NEW RELEASES
For a year Ferrante (author of 'The Neapolitan Novels') wrote columns for The Guardian on a wide range of topics, from first love to climate change, from enmity among women to the adaptation of her novels to film and TV. These columns are collected here, each with a charming illustration by Andrea Ucini, in this attractive volume.
Thousands of South Korean children were adopted around the world in the 1970s and 1980s. More than nine thousand found their new home in Sweden, including Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom, who was adopted when she was two years old. Throughout her childhood she struggled to fit into the homogenous Swedish culture and was continually told to suppress the innate desire to know her origins. Sjöblom's unaddressed feelings about her adoption come to a head when she is pregnant with her first child. When she discovers a document containing the names of her biological parents, she realises her own history may not match up with the story she's been told her whole life: that she was an orphan without a background. An outstanding graphic memoir. Sjöblom now lives in New Zealand.
Essays and memoir by Katherine Angel, William Atkins, Tash Aw, Melitta Breznik, Lara Feigel, Joseph Leo Koerner, Andrew Miller, Ulf Karl Olov Nilsson, Elif Shafak and Adam Weymouth. Fiction by Anne Carson, Caroline Albertine Minor and Antonio Muñoz Molina. Poetry by Ken Babstock, Colin Herd and Peter Mishler. Photography by Bruno Fert and Nicola Lo Calzo, introduced by Nam Le and Daisy Lafarge. Plus a symposium on Europe, with responses from Marie Darrieussecq, Laurent Gaudé, Alicja Gescinska, Romesh Gunesekera, Michael Hofmann, Srećko Horvat, Tom McCarthy, Orhan Pamuk, Jacqueline Rose and Ludmila Ulitskaya
>>Read Rausing's introduction.
l'Ouvroir de littérature potentielle (the 'workshop for potential literature') was founded in 1960 to test, strengthen and create literary forms through the application of strict compositional constraints. This anthology of 100 pieces, from Queneau, Perec, Calvino and others, shows the range of the OuLiPo's activites.
>>See also All That is Evident is Suspect.
Louise Henderson (1902-1994) worked alongside Rita Angus, John Weeks, Colin McCahon and Milan Mrkusich and developed a bold, colourful and distinctive abstract style. Despite her prominence there has been no comprehensive survey of her work until now.
>>Radio and slide show.
Agnes Day — sub-editor, suburbanite, failure extraordinaire — has discovered disconcerting gaps in her general understanding of the world. Terminally middle-class and incurably romantic, Agnes finds herself chronically confused by the most basic interactions. Life and love go on without her, but with a little façade she can pass herself off as a success. Beneath the fiction, however, the burden of truth becomes harder to bear. A reissue of Cusk's first novel, first published in 1993.
In a run-down neighbourhood, in an unnamed seaside city without amenities, a father and son struggle to keep their heads above water. When a terrible, macabre event rocks the neighbourhood’s bar district and the locals start to flee, father and son decide to stay put.
"Caputo is a blazing new talent in world literature. Everyone should read this book." —Garth Greenwell
No recent scientific enterprise has been so alluring, terrifying, and filled with extravagant promise and frustrating setbacks as artificial intelligence. How intelligent are the best of today's AI programs? To what extent can we entrust them with decisions that affect our lives? How human-like do we expect them to become, and how soon do we need to worry about them surpassing us in most, if not all, human endeavours?
Using seasonal ingredients in simple preparations, Sonoko Sakai offers recipes with a gentle voice and a passion for authentic Japanese cooking. Very nicely presented.
On the one hand, Bellow looks outward at forty years of American cultural history; on the other hand, this reveals what could be said to amount to an autobiography of four decades of ideas.
In a world where our value is determined by our data productivity, doing nothing may be our most important form of resistance. Odell sees our attention as the most precious — and overdrawn — resource we have. Once we can start paying a new kind of attention, we can undertake bolder forms of political action, reimagine humanity's role in the environment, and arrive at a more meaningful understanding of happiness and fulfilment.
>>On the "colonisation of the self by Capitalist notions of efficiency" and other matters.
Heartbreak, confusion and misogyny stalk this blue-green sphere, yes, but it is also a place of wild delight and unconstrained vitality, a place where we can start living as soon as we are born, and we can be born at any time.
"Honest, funny, positive, completely original and inspiring in the very best way." —George Saunders
>>Interview.
A hitherto untold story of the co-operation between Soviet and US forces from 1943, including US Airforce bases in Soviet-controlled territory. This book changes the way you think about World War 2.
Three years before David Bowie died, he made a list of the one hundred books that had transformed his life — a list that formed something akin to an autobiography. John Connell examines each one, speculates on their effect on Bowie's creative output, and provides and exemplary playlist for each.
>>The boy that books built.
A search for the origins of chocolate, both historically and geographically is also a search for new ways to use the substance in irresistible desserts and baking. Perfect for the chocolate aficionado.
As a young architect, Bossley travelled in Europe and the Middle East, drawing the buildings and learning to 'read' them. Bossley looks back on this year, and on the practice of drawing that has become central to his working process.
Coloured lenses reveal monsters in the most unexpected places. Fun.
Can you find the matching pairs in this attractive game based on prints from actual cross sections of various trees?