Library of Wales

The Valley, The City, The Village

Author: 
Glyn Jones

Glyn Jones was one of the giants of twentieth-century Welsh writing whether as short story writer, critic or poet, and here in his remarkable novel of 1956, he creates a narrative of exceptional power that draws on all these gifts.

 

Synopsis:

An artist at heart, Trystan Morgan grows up in his grandmother’s valley mining cottage, duty-bound by her deep wish for him to be a preacher. He comes from farming stock and longs to paint the Welsh countryside of his people. But he agrees to study at the city university although his adolescent mind revolts at the social posturing around him.

Trystan’s journey through the conflicting cultural, social and political values of his country in the mid-twentieth century is bewildering but finally liberating. And through the glittering, crowded, kaleidoscopic images of this bravura novel, the author creates a rich impression of people and place; a Wales which is a landscape of the mind.

 

About the author:

Glyn Jones was born in 1905. In the thirties, he entered the Welsh writing scene and continued to publish novels, poetry, short story collections, translations and works of criticism until his death in 1995. He received several awards for his contributions to literature in Wales. Brought up in a Welsh-speaking, chapel-going family, Glyn Jones was educated in English, which remained his primary writing language, although he read and spoke fluent Welsh. The first chairman and then vice president of Yr Academi Gymreig (English section), he was deeply concerned with supporting the literature of both languages.

 

Short extract:

They were red and rugged, the hands of a labourer, their knotted erubescence evidenced familiarity with the roughest work, they seemed as if the coarse substance at which they had laboured had become an element of their conformation ... [I] watched my own painter’s hand, culpable, indulged, and epicene, as it moved adroitly in the perfect glove of its skin.

 

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The Heyday in the Blood

Author: 
Geraint Goodwin

"It has filled me with a sense of seeing great talent trying its first flight, which I have not experienced since reading D.H Lawrence’s The White Peacock." - Howard Spring

"It is a mystery why a masterpiece like The Heyday in the Blood has been overlooked. Alternately comic and touching... a poignant romance."
 - Paul Durden

 

"[The Heyday in the Blood] explores issues of nationality, language and class with a humorous yet tragic story attached... The in-depth descriptions of places and situations create a vivid image for the reader, providing an interesting if challenging read." - Buzz Magazine

 

Synopsis:

The village of Tanygraig on the Welsh-English border is the setting for this passionate novel of love and its consequences. Beti, the beautiful and wilful daughter of a pub landlord, is pursued by two men: Llew, her aggressive, red-haired cousin, and Evan, the dreamy miller and would-be poet. She has to make a choice but it’s not her future alone that depends on her decision. She and Tanygraig are positioned precariously on borders of class, nation, language, and changing times. In this enduring novel by Geraint Goodwin, first published in 1936, Wales is associated with tradition and stability, England connotes modernity and movement. Beti is conscious of living at a temporal border: ‘The old way of things was ending; she had come at the end of one age and the beginning of another. Wales would be the last to go – but it was going…’

 

About the author:

Geraint Goodwin was born in Wales in 1903. He started writing at an early age, his first success being at a local eisteddfod. As a young man he made his living as a journalist in London, where he wrote his first book Conversations with George Moore, and followed it with Call Back Yesterday. It was not, however, until he reached the age of thirty-two that he published his first work of fiction. The Heyday in the Blood made a considerable impression on the critics, and its author was hailed as a second Thomas Hardy. His untimely death in 1941 brought to an end a brilliant literary career which had barely time to begin. He was married and had two children, a girl and a boy.

 

Short extract:

Beti had gone out to see the kingfisher. She went tripping out over the old lawn, her feet sinking into it and with each step there came that strange resilience from the earth; it felt as though she were going to take flight.

 

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The Great God Pan

Author: 
Arthur Machen

"Arthur Machen’s stories… are inspired by a genuine emotion. He hardly ever wrote merely to frighten others; he did so because he knew he lived in an alien world." - Jorge Luis Borges

"One of the greatest horror stories ever written." - Stephen King

Synopsis:

Arthur Machen's most famous story was condemned on its first publication in 1894 as decadent and nightmarish. But its mixture of chilling horror and pagan sexuality with contemporary Victorian London, plus his distinctive and haunting writing style, soon brought him cult status.

