NEW RELEASES
A poet, father and husband's meditation on love and adolescence, the poet's art is also revealed in stages in this 'making-of' book, where we watch as poems take shape—first as dreams or memories, then as drafts, and finally as completed works set loose on the world.
With her characteristic verbal fury, Jelinek exposes Wagner's 'Ring Cycle' as a precursor of the social ills of late capitalism. Structured as a sort of a dialogue between Wotan and Brünnhilde, the book is hyperattuned to issues of power, inequality, sexism, exploitation and self-interest that feed contemporary society and also presage its downfall.
"Rein Gold is a masterful, obsessional, hypnotic journey. Jelinek brings a sharp modernity and relevance to a series of inward wanderings. She is equal to a great myth and makes it new." — A.L. Kennedy
In this series of electrifying essays, Arundhati Roy challenges us to reflect on the meaning of freedom in a world of growing authoritarianism. The essays include meditations on language, public as well as private, and on the role of fiction and alternative imaginations in these disturbing times. The pandemic, she says, is a portal between one world and another. For all the illness and devastation it has left in its wake, it is an invitation to the human race, an opportunity, to imagine another world.
Bennett has written two further monologues to extend his adored Talking Heads series. Bennett's immense sympathy with his characters and the subtlety of his observations on the interplay of individuality and conformity in the lives of ordinary people make for compelling reading. These two monologues, pitch perfect and unsettling, feature women who must rethink their relationships in ways they had not expected.
"Last year I lost my cat Gattino. He was very young, at seven months barely an adolescent. He is probably dead but I don't know for certain." So begins Mary Gaitskill's stunning long essay, the closest thing she has written to a memoir, about a lost cat and a pair of adopted children. In this searing piece about loss, love, safety and fear, Gaitskill applies her razor-sharp writing to her most personal subjects yet.
Kae (formerly Kate) Tempest's first work of non-fiction: a hopeful theory of creativity. The increasingly hyper-individualistic, competitive and exploitative society that we live in has caused a global crisis at the turn of the new decade; in order to survive, numbness has pervaded us all. Tempest reckons against this system, placing our legacy in our own hands. Creativity holds the key: the ability to provide us with internal and external connection, to move us beyond consumption, to allow us to discover authenticity and closeness to all others, to deliver us an antidote for our numbness.
A new collection of short stories from one of Ireland's most accomplished voices. In That Old Country Music, we encounter a ragbag of west of Ireland characters, many on the cusp between love and catastrophe, heartbreak and epiphany, resignation and hope. These stories show an Ireland in a condition of great flux but also as a place where older rhythms, and an older magic, somehow persist.
Patch Work: A life amongst clothes by Claire Wilcox $45
>>Read Thomas's reviews of Beatlebone and Night Boat to Tangier.
Claire Wilcox has been a curator of fashion at the Victoria and Albert Museum for most of her working life. In Patch Work, she steps into the archive of memory, deftly stitching together her dedicated study of fashion with the story of her own life lived in and through clothes. From her mother's wedding outfit to her own silk kimono, her memoir unfolds in a series of intimate and compelling close-ups. Wilcox tugs on the threads that make up the fabric of our lives—a cardigan worn by a child, a mother's button box, the draping of a curtain, a pair of cycling shorts, a roll of lace, a pin hidden in a seam. Through the eye of a curator, we see how the stories and the secrets of clothes measure out the passage of time, our gains and losses, and the way we use them to unravel and write our histories.
Ellinor, a 35-year-old media consultant, has not been feeling herself; she's not been feeling much at all lately. Far beyond jaded, she picks through an old diary and fails to recognise the woman in its pages, seemingly as far away from the world around her as she's ever been. But when her co-worker vanishes overnight, an unusual new task is dropped on her desk. She goes to meet the Norwegian Postal Workers Union, setting the ball rolling on a strange and transformative six months. The new novel from the author of Will and Testament.
