The Wild Places
3.690 kr.Are there any genuinely wild places left in Britain and Ireland? Or have we farmed and built ourselves out of wildness? From forest to moor, mountain to saltmarsh, Robert Macfarlane explores the wild places of Britain to see the wonders we still possess.
In his beautiful, bewitching, inspiring modern classic of nature writing, the acclaimed author of Underland and The Lost Words presents a portrait of a vanishing but still miraculous British landscape.
John and Paul: A Love Story in Songs
3.990 kr.At the centre of The Beatles was the volatile, madly creative chemistry between John Lennon and Paul McCartney. This is the story of how two young men merged their souls and multiplied their talents to produce one of the greatest bodies of music in history. It is also a love story, full of longing, laughter, pain and joy.
Super Nintendo: How One Japanese Company Helped the World Have Fun
5.690 kr.From the instant classics to the hidden gems, Nintendo’s video games occupy a special place in the hearts of hundreds of millions of people around the globe. Every player has forged a unique connection with a beloved game, feeling that rush of awe and wonder as they immersed themselves in a virtual world in pursuit of that most human of impulses: the desire to have fun.
Super Nintendo finds lifelong gamer Keza MacDonald exploring Nintendo’s legendary roster of games – as well as consoles such as the SNES, Gameboy, Wii and Switch, and a host of other quirky inventions from the Power Glove to Nintendo Labo – drawing from decades’ worth of exclusive interviews with their creators and the people whose lives have been changed by them.
Along the way, she tells the story of how this unassuming playing card company, founded in Kyoto in 1889, became one of the dominant cultural forces of the twenty-first century.
Offering unparalleled access to the company and its fun-filled world, and written with warmth and wit, Super Nintendo captures the love that so many of us feel for video games – and reveals just what that love tells us about being human.
How Music Works
5.490 kr.How Music Works is David Byrne’s bestselling, buoyant celebration of a subject he has spent a lifetime thinking about. Drawing on his own work over the years with Talking Heads, Brian Eno, and his myriad collaborators – along with journeys to Wagnerian opera houses, African villages, and anywhere music exists – Byrne shows how music emerges from cultural circumstance as much as individual creativity. It is his magnum opus, and an impassioned argument about music’s liberating, life-affirming power.
Chromorama
4.690 kr.Have you ever wondered why so many pencils are yellow? Why black is the colour of mourning? Or why carrots are orange?
In Chromorama, acclaimed graphic designer Riccardo Falcinelli delves deep into the history of colour to show how it has shaped the modern gaze. With over four hundred illustrations throughout and with examples ranging widely across art and culture – from Flaubert’s novels to The Simpsons, from Byzantine jewellery to misshapen fruit, from the black lines of Mondrian to the thrillers of Hitchcock – Falcinelli traces the evolution of our long relationship with colour, and how first the industrial revolution, and then the dawn of the internet age, changed it forever.
Beautiful, warm and wise, taking in the lives of philosophers, entrepreneurs, designers, astrologists, shop assistants and pastry chefs, Chromoroma is an engrossing account of shade and light, of tone and hue, of dyes, pigments, and pixels. It is the story of why we now see the world the way we do.
Love In Exile
3.990 kr.Shon Faye grew up quietly obsessed with the feeling that love was not for her. Not just romantic love: the secret fear of her own unworthiness penetrated every aspect and corner of her life. It was a fear that would erupt in destructive, counterfeit versions of the real love she craved: addictions and short-lived romances that were either euphoric and fantastical, or excruciatingly painful and unhinged, often both. Faye’s experience of the world as a trans woman, who grew up visibly queer, exacerbated her fears. But, as she confronted her damaging ideas about love and lovelessness, she came to realize that this sense of exclusion is symptomatic of a much larger problem in our culture.
Love, she argues, is as much a collective question as a personal one. Yet our collective ideals of love have developed in a society which is itself profoundly sick and loveless; in which consumer capitalism sells us ever new, engrossing fantasies of becoming more loved or lovable. In this highly politicized terrain, boundaries are purposefully drawn to keep some in and to keep others out. Those who exist outside them are ignored, denigrated, exiled.
In Love in Exile, Shon Faye shows love is much greater than the narrow ideals we have been taught to crave so desperately that we are willing to bend and break ourselves to fit them. Wise, funny, unsparing, and suffused with a radical clarity, this is a book of and for our times: for seeing and knowing love, in whatever form it takes, is the meaning of life itself.
Inadvertent (Why I Write)
2.990 kr.The second book in the Why I Write series provides generous insight into the creative process of the award-winning Norwegian novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard
“Why I Write” may prove to be the most difficult question Karl Ove Knausgaard has struggled to answer yet it is central to the project of one of the most influential writers working today. To write, for the Norwegian artist, is to resist easy thinking and preconceived notions that inhibit awareness of our lives. Knausgaard writes to “erode [his] own notions about the world. . . . It is one thing to know something, another to write about it.” The key to enhanced living is the ability to hit upon something inadvertently, to regard it from a position of defenselessness and unknowing. A deeply personal meditation, Inadvertent is a cogent and accessible guide to the creative process of one of our most prolific and ingenious artists.
On Women
3.690 kr.For the most part written in the 1970s during the height of second-wave feminism, Sontag’s essays are strikingly relevant to our contemporary conversations. At times powerfully in sync and at others powerfully at odds with them, they are always characteristically original in their examinations of the ‘biological division of labour’, the double-standard for ageing and the dynamics of women’s powerlessness and women’s power.
As Merve Emre writes in her introduction, ‘They offer us the spectacle of a ferocious intellect setting itself to the task at hand: to articulate the politics and aesthetics of being a woman in the United States, the Americas and the world.’
Of Walking in Ice
3.490 kr.‘I set off on the most direct route to Paris, in full faith, believing that she would stay alive if I came on foot’
In November 1974, when Werner Herzog was told that his mentor Lotte Eisner, the film historian and critic, was dying in Paris, he set off to walk there from Munich, ‘in full faith, believing that she would stay alive if I came on foot’. Along the way he recorded what he saw, how he felt, and what he experienced, from the physical discomfort of the journey to moments of rapture. It is a remarkable narrative – part pilgrimage, part meditation, and a confrontation between a great German Romantic imagination and the contemporary world.
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.
How To Art
4.690 kr.What is art, where do I find it, and once I’m in front of it, what am I supposed to think about it?
Kate Bryan is a self-confessed art addict who has worked with art for over twenty years. But before she studied art history at university, she’d been into a gallery just twice in her life and had no idea she was entering an elitist world.
Now, she’s on a mission to help everybody come to art. Like playing or listening to music, or cooking and eating great food, reading or watching films, making art or looking at other people’s deserves to be an enriching part of all our lives.
So here, in How to Art, is a nifty way to take art on your own terms. From where it is to what it is, to tips on how to actually enjoy really famous artworks like the Mona Lisa, to how to own art and make art at home, through to vital advice for making a career as an artist and even how to make your dog more cultural, How to Art gives art to everyone, and makes it fun.
Laced throughout with original artworks by the very down-to-earth artist David Shrigley.