 

About the author:

 

 
Machen spent a solitary childhood in the Monmouthshire countryside, exploring the Black Mountains, the ancient forest of Wentwood and the Severn Valley. He drew on his childhood among these dark landscapes and long-buried pagan remains, interweaving it with his adult life in bohemian fin-de-siécle London, to create magical and often deeply disturbing tales.
 
After WWI, he became a star on both sides of the Atlantic, and attracted admirers including H. P. Lovecraft, who described him as one of the four ‘modern masters of the horror story’. His fans today include Stephen King, Clive Barker, Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman, who have all emphasised their debt to Machen as ‘the forgotten father of weird fiction’ (The Guardian)

 

Short extract:

A contemporary of Arthur Conan Doyle, Oscar Wilde and William Butler Yeats, all of whom admired his work tremendously, Machen's legacy is central to gothic fiction in the twentieth century. His great literary significance was recognized by H. P. Lovecraft who named Machen as one of the four "modern masters" of supernatural horror. His immediate influence in the US is recognisable in the development of the pulp horror found in magazines like Weird Tales and on such notable fantasy writers as Robert E. Howard. The Shining Pyramid was filmed for television in 1980 and films with Machen influences or references include John Carpenter's 1980 film The Fog (which features a character named "Mr. Machen").

 

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This title is also available as an ebook: http://thelibraryofwales.com/node/68

 

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The Dark Philosophers

Author: 
Gwyn Thomas

Thomas Hardy met Damon Runyon over a loving cup of small beer.
- New York Herald Tribune, 1947

 

A Masterpiece, a warm, beautiful, splendid book.
- Howard Fast

 

Synopsis:

Sex, murder, and a devastating, humour mark these three novellas that Gwyn Thomas wrote in 1946. In ‘Oscar’, the narrator of death and exploitation fails to fend off the evil that envelops him. In ‘Simeon’, the abuse of sexual and family power ends with violent death, and in ‘The Dark philosophers’ itself, the grimly humorous philosophers gather in an Italian café to tell the tragic tale of revenge and manslaughter that they engineer.

 

About the author:

Writer and broadcaster, Gwyn Thomas was born in Cymmer, Porth in 1913. His other work includes The Alone to the Alone (1947); All Things Betray Thee (1949); The World Cannot Hear You (1951), and Now Lead Us Home (1952), as well as short stories, plays and an autobiography.

 

Short extract:

The extraordinary thing about Gwyn Thomas is that he found anything to laugh about. He grew up in one of the grimmest and most depressed areas in the United Kingdom. He was the last (and felt himself to be the least wished-for) of twelve children. His mother died when he was six, leaving the memory of a beautiful and creative woman who ‘would look at me, and almost forgive me, sometimes, for being there.’ He inherited her zest for life, and acquired an appetite for learning which took him to Oxford, but he was miserably hardup and lonely there, and plagued by mysterious health problems. These grew steadily worse until he was twenty three, when he was told that an undiagnosed thyroid malfunction had been poisoning him for years and if he wasn’t promptly operated on he would shortly die. It doesn’t sound like the kind of raw material that would lead to his one day being hailed by a chorus of critics as one of the funniest men in the Western world. When that happened, it would have come as no surprise to those who knew him. Whatever he talked about, he could when he was in the mood reduce his listeners to helpless laughter.

 

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The Caves of Alienation

Author: 
Stuart Evans

Synopsis:

The Caves of Alienation is a story of unfolding revelation about the difficult, fascinating character of Caradock. His family made their fortune from the industry of Wales, but his cosseted childhood in the Welsh valleys only fuelled his desire to leave, and his efforts to escape are explored through the multi-voiced narrative. Then there are his crucial first encounters with sex, his literary success in London and his final withdrawal to Wales. But it is the riveting manner of the telling which gives The Caves of Alienation its virtuosity.

It is told from a variety of viewpoints, some conflicting, all interrelated. Friends and enemies, literary rivals, lovers, critics, the ‘official biography’ even television and radio documentaries jostle each other in the narrative with their own (sometimes feigning) fragments of truth. Caradock’s own novels and essays play a vital part in the story. All this makes for an exhilarating, kaleidoscopic read, funny and profound by turns, yet never flinching in its portrayal of Caradock and his deepest preoccupations.

