On the Calculation of Volume III
3.990 kr.Tara Selter is no longer alone. Tara Selter has lived the eighteenth of November 1,143 times when she notices a break in the pattern: a man has changed his shirt. The man is Henry Dale, and he remembers all the days that have come before.He knows that time has fallen out of joint. Now they are two of a kind – trapped in the eighteenth of November, but no longer alone.
Together they learn to share their present; their voices grow hoarse recounting their small battles against it and their bewilderment at the disintegrating world. Henry sees things differently to Tara: he does not think that time will put itself back together and he does not think that the future will come around. But he makes her realise that she is no longer the same person she was before this fault in time. And he makes her believe that there may be others to find within it.
Bread of Angels
4.390 kr.God whispers through a crease in the wallpaper, writes Patti Smith in this indelible account of her life as an artist. A post-Second World War childhood unfolds in a condemned housing complex described in Dickensian detail: consumptive children, vanishing neighbours, an infested rat house, and a beguiling book of Irish fairytales. We enter the child’s world of the imagination where Smith, the captain of her loyal and beloved sibling army, vanquishes bullies, communes with the king of tortoises and searches for sacred silver pennies.
The most intimate of Smith’s memoirs, Bread of Angels takes us through her teenage years where the first glimmers of art and romance take hold. Arthur Rimbaud and Bob Dylan emerge as creative heroes and role models as Patti starts to write poetry, then lyrics, merging both into the iconic songs and recordings such as Horses and Easter, ‘Dancing Barefoot’ and ‘Because the Night’.
She leaves it all behind to marry her one true love, Fred Sonic Smith, with whom she creates a life of devotion and adventure on a canal in St. Clair Shores, Michigan with ancient willows and fulsome pear trees. She builds a room of her own, furnished with a pillow of Moroccan silk, a Persian cup, inkwell and fountain pen. The couple spend nights in their landlocked Chris-Craft studying nautical maps and charting new adventures as they start their family.
As Smith suffers profound losses, grief and gratitude are braided through years of caring for her children, rebuilding her life and, finally, writing again – the one constant in a life driven by artistic freedom and the power of the imagination to transform the mundane into the beautiful, the commonplace into the magical, and pain into hope. In the final pages, we meet Patti on the road again, the vagabond who travels to commune with herself, who lives to write and writes to live.
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.
In Farthest Seas
3.690 kr.Upon the death of her husband, Innocenzo Monti, Lalla Romano sought to distil the essence of their long life together. The result was In Farthest Seas: a piercingly intimate retelling of the first four years and final four months of their relationship, built from shard-like moments of connection and revelation.
With precise artistry, Romano braids together seemingly minor details – the expressiveness of Innocenzo’s hands, the beauty of his face in sleep, a fleeting instance of pallor – that come to reveal the barest truths of life and death. Unsparing yet tender, minimal yet monumental, In Farthest Seas is a startlingly moving elegy for a great love by a vital Italian writer.
A Silence Shared
3.690 kr.Forced back to her remote hometown by the war, Giulia is immediately drawn to a couple in a similar situation: graceful, spontaneous Ada and her husband Paolo, a sickly teacher and partisan in hiding. Joined from Turin by Giulia’s husband Stefano, the two couples form an intense bond; as the Germans begin to occupy Italy, a subtle dance of attractions begins, intensified by their shared isolation and the muffled hum of threat over a long, hard winter.
In prose of subtle, enigmatic atmospheres and acutely precise images, Lalla Romano evokes both the tension and the stillness of life in occupied Italy. Translated into English for the first time, A Silence Shared is a captivating classic novel that inhabits the silent spaces between historic events, depicting the mysterious luminosity of human relationships in extraordinary circumstances.
Under the Eye of the Big Bird
3.490 kr.In the distant future, humans are on the verge of extinction and have settled in small tribes across the planet under the observation and care of the Mothers. Some children are made in factories, from cells of rabbits and dolphins; some live by getting nutrients from water and light, like plants. The survival of the race depends on the interbreeding of these and other alien beings – but it is far from certain that connection, love, reproduction, and evolution will persist among the inhabitants of this faltering new world.
Unfolding over geological eons, Under the Eye of the Big Bird is at once an astonishing vision of the end of our species as we know it and a meditation on the qualities that, for better and worse, make us human.
A Thousand Feasts
3.990 kr.For years, Nigel Slater has kept notebooks of curiosities and wonderings, penned while at his kitchen table, soaked in a fisherman’s hut in Reykjavik, sitting calmly in a moss garden in Japan or sheltering from a blizzard in a Vienna Konditorei.
These are the small moments, events and happenings that gave pleasure before they disappeared. Miso soup for breakfast, packing a suitcase for a trip and watching a butterfly settle on a carpet, hiding in plain sight. He gives short stories of feasts such as a mango eaten in monsoon rain or a dish of restorative macaroni cheese and homes in on the scent of freshly picked sweet peas and the sound of water breathing at night in Japan.
This funny and sharply observed collection of the good bits of life, often things that pass many of us by, is utter joy from beginning to end.
Galdrastafir – Historical Icelandic magic symbols
4.990 kr.In the 1800s and early 1900s, the tradition of Icelandic magical symbols (galdrastafir) was in decline. At the same time, these symbols, once forbidden upon penalty of death, became the subject of increased interest in the scholarly community. One such scholar was Jónas Jónasson, a priest, folklore collector, and antiquarian who collected and compiled historical Icelandic symbols before his death in 1918. His labors resulted in a manuscript he titled simply Galdrastafir. Now, for the first time, this lush and beautiful book translates and reproduces material and presents