{"title":"John Hartley Williams","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"cornerless-people-book-john-hartley-williams-9781852241018","title":"Cornerless People","description":"'There is only one subject here \u0026amp; that is the people of the title. Any book with people in it is a gaolhouse, as you will see. There they all sit, waiting for you, the reader, to open the book. Why are all these people cornerless? Because in this prison, this book, which is just a figment of yr imagination, they belong nowhere, have no edges \u0026amp; are therefore exposed on all surfaces. On a flat plane there is no dimension which holds them. Odd penitentiary, this. If you pay them a pastoral visit you will find nothing but the anxiety of truth. That old missed bus feeling. Better get out of here \u0026amp; make sure of yr connection. Alas, words are no more than a request stop at which you have forgotten to raise yr hand. And there you are, looking up the road, watching it vanish, while yr fingers creep imperceptibly into yr jacket \u0026amp; locate exactly the right amount of change to purchase this volume. I knew you wd.' - John Hartley Williams","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49511542915345,"sku":"GOR002205713","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1852241012.jpg?v=1751457323"},{"product_id":"mystery-in-spiderville-book-john-hartley-williams-9780099426936","title":"Mystery In Spiderville","description":"Alongside the names of James Hadley Chase and Erle Stanley Gardner we must now add that of John Hartley Williams - though Mystery in Spiderville is no run-of-the-mill hard-boiled thriller. The décor is by Dali, the plot is a mixture of Breton and Burroughs, and the main character - the protean and unkillable Spider Rembrandt - has six toes, sleeps in a grave and dreams of congress with the pert and playful Reedy Buttons.   Sucked into the vortex of Spider's philandering mind is a narrator - sometimes Spider's adversary, sometimes his victim - who lies upon a bed brooding on the absence of a nameless, brown-haired woman. He, too, is protean: full of passionate longings and homicidal tendencies.   A surrealist film-noir that blends the forensic with the erotic, the seedy penny-dreadful and the lyric prose-poem, Mystery in Spiderville is one of the strangest, strongest and most arresting fictional debuts in years.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49583218229521,"sku":"GOR005276673","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0099426935.jpg?v=1767091874"},{"product_id":"double-book-john-hartley-williams-9781852242732","title":"Double","description":"John Hartley Williams was an English poet marooned in Berlin, where he lived for most of his life, through times of great upheaval and change. The streets he knew in West Berlin used to peter out in a dead arena of cobbles and waste ground blanked off by the Wall. 'Real-existing socialism', whichever way you pointed, was druben - over there. The poems in Double are located somewhere in between. As the dilapidation of one half of the city vanishes, Williams was troubled by normalisation. All traces of an alternative way of doing things are being erased. The poems reflect the presence of that invisible stranger on the other side of the Wall, whose presence could always be felt, even if symbolically denied. A denial now becoming fact. He connects his adopted home with the London of his childhood and youth, and with what a city means on a personal level, through poems about love, death and memories of an earlier time, through memory within memory, desire within desire.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49584122495249,"sku":"GOR005180598","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1852242736.jpg?v=1751456899"},{"product_id":"cafe-des-artistes-book-john-hartley-williams-9780224087858","title":"Cafe des Artistes","description":"Entertains and diverts by bizarre stories of mapless roads and unreal cities, the Ostrich Palisades and the erotic stones of Bonehenge.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49651039928593,"sku":"GOR003660693","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50942074913041,"sku":"GOR014135698","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0224087851.jpg?v=1751165224"},{"product_id":"canada-book-john-hartley-williams-9781852244316","title":"Canada","description":"John Hartley Williams's Canada explores a country of the mind, where whatever mania comes to mind becomes its own reality, and writing happens automatically. In Canada, poems arrive out of the ether like the fabled, lantern-jawed Mountie coming to the rescue out of nowhere. Others are on their way back into the ether, transmissions from the brain of an uneasy redman. These are poems which make you feel like the hairs on a pony's neck. Canada opens in the backwoods of autobiography and narrative, then reports crisply on the alarums of sex and desire. After crossing the frontier, a final coda blows innocence off the map for good and all. Shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize 1997.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49652597621009,"sku":"GOR002269133","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1852244313.jpg?v=1751457266"},{"product_id":"golden-age-of-smoking-book-john-hartley-williams-9781907356988","title":"The Golden Age of Smoking","description":null,"brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50207380177169,"sku":"GOR005905930","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1907356983.jpg?v=1751092393"},{"product_id":"blues-book-john-hartley-williams-9780224073448","title":"Blues","description":"Subversive and satirical, inventive, wry and unconventional, John Hartley Williams has long been celebrated for his maverick sensibility, for his outsider's take on the way we live our lives. In Blues, his eighth collection, he focuses with new directness on the turmoil of Germany and Eastern Europe, and writes eloquently about being English, and staying English, in a continental climate, through all the upheavals of the last fifteen years.   Alert to the intricacies and ironies of the language, to the musculature of politics and passion, these poems are chronicles of change, wired to the energies of jazz and science fiction, yet the under-song is a threnody for the loss of a kind of Englishness - voiced powerfully in a moving elegy for the poet Ken Smith. While there is no diminishing of his comic brio, no dulling of his incisive, questioning intelligence, Blues finds John Hartley Williams taking on subjects of new depth and complexity - while maintaining his characteristic lightness of touch, imagination and profound originality.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51395325722897,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51395325755665,"sku":"GOR005230759","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0224073443.jpg?v=1751259265"},{"product_id":"ship-book-john-hartley-williams-9781844713394","title":"The Ship","description":"A collection of poems dating back as far as 1958, and ending in 1982.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52371181273361,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52371181371665,"sku":"GOR003194513","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781844713394.jpg?v=1758206444"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/author-books-by-john-hartley-williams.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}