Hnúfa og Skrúfa
4.990 kr.Hnúfa og Skrúfa er sjöunda bókin sem kemur út á íslensku eftir bresku metsöluhöfundana Juliu Donaldson og Axel Scheffler sem íslensk börn og foreldrar þeirra þekkja orðið mætavel. Bækur þeirra eru margverðlaunaðar og hafa verið þýddar á gríðarmörg tungumál.
Snigilinn Skrúfu dreymir um að yfirgefa litla skerið sitt og skoða heiminn. Eina nóttina rætist óskin: Risastór hvalur kemur syndandi og býður henni far á sporði sínum. Og þá hefst ógleymanleg ævintýraferð, uppfull af undrum og hættum.
Sagan er í bundnu máli. Sigríður Ásta Árnadóttir þýddi.
Time Tunnel: Stories and Essays
4.690 kr.“China’s Virginia Woolf.” —The Wall Street Journal
Now in English for the first time, stories and essays about love, sex, and migration by one of the greatest Chinese authors of the twentieth century.
Time Tunnel offers a new selection of stories and essays, some translated for the first time into English, drawn from every stage of the career of the great Chinese writer Eileen Chang, from her debut in Japanese-occupied Shanghai through her flight, following the Revolution, to Hong Kong and America, to her last years as a bus-riding flaneuse on the highways and byways in Los Angeles.
“Genesis,” left out of the two volumes of stories with which Chang made her name in the 1940s, shows her transfixing eye for visual detail and aptitude for brilliant verbal description, even as it looks forward to the improvisatory, open-ended approach to narrative she developed in later years. “Blossoms Afloat, Flowers Adrift” addresses the perils and uncertainties—the vertigo—of exile, while in the late masterpiece “Those Old Schoolmates They’re All Quite Classy Now,” Chang looks back across the better part of a lifetime to the world she came from and the changes that have come with the years.
Essays like “Return to the Frontier” and “New England Is China,” both written in English, broaden our wonder at the effervescent and melancholy genius of a transformative modern writer.
Memoirs from Beyond the Grave: 1815-1830
6.990 kr.In 1815—with Bonaparte on the isle of Elba and the Napoleonic era at an end—François-René de Chateaubriand seemed poised, like the Bourbon royal family he’d so long supported, to wield unprecedented power in France. Already one of the country’s most celebrated writers, he now became an ambassador (with posts in Berlin, London, and Rome) and, for a time, minister of foreign affairs. Yet as passionate as Chateaubriand was about the cause of the Bourbons in theory, in reality he was a recalcitrant subject. Part liberal, part ultraconservative, a warmonger with his head in the clouds, he quarreled with both Louis XVIII and Charles X and eventually tendered his resignation altogether, just in time for the July Revolution, which brought the Restoration to a close and allowed Chateaubriand to go back to praising the Bourbons, now safely exiled in the realm of the ideal.
As always in Memoirs from Beyond the Grave, Chateaubriand narrates the events of his era unforgettably. His accounts of international politics, and the papal conclave, and the revolutionary strife of 1830 (so different from the revolutionary strife of his youth) are gripping. His digressions, however, are the main event, and readers will be glad to find him wandering around Paris and Rome, reflecting on storms and ruins, moonlight and mortality.
Jack The Modernist
4.690 kr.A classic of postmodern fiction, Robert Glück’s Jack the Modernist portrays the slow disintegration of a love affair set in the early 1980s. Bob is excited and lonely. He meets and pursues the elusive Jack, a director who is able to transform others without altering himself. Bob goes to the baths, gossips on the phone, goes to a bar, thinks about werewolves, has an orgasm, and discovers a number of truths about Jack. Out of print for decades, Glück’s paean to desire and obsession explores the everyday in an idiom both intimate and lush. Sensual as well as sensational, self-conscious, but never self-serious, Jack the Modernist is a candid and heartfelt lover’s discourse unlike any other.
Godlike
4.390 kr.An outrageous spectacle of love between two untamed poets, a 27-year old man and a teenage boy, written by one of America’s original punks and finest writers.
Based on Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine’s notorious affair, but set in the epochal downtown poetry scene of filthy 1970s New York, Godlike is a tribute to poetry and the beauty and mess of art, desire, and New York City.
New York poet Paul Vaughn has a trick for enjoying poetry readings: He simply imagines the reader died a long time ago. Paul is twenty-seven, married, and an admired poet himself. R. T. Wode’s mission is to give offense. He’s also a poet, freshly landed in the city, and, at age sixteen, unknown.
Paul worships T. They embark on a tempestuous affair, dropping acid and crashing parties and perambulating the grit and grime of New York City circa 1972. Paul is in love with T., but T. is in love with experience. Their relationship disintegrates.
A novel of compelling originality and transcendent beauty by legendary musician and poet Richard Hell, Godlike transposes the notorious romance of Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud to the East Village in its squalid, glorious ’70s heyday. The book comprises a version of Paul’s 1997 hospital notebooks: diaries amidst poems and essays, along with, most pertinently, the poet’s third-person memoir-novelette of his youthful time with the now-famous T. Godlike is infused as well with evocations—and sometimes actual poems—of many New York poets of the era, from Ted Berrigan and Ron Padgett to Edwin Denby and James Schuyler. It achieves a lyricism both profane and profound as it conjures the frenetic vitality as well as the existential malaise of an era. It’s a searching meditation on art, life, love, and the impossibility of everything.
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.
East Of Eden
3.990 kr.‘There is only one book to a man,’ Steinbeck wrote of East of Eden, his most ambitious novel. Set in the rich farmland of the Salinas Valley, California, this powerful, often brutal novel, follows the intertwined destinies of two families – the Trasks and the Hamiltons – whose generations hopelessly re-enact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel. Here Steinbeck created some of his most memorable characters and explored his most enduring themes: the mystery of identity; the inexplicability of love, and the murderous consequences of love’s absence.
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.
Landkostir – úrval greina um sambúð lands og þjóðar, 1927-1984
990 kr.Allan sinn höfundarferil var Halldór Laxness ötull samfélagsrýnir og skrifaði beittar ritgerðir og blaðagreinar samhliða skáldskapnum.
Það ríkti aldrei lognmolla í skrifum hans og hann var óhræddur við að tyfta samlanda sína og taka sér stöðu barnsins sem bendir á klæðleysi keisarans. Mörgum mislíkaði hreinskiptni skáldsins og óbilgirni gagnvart heimsku og heimóttarskap, en öðrum urðu þessar gagnrýnu greinar ómetanlegur innblástur.
Hér hefur verið safnað saman greinum sem Halldór skrifaði á löngu árabili um sambúð lands og þjóðar – umhverfið sem við hrærumst í og umgengni okkar við það. Sumar greinanna bera augljós merki þess að vera innlegg í deilumál síns tíma, aðrar hafa víðari skírskotun, en allar eiga þær erindi við samtímann, ýmist sem merkilegar heimildir um málefni sem brunnu á fólki á liðinni öld eða sem sígild sannindi og áríðandi boðskapur sem ekki fyrnist.
Halldór Þorgeirsson valdi greinarnar.