NEW RELEASES (2.8.24)
New books for a new month. Choose and read something new:
Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel by Yoko Tawada (translated from German by Susan Bernofsky) $36
Also available as Spontaneous Acts $35
Patrik, who sometimes calls himself ‘the patient’, is a literary researcher living in Berlin, a city just coming back to life after lockdown. Though his beloved opera houses are open again, Patrik cannot leave the house and hardly manages to get out of bed. He is supposed to give a paper at a conference in Paris, on the poetry collection Threadsuns by Paul Celan, but he can't manage to get past the first question on the registration form: "What is your nationality?" As Patrik attempts to find a connection in a world that constantly overwhelms him, he meets a mysterious stranger. The man's name is Leo-Eric Fu, and somehow he already knows Patrik… Yoko Tawada's novel unfolds like a lucid dream in which the solace of friendship, reading, conversation, music, of seeing and being seen weave a life together across decades, languages, and cultures, and reaches out to all of us who find meaning and even obsession in the words of those before us.
”A keen observer of cultural and linguistic dislocation, Tawada has absorbed a kind of anti-language from Celan, a deeply affecting, sui generis diction unmoored from nationality or obvious tradition." —Dustin Illingworth, New Left Review
"The varied characters in Tawada's work — from different countries, of different sexes and species — are united by the quality that Walter Benjamin describes as 'crepuscular': none has a firm place in the world, or firm, inalienable outlines." —Rivka Galchen, The New York Times Magazine
"Yoko Tawada conjures a world between languages. She is a master of subtraction, whose characters often find themselves stripped of language in foreign worlds." —Julian Lucas, The New Yorker
”Tawada’s Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel reads almost like a cautionary tale: this is what happens if you devote your life to poetry. Celan’s poems are Patrik’s only confidants. His girlfriend is long gone. A mysterious stranger, the trans-Tibetan angel of the title, lifts his spirits by seeking him out at a café with a gift: a German medical text that Celan once annotated on his quest for new language. This is Tawada's pandemic novel, which is never addressed directly—but it explains why so many buildings are closed, and why Patrik’s desire for connection has a hysterical, unresolved urgency.” —Dan Piepenbring, Harper's
"Tawada is interested in language at its most elusive or incomprehensible." —Natasha Wimmer, The New York Review of Books
Célina by Catherine Axelrad (translated from French by Philip Terry) $38
By the age of fifteen, Célina has lost her father to the sea, a brother to suicide, a sister to tuberculosis, her virginity to a wolfish man at the inn where she was waitressing, and the job at the inn when another servant informed on her. In the Channel Islands of the 1850s, Alderney is not yet the tourist paradise filled with luxury cars it is today. When the chance arises to leave and work in Hauteville House for the Victor Hugo household during their exile in Guernsey, it is Célina's first glimpse of a different kind of life. Axelrad sheds a new light on the complexity of Hugo’s persona, and on the sexual and class dynamics at play in the proprietary, yet strangely tender relationship between the maid and le grand homme. A fictional recreation based on Hugo’s Guernsey Diaries and on letters from his wife, Célina is a miniature literary monument to a forgotten life cut short.
