NEW RELEASES
A hunted being escapes certain death at breakneck speed. Faster and faster, escaping the assassins, the protagonist flies forward, blending into crowds, adjusting to terrains, hopping on and off ferries, always desperately trying to stay a step ahead of certain death—the past did not exist, only what was current existed—a prisoner of the instant, rushing into this instant, an instant that has no continuation. Krasznahorkai's mesmeric prose is accompanied by unsettling paintings by Neumann, and Miklós's percussive accompaniment is accessed via QR codes in each section. Remarkable.
"Allusive and acerbic: a brilliant work that proves the adage that even paranoiacs have enemies." —Kirkus
i>>Dismiss all questions.
>>"I didn't want to be a writer."
>>"I thought that real life was elsewhere."
>>Where to start with Krasznahorkai.
>>Other books by Krasznahorkai.
In the four stories that make up The Dolls, characters are plagued by unexplained illnesses and oblique, human-made disasters and environmental losses. A big sister descends into the family basement. Another sister refuses her younger brother. A third sister with memory loss is on the run and offered shelter by Notpla, a man both an ally and an enemy. A fourth set of siblings travel to Hungary with their late mother in a coffin. They each have a different version of their mother’s story. Drawing on the likes of August Strindberg, Franz Kafka, Andrej Kurkov, Knut Hamsun, T.S. Eliot, Béla Tarr, and Hieronymus Bosch, Scavenius’s universe is chilling and excruciatingly seductive.
>>'Compartment.'
>>In a choked state of mind.
>>'Compartment.'
>>In a choked state of mind.
H of H Playbook is an explosion of thought, in drawings and language, about a Greek tragedy called Herakles by the 5th-century BC poet Euripides. In myth Herakles is an embodiment of manly violence who returns home after years of making war on enemies and monsters to find he cannot adapt himself to a life of peacetime domesticity. He goes berserk and murders his whole family. Suicide is his next idea, but, due to the intervention of his friend Theseus, Herakles comes to believe he is not, after all, indelibly stained by his own crimes, nor is his life without value. It remains for the reader to judge this redemptive outcome.
In the first days of spring in his eighty-second year, Gerald Murnane began a project which would round off his career as a writer – he would read all of his books in turn and prepare a report on each. His original intention was to lodge the reports in two of his legendary archives, the Chronological Archive, which documents his life as a whole, and the Literary Archive, which is devoted to everything he has written. But as the reports grew, they themselves took on the form of a book, Last Letter to a Reader. The essays on each of his works travel through the capacious territory Murnane refers to as his mind: they dwell on the circumstances which gave rise to the writing, images, associations, reflections on the theory of fiction, and memories of a deeply personal kind.
>>Read Thomas's reviews of several of Murnane's books.
.....and then there were none by Harvey Benge, Jon Carapiet, Lloyd Jones, Haru Sameshima, and Stu Sontier $40
>>Read Thomas's reviews of several of Murnane's books.
An outstanding collaborative book by four New Zealand-based photographers and one writer, breaking out of conventional story-telling to play out their anxieties and doubts about the world they see. Developed over the last two years, . . . . . and then there were none grew from conversations and arguments about mortality, our technologically mired existence and the degradation of the environment. The project triggered its own version of flygskam for the collaborators, conflicted by the international travel that made many of the photographs and the writing possible and tainted by knowing the greater price to be paid. Images included from such travels are drenched in sordid human histories that recall the myriad pathways that have led us to now, and to what comes next.
His life passed without recognition and he worked without reward, mocked, dismissed and misinterpreted. Yet from his ignoble end in a pauper's grave, Blake now occupies a unique position as an artist who unites and attracts people from all corners of society. Blake famously experienced visions, and it is these that shaped his attitude to politics, sex, religion, society and art. Thanks to the work of neuroscientists and psychologists, we are now in a better position to understand what was happening inside that remarkable mind, and gain a deeper appreciation of his brilliance. His work has never been more relevant. In William Blake vs the World we return to a world of riots, revolutions and radicals, discuss movements from the Levellers of the sixteenth century to the psychedelic counterculture of the 1960s, and explore the latest discoveries in neurobiology, quantum physics and comparative religion. Taking the reader on wild detours into unfamiliar territory, John Higgs places the bewildering eccentricities of a most singular artist into context. Lively and compelling.
