The Road to the City
3.490 kr.They say that big families are happy, but I could never see anything particularly happy about ours.
Delia is one of five children, growing up in a poor Italian village. She is seventeen, and dreams of marrying a rich man; she dreams of a grand apartment in the city and silk stockings. To escape her father’s neglect and her mother’s sadness, she begins to take the dusty road to the city every day, accompanied by Nini, her sweet and mysterious cousin.
When Nini takes a job in a factory and moves in with a city woman, Delia sees another way of being. But when she discovers she’s pregnant, she agrees to marry the father, seduced by the promise of wealth and comfort. Nothing, not even Nini’s desperate declaration of love, can stop her – but her rejection will be his undoing.
The Road to the City is a short, poignant novel about the dreams of youth, and the cruelty it takes to make them come true.
One Boat
3.990 kr.On losing her father, Teresa returns to a small town on the Greek coast – the same place she visited when grieving her mother nine years ago. She immerses herself again in the life of the town, observing the inhabitants going about their business, a quiet backdrop for her reckoning with herself. An episode from her first visit resurfaces vividly – her encounter with John, a man struggling to come to terms with the violent death of his nephew. Soon Teresa encounters some of the people she met last time around: Petros, an eccentric mechanic, whose life story may or may not be part of John’s; the beautiful Niko, a diving instructor; and Xanthe, a waitress in one of the cafés on the leafy town square. They talk about their longings, regrets, the passing of time, their sense of who they are. Artfully constructed, absorbing and insightful, One Boat is a brilliant novel grappling with questions of identity, free will, guilt and responsibility.
Memories of a Catholic Girlhood
4.390 kr.Blending memories and family myths, Mary McCarthy takes us back to the 1920s, when she was orphaned into a world of relations as colourful, potent and mysterious as the Catholic religion. There was her Catholic grandmother who combined piousness with pugnacity, and her veiled Jewish grandmother who mourned the disastrous effects of a face-lift; there was wicked Uncle Myers who beat her for the good of her soul, and Aunt Margaret who laced her orange juice with castor oil, and taped her lips at night to prevent unhealthy ‘mouth-breathing’. ‘Many a time in the course of doing these memoirs,’ Mary McCarthy says, ‘I have wished that I were writing fiction.’ But these were the people, along with the Ladies of the Sacred Heart convent school, who inspired her engaging perception, her devastating sense of the sublime and ridiculous, and her witty, novelist’s imagination. Memories of a Catholic Girlhood is a major work by one of the leading American intellectuals of the twentieth century – witty, scathing, piercingly insightful and stylishly written.
The Unnamable
3.190 kr.The Unnamable is a voice. Is it curled up inside an urn, on the point of being born, or is it about to die? Haunted by visitors, it weeps. The Unnamable sifts disjointed memories, grapples with the problem of existence and ultimately perpetuates itself through an endless stream of fragmented words.
The Unnamable is the last of the three great novels Samuel Beckett produced during his ‘frenzy of writing’ in the late 1940s. The others are Molloy and Malone Dies.
Megir þú upplifa
1.990 kr.Í Vesturbænum býr breyskur maður í eilífri leit að fegurð lífsins um leið og hann tekst á við persónulegan harm. Hann þráir frelsi æskunnar og hina brothættu fullkomnun sem er rétt utan seilingar. Við fylgjum honum í gegnum ferðalög, endurminningar og hjákátleg samskipti við konurnar í lífi hans. Fylgjumst með honum gera tilraun til að vera guðseindin í heimi sem oft virðist svo glataður.
Megir þú upplifa er óður til fegurðarinnar. Óður til borgarlífs. Óður til Evrópu. Og óður til skálds. Hún er tilraun til að milda hjörtu. Tilraun til að mála með litríkum breiðum penslum yfir gráan hversdagleika. Og tilraun til að fanga það besta sem lífið hefur upp á að bjóða.
Kóperníka
1.290 kr.Kaupmannahöfn 1888. Raðmorðingi gengur laus og sýfilisfaraldur geisar. Börn í borginni hverfa unnvörpum. Kóperníkus, íslenskur unglæknir á Konunglega spítalanum, er rekinn frá störfum sínum og fært það í hendur að rannsaka lát besta vinar síns. En er nokkur niðurstaða í augsýn?
Kóperníkus einsetur sér að komast til botns í málinu og fylgist grannt með háttum samstarfsmanna sinna á spítalanum, sem hann grunar að séu ekki allir þar sem þeir eru séðir. Lík eru grafin upp úr Assistens-kirkjugarði eftir því sem þau hrannast upp á krufningaborðinu, og svo er ástin sem enginn má hugsa um þar til niðurstaða finnst. Á endanum getur Kóperníkus fáu treyst nema eigin innsæi.
Sölvi Björn Sigurðsson hlaut Íslensku bókmenntaverðlaunin fyrir síðustu skáldsögu sína, Seltu. Kóperníka er sú sjöunda í röðinni og hafa bækur hans hvort tveggja hlotið innlenda og alþjóðlega viðurkenningu.
Private Notebooks: 1914-1916
4.390 kr.During the pandemic, Marjorie Perloff, one of our foremost scholars of global literature, found her mind ineluctably drawn to the profound commentary on life and death in the wartime diaries of eminent philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951). Upon learning that these notebooks, which richly contextualise the early stages of his magnum opus, the Tractatus-Logico-Philosophicus, had never before been published in English, the Viennese-born Perloff determinedly set about translating them. Beginning with the anxious summer of 1914, this historic, en-face edition presents the first-person recollections of a foot soldier in the Austrian Army, fresh from his days as a philosophy student at Cambridge, who must grapple with the hazing of his fellow soldiers, the stirrings of a forbidden sexuality, and the formation of an explosive analytical philosophy that seemed to draw meaning from his endless brushes with death.
Much like Tolstoy’s The Gospel in Brief, Private Notebooks takes us on a personal journey to discovery as it augments our knowledge of Wittgenstein himself.