I am a Bird from Paradise
2.490 kr.May I remember always when
Your glance in secrecy met mine,
And in my face your love was like
A visibly reflected sign.
From the greatest and most popular of all Persian poets, a selection celebrating love, beauty and the profound connection between the human and the divine.
A Moment of War
2.490 kr.In one of the great English war memoirs, we learn what it is to cross the Pyrenees through freezing snow to fight fascism in Spain; to narrowly escape execution by your own side; to kill a man with a borrowed rifle and feel nothing but shame. Moving and shrapnel-sharp, A Moment of War recalls the defeat of idealism; ‘that flush of youth which never doubts self-survival, that idiot belief in luck’.
A Confirmed Bachelor
2.490 kr.Following the death of his sister, middle-aged Dr Graesler leaves his winter home in Lanzarote for a health resort in Germany, where he practised medicine for many years. There he meets the Schleheim family, and is particularly drawn to their daughter Sabine. But a simple, stilted courtship soon unravels a web of hushed-up suicide and illicit sexual liaisons.
Arthur Schnitzler’s tumultuous psychodrama remains as startling now as it did on first publication.
The Price of Freedom
2.490 kr.Saadat Hasan Manto, the most widely read and translated writer in the Urdu language, captured the devastation and absurdity of the partition of India and Pakistan like no other. The Price of Freedom brings together ten of his best stories, focusing on human voices from the religious fracture that forever unhinged two newly independent nations. Powerful, piercing and deeply moving, Manto’s works are key to understanding this bloody chapter in South Asian history.
Lady L.
2.490 kr.‘Why should I bother to invent things? My life has been far more exciting and wonderful than any fairy-tale’
In the heart of the English countryside, surrounded by irritatingly polite relatives and hopeless sycophants, Lady L. is celebrating her eightieth birthday. But as the guests disperse, she feels the undeniable pull of a mysterious pavilion in the lush grounds, and the terrible secret she buried there many years ago .
The Broken Nest
2.490 kr.Rabindranath Tagore was one of the greatest authors of his generation. In these two short stories – ‘The Broken Nest’ and ‘Dead or Alive’ – he is at his devastating best, charting the slow, then fast, implosion of two perfect Bengali households. No-one understands each other; everything is misconstrued; all is lost.
The Chimes
2.490 kr.Fabien tonight was wandering over the vast splendour of a sea of clouds, but below him lay eternity.
Inspired by his career as an aviator, Saint-Exupéry’s soaring novel follows the journeys of three pilots delivering mail overnight. The author’s beautiful, weightless prose is as haunting as his own disappearance in flight, eerily foreshadowed by his protagonist Fabien, who becomes lost in otherworldly darkness. Letter to a Hostage, Saint-Exupéry’s meditation on displacement and friendship, also explores solitude and questions the human condition.
Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland
3.690 kr.One night in December 1972, Jean McConville, a mother of ten, was abducted from her home in Belfast and never seen alive again.
Her disappearance would haunt her orphaned children, the perpetrators of the brutal crime and a whole society in Northern Ireland for decades.
With gripping, forensic reportage and lyrical, vivid detail, Say Nothing weaves the stories of Jean McConville and her family with those of Dolours Price, the first woman to join the IRA as a front-line soldier, who bombed the Old Bailey when barely out of her teens; Gerry Adams, who helped bring an end to the fighting but denied his IRA past; Brendan Hughes, a fearsome IRA commander who turned on Adams after the peace process and broke the IRA’s code of silence; and other indelible figures.Keefe captures the intrigue, the drama and the profound human cost of the Troubles.
Sunflower Sutra
2.490 kr.I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.
Allen Ginsberg’s poetry fomented a social and political revolution, and with its rawness and spontaneity changed the course of the American lyric. To read his profane and prophetic verses, about sex, death and America, as well as the humour of his humiliations and self-transformations, is to stretch consciousness and grasp an entire era.
Night Flight
2.490 kr.Fabien tonight was wandering over the vast splendour of a sea of clouds, but below him lay eternity.
Inspired by his career as an aviator, Saint-Exupéry’s soaring novel follows the journeys of three pilots delivering mail overnight. The author’s beautiful, weightless prose is as haunting as his own disappearance in flight, eerily foreshadowed by his protagonist Fabien, who becomes lost in otherworldly darkness. Letter to a Hostage, Saint-Exupéry’s meditation on displacement and friendship, also explores solitude and questions the human condition.
