Kjarvalskver
1.990 kr.Þessi bók geymir í einu lagi viðtöl Matthíasar Johannessens við Jóhannes Kjarval, bæði þau, sem birzt hafa áður og einnig önnur, sem ekki hafa fyrr komið á prent, auk áhrifamikils lokaþáttar frá hendi Matthíasar. Viðtölin eru svo merkileg heimild um einhvern mesta og frumlegasta persónuleika þjóðarinnar, að sjálfsagt má þykja, að þau séu til á einum stað, enda mun lesandi fljótt finna innra samhengi þeirra og listræna stígandi.
Allar heimildir um Jóhannes Kjarval eru og verða mikils virði. Og þótt Matthías Johannessen sé viðurkenndur snillingur að gera viðtöl við hina ólíkustu menn, er óvíst, að honum hafi nokkurn tíma tekizt betur en hér. Samband hans og Kjarvals er náið og skemmtilegt. Eitt er víst, að það myndi á fárra valdi að festa hugmyndaflug og leik Kjarvals jafn-trúverðuglega á blað og hér er gert. Í þessum viðtölum heyrist umfram allt rödd listamannsins sjálfs ósvikin, sterk og margbreytileg. Hún tekur yfir ótrúlega vítt svið milli ólíkindaleiks og trúnaðar, milli ævintýralegs gamans og djúprar alvöru.
Sunflower Sutra
2.490 kr.I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.
Allen Ginsberg’s poetry fomented a social and political revolution, and with its rawness and spontaneity changed the course of the American lyric. To read his profane and prophetic verses, about sex, death and America, as well as the humour of his humiliations and self-transformations, is to stretch consciousness and grasp an entire era.
Night Flight
2.490 kr.Fabien tonight was wandering over the vast splendour of a sea of clouds, but below him lay eternity.
Inspired by his career as an aviator, Saint-Exupéry’s soaring novel follows the journeys of three pilots delivering mail overnight. The author’s beautiful, weightless prose is as haunting as his own disappearance in flight, eerily foreshadowed by his protagonist Fabien, who becomes lost in otherworldly darkness. Letter to a Hostage, Saint-Exupéry’s meditation on displacement and friendship, also explores solitude and questions the human condition.
A River Dies of Thirst: Diaries
3.990 kr.Mahmoud Darwish Mahmoud Darwish was one of the most acclaimed contemporary poets in the Arab world, and is often cited as the poetic voice of the Palestinian people. During the tumultuous summer of 2006, as Israel attacked Gaza and Lebanon, Darwish was in Ramallah. He recorded his observations and feelings in writing included in A River Dies of Thirst, some of his last work.
In this collection Darwish writes of love, loss, and the pain of exile in bittersweet poems and diary entries leavened with hope and joy.
The Image of Her
4.390 kr.She’s living a perfect life – so why does Laurence feel so torn? Weekends in the country, weekdays in Paris – Laurence’s life features all the trappings of 1960s French bourgeoisie. She has money, a handsome husband, two daughters and a lover. She also has a successful career as an advertising copywriter, though her mind writes copy while she’s at home, and dreams of domesticity in the office.
All her life she has strived to meet the expectations of others. But when her 10-year-old daughter, Catherine, starts to vocalise her despair about the unfairness of the world, Laurence must finally grapple with a life that prizes image over truth. Slim but powerful, this is a classic story of womanhood and its oppressors, parents and their children, and the quest for personal truth – by the iconic feminist Simone de Beauvoir.
Grief Is the Thing with Feathers
3.490 kr.In a London flat, two young boys face the unbearable sadness of their mother’s sudden death. Their father, a Ted Hughes scholar and scruffy romantic, imagines a future of well-meaning visitors and emptiness. In this moment of despair they are visited by Crow – antagonist, trickster, healer, babysitter.
This sentimental bird is drawn to the grieving family and threatens to stay until they no longer need him. In a London flat, two young boys face the unbearable sadness of their mother’s sudden death. Their father, a Ted Hughes scholar and scruffy romantic, imagines a future of well-meaning visitors and emptiness.
In this moment of despair they are visited by Crow – antagonist, trickster, healer, babysitter. This sentimental bird is drawn to the grieving family and threatens to stay until they no longer need him. As weeks turn to months and the pain of loss gives way to memories, the little unit of three starts to heal.
Max Porter’s extraordinary debut – part novella, part polyphonic fable, part essay on grief – marked the arrival of a thrilling new literary talent. Ten years on, readers continue to discover and fall in love with Grief is the Thing With Feathers.
Valencia
3.690 kr.The 25th anniversary edition of Michelle Tea’s classic coming-of-age story, now with a foreword by Maggie Nelson, award-winning author of The Argonauts.
