A SCROLLABLE SELECTION OF NEW RELEASES
These books are all on the shelf now at VOLUME.
Three classic Soviet-era children's books by leading avant-garde writers and illustrators, newly translated.
Starting as a coming-of-age story, developing as a love story and ending as a ghost story, Kunzru's novel is also the story of black lives and black music stolen by the a mainstream culture eager to absorb the identities of its components.
"Part thriller, part literary horror novel; completely impossible to put down." - NPR
What price beauty? The nineteenth century chemical processes enabled a leap in the range of intense pigments available for both dress and decor. Unfortunately, many of these pigments were highly toxic. Scheele's green and Schweinfurt green, pigments created using arsenic, were used to produce millions of rolls of vibrant wallpaper, which had a devastating effect on the inhabitants of the rooms they decorated, to say nothing of the factory workers. Hawksley's fascinating account is accompanied by the most stunning reproductions of ansenical wallpaper (not printed with arsenic (though that would be interesting)).
>> Was Jane Austen poisoned by arsenic?
This stupendously illustrated piece of speculative examines the suburban family home as an economic and environmental calamity and extrapolates a series of scenarios which highlight issues already at play, both in 'McMansions' and ordinary homes. The fictiontakes the form of a series of plans and interventions in iconic bucolic artworks.
>> See more here.
Thirteen poetic riddles as only Manhire could write them, with a CD of music by Griffin and photographs by Peryer.
>> An interview with Manhire.
"Blood Ties is a journey through a lifetime that is a parable of settlement, one man’s response to the challenge of living responsibly and with sensitivity to the question of where we are and what we must be. There are strong ancestors throughout, but, at the same time and very distinctively, the urgent sound of this river of poetry is all this fine poet’s own." - Patrick Evans
Events and addictions conspire to send Maya's life into a chaotic spiral.
"The problem with Jade Sharma's novel is that it ends. The narrator, Maya, is a hot mess with zero percent of her shit together, and yet as I got to know her through the Sharma's inventive narrative voice, I saw her as - or perhaps wanted her to be - my friend." - The Rumpus
Lured to Germany by her crush on two young men (one of whom, Franz Kafka, wasn't even German), Schuman learned a lot about the language and the people, but (possibly) even more about herself through her experiences both personal and literary.
The definitive book on this important brutalist architect and designer.
>> Preview the book here (or come into the shop).
>> Glance through his work here.
When Mahony returns to Mulderrig, a speck on Ireland's west coast, he brings only a photograph of his long-lost mother and a determination to do battle with the lies of his past. No one - living or dead - will tell Mahony what happened to the teenage mother who abandoned him as a baby, despite his certainty that more than one of the villagers knows the sinister truth.
"A sort of Under Milk Wood meets The Third Policeman meets Agatha Christie. Lushly imagined, delightfully original and very, very funny." - M.L. Stedman
>> Find out more.
Unimaginable loss is treated in prose of delicate poetic texture in this subtle novel.
"This journey across the boundaries of form and genre, to write about what is un-write-aboutable, is a smart maneuver - it permits the reader to experience what has been written about over and over in a way that is fresh and absorbing in its difference." - NPR
How does a lonely teenager in recession Ireland with a crazed alcoholic mother cope with reality? He escapes to the Swamp, a mysterious rising pool of water on the outskirts of town and befriends a girl as lost as himself but with even less regard for reality.
"Fast and urgent and full of feeling and savage humour and all kinds of tenderness." - Kevin Barry
Manguel tags along with Dante and converses with Hume, Lewis Carroll, Rachel Carson and Socrates as he investigates the quality that drives the expansion of human knowledge but has also been the death of cats. Why have we evolved this faculty?
>> Manguel talks at our London branch.
I uproot one
of the ladies and use her to beat back a
path through the others, until they look
almost young again in the freshness
of their bruises. When I get back to the
pond most of the spinsters have frosted
in the ground. The children are there
wearing new fur coats. One is putting logs
on a fire, while the other pulls dinner
from the snow.
"This book will push you down a marble staircase, and then cheerfully bring you a couple of aspirin." — Hera Lindsay Bird
An innovative novelistic picture of New York through the creative minds of Walt Whitman, Robert Moses, Robert Mapplethorpe and Edmund White. Now in softcover.
"Beautiful, kaleidoscopic. Everyone should be watching Megan Bradbury from now on." - Eimear McBride
"Megan Bradbury's daring, urgent novel is a thrilling act of psychic and historical excavation, a profound examination of the relationship between urban spaces and the making of art. A moving portrait of lives linked across time, Everyone is Watching is an important addition to the literature of New York." - Garth Greenwell
>>> We have the lovely hardback edition still available.
Not only does this large-format picture book contain a large amount of information about bees (some useful; some curious), it is irresistibly illustrated.
When Kapka Kassabova was a child, the border zone between Bulgaria, Turkey and Greece was rumoured to be an easier crossing point into the West than the Berlin Wall, so it swarmed with soldiers, spies and fugitives. On holidays close to the border on the Black Sea coast, she remembers playing on the beach, only miles from where an electrified fence bristled, its barbs pointing inwards toward the enemy: the holiday-makers, the potential escapees. Today, this densely forested landscape is no longer heavily militarised, but it is scarred by its past. Kassabova sets out on a journey to meet the people of this triple border - Bulgarians, Turks, Greeks - and the latest wave of refugees fleeing conflict further afield.
Alone in space on a derailed mission to Venus from which he was never expected to return, a Czech cosmonaut comes to doubt his marriage, his memory, his heroism, his family history and his sanity.
>> Shades of Omon Ra?
An expose of the killing of civilians in Afghanistan by the New Zealand SAS, and of a cover-up that implicates the highest levels of government.
Multifaceted short short stories riffing in all sorts of ways on life in modern Bangkok.
"Evocative, erudite and often very funny." - Guardian
A wide survey of disruptive protest in the US in the last forty years, drawing parallels between the efforts of environmentalists, black and indigenous activist, feminists and radical queers. What effect has protest had on shaping society, and what are the potentials for protest now?
Moscow, 1953. Three secret policemen arrive in the middle of the night to arrest Solomon Shimonovich Levinson, an actor from the defunct State Jewish Theater. But Levinson, though an old man, is a veteran of past wars, and he proceeds to assemble a ragtag group to help him enact a mad-brilliant plot: the assassination of Stalin (no less). While the setting is Soviet Russia, the backdrop is Shakespeare: A mad king has a diabolical plan to exterminate and deport his country's remaining Jews.
"Darkly playful and generous with quick insights into the vast weirdness of its landscape." - The Washington Post
"A brilliant novel that is at once surreally comic, suspenseful if slightly cracked and punctuated with eruptions of violence, but with a poignant ending . An extraordinary, rich and surprising tale of intrigue Paul Goldberg has been aptly compared to a whole constellation of Jewish literary geniuses Sholem Aleichem, Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, E.L. Doctorow, Michael Chabon and even the Coen brothers. Goldberg possesses a voice and vision that are entirely and uniquely his own." - The Jewish Journal
Not only shows you how to ferment, pickle and dry all manner of ingredients but shows you how ingredients so preserved can be used in all manner of delicious dishes.
Is productive disobedience necessary to avoid academic straightjacketing and overassessment, and to enable positive outcomes for students?
>> The case for disobedience in schools.
The world's oldest clowning organisation, Clowns International, has long kept an archive of eggs upon which clowns have registered their identity and make-up. This unusual and fascinating book accompanies images of the egg register with the professional and life stories of the clowns to whom the eggs refer.
>>> Bring in the eggs!
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