Daughters of the Bamboo Grove
4.390 kr.In 2000, a Chinese woman gave birth to twins in a bamboo grove, trying to avoid detection by the government because she already had two daughters. Two years later, an American couple travelled to Shaoyang to adopt a Chinese toddler they thought had been abandoned. Their understanding had been that China’s brutal one-child policy was leading to hundreds of abandoned girls, desperate for the care of adopted parents.
What they didn’t know – and what award-winning journalist Barbara Demick uncovered in 2007, while working as a correspondent in Beijing – was that their daughter had been snatched from her beloved family and her identical twin. Under China’s one-child policy hundreds of poor Chinese were giving up their children due to soaring fines and threats of violence. More sinister still, international demand for adoptees was sky-rocketing, and local officials were forcibly seizing children and trafficking them to orphanages, who were selling them abroad.
Daughters of the Bamboo Grove tells the gripping story of separated twins, their respective fates in China and the USA, and Barbara Demick’s role in reuniting them against huge odds. Painting a rich portrait of China’s history and culture, it asks questions about the roots, impact and consequences of China’s one-child policy, the ethics of international adoption, and, ultimately, the assumptions and narratives we hold about the quality of lives lived in the East and the West.
ERODE
4.390 kr.ERODE is Biswamit Dwibedy’s fourth full-length collection of poetry and brings together his first out-of-print book, Ozalid, and the expansion and continuation of that work into Erode. As a single collection, these sequences unfold in movements of erasure and collage. What emerges is a poetics of accumulation and subtraction, a method of excavation that reveals the personal buried within the communal, the lyric submerged in the residual. If erasure is a form of attention, then ERODE listens acutely—to language, to silence, to the faint signal of the other. With a sensibility both spare and lush, ERODE traces the shifting terrain of meaning, where fragments flare into wholeness and then dissolve again.
The Penguin Book of French Verse 4
1.490 kr.The Penguin Book of French Verse 4
The Twentieth Century Introduced and edited by Anthony Hartley
A Woman Looks Over Her Shoulder
3.490 kr.In A Woman Looks Over Her Shoulder, written by contemporary Icelandic poet Brynja Hjálmsdóttir and translated by Rachel Britton, one woman lives in a glass ball that is being shaken by someone else. This book of poems, however, is always shaking itself up, leaping between the extreme and the daily, the gross and the delicious, between being scared and being scary. These surreal, visceral, and somehow polite poems explore what it can be like to be a woman and to slither through and away from threat to find voice and form and power, no matter how strange. The apocalyptic utopia we arrive at in this book—The Whore’s City—is a perfect model to move to in one’s head: feminist, funny, odd, and a little disgusting, all towards transformation.
The Museum of Whales You Will Never See
3.490 kr.Welcome to Iceland, a very small nation with a very large number (two hundred and sixty five) of (mostly) very small museums. Founded in the backyards of houses, begun as jokes or bets or memorials to lost friends, these museums tell the story of an enchanted island where bridges arrived only at the beginning of the 20th century, and waterproof shoes only with the second world war. A nation formerly dirt poor, then staggeringly rich, and now building its way to affluence once again.
A nation where, in the remote and wild places, you might encounter still a shore laddie, a sorcerer or a ghost. From Reykjavík’s renowned Phallological Museum to a house of stones on the eastern coast; from the curious monsters which roam the remote shores of Bíldudalur to a museum of whales which proves impossible to find, here is an enchanted story of obsession, curation, and the peculiar magic of this isolated island.
Glass And God
4.390 kr.Anne Carson’ s first full-length publication in Britain, Glass and God introduces an assured and challenging new voice: vivid, laconic, precise. Her ‘Short Talks’ are about everything from Sylvia Plath to Franz Kafka, from waterproofing to walking backwards; the brilliant long poem ‘The Glass Essay’ deals with the end of a contemporary love affair, but is haunted by the Brontë sisters. Blending the modern and the classical, Anne Carson writes with an intensity and an integrity that is transfiguring.
A Woman’s Battles and Transformations
3.690 kr.One day, Édouard Louis finds a photograph of his mother from twenty years ago: a happy young woman, full of hopes and dreams. But growing up, Édouard only knew his mother’s sadness – what happened in those years since the photo was taken? Then, at the age of forty-five, Édouard’s mother frees herself from this life of oppression, to start a new one in Paris.
A Woman’s Battles and Transformations reckons with the cruel systems that govern our lives – and with the possibility of escape. It is a tender portrait of a mother, and an honouring of her self-discovery as she chooses to live on her own terms.
Hamnet
3.690 kr.The untold love story that inspired Shakespeare’s greatest masterpiece.
On a summer’s day in 1596, a young girl in Stratford-upon-Avon takes to her bed with a sudden fever. Her twin brother, Hamnet, searches everywhere for help. Why is nobody at home?
Their mother, Agnes, is over a mile away, in the garden where she grows medicinal herbs. Their father is working in London.
Neither parent knows that Hamnet will not survive the week.
Hamnet tells the powerful story of Agnes and Will, and of the son whose life has been all but forgotten, but who inspired one of the greatest plays ever written.