NEW RELEASES
On the eve of the Occupy Wall Street protests, C is flat broke. Once a renowned textile artist, she's now the sole proprietor of an arts supply store in Lower Manhattan. Divorced, alone, at loose ends, C is stuck with a struggling business, a stack of bills, a new erotic interest in her oldest girlfriend, and a persistent hallucination in the form of a rogue garden gnome with a pointed interest in systems collapse. C needs to put her medical debt and her sex life in order, but how to make concrete plans with this little visitor haunting her apartment, sporting a three-piece suit and delivering impromptu lectures on the vulnerability of the national grid? Moreover, what's all this computer code doing in the story of her life? And do the answers to all of C's questions lie with an eco-hacktivist cabal threatening to end modern life as we know it? Replaying recent history through a distorting glass, The Visitors is a mordantly funny tour through through a world where not only civic infrastructure but our darkest desires (not to mention our novels) are vulnerable to malware; where mythical creatures talk like Don DeLillo; where love is little more than a blip in our metadata.
"The Visitors is conceptually bold. Stevens threads through needles of political theory so deftly you barely feel them piercing the brain. Her work calmly suggests this: the apocalypse is coming for us all, baby - so, what are you doing about it?" —Annie Hayter
>>Welcome to the new world.
"The Visitors is conceptually bold. Stevens threads through needles of political theory so deftly you barely feel them piercing the brain. Her work calmly suggests this: the apocalypse is coming for us all, baby - so, what are you doing about it?" —Annie Hayter
>>Welcome to the new world.
In thirteen chapters, van den Broeck goes in search of buildings that were fatal for their architects — architects who either killed themselves or are rumoured to have done so. They range across time and space from a church with a twisted spire built in seventeenth-century France to a theatre that collapsed mid-performance in 1920s Washington, DC, and an eerily sinking swimming pool in her hometown of Turnhout. Drawing on a vast range of material, from Hegel and Charles Darwin to art history, stories from her own life and popular culture, patterns gradually come into focus, as van den Broeck asks- what is that strange life-or-death connection between a creation and its creator? Threaded through each story, and in prose of great essayistic subtlety, van den Broeck meditates on the question of suicide — what Albert Camus called the 'one truly serious philosophical problem' — in relation to creativity and public disgrace.
I Fear My Pain Interests You by Stephanie LaCava $28
"Everyone fails every day, but an architect's failure is inescapably visible, a public humiliation, even when it doesn't occasion loss of life. That the relationship between creator and creation can become so deleterious is a source of obsession for Charlotte van den Broeck. Bold Ventures resembles a pop version of Iain Sinclair's psychogeography or Out of Sheer Rage, Geoff Dyer's anti-biography of DH Lawrence." —Olivia Laing, Guardian
An absurdist novel about fame, culture and connections, bodies and breakdowns. Margot’s on her way to Montana, with blood on her face and a jeweled cigarette case full of pills. She’s fresh from a bad break-up and fleeing the cold comforts of her famous family – legendary punk parents and an overbearing show business scion of a grandmother. But while the eyes of the world are elsewhere for the first time in Margot's life, a graveyard encounter with a disgraced doctor and the discovery of a dozen old film reels leads to a troubling new subjecthood, as her congenital inability to feel pain puts her center stage for one man’s desire and ambition. A jarringly sensual book about the peculiarities of our bodies and the impossibilities of our families, and a young woman trying to find a way forward with both.
"A sharp critical vision lurches into focus: of culture as commodity, of suffering as currency, and of the female body as this agon's generalized battleground." — Tom McCarthy
"I Fear My Pain Interests You is meticulously constructed, with each part supporting and supported by the others. Controlled self-awareness like this in novels makes me pay close attention, enriching my experience." —Tao Lin, The New York Times
"LaCava's book animates its story with something of Patricia Highsmith's sociopathology and Clarice Lispector's macabre glamor." —JC Holburn
"I am merely an eccentric, a dreamer who wishes to live far from the civilised world, as a free nomad." Isabelle Eberhardt's writing chronicles, in passionate prose, her travels in French colonial North Africa at the turn of the 20th century. Often dressed in male clothing and assuming a man's name, she worked as a war correspondent, married a Muslim non-commissioned officer, converted to Islam, and survived an assassination attempt, all before dying in a flash flood at the age of 27.
