It's not the dream that matters, it's the telling of the dream - the words you choose, the risks you take in externalising your mindThis is a dreamlike portrait of a body in struggle to connect with itself and others. As the narrator contends with chronic pain, and with a pandemic raging in the background, she sets out to examine the literal and symbolic role of the mouth in the life of a writer. Merging dreams and dailies, Pathemata recounts the narrator's tragicomic search to alleviate her suffering, a search that eventually becomes a reckoning with various forms of loss - the loss of intimacy, the loss of her father and the loss of a pivotal friend and mentor. In exacting, distilled prose, her account blurs the lines between embodied, unconscious and everyday life. With characteristic precision, humour and compassion, Nelson explores the limits of language to describe experience, while also offering a portrait of an unnerving and isolating time in our shared history. A stunning new, original experiment in interiority by the adored author of Bluets and The Argonauts, Pathemata is a personal and poetic reckoning with pain and loss, both physical and emotional, as well as an uncanny meditation on love, affliction and resilience.
'A deeply touching, enjoyable novel, beautifully written and fascinatingly mysterious and intricate in its designs' New York TimesIn a city that could be Paris, London or Vienna, a loose-knit group of travellers, artists, and dreamers gather - drawn together by a cryptic passage from a book. Among them are the exiled writer Juan, the elusive Hélène, and the troubled Celia, each slipping between reality and illusion as their lives intertwine. Conversations turn into riddles, encounters take on the weight of fate, and a dark undercurrent of violence pulses beneath it all.Both playful and disorienting, 62: A Model Kit is Julio Cortázar's most enigmatic puzzle - an intricate, hypnotic novel that challenges the very nature of storytelling.
Dive into the mesmerizing dreamworld of Latin America's literary great, Julio Cortázar.As the 1949 carnival dances on in Buenos Aires, a group of young creatives gather in the sumptuous seclusion of an art studio. In this surreal, bohemian sanctuary, ruled by the dazzling Renato Lozano, elaborate meals are assembled, while strange poetry and merciless witticisms flow like wine.Yet, as time passes, tensions and secrets begin to unravel, and so too do the boundaries of established reality. Divertimento will whisk you away on a bizarre and brilliant journey, taking you to the hidden heart of art, fantasy and the alchemy that is creative interpretation.This is Julio Cortázar's bold, experimental debut, here translated into English for the very first time.TRANSLATED BY HARRY MORALES'Anyone who doesn't read Cortázar is doomed' Pablo Neruda'A first-class literary imagination' The New York Times Book Review
In 1970s Paris, a group of revolutionaries plot the daring kidnapping of a powerful Latin American official. But among them is Andrés, a man adrift in a world of high-stakes politics.As Andrés spirals into a crisis of identity, Cortázar intersects the group's story with real-life documents, newspaper clippings, and personal reflections to construct a compelling mosaic that explores the complexities of revolution, commitment, and the human spirit.
When a group of Argentinians win a mysterious lottery, their prize - a luxury cruise - seems too good to question. But as the voyage unfolds, strange and unsettling events begin to mount. The passengers find themselves trapped aboard a ship run by a silent, secretive crew, and the true nature of their journey grows ever more uncertain.Funny, frightening, and richly lyrical, The Winners is a philosophical thriller of tangled fates and wayward love - an incisive meditation on power, exile, and the myth of the New World.
In a fog-drenched Buenos Aires, Juan and Clara should be preparing for their final exam. Instead, they roam the city with friends, drifting through cafés, encountering strange happenings, and unravelling life's mysteries. All the while, they are shadowed by the mysterious Abel.Darkly funny and steeped in ambiguity, Final Exam is Julio Cortázar's haunting allegory of a world on the brink-his melancholic, defiant farewell to an Argentina he would soon leave behind forever.
