NEW RELEASES
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"Obscure soul records and obscure pap smear specimens. Fluid, fluidity and inflammation at 45 revolutions per minute. Equal parts autobiography and soap-opera, Girl at End is a work of hypervigilant minor literature featuring only hypomanic minor characters. Girl at End is quality TV, gynaecological cytolology and Northern Soul at 45rpm, at 78rpm, at 7200rpm. Girl at End is a dentist's drill, it's a leaf found pressed inside a book about Javascript. Girl at End is drum machine presets and pressure of speech, forgotten current affairs, nitrile times and above all NO MOUTH PIPETTING!"
"UK literary subculture at its best." - Isabel Waidner, author of Gaudy Bauble
>> Read an extract (recommended!).
>> There's an 'Official Trailer'!
An ecological disaster has contaminated the soil of Japan. Children are born frail but wise, and the elderly are new creatures, full of vitality. Yoshiro frets about the declining health of his grandson Mumei, but Mumei is a beacon of hope, guiding his grandfather towards "the beauty of the time that is yet to come" (but which was does time run?).
"Persistent mystery is what is so enchanting about Tawada's writing. Her penetrating irony and deadpan surrealism fray our notions of home and combine to deliver another offbeat tale. An absorbing work from a fascinating mind." - Kirkus
A compelling and original novel exploring the imaginative territory surrounding the life and works of one of Japan's outstanding modern writers (author of 'Rashōmon' and 'In a Bamboo Grove'), who was active during the turbulent Taishō period (1912-1926 (including the 1923 earthquake)), and who killed himself at the age of 35 in 1927.
"David Peace not only lays bare the psyche of an era in which Japan came of age as a modern nation, he gives us a stunning, intense, profound and moving portrait of the life and death of a great writer." - Japan Times
"David Peace writes the boldest and most original British fiction of his generation." - New York Times
>> David Mitchell talks with David Peace.
Ten stories and two novellas displaying Shriver's sharp eye for the dynamics of power relations, here all hinging upon the ownership of property as real estate and property as stuff. What does it mean to own? What does it mean to be owned?
"A phenomenal collection, assured and entertaining." - The Guardian
Re-reading The Golden Notebook in her thirties, shortly after Doris Lessing's death, Lara Feigel discovered that Lessing spoke directly to her as a woman, a writer, and a mother in a way that no other novelist had done. At a time when she was dissatisfied with the conventions of her own life, Feigel was enticed by Lessing's vision of freedom. Studying Lessing further helped her to change her own life and to write this dazzling book of forensic intensity.
"The most intriguing and certainly the bravest work of literary scholarship I have ever read." - Deborah Levy
A collection of surreal stories, springing from the author's research into the doomed love affair bertween painter Rita Angus and composer Douglas Lilburn.
Beautifully written (and devastatingly funny) lyric essays, largely concerning the conditions that make literature (the writing of it and the reading of it) impossible (or nearly so), especially the conditions that apply to the particular woman living in a Kansas City apartment and writing these confessions.
"In this textual hybrid of rhythmic lyric prose and essayistic verse, visual artist and poet Boyer faces the material and philosophical problems of writing—and by extension, living—in the contemporary world. Boyer attempts to abandon literature in the same moments that she forms it, turning to sources as diverse as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the acts of sewing and garment production, and a book on happiness that she finds in a thrift store. Her book, then, becomes filled with other books, imagined and resisted.” - Publishers' Weekly
"Some of the most wonderful writing I’ve read on happiness occurs in these pages." - 3AM
>> Read an extract.
A stunning vast set of large-format images recording instances of skilled and unskilled labour around the world, and of the men, women and children who are responsible for the production of the goods upon which a consumer society depends. Moving, exquisite and inherently political.
In 1956, Sudan gained Independence from Britain. On the brink of a promising future, it instead descended into civil war and conflict, including the crisis in Darfur that has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and driven many more from their homes. When the 1989 coup brought a hard-line Islamist regime to power, Jamal Mahjoub's family were among those who fled. Almost twenty years later, he returned to a country on the brink of rupture.
"I am entering the frozen land, although to which country it belongs I cannot say." A middle-aged man must drive alone from Belfast to Sunderland to collect his sick son from university. The world is clogged in snow as he makes his way not only towards his son but towards the tragedy that lies, almost unfaceable, in the past.
"The Belfast Turgenev. One of the truest observers of life." - Big Issue
"The voice of a middle-aged everyman reflecting on his wife and children recalls that of Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones. Park takes this emotional terrain of parenthood as both his setting and his subject, and creates something exhilaratingly brave and powerful from its jagged peaks and troughs." - Guardian
Full of colour and fun facts, this book is the ideal way to introduce children to the world of plants. Matches Creaturepedia.