The Paper Chase: The printer, the spy-master, and the hunt for the rebel pamphleteers by Joseph Hone $48
I Wanna Be Yours by John Cooper Clarke $50
A Girl Returned by Donatella Di Pietrantonio $23
"The Paper Chase is a remarkable achievement. Hone transforms what is essentially a case study of English press censorship following the expiry of the 1695 Licensing Act into a fast-paced, captivating narrative about the attempt to track down the individuals responsible for a pamphlet called The Memorial of the Church of England (1705). This was an anti-Dissenter work which sought to destabilise the government in the early years of Queen Anne’s reign by arguing that the Church of England was in immediate danger from current tolerationist policies. The queen herself was distressed by the pamphlet’s arguments that she and her ministers were letting established religion go to ruin, and her secretary of state, Robert Harley, set about uncovering and rounding up those responsible for the assertion." —Spectator
The intriguing and long-awaited memoir of the poet and performer who has been an enduring countercultural knot stubbornly refusing to be disentangled from a Britain still impacted by Margaret Thatcher's economic policies (and all that followed).
"I was the Arminuta, the girl returned. I spoke another language, I no longer knew who I belonged to. The word 'mama' stuck in my throat like a toad. And, nowadays, I really have no idea what kind of place mother is. It is not mine in the way one might have good health, a safe place, certainty." Without warning or a word of explanation, an unnamed 13-year-old girl is sent away from the family she has always thought of as hers to live with her birth family: a large, chaotic assortment of individuals whom she has never met and who seem anything but welcoming. Thus begins a new life, one of struggle, conflict, especially between the young girl and her mother, and deprivation. But in her relationship with Adriana and Vincenzo, two of her newly acquired siblings, she will find the strength to start again and to build anew and enduring sense of self. Translated by Ann Goldstein, who has also translated the works of Elena Ferrante.
There are Places in the World Where Rules are Less Important than Kindness, And other thoughts on physics, philosophy, and the world by Carlo Rovelli $40
Approaching Eye Level by Vivian Gornick $25
Black Spartacus: The epic life of Toussaint Louverture by Sudhir Hazareesingh $65
From Newton's alchemy to Einstein's mistakes, from Nabokov's butterflies to Dante's cosmology, from travels in Africa to the consciousness of an octopus, from mind-altering psychedelic substances to the meaning of atheism, Rovelli is always thinking and rethinking, giving us now insights into reality.
In these seven essays Gornick chronicles the New York streets that energise her, and looks back on the dangerously charged atmosphere of the Catskills where she waitressed as a student in the late fifties. She describes her introduction to the feminism of the 1970s and the lessons it taught her, reflects on a friendship with an older female writer that faltered, and analyses the failure of connection among like-minded people. She considers what it means to live alone, and the absorbed solitude of writing letters.
The Haitian Revolution began in the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue with a slave revolt in August 1791, and culminated a dozen years later in the proclamation of the world's first independent black state. After the abolition of slavery in 1793, Toussaint Louverture, himself a former slave, became the leader of the colony's black population, the commander of its republican army and eventually its governor. During the course of his extraordinary life he confronted some of the dominant forces of his age—slavery, settler colonialism, imperialism and racial hierarchy. Treacherously seized by Napoleon's invading army in 1802, this charismatic figure ended his days, in Wordsworth's phrase, "the most unhappy man of men", imprisoned in a fortress in France.
Antlers of Water: Writing on the nature and environment of Scotland edited by Kathleen Jamie $45
How Life on Earth Began by Aina Bestard $45
The Look of the Book: Jackets, covers and art at the edges of literature by Peter Mendelsund and David J. Alworth $100
Featuring prose, poetry and photography, this collection takes us from walking to wild swimming, from red deer to pigeons and wasps, from remote islands to back gardens. With contributions from Amy Liptrot, Malachy Tallack, Chitra Ramaswamy, Jim Crumley, Amanda Thomson, Karine Polwart and many more, Antlers of Water urges us to renegotiate our relationship with the more-than-human world, in writing which is by turns celebratory, radical and political.
What did the Earth look like 300 million years ago? Here's a chance to travel back through time and discover the days when the Earth was a very different place. Packed with fascinating beautiful illustrations and glassine overlays, this is a wonderful way to understand the story of evolution, from the earliest single-cell lifeforms to the mighty dinosaurs and onwards to the first human beings.
As the outward face of the text, the book cover makes an all-important first impression. The Look of the Book examines the interface of art and literature through notable covers and the stories behind them, galleries of the many different jackets of bestselling books, an overview of book cover trends throughout history, and insights from dozens of literary and design luminaries.