NEW RELEASES
"One day in 2007," recalls Jean Frémon about a visit to artist Louise Bourgeois’s studio, "I discovered an entirely new series of drawings…. silhouettes of women with embryos in their wombs, drawn with a brush full of water and red gouache. These drawings were, for me, the most poignant of her long career. Each time I visited, Louise would ask me about what I was writing. … I said: it’s the story of the first painter who had the idea of representing the baby Jesus completely naked rather than in swaddling clothes…. Louise asked me for the text, which I sent to her. When I next came to visit her, five drawings were awaiting me to illustrate the book."
>>Read an excerpt.
>>Read our reviews of Now, Now, Louison.
Where the Wild Ladies Are by Matsuda Aoko $35
Wagnerism: Art and politics in the shadow of music by Alex Ross $45
Himalaya: A human history by Ed Douglas $40
How We Live Now: Scenes from the pandemic by Bill Hayes $35
Cardiff, by the Sea by Joyce Carol Oates $35
Kindred: Neanderthal life, love, death, and art by Revecca Wragg Sykes $40
The Power of Words by Simone Weil $13
>>Read an excerpt.
>>Read our reviews of Now, Now, Louison.
Exuberant feminist retellings of Japanese folktales. A busybody aunt who disapproves of hair removal; a pair of door-to-door saleswomen hawking portable lanterns; a cheerful lover who visits every night to take a luxurious bath; a silent house-caller who babysits and cleans while a single mother is out working. Where the Wild Ladies Are is populated by these and many other spirited women—who also happen to be ghosts.
"These ghosts are not the monstrous, vengeful spirits of the original stories; they are real people with agency and personalities, finally freed from the restraints placed on living women. Funny, beautiful, surreal and relatable, this is a phenomenal book." —Guardian
For better or worse, Wagner is arguably the most widely influential figure in the history of music. Around 1900, the phenomenon known as Wagnerism saturated European and American culture. Such colossal creations as The Ring of the Nibelung, Tristan und Isolde, and Parsifal were models of formal daring, mythmaking, erotic freedom, and mystical speculation. A procession of writers, artists, and thinkers, including Charles Baudelaire, Virginia Woolf, Isadora Duncan, Vasily Kandinsky, and Luis Buñuel, felt his impact. Anarchists, occultists, feminists, and gay-rights pioneers saw him as a kindred spirit. Then Hitler incorporated Wagner into the soundtrack of Nazi Germany, and the composer came to be defined by his ferocious anti-Semitism. His name is now almost synonymous with artistic evil. Wagnerism restores the magnificent confusion of what it means to be a Wagnerian. The narrative ranges across artistic disciplines, from architecture to the novels of Philip K. Dick, from the Zionist writings of Theodor Herzl to the civil-rights essays of W. E. B. Du Bois, from O Pioneers! to Apocalypse Now. Neither apologia nor condemnation, Wagnerism is a work of intellectual passion, urging us toward a more honest idea of how art acts in the world.
>>How a Wagner opera defined the sound of Hollywood blockbusters.
"Douglas surveys the dazzling geology and ecology of the world’s highest mountain range and the unique civilisations it fostered, which produced a flowering of Buddhist philosophy, art, and architecture during Tibet’s medieval glory days. He also probes the tectonic geopolitical forces that molded Tibet and Nepal as they confronted powerful neighbors in China and British India and then diverged in the post-WWII era, with Tibet succumbing to Chinese colonization while Nepal struggled through monarchical dictatorships and Maoist insurgency to become a democracy and tourist mecca. It’s a colorful story, full of bloody palace intrigues in Kathmandu and Lhasa and nervy exploits by the many foreign (primarily British) outsiders drawn to the region—merchants, missionaries, cartographers, and, above all, mountaineers, whose conquests of Himalayan peaks Douglas recounts in vivid detail. Providing a corrective to romantic Western stereotypes of the region as the homeland of spiritual purity, Douglas notes the allure of Himalayan cultures but is clear-eyed about the prosaic economic motives that shape life there. Written in elegant prose with sharply etched profiles of historical figures, this engrossing account offers a fresh, revealing portrait of a much-mythologised place." —Publishers Weekly
As he wanders the increasingly empty streets of Manhattan, Hayes meets fellow New Yorkers and discovers stories to tell, but he also shares the unexpected moments of gratitude he finds from within his apartment, where he lives alone and—like everyone else—is staying home, trying to keep busy and not bored as he adjusts to enforced solitude with reading, cooking, reconnecting with loved ones, reflecting on the past—and writing. Featuring Hayes's street photographs, How We Live Now chronicles an unimaginable moment in time, offering a long-lasting reminder of the importance of community—however that is constructed.
A haunting collection of four previously unpublished novellas:
A Pennsylvania academic discovers a terrifying trauma from her past after inheriting a house in Cardiff, Maine from someone she has never heard of.
A pubescent girl overcome with loneliness befriends a feral cat that becomes her protector from the increasingly aggressive males that surround her.