But we still consume the energy of the sun in the form of food. The sun is available for consumption because of plants. Plants make food from the sun by the process of photosynthesis; nothing else in the world can do this. We eat plants, or we do so at second hand, by eating the eaters of plants.
Plants give us food. Plants take in carbon dioxide and push out oxygen: they give us the air we breathe, direct the rain that falls and moderate the climate. Plants also give us shelter, beauty, comfort, meaning, buildings, boats, containers, musical instruments, medicines and religious symbols. We use flowers for love, we use flowers for death. The fossils of plants power our industries and our transport. Across history we have used plants to store knowledge, to kill, to fuel wars, to change our state of consciousness, to indicate our status. The first gun was a plant, we got fire from plants, we have enslaved people for the sake of plants. We humans like to see ourselves as a species that has risen above the animal kingdom, doing what we will with the world. But we couldn't live for a day without plants. Our past is all about plants, our present is all tied up with plants; and without plants there is no future. Nicely written and presented.
Oozing with bad airs, boggarts and other spirits, the world's marshes and swamps are often seen as sinister, permanently twilit - and only partly of this earth. For centuries, they - and their inhabitants - have been the object of our distrust. We have tried to drain away their demons and tame them, destroying their fragile beauty, botany and birdlife, along with the carefully calibrated lives of those who have come to understand and thrive in them. Blass journeys through a series of such watery landscapes, from Romney Marsh to North Carolina, from Lapland to the Danube Delta and on to the Bay of Bengal, encountering those whose very existence has been shaped by wetlands, their myths and hidden histories. Here are tales of shepherds, smugglers and salt-gatherers; of mangroves and machismo, frogs and fishermen. And of carp soup, tiger gods, flamingos and floods.A dazzling exploration of lives lived on the fringes of civilisation, Swamp Songs is a reappraisal and celebration of people and environments closely intertwined.
A new translation of this novella extracted from In Search of Lost Time. A good place to start with Proust. When Charles Swann first lays eyes on Odette de Crécy, her beauty leaves him indifferent. Their paths continue to cross in the drawing rooms and theatres of Parisian high society, and the seeds of desire in Swann begin to flourish. What follows is a journey through self-delusion, jealousy and delirious fantasy, which will take Swann far from the sedate comfort of his society life.
Olive's best friend is a four-hundred-year-old oak tree, and it is in danger. As she tumbles into its magic world, she makes it a promise. From deep roots to high branches, a Persian garden to an underwater forest, from tulip trees to wild apple to vengeful box, she listens to the trees telling stories for all time. And she keeps her promise. Nicely illustrated and presented.
Maria Ressa's work tracking disinformation networks seeded by her own government, spreading lies to its own citizens laced with anger and hate, landed her in trouble with the most powerful man in the Philippines — President Duterte. How to Stand Up to a Dictator tells how democracy dies by a thousand cuts, and how an invisible atom bomb has exploded online that is killing our freedoms. It maps a network of disinformation that has netted the globe, from Duterte's drug wars, to America's Capitol Hill, to Britain's Brexit, to Russian and Chinese cyber-warfare, to Facebook and Silicon Valley, to our own clicks and our own votes. Ressa was awarded the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize for her work.
"Absolutely sublime and transformational. Maria Ressa lays out the moral paradigm for our time and the consequences of ignoring it and the thrill and reward of embracing it." —Shoshana Zuboff
Bevan argues that monuments, architecture and cities are material evidence of history. They are the physical trace of past events, of previous ways of thinking and of politics, economics and values that percolate through to today. When our cities are reshaped as fantasies about the past, when monuments tell lies about who deserves honour or are destroyed and the struggle for justice forgotten, the historical record is being manipulated. When decisions are based on misinformed assumptions about how the built environment influences our behaviour or we are told, falsely, that certain architectural styles are alien to our cities, or when space pretends to be public but is private, or that physical separation is natural, we are being manipulated. There is a growing threat to the material evidence of the truth about history.
