NEW RELEASES
The Call Me Ishmael Phone Book: An interactive guide to life-changing books by Logan Smalley and Stephanie Kent $48
The authors of this lovingly assembled book instigated a phone service on which callers could leave messages about their favourite books. Now, in
The Call Me Ishmael Phone Book, these messages are collected for book lovers everywhere. Designed in the style of the classic Yellow Pages, there is something exciting to discover on each page, from unique phone extensions that have been assigned to each voicemail, as well as transcripts of those calls, literary advertisements, bookstore checklists, bookish Easter eggs, all organised by category.
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Like this!by Ann Quin $33
A woman, accompanied by her lover, searches for her lost brother, who may have been a revolutionary, and who may have been tortured, imprisoned or killed. Roving through a Mediterranean landscape, they live out their entangled existences, reluctant to give up, afraid of the outcome. Reflecting the schizophrenia of its characters, the novel splits into alternating passages, switching between the sister and her lover's perspective. The lover's passages are also fractured, taking the form of a diary with notes alongside the entries. An intricate system of repetition and relation builds across the passages.
"Passages stirred up a certain kind of curiosity that I hadn’t felt kindling in me for so long. It’s difficult to describe – it’s almost like the omnipotent curiosity one burns with as an adolescent – sexual, solipsistic, melancholic, fierce, hungry, languorous – and without limit." —Claire Louise Bennett
"To read Passages is to look down through clear water. It's absolutely lucid and blindingly reflective. It moves and you don't know how deep it goes. Perhaps there's a body down there. Perhaps it's your own." —Joanna Walsh
A Man's Place by Annie Ernaux $32
Barely educated and valued since childhood strictly for his labor, Ernaux's father had grown into a hard, practical man who showed his family little affection. Narrating his slow ascent towards material comfort, Ernaux's cold observation reveals the shame that haunted her father throughout his life. She scrutinizes the importance he attributed to manners and language that came so unnaturally to him as he struggled to provide for his family with a grocery store and cafe in rural France. Over the course of the book, Ernaux grows up to become the uncompromising observer now familiar to the world, while her father matures into old age with a staid appreciation for life as it is and for a daughter he cautiously, even reluctantly, admires.
"Ernaux has inherited de Beauvoir’s role of chronicler to a generation." —Margaret Drabble, New Statesman
"A lesser writer would turn these experiences into misery memoirs, but Ernaux does not ask for our pity – or our admiration. It’s clear from the start that she doesn’t much care whether we like her or not, because she has no interest in herself as an individual entity. She is an emblematic daughter of emblematic French parents, part of an inevitable historical process, which includes breaking away. Her interest is in examining the breakage. Ernaux is the betrayer and her father the betrayed: this is the narrative undertow that makes A Man's Place so lacerating." —Frances Wilson, Telegraph
Men and Apparitions by Lynne Tillman $38
Ezekiel Hooper Stark is a cultural anthropologist and bemused commentator on the contemporary world. Zeke has carved out an academic career studying family photographs, gender and images. Meanwhile – now 38 – he still contends with his own family’s perversities and pathologies, which charge his chaotic love life. While living in London, Zeke finds himself spiralling into crisis. As the centre ceases to hold, so too does any pretence of his having a dispassionate, purely academic interest in these issues. Zeke finds a new research topic: himself. He embarks on a quixotic new project, studying the ‘New Man’, born under the sign of feminism. What, he asks his male subjects, does masculinity mean today, in a world in which all the old models are broken? What do you expect from women? What do you expect from yourself? Meanwhile, what will the reader make of Zeke – is he enlightened or misguided, chauvinistic or simply delusional?
"A true force in American literature." –George Saunders
"A new thought in every sentence." –Lydia Davis
The Weak Spot by Lucie Elven $37
On a remote mountaintop somewhere in Europe, accessible only by an ancient funicular, a small pharmacy sits on a square. As if attending confession, townspeople carry their ailments and worries through its doors, in search of healing, reassurance, and a witness to their bodies and their lives. One day, a young woman arrives in the town to apprentice under its charismatic pharmacist, August Malone. She slowly begins to lose herself in her work, lulled by stories and secrets shared by customers and colleagues. But despite her best efforts to avoid thinking and feeling altogether, as her new boss rises to the position of mayor, she begins to realise that something sinister is going on around her.
