NEW RELEASES
In the mid-eighteenth century, as new ideas begin to sweep the continent, a young Jew of mysterious origins arrives in a village in Poland. Before long, he has changed not only his name but his persona; visited by what seem to be ecstatic experiences, Jacob Frank casts a charismatic spell that attracts an increasingly fervent following. In the decade to come, Frank will traverse the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires, throngs of disciples in his thrall as he reinvents himself again and again, converts to Islam and then Catholicism, is pilloried as a heretic and revered as the Messiah, and wreaks havoc on the conventional order, Jewish and Christian alike, with scandalous rumours of his sect’s secret rituals and the spread of his increasingly iconoclastic beliefs. The Nobel Prize in Literature laureate writes the story of Frank through the perspectives of his contemporaries, capturing Enlightenment Europe on the cusp of precipitous change, searching for certainty and longing for transcendence.
"A visionary novel. Tokarczuk is wrestling with the biggest philosophical themes: the purpose of life on earth, the nature of religion, the possibility of redemption, the fraught and terrible history of eastern European Jewry. With its formidable insistence on rendering an alien world with as much detail as possible, the novel reminded me at times of Paradise Lost. The vividness with which it’s done is amazing. At a micro-level, she sees things with a poetic freshness. The Books of Jacob, which is so demanding and yet has so much to say about the issues that rack our times, will be a landmark in the life of any reader with the appetite to tackle it." —Marcel Theroux, Guardian
>>The rise and fall of a messiah.
>>The rise and fall of a messiah.
The miniature stories of A. L. Snijders might concern a lost shoe, a visit with a bat, fears of travel, a dream of a man who has lost a glass eye: uniting them is their concision and their vivacity. Lydia Davis in her introduction delves into her fascination with the pleasures and challenges of translating from a language relatively new to her. She also extols Snijders's "straightforward approach to storytelling, his modesty and his thoughtfulness."
Selected from many hundreds in the original Dutch, the stories gathered here—humorous, or bizarre, or comfortingly homely--are something like daybook entries, novels-in-brief, philosophical meditations, or events recreated from life, but—inhabiting the borderland between fiction and reality—might best be described as autobiographical mini-fables.
A compellingly intrusive photographic project from this forensically conceptual artist. In 1981, Calle took a job as a chambermaid at a Venetian hotel and used her access to the rooms she cleaned to photograph and catalogue the evidence of the gusts lives as presented in their personal belonging and use of the rooms. The results are fascinating, the ordinary lives of strangers are rendered extraordinary. Recommended.
>>The art of leaving a trace.
>>Read Stella's review.
Free: Coming of age at the end of history by Lea Ypi $38
>>Read Stella's review.
Ypi grew up in one of the most isolated countries on earth, a place where communist ideals had officially replaced religion. Albania, the last Stalinist outpost in Europe, was almost impossible to visit, almost impossible to leave. It was a place of queuing and scarcity, of political executions and secret police. To Lea, it was home. People were equal, neighbours helped each other, and children were expected to build a better world. There was community and hope. Then, in December 1990, a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, everything changed. The statues of Stalin and Hoxha were toppled. Almost overnight, people could vote freely, wear what they liked and worship as they wished. There was no longer anything to fear from prying ears. But factories shut, jobs disappeared and thousands fled to Italy on crowded ships, only to be sent back. Predatory pyramid schemes eventually bankrupted the country, leading to violent conflict. As one generation's aspirations became another's disillusionment, and as her own family's secrets were revealed, Lea found herself questioning what freedom really meant.
Foster sets out to understand what a human is, inhabiting the sensory worlds of humans at three pivotal moments in our history. Foster begins his quest in a wood in Derbyshire with his son, shivering, starving and hunting, trying to find a way of experiencing the world that recognises the deep expanse of time when we understood ourselves as hunter-gatherers, indivisible from the non-human world, and when modern consciousness was first ignited. From there he travels to the Neolithic, when we tamed animals, plants and ourselves, to a way of being defined by walls, fences, farms, sky gods and slaughterhouses, and finally to the rarefied world of the Enlightenment, when we decided that the universe was a machine and we were cogs within it.
Caliban and the Witch is Silvia Federici's history of the body in the transition to capitalism. Moving from the peasant revolts of the late Middle Ages through the European witch-hunts, the rise of scientific rationalism and the colonisation of the Americas, it gives a panoramic account of the often horrific violence with which the unruly human material of pre-capitalist societies was transformed into a set of predictable and controllable mechanisms. It is a study of indigenous traditions crushed, of the enclosure of women's reproductive powers within the nuclear family, and of how our modern world was forged in blood.
Trans people have become a culture war 'issue'. Despite making up less than one per cent of the population, they are the subjects of a toxic and increasingly polarised 'debate' which generates reliable controversy for newspapers and talk shows. This media frenzy conceals a simple fact — that we are having the wrong conversation, a conversation in which trans people themselves are reduced to a talking point and denied a meaningful voice. Faye reclaims the idea of the 'transgender issue' to uncover the reality of what it means to be trans in a transphobic society. In doing so, she provides a compelling, wide-ranging analysis of trans lives from youth to old age, exploring work, family, housing, healthcare, the prison system and trans participation in the LGBTQ+ and feminist communities.
"An inspiring call for coalition. Shon Faye shows with courage and clarity that the struggle of trans people is the struggle of us all. This book is a game-changer." —Owen Jones
Shows how Cohen's songs are full of reference to Jewish, Kabbalistic, Christian and Zen Buddhist traditions.
>>'The Story of Isaac'.