Deep within the remote jungle community of the Village, Westerners Kit and Lara have discovered their own private idyll: a world far from their dysfunctional, failing lives back home. With Helen, their four-month-old daughter, in tow, Kit and Lara tend to medical supplies, learn the local language, and luxuriate, often stoned, in the comfort of their newfound freedom.But all highs have their comedown . . . With Lara several days into the jungle on a vaccination drive, an unwelcome messenger from the border arrives - the message: an army is amassing. Shot in shaky footage, entombed in a tiny memory card, what Kit unwittingly holds in his hands is evidence of a world-shattering event unfolding, the audaciously violent power-play of the teetering Superpower. Now, without her mother, Kit also holds his infant daughter.As the Village falls squarely in the Superpower's sights, Kit and Helen are forced into a dramatic odyssey - one that will take father and daughter straight into the heart of an unforgiving world Kit thought they'd left behind.
In this short sequel to his acclaimed memoir, the legendary filmmaker and global cultural icon explores one of his favourite topics: the nature of truth.What if a lie is told to reveal some underlying truth? Are feelings that seem inappropriate, such as the hysteria following the death of a celebrity, any less real or true than the grief we feel over the death of a loved one? Even if the plot of an opera seems preposterous, can't it still express strong human emotions that ring true with the audience?At the heart of the book lies Werner Herzog's concept of 'ecstatic truth' - a truth that is often hidden behind the facts and our conceptions of reality but can be gleaned through the poetic imagination, in art, literature and cinema, when we open ourselves up to an aesthetic experience.Written in Herzog's inimitable tyle, the stories, anecdotes and reflections take us from present-day deep fakes and the opportunities and perils of AI to Ancient Egyptian and Rome, where rulers resorted to lies and propaganda in the same way as governments do today; from Scott's and Amundson's race to the South Pole to alien abduction stories and the making of Herzog's own films.With its singular vision and unique voice, The Future of Truth is a compelling meditation on the relationship between fact and fiction, evidence and the imagination, by one of the most fascinating and idiosyncratic thinkers in the world today.
Olive just wants people to open up. As a radio host, she interviews writers about their works-in-progress, probing for insight; as a friend and a sister, she's hungry for closeness. She has a habit of recording people without their knowledge, just to hear the world reflected back at her. Olive is approaching her mid-thirties, coddled by her mother and perpetually single, when she meets Theo. He's a surgeon - he literally cuts people open, which fascinates her - and, with a quick wit and a charming gap between his two front teeth, he seems to adore her. Theo relishes her curious mind, upending everything she's come to expect from men.They fall for each other quickly, dizzyingly, but Olive can't get enough. She struggles to comprehend where she stops and Theo begins. As their relationship intensifies, so does Olive's resentment of the physical and emotional boundaries between them. So she tests those boundaries: first by recording their conversations, then by recording their sex. Next, on a night there's no coming back from, she unzips his body and nestles between his organs while he sleeps. Once she starts, she can't stop - and as she climbs inside Theo, Olive has some disturbing revelations about intimacy, trust, and her own long-repressed memories.Funny, sexy, razor-sharp and deliciously unsettling, Open Wide pushes the boundaries of genre and it might just push you, too. This absurdist and devastatingly vulnerable novel is for anyone who craves an intimacy they can't quite reach, taking our fear and craving for connection to new heights.
In 1947 Simone de Beauvoir took a road trip across America.She travelled from coast to coast, from New York to Hollywood, taking in New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana and Washington DC. She rode a pony through the Grand Canyon, listened to jazz in New Orleans and visited the nightclubs of Chicago. And she captured the entire experience in her journal.This captivating book is that journal and an immersive portrait of postwar America. Beauvoir was disturbed by the poverty and segregation she encountered and at the same time delighted by American energy and friendliness.Intimate, warm, and compulsively readable, this is travel writing from the great feminist and thinker, Simone de Beauvoir.On New York: 'I walk between the steep cliffs at the bottom of a canyon where no sun penetrates: it's permeated by a salt smell. Human history is not inscribed on these carefully calibrated buildings: They are closer to prehistoric caves than to the houses of Paris or Rome.'On Los Angeles: 'I watch the Mexican dances and eat chilli con carne, which takes the roof off my mouth, I drink the tequila and I'm utterly dazed with pleasure.'