"In prose reminiscent of Fleur Jaeggy, The Weak Spot is a prismatic fable spiked with dozens of elegant relevations." —Catherine Lacey
"This eccentric, intensely observed book—full of dry humour and sturdy, elegant sentences—examines the slippery quality of the self in relation to others and the treacherous terrain of a world governed by manipulative men." —Kathryn Scanlan
Trout, Belly Up by Rodrigo Fuentes $34
In seven interconnected short stories, the Guatemalan countryside is ever-present: a place of timeless peace, and the site of sudden violence. Don Henrik, a good man struck time and again by misfortune, confronts the crude realities of farming life, family obligation, and the intrusions of merciless entrepreneurs, hitmen, drug dealers, and fallen angels, all wanting their piece of the pie. Told with precision and a stark beauty, Trout, Belly Up is a beguiling, disturbing ensemble of moments set in the heart of a rural landscape in a country where brutality is never far from the surface.
The new book from the author of
The Long Take, shortlisted for the Booker Prize and winner of both the Walter Scott Prize and the Goldsmiths Prize. Like some lost chapters from the Celtic folk tradition,
Grimoire tells stories of ordinary people caught up, suddenly, in the extraordinary: tales of violence, madness and retribution, of second sight, witches, ghosts, selkies, changelings and doubles, all bound within a larger mythology, narrated by a doomed shape-changer—a man, beast or god.
"'I've long admired Robin Robertson's narrative gift. If you love stories, you will love this book." —Val McDermid
"Robin Robertson is a fearless and thrilling poet in what he confronts in himself as well as what he unearths from the commons of myth and balladry." —Marina Warner
by Imogen Greenberg and Isabel Greenberg $30
Meet Marie Curie. Shy and reserved, she loved science more than anything else in the world. But she lived at a time when women couldn't be scientists. Marie followed her passion and is now remembered for her game-changing discoveries. But while she tinkered away with test tubes and experimented with a glow-in-the-dark chemical elements, Marie became a mother. Irene and Eve grew up to be fiercely independent and determined women just like their mother, and had many adventures of their own.
An epistolary novel charting the relationship between a mother and daughter over the course of thirty-odd years. In October 1985, Lynn moves down to London to enroll at Saint Martin's School of Art, leaving her mother behind in a suburb of Birmingham. Their relationship is complicated, and their only form of contact is through the letters, postcards and emails they send each other periodically, while Lynn slowly makes her mark on the London art scene. Bolt from the Blue captures the waxing and waning of the mother-daughter relationship over time, achieving a depth of feeling with a deceptively simple literary form.
Winner of the 2018 Novel Prize.
by Jonathan Clements $38
There are barely a dozen words for cooking processes in English. But in Chinese there are 26 verbs for preparing food, from stir-frying to cooking in embers (wei) and baking in moist clay (baozai). Its ancient cuisine reflects China’s long history of invasion and conquest, as each new emperor has sought to unify this diverse land. Modern Chinese cooking brings together many regional and foreign influences, from the fresh seafood of Fujian province in the south to the love of roast meat in the north (“the Manchus ate little else”). Even the habit of eating rice varies across China: in the wheat-growing north, rice formed only 1% of the diet in the 20th century, whereas in the south it was a quarter of all calories.
"A splendid introduction to the cooking and history of China." —Guardian
An astounding survey of contemporary drawing from over 100 artists, selected by over 70 international experts.
a radical revision of the canon of the Irish story, uniting classic works with neglected writers and marginalised voiceswomen, LGBT writers, Traveller folk-tales, neglected 19th-century authors and the first wave of 'new Irish' writers from all over the world now making a life in Ireland. Sinéad Gleeson brings together stories that range from the most sublime realism to the downright bizarre and transgressive, some from established literary figures and some that have not yet been published in book form. The collection draws on a tremendous spectrum of experience: the story of a prank come good by Bram Stoker; Sally Rooney on the love languages of the new generation; Donal Ryan on the pains of ageing; Edna O'Brien on the things we betray for love; James Joyce on a young woman torn between the familiar burdens and oppression of her home and the dangerous lure of romance and escape; and the internal monologue of a woman in a coma by Marian Keyes. Here too are vivid and less familiar stories by Chiamaka Enyi-Amadi, Oein De Bharduin, Blindboy Boatclub and Melatu Uche Okorie. Sinead Gleeson's anthology is a marvellous representation of a rich literary tradition renewing itself in the 21st century.
by Sujit Sivasundaram $38
Too often, history is told from the northern hemisphere, with modernity, knowledge, selfhood and politics moving from Europe to influence the rest of the world. This book traces the origins of our times from the perspective of indigenous and non-European people in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. From Aboriginal Australians to Parsis and from Mauritians to Malays, people asserted their place and their future as the British empire drove unexpected change. The tragedy of colonisation was that it reversed the immense possibilities for liberty, humanity and equality in this period. Waves Across the South insists on the significance of the environment: the waves of the Bay of Bengal or the Tasman Sea were the context for this story. Sivasundaram tells how revolution, empire and counter-revolt crashed in the global South. Naval war, imperial rivalry and oceanic trade had their parts to play, but so did hope, false promise, rebellion, knowledge and the pursuit of being modern.