>>'The Story of Isaac'.
Author of the acclaimed postpunk history Rip It Up and Start Again, Reynolds became a rave convert in the early nineties. He experienced first-hand the scene's drug-fuelled rollercoaster of euphoria and darkness. He danced at Castlemorton, the illegal 1992 mega-rave that sent spasms of anxiety through the Establishment and resulted in the Criminal Justice and Public Order Bill. Mixing personal reminiscence with interviews and ultra-vivid description of the underground's ever-changing sounds as they mutated under the influence of MDMA and other drugs, Energy Flash is the definitive chronicle of electronic dance culture. From rave's origins in Chicago house and Detroit techno, through Ibiza, Madchester and the anarchic free-party scene, to the pirate-radio underworld of jungle and UK garage, and then onto 2000s-shaping genres such as grime and electro, Reynolds documents with authority, insight and infectious enthusiasm the tracks, DJs, producers and promoters that sound tracked a generation. A substantial final section, added for this new edition, brings the book up to date, covering dubstep's explosive rise to mass popularity and America's recent but ardent embrace of rave.
The 1619 Project: A new American origin story edited by Nikole Hannah-Jones $40
In 1619 a ship arrived in the British colony of Virginia bearing a first cargo of twenty to thirty enslaved people from Africa. Slavery persisted for 250 years, and its consequences shape the present. The New York Times Magazine's award-winning '1619 Project' issue reframed understanding of American history by placing slavery and its continuing legacy at the center of the national narrative. This new book substantially expands on that work, weaving together eighteen essays that explore the legacy of slavery in present-day America with thirty-six poems and works of fiction that illuminate key moments of oppression, struggle, and resistance. The essays show how the inheritance of 1619 reaches into every part of contemporary American society, from politics, music, diet, traffic, and citizenship to capitalism, religion, and democracy itself.
Istria is the heart-shaped promontory at the northern crux of the Adriatic Sea, where rows of vines and olives grow in fields of red earth. Here, the cuisine records a history of changing borders — a blend of the countries (Italy, the Republic of Venice, Austria, Hungary and now Slovenia and Croatia) that have shared Istria's hills and coasts and valleys. This book is a record of traditions, of these cultures and of Bacchia's family: recipes from her childhood, the region's past, and family and friends who still live beside the Adriatic coast.
Giften by Leyla Suzan $19
Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner $38
Dante by Alessandro Barbero (translated by Allan Cameron) $45
The Stardust that Made Us: A visual exploration of chemistry, atoms, elements, and the universe by Colin Stuart and Ximo Abadia $33
Dog Park by Sofi Oksanen (translated by Owen F. Witesman) $33
Spacecraft by Timothy Morton $23
Ever since The Darkening, survival has been a struggle. The people of the Field toil on parched earth, trying to forge a life amid dwindling resources. As one of the Giften, Ruthie is a saviour to her isolated community: her hands hold the rare ability to raise food from dead soil. But she is also its greatest danger. In the City lurks a dark army, intent on hunting Giften to harness their power, destroying all who stand in their way. With the threat growing ever stronger, Ruthie and her friends must leave behind all they have ever known and embark on a quest that will pitch them towards the City, and unknowable danger.
Zauner tells of growing up the only Asian-American kid at her school in Oregon; of struggling with her mother's particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother's tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food. As she grew up, moving to the east coast for college, finding work in the restaurant industry, performing gigs with her fledgling band-and meeting the man who would become her husband — her Koreanness began to feel ever more distant, even as she found the life she wanted to live. It was her mother's diagnosis of terminal pancreatic cancer, when Michelle was twenty-five, that forced a reckoning with her identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her mother had given her.
Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy has defined how people imagine and depict heaven and hell for over 700 years. However, outside of Italy, his other works are not well-known, and less still is generally known about the context he wrote them in.
"A richly informative biography of a man who can seem so reticent and aloof that at times it feels as if he's hiding behind the 14,233 verses of The Divine Comedy." —New York Times
Imagine that Nature has an unseen cookbook full of different recipes for making everything you've ever encountered, from fish to fingernails and sand to Saturn. The 'ingredients' are known as chemical elements and there are 118 that we know about so far, which are organised in a grid called the periodic table. Some occur in nature, some are human-made, some are dangerous, some even glow blue.
Helsinki, 2016. Olenka sits on a bench, watching a family play in a dog park. A stranger sits down beside her. Olenka startles; she would recognize this other woman anywhere. After all, Olenka was the one who ruined her life. And this woman may be about to do the same to Olenka. Yet, for a fragile moment, here they are, together - looking at their own children being raised by other people. Moving between modern-day Finland and Ukraine in the early days of its post-Soviet independence, Dog Park is a propulsive novel set at the intersection of East and West, centered in a web of exploitation and the commodification of the female body.
"A remarkably ambitious story. Oksanen has much to say about the price of parenthood and the cost for young women who, with few other options to escape poverty, become egg donors or surrogates." —The New York Times
Science fiction is filled with spacecraft. On Earth, actual rockets explode over Texas while others make their way to Mars. But what are spacecraft, and just what can they teach us about imagination, ecology, democracy, and the nature of objects? Why do certain spacecraft stand out in popular culture? If ever there were a spacecraft that could be detached from its context, sold as toys, turned into Disney rides, parodied, and flit around in everyone's head-the Millennium Falcon would be it. Springing from this infamous Star Wars vehicle, Spacecraft takes readers on an intergalactic journey through science fiction and speculative philosophy, revealing real-world political and ecological lessons along the way.
>>More than you need to know.
>>More than you need to know.