The South
3.490 kr.When his grandfather dies, a boy named Jay travels south with his family to the property he left them, a once flourishing farm that has fallen into disrepair. The trees are diseased, the fields parched from months of drought.
Still, Jay’s father, Jack, sends him out to work the land, or whatever land is left. Over the course of these hot, dense days, Jay finds himself drawn to Chuan, the son of the farm’s manager, different from him in every way except for one.
Out in the fields, and on the streets into town, the charge between the boys intensifies. Inside the house, the other family members confront their own regrets, and begin to drift apart. Like the land around them, they are powerless to resist the global forces that threaten to render their lives obsolete.
At once sweeping and intimate, The South is a story of what happens when private and public lives collide. It is the first in a quartet of novels that form Tash Aw’s masterful portrait of a family navigating a period of great change – a reimagined epic for our times.
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.
plastic
3.990 kr.Set during a single twelve-hour night shift in a factory, plastic is a book-length poem exploring the life of the industrial worker turned poet.
Bringing together memoir, ekphrasis and satire, Bplastic is based on Matthew Rice’s experience working in a plastic moulding factory for ten years. Illustrating alienated twenty-first-century Irish labour in poetic form, plastic engages with the inflictions and implications of a ‘post-industrial’, ‘post-Troubles’ society, all while weaving in depictions of factory work from literature, film and the visual arts.
Time-stamped to highlight the claustrophobia of the worker’s experience, this is a poem about feeling a calling while being submerged in the world of menial labour – making plastic airplane parts by night, making poetry by day, uniting what Jacques Rancière calls the ‘labourers in love with the intellectual nights’ and those ‘intellectuals in love with the toilsome and glorious days of the labouring people.’ plastic’s evocation and lucidity moves with grace through working class realities and hopeful imaginings.
Goatsong
4.390 kr.The ancient Greek word for tragedy (τραγωδία) is a compound of goat (τράγος) and song (ᾠδή). In Phoebe Giannisi’s Goatsong, the seam that connects human and animal, myths and history, is the body.
In Giannisi’s language, life obeys myth. A man places a screaming cicada in his mouth, reminding us of a scene from Plato’s Phaedrus, where Socrates claims cicadas to have been humans who became entranced by the invention of singing, and didn’t stop to eat or drink. When the goddess Thetis dips her newborn son, Achilles, into the River Styx to protect all but his famous heel where her hand grips, we’re told ‘the place of the mother’s grip / is the mark of death.’ Adjacent to the mythical setting is the material, where the rumination of goats, their digestive cycle – chewing, swallowing, then recalling food back into the mouth to be reconsidered – begins after weaning, and is lain alongside how we think: ‘from the moment of separation / from the mother / they ruminate.’ In these lyric enactments, all is transformative and transformed; territories of land, the body and history are blurred, and nothing is still.
From Homer to Donna Haraway, Derrida to state archives, klephtic ballads and rebetiko, to Parmenides and Giannisi’s dog, Ivan, the many human and animal voices of Goatsong form an incantatory lyricism and layered engagement unique in literature.
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.
Zone
3.490 kr.Francis Mirkovic, a French Intelligence Services agent for fifteen years, is travelling first class on the train from Milan to Rome. Handcuffed to the luggage rack above him is a briefcase containing a wealth of information about the war criminals, terrorists and arms dealers of the Zone – the Mediterranean region, from Barcelona to Beirut, from Algiers to Trieste, which has become his speciality – to sell to the Vatican. Exhausted by alcohol and amphetamines, he revisits the violent history of the Zone and his own participation in that violence, beginning as a mercenary fighting for a far-right Croatian militia in the 1990s. One of the truly original books of the decade, and written as a single, hypnotic, propulsive, physically irresistible sentence, Mathias Enard’s Zone is an Iliad for our time, an extraordinary and panoramic view of violent conflict and its consequences in the twentieth century and beyond
Compass
4.690 kr.As night falls over Vienna, Franz Ritter, an insomniac musicologist, takes to his sickbed with an unspecified illness and spends a restless night drifting between dreams and memories, revisiting the important chapters of his life: his ongoing fascination with the Middle East and his numerous travels to Istanbul, Aleppo, Damascus, and Tehran, as well as the various writers, artists, musicians, academics, orientalists, and explorers who populate this vast dreamscape. At the centre of these memories is his elusive, unrequited love, Sarah, a fiercely intelligent French scholar caught in the intricate tension between Europe and the Middle East. An immersive, nocturnal, musical novel, full of generous erudition and bittersweet humour, Compass is a journey and a declaration of admiration, a quest for the otherness inside us all and a hand reaching out like a bridge between West and East, yesterday and tomorrow.
Winner of the 2015 Prix Goncourt, this is Mathias Enard’s most ambitious novel since Zone.
