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?
What We Can Know
4.690 kr.2014: A great poem is read aloud and never heard again. For generations, people speculate about its message, but no copy has yet been found.
2119: The lowlands of the UK have been submerged by rising seas. Those who survive are haunted by the richness of the world that has been lost.
Tom Metcalfe, a scholar at the University of the South Downs, part of Britain’s remaining archipelagos, pores over the archives of the early twenty-first century, captivated by the freedoms and possibilities of human life at its zenith.
When he stumbles across a clue that may lead to the great lost poem, revelations of entangled love and a brutal crime emerge, destroying his assumptions about a story he thought he knew intimately.
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.
Poor Artists
3.690 kr.Why make art? Faced with a capitalist system that has turned art into artwork and creative expression into cut-throat competition, why do so many artists try anyway?In this eye-opening journey through the bizarre world of contemporary art, criticism duo The White Pube tell the story of art like never before.
Poor Artists follows aspiring artist Quest Talukdar through childhood obsessions, art school lessons and her professional debut. In surreal encounters with other artists, Quest learns profound truths about money and power, and must decide whether she cares more about success or staying true to herself.
Blending imaginative storytelling with dialogue from anonymized interviews with real people in the art world who have all had to wrestle with the same decisions – including a Turner Prize winner or two, a few ghosts, a Venice Biennale fraudster and a communist messiah – Poor Artists is a powerful testimony to the emotional, existential and financial experience of artists today.
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.
