The Faber Book of Drink, Drinkers and Drinking - Softcover

9780571168217: The Faber Book of Drink, Drinkers and Drinking

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0571168213 ISBN 13: 9780571168217

Publisher: Faber and Faber, 1993

Alcohol is mankind's favourite mind-altering drug. Its effects - sublime, hilarious, heroic or catastrophic - have provided writers of all ages and cultures with subject-matter. This anthology offers a generous selection of extracts, ranging from the Epic of Gilgamesh, which predates Homer by some 1,500 years, through Homer himself, the Bible, Beowulf, Rabelais, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens and Zola to such contemporaries as Martin Amis, Thomas Pynchon, Wendy Cope and Seamus Heaney. Use and abuse, mild intoxication and violent excess, addiction and temperance, delights and perils are all considered. Writers have long enjoyed a close relationship with alcohol - sometimes too close. But, as this anthology demonstrates, it has often inspired their most brilliant flights.

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About the Author:

Simon Rae's award-winning W. G. Grace: A Life received widespread acclaim on its publication in 1998. He has also edited a number of anthologies, and for five years presented BBC Radio 4's 'Poetry Please!'. For nearly ten years he wrote regular topical poems for the Guardian and published two collections of them, Soft Targets and Rapid Response. He collaborated with Ronald Searle on a book of cartoons and poems, The Face of War, and in 1999 he won the National Poetry Prize. His first stage play, A Quiet Night In, was produced in Bristol and London the same year. In 1999/2000 he was poet in residence with Warwickshire County Cricket Club and MAC at Edgbaston, and he was Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Warwick University for 2000/2001.

Synopsis:

Alcohol is mankind's favourite drug. Tipple, red-eye, poison, mother's ruin, mud in your eye, juice, sauce, a shot of the hard stuff and plonk - all of these terms are included in this anthology of nips and draughts of every intoxicant in the thesaurus - and then some more - with swigs and gulps from Rabelais, Homer, the Bible, Chaucer, Dickens, Kingsley Amis, Gavin Ewart, Wendy Cope and Seamus Heaney.

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