NEW RELEASES
Hede's intriguing novel is a haunting, transmundane portrait of a young family told in four parts, in Copenhagen and London. The love between B and Q is tender but worn. When their daughter Æ is born, the everyday lights up in a new way. In its second part, the dead are animated in B's brain. When B's father dies, the news is delivered to her by phone and an essayistic, collagist meditation on death and transmission ensues. And then, it's finally Friday. B and Q descend below the living room floor and wander through a cracked and skittish underworld. In Hede's porous world, which is our world, grime, bacteria, and even death are intimately bound up with health and renewal.
"Adorable pulls us between wanting to live and having to die, between child found and parent lost, feeling from inside Hede's brain-womb all that hide and seek within the concaves of living rooms, telephone calls, and other skins. An urgent, brutally tactile novel that grows boundless in the mind, Adorable achieves life." —Mara Coson
>>Read an extract.
Library of Exile by Edmund de Waal $35
Notes from Childhood by Norah Lange $35
>>Read an extract.
De Waal's powerful installation and accompanying book appreciate the cultural importance of books—both individually and collected into libraries—and remembers books and libraries that have been lost or destroyed—and writers who have suffered or been exiled—by war and authoritarian powers. The library de Waal assembled contains 2,000 books written by authors in exile in numerous languages from antiquity to the present day. The exterior walls, washed with porcelain over sheets of gold are inscribed with the names of lost or destroyed libraries from history — from Nineveh and Alexandria to those lost more recently including Timbuktu, Aleppo and Mosul. Displayed inside the structure are vitrines of porcelain vessels inspired by Daniel Bomberg's Renaissance printing of the Talmud. Visitors are invited to contemplate and respond to the books by writing notes on the ex libris bookplate inserted into each edition.
The rediscovered Argentinian writer makes a laboratory of domesticity in this series of vignettes based on her own childhood in the early twentieth century. Lange's notes tell intimate, half-understood stories from the seemingly peaceful realm of childhood, a realm inhabited by an eccentric narrator searching for clues on womanhood and her own identity. She watches: her pubescent older sister, bathing naked in the moonlight; the death of a horse; and herself, a changeable and untimely girl. How she cried, when lifted onto a table and dressed as a boy, and how she laughed, climbing onto the kitchen roof in men's clothing and throwing bricks to announce her performance.
>>Thomas reviews People in the Room.
Islands of Abandonment: Life in the post-human landscape by Cal Flyn $33
This is a book about abandoned places: exclusion zones, no man's lands, ghost towns and post-industrial hinterlands – and what nature does when we're not there to see it. Exploring some of the eeriest, most desolate places in the world, Cal Flyn asks: what happens after humans pick up and leave? Whether due to war or disaster, disease or economic decay, each extraordinary place visited in this book has been left to its own devices for decades. In this time, nature has been left to work unfettered – offering a glimpse of how abandoned land, even the most polluted regions of the world, might offer our best opportunities for environmental recovery.
"There is nothing more personal than doing your job." So goes the motto of the Temporary, as she takes job after job, in search of steadiness, belonging, and something to call her own. Aided by her bespoke agency and a cast of boyfriends — each allotted their own task (the handy boyfriend, the culinary boyfriend, the real estate boyfriend) — she is happy to fill in for any of us: for the Chairman of the Board, a ghost, a murderer, a mother.
“Temporary is a demented, de-tuned love song for the working life. Hilary Leichter possesses the brute force of language and imagination to create ultra-vivid worlds, suffused with an eerie weirdo beauty. It is Leichter’s brilliance that these invented worlds reflect so directly, blindingly, on the secret, mythical workings of our own.” —Ben Marcus
"Leichter keeps the narrative crisp, swift and sardonic. Temporary reads like a comic and mournful Alice in Wonderland set in the gig economy, an eerily precise portrait of ourselves in a cracked mirror." —The New York Times
>>Odd jobs.
Wilczek investigates the ideas that form our understanding of the universe: time, space, matter, energy, complexity, and complementarity. He excavates the history of fundamental science, exploring what we know and how we know it, while journeying to the horizons of the scientific world to give us a glimpse of what we may soon discover.
Meijer avoids cliches and explores the meaning of depression and its philosophical implications. How can life be distorted by depression over time, and can this distortion be realigned to some sort of shared world?