”Pitch-perfect, and so light yet so profound. All of Axelrad's books have at their centre a silent, vulnerable young woman, but also one who is tough and resilient, totally unsentimental but deeply responsive and intelligent. How such a person emerges out of such apparent silence is the wonder of her work. Célina is as quiet and devastating a novel as I have read in a long time. Unforgettable.” —Gabriel Josipovici
”Seen through Célina’s eyes, told with her curiosity, her wonder, her sharp observations, what we witness unfolding here is not so much Victor Hugo’s life as that of the young narrator. We see the intelligence she brings to bear, playing her few cards just so in a time which may be the most patriarchal in our history: the nineteenth century. Catherine Axelrad describes a quiet young woman who nevertheless hears everything, sees everything, silently appraises her lovers, picks and chooses, and escapes submission in her own way. It’s a joyful read.” —Colombe Schneck
”Living in exile in the Channel Islands, the irrepressibly philandering author of Les Misérables went through what is called his ‘Chambermaid Period’. In this moving short novel, Catherine Axelrad gives us the great man and his retinue, his house and his mania for Gothic décor, the island and the threatening sea, all through the eyes of a chambermaid—not a fantasy maid, but the real girl from Alderney whose death in 1861 saddened the whole Hugolian establishment. The poverty, ill-health and exploitation of working folk and especially of the young girls who are brought to life here deepen the understanding of what Hugo’s great novel was really about. In this lively translation by Philip Terry, Axelrad’s portrait of a normal yet unique Victorian household seen from ‘downstairs’ is a true gem.” —David Bellos
”In this remarkable book Catherine Axelrad gives speech to a young woman born in poverty and almost lost to history. Célina is restored to life, emerging as lively, courageous, complex, witty, pragmatic, and joyful. There are moments of great tenderness and longing; despite her exploitation (for relations are often complicated, as Axelrad so subtly weaves), there is a real and delicate relation between her and her master, with whom she discovers the possibility of poetic language. Célina and Célina, woman and book, haunt me.” —Sharon Kivland
Ask Me Again by Clare Sestanovich $38
Eva meets Jamie by chance. She is sixteen, living in middle-class Brooklyn; he is the same age, but from the super-rich of upper Manhattan. She's observant, cautious, eager to seem normal; he's bold, mysterious, eccentric. Eva's family is warm and welcoming, but Jamie avoids going home to his. Despite having little in common, they instantly forge a deep friendship. As Eva goes off to college and falls in and out of love, Jamie drops out of school and is drawn toward radical experiments in politics and religion. Their separate spheres seem to be spiralling away from each other, but it soon becomes clear that they are both circling the same question: how do you define yourself and your beliefs in a divided and unjust world?
”Ask Me Again is a beautifully observed and deeply philosophical novel, which surprises and delights at every turn.” —Jenny Offill
”Rigorous, intensely observed, and brimming with the sort of elusive revelations that form the heartbeat of a life, Sestanovich's novel debut demonstrates a tremendous gift at rendering the texture of love, faith, and heartbreak with both subtlety and force. In her masterful hands, relationships condense, turn acute, and unfurl with symphonic grace across the individual arcs of characters that you can't help but carry with you long afterward.” —Alexandra Kleeman
A Radically Different World: Preparing for climate change by Jonathan Boston $18
Boston provides an urgent exploration of our future in the face of climate change. Focusing on the challenges of adaptation, Boston’s insightful analysis assesses the scale of impact on communities, the need for robust policy for relocation and the design of fair compensation schemes. He charts the changing landscape of residential property insurance and offers a vision for navigating our uncertain future with hope.
A House Built on Sand by Tina Shaw $38
Maxine has been losing things lately. Her car in the shopping centre carpark. Important work files — and her job as a result. Her marbles? 'Mild cognitive impairment', according to the doctor. Time for a nursing home, according to her daughter, Rose. Rose has her own troubles with memory: a recurring vision of a locked cupboard, claustrophobic panic. Something in the shadows. Something to do with the old family house in Kutarere. Back in that house by the beach, Maxine and Rose try to find their bearings. But they can't move forward without dealing with the past — and the past has a few more surprises in store.
”A beautiful story, this tangled yarn of dementia and love—harrowing, haunting and tender.’ —Michelle Elvy
Pirate Enlightenment, Or, The Real Libertalia by David Graeber $30
Pirates have long lived in the realm of romance and fantasy, symbolising risk, lawlessness, and radical visions of freedom. But at the root of this mythology is a rich history of pirate societies — vibrant, imaginative experiments in self-governance and alternative social formations at the edges of European empire. In graduate school, David Graeber conducted ethnographic field research in Madagascar, producing what would eventually become a doctoral thesis on the island's magic, slavery, and politics. During this time, he encountered the Zana-Malata, an ethnic group made up of mixed descendants of the many pirates who settled on the island at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia, Graeber's final posthumous book, is the outgrowth of this early research, written while he and David Wengrow were working on what would become their major bestseller, The Dawn of Everything. In direct conversation with that work, Graeber explores how the proto-democratic, even libertarian practices of the Zana-Malata came to shape the Enlightenment project defined for too long as distinctly European. The result is a short but sweeping exploration of the non-European origins of what we consider to be "Western" thought, and an endeavor to recover forgotten forms of social and political order that gesture toward new, hopeful possibilities for the future. [Now in paperback!]
