Was That Racist?
4.690 kr.To hold the line against racism, we need to know it when we see it. And as the dominant racial group in our society, White people must take up the charge. The problem is that White people haven’t been socialised to detect racial bias in the way people of colour do.
Racism is more than using racial slurs or overt, hateful speech, and it’s more than unintentional slights; it’s about an entire system that upholds Whiteness as the preferred standard.
Fortunately, detecting it is a skill that can be learned.
Was that Racist? is a re-education, call to action and practical guide, full of research-backed strategies including how to: cultivate a growth mindset about bias unlearn colour blindness and practice colour consciousness, talk to kids about race and racism – and bring others along for the journey.
Geirmundar saga heljarskinns
1.290 kr.«Geirmundr heljarskinn sté nú til slíkra virðinga at svá er sagt at hverr maðr á Vestfjörðum vildi sitja eðr standa svá sem hann fyrir sagði.»
Geirmundur heljarskinn var sagður göfgastur allra landnámsmanna á Íslandi. Þó hefur sögu hans aldrei verið haldið á lofti – fyrr en nú. Enda má segja að hann sé, þegar öllu er á botninn hvolft, 21. aldar maður, þótt hann hafi verið uppi fyrir 1100 árum. Bergsveinn Birgisson vakti mikla athygli í Noregi árið 2013 fyrir fræðirit sitt um Geirmund heljarskinn sem hann ritaði á norsku og nefndi Svarta víkinginn. Hér er hins vegar loks hægt að lesa stórbrotna sögu Geirmundar sjálfs. Og kominn tími til.
Bergsveinn Birgisson hefur rannsakað sögu landnámsmannsins Geirmundar heljarskinns um árabil. Hann hefur leitað fanga víða, í fornum ritum, munnmælum og örnefnum, stuðst við fornleifarannsóknir, málfræði og erfðafræði. Hér er komin Íslendingasagan sem fékk ekki að vera með.
Feeling At Home
3.690 kr.The home where our hopes and dreams play out is at the heart many vital political questions
Housing is more than bricks and mortar. Feeling at Home grapples with the practical and emotional questions of housing – domestic labour, privacy, security, ownership, and health. Is it possible to imagine success without home ownership? Alva Gotby shows that solving the housing crisis is about much more than housing stock. It means revolutionising our everyday lives and labours.
It Came From The Closet
4.390 kr.“Horror opened me up to new possibilities for survival … I saw power in freakery and transgression and wondered if it could be mine.”
The relationship between horror films and the LGBTQ+ community? It’s complicated. Haunted houses, forbidden desires and the monstrous can have striking resonance for those who’ve been marginalised. But the genre’s murky history of an alarmingly heterosexual male gaze, queer-coded villains and sometimes blatant homophobia, is impossible to overlook. There is tension here, and there are as many queer readings of horror films as there are queer people.
Edited by Joe Vallese, and with contributions by writers including Kirsty Logan and Carmen Maria Machado, the essays in It Came from the Closet bring the particulars of the writers’ own experiences, whether in relation to gender, sexuality, or both, to their unique interpretations of horror films from Jaws to Jennifer’s Body.
Exploring a multitude of queer experiences from first kisses and coming out to transition and parenthood, this is a varied and accessible collection that leans into the fun of horror while taking its cultural impact and reciprocal relationship to the LGBTQ+ community seriously.
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.
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.
Berlin Childhood Around 1900
4.390 kr.Composed in exile in the 1930s and published as a whole only after his death, the miniatures that make up Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood are crystallized images of childhood experienced in a city later surrendered to fascism. No ordinary autobiography, the book is a Proustian experiment in memory and a meditative tour of the iconic spaces of a city irretrievably lost to the adult. Instead of details of family and friends, these miniatures evoke the sensory richness of childhood in images of the squares and courtyards, the parks and monuments of Berlin, the child’s schoolbooks and the gloomy flats of elderly relatives.
As Benjamin’s friend Theodor Adorno writes in his afterword, ‘the images the book brings up into a disturbing proximity are not idyllic and not contemplative. The shadow of Hitler’s Reich falls across them. Dreamlike, they unite that horror with something that has long existed.’
This new translation includes an introduction by Antonia Hofstätter, highlighting the way this nearly century-old work resonates with contemporary readers and inspires hope by providing access to strata of experience not governed by instrumentality and domination.
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.
What Time Is It?
4.390 kr.“Patience, patience, because the great movements of history have always begun in those small parenthesis that we call ‘in the meantime.’” — John Berger
The last book that John Berger wrote was this precious little volume about time titled What Time Is It?, now posthumously published for the first time in English by Notting Hill Editions. Berger died before it was completed, but the text has been assembled and illustrated by his longtime collaborator and friend Selçuk Demirel, and has an introduction by Maria Nadotti.
What Time Is It? is a profound and playful meditation on the illusory nature of time. Berger, the great art critic and Man Booker Prize–winning author, reflects on what time has come to mean to us in modern life. Our perception of time assumes a uniform and ceaseless passing of time, yet time is turbulent. It expands and contracts according to the intensity of the lived moment. We talk of time “saved” in a hundred household appliances; time, like money, is exchanged for the content it lacks. Berger posits the idea that time can lengthen lifetimes once we seize the present moment. “What-is-to-come, what-is-to-be-gained empties what-is.”