Grief Is the Thing with Feathers
3.490 kr.In a London flat, two young boys face the unbearable sadness of their mother’s sudden death. Their father, a Ted Hughes scholar and scruffy romantic, imagines a future of well-meaning visitors and emptiness. In this moment of despair they are visited by Crow – antagonist, trickster, healer, babysitter.
This sentimental bird is drawn to the grieving family and threatens to stay until they no longer need him. In a London flat, two young boys face the unbearable sadness of their mother’s sudden death. Their father, a Ted Hughes scholar and scruffy romantic, imagines a future of well-meaning visitors and emptiness.
In this moment of despair they are visited by Crow – antagonist, trickster, healer, babysitter. This sentimental bird is drawn to the grieving family and threatens to stay until they no longer need him. As weeks turn to months and the pain of loss gives way to memories, the little unit of three starts to heal.
Max Porter’s extraordinary debut – part novella, part polyphonic fable, part essay on grief – marked the arrival of a thrilling new literary talent. Ten years on, readers continue to discover and fall in love with Grief is the Thing With Feathers.
Valencia
3.690 kr.The 25th anniversary edition of Michelle Tea’s classic coming-of-age story, now with a foreword by Maggie Nelson, award-winning author of The Argonauts.
Fleeing Tucson and her troublesome on-and-off ex-girlfriend, Michelle lands in queer San Francisco’s riotous underbelly, stumbling through her early twenties in a haze of nightlife, drug adventures, scams and a string of hookups, break-ups and make-ups. As butches and dykes spin in and out of her orbit, she considers the force and casual cruelty of their desires and her own. Heady, beer-sticky and brimming with life, Valencia is a sharply observed and piercingly funny chronicle of a year lived close to the bone.
‘Hilarious, euphoric, perspicacious and punk – the book that showed so many of us how writing can be real’ – Jeremy Atherton Lin, author of Gay Bar
‘One of the few truly life changing books I’ve encountered’ – Torrey Peters, bestselling author of Detransition, Baby
In The Kitchen: Essays on food and life
3.490 kr.‘A delightful collection of original, vibrant and heart-warming writing.’ – Nigel Slater
‘I learned that before entering the kitchen, I must get the measure of its hold over me.’
Food can embody our personal history as well as wider cultural histories. But what are the stories we tell ourselves about the kitchen, and how do we first come to it? How do the cookbooks we read shape us? Can cooking be a tool for connection in the kitchen and outside of it?
In these essays thirteen writers consider the subjects of cooking and eating and how they shape our lives, and the possibilities and limitations the kitchen poses. Rachel Roddy traces an alternative personal history through the cookers in her life; Rebecca May Johnson considers the radical potential of finger food; Ruby Tandoh discovers other definitions of sweetness through the work of writer Doreen Fernandez; Yemisí Aríbisálà remembers a love affair in which food failed as a language; and Julia Turshen considers food’s ties to community.
A collection to savour and inspire, In the Kitchen brings together thirteen contemporary writers whose work brilliantly explores food, capturing their reflections on their experiences in the kitchen and beyond.
Contributors
Juliet Annan
Yemisí Aríbisálà
Laura Freeman
Joel Golby
Daisy Johnson
Rebecca May Johnson
Rebecca Liu
Nina Mingya Powles
Ella Risbridger
Rachel Roddy
Mayukh Sen
Ruby Tandoh
Julia Turshen
‘A moving and beautiful tribute to food and taste and how these essential things wrap themselves round the colour of our lives.’ – Stylist
‘Immerse yourself in the culinary charms of this foodie essay collection.’ – Town & Country
‘This warming and varied collection of essays on food, cooking and all the emotions that get tangled up in the process, is a true balm.’ – New Statesman
‘In the Kitchen is literary comfort food for the soul and I heartily recommend it.’ – Idler
Freewheeling: Essays on Cycling
3.690 kr.Cycling? It’s one of my life’s constants, it feeds my need for beauty, for delight and for aimless exploring. It makes my body hum and brings me safely back to the present . . . I hope to continue pedalling, nice and slowly, for the rest of my life, with the same curiosity that ignited my childhood.
