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 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.
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.
Decreation
4.690 kr.Anne Carson’ s first full-length publication in Britain, Glass and God introduces an assured and challenging new voice: vivid, laconic, precise. Her ‘Short Talks’ are about everything from Sylvia Plath to Franz Kafka, from waterproofing to walking backwards; the brilliant long poem ‘The Glass Essay’ deals with the end of a contemporary love affair, but is haunted by the Brontë sisters. Blending the modern and the classical, Anne Carson writes with an intensity and an integrity that is transfiguring.
Af steypu
2.990 kr.Afbók #5
Dagblaðið frá því í gær er í öllum aðalatriðum það sama og dagblaðið í dag. Þar að auki er stór hluti alls þessa texta tilþrifalaus, smekklaus, lágkúrulegur og beinlínis heimskulegur. Nefljóð? Öngljóð? Gómljóð? Vefðu bókinni upp, stingdu henni í flösku og fleygðu henni í hafið. Það getur verið svo mikill léttir að komast í óhlutbundið efni eftir áralanga neyslu alþjóðlegra fríljóða. Djöfulsins skens og stælar alltaf hreint. Starðu á tungumálið þar til það brotnar. Til að sjá það þarf engin gleraugu. Reglubundin hrynjandi fannst honum svæfandi. Lítið annað en leikfimisæfingar. Nema fallega innbundið flúr í bókasafn hinna vel stæðu. Þetta er reiturinn sem við fengum þér. Bíttu gras og haltu sáttmálann. Hrein og klár minni- máttarkennd sem á rætur sínar í grárri forneskju. Líkt og sífrið í (misgömlum) ellibjúgum er nýjunin eilíf og ódrepandi. Lífið er stutt og klisjurnar eru margar.
-Brot úr formála ritstjóra
Things in Nature Merely Grow
4.690 kr.A remarkable, defiant work of radical acceptance from acclaimed Pulitzer Prize finalist Yiyun Li as she considers the loss of her son James. ‘There is no good way to say this,’ Yiyun Li writes at the beginning of this book. ‘There is no good way to state these facts, which must be acknowledged.
My husband and I had two children and lost them both: Vincent in 2017, at sixteen, James in 2024, at nineteen. Both chose suicide, and both died not far from home.’ There is no good way to say this – because words fall short. It takes only an instant for death to become fact, ‘a single point in a timeline’.
Living now on this single point, Li turns to thinking and reasoning and searching for words that might hold a place for James. Li does what she can: including not just writing but gardening, reading Camus and Wittgenstein, learning the piano, and living thinkingly alongside death. This is a book for James, but it is not a book about grieving.
As Li writes, ‘The verb that does not die is to be. Vincent was and is and will always be Vincent. James was and is and will always be James.
Who Killed My Father
3.490 kr.In Who Killed My Father, Édouard Louis explores key moments in his father’s life, and the tenderness and disconnects in their relationship.
Told with the fire of a writer determined on social justice, and with the compassion of a loving son, the book urgently and brilliantly engages with issues surrounding masculinity, class, homophobia, shame and social poverty. It unflinchingly takes aim at systems that disadvantage those they seek to exclude – those who have their expectations, hopes and passions crushed by a society which gives them little thought.
Og þaðan gengur sveinninn skáld
7.490 kr.Thor Vilhjálmsson (1925–2011) var einn frumlegasti og áhrifamesti höfundur okkar á síðari hluta síðustu aldar og fram á þessa, auk þess sem hann var óþreytandi menningarfrömuður og áberandi í þjóðlífinu.
Í tilefni þess að öld er liðin frá fæðingu Thors minnast samferðamenn, fræðimenn, þýðendur og aðrir rithöfundar hans, hver frá sínum sjónarhóli, og varpa ólíku ljósi á þennan flókna höfund og margbrotna persónuleika. Hér eru stuttar svipmyndir, fræðilegar úttektir, ljóð og teikningar. Synir Thors, Örnólfur og Guðmundur Andri, söfnuðu greinunum og völdu einnig stutta texta úr verkum hans sem birtir eru á milli greinanna. Innleggin eru á fjórða tug og að auki er í bókinni fjöldi mynda.
We Are Not Numbers: The Voices of Gaza’s Youth
4.390 kr.A teenage girl stares at her roof, hoping it won’t collapse over her head. A young student searches the Internet for photos of libraries around the world, hoping he’ll be able to visit them one day. Another walks around the city, taking notes of all the buildings she dreams of repairing.
These are the stories of young people from Gaza, born under Israeli occupation and blockade. They are people who have endured unspeakable struggles and losses, who keep fighting to be recognised not as numbers, but as human beings with hopes, dreams and lives worth living.
We Are Not Numbers was founded in 2014 to give voice to the youth of Gaza. In this collection, vital, urgent and full of heart, spanning over ten years to the present moment, we gain an unparalleled insight into the past, as well as the current and next generation of Palestinian leaders, artists, scientists and scholars and imagine where we might go from here.