Is it actually possible to be original? The narrator of our Book of the Week—Dead Souls by Sam Riviere—meets a poet in a bar who has been cast out of poetry circles (twice) for plagiarism, and who presents the narrator (and us) with a wonderful seven-hour monologue full of bitterness, inventiveness, and devastating humour. 
>>Read Thomas's review. 
<<Read an excerpt. 

>>Read another excerpt. 
>>Mixed feelings towards poetry. 

>>"Combines meticulous analysis with despairing intimacy."
>>Crimes against originality. 
>>On plagiarism, social media, and conspiracy theories. 
>>A profound experience of poetry? 
>>Why poetry? Why the novel? 
>>Why has Riviere plagiarised the book's title from Gogol (or vice-versa)? 
>>Dead Souls live.   
>>Read the book!

 

>> Read all Thomas's reviews.

Dead Souls by Sam Riviere    {Reviewed by THOMAS} “Poets are the most dangerous and megalomaniacal of all types of writers, and writers are the most dangerous and megalomaniacal of all types of people, the old poet said,” writes poet Sam Riviere in Dead Souls, a novel that is a satire, that is not the word, an evisceration of the poetry scene, so to call it, under late capitalism. The creative industries, as they have the misfortune too often to be called, in our time as in the very-near-to-our-time world of the novel, are, of course, focussed on industrial production, their cultural products, so to call them, quantified and qualified, if that is the right way to put it, on scales of popularity and originality, vacuous measures, the whole writing enterprise is futile, really, other than as a means of pointing out how futile it is, which Riviere does, incidentally, rather well. Dead Souls is narrated by the editor of a poetry journal or some such but, after the first pages, the book is entirely given over to the narrator’s verbatim reporting of the seven-hour monologue of renegade poet Solomon Wiese, delivered to the narrator in the poet-infested Travelodge Bar over one night during London’s so-called Festival of Culture. Riviere not only emulates Thomas Bernhard in nesting the narrative, so to call it, in often several layers of reported speech, keeping his protagonist, so to call him, at a filtered remove from the reader, but also in the employment of long, looping, comma-rich sentences that take any thought to the point at which that thought, not to mention frequently sanity itself, is entirely exhausted. Riviere has a keen sense of the ridiculous, and a keen sense of how closely the ridiculous lies to the ordinary, a keen sense that in fact the ridiculous is only the ordinary logically extended, as you will affirm from your own experience. Having fallen foul of the algorithm QACS that measures a poem’s originality and therefore what we could call its market value, Wiese, branded a plagiarist (is it possible to be anything else?), withdraws to a provincial town, the population of which seems interested only in virtual buggy-racing, and amasses the output of several overlooked provincial poets, whose work he spontaneously regurgitates on his wildly popular return to the London scene (so to call it). For Wiese, it seems, poetic production is the releasing of unoriginal and mediocre material back into the nothingness where it belongs, the opposite or complement of inspiration, not that there is such a thing as inspiration, really, a relinquishment of thought. “It was this nothingness that had attracted him to poetry … the literal nothingness on the page, invading from the right margin, threatening to wipe out meaning entirely. Rather than making something, Solomon Wiese said, the writing of poetry was far more like deleting something, it was like pointing at something to make it disappear. … Poetry was the gradual replacement of things in the world with their absence.” Ultimately, Wiese falls again into disgrace, notwithstanding the ‘dead souls’ he has bought in the form of fake follower accounts on the poetry social media platform Locket—in much the same way that Chichikov purchases for his intended advancement the identities of serfs who have died since the last census in Gogol’s novel of the same name (does this make Gogol an anticipatory plagiarist of Riviere?). Riviere’s book is full of bitter invention, of devastating humour, of the skewering of anything and anyone skewerable, of exquisite panic. It will amuse you to the point of despair. Although, of course, everything that is wrong with the poetry world, so to call it, is wrong also with the wider world of other concerns, Riviere does have a special affinity for the poetic calling: “Detach yourself from this terrible pastime that will lead only to ruin. It will never please you or anyone you care about, it will never make you happy, it will simply become the basis and means of recording your own unhappiness, the old poet said.”

