When the clubhouse fills with smoke, Marissa and Clara Suarez escape through one of its doors-and find themselves in James Madison's presidency, with the White House and capital city set on fire by invading British troops! With an iconic portrait of George Washington in hand, they race through the countryside as the War of 1812 rages all around them. Over rough roads, on sailing ships, and on the ramparts of Baltimore's Fort McHenry, Marissa and Clara help save a young nation (and play a part in writing "The Star-Spangled Banner") while confronting the contradictions that challenge what it means to be free.Funny, fast-paced, and filled with wholesome adventure, White House on Fire! continues Sean O'Brien's exciting middle grade series that "masterfully weaves together history, adventure, and purpose" (Ruby Shamir).
The world is changing. How much will it change?Sydney wakes up in the world of the algorithm and is mysteriously ejected. He meets new friends who live beyond the algorithm, but who serve it nonetheless. Will he find a way to adapt? Will they accept him? Will he be able to help them as they are being drawn into an interplanetary scheme? Or will the algorithm win?A pleasant dystopian novel that you won't be able to put down!
Marissa and Clara's mom is the newly elected president of the United States and they haven't experienced much freedom lately. While exploring the White House they discover a hidden tunnel that leads to an underground clubhouse full of antique curiosities, doors heading in all directions-and a mysterious invitation to join the ranks of White House kids. So they sign the pledge.Suddenly, the lights go out and Marissa and Clara find themselves at the White House in 1903. There they meet Quentin, Ethel, Archie and Alice, the irrepressible children of President Theodore Roosevelt. To get back home, Marissa and Clara must team up with the Roosevelt children "to help the president" and "to make a difference".White House Clubhouse is a thrilling and hilarious adventure that takes readers on an action-packed, cross-country railroad trip, back to the dawn of the twentieth century and the larger-than-life president at the country's helm.
A new collection by Sean O'Brien - 'Auden's true inheritor', and one of our wisest poetic chronographers - is not just a literary event, but also, invariably, a reckoning of the times. Given the nature of our times, his voice is an essential one: there is no other poet currently writing with O'Brien's intellectual authority, historical literacy and sheer command of the facts. Embark also registers our unique cultural climacteric, where the larger crises of the planet - the pandemic and the terrifying spectre of revanchist nationalism among them - impact all of us, and where the illusion of a church-and-state separation of the personal and political can no longer hold. As the poet turns seventy, he shows us how the inevitable absences that age brings are assuaged by how we furnish them; the result is not just a logic made from loss and pain, but a music, a metaphysic, and finally a redemptive art. Embark reminds us of the enduring consolations of love, of friendship, of the freedoms and possible futures still afforded by the imagination - and, through O'Brien's own exemplary model, of poetry itself.
The last major battle of the Civil War, the Federal campaign against Mobile, the last Southern city that remained in rebel hands, was a military operation involving 45,000 Union soldiers and 9000 Confederates. This work provides a treatment of the campaign.
En route to colonize the extrasolar planet Tau Ceti III...Donn Cardenio, damaged veteran of Earth's disastrous first interstellar war, and two hundred fellow Caretakers are charged with caring for a quarter million embryos en route to colonize the extrasolar planet Tau Ceti III.Cardenio considers this assignment a chance to redeem himself from the ravages of the past great war.But, when one of his Caretaker colleagues snaps, Cardenio is forced to begin an investigation that leads to more questions than answers - questions about his relationship with his lover, his own past, and the nature of the mission he's on.Unfortunately for Cardenio, nothing is as it appears. His fellow Caretakers do not share his reverence for the lives in their charge; friends and lovers hide vital truths; and his enemies and rivals become allies.By the end of the mission, Donn Cardenio will confront the terrible reality of what he's done to determine how the future will unfold.
Asteroid belt miner Collier South is on the brink. The once-exciting frontier of space has been overtaken by corporate creep, and he stands as one of the last independent beltrunners in the system. Almost squeezed out of the only life he's ever known by impersonal conglomerates and a vindictive ex-lover, he's desperate for a strike. But what he finds this time has the power to change his life forever. Worse, it has the power to change the fate of the entire system, and the corporations are on a hunt to pry it from his stubborn fingers.
This collection from award-winning poet Sean O'Brien tackles England and its relationship with Europe through their tangled history and into the uncertain future.
Pez and Eck are on the hunt for the perfect society in "a city where free men might live like birds". But when they start building the bird city for real, Pez starts to have ambitions. As the fantasy utopia threatens to turn into a tyrany, the birds start to rebel.
