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.
Reminiscences of Tolstoy, Chekhov and Andreyev
4.390 kr.In 1920, Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press published Maxim Gorky’s Reminiscences of Tolstoy and it was recognized almost immediately as one of the few masterpieces of modern biography. ‘It is one of the most remarkable biographical pieces ever written,’ writes Leonard Woolf in his autobiography. ‘It makes one hear, see, feel Tolstoy and his character as if one were sitting in the same room – his greatness and his littleness, his entrancing and infuriating complexity, his titanic and poetic personality, his superb humour.’ In 1934, the book was expanded to include Gorky’s memoirs of two other great Russian literary figures, Anton Chekhov and Leonid Andreyev. Almost a hundred years later, Reminiscences of Tolstoy, Chekhov and Andreyev is reissued in a superb new translation by Bryan Karetnyk.
The Other Girl
3.190 kr.One Sunday in Yvetot, August 1950. Annie is playing outside in the sun. Her mother steps out of the grocery to chat with a customer, a few metres from her. The two women’s conversation is perfectly audible; its scraps become etched forever in Annie’s memory. Before she was born, her parents had another daughter. She died at the age of six from diphtheria. Annie will never hear another word from her parents about this unknown sister, nor will she ask them a single question about her: their family unit has formed in the image of its vanished predecessor. In The Other Girl, brilliantly translated for the first time into English by Alison L. Strayer, Annie Ernaux explores the meaning of this family secret, and the insurmountable distance that separates the two sisters.
Kitchen Confidential: 25th Anniversary Edition
3.990 kr.After twenty-five years of sex, drugs, bad behaviour and haute cuisine, chef and novelist Anthony Bourdain decided to tell all – and he meant all.
From his first oyster in the Gironde as a child, to his lowly position as a dishwasher in a honky-tonk fish restaurant in Provincetown; from the kitchen of the Rainbow Room atop the Rockefeller Center to drug dealers in the East Village, from Tokyo to Paris and back to New York again, Bourdain’s tales of the kitchen are as passionate as they are unpredictable, as shocking as they are funny.
Kitchen Confidential will make your mouth water and your belly ache with laughter and leave you wanting more.
The First Bad Man
3.490 kr.From the acclaimed filmmaker, artist, and bestselling author of No One Belongs Here More Than You, a spectacular debut novel that is so heartbreaking, so dirty, so tender, so funny–so Miranda July–readers will be blown away.
Here is Cheryl, a tightly-wound, vulnerable woman who lives alone, with a perpetual lump in her throat. She is haunted by a baby boy she met when she was six, who sometimes recurs as other people’s babies. Cheryl is also obsessed with Phillip, a philandering board member at the women’s self-defense non-profit where she works. She believes they’ve been making love for many lifetimes, though they have yet to consummate in this one.
When Cheryl’s bosses ask if their twenty-one-year-old daughter Clee can move into her house for a little while, Cheryl’s eccentrically-ordered world explodes. And yet it is Clee–the selfish, cruel blond bombshell–who bullies Cheryl into reality and, unexpectedly, provides her the love of a lifetime.
Tender, gripping, slyly hilarious, infused with raging sexual fantasies and fierce maternal love, Miranda July’s first novel confirms her as a spectacularly original, iconic and important voice today, and a writer for all time. The First Bad Man is dazzling, disorienting, and unforgettable.