 

>> Read all Stella's reviews.

Liberté by Gita Trelease   {Reviewed by STELLA} The French Revolution meets magic in the sequel to Enchantée. Gita Trelease’s Liberté pitches us back into the world of the compelling heroine Camille Durbonne. Living in relative safety with her sister Sophie in Paris, she has gambled and won against the court of Versailles and a sinister powerful magician. From the streets of poverty, Camille almost sacrificed her sanity with the murderous dress and the power it gave her, the sisters have survived and risen in the ranks inheriting a beautiful (if enchanted) home and independence. A career as a milliner for Sophie and a writer (following in the footsteps of her printing press father) for Camille. Yet Paris is unsettled and the people are rising. What should be the end of heartache and danger for the two sisters is anything but! Magic has a role to play despite Camille’s desire to keep it at bay. When she witnesses a flower girl’s harassment at the hands of a gentleman, she gets involved with a group of streetsmart girls who live by their wits and skills. When the girls are threatened with eviction from the makeshift home they have built under the bridge by the Seine, Camille uses her writing skills and her printing press to woo the people to the girls’ cause and pressure the authorities to halt the destruction of their home. Surprisingly her ploy begins to work, but at the edges of this success is a question nagging at her and doubt about her abilities gnaws at her. Can she repress her magic, even if she wishes to? It doesn’t help that her house seems to have a mind of its own, opening and closing off parts of itself, calling to her with whispers and bangs to get her attention. Yet the real threat lies outside —  in the words of the King, desperate to hold onto power, and in the actions of the people, hungrier and increasingly determined to seek change. But who do they turn on in their hour of despair? The magicians! Camille and her friends are in dire straits. France is no longer safe and the magicians and those that love magic must think on their feet, and quickly, if they want to save their necks (literally). Meeting in magical spaces (enchantments built over centuries to hide magicians and ward away enemies), they make a plan to escape. The only problem is they need a book, and that book is hidden, along with several vials of tears — sorrow is the necessary ingredient to become momentarily invisible. In Enchantée, Camille is burdened by her magic. Her sister is wary of it and her lover, Lazare, is troubled by its power. Yet in Liberté, to be truly free, she needs to embrace it. Is it possible to survive and keep those she loves close to her? Can Camille retain herself as she slips back into the dark edges of enchantment, and will words make her safe or put her in mortal danger? An excellent sequel to Enchantée — just as much adventure, romance and daring.

 NEW RELEASES

From the Centre, A writer's life by Patricia Grace             $40

Patricia Grace begins her remarkable memoir beside Hongoeka Bay. It is the place she has returned to throughout her life, and fought for, one of many battles she has faced. This book provides special insight into the life of this important author. "It was when I first went to school that I found out that I was a Maori girl. I found that being different meant that I could be blamed." 

The Mysterious Correspondent: New stories by Marcel Proust        $37

Throughout Proust's life, nine of his short stories remained unseen-the writer never spoke of them. Why did he choose not to publish them along with the others? One possible answer is that he was developing his themes in preparation for In Search of Lost Time; another is that the stories were too audacious—too near to life—for the censorious society of the time. 

>>A whiff of scandal. 

Taking a Long Look: Essays on culture, literature, and feminism in our time by Vivian Gornick           $43

For nearly fifty years, Vivian Gornick’s essays, written with her characteristic clarity of perception and vibrant prose, have explored feminism and writing, literature and culture, politics and personal experience. Drawing on writing from the course of her career, Taking a Long Look illuminates one of the driving themes behind Gornick’s work: that the painful process of understanding one’s self is what binds us to the larger world. In these essays, Gornick explores the lives and literature of Alfred Kazin, Mary McCarthy, Diana Trilling, Philip Roth, Joan Didion, and Herman Melville; the cultural impact of Silent Spring and Uncle Tom’s Cabin; and the characters you might only find in a New York barber shop or midtown bus terminal. Even more, Taking a Long Look brings back into print her incendiary essays, first published in the Village Voice, championing the emergence of the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s.

