No Longer Human
3.690 kr.The poignant and fascinating story of a young man who is caught between the breakup of the traditions of a northern Japanese aristocratic family and the impact of Western ideas.
Portraying himself as a failure, the protagonist of Osamu Dazai’s No Longer Human narrates a seemingly normal life even while he feels himself incapable of understanding human beings. Oba Yozo’s attempts to reconcile himself to the world around him begin in early childhood, continue through high school, where he becomes a “clown” to mask his alienation, and eventually lead to a failed suicide attempt as an adult. Without sentimentality, he records the casual cruelties of life and its fleeting moments of human connection and tenderness.
The Odyssey
5.490 kr.The epic tale of Odysseus and his ten-year journey home after the Trojan War forms one of the earliest and greatest works of Western literature. Confronted by natural and supernatural threats – shipwrecks, battles, monsters and the implacable enmity of the sea-god Poseidon – Odysseus must use his wit and native cunning if he is to reach his homeland safely and overcome the obstacles that, even there, await him.
The Little Prince
4.690 kr.The narrator is a downed pilot in the Sahara Desert, frantically trying to repair his wrecked plane. His efforts are interrupted one day by the apparition of a little prince, who asks him to draw a sheep. “In the face of an overpowering mystery, you don’t dare disobey,” the narrator recalls.
“Absurd as it seemed, a thousand miles from all inhabited regions and in danger of death, I took a scrap of paper and a pen out of my pocket.” And so begins their dialogue, which stretches the narrator’s imagination in all sorts of surprising, childlike directions.
The Young Man
3.190 kr.In her latest work, Annie Ernaux recounts a relationship with a student thirty years her junior – an experience that transforms her, briefly, back into the ‘scandalous girl’ of her youth. When she is with him, she replays scenes she has already lived through, feeling both ageless and closer to death. Laid like a palimpsest on the present, the past’s immediacy pushes her to take a decisive step in her writing – producing, in turn, the need to expunge her lover. At once stark and tender, The Young Man is a taut encapsulation of Ernaux’s relationship to time, memory and writing.
Vanishing World
3.990 kr.“Normality is the creepiest madness there is…”
From the author of the bestselling literary sensations Convenience Store Woman and Earthlings comes a surprising and highly imaginative story set in a version of Japan where sex between married couples has vanished and all children are born by artificial insemination. Sayaka Murata has proven herself to be one of the most exciting chroniclers of the strangeness of society, x-raying our contemporary world to bizarre and troubling effect. Her depictions of a happily unmarried retail worker in Convenience Store Woman and a young woman convinced she is an alien in Earthlings have endeared her to millions of readers worldwide.
Vanishing World takes Murata’s universe to a bold new level, imagining an alternative Japan where attitudes to sex and procreation are wildly different to our own. As a girl, Amane realizes with horror that her parents “copulated” in order to bring her into the world, rather than using artificial insemination, which became the norm in the mid-twentieth century. Amane strives to get away from what she considers an indoctrination in this strange “system” by her mother, but her infatuations with both anime characters and real people have a sexual force that is undeniable.
As an adult in an appropriately sexless marriage-sex between married couples is now considered as taboo as incest-Amane and her husband Saku decide to go and live in a mysterious new town called Experiment City or Paradise-Eden, where all children are raised communally, and every person is considered a Mother to all children. Men are beginning to become pregnant using artificial wombs that sit outside of their bodies like balloons, and children are nameless, called only “Kodomo-chan.” Is this the new world that will purify Amane of her strangeness once and for all?
Jörð / Earth
9.290 kr.Bryndís Jónsdóttir sækir innblástur í náttúruna og leitast við að ná fram hinu lífræna úr ólíkum efnivið. Hún horfir til táknkerfis íslensku fjármarkanna, sem fylgt hafa þjóðinni frá fornu fari. Sýlthamrað, þrístigað eða heilrifað, hún útfærir mörkin í volduga leir- og járnskúlptúra, massíft gler og viðkvæm grafíkverk. Efniskenndin er áþreifanleg.
Based on a True Story
3.190 kr.Overwhelmed by the huge success of her latest novel, exhausted and suffering from a crippling inability to write, Delphine meets L. L. embodies everything Delphine admires; sophisticated and unusually intuitive, she slowly but deliberately carves herself a niche in the writer’s life. However, as she makes herself indispensable to Delphine, the intensity of this unexpected friendship manifests itself in increasingly sinister ways. And as their lives become further entwined, L. begins to threaten Delphine’s identity and her safety.
