NEW RELEASES
Af Klint is now widely regarded as one of the world's pioneers of 20th-century abstract art. Hidden from view for decades, as stipulated in her will, the startling re-discovery of af Klint's work has captured the imagination of contemporary audiences.
Pristina, Kosovo, 1999. Barry Ashton, recently divorced, has been deployed as a civil engineer attached to the Royal Engineers corps in the British Army. In an extraordinary feat of ventriloquism, Adam Mars-Jones constructs a literary story with a thoroughly unliterary narrator, and explores issues of masculinity, class and identity.
"No one inhabits character as intensely and subtly as Mars-Jones. Batlava Lake is therefore completely convincing as an everyman narrative – we know people exactly like Barry Ashton, and may even be exactly like him – but there’s a larger truth here too, about clashes of cultures and history, that make this an important and highly recommended book." —Lee Child
"Barry is a man with no friends and little sense of wonder, who’s better with things than with people, and who can’t see through the detail to what’s really going on. And when we finally find out what he’s been skirting around, it all fits together precisely, and we look back in wonder at how we got from there to here without being able to see the join. Mars-Jones, it turns out, is an expert engineer himself. And much better at people than poor old Barry." —John Self, Observer
Aspiring writer Sterling is arrested one morning, without having done anything wrong. Plunged into a terrifying and nonsensical world, Sterling — with the help of their three best friends — must defy bullfighters, football legends, spaceships, and Google Earth tourists in order to exonerate themselves and to hold the powers that be to account. Sterling Karat Gold is Kafka's The Trial written for the era of gaslighting, a surreal inquiry into the very real effects of state violence and coercion on gender-nonconforming, working-class, and Black bodies.
"A sublime, mesmerising feat. The world feels all the better for it." —Irenosen Okojie
"Sterling Karat Gold reminds me of nothing else. With atypical inventiveness Waidner steers us thorugh a marvellous spinning parade of matadors, red cards, time travel and cataclysm. A beautifully elegant miracle of a book." —Guy Gunaratne
>>Different doesn't need to be scary. It can be fun.
"A sublime, mesmerising feat. The world feels all the better for it." —Irenosen Okojie
"Sterling Karat Gold reminds me of nothing else. With atypical inventiveness Waidner steers us thorugh a marvellous spinning parade of matadors, red cards, time travel and cataclysm. A beautifully elegant miracle of a book." —Guy Gunaratne
>>Different doesn't need to be scary. It can be fun.
The landscape of the stories in Verge is peopled with characters who are innocent and imperfect, wise and endangered — an eight-year-old black-market medical courier, a restless lover haunted by memories of his mother, a teenage girl gazing out her attic window at a nearby prison — all of them wounded but grasping toward transcendence.
>>Monsters in the mirror.
>>Monsters in the mirror.
A wide ranging collection of vignettes and writings from the influential contemporary conceptual artist and painter. Craig-Martin reflects on the people, ideas and events that have shaped his professional life. In a series of short, entertaining episodes, he recounts his time studying under Josef Albers at Yale University School of Art alongside Chuck Close, Richard Serra and others; his memories of meeting personal heroes such as Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns and John Cage; and his surreal experience of staking out Christine Keeler at the height of the Profumo scandal. He recalls, too, his first tentative steps as an artist and emergence as a key figure of early conceptual art, and looks back on his achievements as a teacher at Goldsmiths, where he nurtured two generations of students, among them Damien Hirst and Sarah Lucas, earning himself the sobriquet "the godfather of the YBAs". Craig-Martin tackles controversial issues such as the fashionability of contemporary art, the enduring status of painting, the relevance of life drawing and practical skills, the qualities of art schools, the role of commercial dealers and the judgment of what is good and bad in art.
A cli-fi novel of the extraordinary and the everyday, The High House explores how we get used to change that once seemed unthinkable, how we place the needs of our families against the needs of others – and it asks us who, if we had to, we would save. Francesca is Caro’s stepmother, and Pauly’s mother. A scientist, she can see what is going to happen. The high house was once her holiday home; now looked after by locals Grandy and Sally, she has turned it into an ark, for when the time comes. The mill powers the generator; the orchard is carefully pruned; the greenhouse has all its glass intact. Almost a family, but not quite, they plant, store seed, and watch the weather carefully.
"Jessie Greengrass is a master observer of inter-human atmosphere. The High House is about the great crisis of our time but is an unconventional domestic drama performed on an intimate stage." —Max Porter
"The future imagined in this brave, important and exquisitely written novel is a frightening one. But even the darkest times are lit by moments of beauty and grace, and the reader is uplifted by Greengrass's conviction that salvation lies not in competing with one another to survive but in uniting to help those we love." —Sigrid Nunez
He is a renowned Swedish filmmaker and has a plan for everything. She is his daughter, by the actress he directed and once loved. Each summer of her childhood, the daughter visits the father at his remote Faro island home on the edge of the Baltic Sea. Now that she's grown up — a writer, with children of her own — and he's in his eighties, they envision writing a book together, about old age, language, memory and loss. She will ask the questions. He will answer them. The tape recorder will record. But it's winter now and old age has caught up with him in ways neither could have foreseen. And when the father is gone, only memories, images and words — both remembered and recorded — remain. And from these the daughter begins to write her own story, in the pages which become this book.
"Linn Ullmann has written something of beauty and solace and truth. I don't know how she managed to sail across such dangerous waters." —Rachel Cusk
>>Watch some films by Ingmar Bergman.
>>Watch some films by Ingmar Bergman.