The seventies. Summer. Four students in a cottage in the middle of nowhere. Two young American women, one hell-bent on destruction. Alcohol, LSD, sex, jealousy, infidelity and poetry. At the end of the summer, one of the four students will be dead, and another will be destroyed by his inability to let go of past memories, guilt and bitterness. 'A cracker' Evening Standard 'Chills to the bone' Independent on Sunday 'Rich and powerful' Daily Mail 'Afterlife positively throbs with loss . . . It's a deeply absorbing novel that lingers in the mind like the ghosts it so ardently evokes' Claire Kilroy Irish Times 'A richly rewarding portrait of friendships under siege, full of vibrant characters and atmospheres that linger in the mind and the heart' Sunday Telegraph
Each poem in Sean O'Brien's superb new collection opens on a wholly different room, vista or landscape, each drawn with the poet's increasingly refined sense of tone, history and rhetorical assurance. The Beautiful Librarians is a stock-taking of sorts, and a celebration of those unsung but central figures in our culture, often overlooked by both capital and official account. Here we find infantrymen, wrestlers, old lushes in the hotel bar - but none more heroic than the librarians of the title, those silent and silencing guardians of literature and knowledge who, the poet reminds us, also had lives of their own to be celebrated. Elsewhere we find a 12-bar blues sung by Ovid, a hymn to a grey rose, a writing course from hell, and a very French exercise in waiting. A book of terrific variety of theme and form, The Beautiful Librarians is another bravura performance from the most garlanded English poet of his generation.
Stephen Maxwell has just retired from a lifetime spent teaching history at his alma mater. As he writes the official history of Blake's, a minor public school steeped in military tradition, he also reveals how, forty years ago, a secret conflict dating from the Second World War re-enacted itself among staff and pupils, when fascism once more made its presence felt in the school and the city, with violent and nightmarish results.
The seldom-recalled Creek War of 1813-1814 and its extension, the First Seminole War of 1818, had significant consequences for the growth of the United States.
Mountain Partisans penetrates the shadowy world of Union and Confederate guerrillas, describes their leaders and bloody activities, and explains their effect on the Civil War and the culture of Appalachia. Although it did not alter the outcome of the war, guerrilla conflict affected the way the war was fought.
With an introduction by Helen DunmoreCome for a walk down the river road,For though you're all a long time deadThe waters part to let us passThe way we'd go on summer nightsIn the times we were childrenAnd thought we were lovers.The Drowned Book is a work of memory, commemoration and loss, dominated by elegies for those the author has loved and admired. Sean O'Brien's exquisite collection is powerfully affecting, sad and often deeply funny; but it is also a dramatically compelling book - disquieting, even - and full of warnings. As the book unfolds, O'Brien's verse occupies an increasingly dark, subterranean territory - where the waters are rising, threatening to overwhelm and ruin the world above. Winner of both the T. S. Eliot and Forward prizes, The Drowned Book is an extraordinary collection, a classic from one of the leading poets of our time.
This collection, drawing on almost forty years of verse, represents the definitive guide to one of the leading English poets working today. It will allow the reader the chance to survey both the remarkable variety and the consistent quality of O'Brien's work, as well as the enduring strength of his obsessions: these have helped create a tone and a landscape as immediately recognizable as those of MacNeice, Larkin or Eliot. O'Brien's hells and heavens, underworlds and urban dystopias, trains and waterways have formed the imaginative theatre for his songs, satires, pastorals and elegies; throughout, the poems demonstrate O'Brien's astonishing flair for the dramatic line, where he has inherited the mantle of W. H. Auden. Also included are selections from both O'Brien's dramatic writing and his acclaimed version of the Inferno.
November is Sean O'Brien's first collection since his widely celebrated The Drowned Book, the only book of poetry to have won both the Forward and T. S. Eliot prizes. November is haunted by the missing, the missed, the vanished, the uncounted, and the uncountable lost: lost sleep, connections, muses, books, the ghosts and gardens of childhood. Ultimately, these lead the poet to contemplate the most troubling absences: O'Brien's elegies for his parents and friends form the heart of this book, and are the source of its pervasive note of depart. Elsewhere - as if a French window stood open to an English room - the islands, canals, railway stations and undergrounds of O'Brien's landscape are swept by a strikingly Gallic air. This new note lends O'Brien's recent poems a reinvigorated sense of the imaginative possible: November shows O'Brien at the height of his powers, with his intellect and imagination as gratifyingly restless as ever.
In this series, a contemporary poet selects and introduces a poet of the past. By their choice of poems and by the personal and critical reactions they express in their prefaces, the editors offer insights into their own work as well as providing an accessible and passionate introduction to some of the greatest poets of our literature.Andrew Marvell was born in Yorkshire in 1624 and was educated in Hull and Cambridge. He became the unofficial laureate to Cromwell and in 1657 he took over from Milton as the Latin Secretary to the Council of State. Famed as a satirist during his lifetime Marvell was a virtually unknown lyric poet until rediscovered in the nineteenth century. However, it was only after the First World War that his poetry gained popularity thanks to the efforts of T. S. Eliot and Sir Herbert Grierson. Marvell died in 1678.
Three lectures on contemporary British poets and their relationship with England, its history, politics and culture, and with the continuing tradition of English poetry.
While Downriver contains the English urban pastoral and hymns to the Northern deities for which Sean O'Brien is justly celebrated, the poet has always been more a singer than even his many admirers have sometimes conceded: here, that lyric note is sounded more openly than ever before. With Downriver, his fifth collection, O'Brien has produced his most various and mature work yet. This is a poetry of both delicacy and gravity, assuagement as well as agitation, rivers that start in hell but later fall as rain - and will only strengthen his reputation as one of the most gifted English poets at work today.
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