Travelling Passions: The Hidden Life of Vilhjalmur Stefansson
1.290 kr.Vilhjalmur Stefansson has long been known for his groundbreaking work as an anthropologist and expert on Arctic peoples. His three expeditions to the Canadian Arctic in the early 1900s, as well as his expertise in northern anthropology, helped create his public image as an heroic, Hemingway-esque figure in the annals of twentieth-century exploration. But the emotional and private life of Stefansson the man have remained hidden, until now.
New evidence of this other life has recently been discovered: a collection of love letters between Stefansson and his fiance Orpha Cecil Smith were found in a New Hampshire flea market; Stefansson’s field diaries have revealed elegant essays and insightful commentary on Inupiat society; baptismal records have revealed that Stefansson had a son, Alex, with his informant and guide, Fanny Pannigabluk; and through Web searches and a private detective, Palsson found and conducted interviews with the descendents of both Cecil Smith and Alex Stefansson.
Travelling Passions sheds new light on Stefanssonís life and work, focussing on the tension between his private life and the theories that brought his name to the halls of fame. Palsson draws a clear, vivid, and in many ways unexpected picture of the mythical figure of Stefansson.
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.
Decreation
4.990 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.
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.
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny
6.490 kr.When Sonia and Sunny first glimpse each other on an overnight train, they are immediately captivated, yet also embarrassed by the fact that their grandparents had once tried to matchmake them, a clumsy meddling that only served to drive Sonia and Sunny apart.
Sonia, an aspiring novelist who recently completed her studies in the snowy mountains of Vermont, has returned to her family in India, fearing she is haunted by a dark spell cast by an artist to whom she had once turned for intimacy and inspiration. Sunny, a struggling journalist resettled in New York City, is attempting to flee his imperious mother and the violence of his warring clan. Uncertain of their future, Sonia and Sunny embark on a search for happiness together as they confront the many alienations of our modern world.
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is the sweeping tale of two young people navigating the many forces that shape their lives: country, class, race, history, and the complicated bonds that link one generation to the next. A love story, a family saga, and a rich novel of ideas, it is the most ambitious and accomplished work yet by one of our greatest novelists.
Big Swiss
3.490 kr.Greta liked knowing people’s secrets. That wasn’t a problem. Until she met Big Swiss. Big Swiss. That’s Greta’s nickname for her – she is tall, and she is from Switzerland.
Well that’s how Greta imagines her; they haven’t actually met in person. Nor has Greta actually ever been to Switzerland. What Greta doesn’t know is that she’s about to bump into Big Swiss in the local dog park. A new – and not entirely honest – relationship is going to be born.
A relationship that will transform both of their lives . . .
False War
4.390 kr.The characters in False War are ambivalent castaways living lives of deep estrangement from their home country, stranded in an existential no-man’s land. Some of them want to leave and can’t, others left and never quite finished getting anywhere. In this choral novel, employing a dazzling range of narrative styles from noir to autofiction, Carlos Manuel Álvarez brings together a series of interconnected stories of the perennially displaced. From Havana to Mexico City to Miami, from New York to Paris to Berlin, whether toiling in a barber shop, lost in the Louvre, competing in a chess hall in Cuba, plotting a theft, or on a trip for émigré dissidents, these characters learn that while they may appear to be on the move, in reality they are paralysed, living in permanent stasis. With a fractured narrative that brilliantly reflects the disintegration that comes with uprooting, full of tenderness, disenchantment and melancholy, False War is an extraordinary novel that confirms Carlos Manuel Álvarez as one of the indispensable voices of his generation.
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.
On Palestine
3.490 kr.Co-authored by two leading voices in the struggle to liberate Palestine, an indispensable book for understanding the situation in Gaza right now.
What is the future of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement directed at Israel? Which is more viable, the binational or one state solution? Noam Chomsky and Ilan Pappé discuss the road ahead for Palestinians and how the international community can pressure Israel to end its human rights abuses against the people of Palestine in this urgent and timely book, a sequel to their acclaimed Gaza in Crisis.
