NEW RELEASES (8.3.24)
Choose your next book straight out of the cartons that arrived this week:
La Bâtarde by Violette Leduc (translated from French by Derek Coltman) $35
An obsessive and revealing self-portrait of a remarkable woman humiliated by the circumstances of her birth and by her physical appearance, La Bâtarde relates Violette Leduc's long search for her own identity through a series of agonizing and passionate love affairs with both men and women. When first published, La Bâtarde earned Violette Leduc comparisons to Jean Genet for the frank depiction of her sexual escapades and immoral behavior. A confession that contains portraits of several famous French authors, this book is more than just a scintillating memoir--like that of Henry Miller, Leduc's brilliant writing style and attention to language transform this autobiography into a work of art.
”Notoriety aside, Leduc is first and foremost a first-rate writer. Not someone who just tells a provocative story and is unafraid to reveal the most offensive parts of her personality and of her experience, but someone who is in love with words, struggles with them, wrestles with language, dies for adjectives, is tortured by her search for le mot juste." —Women's Review of Books
North Woods by Daniel Mason $38
When a pair of young lovers abscond from a Puritan colony, little do they know that their humble cabin in the woods will become the home of an extraordinary succession of human and inhuman characters alike. An English soldier, destined for glory, abandons the battlefields of the New World to devote himself to apples. A pair of spinster twins navigate war and famine, envy and desire. A crime reporter unearths a mass grave - only to discover that the ancient trees refuse to give up their secrets. A lovelorn painter, a sinister conman, a stalking panther, a lusty beetle: as each inhabitant confronts the wonder and mystery around them, they begin to realize that the dark, raucous, beautiful past is very much alive.
”A monumental achievement . . . it sweeps the reader through hundreds of years and an array of protagonists with a deft, heartbreaking, idiosyncratic zeal. I loved it.” —Maggie O'Farrell
I Seek a Kind Person: My father, seven children, and the adverts that helped them escape the Holocaust by Julian Borger $38
'I SEEK A KIND PERSON WHO WILL EDUCATE MY INTELLIGENT BOY, AGED 11.' In 1938, Jewish families are scrambling to flee Vienna. Desperate, they take out advertisements offering their children into the safe keeping of readers of a British newspaper, the Manchester Guardian. The right words in the right order could mean the difference between life and death. Eighty-three years later, Guardian journalist Julian Borger comes across the advert that saved his father, Robert, from the Nazis. Robert had kept this a secret, like almost everything else about his traumatic Viennese childhood, until he took his own life. Drawn to the shadows of his family's past and starting with nothing but a page of newspaper adverts, Borger traces the remarkable stories of his father, the other advertised children and their families, each thrown into the maelstrom of a world at war. From a Viennese radio shop to the Shanghai ghetto, internment camps and family homes across Britain, the deep forests and concentration camps of Nazi Germany, smugglers saving Jewish lives in Holland, an improbable French Resistance cell, and a redemptive story of survival in New York, Borger unearths the astonishing journeys of the children at the hands of fate, their stories of trauma and the kindness of strangers.
”A powerful, eloquent and deeply affecting book. I loved it.” —Edmund de Waal
”Julian's book is profoundly affecting, part memoir, part detective story, part history, at once elegiac and fascinating, it is so deeply relevant for our times, I zipped through it with the deepest personal interest.” —Philippe Sands,
Your Utopia by Bora Chung (translated from Korean by Anton Hur) $35
From the author of Cursed Bunny, Your Utopia is full of tales of loss and discovery, idealism and dystopia, death and immortality. "Nothing concentrates the mind like Chung's terrors, which will shrivel you to a bouillon cube of your most primal instincts" (Vulture), yet these stories are suffused with Chung's inimitable wry humour and surprisingly tender moments, too — often between unexpected subjects. In 'The Center for Immortality Research', a low-level employee runs herself ragged planning a fancy gala for donors, only to be blamed for a crime she witnessed during the event, under the noses of the mysterious celebrity benefactors hoping to live forever. But she can't be fired - no one can. In 'One More Kiss, Dear', a tender, one-sided love blooms in the A.I.-elevator of an apartment complex; as in, the elevator develops a profound affection for one of the residents. In 'Seeds', we see the final frontier of capitalism's destruction of the planet and the GMO companies who rule the agricultural industry in this bleak future, but nature has ways of creeping back to life.