In 1946 George Orwell wrote an essay ‘Why I Write’, in which he described some events that marked his development towards becoming a writer and outlined what he saw were the four main motives for writing: ‘Sheer egoism’, ‘Aesthetic enthusiasm’, ‘Historical impulse’ and ‘Political purpose’. He explained that he would not naturally have become a political writer had circumstances not demanded it. Responding to this essay but contrasting the bluntness of its assertions with a subtler and less direct approach, Deborah Levy, who re-emerged from undeserved obscurity when she was shortlisted for the 2011 Booker Prize for Swimming Home, takes Orwell’s four ‘motives’ as titles for pieces of memoir: of her childhood in South Africa (where her father was imprisoned for five years as a member of the ANC); of her teenage years in England, wishing to ‘belong’; and of a time she spent in the off-season at a small mountain hotel in Majorca, despondent, wondering how to deal with things she didn’t want to think about and doubting her ability to get her writing out into the world. As she talks with a Chinese shopkeeper, another displaced character, over dinner, she comes to some resolve: “To become a writer I had to learn to interrupt, to speak up, to speak a little louder, and then louder, and then to just speak in my own voice which is not loud at all”. New edition.
Two boys grow up in a poor neighbourhood of Toronto, sons of a Trinidadian immigrant, assailed from all sides by many sorts of hopelessness.
"A brilliant, powerful elegy from a living brother to a lost one, yet pulsing with rhythm, and beating with life." - Marlon James
"I love this novel. Riveting, composed, charged with feeling, Brother surrounds us with music and aspiration, fidelity and beauty." - Madeleine Thien
A passionate case for the study of history and for importance of historical fact in a 'post-truth' world.
An impassioned collection of essays and poetry from Claudia Rankine, Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, Jericho Brown, Carol Anderson, Edwidge Denticat and others responding to James Baldwin's pivotal 1963 The Fire Next Time. What has been achieved? Why is there so far still to go?
Everything a young oceanographer needs to know: what lives where in the ocean and why. Attractively presented, full of detail, and a companion volume to The Big Book of Bugs and The Big Book of Beasts.
What happens to a young film student when he finds himself immersed in the depths of the Japanese avant-garde arts scene in the 1970s? How does he re-examine his cultural, aesthetic and social preconceptions when faced with what at first seem contradictions? What is it like to perform butoh? Interesting and unexpected.
>> Find out more.
>> Buruma performed with the Dairakudakan butoh company.
A novel giving insight in the world of women in the fourteenth century from the author of The Anchoress. London, 1321. In a small stationer's shop in Paternoster Row, three people are drawn together around the creation of a magnificent illuminated book, a Book of Hours. Even though the commission seems to answer the aspirations of each one of them, their own desires and ambitions threaten its completion. As each struggles to see the book come into being, it will change everything they have understood about their place in the world.
Dunn set off to the remotest corners of the British Isles to find all the native species of orchid. He succeeded, but he found out a lot about other orchid hunters and about the flowers themselves on the way.
"A wonderful book." - Robert Macfarlane
In the 19th century, swimming was exclusively the domain of men, and access to pools was a luxury limited by class. Women were allowed to swim in the sea, as long as no men were around, but even into the 20th century they could be arrested and fined if they dared dive into a lake. It wasn't until the 1930s that women were finally granted equal access. Part social history, part memoir, Swell uncovers a world of secret swimming in the face of these exclusions and shines a light on the `swimming suffragettes' who made equal access possible. It is also the story of her own realisation of the importance and meaning of swimming for herself.
>> A selection of books exploring the relationship between swimming and thought.
Key concepts on capital's role in the creation of false needs from Marx's chapter on money in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1844) have been illustrated in the form of an unsetlling concertinaed double-sided freize drawing inspiration from Bosch.
>> How the book came about.
Meet 15 boats and ships and learn what keeps them so busy. Also learn what those flags mean. An appealing board book.
Edible science! If you can follow a recipe you can learn about science. Ideal for children (and other people too).
>> Nanogirl is a good name for a superhero.
Ponti by Sharlene Teo $35
A novel of many stories, running from the late 1960s into the near future and capturing the accumulating pressures of life in Singapore, mother-daughter rifts, teenage angst and cult movies.
"Remarkable. Teo's characters glow with life and humour and minutely observed desperation." - Ian McEwan
An interesting account of the life and concerns of the woman after whom is named Australia's premier literary award.
A graphic distillation of the man and the band by the artist responsible for Nick Cave: Mercy on me.
"A complex, chilling and completely bizarre journey into Cave World." - Nick Cave
>> Get down, get down.
When Circle thinks that Square's blocks are sculptures, she asks him to make a sculpture of her. He doesn't know how. Is he a genius?
>> Trailer.
>> Square has also met Triangle.
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