Fleeing Tucson and her troublesome on-and-off ex-girlfriend, Michelle lands in queer San Francisco’s riotous underbelly, stumbling through her early twenties in a haze of nightlife, drug adventures, scams and a string of hookups, break-ups and make-ups. As butches and dykes spin in and out of her orbit, she considers the force and casual cruelty of their desires and her own. Heady, beer-sticky and brimming with life, Valencia is a sharply observed and piercingly funny chronicle of a year lived close to the bone.
‘Hilarious, euphoric, perspicacious and punk – the book that showed so many of us how writing can be real’ – Jeremy Atherton Lin, author of Gay Bar
‘One of the few truly life changing books I’ve encountered’ – Torrey Peters, bestselling author of Detransition, Baby
Lily is Crying
3.990 kr.Lili is Crying, Hélène Bessette’s debut novel, explores the fraughtness and depth of the troubling relationship between Lili and her mother Charlotte. With a near-mythic quality, Bessette’s stripped-back prose evokes at once the pain of thwarted love – of desire run cold – and the promise of renewal. Lauded by critics on its initial publication in 1953 for its boundary-pushing style, unusual economy of expression, strange humour and sheer vivacity, Lili is Crying announces Bessette’s singular take on the ‘poetic novel’.
This edition marks the very first translation of Bessette’s work into English, by Windham-Campbell Prize-winning author and translator Kate Briggs.
In The Kitchen: Essays on food and life
3.490 kr.‘A delightful collection of original, vibrant and heart-warming writing.’ – Nigel Slater
‘I learned that before entering the kitchen, I must get the measure of its hold over me.’
Food can embody our personal history as well as wider cultural histories. But what are the stories we tell ourselves about the kitchen, and how do we first come to it? How do the cookbooks we read shape us? Can cooking be a tool for connection in the kitchen and outside of it?
In these essays thirteen writers consider the subjects of cooking and eating and how they shape our lives, and the possibilities and limitations the kitchen poses. Rachel Roddy traces an alternative personal history through the cookers in her life; Rebecca May Johnson considers the radical potential of finger food; Ruby Tandoh discovers other definitions of sweetness through the work of writer Doreen Fernandez; Yemisí Aríbisálà remembers a love affair in which food failed as a language; and Julia Turshen considers food’s ties to community.
A collection to savour and inspire, In the Kitchen brings together thirteen contemporary writers whose work brilliantly explores food, capturing their reflections on their experiences in the kitchen and beyond.
Contributors
Juliet Annan
Yemisí Aríbisálà
Laura Freeman
Joel Golby
Daisy Johnson
Rebecca May Johnson
Rebecca Liu
Nina Mingya Powles
Ella Risbridger
Rachel Roddy
Mayukh Sen
Ruby Tandoh
Julia Turshen
‘A moving and beautiful tribute to food and taste and how these essential things wrap themselves round the colour of our lives.’ – Stylist
‘Immerse yourself in the culinary charms of this foodie essay collection.’ – Town & Country
‘This warming and varied collection of essays on food, cooking and all the emotions that get tangled up in the process, is a true balm.’ – New Statesman
‘In the Kitchen is literary comfort food for the soul and I heartily recommend it.’ – Idler
Freewheeling: Essays on Cycling
3.690 kr.Cycling? It’s one of my life’s constants, it feeds my need for beauty, for delight and for aimless exploring. It makes my body hum and brings me safely back to the present . . . I hope to continue pedalling, nice and slowly, for the rest of my life, with the same curiosity that ignited my childhood.
In these essays twelve writers consider the joys of cycling, whether in a city late at night, or along country lanes on a summer’s day. Yara Rodrigues Fowler and Xani Byrne write a moving essay on coming to terms with loss through tandem biking, Jon McGregor reminisces on the significance of cycling to Dunwich Beach throughout his life, Annie Lord sings the praises on cycling home on Lime Bikes from parties and the late Dervla Murphy regales us with stories of her cycle to India on her bike, named Roz.
These essays are a celebration of life on two wheels, touching on the joy, exhilaration and serenity to be found while cycling, and how bikes become an extension of ourselves, a type of armour, and a metaphor for life.
Contributors
Imogen Binnie
Aniefiok Ekpoudom
Yara Rodrigues Fowler & Xani Byrne
Mina Holland
Annie Lord
Jon McGregor
Moya Lothian-McLean
Dervla Murphy
David O’Doherty
Jini Reddy
Ashleigh Young
‘Thrums with beauty, wears its humanity like a crown.’ Michael Pedersen
‘The writing here has enough lightness of spirit to whip out on your morning commute . . . the essays have also been judiciously chosen, have an aerodynamic focus, and you’ll speed through them.’ LeftLion
‘An evocative and thought-provoking anthology that captures the multifaceted world of cycling . . . A delightful ride.’ BIKE magazine
Hop-Frog
2.490 kr.Edgar Allen Poe’s short stories have lost none of their power to horrify. He remains a destabilizingly terse sketcher out of ideas, a writer who allows the reader to fill in the many ghastly blanks in his narratives of violence, retribution and animalism. It is hard to recommend Hop-Frog wholeheartedly (its original subtitle was: Or, The Eight Chained Ourang-Outangs) as it is such an affront to decency, but you will certainly never forget it.
