Calder Publications – The Bell Bookshop

The cross and the arrow

Emma — Thu, 25 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Despite being decorated with a German Service Cross, Willi Wegler is inwardly sickened by both Hitler’s genocidal war and the complicity of his fellow citizens in Third Reich brutalities. Wracked by guilt, he suddenly betrays his country in a profound gesture of protest and self-sacrifice: during the course of an air raid, he fashions an enormous arrow out of hay in an open field, then ignites it as a flaming signal to direct British bombers to the site of the factory where he works – an act that cannot fail to precipitate a series of dramatic events.The Cross and the Arrow – first published in 1944, during the latter stages of the war it describes – portrays a man’s struggle to retain his dignity in defiance of state-sponsored cruelty and explores the role and responsibility of the individual in the face of tragic global events. In its examination of an enemy’s complex heroism, it provides a life-affirming message of humanity’s ultimate capacity for good.

A tale of one January

Emma — Tue, 02 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Poland, January 1945. Two women and four men escape from a Nazi death march. Each is from a different background and a different country, but all have endured the horrors of imprisonment in Auschwitz. They find refuge in an abandoned factory, and suddenly they realize that they are no longer mere numbers. Even in their wild euphoria at being free, however, they can have no certainty about their future.This is a tale of exploding joy within a hothouse of fear, a tale of human beings erupting into life after breaking free of the embrace of death – an unusual and moving tale that cements Albert Maltz’s reputation as a compassionate observer of character and one of the finest storytellers of his generation.

Six Plays

Emma — Thu, 26 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This selection of plays by Luigi Pirandello contains some of his best-known works, such as Six Characters in Search of an Author – an absurdist piece in which the characters, actors and Pirandello himself interact during the rehearsal of a fictional play within the play – and Henry IV – a tragicomic tale of a man who falls from a horse and believes himself to be the eponymous Holy Roman Emperor. Preoccupied with the nature of truth and delusion, and treading dangerously on the borderline between sanity and madness, Pirandello’s plays are a daring exploration of human actions and the dark motives lying behind them, and the culmination of the naturalistic school of theatre inaugurated by authors such as Ibsen and Chekhov.