In Praise of Shadows
3.490 kr.Were it not for shadows there would be no beauty.
Nothing evokes the calm and nuance of the traditional Japanese aesthetic more profoundly than this book. Tanizaki’s eye ranges over architecture, jade, food, even toilets, examining the design and feel of the intimate places we inhabit. His acute sense of the use of space in buildings, his poetic descriptions of lacquerware under candlelight and his appreciation for natural materials suggest the possibility of a simpler, more beautiful life – one in which the softness of shadows is shielded from the dazzling light of modernity.
Advent
3.990 kr.Every winter, in the days leading up to Christmas, Benedikt walks into the snowy mountains of Iceland to rescue sheep lost in the blizzards.
With his dog and his ram by his side, traversing wild snowstorms and crystalline nights, fuelled by endless cups of hot coffee, Benedikt dedicates himself to helping other living beings in need. It is midwinter in the harshest of landscapes, but this is a place of deep belonging and peace – brutal and remorseless yet irresistible and indispensable. It is also a time of peace, filled with the anticipation of that special time of year – the days before Christmas: Advent.
This enchanting Icelandic classic of one man’s selfless quest at Christmas time has been newly translated into English for the first time in 90 years.
The Master and Margarita
3.490 kr.He is accompanied by various demons, including a naked girl and a huge black cat. When he leaves, the asylums are full and the forces of law and order are in disarray. Only the Master, a writer and a man devoted to truth, and Margarita, the woman he loves, can resist the devil’s onslaught.
Orlanda
3.490 kr.There’s a voice in Aline’s head: a voice that wants out. Brash, boisterous and sexually adventurous, this voice seems to be the antithesis of Aline, a prim literature professor for whom each day promises to be as quiet and conventional as the last. That is until, after thirty-five years of imprisonment, her alter ego breaks free.
Taking on a life of his own, Orlanda – Aline’s second self – slips into the taut, rugged body of a young man. As Aline continues unaware, Orlanda follows, dragging gleeful chaos in his wake, vowing to leave both their existences forever altered. A bewitching fable, an androgynous dream, Orlanda is one woman’s reckoning with all the hidden sides of her soul.
Life: A User’s Manual
3.690 kr.In this ingenious book Perec creates an entire microcosm in a Paris apartment block. Serge Valene wants to make an elaborate painting of the building he has made his home for the last sixty years. As he plans his picture, he contemplates the lives of all the people he has ever known there. Chapter by chapter, the narrative moves around the building revealing a marvellously diverse cast of characters in a series of every more unlikely tales, which range from an avenging murderer to an eccentric English millionaire who has devised the ultimate pastime…
The Wall
3.490 kr.A woman takes a holiday in the Austrian mountains, spending a few days with her cousin and his wife in their hunting lodge. When the couple fails to return from a walk, the woman sets off to look for them. But her journey reaches a sinister and inexplicable dead end. She discovers only a transparent wall behind which there seems to be no life. Trapped alone behind the mysterious wall she begins the arduous work of survival.
This is at once a simple account of potatoes and beans, of hoping for a calf, of counting matches, of forgetting the taste of sugar and the use of one’s name, and simultaneously a disturbing dissection of the place of human beings in the natural world.
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller
3.490 kr.You go into a bookshop and buy If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino. You like it. But there is a printer’s error in your copy. You take it back to the shop and get a replacement. But the replacement seems to be a totally different story. You try to track down the original book you were reading but end up with a different narrative again. This remarkable novel leads you through many different books including a detective adventure, a romance, a satire, an erotic story, a diary and a quest. But the real hero of them all is you, the reader.
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.