Nigel Slater is always superb company in the kitchen. In this substantial new book, he looks back over his life and presents his culinary experiences from childhood to the present alongside 200 of his ever-wonderful recipes.
"A Cook's Book, all 500 pages and nearly one and a half kilos of it, enters the world as if from the kitchen of someone fresh to the world of food writing, a-brim with ideas, vital and enthusiastic." —Nigella Lawson
"This is a book for life. This, and it's high praise, is Slater's best book. —Diana Henry
Cast out of the royal court by Eleanor of Aquitaine, deemed too coarse and rough-hewn for marriage or courtly life, seventeen-year-old Marie de France is sent to England to be the new prioress of an impoverished abbey, its nuns on the brink of starvation and beset by disease. At first taken aback by the severity of her new life, Marie finds focus and love in collective life with her singular and mercurial sisters. In this crucible, Marie steadily supplants her desire for family, for her homeland, for the passions of her youth with something new to her: devotion to her sisters, and a conviction in her own divine visions. A historical novel from the author of the outstanding (and very contemporary) Fates and Furies.
>>Research and imagination.
All the Queens Houses: An architectural portrait of New York's most diverse borough by Rafael Herrin-Ferri $45
>>Research and imagination.
Queens is often celebrated as the 'melting pot' of the United States of America. People from all over the world built houses that reflected both their heritages and their aspirations. While All the Queens Houses is mainly a photography book celebrating the broad range of housing styles in New York City's largest and most diverse county, it is also an endorsement of a multicultural community that mixes global building traditions into the American vernacular, and by so doing breathes new life into its architecture and surrounding urban context.
"The character of the everyday has always been repetitive and veiled by obsession and fear." The Everyday and Everydayness takes seriously the everyday as a structure imposed upon all of life in the context of the 'modern'. At a moment of enforced reflection on the everyday, artist Julie Mehretu re-examines and responds to Lefebvre's text, bringing to bear her own longstanding fascination with questions of time, space and place.
Matt's book reflects his extensive research into traditional Icelandic dishes to preserve local culinary knowledge while applying a modern approach for a cuisine to be enjoyed both by locals and international foodies.
Julian Lawndsley has renounced his high-flying job in the City for a simpler life running a bookshop in a small English seaside town. But only a couple of months into his new career, Julian's evening is disrupted by a visitor. Edward, a Polish émigré living in Silverview, the big house on the edge of town, seems to know a lot about Julian's family and is rather too interested in the inner workings of his modest new enterprise. When a letter turns up at the door of a spy chief in London warning him of a dangerous leak, the investigations lead him to this quiet town by the sea... What happens when public duty and private morals are irreconcilable? This is the last novel from this master of intrigue, whose insider knowledge of the secret service gave his novels a powerful veracity.
There are said to be over 300 shapes of pasta, each of which has a history, a story to tell, and an affinity with particular foods. These shapes have evolved alongside the flavours of local ingredients, and the perfect combination can turn an ordinary dish into something sublime. The Geometry of Pasta pairs over 100 authentic recipes from critically acclaimed chef, Jacob Kenedy, with award-winning designer Caz Hildebrand's incredible black-and-white designs to reveal the science, history and philosophy behind spectacular pasta dishes from all over Italy.
Joy Division: Juvenes photography by Kevin Cummins $70
The iconic images captured by Cummins — from snowy bridges and dark rehearsal rooms to electrifying live performances — helped to define Joy Division and cement their place in music history. Originally published in an limited run of just 226 copies, Juvenes is a book with legendary status. Now comprehensively updated with new material and images, and including interviews with Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook and Stephen Morris, and recollections by David Peace, Pat Nevin, and others.
>>'Dead Souls.'
>>'Dead Souls.'
Some things sound like other things, and those things could be very silly indeed. Pesenti continues the madness of the very popular Rhyme Cordial in this bold and inventive board book. Each page also opens backwards to reveal an illustrated silly sound-alike. Would you fancy instant poodles or a cheese ghostie for lunch? A large amount of fun.