”Chung's writing is haunting, funny, gross, terrifying - and yet when we reach the end, we just want more.” —Alexander Chee
Fevered Planet: How diseases emerge when we harm nature by John Vidal $39
Covid-19, mpox, bird flu, SARS, HIV, AIDS, Ebola; we are living in the Age of Pandemics — one that we have created. As the climate crisis reaches a fever pitch and ecological destruction continues unabated, we are just beginning to reckon with the effects of environmental collapse on our global health. Fevered Planet exposes how the way we farm, what we eat, the places we travel to, and the scientific experiments we conduct create the perfect conditions for deadly new diseases to emerge and spread faster and further than ever. Drawing on the latest scientific research and decades of reporting from more than 100 countries, former Guardian environment editor John Vidal takes us into deep, disappearing forests in Gabon and the Congo, valleys scorched by wildfire near Lake Tahoe and our densest, polluted cities to show how closely human, animal and plant diseases are now intertwined with planetary destruction. He calls for an urgent transformation in our relationship with the natural world, and expertly outlines how to make that change possible.
”Urgent, fascinating and essential.” —George Monbiot
”John Vidal has travelled far and wide, and we would be wise to take seriously the reports he sends back; human lives, particularly of the rich, are not just altering the planet in devastatingly predictable ways, they are setting us up for some nasty surprises.” —Bill McKibben
”A searing, vital work. Plagues and epidemics determine human history - now it is time to learn that how we live today is driving disease on a planetary level.” —Bettany Hughes
”Drawing on a lifetime's experience as a frontline journalist, John Vidal compellingly joins the dots between accelerating climate change, population growth, dangerously disrupted ecosystems, our obsession with economic growth - and the inevitability of future pandemics. Fevered Planet is the most illuminating and disturbing book I've read in years.” —Jonathon Porritt
Sounds Good! Discover 50 instruments by Ole Könnecke and Hans Könnecke $40
What does a double bass or a sitar sound like? What's the difference between bongos and congas? Which instrument has only one note? Which one takes just 30 seconds to learn? What do these instruments really sound like? This book engagingly presents 50 common and uncommon musical instruments with practical and curious facts that will spark interest in music of all kinds. Each instrument features a piece of music composed by an award-winning musician, accessed via QR code. Very appealingly presented and full of good information.
Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil by Timothy Mitchell $32
Oil is a curse, it is often said, that condemns the countries producing it to an existence defined by war, corruption and enormous inequality. Carbon Democracy tells a more complex story, arguing that no nation escapes the political consequences of our collective dependence on oil. It shapes the body politic both in regions such as the Middle East, which rely upon revenues from oil production, and in the places that have the greatest demand for energy. Timothy Mitchell begins with the history of coal power to tell a radical new story about the rise of democracy. Coal was a source of energy so open to disruption that oligarchies in the West became vulnerable for the first time to mass demands for democracy. In the mid-twentieth century, however, the development of cheap and abundant energy from oil, most notably from the Middle East, offered a means to reduce this vulnerability to democratic pressures. The abundance of oil made it possible for the first time in history to reorganize political life around the management of something now called "the economy" and the promise of its infinite growth. The politics of the West became dependent on an undemocratic Middle East. In the twenty-first century, the oil-based forms of modern democratic politics have become unsustainable. Foreign intervention and military rule are faltering in the Middle East, while governments everywhere appear incapable of addressing the crises that threaten to end the age of carbon democracy--the disappearance of cheap energy and the carbon-fuelled collapse of the ecological order. In making the production of energy the central force shaping the democratic age, Carbon Democracy rethinks the history of energy, the politics of nature, the theory of democracy, and the place of the Middle East in our common world.
