George Mackay Brown has long been recognized as one of the most original and important Scottish writers of the twentieth century. This book is the first comprehensive account of Brown's work from a ph
Scotland has long been associated with Gothic literature. Looking at both familiar and neglected contemporary novels by writers including Alasdair Gray, James Robertson, Alice Thompson, John Burnside,
This book surveys a broad range of contemporary texts to show how representations of human-animal relations challenge the anthropocentric nature of fiction. By looking at the relation between language
An innovative memoir connecting ideas of grief, memory, and animals to illustrate the importance of storytelling.When his mother died, Timothy C. Baker discovered that there was almost no record of her existence, and no stories that were his to tell: the only way to bring her back was through reading. Reading My Mother Back is a genre-bending memoir that explores a life marked by trauma, illness, religion, and abuse through a focus on the books Baker and his mother shared. The book combines accounts of rereading childhood classics with true and apocryphal stories of a quiet life, marked by great sorrow and great joy. The book is about grief and memory and how our childhood reading shapes the way we see the world; it’s about loneliness and the search for belonging; it’s about how ordinary lives are transfigured by storytelling. Moving from accounts of American evangelical communities to kidney failure, from literary criticism to psychoanalysis, and from guilt to love, Baker shows how