Rhythm of labor / Taktur í verki
5.990 kr.Hulda Rós Guðnadóttir (b. Reykjavík, Iceland, 1973; lives and works in Berlin) creates work across video, photography, performance, installation art, and others. Central to her practice is a conceptual approach that fluidly transitions between various artistic mediums. Her work is deeply influenced by anthropological research methods as well as her own personal experiences. She employs strategies of dislocation and defamiliarization to interrogate narratives about labor, class, and urban development and their entanglements with art.
Guðnadóttir’s first monograph Rhythm of Labor is dedicated to her artistic research project Keep Frozen. The project, which has been ongoing for over fifteen years, analyzes the operation of the global economy in the specific local example of the dynamics of industrialized fishing in Iceland. An extensive essay section sheds light on Guðnadóttir’s exploratory performances and films. Heiða Björk Árnadóttir charts the historical and social contexts of the Keep Frozen series. Elisabeth Brun shows how the artist challenges clichéd visualizations of the Arctic and Subarctic, while Anamaría Garzón Mantilla underscores the need to integrate the Arctic north into a critique of coloniality. Katla Kjartansdóttir discusses Guðnadóttir’s series of works that focus on the puffin, a seabird native to the North Atlantic, which has been co-opted by the booming tourism industry as an Icelandic symbol. With a foreword by Julia Gwendolyn Schneider.
Feeding the Monster: Why horror has a hold on us
3.690 kr.Zombies want brains. Vampires want blood. Cannibals want human flesh.
All monsters need feeding. Horror has been embraced by mainstream pop culture more than ever before, with horror characters and aesthetics infecting TV, music videos and even TikTok trends. Yet even with the commercial and critical success of The Babadook, Hereditary, Get Out, The Haunting of Hill House, Yellowjackets and countless other horror films and TV series over the last few years, loving the genre still prompts the question: what’s wrong with you? Implying, of course, that there is something not quite right about the people who make and consume it.
In Feeding the Monster, Anna Bogutskaya dispels this notion once and for all by examining how horror responds to and fuels our feelings of fear, anxiety, pain, hunger and power.
In Writing
3.690 kr.In these intimate and frank conversations with some of our best-loved writers, Hattie Crisell uncovers the mysteries of the creative process, asking: Where do ideas come from? How do stories find their shape? What happens when confidence falters or the work fails – and what does success look like?
The answers range from the thought-provoking to the hilarious. Here we meet the novelist who makes a playlist for each manuscript; the screenwriter who considers swearing an art form; the author who prefers to work in near-darkness, and the confessional writer at risk of revealing too much. Taken as a whole, these inspiring interviews amount to an insider’s guide to the writing process: its disciplines and demands; its ecstasies and agonies; its coffees, word counts and publishing hurdles. Most of all, they reveal how it really feels to write and be read.
With contributions from James Acaster, André Aciman, Ayobami Adebayo, Rumaan Alam, Amer Anwar, Mona Arshi, Andrew Billen, Holly Bourne, Charlie Brooker, Wendy Cope, Cressida Cowell, John Crace, Elizabeth Day, Grace Dent, Kit de Waal, Geoff Dyer, Wendy Erskine, Tor Freeman, Will Harris, Anna Hope, John Lanchester, Sophie Mackintosh, Emily St. John Mandel, Meg Mason, Mhairi McFarlane, Liane Moriarty, David Nicholls, Mary Norris, Graham Norton, Maggie O’Farrell, Ruben Östlund, Robert Popper, Lucy Prebble, Georgia Pritchett, Kiley Reid, John Rentoul, Hugo Rifkind, Jon Ronson, Michael Rosen, Sathnam Sanghera, George Saunders, David Sedaris, Elif Shafak, Alexandra Shulman, Curtis Sittenfeld, Raven Smith, Will Storr, Brandon Taylor, Craig Taylor, Barbara Trapido, Emma Jane Unsworth, Robert Webb, Zoe Williams, Meg Wolitzer.
The Christmas cat
4.990 kr.All know well the dreadful Christmas Cat, who finds it nice to hunt poor children rather than mice.Here the cat truly comes to life, cheeky and voracious as he’s always been.THE CHRISTMAS CAT is the classic Christmas poem by Jóhannes úr Kötlum – now with illustrations by Þórarinn Leifsson that put the dreadful Christmas Cat in a fresh and entertaining light.- -50%
Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts
Original price was: 8.290 kr..4.145 kr.Current price is: 4.145 kr..Raised by scientifically minded parents, Atwood spent most of each year in the wild forest of northern Quebec: a vast playground for her entomologist father and independent, resourceful mother. It was an unfettered and nomadic childhood, sometimes isolated but also thrilling and beautiful.