“We all talk the talk about public intellectuals nowadays. Vivian Gornick walks the walk. The essays in Taking a Long Look could not be more direct, more authoritative, more alive with the pleasures of discovery or alert to the ambiguities of argument. Whether writing literary or political criticism, memoir, or feminist polemic, her mastery is assured.” —George Scialabba
>>An interview with Gornick. 

Lonely Castle in the Mirror by Mizuki Tsujimora            $37

How can you save your friend's life if she doesn't want to be rescued? In a tranquil neighbourhood of Tokyo, seven teenagers wake to find their bedroom mirrors are shining. At a single touch, they are pulled from their lonely lives to a wondrous castle filled with winding stairways, watchful portraits and twinkling chandeliers. In this new sanctuary, they are confronted with a set of clues leading to a hidden room where one of them will be granted a wish. But there's a catch—if they don't leave the castle by five o'clock, they will be punished. As time passes, a devastating truth emerges—only those brave enough to share their stories will be saved.

The Little Ache: A German notebook by Ian Wedde           $30

In Berlin and the north of Germany around Kiel, Wedde's nineteenth-century ancestors whisper to him amid the clamour of history and the pleasures of daily life. Wedde wrote these poems while researching his novel The Reed Warbler. 

>>Find out about The Reed Warbler. 

I am an Island by Tamsin Calidas           $37
When Tamsin Calidas first arrives on a remote island in the Scottish Hebrides, it feels like coming home. Disenchanted by London, she and her husband left the city and high-flying careers to move the 500 miles north, despite having absolutely no experience of crofting, or of island life. It was idyllic, for a while. But as the months wear on, the children she'd longed for fail to materialise, and her marriage breaks down, Tamsin finds herself in ever-increasing isolation. Injured, ill, without money or friend she is pared right back, stripped to becoming simply a raw element of the often harsh landscape. But with that immersion in her surroundings comes the possibility of renewal. 

Six by Six: Short stories by New Zealand's best writers edited by Bill Manhire         $40
Katherine Mansfield, Frank Sargeson, Maurice Duggan, Janet Frame, Patricia Grace, Owen Marshall. First published in 1989, this is a new edition of what remains an excellent introduction to New Zealand short story practice in the twentieth century. 

The Benjamin Files by Frederic Jameson         $43

Jameson offers a comprehensive new reading of all of Walter Benjamin's major works and a great number of his shorter book reviews, notes and letters. Its premise is that Benjamin was an anti-philosophical, anti-systematic thinker whose conceptual interests also felt the gravitational pull of his vocation as a writer. What resulted was a coexistence or variety of language fields and thematic codes which overlapped and often seemed to contradict each other: a view which will allow us to clarify the much-debated tension in his works between the mystical or theological side of Benjamin and his political or historical inclination.  

Our Lady of the Nile by Scholastique Mukasonga            $23

Parents send their daughters to Our Lady of the Nile to be molded into respectable citizens, and to escape the dangers of the outside world. In the elite school run by white nuns, the young ladies learn, eat, sleep and gossip together. Fifteen years prior to the 1994 Rwandan genocide, the girls try on their parents' preconceptions and attitudes, transforming the lycee into a microcosm of the country's mounting racial tensions and violence. In the midst of the interminable rainy season, everything unfolds behind the closed doors of the school: friendship, curiosity, fear, deceit, and persecution.