Liars: Falsehoods and free speech in an age of deception by Cass R. Sunstein $45
This is How We Come Back Stronger: Feminist writers on turning crisis into change edited by The Feminist Book Society $45
Wars of the Interior by Joseph Zarate $25
Undreamed Shores: The hidden heroines of British anthropology by Frances Larson $45
Astragal by Albertine Sarrazin $25
Two-Way Mirror: The life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning by Fiona Sampson $45
The Most Precious of Cargoes by Jean-Claude Grumberg $35
Places I've Taken My Body by Molly McCully Brown $33
We Will Not Cease by Archibald Baxter $30
Elegy for Mary Turner: An illustrated account of a lynching by Rachel Marie-Crane Williams $33
An examination of why lies and falsehoods spread so rapidly these days, and how we can reform our laws and policies regarding speech to allow democracy to function without it being undermined.
The pandemic has highlighted many inequalities around the world. This book gives a taste of the intersectional feminist resurgence, and of the urgency with which these issues must be faced. Includes Akasha Hull, Amelia Abraham, Catherine Cho, Dorothy Koomson, Fatima Bhutto, Fox Fisher, Francesca Martinez, Gina Miller, Helen Lederer, Jenny Sealey, Jess Phillips, Jessica Moor, Jude Kelly, Juli Delgado Lopera, Juliet Jacques, Kate Mosse, Kerry Hudson, Kuchenga, Laura Bates, Lauren Bravo, Layla F. Saad, Lindsey Dryden, Lisa Taddeo, Melissa Cummings-Quarry and Natalie A. Carter, Michelle Tea, Mireille Cassandra Harper, Molly Case, Radhika Sanghani, Rosanna Amaka, Sara Collins, Sarah Eagle Heart, Shaz, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Sophie Williams, Stella Duffy, Virgie Tovar, and Yomi Adegoke.
>>'2020: The Failurey, Non-Chrononormative Year That I Can Finally Relate To.'
>>The Feminist Book Society.
>>The Feminist Book Society.
There is a war raging in the heartlands of Peru, waged on the land by the global industries plundering the Amazon and the Andes. In Saweto, charismatic activist Edwin Chota returns to his ashaninka roots, only to find that his people can't hunt for food because the animals have fled the rainforest to escape the chainsaw cacophony of illegal logging. Farmer Maxima Acuna is trying to grow potatoes and catch fish on the land she bought from her uncle — but she's sitting on top of a gold mine, and the miners will do anything to prove she's occupying her home illegally. The awajun community of the northern Amazon drink water contaminated with oil; child labourer Osman Cunachi's becomes internationally famous when a photo of him drenched in petrol as part of the clean-up efforts makes it way around the world. Joseph Zarate's work of documentary takes three of Peru's most precious resources — gold, wood and oil — and exposes the tragedy, violence and corruption tangled up in their extraction. He also draws us in to the rich, surprising world of Peru's indigenous communities, of local heroes and singular activists, of ancient customs and passionate young environmentalists. Wars of the Interior is an insight into the cultures alive in the vanishing Amazon, and a forceful, shocking expose of the industries destroying this land.
In the first decades of the 20th century, five women arrived at Oxford to take the newly created Masters diploma in Anthropology. Though their circumstances differed radically, all five were intent on travelling to the furthest corners of the globe and studying remote communities whose lives were a world away from their own. In the wastelands of Siberia; in the pueblos and villages of the Nile and New Mexico; in the midst of a rebellion on Easter Island; and in the uncharted interiors of New Guinea, they documented customs now long since forgotten, and bore witness to now-vanished worlds. Through their work they overturned some of the most pernicious myths that dogged their gender, and proved that women could be explorers and scientists, too. Yet when they returned to England they found loss, madness, and regret waiting for them.
"A deeply poignant account of five women who defied convention to pioneer female scholarship at immense personal cost. If you want to understand why there is so little historical evidence of women's intellectual achievement, read this. A devastating indictment of prejudice and how it held women back from achieving their potential." —Madeleine Bunting
"A vivid and moving history of a pioneering group of women, sensitively told and rigorously researched. Undreamed Shores is a compelling and memorable work." —Sarah Moss
"My Albertine, how I adored her! Her luminous eyes led me through the darkness of my youth. She was my guide through the nights of one hundred sleeps. And now she is yours." (from Patti Smith's introduction). At the age of twenty-one, a sad and hungry Patti Smith walked into a bookshop in Greenwich Village and decided to spend her last 99 cents on a novel that would change her life forever. The book was Astragal, by Albertine Sarrazin. Sarrazin was an enigmatic outsider who had spent time in jail and who wrote only two novels and a book of poems in her short life—she died the year before Patti found her book, at the age of twenty-nine. Astragal tells the story of Anne, a young woman who breaks her ankle in a daring escape from prison. She makes it to a highway where she's picked up by a motorcyclist, Julien, who's also on the run. As they travel through nights and days together, they fall in love and must do whatever they can to survive, living their lives always on the edge of danger.