The phrase tour de force is a tired one, but it has seldom been more justified than in the case of this exceptional novel.

 

About the author:

Stuart Evans was born in Swansea in 1934 and brought up at Ystalyfera in Glamorgan. It was as a novelist that he established his reputation, with eight long, technically complex novels which are more inclined to the philosophical than is usual in English fiction. They include Meritocrats (1974), The Gardens of the Casino (1976), The Caves of Alienation (1977), and a quintet known as The Windmill Hill Sequence. He also published two volumes of verse, Imaginary Gardens with Real Toads (1972) and The Function of the Foal (1997). He died in 1994.

 

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The Alone to the Alone

Author: 
Gwyn Thomas

Once you have heard the lark, known the swish of feet through hill-top grass and smelt the earth made ready for the seed, you are never again going to be fully happy about the cities and towns that man carries like a crippling weight upon his back.

 

Synopsis:

The Alone to the Alone was first published in 1947. It came, Gwyn Thomas recalled, as the “last gasp of the first violent mood” of creation with which he had written his early masterpieces Oscar and The Dark Philosophers. The Alone to the Alone unites Gwyn Thomas’ lyrical and philosophical flights of narrative in a satire whose savagery is only relieved by irrepressible laughter. It is Gwyn Thomas’ most shaped work: the underlying meaning of South Wales' history is not so much documented as laid bare for universal dissection and dissemination. The novel, with its distinctive plural narration, is a choric commentary on human illusion and knowledge, on power and its attendant deprivation, on dreams and their destruction. The Alone to the Alone is History as Carnival and, in Gwyn Thomas’ unique voice, a comic vision of humanity that recognises no geographical boundaries.

 

About the author:

Gwyn Thomas was born into a large and boisterous family in Porth, in the Rhondda Valley, in 1913. After a scholarship to Porth County School he went to St Edmund Hall, Oxford, where he read Spanish. Mass unemployment and widespread poverty in South Wales deepened his radicalism. After working for the Workers’ Educational Association he became a teacher, first in Cardigan and from 1942 in Barry. In 1962 he left teaching and concentrated on writing and broadcasting. His many published works of fiction include The Dark Philosophers (1946); The Alone to the Alone (1947); All Things Betray Thee (1949); The World Cannot Hear You (1951) and Now Lead Us Home (1952). He also wrote several collections of short stories, six stage plays and the autobiography A Few Selected Exits (1968). He died in 1981.

 

Short extract:

In the Terraces, we never opposed love. The way we viewed this question was that love must be pretty deeply rooted to have gone on for so long. One would have to be very deep to tinker with so deep a root, deeper than we were. Also, love passes on the time. That is a prime feature in any place where there is a scarcity of work for the local men and women to do, a state which prevailed on a high plane indeed during the dark years now being spoken of. Also, love, properly used, keeps people warm.

 

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Sport

Author: 
Various

There has long been a need for an anthology of Welsh sports writing that would reflect the best of it. Here it is.
- The Western Mail

 

Synopsis:

Sport is one of our consuming passions, and its literature is rich and extensive. This original and enjoyable anthology brings together for the very first time the finest writing on Welsh sport by some of our most acclaimed authors - novelists, short-story writers, journalists, historians and poets.

Its wide-ranging selection of fiction, non-fiction and verse reminds us that sport, like literature, is not only about itself but also about life, and sometimes death, and the human meaning of both.

 

About the author:

Featuring writing by: Richard Burton, Dylan Thomas, Dannie Abse, Richard Llewellyn, Carolyn Hitt, Leslie Thomas, Sheenagh Pugh, Alexander Cordell, Lewis Davies, Max Boyce, Jon Arlott, Eddie Butler, John Toshack, Rupert Moon, Gerald Davies and many more.

 

Short extract:

The Welshman has no national sport or pastime, unless it is playing dominoes, or ‘rings,’ for beer, in the pot-house. Cricket is, comparatively speaking, unknown, not a single county having a team composed of Welshmen that could hold its own anywhere outside the Principality. Golf is entirely in the hands of English or Scottish people, and most other pastimes are non-existent.

