Lydia Davis's writing is a masterclass in control — wry, lucid, penetrating, every word placed deliberately. Here she presents a dazzling collection of literary essays, each one as beautifully formed, thought-provoking, playful and illuminating as her critically acclaimed short fiction.
>>"There's no such thing as no style."
What can change in a single night? Everything.
In this beautifully illustrated modern re-telling of a classic European folktale, a young boy is visited by an enigmatic creature with a beautiful secret. Together they explore the playfulness, mystery, and danger of nature, before the visitor reveals their true self. A story of joy and loss, that yearns for the endless freedom of childhood.
>>Visit Esther Remnant's website.
A bumper crop of new art and writing: a 24-page full-color comic, a letters section, a fair-sized collection of stories, a graphic nonfiction experiment called American Pie Graph, and a booklet of cliffhanger tales—all packaged in an elaborate three-fold case. Featuring Oyinkan Braithwaite, Claudia Rankine, Julio Torres, Elena Passarello, Bob Odenkirk, Brian Evenson, Adrienne Celt, Lorrie Moore, Alison Bechdel, Jeff Tweedy, Jerry Saltz, Avery Trufleman, Hanif Abdurraqib, Ken Burns, and other authors, artists, musicians, podcasters, journalists, comedians, young children, lawyers, scholars, and former presidential candidates.
>>Like this!
Will Self's adolescence and early adulthood were spent largely under the influence of or on the quest for drugs of some sort or other. It is also the period of his life in which his future directions in literature took form. This third-person memoir is self-excoriating and enjoyable to read.
>>Will Self in Conversation.
Somewhere on a salt-and-shingle island, inside a ruined concrete structure known as The Green Chapel, a figure called The Armourer is leading a black mass with terrible intent. But something is coming to stop him. Five more-than-human forms are traversing land, sea and time towards The Green Chapel, moving towards the point where they will converge and become Ness. Ness has lichen skin and willow-bones. Ness is made of tidal drift, green moss and deep time. Ness has hagstones for eyes and speaks only in birds. And Ness has come to take this island back.
"Ness goes beyond what we expect books to do. Beyond poetry, beyond the word, beyond the bomb — it is an aftertime song. It is dark, ever so dark, nimble and lethal. It is a triumphant libretto of mythic modernism for our poisoned age. Ness is something else, and feels like it always has been." —Max Porter
An exploration of the depths of longing and obsession from the author of The Empathy Exams. Always mindful of why and how we tell stories, this book takes us into lives on the fringes — from a woman healed by the song of 'the loneliest whale in the world' to a family convinced their child is a reincarnation of a lost pilot — and asks how we can bear witness to the changing truths of others' lives while striving to find a deeper understanding of the complexities of our own.
"Intelligent, compassionate, and fiercely, prodigiously brave." —Eleanor Catton
>>Reading and answering.
Gisele is a transparent girl. Not only can she be seen through, her feeling show for anyone to see. How will she learn to live in the world? Wonderful illustrations.
Paleontology meets neurology in this reassessment of our evolutionary history. Humans now live longer than ever before, and we are the most populous big animal on earth. Meanwhile, our closest living relatives, the now-endangered chimpanzees, continue to live as they have for millions of years. We are not like the other animals, yet we evolved through the same process. What are we then? And now we have remade the world, what are we becoming?
Not only do we need to alleviate our current serious social problems, but we also need to meet the challenges of the future in a way that enhances intergenerational fairness and wellbeing. The answer, Boston argues, lies in a comprehensive package of reforms covering the benefit system, family assistance, child support, housing, and health care.
Spanning the history of quantum discoveries, from Einstein and Bohr to the present day, Carroll debunks myths that have grown up around quantum physics, reinstates the Many-Worlds Interpretation, and presents a new path to solving the apparent conflict between quantum mechanics and gravity.
How the film industry made America ready for the real-life supervillains of right-wing extremism.
"A bold, witty, and brilliantly argued analysis of the role pop culture has played in the rise of American extremism." —Ruth Reichl
"You'll never look at your favorite movies and TV shows the same way again. And you shouldn't." —Steven Soderbergh
>>President Trump or Red Skull?