In these essays twelve writers consider the joys of cycling, whether in a city late at night, or along country lanes on a summer’s day. Yara Rodrigues Fowler and Xani Byrne write a moving essay on coming to terms with loss through tandem biking, Jon McGregor reminisces on the significance of cycling to Dunwich Beach throughout his life, Annie Lord sings the praises on cycling home on Lime Bikes from parties and the late Dervla Murphy regales us with stories of her cycle to India on her bike, named Roz.
These essays are a celebration of life on two wheels, touching on the joy, exhilaration and serenity to be found while cycling, and how bikes become an extension of ourselves, a type of armour, and a metaphor for life.
Contributors
Imogen Binnie
Aniefiok Ekpoudom
Yara Rodrigues Fowler & Xani Byrne
Mina Holland
Annie Lord
Jon McGregor
Moya Lothian-McLean
Dervla Murphy
David O’Doherty
Jini Reddy
Ashleigh Young
‘Thrums with beauty, wears its humanity like a crown.’ Michael Pedersen
‘The writing here has enough lightness of spirit to whip out on your morning commute . . . the essays have also been judiciously chosen, have an aerodynamic focus, and you’ll speed through them.’ LeftLion
‘An evocative and thought-provoking anthology that captures the multifaceted world of cycling . . . A delightful ride.’ BIKE magazine
Hop-Frog
2.490 kr.Edgar Allen Poe’s short stories have lost none of their power to horrify. He remains a destabilizingly terse sketcher out of ideas, a writer who allows the reader to fill in the many ghastly blanks in his narratives of violence, retribution and animalism. It is hard to recommend Hop-Frog wholeheartedly (its original subtitle was: Or, The Eight Chained Ourang-Outangs) as it is such an affront to decency, but you will certainly never forget it.
Lois the Witch
2.490 kr.Beware the self-righteous man of faith, the wicked-eyed child, the jealous lover. For this is Salem, in 1691, where rumours fly on the wind and witchcraft is abroad. Lois Barclay, cursed in childhood, is a stranger in a strange land – and the devil will work his mischief on Lois’s neighbours before the season of madness is out.
The Rich Boy
2.490 kr.Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me . . .
In this glittering new selection of Fitzgerald’s short stories, we meet Anson Hunter, ‘The Rich Boy’, whose opulent, haunting world paints a vivid portrait of the American elite. ‘Absolution’ offers a poignant glimpse into the soul of a young boy grappling with sin, whilst ‘May Day’ captures the whirling hysteria at the dawn of the Jazz Age.
Mammoth
3.990 kr.Mammoth’s protagonist is a disenchanted young lesbian. She’s inexperienced, irritated by life, eager to gestate, and determined to strip everything else down to essentials. She seduces men at random, swaps her urban habitat for an isolated farmhouse, befriends a shepherd, nurses lambs, battles stray cats, waits tables, cleans house, and dabbles in sex work – all in pursuit of life in the raw.
This small bomb of a novel, not remotely pastoral, builds to a howling crescendo of social despair, leaving us at the mercy of Eva Baltasar’s wild voice.
Intermezzo
3.490 kr.Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties – successful, competent and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women – his enduring first love Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke.
Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined.
For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude – a period of desire, despair and possibility – a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.
Like Love: Essays and Conversations
3.690 kr.Like Love is a momentous, raucous collection of essays drawn from twenty years of Maggie Nelson’s brilliant work. These profiles, reviews, remembrances, tributes and critical essays, as well as several conversations with friends and idols, bring to life Nelson’s passion for dialogue and dissent. The range of subjects is wide – from Prince to Carolee Schneemann to Matthew Barney to Lhasa de Sela to Kara Walker – but certain themes recur: intergenerational exchange; love and friendship; feminist and queer issues, especially as they shift over time; subversion, transgression and perversity; the roles of the critic and language in relation to visual and performance arts; forces that feed or impede certain bodies and creators; and the fruits and follies of a life spent devoted to making.
Arranged chronologically, Like Love shows the writing, thinking, feeling, reading, looking and conversing that occupied Nelson while writing iconic books such as Bluets and The Argonauts. As such, it is a portrait of a time, an anarchic party rich with wild guests, a window into Nelson’s own development and a testament to the profound sustenance offered by art and artists.