Disappoint Me
3.490 kr.Max didn’t mean to fall for Vincent – a corporate lawyer and hobby baker whose trad friendship group are a world away from her life as a trans woman. But after years of bad dates and dysphoria he’s a breath of fresh air. Their connection seems genuine, his care feels real.
But Vincent is carrying his own baggage. On his gap year in Thailand a decade prior, he vies for the attention of a gorgeous traveller, Alex, with secrets of her own. Is Vincent really the new face of the Enlightened Man, or will the ghosts of his past sabotage his and Max’s happiness?
Disappoint Me is an incisive reckoning with forgiveness and the complexity of modern relationships, told with Nicola Dinan’s trademark wit and heart.
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.
When the Cranes Fly South
3.490 kr.Bo lives a quiet existence in his small rural village in the north of Sweden. He is elderly and his days are punctuated by visits from his care team and his son.
Fortunately, he still has his rich memories, phone calls with his best friend Ture, and his beloved dog Sixten for company. Only now his son is insisting the dog must be taken away. The very same son that Bo is wanting to mend his relationship with before his time is up. The threat of losing Sixten stirs up a whirlwind of emotions and makes Bo determined to resist and find his voice.
When the Cranes Fly South is a profoundly moving and life-affirming novel about one man’s desire to preserve his autonomy, the multitude of stories contained within a life, and the big things for which we have no words.
Nymph
3.990 kr.Not yet thirty, Bathory has assembled a peculiar résumé: model, sex worker, linguist, Latin scholar, and assassin. The last of these has been the family trade for generations. Growing up, Bathory, her mother, and her father made an isolated, strange, and loving – if very unusual – family unit. Her lonely childhood games mimicked spycraft and wet-work, while her parents watched and shared their arcane theories about love and death.
As a student in New York, her life changes on accepting a job at a dilapidated card shop in Manhattan. This is a front for an agency that allows her to put her inherited skills to use while pursuing romance in the city.
However, steering clear of attachment is as dangerous as anything else she does and means sidestepping a certain alluring figure from her father’s past. She is equally intent on dying young, a less difficult proposition given her heritage, the company she keeps – call girls, conflicted cops, trustfund hoodlums – and the people pursuing her.
Will Bathory escape both fate and family, or does satisfaction and salvation lie only in their embrace?
The Future of Truth
4.390 kr.What if a lie could be true?
At the heart of this fascinating and iconoclastic book lies Werner Herzog’s concept of ‘ecstatic truth’ – a truth that is often hidden behind the facts and our conceptions of reality but can be gleaned through the poetic imagination, in art, literature and cinema, when we open ourselves up to an aesthetic experience.
Written in Herzog’s inimitable style, these stories, anecdotes and reflections take us from present-day deep fakes and the opportunities and perils of AI to ancient Egypt and Rome, where rulers resorted to lies and propaganda in the same way as governments do today; from Scott and Amundsen’s race to the South Pole to alien abduction claims and the making of Herzog’s own films. With its singular vision and unique voice, The Future of Truth is a compelling meditation on the relationship between fact and fiction – evidence and imagination – by one of today’s most fascinating and idiosyncratic thinkers.
The Cosmic Oval
3.190 kr.The Cosmic Oval is an elliptical entrance into an exploration of feminist cosmologies, storytelling and the many ways of knowing and imagining the hot blue beginnings of time. By turn dreaming and waking, Ella Finer’s essay enters history and imagination from the sleep side, taking its cue from Anne Carson. Finer attends to cultural memory as composition, gathering cosmic guides with whom to listen beyond what is given to hear.
In west London, the entrance to architect and theorist Charles Jencks’ Cosmic House is overlooked by The Cosmic Oval, a representation of the origin of the universe referencing both contemporary scientific discoveries about its elliptical shape and ancient cosmogonic myths. Invited by the Cosmic House to write an imagined conversation between figures who inhabit the frieze surrounding the Oval, such as Hannah Arendt, Imhotep and John Donne, Finer re-orchestrates cultural history to explore social scenes of study and the way knowledge moves through bodies and time.
The Site of Memory
2.990 kr.The Site of Memory describes Toni Morrison’s work of literary archaeology. She offers insights into how she arrives at a text through the act of imagination bound up with memory and shows how she explores two worlds – the actual and the possible – via the nimbus of emotion surrounding the journey of an image: from picture to meaning to text.
