The Road to the City
3.490 kr.They say that big families are happy, but I could never see anything particularly happy about ours.
Delia is one of five children, growing up in a poor Italian village. She is seventeen, and dreams of marrying a rich man; she dreams of a grand apartment in the city and silk stockings. To escape her father’s neglect and her mother’s sadness, she begins to take the dusty road to the city every day, accompanied by Nini, her sweet and mysterious cousin.
When Nini takes a job in a factory and moves in with a city woman, Delia sees another way of being. But when she discovers she’s pregnant, she agrees to marry the father, seduced by the promise of wealth and comfort. Nothing, not even Nini’s desperate declaration of love, can stop her – but her rejection will be his undoing.
The Road to the City is a short, poignant novel about the dreams of youth, and the cruelty it takes to make them come true.
One Boat
3.990 kr.On losing her father, Teresa returns to a small town on the Greek coast – the same place she visited when grieving her mother nine years ago. She immerses herself again in the life of the town, observing the inhabitants going about their business, a quiet backdrop for her reckoning with herself. An episode from her first visit resurfaces vividly – her encounter with John, a man struggling to come to terms with the violent death of his nephew. Soon Teresa encounters some of the people she met last time around: Petros, an eccentric mechanic, whose life story may or may not be part of John’s; the beautiful Niko, a diving instructor; and Xanthe, a waitress in one of the cafés on the leafy town square. They talk about their longings, regrets, the passing of time, their sense of who they are. Artfully constructed, absorbing and insightful, One Boat is a brilliant novel grappling with questions of identity, free will, guilt and responsibility.
Malone Dies
3.190 kr.Malone, a decrepit old man, lies naked in his bed, scrawling bitter observations in an exercise book. He is fed on a bed-table, his chamber pot is emptied, he hooks items with his stick, he looks out of the window. He tells the story of a man, looked after by nurses, taken for an ill-fated picnic on an island in the sea. As his mind disintegrates, so does the novel . . .
Malone Dies is the second of the three great novels Samuel Beckett produced during his ‘frenzy of writing’ in the late 1940s. The others are Molloy and The Unnamable.
Private Notebooks: 1914-1916
4.390 kr.During the pandemic, Marjorie Perloff, one of our foremost scholars of global literature, found her mind ineluctably drawn to the profound commentary on life and death in the wartime diaries of eminent philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951). Upon learning that these notebooks, which richly contextualise the early stages of his magnum opus, the Tractatus-Logico-Philosophicus, had never before been published in English, the Viennese-born Perloff determinedly set about translating them. Beginning with the anxious summer of 1914, this historic, en-face edition presents the first-person recollections of a foot soldier in the Austrian Army, fresh from his days as a philosophy student at Cambridge, who must grapple with the hazing of his fellow soldiers, the stirrings of a forbidden sexuality, and the formation of an explosive analytical philosophy that seemed to draw meaning from his endless brushes with death.
Much like Tolstoy’s The Gospel in Brief, Private Notebooks takes us on a personal journey to discovery as it augments our knowledge of Wittgenstein himself.
3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans & The Lost Empire of Cool
3.990 kr.1959 saw Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans and the other members of Miles’s sextet come together to record the bestselling jazz album of all time: Kind of Blue. 3 Shades of Blue follows the paths of Miles, Coltrane and Evans to the mountaintop of 1959 and their roads on from there. It’s a book about music and business, race and heroin, and an astonishing meditation on creativity and the strange hothouses that can produce its full flowering.
But above all this is the story of three very different men – their struggles, their choices, their inspiration. The tapestry of their lives is, in James Kaplan’s hands, an American Odyssey.
Letters to Milena
3.490 kr.Franz Kafka’s letters to his one-time muse, Milena Jesenska – an intimate window into the desires and hopes of the twentieth-century’s most prophetic and important writer.
Kafka first made the acquaintance of Milena Jesenska in 1920 when she was translating his early short prose into Czech. Their relationship quickly developed into a deep attachment. Such was his feeling for her that Kafka showed her his diaries and, in doing so, laid bare his heart and his conscience. While at times Milena’s ‘genius for living’ gave Kafka new life, it ultimately exhausted him, and their relationship was to last little over two years. In 1924 Kafka died in a sanatorium near Vienna, and Milena died in 1944 at the hands of the Nazis, leaving these letters as a moving record of their relationship.
Foster
3.490 kr.It is a hot summer in rural Ireland. A girl is sent to live with foster parents on a farm, not knowing when she will return home. In the strangers’ house, she finds a warmth and affection she has not known before and slowly begins to blossom in their care. But in a house where there are meant to be no secrets, she discovers how fragile her idyll is.
The Beauty Of The Husband
4.690 kr.Since Glass and God, which was her first full-length collection published in Britain and which was nominated for the 1998 Forward Prize, Anne Carson has published a book a year to extraordinary critical acclaim. Her last two volumes, Autobiography of Red and Men in the Off Hours were both shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, and she has received numerous North American awards, including the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship.
In her brilliant new book, she tells a single story. A long-time love, now a crumbling marriage, unfolds in 29 ‘tangos’ of narrative verse, informed by the romanticism of Keats, the wisdom of the classical world and, most importatnly, by Carson’s own unique sensibility.
The unnamed narrator – sometimes ‘I’, sometimes ‘the wife’ – speaks of the man she calls only ‘the husband’, illuminating moments that are by turn sensual, erotic, painful and heartbreaking. The Beauty of the Husband is a work that explores these oldest of lyrical subjects – beauty, desire, love, betrayal – with freshness and devastating power.
**ONE OF THE GUARDIAN‘S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21st CENTURY**
Eros the Bittersweet
4.390 kr.Since it was first published, Eros the Bittersweet, Anne Carson’s lyrical meditation on love in ancient Greek literature and philosophy, has established itself as a favorite among an unusually broad audience, including classicists, essayists, poets, and general readers. Beginning with the poet Sappho’s invention of the word “bittersweet” to describe Eros, Carson’s original and beautifully written book is a wide-ranging reflection on the conflicted nature of romantic love, which is both “miserable” and “one of the greatest pleasures we have.”