The Springbok Tour held in New Zealand over 3 months in 1981 remains one of the most divisive periods in New Zealandâs recent history. Through his (fictional) diary entries, we learn about 13-year-old Martin Daly's experiences during the tour and his thoughts and feelings about the escalating conflict. His sister, Sarah, is out to stop the tour in protest against South Africa's racist apartheid system. His rugby-mad dad is equally determined that the tour should go ahead. Martin wishes the whole thing would simply go away. But a growing understanding of the issues helps him to stop sitting on the fence and choose a side.
In 2017, acclaimed journalist Alexander Wolff moved to Berlin to take up a long-deferred task: learning his family's history. His grandfather Kurt Wolff set up his own publishing firm in 1910 at the age of twenty-three, publishing Franz Kafka, Emile Zola, Anton Chekhov and others whose books would be burned by the Nazis. In 1933, Kurt and his wife Helen fled to France and Italy, and later to New York, where they would bring books including Doctor Zhivago, The Leopard and The Tin Drum to English-speaking readers. Meanwhile, Kurt's son Niko, born from an earlier marriage, was left behind in Germany. Despite his Jewish heritage, he served in the German army and ended up in an prisoner of war camp before emigrating to the US in 1948. As Alexander gains a better understanding of his taciturn father's life, he finds secrets that never made it to America and is forced to confront his family's complex relationship with the Nazis.
Every year, as darkness falls upon Northern hemisphere woodlands, the nightingale heralds the arrival of Spring. For thousands of years, its sweet song has inspired musicians, writers and artists around the world, from Germany, France and Italy to Greece, Ukraine and Korea. Conservationist, musician and folk expert Sam Lee tells the story of the nightingale. This book reveals in detail the bird's song, habitat, characteristics and migration patterns, as well as the environmental issues that threaten its livelihood.
>>Sings with nightingales.
>>Sings with nightingales.
Women are in a bind. In the name of consent and empowerment, they must proclaim their desires clearly and confidently. Yet sex researchers suggest that women's desire is often slow to emerge. And men are keen to insist that they know what women—and their bodies—want. Meanwhile, sexual violence abounds. How can women, in this environment, possibly know what they want? And why do we expect them to?
Hagerup's children's poems are known by heart by every Norwegian child, and this selection is now available in English, with suitably crazy illustrations by Paul Ren Gauguin.
The human brain is an extraordinary machine. Its ability to process information and adapt to circumstances by reprogramming itself is unparalleled, and it remains the best source of inspiration for recent developments in artificial intelligence. How We Learn finds the boundary of computer science, neurobiology, cognitive psychology and education to explain how learning really works and how to make the best use of the brain's learning algorithms — and even improve them — in our schools and universities as well as in everyday life.
General Alwany is a pious man who loves his family. He also tortures and kills enemies of the state. Under the regime of Hosni Mubarak, Egypt is gripped by cronyism, religious hypocrisy, and the oppressive military. Now, however, the regime faces its greatest crisis. The idealistic young from different backgrounds - engineers, teachers, medical students, and among them the general's daughter - have come together to challenge the status quo. Euphoria mounts as Mubarak is toppled and love blossoms across class divides, but the general and his friends mount a devastating counter-attack.
"An amazing portrait of fanaticism and cynicism among Egyptian powermongers." — Andre Aciman
In the sequel the the phenomenal The Loop, Luka is in prison again — but this time it's worse. He's in the Block, a place where reality and simulation start to blur. But an audacious breakout reunites Luka and his friends at last. Hiding out in the heart of the destroyed city, Luka realises the scale of their mission to defeat all-powerful AI, Happy. How can they stay hidden, let alone win the war? Old friends and new — including annoyingly cheerful companion drone, Apple-Moth — hold the key to their slim chance of victory.
>>Read Stella's review of The Loop.
>>Read Stella's review of The Loop.
In an Italian city ravaged by plague, Sofia’s mother carves beautiful mementoes from bones. But one day, she doesn’t return home. Did her work lead her into danger? Sofia and her little brother Ermin are sent to the convent orphanage but soon escape, led by an enigmatic new friend and their pet crow, Corvith. Together they cross the city underground, following clues in bones up to the towers of Siena, where – circled by magpies – the children find the terrible truth... From the author of The Girl of Ink and Stars.
Bernstein engages with mass delusion with curiosity and passion, but armed with the latest scientific research that explains the biological, evolutionary and psychosocial roots of human irrationality. Bernstein tells the stories of dramatic religious and financial mania in western society over the last 500 years - from the Anabaptist Madness that afflicted the Low Countries in the 1530s to the dangerous end-times beliefs that animate ISIS and pervade today's polarised nations; and from the South Sea Bubble to the Enron scandal and dot com bubbles of recent years.
Brood by Jackie Polzin $38
Meet Gloria, Gam Gam, Darkness, Miss Hennepin County, and their unlikely owner. Over the course of a single year, our nameless narrator heroically tries to keep her small brood of four chickens alive despite the seemingly endless challenges that caring for another creature entails. From the freezing nights of a brutal winter to a sweltering summer which brings a surprise tornado, she battles predators, bad luck, and the uncertainty of a future that may not look anything like the one she always imagined.
>>Is there something inherently funny about hens? See also Barn 8 by Deb Olin Unferth.
>>Pecking Order.
>>Pecking Order.
With ten 25-square bingo boards, 80 tokens, and 50 calling cards included, up to ten players of all ages can play this whimsically illustrated version of the beloved game. Visit New York from the comfort of your own home and keep your eyes peeled for the city's classic iconography, from pizza, bagels, and pigeons to the Chrysler Building, the Staten Island Ferry, and much more.
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