“Robert Bevan's passionate, timely polemic is a much-needed antidote to all the horror stories about 'woke' protesters tearing down monuments. The true threat to our built-up environment, he argues, comes not from the Left, but from governments who employ all the powers of the state to re-write history in their image. It is at times a truly terrifying read.” – Keith Lowe
“Bevan astutely argues that those who manipulate our cultural past are shaping our future, making the case that historic buildings have become battlegrounds for right-wing and nationalist political arguments.” – The Art Newspaper
“This close reading of the city is a potent response to the culture wars because it deals in precisely the historical honesty that culture warriors have no stomach for. Righteous but always nuanced, Bevan is the perfect guide to the way urban iconography distorts history and entrenches power.” – Justin McGuirk
Archaeology is transforming our knowledge of what it would have been like to live in Britain and Ireland in the time before the Romans. By revealing how prehistoric forebears coped with both simple practical problems and more existential challenges, Francis Pryor offers remarkable insights into the long and unrecorded centuries of our early history, and a convincing, well-attested and movingly human portrait of prehistoric life as it was really lived. Pryor paints a vivid picture of British and Irish prehistory, from the Old Stone Age (about one million years ago) to the arrival of the Romans in AD 43, in a sequence of fifteen chronologically arranged profiles of specific ancient landscapes. Whether writing about the early human family who trod the estuarine muds of Happisburgh in Norfolk c.900,000 BC, the craftsmen who built a wooden trackway in the Somerset Levels early in the fourth millennium BC, or the Iron Age denizens of Britain's first towns, Pryor uses excavations and surveys to uncover the daily routines of ancient ancestors.
Madurer is the son of a great lord, with untold wealth, but he is also the victim of a mysterious disease that means he cannot be exposed to sunlight or fresh air. He is confined to three windowless rooms inside a palace, but his doting father summons a famous artist to cover the walls of the rooms with paintings showing the world his son cannot truly experience. As the painter works on his murals, his relationship with the boy begins to deepen until they forge a firm friendship. How can he show this child the beauty of the world with only his paintbrush to work with? Glowrushes is a classic of Italian children's literature, published in English for the first time.
A classic Japanese murder mystery set in post-war Tokyo and steeped in the illicit subculture of Yakuza tattoos. Kinue Nomura survived World War II only to be murdered in Tokyo, her severed limbs discovered in a room locked from the inside. Gone is the part of her that bore one of the most beautiful full-body tattoos ever rendered. Kenzo Matsushita, a young doctor who was first to discover the crime scene, feels compelled to assist his detective brother, who is in charge of the case. But Kenzo has a secret: he was Kinue's lover, and soon his involvement in the investigation becomes as twisted and complex as the writhing snakes that once adorned Kinue's torso.
Featuring images of over 100 species, this book explains the folklore, science and occult of fungi, showing that from saving lives to expanding the mind, the potential of these fascinating organisms is immense.
Includes Megan Giddings, Claire Dederer, Imani Perry, Jeffery Renard Allen, Maggie Shipstead, Emily Raboteau, Lev Grossman, Lena Dunham, Yiyun Li, Anthony Doerr, Helena Fitzgerald, Maile Meloy, Aja Gabel, Jean Kwok, Amy Shearn, Peter Ho Davies, Maya Shanbhag Lang, Jhumpa Lahiri, Jesmyn Ward, Lidia Yuknavitch, Dina Nayeri, Melissa Febos.
Brought to the flying city of Highgate when he was only five years old, orphan Milo Quick has never known another home. Now almost thirteen, Milo survives one daredevil grift at a time, relying only on his wit, speed, and best friends Jules and Dagda. A massive armada has surrounded Highgate's crumbling armaments. Because behind locked doors—in opulent parlours and pneumatic forests and a master toymaker's workshop—the once-great flying city protects a powerful secret, hidden away for centuries. A secret that's about to ignite a war. One small airship, the Halcyon, has slipped through the ominous blockade on a mission to collect Milo—and the rich bounty on his head—before the fighting begins. But the members of the Halcyon's misfit crew aren't the only ones chasing Milo Quick. An exciting new series.