Models of the Mind: How physics, engineering and mathematics have shaped our understanding of the brain by Grace Lindsay        $37

The brain is made up of 85 billion neurons, which are connected by over 100 trillion synapses. For more than a century, a diverse array of researchers has been trying to find a language that can be used to capture the essence of what these neurons do and how they communicate - and how those communications create thoughts, perceptions and actions. The language they were looking for was mathematics, and we would not be able to understand the brain as we do today without it. In Models of the Mind, computational neuroscientist Grace Lindsay explains how mathematical models have allowed scientists to understand and describe many of the brain's processes, including decision-making, sensory processing, quantifying memory, and more.

Empireland: How imperialism has shaped modern Britain by Sathnam Sanghera           $50

 "Sanghera’s impassioned and deeply personal journey through Britain’s imperial past and present. The empire, he argues, still shapes British society – its delusions of exceptionalism, its immense private and public wealth, the fabric of its cities, the dominance of the City of London, even the entitled and drunken behaviour of British expats and holidaymakers abroad. Yet the British choose not to see this: wilful amnesia about the darker sides of imperialism may be its most pernicious legacy. Moving effortlessly back and forth between history and journalism, Sanghera connects the racial violence and discrimination of his childhood in 1970s and 80s Wolverhampton with the attitudes and methods previously used to impose empire and white supremacy across the world – and still perpetuated in British fantasies of global leadership. Both deliberately and unconsciously, the empire was “one of the biggest white supremacist enterprises in the history of humanity”, and it still corrupts British society in countless ways. Sanghera’s unflinching attempt to understand this process, and to counter the cognitive dissonance and denial of Britain’s modern imperial amnesia, makes for a moving and stimulating book that deserves to be widely read." —Guardian

Talking Heads by Alan Bennett           $37

Alan Bennett sealed his reputation as the master of observation with this series of twelve groundbreaking monologues, originally filmed for BBC Television. At once darkly comic, tragically poignant and wonderfully uplifting, Talking Heads is widely regarded as a modern classic. This new edition, which contains the original complete collection of Talking Heads, as well as his earlier monologue, A Woman of No Importance, contains some of Bennett's finest work.
>>Two Besides adds two more monologues to the series. 

>>Watch the monologues.

The Island Child by Molly Aitken           $23

Twenty years ago, Oona left the Irish island of Inis for the very first time. A wind-blasted rock of fishing boats and turf fires, where girls stayed in their homes until they became mothers themselves, the island was a gift for some, a prison for others. Oona was barely more than a girl, but promised herself she would leave the tall tales behind and never return. The Island Child tells two stories: of the girl who grew up watching births and betrayals, storms and secrets, and of the adult Oona, desperate to find a second chance, only to discover she can never completely escape. As the strands of Oona's life come together, in blood and marriage and motherhood, she must accept the price we pay when we love what is never truly ours.

On Violence and On Violence Against Women by Jacqueline Rose          $33

Is violence always gendered and if so, always in the same way? What is required of the human mind when it grants itself permission to do violence? On Violence and On Violence Against Women is a timely and urgent agitation against injustice, a challenge to radical feminism and a meaningful call to action.

The Bilingual Brain, And what it tells us about the science of language by Albert Costa         $26

Over half of the world's population is bilingual and yet few of us understand how this extraordinary, complex ability really works. How do two languages co-exist in the same brain? What are the advantages and challenges of being bilingual? How do we learn - and forget - a language?

Watermarks: Life, death and swimming by Lenka Janiurek          $28

Lenka Janiurek's story really begins after the death of her mother when she was a small child, and speaks of the men who came to define her life; she is the daughter of a Polish immigrant father, the sister of five brothers, the wife of one husband, the lover of several men, and the mother of two more. Her memoir speaks of identity and trying to find your place in a country that isn't your own, within a family that doesn't feel like your own. This remarkable book traces Janiurek's journey from the UK to Eastern Europe, from the 1960s to the present day. However, across the years, she remains haunted by the rage, addiction and despair of the men she is closest to. Alongside these challenges, she develops a powerful connection with the natural world, particularly water, which provides her with strength and joy.

