Four Spent the Day Together
4.690 kr.On the Iron Range of northern Minnesota, at the end of the last decade, three teenagers shot and killed an older acquaintance after spending the day with him. In a cold, rundown town, the three young people were quickly arrested and imprisoned. No one knows why they did it.
At the time of the murder, Catt Greene and her husband, Paul Garcia, are living nearby in a house they’d bought years earlier as a summer escape from Los Angeles. Undergoing a period of personal turmoil, moving between LA and Minnesota — between the urban art world and the rural poverty of the icy Iron Range — Catt turns away from her own life and towards the murder case, which soon becomes an obsession. In her attempt to pierce through the mystery surrounding the murder and to understand the teenagers’ lives, Catt also finds herself travelling back through the idiosyncratic, aspirational lives of her parents in the working-class Bronx and small-town, blue-collar Milford, Connecticut.
Written in three linked parts, The Four Spent the Day Together explores the histories of three generations of American lives and the patterns that repeat over lifetimes, and is piercing commentary on the pressures of lives lived on the edge.
Shame
3.490 kr.‘My father tried to kill my mother one Sunday in June, in the early afternoon.’ Thus begins Shame, the probing story of the twelve-year-old girl who will become the author herself, and the traumatic memory that will echo and resonate throughout her life. With the emotionally rich voice of great fiction and the analytical eye of a scientist, Annie Ernaux provides a powerful reflection on experience and the power of violent memory to endure through time, to determine the course of a life.
The Young Man
3.190 kr.In her latest work, Annie Ernaux recounts a relationship with a student thirty years her junior – an experience that transforms her, briefly, back into the ‘scandalous girl’ of her youth. When she is with him, she replays scenes she has already lived through, feeling both ageless and closer to death. Laid like a palimpsest on the present, the past’s immediacy pushes her to take a decisive step in her writing – producing, in turn, the need to expunge her lover. At once stark and tender, The Young Man is a taut encapsulation of Ernaux’s relationship to time, memory and writing.
Based on a True Story
3.190 kr.Overwhelmed by the huge success of her latest novel, exhausted and suffering from a crippling inability to write, Delphine meets L. L. embodies everything Delphine admires; sophisticated and unusually intuitive, she slowly but deliberately carves herself a niche in the writer’s life. However, as she makes herself indispensable to Delphine, the intensity of this unexpected friendship manifests itself in increasingly sinister ways. And as their lives become further entwined, L. begins to threaten Delphine’s identity and her safety.
Poor Artists
3.690 kr.Why make art? Faced with a capitalist system that has turned art into artwork and creative expression into cut-throat competition, why do so many artists try anyway?In this eye-opening journey through the bizarre world of contemporary art, criticism duo The White Pube tell the story of art like never before.
Poor Artists follows aspiring artist Quest Talukdar through childhood obsessions, art school lessons and her professional debut. In surreal encounters with other artists, Quest learns profound truths about money and power, and must decide whether she cares more about success or staying true to herself.
Blending imaginative storytelling with dialogue from anonymized interviews with real people in the art world who have all had to wrestle with the same decisions – including a Turner Prize winner or two, a few ghosts, a Venice Biennale fraudster and a communist messiah – Poor Artists is a powerful testimony to the emotional, existential and financial experience of artists today.
The Christmas cat
4.990 kr.All know well the dreadful Christmas Cat, who finds it nice to hunt poor children rather than mice.Here the cat truly comes to life, cheeky and voracious as he’s always been.THE CHRISTMAS CAT is the classic Christmas poem by Jóhannes úr Kötlum – now with illustrations by Þórarinn Leifsson that put the dreadful Christmas Cat in a fresh and entertaining light.