 

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So Long, Hector Bebb

Author: 
Ron Berry

Hector Bebb and his loyal associates stand as symbols of the put-upon, the inarticulate underdogs of our grubby industrial society … whose humour, tenacity and fierce spirit pass almost unnoticed in English Literature.
- Alun Richards, Planet

 

Violence and physical combat are self-identifying touchstones. Hector becomes the essence of what it is to be a man.
- Niall Griffiths

 

Synopsis:

  • How far will friends go when a single-minded fighting machine becomes a killer?
  • The traditional values of family and friendship are stripped bare by the relentless world of boxing.

 

About the author:

Ron Berry was born in 1920 in Blaen-cwm in the Rhondda Valley, and he worked as a miner from the age of fourteen. Although he served in both the Army and the Merchant Navy in the Second World War, his consistent attitude to all authority was to absent himself from it. He was a gifted sportsman who had played for Swansea Town, and was an occasional boxer, but it was a year in adult education at Coleg Harlech in the early 1950s that released him from sporadic casual work to concentrate on writing. Against all odds he never flagged in this determined pursuit.

In addition to So Long, Hector Bebb, he published four works of fiction, including Travelling Loaded (1963); The Full-Time Amateur (1966); Flame and Slag (1968), and This Bygone (1996).

 

Short extract:

Almost three decades on, I can still remember the thrill of discovering So Long, Hector Bebb. Five pence it cost, or something like that, from a church hall jumble sale somewhere in Liverpool. What drew me to it I don’t know – the Americanism in the title? The author’s pretty name? Simpler to state that there were forces at work. The mysteries of my eight year old mind forever forgotten long since, I remember taking it home and up to my bedroom and I remember sitting on my bed beneath the football posters and I remember opening it and I remember reading this:

We’re each and every one of us shaped for muck and glory, thank the Jesus Christ All-bloody-mighty for it and all.

And I remember reading this, too:

Hect just vanisht. Not so much as ‘So long then Lennie, see you in the mornin’. All cause Milly flasht her old twat inna Transport Caff. Milly and her big greesy minj.

And I remember thinking something like:

My God, the grownup people around me and the ways they talk, the words they use so unlike anything in a set-text syllabus... they can be Literature.

 

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Rhapsody

Author: 
Dorothy Edwards

I can't think of a more wonderful collection of stories than Rhapsody by Dorothy Edwards. It's a card-carrying masterpiece Funny, creepy, and strangely beautiful.
- Dan Rhodes

 

Synopsis:

The ten stories of Rhapsody, together with the three previously uncollected pieces added to this edition, are utterly distinctive in voice and sensibility. At least three of the Rhapsody stories – ‘A Country House’, ‘Days’, and the brilliant, allusive and enigmatic ‘A Garland of Earth’- are small masterpieces. Not bad by the age of twenty-four. All of them are extremely controlled studies of constrained desire, loneliness and incomplete relationships for which Edwards was developing a non-realist world of imagery and symbolism and her own language. Music is one of the motifs. For Edwards, music represents art, but also the possibility of sexual passion which is otherwise largely unstated but is everywhere a powerful undercurrent.

 

About the author:

Dorothy Edwards was born in 1903 in Ogmore Vale, a small mining community in Mid Glamorgan. Her father, an ardent socialist and Independent Labour Party leader, was the local school headmaster. After a scholarship to Howell’s School for Girls, Llandaf, she took a degree at Cardiff University in Greek and Philosophy, but literature was her passion and soon after graduating her short stories began to appear in magazines and journals. These were collected in Rhapsody (1927), along with several previously unpublished stories written during the nine months Edwards spent in Vienna and Florence. Her novel Winter Sonata (1928) followed shortly afterwards. She spent the following years trying to supplement her mother’s meagre pension by writing stories and articles for magazines and newspapers, and doing some extra-mural teaching at Cardiff University, but she never undertook full-time employment. After a brief period spent living in London with acquaintances from the Bloomsbury circle, Edwards committed suicide on a Cardiff railway line in 1934. A note left in her pocket at the time of her death read: ‘I am killing myself because I have never sincerely loved any human being all my life. I have accepted kindness and friendship and even love without gratitude, and given nothing in return.’

