NEW RELEASES
These books arrived this week and are already feeling their way towards your shelves.
It's not easy being a tough guy. Sometimes things just don't work out. Sometimes tough guys can be frustrated and disappointed. But it's OK to show your feelings, even for tough guys.
Features 60 recipes, each with fascinating background text explaining the relationship between edible culture and its political, social economic and ethnic corollaries. The illustrations and the food are at once ugly and beautiful, attractive and repellent. A beautifully produced book that will possibly give you deeper insight into Soviet life than most histories.
Animals that no longer exist are just as fascinating as animals that still do. This beautifully illustrated book introduces us to some you'll know and some you won't, and describes many of their surprising quirks.
A companion volume to Amazing Animal Facts.
The process of compiling a dictionary is as fraught and dynamic as language itself. Stamper reveals the rich and complex world of lexicography and shows how problematic even the most simple words and their actions can be.
"As a writer, Kory Stamper can do anything with words: define them, split them, lump them, agglute them, and make them work for her every bit as ferociously and precisely as she works for them in her day job as a far from mild-mannered lexicographer at Merriam-Webster. You will never take a dictionary entry for granted again." - Mary Norris, bestselling author of Between You & Me: Confessions of a comma queen
Clothing has caused illness, injury, madness and death ever since it was adopted, but in some eras more than others. This well-illustrated volume explores the hazards, both of substance and of design and ponders the social forces that have exposed humans to intimate hazards, both known and unknown.
In the lead-up to Yuri Gagarin's first space flight, small robust stray dogs were plucked from the streets of Moscow and trained to endure gravitational pressure, low oxygen levels, a constipating diet, ungainly outfits and celebrity status before being launched into orbits from which some actually returned alive. This interesting book traces their history and also records the vast array of paraphernalia, from postcards to nightlights, designed to celebrate these remarkable dogs.
>> Can you tolerate this?
>> Was Ivan Ivanovich the model master?
>> Chernushka today.
Another set of very fine short stories for adults, telling of discomfiting encounters, unlooked-for connections and moments of isolation that span generations and decades.
"Each new translation proves a revelation of Jansson's literary astuteness." - Ali Smith
"Masterfully muted, their insights impactful but delayed. Fraile's stories, tightly controlled and peopled with scrupulously-rendered characters, offer a fine deviation from the giddy desperation of much contemporary literature. English readers are lucky to finally have the opportunity to read the Spanish master's crystalline work." - Iowa Review
"So little is said and so much is conveyed." - Ali Smith
Franz Kafka was an exceptional writer, not just in quality but in his qualities. He was also an exception to much of what has been thought of him since, or, rather, both as a writer and a person, he is compounded from exceptions, both to his literary and social milieu and to his own psychology. Kafka never lied but he did cheat in an exam, he liked to drink beer, he followed a fitness regime, he made presents for children, he devised, with his friend Max Brod, a series of on-the-cheap travel guides, he loved slapstick and he liked to be called Frank. Stach also provides a couple of plausible Kafka sightings in contemporary crowd photographs. Is that Kafka? Quite possibly, yes. Now in paperback.
You will like these.
Recovering from a plague that kills 90% of the world's female population and makes childbirth fatal for both infant and mother, an unnamed midwife sets out, disguised as a man, to find a place where she can live without fear.
All life forms on the planet move, faster or more slowly, towards death. How has life evolved to orient itself around its own demise? How can death be an evolutionary advantage? Could immortality ever arise through natural selection?
"Western liberal democracy is not yet dead but it is far closer to collapse than we may wish to believe. It is facing its gravest challenge since the Second World War. This time, we have conjured up the enemy from within. At home and abroad, America's best liberal traditions are under assault from its own president. We have put arsonists in charge of the fire brigade."
Seeing Trump and Le Pen as symptoms rather than causes of current malaise, Luce traces the rise of populism to its economic and political roots."
"Insightful and harrowing." - The New York Times
"The most wide-ranging, comprehensive and inclusive book on small-scale architecture ever published." Over 300 exemplars.
A beautifully presented intimation of the exploration of the world beneath the surface of New Zealand, an exploration still in its infancy.
Three New Zealanders moved to London and ended up opening a string of restaurants and teaching the English to be more relaxed about what they ate when. You can try this at home.
A touching graphic novel about a park bench and all the people who spend time upon it.
Distill's Lisbon's culture and history into 80 authentic and achievable recipes for food and drink of all kinds. Nicely presented.
The tsars looked on Siberia as creating the ultimate political quarantine from the contagions of revolution. Generations of rebels - republicans, nationalists and socialists - were condemned to oblivion thousands of kilometres from European Russia. Over the nineteenth century, however, these political exiles transformed Siberia's mines, prisons and remote settlements into an enormous laboratory of revolution.
In his 97 years, Steven Runciman managed not just to be a great historian of the Crusades and Byzantium, but Grand Orator of the Orthodox Church, a member of the Order of Whirling Dervishes, Greek Astronomer Royal and Laird of Eigg. His friendships, curiosities and plottings entangled him in a huge array of different artistic movements, civil wars, Cold War betrayals and, above all, the rediscovery of the history of the Eastern Mediterranean. He was as happy living in a remote part of the Inner Hebrides as in the heart of Istanbul. He was obsessed with historical truth, but also with tarot, second sight, ghosts and the uncanny.
"Very interesting person." - Orlando
"This is the finest single-volume history of Vietnam in English. It challenges myths, and raises questions about the republic’s political future." - Guardian
"Fresh and lively. Turner's life is given a vivid colour and depth as Moyle deftly interweaves his professional career with his private life. Moyle writes with sensitivity about individual pictures and series, and is good at explaining the context." - Jenny Uglow
>> The artist paints.
What is it to think of not only of ourselves having a mind but postulating the mind of another? Why do we make the assumptions we do about minds and the entities we attribute them to? Who and what has feelings and who and what does not?
Fitzpatrick tells her late husband's story: how he chanced upon a pit full of murdered Jews in the Latvian woods, avoided conscription into the Waffen-SS by going on a student exchange to Germany, survived the fire-bombing of Dresden, crossed into Denmark, became a member of the Heidelberg school of physics, moving to the US in the 1950s (which is where he met Fitzpatrick).
The author moved to rural France and acquired two pigs to rear for slaughter. Of course, she fell in love with them and began to grow reluctant to eat her friends.
An enjoyable and challenging strategic game. Maximise the size of your colour field while minimising those of your opponents.
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