Exploring the radical possibilities of literature and the limits of history, Morrison finds a truth deeper than documentation in the silences and omissions in African American narratives of the past. Fiction, for Morrison, is a practice of ethical restoration: a means to recover what history has neglected through the ‘flooding’ of a rush of imagination. In The Site of Memory, ancestral presence, emotion and imagination converge. If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic.
The Director
5.990 kr.An artist’s life, a pact with the devil, a novel about the dangerous illusions of the silver screen.
G.W. Pabst, one of cinema’s greatest, perhaps the greatest director of his era: when the Nazis seized power he was filming in France, to escape the horrors of the new Germany he flees to Hollywood. But under the blinding California sun, the world-famous director suddenly looks like a nobody. Not even Greta Garbo, who he made famous, can help him. And thus, almost through no fault of his own, he finds himself back in his homeland of Austria, which is now called Ostmark. The returning family is confronted with the barbaric nature of the regime. But Goebbels, the minister of propaganda in Berlin, wants the film genius, he won’t take no for an answer and makes big promises. While Pabst still believes that he will be able to resist these advances, that he will not submit to any dictatorship other than art, he has already taken the first steps into a hopeless entanglement.
Daniel Kehlmann’s novel about art and power, beauty and barbarism is a triumph.
The Director shows what literature is capable of.
The Tower
4.390 kr.Once upon a time, there was a tower on a hill, beyond the dark trees, somewhere north. An octagonal tower on two levels: glass upstairs and stone below, beneath a steep slate roof – a folly, it was said. According to locals, a young woman named Annie who fell ill was confined to the tower by her father for three years and died there, alone.
Fascinated by Annie’s story, Thea Lenarduzzi attempts to piece the past together in a formidable act of imagination, which, tugging at the strings of the how, why and who of stories, begins to unravel the very idea of storytelling itself. Veering between fiction, memoir, fairy tale and folklore, The Tower is an extraordinary book about power, abuse and why we don’t always tell the story we set out to tell.
Falling Animals
3.490 kr.On an isolated, windswept beach, a pale figure sits serenely against a sand dune staring out to sea. His hands are folded neatly in his lap and there is a faint smile on his otherwise lifeless face. After months of fruitless investigation, the nameless stranger is buried in an unmarked grave, but the mystery of his life and death lingers on, drawing the nearby villagers into its wake. From strandings to shipwrecks, it is not the first time that strangeness has washed up on their shores.
As a chorus of voices come together to unravel the story of one man, alone on a beach, a crosshatched portrait begins to emerge, threaded by lives both true and imagined, real and surreal, past and present.
The Shapeshifter’s Daughter
4.690 kr.Nothing, on earth or below it, freezes faster than the worthless heart.
Before she was a hideous monster, the queen of the underworld was simply Hel. But cast as a girl out of lofty Asgard, realm of the gods, by Odin the Allfather, Hel’s fate as the terrible goddess of death is sealed. Half beauty, half crone, she has reigned for aeons in the starless darkness of Niflheim, grimly welcoming the most pitiful of death’s travellers to her ice-locked prison. Until one day a memory shifts, and she is forced to seek out the sun in Midgard, where humans have made their home.
Faced with a terminal cancer diagnosis, Helen Firth makes the impulsive decision to return to Orkney after forty years to make peace with her past. Under the wintering solstice sun, she reconnects with the ungainly but affable Thorfinn Coffin, who helps her address the real reason she has returned to the islands: to die.
As Helen draws closer to death and ever closer to Thorfinn, Hel in turn is intrigued by Helen. She, too, has a past to confront and a lesson to learn: that perhaps who she believes herself to be isn’t who she really is.
A powerful reimagining of the Norse myth of Hel, The Shapeshifter’s Daughter celebrates the joy of reclaiming our stories.
This Little Art
4.390 kr.An essay with the reach and momentum of a novel, Kate Briggs’s This Little Art is a genre-bending song for the practice of literary translation, offering fresh, fierce and timely thinking on reading, writing and living with the works of others. Taking her own experience of translating Roland Barthes’s lecture notes as a starting point, the author threads various stories together to give us this portrait of translation as a compelling, complex and intensely relational activity. She recounts the story of Helen Lowe-Porter’s translations of Thomas Mann, and their posthumous vilification.
She writes about the loving relationship between André Gide and his translator Dorothy Bussy. She recalls how Robinson Crusoe laboriously made a table, for him for the first time, on an undeserted island. With This Little Art, a beautifully layered account of a subjective translating experience, Kate Briggs emerges as a truly remarkable writer: distinctive, wise, frank, funny and utterly original.