A Line in the World: A year on the North Sea coast by Dorthe Nors (translated from Danish by Caroline Waight) $28
Me, my notebook and my love of the wild and desolate. I wanted to do the opposite of what was expected of me. It's a recurring pattern in my life. An instinct.. There is a line that stretches from the northernmost tip of Denmark to where the Wadden Sea meets Holland in the south-west. Dorthe Nors, one of Denmark's most acclaimed contemporary writers, grew up on this line; a native Jutlander, her childhood was spent among the storm-battered trees and wind-blasted beaches of the North Sea coast. In A Line in the World, her first book of non-fiction, she recounts a lifetime spent in thrall to this coastline - both as a child, and as an adult returning to live in this mysterious, shifting landscape. This is the story of the violent collisions between the people who settled in these wild landscapes and the vagaries of the natural world. It is a story of storm surges and shipwrecks, sand dunes that engulf houses and power stations leaching chemicals into the water, of sun-creased mothers and children playing on shingle beaches. In this singularly thrilling work, Nors invites the reader on a journey through history and memory - the landscape's as well as her own.
”'A beautiful, melancholy account of finding home on a restless coast. In Dorthe Nors's deft hands, the sea is no longer a negative space, but a character in its own right. I loved it.'“ —Katherine May
Every Man for Himself and God against All: A memoir by Werner Herzog $55
From his early movies to his later documentaries, he has made a career out of exploring the boundaries of human endurance: what we are capable of in exceptional circumstances and what these situations reveal about who we really are. But these are not just great cinematic themes. During the making of his films, Herzog pushed himself and others to the limits, often putting himself in life-threatening situations. Filled with memorable stories and poignant observations, Every Man for Himself and God against All unveils the influences and ideas that drive his creativity and have shaped his unique view of the world.
The Taming of the Cat by Helen Cooper $33
A story within a story, featuring a mouse who is forced to tell stories to save his life, a cat who plans to eat said mouse as soon as the story is finished — and our protagonist’s protagonist, a princess in trouble. It’s a lifesaving tale – about a runaway princess, a cat that can grow to the size of a panther, an enchanted feast, a vanishing cavern and a quest to find a magical herb. But the cat is getting hungry. If the mouse wants its life to be spared, this must be the best story he has ever told.
My Baby Sister is a Diplodocus by Aurore Petit $30
is a delightful and excellent introduction to being a sibling. Perfect for anyone embarking on this adventure: the excitement, the pitfalls, the frustration, and the curiosity. From the wonderful French author and illustrator Aurore Petit (her previous book was the thoughtful A Mother is A House), translated by Daniel Hahn and published by Gecko Press.
Alebrijes: Flight to a New Haven by Donna Barba Higuera $20
For 400 years, Earth has been a barren wasteland. The few humans that survive scrape together an existence in the cruel city of Pocatel - or go it alone in the wilderness beyond, filled with wandering spirits and wyrms. They don't last long. 13-year-old pickpocket Leandro and his sister Gabi do what they can to forge a life in Pocatel. The city does not take kindly to Cascabel like them - the descendants of those who worked the San Joaquin Valley for generations. When Gabi is caught stealing precious fruit from the Pocatelan elite, Leandro takes the fall. But his exile proves more than he ever could have imagined - far from a simple banishment, his consciousness is placed inside an ancient drone and left to fend on its own. But beyond the walls of Pocatel lie other alebrijes like Leandro who seek for a better world - as well as mutant monsters, wasteland pirates, a hidden oasis, and the truth.
How I Won a Nobel Prize by Julius Taranto $38
Helen, a graduate student on a quest to save the planet, is one of the best minds of her generation. But when her irreplaceable advisor’s student sex scandal is exposed, she must choose whether to give up on her work or accompany him to RIP, a research institute which grants safe harbour to the disgraced and the deplorable. As Helen settles into life at the institute alongside her partner Hew, she develops a crush on an older novelist, while he is drawn to an increasingly violent protest movement. As the rift between them deepens, they both face major – and potentially world-altering – choices. How I Won A Nobel Prize approaches contemporary moral confusion in a fresh way, examining the price we’re willing to pay for progress and what it means, in the end, to be a good person.