From this unconventional start, Atwood unfolds the story of her life, linking key moments to the books that have shaped our literary landscape, from the cruel school year that would become Cat’s Eye to the unease of 1980s Berlin, where she began The Handmaid’s Tale. In pages alive with the natural world, reading and books, major political turning points and her lifelong love for the charismatic writer Graeme Gibson, we meet poets, bears, Hollywood stars and larger-than-life characters straight from the pages of an Atwood novel.
As she explores her past, Atwood reveals more and more about her writing, the connections between real life and art – and the workings of one of our boldest imaginations.
Lolita
4.990 kr.Poet and pervert, Humbert Humbert becomes obsessed by twelve-year-old Lolita and seeks to possess her, first carnally and then artistically, out of love, ‘to fix once for all the perilous magic of nymphets’. Is he in love or insane? A tortured soul or a monster? Humbert Humbert’s seduction is one of many dimensions in Nabokov’s dizzying masterpiece, which is suffused with a savage humour and rich, elaborate verbal textures. Filmed by Stanley Kubrick in 1962 starring James Mason and Peter Sellers, and again in 1997 by Adrian Lyne starring Jeremy Irons and Melanie Griffith, Lolita has lost none of its power to shock and awe.
On the Calculation of Volume III
3.990 kr.Tara Selter is no longer alone. Tara Selter has lived the eighteenth of November 1,143 times when she notices a break in the pattern: a man has changed his shirt. The man is Henry Dale, and he remembers all the days that have come before.He knows that time has fallen out of joint. Now they are two of a kind – trapped in the eighteenth of November, but no longer alone.
Together they learn to share their present; their voices grow hoarse recounting their small battles against it and their bewilderment at the disintegrating world. Henry sees things differently to Tara: he does not think that time will put itself back together and he does not think that the future will come around. But he makes her realise that she is no longer the same person she was before this fault in time. And he makes her believe that there may be others to find within it.
Bread of Angels
4.390 kr.God whispers through a crease in the wallpaper, writes Patti Smith in this indelible account of her life as an artist. A post-Second World War childhood unfolds in a condemned housing complex described in Dickensian detail: consumptive children, vanishing neighbours, an infested rat house, and a beguiling book of Irish fairytales. We enter the child’s world of the imagination where Smith, the captain of her loyal and beloved sibling army, vanquishes bullies, communes with the king of tortoises and searches for sacred silver pennies.
The most intimate of Smith’s memoirs, Bread of Angels takes us through her teenage years where the first glimmers of art and romance take hold. Arthur Rimbaud and Bob Dylan emerge as creative heroes and role models as Patti starts to write poetry, then lyrics, merging both into the iconic songs and recordings such as Horses and Easter, ‘Dancing Barefoot’ and ‘Because the Night’.
She leaves it all behind to marry her one true love, Fred Sonic Smith, with whom she creates a life of devotion and adventure on a canal in St. Clair Shores, Michigan with ancient willows and fulsome pear trees. She builds a room of her own, furnished with a pillow of Moroccan silk, a Persian cup, inkwell and fountain pen. The couple spend nights in their landlocked Chris-Craft studying nautical maps and charting new adventures as they start their family.
As Smith suffers profound losses, grief and gratitude are braided through years of caring for her children, rebuilding her life and, finally, writing again – the one constant in a life driven by artistic freedom and the power of the imagination to transform the mundane into the beautiful, the commonplace into the magical, and pain into hope. In the final pages, we meet Patti on the road again, the vagabond who travels to commune with herself, who lives to write and writes to live.
Vineland
3.690 kr.The inspiration for One Battle After Another
Thomas Pynchon’s wretchedly funny dystopian thriller, sending up the end days of the American dream
Vineland, a zone of blessed anarchy in northern California, is the last refuge of hippiedom, a culture devastated by the sobriety epidemic, Reaganomics, and the Tube. Here, in an Orwellian 1984, Zoyd Wheeler and his daughter Prairie search for Prairie’s long-lost mother, a Sixties radical who ran off with a narc.
Full of quasi-allegorical characters, elaborate unresolved subplots, corny songs, movie spoofs, and illicit sex, Vineland is vintage Pynchon.
‘That rarest of birds: a major political novel about what America has been doing to itself, to its children, all these many years’ Salman Rushdie