Nostalgia by Mircea Cărtărescu           $26

A dreamlike novel of memory and magic, Nostalgia turns the underbelly of Communist Bucharest into a place of strange enchantments. Here a man plays increasingly death-defying games of Russian Roulette, a child messiah works his magic in the tenements, a young man explores gender boundaries, a woman relives her youth and an architect becomes obsessed with the sound of his new car horn — with unexpected consequences. 

"Gripping, impassioned, unexpected." —Los Angeles Times

Words Fail Us: In defence of disfluency by Jonty Claypole            $37

What if hyper-fluency is not only unachievable but undesirable? Jonty Claypole spent fifteen years of his life in and out of extreme speech therapy. From sessions with child psychologists to lengthy stuttering boot camps and exposure therapies, he tried everything until finally being told the words he'd always feared: 'We can't cure your stutter.' Those words started him on a journey towards not only making peace with his stammer but learning to use it to his advantage. Here, Claypole argues that our obsession with fluency could be hindering, rather than helping, our creativity, authenticity and persuasiveness. Exploring other speech conditions, such as aphasia and Tourette's, and telling the stories of the 'creatively disfluent' — from Lewis Carroll to Kendrick Lamar — Claypole explains why it's time for us to stop making sense, get tongue tied and embrace the life-changing power of inarticulacy.
"Jonty Claypole's book is timely, thoughtful, rich in fact and personal anecdote, and looks to a more enlightened, speech-diverse future." —David Mitchell

Ceramic: Art and civilisation by Paul Greenhalgh        $66

The story of ceramics is the story of human civilisation. This book traces both the utilitarian and the ornamental developments in the use of clay, from the most ancient examples to those of the present. 

 

BOOKS @ VOLUME #236 (2.7.21)

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>> Read all Stella's reviews.

We Run the Tides by Vendela Vida     {Reviewed by STELLA} Eulabee lives in Sea Cliff, a coastal neighbourhood of San Fransisco with an enviable view of the Golden Gate. She attends a private all-girls school and is part of a group of teenage girls with her best friend, the enchanting Maria Fabiola, at its centre. All is perfect and desirable, on the surface. Yet the fog that rolls in, literally, over the bay, and metaphorically over the teens, obscuring and confusing the landscape, of the neighbourhood and the girls' behaviour, is quietly threatening. In We Run the Tides, the girls own the streets: they know who lives where and why, who the strange ones are, and what goes on behind closed doors in the skimpiest sense. What it hides, as the girls come to discover as they move through that time between child and adulthood, is both blindingly obvious and indeterminately deceptive: a vagueness that can’t be resolved with the lifting of the murk. Life is golden for Eulabee: her mother, a nurse and her father, an antique dealer, who scored their home through hard work and good fortune — theirs was the doer-upper in the street, a warm, culturally rich home; she has the best friend with a ‘laugh that sounded like a reward’, and is free to enjoy her privileged life. As adolescence raises her head and the gang of girls shift around each other in different patterns, the blinkers slowly lift. Shifts overlaid by the landscape, the tides that rise and fall, creating beauty as well as danger. An incident on the way to school will change her relationship with Maria Fabiola in a way she could never have imagined. Perception is everything, and what one sees and another does not escalates a situation from the trivial to the dramatic, not helped by the enchanting Maria Fabiola and her penchant for attention and excitement. Under this coming-of-age story are deeper issues of coming womanhood, body image and sexual awakening, deception, pretension and power. A missing girl and a body on the beach shake the neighbourhood at its core. Against this backdrop, Eulabee, now isolated and confused after being ousted from the group, edges towards a new understanding of herself and a realisation that her best friend is not the girl she thought she was — and even meeting years later will reveal further truths that the teenage girl had failed to see. Vendela Vida’s compulsively attractive writing and vivid portrayal of growing up in 1980s San Francisco make We Run the Tides captivating and subtly played.