>>Patron saint of delinquent writers.
>>Patron saint of delinquent writers.
Born into an age when women could neither vote nor own property once married, Barrett Browning seized control of her private income, overcame long term illness and disability, eloped to revolutionary Italy with Robert Browning—and achieved lasting fame as a poet. Feminist icon, political activist and international literary superstar, she inspired writers as diverse as Emily Dickinson, George Eliot, Rudyard Kipling, Oscar Wilde and Virginia Woolf.
A father throws one of his twin children from the train taking them to Auschwitz and returns years later to find her cared for by a Polish peasant who had longed for a child. What is the relationship between fairy tales and the most difficult aspects of real history?
"The book implores readers to consider the relationships between storytelling and history, between myth and truth. The question is not whether this unlikely story is true, but rather what we talk about when we talk about true stories. The epilogue not only acknowledges that it is difficult to suspend disbelief when confronted with a fairy tale, but also asks us to consider the implications of suspending disbelief in the first place." —Los Angeles Review of Books
The Book of Trees: Visualising branches of knowledge by Manuel Lima $65
Trees are in nature but also in our minds. Their shape have influenced how we communicate via diagrams, link ideas together and illustrate deeper human thoughts in art throughout history. Trees have been a recurrent metaphor for mapping information in numerous scientific domains, such as biology, genetics, sociology and linguistics and information visualisation is a growing area of interest amongst a variety of professional practices. This book exposes our long-lasting obsession with trees, as metaphors for organising and representing hierarchical information, and provide a broad visual framework for the various types of executions, many dating back hundreds of years.
'The Rebecca Solnit of the body', Brown's essays grapple with subjects that define her inside and out: a disabled and conspicuous body, a religious conversion, a missing twin, a life in poetry. As she does, she depicts vividly for us not only her own life but a striking array of sites and topics, among them Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and the world's oldest anatomical theater, Eugenics, and Jerry Falwell's Liberty University.
"Her writing is sensitive, intelligent, and above all, clear-eyed and curious about her own experience as a writer, a traveller, and a disabled person. This is an important and beautiful rethinking of how bodies move through the world." —Claire Dederer
"To oppose the military machine means to accept the possibility that one may be destroyed by it." We Will Not Cease is the unflinching account of New Zealander Archibald Baxter's brutal treatment as a conscientious objector during World War I. A new edition of this pacificist classic.
In late May 1918 in Valdosta, Georgia, USA, ten black men and one black woman, Mary Turner, eight months pregnant at the time, were lynched and tortured by mobs of white citizens. Through hauntingly detailed full-color artwork and collage, Elegy for Mary Turner names those who were killed, identifies the killers, and evokes a landscape in which the NAACP investigated the crimes when the state would not, when white citizens baked pies and flocked to see black corpses, and when black people fought to make their lives and their mourning matter. Includes an introduction by historian Julie Buckner Armstrong, who opens a window onto the broader scale of lynching's terror in American history.
Long Peace Street: A walk in modern China by Jonathan Chatwin $35
Through the centre of China's historic capital, Long Peace Street cuts a long, arrow-straight line. It divides the Forbidden City, home to generations of Chinese emperors, from Tiananmen Square, the vast granite square constructed to glorify a New China under Communist rule. To walk the street is to travel through the story of China's recent past, wandering among its physical relics and hearing echoes of its dramas. Long Peace Street recounts a journey in modern China, a walk of twenty miles across Beijing offering a very personal encounter with the life of the capital's streets. At the same time, it takes the reader on a journey through the city's recent history.
Veggie Power by Olaf Hajek $45
Olaf Hajek's wondrously imaginative and detailed illustrations of vegetables are paired with engaging texts. Organised by season, the book tells how each vegetable is grown, how it can be enjoyed on our plates, its health benefits, historical tidbits, and botanical fun facts.