A brilliant but shy college sophomore realizes she is pregnant and, distraught, allows a distinguished visiting professor to take her under his wing.
A widower remarries, but his young wife is haunted by his dead wife's voice dancing in the wind.
Neanderthals became a distinct population 450,000 to 400,000 thousand years ago, and lived all over the world from north Wales to China and Arabia, in climates ranging from glacial to tropical, until about 40,000 years ago. They were shorter than we are, with strong arms for working hides and fine motor skills for making small tools, but probably saw, heard, smelled and possibly even spoke much like we do. With a sketch and a short piece of fiction at the start of each chapter, Wragg Sykes paints a vivid picture of life as lived by a Neanderthal parent, hunter or child. She doesn’t just want us to see Neanderthals for who they (probably) really were; she wants us to see their world through their eyes.
In this impressive reassessment Neanderthals emerge as complex, clever and caring, with a lot to tell us about human life." —Guardian
How is language manipulated by the powerful, and how to our obligations towards each other imply obligations towards the ways in which we use language?
Sexuality in the Field of Vision by Jacqueline Rose $25
An exploration of the interface between feminism, psychoanalysis, semiotics and film theory.
The Last Million: Europe's Displaced Persons from World War to Cold War by David Nasaw $70
Going Home: A walk through fifty years of occupation by Raja Shehadeh $25
Frida Kahlo: The last interview and other conversations $37
After World War 2, millions of lost and homeless POWs, slave laborers, political prisoners, and concentration camp survivors overwhelmed Germany, a country in complete disarray. British and American soldiers gathered the malnourished and desperate foreigners, and attempted to repatriate them to Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine, and the USSR. But after exhaustive efforts, there remained over a million displaced persons who either refused to go home or, in the case of many, had no home to which to return. They would spend the next three to five years in displaced persons camps, divided by nationalities, temporary homelands in exile, with their own police forces, churches, schools, newspapers, and medical facilities. The international community couldn't agree on the fate of the Last Million, and after a year of fruitless debate and inaction, an International Refugee Organization was created to resettle them in lands suffering from labor shortages. But no nations were willing to accept the 200,000 to 250,000 Jewish men, women, and children who remained trapped in Germany.
Raja Shehadeh, the Orwell Prize-winning author of Palestinian Walks, takes us on a series of journeys around his hometown of Ramallah. Set in a single day—the day that happens to be the fiftieth anniversary of Israel's occupation of the West Bank—the book is a powerful and moving chronicle of the changing face of his city.
"You wake up. You go to work. You don't go outside for twelve hours at a time. You have strategy meetings about how to use hashtags. After work you order expensive drink after expensive drink until you're so blackout drunk you can't remember the circumstances which have led you to waking up in bed with your colleague. The next day you stay in bed until the afternoon, scrolling through your social media feeds and wondering why everyone else seems to be achieving so much. Sometimes you don't get out of bed at all. Then you hear about Life on Nyx, a programme that allows 100 lucky winners the chance to escape it all, move to another planet and establish a new way of life. One with meaning and purpose. One without Instagram and online dating. There's one caveat—if you go, you can never come back. But you aren't worried about that. After all, what on Earth could there possibly be to miss?"
"Wry, beautiful, surprising and deeply moving." —Rachel Seiffert, Guardian
Featuring conversations with American scholar and Marxist, Bertram D. Wolfe, and art critic Raquel Tibol, this collection shows an artist undervalued, but also a woman in control of her image.
In the early 1930s, a group of young, queer British MPs visited Berlin on a series of trips that would change the course of the Second World War. As Hitler rose to power, they watched the Nazis arrest their gay and Jewish friends, send them to concentration camps and murder them. These men were some of the first to warn Britain about Hitler, repeatedly speaking out against their government's policy of appeasing him. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain hated them. Branding them 'the glamour boys', he had them followed, harassed, spied upon and derided in the press. They suffered abuse, innuendo and threats of de-selection. At a time when even the suggestion of homosexuality could land you in prison, the bravery these men were forced to show in their personal lives gave them extraordinary courage in public. Adept at hiding their true nature, some became talented spies, while others witnessed the brutality of Hitler's camps first hand. Four of them died in action.
Owen Jones explores how the working class has gone from 'salt of the earth' to 'scum of the earth'. Exposing the ignorance and prejudice at the heart of the chav caricature, he portrays a far more complex reality. The chav stereotype, he argues, is used by governments as a convenient figleaf to avoid genuine engagement with social and economic problems and to justify widening inequality.
"A lively, well-reasoned and informative counterblast to the notion that Britain is now more or less a classless society." —Guardian
"It is possible for man to snatch the world from the darkness of absurdity." Rejecting received notions of good and evil, Beauvoir celebrates a destiny and meaning that comes only from the fact of existing.
A wealth of maps and infographics on the status of women under various criteria throughout the world.
What is it that the things we leave behind can tell us about space and time and the place of human experience in the wider scheme of things?
