Bücher von John Fraser

John Fraser latest novel is about Life: - mysteries and chance, how it seems impossible to make a philosophy from a mixture of what is determinate and universal, and what is invention and potential - and then, how to botch up some plan for living in this uncertainty, cf. Petronius a celebrated author with no book extant, debauché, fine administrator, accused of treachery, forced to commit suicide by Nero.Every human has an ancestry that goes way back - to Creation? Very far, at any rate. The protagonist's name, Petronia, recalls that of the old Roman Petronius - he of the banquets and orgies, trusted administrator, forced to commit suicide by Nero on fake charges of treachery. Author of a book of satires never found, maybe never written. Petronia has no link with him, that life, but modern life affords its parallels. So, why do things happen? Some good, some bad - how and why? A mysterious voyage is offered, taken on the spur: what lies beneath? How, afterwards, to live, to make more voyages, penetrate more mysteries and one's part in them? Plots and spying, manipulative friends and their catastrophies, abundant disappearances and all-too-evident deaths - enmesh her deeper and reluctantly in a grandiose scheme to partition the world - wars and consolidations - on, even to the universe. The prospect is alarming. She twists and turns - there are orgies, the underground, the upward climb - everything to find out why? Why does it happen, what does it signify, where does her feeble contribution come in? She's lucky. Much of the mystery is given an explanation. The more she knows, the deeper the mystery becomes...

Everyone is a part-time person. They do one thing while imagining being elsewhere, or being a lover, worker, fan - of something - or in some other life. We hope for a resolution, a better place, where the bad parts can be discarded, the good ones realised. In PARADISE, we are plunged into ever-deeper contradictions, separations: by nature a deserter, a pacifist, Harri is enrolled, becomes a soldier - becomes literally someone else. As a batman, he can fly - along with his superiors, with lovers who fly higher, outdistance him or, fatally, hit the ground.After many adventures, Harri finds himself in the midst of a squalid conflict. He is adviser, but also mediator. Making peace is advantageous: economically, there's the re-build. Politically, there's prestige for the new leaders. The ploy of war can be made profitable. Unfortunately - he has no ambition, whereas his temporary partners have an excess of it. In the end, he witnesses the magic inherent in humanity, which leads it to destruction, or to mediocrity. Paradise lost, or indefinitely postponed?

TRUE STORIES - three stories of modern life by John Fraser.True Stories poses the question: What is modern life? Struggling with bureaucracy, getting on, and off, lists? The protagonist, Kochi, and his young - then much older - friends, engage with love, philosophy ... the murder of a lover by the mother of a socialite, the centre of the hero's attention: and her reprisal. We follow them, their adventures, the search for the Great Principle, embodied by a fragile ancient, who dosses down and dies on his first night in Kochi's dwelling.Think, says the Master, but no life seems lived by Thinking. There are wildfires, concealed well-shafts, a flight by sea: happenstance determined histories. Eventually, in a declining night-club, the protagonist finds clues, a divan to sleep on, even work. All human knowledge is examined by Kochi and his new partner, the dancer, Jahan. Knowledge at last? Maybe ... The hero, Kochi, leaves by night, seeking a new adventure.Clap Your Hands traces the search for a relationship, taking us from a truncated marriage to Russia, passing through Trabzon in Turkey - the hero caged and dispatched like an exotic bird, and ending in refuge on the Danube's mouth.Smoke addresses the end of life - the narrator's, recalling his youth and his first objectives, the goals to be reached, the satisfaction to be enjoyed - entrusted to him by a sailor in a bar. The ends of life seem trivial, when you reach them - like the end of life itself. His end of life is bitter, though sometimes he remembers sweetness ... It's lived with the dissatisfied, the clueless, and the cheats ... and sadness prevails.

Mercenaries - four new tales by John FraserMercenaries: soldiers of fortune, conottieri, knight errants ... Soldiers have always been paid, somehow; a wage? ... or by their own practices of looting, enslavement, often taking it out on others for vengeance or pleasure, taking prisoners and ransoming - hostages. Yet people who soldier for the money are singled out, and looked down on ... and yet, however you do it, losing, whether done for money or the cause, is never pleasant. Being a prisoner, or dead, gives no material credit whether you are a courageous, altruistic type or needy and conscripted. Now, with people's wars, mass invasions and generalised hostilities - everyone is a soldier. At least, everybody suffers like a soldier, not all bear arms. Many are also mercenaries - have been, would like to be. They are like samurai, who cut the personal risk by doing deals with similars - momentarily, the enemy. Mercenaries concerns attempts by mercenaries to engage more mercenaries to carry out humanitarian work. Maybe it ought to work. It should be clean. What can be accomplished, tying political aims to cash? Suppose the aims are impeccable.... The short concluding pieces, Round Heaven, Square Earth, Hope and Stop, are illustrations of how political schemes might be achieved by force of will, without the cash. All our modern realities, and their dilemmas, are treated here.