 

Short extract:

Last summer, on the very first day I returned from Egypt for my summer vacation, I made a new and interesting acquaintance. I reached London at about three o’clock, and had to wait about until a six o’clock appointment with my firm, and because I was too tired to do anything else in the meantime, and feeling also a little depressed and lonely, I turned into a café and sat there drinking tea and reading a magazine.

 

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Poetry

Author: 
Various

If you are going on holiday to some boring place like Lanzarote or Malta, take it with you. It would be good to read each poem, preferably aloud, against some unsuitable background... Only through an anthology of this range and depth, covering a century of writing, can one see how the styles and substances change.
- Roundyhouse Magazine

 

Poetry 1900-2000 is ... a cultural act, and a landmark in the English language writing of Wales. It is by far the most comprehensive collection of Welsh poetry in English in the Twentieth-century which we have had – or are likely to have.
- Tony Brown, Cambria

 

Synopsis:

Poetry 1900-2000 brings together a vibrant expression of the industrial, pastoral, rural, urban, religious, political and linguistic experience of Wales in the twentieth century world. The poetry collected here is as varied as Wales itself, and ranges from the well known to the startling, from the lyrical to the experimental, the celebration of tradition to that of protest. Each poet’s biography situates the writer in a social and literary context, and the collection presents an unparalleled panorama of the development of Welsh poetry in English in the twentieth century.

 

About the author:

Contains work from; W.H Davies, Huw Menai, A.G Prys-Jones, Wyn Griffith, David Jones, Eiluned Lewis, Gwyn Williams, Idris Davies, Glyn Jones, Vernon Watkins, Margiad Evans, Lynette Roberts, Jean Earle, Tom Earley, Brenda Chamberlain, R.S Thomas, Dylan Thomas, Alun Lewis, Keidrych Rhys, Roland Mathias, Emyr Humphreys, Harri Webb, John Stuart Williams, T.H Jones, Robert Morgan, Peter Hellings, Leslie Norris, Ruth Bidgood, John Ormond, Dannie Abse, Alison Bielski, Raymond Garlick, Mercer Simpson, John Tripp, Joseph P. Clancy, Douglas Phillips, Brian Norris, Tony Conran, Herbert Williams, Daniel Huws, Brian Aspden, Bryn Griffiths, Stuart Evans, Jon Dressel, Sam Adams, Sally Roberts Jones, Peter Gruffydd, Anne Cluysenaar, John Powell Ward, Alun Rees, Gillian Clarke, John Idris Jones, Meic Stephens, Graham Allen, John Barnie, Chris Torrance, Jeremy Hooker, John Pook, Alan Perry, Christine Evans, John Davies, Graham Thomas, Paul Evans, Richard Poole, Duncan Bush, Tony Curtis, Pennyanne Windsor, Andrew McNeillie, Douglas Houston, David Hughes, Paul Groves, Peter Finch, Glenda Beagan, Robert Walton, Nigel Jenkins, Steve Griffiths, Ifor Thomas, Sheenagh Pugh, Rowan Williams, Hillary Llewellyn-Williams, Robert Minhinnick, Pascale Petit, Mike Jenkins, Christopher Meredith, Huw Jones, Richard Gwyn, Catherine Fisher, Oliver Reynolds, Gwyneth Lewis, Paul Henry, Fiona Owen, Stephen Knight, Anna Wigley, Patrick Jones, Samantha Wynne Rhydderch, Deryn Rees-Jones, Frances Williams, Lloyd Robson, Kathryn Gray, and Owen Sheers.

 

Short extract:

A preface is literally that, a saying or writing beforehand. Usually, though, they are written afterwards, after a reading of the contents. The purpose especially of the preface to a book such as this is usually to explain or justify what is in it or even to persuade a potential reader to buy it. In the case of this volume in this series this is hardly necessary. After all, the series itself came about in 2005 when the then Minister for Culture in the Welsh Government, Alun Pugh AM, accepted a recommendation from the Culture Committee of the National Assembly that such a series should be funded and published and placed in all schools and libraries. The series is itself a cultural act, yet another feature of the nation-building that had been going on throughout the twentieth century but has proceeded apace since its turn into the twenty-first.

 

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