Ralph Loman works in an unsatisfying job, for a free London newspaper, when Francine Snaith, a temporary secretary for a corporate finance firm, unexpectedly crosses his path at a party. Her beauty ignites a blaze of excitement in his troubled heart. But Francine is ravenous for attention, driven by a thirst for conquest, and when Ralph tries politely to extricate himself, he finds he is bound by chains of consequence from which it seems there is no escape. The Temporary paints a merciless portrait of the cut and thrust of modern romance, work and life.
A devastatingly perceptive account of travelling in Italy with her husband and two young children. Their journey leads them to both the expected — the Piero della Francesca trail and queues at the Vatican — and the surprising — an amorous Scottish ex-pat and a longing for home. The book explores the desire to travel and to escape, art and its inspirations, beauty and ugliness, and the challenge of balancing domestic life with creativity.
The Hanburys of Egypt Hill are the last word in bohemian living — or so they like to think. Their parties are famous, their relationships confusing, their bravado immense. To Michael, a young student arriving at the house on the hill for Caris Hanbury's eighteenth birthday party, they represent the prospect of relief from the strictures of conformity, and of an enfolding exuberance to which he feels irresistibly attracted. As an adult, Michael finds his own version of the Hanburys. The Alexanders are a wealthy, artistic family for whom moral abandon is almost a point of honour, and their fractious daughter Rebecca is now Michael's wife. While Rebecca struggles with questions of identity and self-expression, Michael becomes increasingly preoccupied with the idea of virtue. Why is his life with Rebecca and their son Hamish so destructive and tumultuous? How has his existence become so tarnished, so without principle? When Michael is invited to spend a week with the Hanburys on Egypt Hill his illusions are startlingly confounded. The hill is being spoiled by development; the family are riven by jealousy and deceit; and as the days pass the rotten core of the Hanbury myth is gradually disclosed.
Since leaving his job to look after Alexa, his eight-year-old daughter, Thomas Bradshaw has found the structure of his daily piano practice and the study of musical form brings a nourishment to these difficult middle years. His pursuit of a more artistic way of life shocks and irritates his parents and his in-laws. Why has he swapped roles with Tonie Swann, his intense, intellectual wife who has accepted a demanding full-time University job? How can this be good for Alexa and for the family as a whole? Meanwhile Tonie tunes herself out of domestic life, into the harder, headier world of work where long-since forgotten memories of herself are awakened. She soon finds herself outside their tight family circle and alive to previously unimaginable possibilities.
>>Other books by Rachel Cusk!
A vivid account of early European experience in these islands, through material evidence offered by the archaeological record. As European exploration in the 1770s gave way to sealing, whaling and timber-felling, Pākehā visitors first became sojourners in small, remote camps, then settlers scattered around the coast. Over time, mission stations were established, alongside farms, businesses and industries, and eventually towns and government centres. Through these decades a small but growing Pākehā population lived within and alongside a Māori world, often interacting closely. This phase drew to a close in the 1850s, as the numbers of Pākehā began to exceed the Māori population, and the wars of the 1860s brought brutal transformation to the emerging society and its economy.
>>Smith speaks.
"The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil." —Hannah Arendt
A study of the psychology of some of the least visible perpetrators of crimes against humanity, the 'desk killers' who ordered and directed some of the worst atrocities of the last two hundred years. It is also an exploration of corporate responsibility and personal culpability today, connecting the bureaucratic blindness that created desk killing to the same moral myopia that exists now in the calm, clean offices of global capitalism.
The German House by Annette Hess $35
A young woman working as an interpreter at a 1963 Nazi war crimes trial finds out rather more than she expected about her own family's complicity in those crimes.
Travels with a Writing Brush: Classical Japanese travel writing from Manyoshu to Basho edited by Meredith McKinney $30
Most of Plath's extensive correspondence has never before been published, and it is here presented unabridged. 2426 pp in total.
The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino $30
A beautiful new hardback edition of Calvino's early novel in which Cosimo, after a quarrel with his father, climbs a tree and swears never to set foot on the earth again.
The story of four young Piedmontese women who joined the Resistance against the German occupation of the north of Italy in 1943. Well written and interesting.