 

>> Read all Thomas's reviews.

Pitch Dark by Renata Adler   {Reviewed by THOMAS} He wanted the review to be a non-review. He wanted his reading of the work to be part of the work, but he wasn’t sure how this could be so. Maybe, though, his reading of the work is always the whole of the work, whatever the work, at least for him, how could it not be so, he thought. If he wrote about the work, is that, too, a part of the work, or is it another work, he wondered. He wanted everything to be about the work, in other words part of the work, but he had no idea, or only very little idea, about the limits of the work, so he didn’t know how to tell if this was so. He didn’t know how to proceed. Circumstances, he thought, are, as far as thinking about those circumstances goes at least, a set of information, he hoped this term was generous enough and without unwanted implication, circumstances are a set of information, but, in order to think about this information, or to make it available to thought, or, possibly, as a consequence of this process of thought, and, he thought, thought processes information, the information undergoes processing by thought just as animals undergo processing at the Alliance meat processing plant on the way the Richmond, a journey he seldom makes, but, anyway, in order to think about a set of information it is necessary to array it on a grammatical rack, for, he thought, it is grammar that determines how we think and not the content of the thoughts, and it is for this reason that he is more interested in novels for their punctuation than for their subjects, what novels are ‘about’ are seldom really what novels are about, or only superficially so at best. Pitch Dark by Renata Adler describes itself, or is described by her in it, or, rather, is described by the text’s putative author Kate Ennis in the text she has putatively written, the text which comprises the novel, as “a series of errors, first of love, then of officiousness, finally of language,” the language of the novel seemingly a means of access to a set of information that lies behind it, or before it, depending upon whether you are thinking spatially or temporally, spatially being presumably a metaphor in this case, though it is interesting that we tend to think that we are facing the future while referring to the past as what happened before, when what is before us is what we face, suggesting that really we are moving backwards into the future, facing the past, as in most novels, writer and reader both advancing with their backs towards the end of the book, sharing experiences in the past tense, always looking backwards though their backs are to the fore. The novel, this novel, Pitch Dark by Renata Adler, is, among other things, about how to write a novel about the set of information that comprises it. The book is about the telling of the story, not about the story as such. “Is it always the same story, then? Somebody loves and somebody doesn’t, or loves less, or loves somebody else.” The novel concerns, if that is the right word, the attempts of its protagonist, if that is the right word, to leave her lover of some years, or, possibly, also concerns her fear that her lover of some years will leave her, though, considering the fact that her lover has a marriage, home and life of his own, none of which depend upon her, the word ‘leave’ may be the wrong word. “But you are, you know, you were, the nearest thing to a real story to happen in my life,” she says. She has little else. The text is unravelled, threads leave off, snap, loop back, extraneous strands are caught in and peter out, really this is too much a metaphor and he is against metaphors, there is an extended section in which the protagonist, who has fled to Ireland flees Ireland, seemingly the only actions she takes or is capable of taking in the entire book, finding Ireland populated by characters who could well be minor characters from a Flann O’Brien novel caught off-guard between their appearances in that novel, caught unprepared at times when they have no role, resentful and perplexed at being so found, and by obnoxious ex-pats from America. She is more comfortable with her dissatisfaction, hopelessness and ennui than she is in taking action when such action is little more than exchanging a familiar dissatisfaction, hopelessness and ennui for one without the comfort of familiarity. Her identity is no more than the sum of her situation, the set of information that she attempts to make her way out of, or into, with her punctuation. Voices break off, or break in. “Wait a minute. Whose voice is this? Not mine. Not mine. Not mine.” Sometimes she is ‘she’ and sometimes ‘I’, she is uncertain of the degree of intimacy she has with us, or with her lover, her text is full of tentative commas, ambivalence, and a lack of direction or obvious goal, if, that is, something can be full of a lack. What could be more life-like, or like life, than that? The novel wonders how a novel treats the same set of information differently from any other way in which that set of information could be treated. Is the evidence, and are the proceedings, so to call them, of a novel anything like the proceedings of a court of law? What is the value of whose evidence in these proceedings, the proceedings either of a novel or the court? “The only ones permitted to bring the story to the court’s attention, the only storytellers, are the ones to whom the story happened, whom the facts befell. … The story is a dispositive for all stories that cannot be proven to be unlike it,” she writes, but all she has is a set of information that is an incomplete set, uncertain evidence, no context or statute, no precedent, no culpability that can be felt without sharing. “I look at you for signs of leaving me and find to my despair that one of us has already left. Maybe it’s me.” The ‘you’ addressed throughout, we realise, is the lover who she does not want to leave, in both senses in which that phrase can be read, the lover she wants at last to leave, or fears that she has lost, the lover whose attention she also wants to keep upon her. This ‘you’, though, also is the reader, who, like the lover, has a complete and separate life to which she is not essential, to which she is an aspirant rival. The lover and the reader spend some time, perhaps each evening, with her, intimately, she tries to hold them both with the text, but ultimately, she knows, both the door and the book will close as such things always close. “I understand that there must be others who are and always have been alone. In this way. They were never, how can I put this, going to be part of life. It is as though, going through a landscape, through the seasons, in the same general direction as everybody else, they never quite make it to the road. Whose voice is this? Not here. Not mine.”

