Engagement
5.490 kr.A feminist cult classic about love, independence and what it means to be an individual, translated into English for the first time.
‘I want to have him, I really do. I just don’t want him to have me.’
Martina and Gustav, students in 1970s Stockholm, meet and fall immediately into coupledom. But what is coupledom? A route to marriage? A declaration of co-dependency? A new dimension of commitment and responsibility? A sexual confrontation? Or is it a habit that an intelligent person must consider breaking? Martina and Gustav discuss their relationship endlessly, between themselves and with others, as they try to make it work.
Engagement, set during a time of social change and political upheaval, sees Martina trying to engage with the world on her own terms. Unwilling to marry, she finds herself in a state of permanent engagement while her friends settle down to marriage and children; uncertain of the world’s future, she engages with demos, sit-ins and philosophy seminars in her quest for a new blueprint for joy. First published in 1976, when it was heralded as an instant classic, Engagement remains as relevant, hilarious and heartbreaking today.
Ficciones
4.690 kr.Ficciones is perhaps the single most mysterious and extraordinary collection of short stories written this century. Influenced by writers as disparate as Lewis Carroll, Stevenson and Cervantes, Borges is nethertheless a complete original who can turn dry logical puzzles in to enchanting fables. The Pieces in this volume represent his most accomplished work.
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.
Discord
4.390 kr.Jeremy Cooper, the author of Brian, returns with Discord, a subjective journey through the world of classical music. On a night in August, an audience at the Royal Albert Hall attends the first ever concert of Distant Voices. The Proms performance is the culmination of a year’s work between the middle-aged composer Rebekah Rosen and the young star-saxophonist Evie Bennet. Alternating between both perspectives, Discord charts the course of their intense and at times fractious relationship, the resonances and dissonances both women find within one another, as well as the struggles and satisfactions that accompany an artistic life. At the heart of the novel is an inquiry into the generative force behind creative collaboration. In what ways does the inexpressible – that amorphous space of friction and unity between musicians – become indelible? And by what process do flawed individuals create works of transcendence? Deeply insightful, at turns poignant and wry, Discord affirms Jeremy Cooper’s status as one of the most interesting fiction writers at work today.
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.
T. S. Eliot – Selected Poems
3.990 kr.This selection, which was made by Eliot himself, is intended as an introduction to the main body of his poetry prior to Four Quartets, which is available separately in Faber Paperbacks. The selection includes the whole of The Waste Land.
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.
The Bell Jar
3.490 kr.Sylvia Plath is a major cultural icon who continues to inspire new generations of female readers. The Bell Jar is one of the defining novels of the 20th century.
I was supposed to be having the time of my life . . .Working as an intern for a New York fashion magazine in the summer of 1953, Esther Greenwood is on the brink of her future. Yet she is also on the edge of a darkness that makes her world increasingly unreal. Esther’s vision of the world shimmers and shifts: day-to-day living in the sultry city, her crazed men-friends, the hot dinner dances . . .
The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath’s only novel, is partially based on Plath’s own life. It has been celebrated for its darkly funny and razor sharp portrait of 1950s society, and has sold millions of copies worldwide.
Called by the Hills: A Home in the Himalaya
3.990 kr.The captivating story of building a home and a garden on the edge of the Himalayan wilds, illuminated by the author’s own watercolours.
When novelist Anuradha Roy and her husband stumble upon a derelict cottage in the hill station of Ranikhet, they decide it is where they will now live. Leaving behind the freneticism of Delhi, Roy is initially bemused by the gentle pace of life in the mountains. Before long, however, she is won over: spellbound by the landscape, taken to the heart of her sometimes recalcitrant neighbours and adopted by four mountain dogs and counting.
Over twenty-five years, as Roy becomes accustomed to living among forests where leopards roam freely, she will come to encounter nature at its most fierce, beautiful and vulnerable – and bear witness to the destructive impact of global warming on the alpine ecosystem.
Called by the Hills: A Home in the Himalaya is a tender and intimate portrait of a home, a community and a rugged, extraordinary landscape. Written with unsentimental clarity, humour and poignancy, this is an account of profound transformations.
Lord of the Flies
3.490 kr.A plane crashes on a desert island. The only survivors are a group of schoolboys. By day, they explore the dazzling beaches, gorging fruit, seeking shelter, and ripping off their uniforms to swim in the lagoon. At night, in the darkness of the jungle, they are haunted by nightmares of a primitive beast.
Orphaned by society, they must forge their own; but it isn’t long before their innocent games devolve into something far more dangerous . . .
Victorian Psycho
3.490 kr.Winifred Notty arrives at Ensor House prepared to play the perfect Victorian governess. She’ll dutifully tutor her charges, Drusilla and Andrew, tell them bedtime stories, and only joke about eating children. But the longer Winifred spends within the estate’s dreary confines and the more she learns of the perversions and pathetic preoccupations of the Pounds family, the more trouble she has sticking to her plan.
Whether creeping across the moonlit lawns in her undergarments or gently tormenting the house staff, Winifred struggles at every turn to stifle the horrid compulsions of her past until her chillingly dark imagination breaches the feeble boundary of reality on Christmas morning. Wielding her signature sardonic wit and a penchant for the gorgeously macabre, Virginia Feito returns with a vengeance in Victorian Psycho.
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.
Júlíana Jónsdóttir – Ljóðmæli: Stúlka & Hagalagðar
7.990 kr.Júlíana Jónsdóttir í Akureyjum var fyrst íslenskra kvenna til þess að fá gefna út bók eftir sig. Það var ljóðabók sem nefndist Stúlka og kom út árið 1876. Löngu síðar kom út önnur ljóðabók eftir Júlíönu, sem þá var orðin roskin og flutt til Vesturheims; sú nefndist Hagalagðar.
Á afmælisári beggja bókanna koma þær nú út saman í einu bindi, önnur 150 ára gömul og hin 110 ára. Ljóðin bera aldurinn vel og vitna um leiftrandi gáfur, seiglu og skopskyn Júlíönu sem var vinnukona frá ungaaldri og hlaut enga formlega skólagöngu.
Silja Aðalsteinsdóttir og Sólveig Ásta Sigurðardóttir rita for- og eftirmála.
Norma Jean Baker Of Troy
3.690 kr.Norma Jeane Baker of Troy is a partly spoken, partly sung performance piece by poet, essayist, and scholar Anne Carson, and an exploration of the lives and myths of Marilyn Monroe and Helen of Troy―iconic beauties who lived millennia apart. A thrilling and thoughtful meditation on the destabilising and destructive power of beauty, this had its world premiere at The Shed in New York City, starring Ben Whishaw and Renée Fleming.
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.