"Fresh, sparkling and ground-breaking, Waves Across the South helps re-centre how we look at the world and opens up new perspectives on how we can look at regions, peoples and places that have been left to one side of traditional histories for far too long." —Peter Frankopan
"Global history at its finest: eloquent, surprising, and deeply moving." —Sunil Amrith, author of Unruly Waters
Will pandemic, economic instability, and social distance lead to deeper inequalities, more nationalism, and further erosion of democracies around the world? Or are we moving toward a global re-awakening to the importance of community, mutual support, and the natural world? The New Possible offers twenty-eight visions of what could be, if, instead of choosing to go back to normal, we choose to go forward to something better. With essays by Mike Joy, Rebecca Kiddle, Kim Stanley Robinson, Michael Pollan, Varshini Prakash, Vandana Shiva, Jack Kornfield, Mamphela Ramphele, Justin Rosenstein, Jack Kornfield, Helena Nordberg-Hodge, David Korten, Tristan Harris, Eileen Crist, Francis Deng, Riane Eisler, Arturo Escobar, Natalie Foster, Jess Rimington, Jeremy Lent, Atossa Soltani, Mark Anielski, Ellen Brown, John Restakis, Zak Stein, Oren Slozberg, Anisa Nanavati, and Joshtrom Isaac Kureethadam.
Nobody free till everybody free. Moa is fourteen. The only life he has ever known is toiling on the Frontier sugar cane plantation for endless hot days, fearing the vicious whips of the overseers. Then one night he learns of an uprising, led by the charismatic Tacky. Moa is to be a cane warrior, and fight for the freedom of all the enslaved people in the nearby plantations. But before they can escape, Moa and his friend Keverton must face their first great task: to kill their overseer, Misser Donaldson. Time is ticking, and the day of the uprising approaches. A gripping YA novel following the true story of Tacky's War in Jamaica, 1760.
The most ambitious graphic novel yet from the devastating Chris Gooch. Under-Earth takes place in a subterranean landfill, hollowed out to serve as a massive improvised prison. Sunken into the trash and debris of the past -- gameboys, iphones, coffee cups, old cars -- we follow two parallel stories. In the first, a new arrival struggles to adapt to the everyday violence, physical labour, and poverty of the prison city. Overwhelmed and alone, he finds a connection with a fellow inmate through an old, beat-up novel. While these two silent and uncommunicative men grow closer thanks to their book, the stress of their environment will test their new bond. Meanwhile, a pair of thieves pull off a risky job in exchange for the prisons' schematics and the promise of escape — only to be betrayed by their employer. On the run with their hope for escape now gone, the two women set their minds to revenge. Yet as they lay their plans, their focus shifts from an obsession with the outside world to the life they have with each other. Equal parts sincerity and violence, Under-Earth explores humanity's inextinguishable drive to find meaning, connection, and even family — and how fragile such constructions can be.
by Grace Blakeley $23
The pandemic has caused the deepest global recession since the Second World War. Meanwhile the human cost is reflected in a still-rising death toll, as many states find themselves unable—and some unwilling—to grapple with the effects of the virus. This crisis will tip us into a new era of monopoly capitalism, argues Blakeley, as the corporate economy collapses into the arms of the state, and the tech giants grow to unprecedented proportions. We need a radical response. The recovery could see the transformation of our political, economic, and social systems based on the principles of the Green New Deal. If not, the alternatives, as Blakeley warns, may be even worse than we feared.
Thirty years in the making, this remarkable book is as much a history of racism in the United States of America as it is the story of the revolutionary Black separatist whose deep understanding of the mechanisms of inequality illuminates many of today's problems.
$12
Featuring a literary interview and photo session with Sarah Jessica Parker, and an exploration of the legacy of Lafcadio Hearn and his strange and interesting collection of
Japanese Ghost Stories.
