably been lost? Peace and War chronicles couples joining up and...

Three novellas by John Fraser with the related theme of friendship:The two cities in Cities on the Plain, on a Hill are the new Jerusalem on the hill, Sodom and Gomorrah on the plain – destinations for Ahmed and Nico, two ex-pats and best friends. Ahmed, an ex-dancer, interested in the law and justice, becomes an amateur judge and Nico, ex-soldier, poetaster, small-time dealer, comes to reside in a city run by drug-cartels.What does it mean, to leave something of oneself? The protagonist of Fame is engaged to follow the past life of an ancient, who hopes to achieve a kind of immortality. ...

John Fraser’s latest work of fiction consists of three thematically-linked trajectories. In the first, two Palestinians escape to humble, even humiliating work in Belgium. They manage to set themselves up as a think-tank above a public dance-hall, and their lives divide between the search for a lofty principle and the drinking and music in the floor below. The link between the levels is provided by a fussy, garrulous first-person narrator, whose own adventures turn out to signify little. There is a party, where the upper and lower worlds mingle, the protagonist dressed as moths and ...

The Case is a novel about loss – of memory, of love, of money, of friends. The protagonist searches throughout the book for a suitcase – maybe valuable in itself, maybe because it represents resources and a destination. The novel takes us on a trip through the American dream, of wealth, cowboys Hollywood movies, and out the other side, to police shootouts, mortal danger and revolution, on a quest for the missing case. About the author: John Fraser is the author of 18 works of literary and speculative fiction. He has lived in Rome since 1980. Previously he worked in England and Canada. ...

Mercenaries - four new tales by John Fraser Mercenaries: soldiers of fortune, conottieri, knight errants ... Soldiers have always been paid, somehow; a wage? ... or by their own practices of looting, enslavement, often taking it out on others for vengeance or pleasure, taking prisoners and ransoming - hostages. Yet people who soldier for the money are singled out, and looked down on ... and yet, however you do it, losing, whether done for money or the cause, is never pleasant. Being a prisoner, or dead, gives no material credit whether you are a courageous, altruistic type or needy and ...

John Fraser's ''Enterprising Women' is a sequence of stories of women in difficult circumstances , who contrive to avoid - and sometimes cause - the worst of consequences. In 'The Flies', the women are witness to violence and temptation, and although one of the heroines succumbs to alcohol, the others manage to maintain their extraneous, and independent, positions. In 'Landfall', the protagonist, a spymaster, survives the loss and betrayal of her male companions, maintains her scepticism regarding the value of her profession, and ultimately we presume she continues on her solitary path, ...

John Fraser's 'Hard Places' consists of three novellas, Red Snow, The Rock and The Sea. They concern human struggles with Nature and human natures. Red Snow involves efforts to have the better of chance by gaming, and the forms of self-discipline this requires. The Rock shows the eternal certainties of art crumbling into inexplicable absences and shady deals. The Sea evokes our longing for submersion in nature when we wish to coneal our misdeeds and rejections. About the author: John Fraser is the author of 18 works of literary and speculative fiction. He has lived in Rome since 1980. ...

The latest work of fiction by John Fraser (‘the most original novelist of our time’, John Fuller, Whitbread Award winner and Booker Prize nominee) consists of two stories about aspiration, and how that is suited to a short reflective life, rather than a long happenstance. ‘O the Poor Horses’ tells of a super-athlete, climber and circus star, Pierre, whose aim is to reach the top of the tent, and then beyond – perfection of the body and its mind. When Pierre tumbles and is crippled, Dora, his assistant and companion, once his facilitator who has become a dead weight, must take on ...

Blue Light comprises two novellas by John Fraser: 'Blue Light: After the End' and 'Starting Over'. We may like to imagine we know what the end of the world will be like – and maybe it will not be dissimilar to our own individual ends. 'Blue Light' shows what it’s like, the running down, the onset of rigor mortis, the new life sprouting, notwithstanding. About the author: John Fraser is the author of 18 works of literary and speculative fiction. He has lived in Rome since 1980. Previously he worked in England and Canada. The distinguished poet, novelist and Booker Prize nominee John ...

In three fables, John Fraser’s The Red Tank presents founding myths and 21st century epics – viewed with a kind of Martian ‘taken-abackness’. In our new globalised world, what happens to the little beings, our species, and their allies among the beasts – do they grow, becoming giant, innocent philosophers, or do they go off to rut and runt in the forest? The human project is once more immense: taming nature, securing peace, creating order. The protagonists are fabulous, easily the equals of ancient gods and heroes. In the first fable, ‘Chinese Whispers’, we try to subdue and ...