 

Britta Teckentrup's beautiful and thoughtful book My Little Book of Big Questions is our Book of the Week this week. Do flowers, when they grow, feel the same as I do when I grow? Why am I afraid of what I don't know? What if winter never ends? How do birds see the world? Why do we always have to argue? Is the world inside or outside of me? Is it possible to understand the whole universe? Is it good to step out of line? Will we be enchanted and carried off into another world? Why do some people turn nasty when they are in a large group? Are dreams as true as reality? What exactly is the future? If I think long and hard, will I discover the meaning of life? Why are my thoughts going around in circles? Is it possible to think of nothing? Is it possible to be too happy? Does everyone ask the same questions? There are no answers in this book (just as well!), so it is the perfect launch-pad for the imagination or for discussion. Teckentrup's prints are exquisite and dream-like. 
>>Look through the book quickly here. 
>>Visit Britta Teckentrup's website. 
>>Living in two languages.
>>Buy a copy of My Little Book of Big Questions (we can gift-wrap and send anywhere).
>>Some other books by Britta Teckentrup. 

 NEW RELEASES

Hilma af Klint: The secret paintings edited by Sue Cramer            $55

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.

>>Have a look at this!

>>And this!

>>When you’re the target audience for the futurist paintings of a long-dead Swedish artist.

Batlava Lake by Adam Mars-Jones             $34

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

Sterling Karat Gold by Isabel Waidner             $38

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. 

Verge by Lidia Yuknavitch                $30

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. 

On Being an Artist by Michael Craig-Martin          $35

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.

The High House by Jessie Greengrass           $33

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

>>Read an extract. 

Unquiet by Linn Ullman            $26

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.

Stop the Tour! by Bill Nagelkerke           $20

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.

Endpapers: Uncovering a family story of books, war, Europe and home by Alexander Wolff               $40

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.

The Nightingale: Notes on a songbird by Sam Lee         $37

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. 

>>He likes blackbirds, too. 

Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again: Women and desire in the age of consent by Katherine Angel               $33

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? 

Little Parsley by Inger Hagerup             $20

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.

How We Learn: The new science of education and the brain by Stanislas Dehaene            $26

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.

The Republic of False Truths by Alaa Al Aswany           $33

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

The Block by Ben Oliver          $22

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. 

A Secret of Birds and Bone by Kiran Millwood Hargrave            $20

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. 

The Delusions of Crowds: Why people go mad in groups by William J. Bernstein            $37

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. 

Big Apple Bingo: A New York game by Sophie Blackall          $40

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.