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Toy Fights
A Boyhood - 'A classic of its kind' William Boyd
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Brief Description
A classic of its kind. - William Boyd Thought-provoking, hilarious, sardonic and scarily brilliant. - Scotsman A work of dazzling craft. - Times Literary Supplement A memoir in a million. - Sunday Times Don Paterson was born in Dundee, Scotland, in 1963. He spent his boyhood...
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Toy Fights
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A future classic of memoir by one of the greatest writers at work today
A future classic of memoir by one of the greatest writers at work today
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Description
A classic of its kind. - William Boyd
Thought-provoking, hilarious, sardonic and scarily brilliant. - Scotsman
A work of dazzling craft. - Times Literary Supplement
A memoir in a million. - Sunday Times
Don Paterson was born in Dundee, Scotland, in 1963. He spent his boyhood on a council housing estate.
When he wasn't busy dreading his birthdays, dodging kids who wanted to kill him in a game of Toy Fights, working with his country-and-western singer dad, obsessing over God, origami, sex or Scottish football cards, he was developing a sugar addiction, playing guitar and descending into madness. While he didn't manage to figure out who he was meant to be, the first twenty years of his lifeβbefore he took a chance, packed his guitar and boarded a train to Londonβdid, for better or worse, shape who he would become.
A book that swan-dives into the filthy waters of growing up and resurfaces clear-eyed, bearing pearls. - Financial Times
Paterson is arguably Scotland's finest writer at work today, his sense of the absurd is acutely honed, his wisdom hard-won. - The National
Wonderful, aggressively wise and alwaysβespecially at its most seriousβdevastatingly funny. - Geoff Dyer
Book Details
INFORMATION
ISBN: 9780571240289
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Format: Paperback / softback
Date Published: 18 January 2024
Country: United Kingdom
Imprint: Faber & Faber
Edition: Main
Audience: General / adult
DIMENSIONS
Spine width: 24.0mm
Width: 130.0mm
Height: 198.0mm
Weight: 313g
Pages: 384
Collections
About the Author
Don Paterson was born in Dundee in 1963. His poetry collections include Nil Nil, God's Gift to Women, Landing Light, Rain, 40 Sonnets and Zonal. He is the author of three books of aphorism - The Book of Shadows, The Blind Eye and The Fall at Home - as well as translations of Antonio Machado and Rainer Maria Rilke. He is also the author of Reading Shakespeare's Sonnets, Smith: A Reader's Guide to the Poetry of Michael Donaghy, and The Poem: Lyric, Sign, Metre. His poetry has won many awards, including the Whitbread Poetry Prize, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Costa Poetry Award, all three Forward Prizes, and the T. S. Eliot Prize on two occasions. He was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 2009. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the English Association and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and teaches at the University of St Andrews, where he is Professor of Poetry. Since 1997 he has been Poetry Editor at Picador Macmillan. For many years he has also worked as a jazz musician and composer. He lives in Edinburgh.
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Reading Shakespeare's Sonnets
Shakespeare's Sonnets are as important and vital today as they were when first published four hundred years ago. Perhaps no collection of verse before or since has so captured the imagination of readers and lovers; certainly no poem has come under such intense critical scrutiny, and presented the reader with such a bewildering number of alternative interpretations. In this illuminating...Paperback$4500Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 4-6 weeks -
101 Sonnets
Poets have been fascinated and challenged by the sonnet ever since it was imported from Italy to England in the sixteenth century. With its fourteen lines, inexhaustibly variable, it has met the particular needs of almost every major poet from Thomas Wyatt to Paul Muldoon. Don Paterson, himself an adept of the form, has devised an anthology that is both...Paperback$3299Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 4-6 weeks -
Rain
In this, his first volume of original verse since the award-winning Landing Light, Don Paterson is found writing at his most memorable and direct. In an assembly of masterful lyrics and monologues, he conjures a series of fables and charms that serve both to expose us to the unsettling forces within the world and simultaneously offer some protection against them....Paperback$3299Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 4-6 weeks -
Toy Fights
Don Paterson was born in Dundee, Scotland, in 1963 and spent his boyhood living on a working-class council housing estate. Toy Fights is the remarkable story of his first twenty years. This is not just a book about music and family, but also about 'schizophrenia, hell, money, narcissists, debt and the working class, anger, swearing, drugs, books, football, love, origami,...HardbackSold Out -
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The Poem attempts to answer several questions: what is a poem? In what way is its use of language distinct? What conditions allow it to arise, and what is its cultural purpose? And how, exactly, do poems work? Part polemic, part technical treatise and part meditation, The Poem is an ambitious contemporary ars poetica. Paterson looks at the writing, transmission...PaperbackSold Out
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