Greyhound
4.390 kr.In 2006, in the wake of several miscarriages, Joanna Pocock travelled by Greyhound bus across the US from Detroit to Los Angeles. Seventeen years later, now in her 50s, she undertakes the same journey, revisiting the same cities, edgelands, highways and motels in the footsteps of the few women writers – Simone de Beauvoir, Ethel Mannin and Irma Kurtz – who chronicled their own road trips across the US. In Greyhound, Pocock explores the overlap of place and memory, the individual with the communal, and the privatization of public space as she navigates two very different landscapes – an earlier, less atomized America, and a current one mired in inequality, as it teeters on the brink of environmental catastrophe. Her focus is on the built-upon environment: the rivers of tarmac, the illuminated gas stations, the sprawling suburbs and the sites of extraction created specifically to fuel contemporary life. Combining memoir, reportage, environmental writing and literary criticism, Greyhound is a moving and immersive book that captures an America in the throes of late capitalism with all its beauty, horror and complexity.
House of Day, House of Night
4.390 kr.A woman settles in a remote Polish village. It has few inhabitants, but it teems with the stories of its living and its dead. There’s the drunk Marek Marek, who discovers that he shares his body with a bird, and Franz Frost, whose nightmares come to him from a newly discovered planet. There’s the man whose death – with one leg on the Polish side, one on the Czech – was an international incident. And there are the Germans who still haunt a region that not long ago they called their own. From the founding of the town to the lives of its saints, these shards piece together not only a history but a cosmology. Another brilliant ‘constellation novel’ in the mode of her International Booker Prize-winning Flights, House of Day, House of Night is a brilliantly imaginative epic novel of a small place by Olga Tokarczuk, one of the most daring and ambitious novelists of our time.
The Creative Act: A Way of Being
5.190 kr.Many famed music producers are known for a particular sound that has its day and then ages out. Rick Rubin is known for something else: creating a space where artists of all different genres and traditions can home in on who they really are and what they really offer. He has made a practice of helping people transcend their self-imposed expectations in order to reconnect with a state of innocence from which the surprising becomes inevitable.
Over the years, as he has thought deeply about where creativity comes from and where it doesn’t, he has learned that being an artist isn’t about your specific output; it’s about your relationship to the world. Creativity has a place in everyone’s life, and everyone can make that place larger. In fact, there are few more important responsibilities.
The Creative Act is a beautiful and generous course of study that illuminates the path of the artist as a road we all can follow. It distils the wisdom gleaned from a lifetime’s work into a luminous reading experience that puts the power to create moments – and lifetimes – of exhilaration and transcendence within closer reach for all of us.
Elemental Rebirth
7.490 kr.Elemental Rebirth is a deeply personal healing journey, poetically woven through the voices of the elements – water, fire, air and earth.
In her early thirties, Jósa Goodlife faced the life-altering challenge of overcoming cervical cancer through a hysterectomy. Yet, what began as a physical transformation became the gateway to a profound personal rebirth… one that you are invited to witness in this book.
Elemental Rebirth is a gift to those willing to receive – a narrative that transcends the physical and dives into the heart of – what it means to be a human being, with all its struggles and sensitivities, grace and much beauty. It is not merely a story of survival, but a living testament to the power of embracing change and finding purpose along unexpected paths.
With the energetic and poetic support of the elements, Jósa’s story invites readers on a creative journey through the swirling layers of the mind – touching the mysteries of life and death. It carries a wish for renewed hope, a call for more intentional living on this magical planet, and a gentle shedding of the heavy shadows cast by a mind-conditioned, results-driven society.
At its heart, Jósa’s hope is to reconnect humanity with its innate purpose: to fall back in love with the miracle of existence. Through the restorative forces of the elements, we are reminded of our essential kinship with the natural world and with one another. And above all, to remember how the power of love will always guide us back home.
The City and Its Uncertain Walls
3.690 kr.When a young man’s girlfriend mysteriously vanishes, he sets his heart on finding the imaginary city where her true self lives. His search will lead him to take a job in a remote library with mysteries of its own.
When he finally makes it to the walled city, a shadowless place of horned beasts and willow trees, he finds his beloved working in a different library – a dream library. But she has no memory of their life together in the other world and, as the lines between reality and fantasy start to blur, he must decide what he’s willing to lose.