Lois the Witch
2.490 kr.Beware the self-righteous man of faith, the wicked-eyed child, the jealous lover. For this is Salem, in 1691, where rumours fly on the wind and witchcraft is abroad. Lois Barclay, cursed in childhood, is a stranger in a strange land – and the devil will work his mischief on Lois’s neighbours before the season of madness is out.
Revenge
2.490 kr.‘And this is fantasy, the flutter, the rapture of fantasy!’
A bashful dragon, a lost wood-sprite, the prophet Elijah and the Devil disguised as a middle-aged woman appear in these playful, exuberant stories by Vladimir Nabokov. So do a vengeful husband, a barber confronting his torturer and the author himself, as he recalls his first love. Each of the thirteen tales here enchants and enraptures us, only to gleefully confound our expectations.
The Rich Boy
2.490 kr.Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me . . .
In this glittering new selection of Fitzgerald’s short stories, we meet Anson Hunter, ‘The Rich Boy’, whose opulent, haunting world paints a vivid portrait of the American elite. ‘Absolution’ offers a poignant glimpse into the soul of a young boy grappling with sin, whilst ‘May Day’ captures the whirling hysteria at the dawn of the Jazz Age.
The Burial of the Rats
2.490 kr.The bones were still warm; but they were picked clean. They had even eaten their own deadThis spine-chilling collection from Dracula creator Bram Stoker showcases five haunting tales, including the newly discovered ‘Gibbet Hill’. From ‘Dracula’s Guest’, thought by many to be the original excised opening of Dracula itself, to the sinister ‘The Judge’s House,’ each gripping story will leave you breathless, perhaps afraid to turn out the lights.
Dare you explore the darkness?
For Art & For Life
2.490 kr.Few artists’ letters are as self-revelatory as Vincent van Gogh’s. From the humanistic inspiration behind The Potato Eaters to his long-time obsession with painting the vision that eventually became The Starry Night, the letters in this selection paint an intense personal narrative of his artistic development and creative process across the years. They reveal a man of great spiritual and emotional depths who – in his own words – did everything ‘for art and for life itself’.
There Are Rivers in the Sky
3.490 kr.In Victorian London, an extraordinary child is born at the edge of the dirt-black Thames. When his brilliant memory earns him a spot as an apprentice at a printing press, the world opens up far beyond the slums and across the seas.
In 2014 Turkey, Narin, a Yazidi girl living by the River Tigris, waits to be baptised. The ceremony is cruelly interrupted, and soon she and her grandmother must journey across war-torn lands in the hope of reaching the sacred valley of their people.
In 2018 London, broken-hearted Zaleekhah, a hydrologist, moves to a houseboat on the Thames to escape the wreckage of her marriage – until an unexpected connection to her homeland changes everything.
A dazzling feat of storytelling from one of the greatest writers of our time that spans centuries, continents and cultures, entwined by rivers, rains, and waterdrops.
Mammoth
3.990 kr.Mammoth’s protagonist is a disenchanted young lesbian. She’s inexperienced, irritated by life, eager to gestate, and determined to strip everything else down to essentials. She seduces men at random, swaps her urban habitat for an isolated farmhouse, befriends a shepherd, nurses lambs, battles stray cats, waits tables, cleans house, and dabbles in sex work – all in pursuit of life in the raw.
This small bomb of a novel, not remotely pastoral, builds to a howling crescendo of social despair, leaving us at the mercy of Eva Baltasar’s wild voice.
Intermezzo
3.490 kr.Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties – successful, competent and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women – his enduring first love Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke.
Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined.
For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude – a period of desire, despair and possibility – a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.
Like Love: Essays and Conversations
3.690 kr.Like Love is a momentous, raucous collection of essays drawn from twenty years of Maggie Nelson’s brilliant work. These profiles, reviews, remembrances, tributes and critical essays, as well as several conversations with friends and idols, bring to life Nelson’s passion for dialogue and dissent. The range of subjects is wide – from Prince to Carolee Schneemann to Matthew Barney to Lhasa de Sela to Kara Walker – but certain themes recur: intergenerational exchange; love and friendship; feminist and queer issues, especially as they shift over time; subversion, transgression and perversity; the roles of the critic and language in relation to visual and performance arts; forces that feed or impede certain bodies and creators; and the fruits and follies of a life spent devoted to making.
Arranged chronologically, Like Love shows the writing, thinking, feeling, reading, looking and conversing that occupied Nelson while writing iconic books such as Bluets and The Argonauts. As such, it is a portrait of a time, an anarchic party rich with wild guests, a window into Nelson’s own development and a testament to the profound sustenance offered by art and artists.
