Toy Fights: A Boyhood

Toy Fights: A Boyhood PDF Author: Don Paterson
Publisher: Liveright Publishing
ISBN: 1324093633
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
“It’s wonderful, aggressively wise, and always—especially at its most serious—devastatingly funny.” —Geoff Dyer For readers of Douglas Stuart and Nick Hornby comes an uproarious, tenderhearted memoir of growing up in working-class Dundee in the 1970s and 1980s. Don Paterson is one of our most acclaimed contemporary poets, possessed of “an infinite sensitivity to the world” (Zadie Smith). But his current standing gives few hints of his hilariously misspent youth. An indifferent student prone to obsessions (with girls at school and . . . origami), Paterson nevertheless made clear early on his immense gift for observation. In Toy Fights, he vividly re-creates the customs of the Scottish working class, from the titular childhood game (“basically twenty minutes of extreme violence without pretext”) to the virtues of the sugary sweet known as tablet. When American pop culture arrived, Paterson fell hard for the so-called outlaw sound; by his teens, he was traveling with his father, a Stetson-wearing “country” musician, and becoming guitar-mad himself. A memoir of family, music, and highly inventive profanity, Toy Fights is an unforgettable account of the years we all spend in rehearsal for real life.

Toy Fights: A Boyhood

Toy Fights: A Boyhood PDF Author: Don Paterson
Publisher: Liveright Publishing
ISBN: 1324093633
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 226

Get Book Here

Book Description
“It’s wonderful, aggressively wise, and always—especially at its most serious—devastatingly funny.” —Geoff Dyer For readers of Douglas Stuart and Nick Hornby comes an uproarious, tenderhearted memoir of growing up in working-class Dundee in the 1970s and 1980s. Don Paterson is one of our most acclaimed contemporary poets, possessed of “an infinite sensitivity to the world” (Zadie Smith). But his current standing gives few hints of his hilariously misspent youth. An indifferent student prone to obsessions (with girls at school and . . . origami), Paterson nevertheless made clear early on his immense gift for observation. In Toy Fights, he vividly re-creates the customs of the Scottish working class, from the titular childhood game (“basically twenty minutes of extreme violence without pretext”) to the virtues of the sugary sweet known as tablet. When American pop culture arrived, Paterson fell hard for the so-called outlaw sound; by his teens, he was traveling with his father, a Stetson-wearing “country” musician, and becoming guitar-mad himself. A memoir of family, music, and highly inventive profanity, Toy Fights is an unforgettable account of the years we all spend in rehearsal for real life.

Toy Fights

Toy Fights PDF Author: Don Paterson
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 057137736X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
Exquisitely sharp, deeply humane and brutally hilarious, Toy Fights is a future classic from one of the greatest writers of his generation. 'Devastatingly funny.' Geoff Dyer 'Thought-provoking, hilarious, sardonic and scarily brilliant' Scotsman 'Laugh-out-loud funny' Herald on Sunday This is a book about family, money and music but also about schizophrenia, hell, narcissists, debt and the working class, anger, swearing, drugs, books, football, love, origami, the peculiar insanity of Dundee, sugar, religious mania, the sexual excesses of the Scottish club band scene and, more generally, the lengths we go to not to be bored. 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, screwing up in the Boys' Brigade, obsessing over God, origami, The Osmonds, stamps, sex or Scottish football cards, he was developing a sugar addiction, failing his exams, playing guitar, falling in love, dodging employment and descending into madness. While he didn't manage to figure out who he was meant to be, the first twenty years of his life - before he took a chance, packed his guitar and boarded a train to London - did, for better or worse, shape who he would become.

Packaging Boyhood

Packaging Boyhood PDF Author: Sharon Lamb, Ed.D.
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 1429983256
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
Player. Jock. Slacker. Competitor. Superhero. Goofball. Boys are besieged by images in the media that encourage slacking over studying; competition over teamwork; power over empower - ment; and being cool over being yourself. From cartoons to video games, boys are bombarded with stereotypes about what it means to be a boy, including messages about violence, risktaking, and perfecting an image of just not caring. Straight from the mouths of over 600 boys surveyed from across the U.S., the authors offer parents a long, hard look at what boys are watch ing, reading, hearing, and doing. They give parents advice on how to talk with their sons about these troubling images and provide them with tools to help their sons resist these mes sages and be their unique selves.

Toy Fights

Toy Fights PDF Author: Don Paterson
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780571240272
Category : Poets, Scottish
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description


Rain

Rain PDF Author: Don Paterson
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1466880686
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 87

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Book Description
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 to offer some protection against them. Whether outwardly elemental in their address or more personal in their direction, these poems—addressed to the rain and the sea, to his young sons or beloved friends—never shy from their inquiry into truth and lie, embracing everything in scope from the rangy narrative to the tiny renku. Rain, which includes the winner of this year's Forward Prize for the Best Individual Poem and an extended elegy for the poet Michael Donaghy, is Paterson's most intimate and manifest collection to date.

Boy Kings of Texas

Boy Kings of Texas PDF Author: Domingo Martinez
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 0762786825
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 459

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Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER AND NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST A lyrical and authentic book that recounts the story of a border-town family in Brownsville, Texas in the 1980's, as each member of the family desperately tries to assimilate and escape life on the border to become "real" Americans, even at the expense of their shared family history. This is really un-mined territory in the memoir genre that gives in-depth insight into a previously unexplored corner of America.

The Story of My Boyhood and Youth

The Story of My Boyhood and Youth PDF Author: John Muir
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description


The White Lie

The White Lie PDF Author: Andrea Gillies
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 1780720521
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
A stunning debut novel from the winner of the Orwell Prize 2010 and the inaugural Wellcome Trust Book Prize 2009 On a hot summer's afternoon, Ursula Salter runs sobbing from the loch on her parents' Scottish estate and confesses, distraught, that she has killed Michael, her 19 year old nephew. But what really happened? No body can be found, and Ursula's story is full of contradictions. In order to protect her, the Salters come up with another version of events, a decision that some of them will come to regret. Years later, at a family gathering, a witness speaks up and the web of deceit begins to unravel. What is the white lie? Only one person knows the whole truth. Narrating from beyond the grave, Michael takes us to key moments in the past, looping back and back until - finally - we see what he sees.

Flint And Steel

Flint And Steel PDF Author: John Weishaar, Ed. D.
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
ISBN: 1456866796
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 82

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Book Description
– Ryan Larsen, 14, moves to Alaska with his family to build a log cabin in the wilderness. He hikes into the wilderness for a two day trip as a rite of passage from boyhood to manhood and faces the harsh elements of winter for seven days. He fights for survival.

Landing Light

Landing Light PDF Author: Don Paterson
Publisher: Graywolf Press
ISBN: 9781555974473
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 88

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Book Description
Now in paperback, the highly acclaimed collection by Scottish poet Don Paterson, winner of the 2003 Whitbread Poetry Award and the T.S. Eliot Prize Dear son, I was mezzo del cammin and the true path was as lost to me as ever when you cut in front and lit it as you ran. See how the true gift never leaves the giver . . . —from "Waking with Russell" Hailed for its "seriousness and moral urgency" (The Independent), Landing Light is one of the most important and resonant poetry collections to come out of Britain in recent years.