Robert Sullivan

Sullivan tillbringade fyra årstider med anteckningsbok och mörkerseende kikare på jakt efter den stadsboende brunråttans själ. Han träffade skadedjurutrotare, sopåkare och stadsdelsaktivister som alla spelar en viktig roll i det uråldriga kriget mellan människa och råtta. Han fick kännedom om 1800-talets råttkampsarenor och den råttburna pestens härjningar i USA. Han reste till ett bisarrt toppmöte för råttexperter. ("Den dåliga nyheten är att råttorna kommer att vinna kampen mot oss människor. Den goda är att det kommer att ge oss skadedjursautrotare en massa bra arbetstillfällen.") Och han upptäckte att råttans liv på många sätt är en avspegling av människans liv.

The author of Meadowlands and A Whale Hunt dispenses rat facts and entertaining rat stories, looks into the history of rats, and describes how, with the aid of a notebook and night-vision gear, he sat nightly in a garbage-filled alley getting to know the wild city rat. Reprint. 75,000 first printing.

Captain Cook in the Underworld is a book-length poem by a gifted Maori poet, an archetypal exploration of Western mythology and legend as it ‘discovers’ itself in the South Pacific. The poem was commissioned as the libretto for a new work with composer John Psathas for the fiftieth anniversary celebration of Wellington’s Orpheus Choir. Captain Cook in the Underworld offers fresh perspectives on the familiar story of Cook’s Pacific explorations; it has a broad bi-cultural (European/Polynesian) frame of references; and Sullivan employs a bold risk-taking approach. The book is a highly stylised, ‘operatic’ account of the voyages, with similarities to the musical structure of Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, and opera. As the poem unfolds, European myth (Orpheus, Venus, etc) has to make space for Polynesian myth (Maui, Reinga, etc). In the final pages, Cook is required after his death to face up to the damage his expeditions have inflicted on the indigenous peoples of the Pacific. This theme of European guilt and recognition will have a strong and shocking impact.

Imagine a grunge nort Jersey version of John McPhee's classic The Pine Barrens and you'll get some idea of the idiosyncratic, fact-filled, and highly original work that is Robert Sullivan's The Meadowlands. Just five miles west of New York City, this vilified, half-developed, half-untamed, much dumped-on, and sometimes odiferous tract of swampland is home to rare birds and missing bodies, tranquil marshes and a major sports arena, burning garbage dumps and corporate headquarters, the remains of the original Penn Station--and maybe, just ,maybe, of the late Jimmy Hoffa. Robert Sullivan proves himself to be this fragile yet amazingly resilient region's perfect expolorer, historian, archaeologist, and comic bard. "Provocative, audacious . . . by looking observantly, without trite moralizing, at the natural world . . . this book suggest a challenging new model for how we ought to pay attention." --Robert Pinsky, The New York Times Book Review"It's full of add, compelling stories and is often hilarious. In short, it's a delight." --Men's Journal

Published on the cusp of the new millennium, Sullivan's third book of poems, Star Waka, came with some strings attached: each poem had to feature either a star, a waka, or the ocean. Within these parameters, and in 2001 lines, Sullivan creates 100 poems that, he says, themselves function like a waka: 'members of the crew change, the rhythm and the view changes it is subject to the laws of nature'.

This is the most extensive account of Moore's fiction to date that considers his many works from the early stories to the recent novel, No Other Life. Moore, who was born in Ireland but is a Canadian citizen and resides predominantly in the United States, has earned an international reputation as an important novelist. This book sets out to demonstrate a discernible pattern of concerns that cut across Moore's fictive output over the last 40 years. It argues that the concerns of love and faith (and the interplay between them) form the backbone of Moore's oeuvre. Sullivan draws from interviews with Moore and presents a study that convincingly demonstrates how Moore's fictions, from first to last, take their place in a larger thematic and formal masternarrative.