The Oresteia
3.990 kr.In the Oresteia Aeschylus addressed the bloody chain of murder and revenge within the royal family of Argos. As they move from darkness to light, from rage to self-governance, from primitive ritual to civilized institution, their spirit of struggle and regeneration becomes an everlasting song of celebration. In Agamemnon, a king’s decision to sacrifice his daughter and turn the tide of war inflicts lasting damage on his family, culminating in a terrible act of retribution; The Libation Bearers deals with the aftermath of Clytemnestra’s regicide, as her son Orestes sets out to avenge his father’s death; and in The Eumenides, Orestes is tormented by supernatural powers that can never be appeased. Forming an elegant and subtle discourse on the emergence of Athenian democracy out of a period of chaos and destruction, The Oresteia is a compelling tragedy of the tensions between our obligations to our families and the laws that bind us together as a society.
The only trilogy in Greek drama that survives from antiquity, Aeschylus’ The Oresteia is translated by Robert Fagles with an introduction, notes and glossary written in collaboration with W.B. Stanford in Penguin Classics.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Strange Buildings
4.390 kr.The addictive mystery taking the world by storm, from the author of The Times Bestseller Strange Pictures
Eleven strange buildings. One terrible secret.
A lonely hut in the woods.
A hidden chamber.
A mysterious shrine.
A home in flames.
A nightmarish prison…
Each of the buildings in this book tells a chilling story. Each one is part of a puzzle.
Look closely… and you’ll see that everything is connected.
All leading to a revelation so horrifying you won’t want to believe it.
Millions of readers have become addicted to solving Uketsu’s dark mysteries.
Strange Buildings is the strangest, and darkest, so far.
Wuthering Heights
4.690 kr.Part of Penguin’s beautiful hardback Clothbound Classics series, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith, these delectable and collectible editions are bound in high-quality colourful, tactile cloth with foil stamped into the design.
In a house haunted by memories, the past is everywhere …
As darkness falls, a man caught in a snowstorm is forced to shelter at the strange, grim house Wuthering Heights. It is a place he will never forget. There he will come to learn the story of Cathy: how she was forced to choose between her well-meaning husband and the dangerous man she had loved since she was young. How her choice led to betrayal and terrible revenge – and continues to torment those in the present. How love can transgress authority, convention, even death.
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The Sisters
Original price was: 5.690 kr..2.845 kr.Current price is: 2.845 kr..Meet the Mikkola sisters: Ina, Evelyn, and Anastasia. Ina is tall, serious, a compulsive organizer. Evelyn is dreamy, magnetic, a smooth talker. And Anastasia is moody, chaotic, quick to anger. Following them from afar is Jonas. Like the sisters, he’s Swedish Tunisian, raised in Stockholm but yearning for so much more. His life intersects with theirs across decades and continents, from Tunis to Berlin and New York. And when Evelyn goes missing, it’s Jonas who tracks her down – and helps break the curse that has loomed over the Mikkolas for years.
Wuthering Heights
3.490 kr.May you not rest, as long as I am living. You said I killed you – haunt me, then
Lockwood, the new tenant of Thrushcross Grange on the bleak Yorkshire moors, is forced to seek shelter one night at Wuthering Heights, the home of his landlord. There he discovers the history of the tempestuous events that took place years before: of the intense passion between the foundling Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw, and her betrayal of him.
As Heathcliff’s bitterness and vengeance is visited upon the next generation, their innocent heirs must struggle to escape the legacy of the past. The Penguin English Library – 100 editions of the best fiction in English, from the eighteenth century and the very first novels to the beginning of the First World War.
Half His Age
4.990 kr.Waldo is ravenous. Horny. Blunt. Naive. Wise. Impulsive. Lonely. Angry. Hurting. Endlessly wanting. And the thing she wants most of all? Mr. Korgy, her creative writing teacher.
Mr Korgy, with the wife and the kid and the mortgage and the bills, with the dead dreams and the atrophied looks and the growing paunch. She doesn’t know why she wants him. Is it his passion? His life experience? The fact that he knows books and films that she doesn’t? Or are they actually kindred spirits, sharing the same filter with which they each take in the world around them? Or, perhaps, it’s just enough that he sees her when no one else does.
Startlingly perceptive, mordantly funny, and keenly poignant, Half His Age is an incisive study of a yearning seventeen-year-old who disregards all obstacles in her effort to be seen, to be desired and to be loved.
Glyph
5.690 kr.It all starts when Petra and her little sister Patch hear a horrifying story from the past and find themselves making up a ghost.
Is it imaginary? Is it real?Then it all starts again thirty years later when Petra, now estranged from Patch, finds a phantom horse kicking the furniture to pieces in her bedroom.
What to do? She phones her sister.In a chiaroscuro dance through our increasingly antagonistic era, Glyph asks if we’re attending to the history that’s made us and to the history we’re making. A funny, warm and clear-eyed take on where we are now, Glyph is about what our imaginations are for and how, in a broken, brutal and divided time, we rekindle care, solidarity, resistance and openness.
This anti-war novel, Ali Smith’s most soulful, playful and vital yet, is a work of lightness that goes deep to counter the forces currently flattening the modern world.
A standalone novel, it’s family to Gliff (2024).
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.