”The chief pleasure of Graeber's writing is not that one always agrees with his arguments about the past. It is rather that, through a series of provocative thought experiments, he repeatedly forces us to reconsider our own ways of living in the present. Whatever happened in 18th-century Madagascar, Pirate Enlightenment implies, we could surely all do with a bit more free-thinking and egalitarianism in our own social, sexual and political arrangements.” —Fara Dabhoiwala, The Guardian
This Other Eden by Paul Harding $26
Inspired by historical events, This Other Eden tells the story of Apple Island: an enclave off the coast of the United States where castaways — in flight from society and its judgment — have landed and built a home. In 1792, formerly enslaved Benjamin Honey arrives on the island with his Irish wife, Patience, to make a life together there. More than a century later, the Honeys’ descendants remain, alongside an eccentric, diverse band of neighbours. Then comes the intrusion of ‘civilization’: officials determine to ‘cleanse’ the island. A missionary schoolteacher selects one light-skinned boy to save. The rest will succumb to the authorities’ institutions — or cast themselves on the waters in a new Noah’s Ark. [Now in paperback.]
Short-listed for the 2023 Booker Prize.
”Based on a relatively unknown true story, Paul Harding’s heartbreakingly beautiful novel transports us to a unique island community scrabbling a living. The panel were moved by the delicate symphony of language, land and narrative that Harding brings to bear on the story of the islanders.” —Booker judges’ citation
The World’s Wife and Feminine Gospels by Carol Ann Duffy Each $25
New editions of two favourite books from this beloved feminist poet.
The World’s Wife: Behind every famous man is a great woman - and from the quick-tongued Mrs Darwin to the lascivious Frau Freud, from the adoring Queen Kong to the long-suffering wife of the Devil himself, each one steps from her counterpart's shadow to tell her side of the story in this irresistible collection.
Feminine Gospels: Duffy draws on the historical, the archetypal, the biblical and the fantastical to create various visions — and revisions — of female identity. Simultaneously stripping women bare and revealing them in all their guises and disguises, these poems tell tall stories as though they were true confessions, and spin modern myths from real women seen in every aspect - as bodies and corpses, writers and workers, shoppers and slimmers, fairytale royals or girls-next-door.
“Part of Duffy's talent — besides her ear for ordinary eloquence, her gorgeous, powerful, throwaway lines, her subtlety — is her ventriloquism: from verbal nuances to mind-expanding imaginative leaps, her words seem freshly plucked from the minds of non-poets — that is, she makes it look easy.” —Charlotte Mendelson, Observer
WHAT by John Cooper Clarke $40
Dr John Cooper Clarke's dazzling, scabrous voice has reverberated through pop culture for decades, his influence on generations of performance poets and musicians plain for all to see. In WHAT, the original 'People's Poet' comes storming out of the gate with an uproarious new collection, reminding us why he is one of Britain's most beloved writers and performers. James Brown, John F. Kennedy, Jesus Christ: nobody is safe from the punk rocker's acerbic pen — and that's just the first poem. Hot on the heels of The Luckiest Guy Alive and his sprawling, encyclopaediac memoir I Wanna Be Yours, the good Doctor returns with his most trenchant collection of poems yet. Vivid and alive, with a sensitivity only a writer with a life as varied and extraordinary as Cooper Clarke's could summon, WHAT is an exceptional collection.
Leonardo Forever by Richard Yaxley $20
In the summer of 1465, fourteen-year-old Annalisa de Torriano reluctantly travels with her family to her father’s new estate near the village of Vinci. Although she misses her privileged life, and the wealthy Matteo, in magnificent Florence, Annalisa is soon entranced by the freedom the countryside offers—and by the brilliant and charming young King of the Forest, Leonardo da Vinci, who, alongside his beloved companion Dante, quickly befriends her. Mesmerised by Leo’s intelligence and beauty, an infatuated Annalisa starts to dream of a different life. But her dreams are an illusion, and as her relationship with Leo unfolds, it is Dante who will change all their lives forever.