The Beach consists of two new tales from John Fraser What is a human life worth? If you save someone's, what is it worth to you - and if you seek a reward, how do you get it, whatever it may be? Is that life, perhaps, the only valuable thing there is, that has value only to the person who wins twice - getting their life back, and not having to give a reward? The characters in The Beach seek answers to this question - what is a life? what worth does it have? - travelling through many remote places and civilisations. Memoirs, Memorials examines a devious spy - a spy on the secrets of life. If saving lives accumulates confusions, a heap of partial, disparate conclusions - what is a life of duplicity, fiddling, false witness and falsity in general, worth? It seems a fiction, in which someone writes all the parts and is the hero/heroine. Is it meaningless, to be condemned, or is it victimless, as victimless as ordinary, straightforward relationships and personalities - with their bad marriages, bad bargains failures, catching infections from partners who should know better?

The death of the Queen was only the beginning for the men and women behind the Crown.On September 8, 2022, an announcement was posted on the gates of Balmoral Castle in Scotland and Buckingham Palace in London that Queen Elizabeth II, the longest serving monarch in British history, had died. That set in motion a remarkable ten days of official mourning and ceremony unlike anything seen in any nation for decades.Members of the royal family gathered—the new King Charles III and his Queen Consort Camilla; the newly-minted Prince of Wales, William and his princess, Kate; Harry the Bolter and his celebrity wife Meghan; and even the bad boy himself, "Prince" Andrew—along with hundreds of royals and heads of states from around the world.Hordes of people, many from overseas, spent long hours lining up in the rain to pay tribute to the beloved monarch, a presence in their lives for seventy years. On the scene for these events, renowned journalist John Fraser takes the reader from inside St. James Palace where the new King was proclaimed to Queen Elizabeth's final resting place at St. George's Chapel in Windsor Castle, from deeply moving scenes to the occasional hilarious screw-up, capturing the magic of the occasion with trenchant observations and witty commentary informed by a lifetime’s experience and curiosity about all things monarchical and his own encounters with the royals.

The Humorous Chap-Books of Scotland - Part 1 is an unchanged, high-quality reprint of the original edition of 1873.Hansebooks is editor of the literature on different topic areas such as research and science, travel and expeditions, cooking and nutrition, medicine, and other genres. As a publisher we focus on the preservation of historical literature. Many works of historical writers and scientists are available today as antiques only. Hansebooks newly publishes these books and contributes to the preservation of literature which has become rare and historical knowledge for the future.

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

The second volume of Unsteady States features seven of John Fraser's selected short stories and novellas.

Two novellas with the common theme of complicity. The Way Back explores the experience of war, flight and rejection. In Elementary Exercises, protagonists engage with authoritarian regimes to escape difficult situations.

This book couples anecdotes with real data to help nature lovers, zoo staff, zoo fans, and even zoo foes understand the many ways zoos are conceptualized, used, and valued, unpacking what seems to happen in the minds of diverse zoo-goers to highlight powerful opportunities for learning, engagement, and activism.