Ferð höfundarins
990 kr.„Grundvallarrit fyrir kvikmyndagerðarfólk frábær leiðarvísir fyrir áhorfendur.“ – Friðrik Þór Friðriksson leikstjóri.
HUGMYNDAHEIMUR GOÐSAGNA Í KVIKMYNDUM OG SKÁLDSKAP
Ferð höfundarins byggir á verkum goðsögufræðingsins Josephs Campbell. Hún sýnir hvaða aðferðum sagnaþulir á borð við Steven Spielberg og George Lucas hafa beitt við að semja sögur, hvernig kvikmyndir þeirra endurspegla goðsögulegan arf sem borist hefur milli kynslóða frá upphafi vega.
Bókin er afar hagnýt þeim sem fást við ritsmíðar og unna góðum sögum og kvikmyndum. Hún afhjúpar hið dulda mynstur sem býr í goðsögunum, mynstur sem varpar ljósi á líkamsbyggingu mannssálarinnar.
Bókin sýnir rithöfundum og kvikmyndagerðarmönnum hvernig söguþráður er byggður upp og við hvaða aðstæður persónur bera grímur stofngerðanna, til dæmis fórnarlambsins eða elskhugans. Tekinn er fjöldi dæma úr kvikmyndum, skáldskap og goðsögum, m.a. norrænum.
Höfundur bókarinnar Christopher Vogler er bókmenntafræðingur með ævintýri og goðsögur að sérsviði. Hann hefur metið og vegið fjölda kvikmyndahandrita fyrir flest stóru kvikmyndaveranna í Hollywood, þar á meðal Walt Disney, þar sem hann var sérstakur ráðgjafi við gerð hinna vinsælu teiknimynda um litlu hafmeyjuna og Fríðu og dýrið.
Í þessari annarri útgáfu bókarinnar á íslensku eru yfir 150 blaðsíður af nýju efni. Meðal annars greining á Reyfara eftir Quentin Tarantino og Titanic eftir James Cameron. Einnig er þar að finna afar fróðlegan kafla um hvernig líffæri líkamans bregðast við sögum.
„Öll vötn falla til Dýrafjarðar. Allir vegir liggja til Rómar. Hjörtum mannanna svipar saman í Súdan og Grímsnesinu. Þessi bók útskýrir skýrt og skorinort, hvernig þá og hversvegna, svo er.“ – Ásgrímur Sverrisson leikstjóri og handritshöfundur.
Þjóðerni í þúsund ár?
1.290 kr.Í þessari bók takast ungir fræðimenn af ýmsum sviðum hug- og félagsvísinda á við spurningar sem tengjast íslensku þjóðerni og sögu þess. Meðal þess sem tekið er til athugunar eru sjálfsmyndir fyrir daga nútíma þjóðernishyggju, mótun þjóðernis og hugmyndir Íslendinga um stöðu sína meðal þjóða heimsins. Hverjir tilheyra hinni íslensku þjóð og hverjir ekki? Eru það ef til vill huldufólk eða vestfirskir sérvitringar sem eru hin eina sanna íslenska þjóð?
Annah, Infinite
5.490 kr.This is an escape story.
In Annah, Infinite, the dominant narratives surrounding Paul Gauguin’s famous painting Annah la Javanaise (1893-94) are turned upside down. The book argues a simple point: what if the portrait is not one of a consenting muse, but a child in pain?
Annah, Infinite questions the colonial power that has defined the infamous subject’s unknown history. Through the mythology of Annah, Okka draws attention to the systems of ablenormativity, racism, and sexism that shape what we learn of art history and what we see on museum walls.
Alongside her critique, the author engages with Annah la Javanaise through poetry, fiction, and visual art. A work of emotional heft, Okka asks us to acknowledge the possibility of pain in every single portrait, as well as the possibility of escape.
Political Girl: Life and Fate in Russia
6.990 kr.What can you do when your country becomes a repressive authoritarian state?
2014: Russia prepares to host the Winter Olympics. Russia invades Crimea. Putin is re-elected president. Several political prisoners are amnestied and released early from prison.
Maria Alyokhina is among them. She had spent two years in a penal colony after performing the punk prayer ‘Virgin Mary, Banish Putin’ with her friends in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. They had warned the rest of the world of the dangers of authoritarianism, but the Russia she finds when she gets out of prison is even more oppressive. What can you do, she asks, when your country has been seized by all-powerful men who are waging war against another country and their own citizens?
As Maria recounts her brave and colourful protests, we are drawn straight into the world of grassroots opposition and witness the absurd measures the Russian state takes to contain protest. And when the full-scale war against Ukraine starts and the Russian opposition is repeatedly silenced, Maria and her activist friends continue to resist despite the high stakes. They fight increasingly absurd cycles of detention and house arrest: sometimes with the smallest acts such as going for a walk or having a rainbow ice cream, until, faced with a new prison sentence, she escapes Russia in May 2022 dressed as a food delivery courier.
Her story, like her life, is fiercely courageous, darkly funny and highly inspiring to anyone who wants to stand up for the truth.