Behaving Well consists of three stories on a related theme: When people are forced to leave their home, in the new place they're often told to 'behave themselves' or be sent back, to to somewhere else. In jail or equivalent, they - everyone - may be let go early for 'good behaviour'. Behaving well is a condition for staying somewhere - even somewhere you don't want to be - and 'going back' may pose dilemmas even more problematic than behaving badly. You find yourself in a chain of ill-fortunes and tragedies - a nakba, a catastrophe as one aspect of it has been called. What other rules exist, except our efforts at 'behaving well'? But, you change, through life; you watch injustices you say you cannot remedy. And your behaviour changes, together with its driving principles. If you want history - you can't have good behaviour. Good Behaviour: Alex, undocumented immigrant, is inspired, shadowed, by the adventures of Alexander, the Great. No one says Alexander behaved well - but he acted! He transformed. He shaped the classical world, scattered Greeks all over, changed cultures, till his suicidal addictions finished him. Alex starts precarious: is jailed, meets a real hero, Valerio - joins the ex-prisoners and outcasts in a barren place. There, they improvise a polity - growing natural drugs, organising an army. Valerio is their inspiration, their guide. Alex teams up with Anicette, whose inspiration is the book 'On Lying'. He spins out of control but his behaviour is consistent. People close to Alex behave in different ways, but all maintain their principles, Anicette as well. Anicette joins with a young ambitious woman, Mélisande. After the death of Alex, we see all who are left have indeed behaved well - at least, consistently. Alex, though, has acted, and imagined: the others, they only react. Anicette concludes, instructing Mélisande - the only judge of our behaviour is ourself. Misconduct: Does behaving well count for something? It doesn't seem to matter for success and failure, revelation or obscurity. In Misconduct, Matti, a political exile with aspirations of humanistic value, tries to make a life - maintaining principles, but surviving - the betrayal of his partner, unofficial enslavement. He wanders, has adventures - becomes a military strategist, travels to the stepps with a lady jockey - but his life is seeing others ride away, betray, or suffer punishments, promotions - which he's been unabvle to prevent or even understand. Ultimately, his organisation gives him the mission - to assassinate the Chief. To do so means his organisation will be expunged - a mass non-violent movement, non-violent, exposed. But for the otther opposition, assassination means a civil war that they are bound to lose. Matti would betray his principles, his own morality - and probably involve all oppositions in disaster. But - loyalty, behaving well or badly - he has no choice. Many real circumstances involve the exiled militants in just this - perfidious - choice.Catastrophe: The catastrophe is that everything happens comes to an end - without a scrap of meaning, still less justice, truth, equity. Some people behave very poorly: Yannick who has 'saved' Hana and enslaved her, Pavel .... for others, the behaviour is just on the edge of awful - Typhaine .... Dr Hoffman sees and can do nothing except register. Hana has character, but no context where the character can assert itself or, indeed, be good or bad.

John Fraser’s latest work of fiction follows the refugee Khalil in two related stories, ‘The Refugees’ and ‘Travels with Strangers’.  We are all refugees seeking an entry to soCaucasmewhere when we’ve left somewhere else. Our knowledge is a raft that’s carried us on lumpy seas. We can forget all that when we arrive. It doesn’t serve. We don’t, of course, stop being refugees, not ever, but we have a lot of living to do while we’re forgetting where we were before.  It’s a commonplace, to say we’re strangers to ourselves – not only when we are alone, but especially when we are in company. Khalil comes from a ruined land, chooses the obvious role in his  new places – acting. On film, where someone else will edit him. He longs to find the treasure we all want – and isn’t his, or ours.  He flits through ‘Travels with Strangers’ too – but people of all spots and stripes are rolling down, shaken from their safe spots – and finish in the Caucasus! A place that once was Eden – and they try to plant and harvest there again. It doesn’t necessarily work. It’s strange, because they’re of all human types. Maybe the world wasn’t made for people, or maybe it’s too far gone for them to find a space to think and talk. And how they talk! Seek love and sex and something – nothing - in between. There must be, of course, conclusion. Khalil’s a fine dancer - exhibition standard. That’s a gift! 

John Fraser's latest work of fiction People You Will Never Meet consists of three thematically-linked trajectories. In the first, two Palestinians escape to humble, even humiliating work in Belgium. They manage to set themselves up as a think-tank above a public dance-hall, and their lives divide between the search for a lofty principle and the drinking and music in the floor below. The link between the levels is provided by a fussy, garrulous first-person narrator, whose own adventures turn out to signify little. There is a party, where the upper and lower worlds mingle, the protagonist dressed as moths and butterflies. The Palestinians move on - one to a ruined Syria, the other to frustration in Europe. The second tale involves a bright country girl, seduced by her teacher with aspirations to a powerful career. She seeks speed, which does not end well for her. In the final tale, the hero aims higher still - a project for the human species. This involves journeying through Eastern Europe, and its underground. Its climax is the burning of a stranger's house, and a long long wait for a slow train...

An attempt to prove that vaccination with its compulsory law, - Instead of being a general blessing, is a universal curse : in a series of letters addressed to the Right Hon. H. A. Bruce, Home Secretary of State is an unchanged, high-quality reprint of the original edition of 1871.Hansebooks is editor of the literature on different topic areas such as research and science, travel and expeditions, cooking and nutrition, medicine, and other genres. As a publisher we focus on the preservation of historical literature. Many works of historical writers and scientists are available today as antiques only. Hansebooks newly publishes these books and contributes to the preservation of literature which has become rare and historical knowledge for the future.