'Magnificent' Tim WintonIn the distant highlands, a puma named Dusk is killing shepherds.Down in the lowlands, twins Iris and Floyd are out of work, money and friends.When the twins hear that a bounty has been placed on Dusk, they reluctantly decide they have to join the dangerous hunt, for a chance to win. But as they journey up into this wild, haunted place, they discover there's far more to the land and people of the highlands than they imagined. As they close in on their prey, Iris and Floyd are forced to reckon with conflicts both ancient and deeply personal.'A sublime novel of loss and redemption, fight and surrender, that left me in absolute awe. Robbie Arnott's prose is incandescent ... With Dusk, he asserts himself as one of Australia's finest literary writers' Hannah Kent
Witness the best and the worst of humanity in The Bells of Nagasaki. . . On 9th August 1945, the Japanese city of Nagasaki is hit by an atomic bomb. Forty thousand people are killed instantly. Doctor Takashi Nagai is not one of them. Pulling himself, broken and bloodied, from the wreckage that was once the city's university hospital, Takashi bundles together a tattered group of survivors. Doctors, nurses, students, each with their own injuries and losses, their own bone-chilling fears for the future, they work tirelessly at the impossible task of aiding the countless wounded and easing the deaths of the dying. They remain determined to heal their fallen city, to find solace and hope among the rubble, even as a strange and growing sickness begins to claim them, one by one. Eyewitness to one of the most fatal events in human history, this is Takashi's record, written from his sickbed - a chilling historical document, and undeniable evidence of the capacity for human kindness. 'A book that everyone should read' The Times
'Don't worry, I'm here in the house where every room has a name, but children's names are often forgotten.'Uplifting and heart-breaking, this lyrical evocation of a childhood on the edge of society marks the arrival of a vital new voice. MINX reveals the vibrant but precarious world of a multi-racial Romani family: a world of grandfathers brewing moonshine in marrows, basement reggae parties, and a mother struggling to support her two daughters on the proceeds of her shadowy profession. Their powerful bond helps the sisters survive when they're taken into care, in a children's home that forcibly separates them. With a verve and playfulness that belies their pain, these poems explore what it means to belong. Through daring experiments with form and narrative, MINX captures how it feels to grow up between a culture whose traditional ways are being lost and a wider society that despises them.
A guide to the art of journaling - and a meditation on the central questions of life - by the bestselling author of Between Two KingdomsFor as long as she can remember, Suleika Jaouad has kept a journal. She has used it to mark life's biggest occasions and to ride its roughest waves. It has buoyed her through illness, through heartbreak, and the deepest oceans of uncertainty. And Suleika is not alone. For so many people, journaling is a process of discovery, sometimes vulnerable and terrifying, always transformative. The Book of Alchemy is based on the premise that journaling is an essential tool for navigating the challenges of modern life. We live in a world where we're not only forced to grapple with personal peaks and valleys but also global upheavals far beyond our control-political, social, economic, technological, environmental. More than ever, we need a space for puzzling through. Designed to be a companion through challenging times, The Book of Alchemy will explore the art of journaling, offering encouragement, direction, and support to those looking for a way to navigate the in-between. It is designed to expand that space, giving readers tools to engage with discomfort, to ask questions, to peel back the layers, to uncover their truest self - and in doing so, to find clarity and calm, to hold the astonishingly beautiful and the often unbearable facts of life in the same palm. "Not only beautiful but exceedingly helpful. I recommend it to every dreamer, with the highest respect and joy." Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat Pray Love
In the rain-slicked, neon glowing streets of a 1970s continental metropolis, a man called François makes a snap decision that will change his life for goodFrançois, in his fifties, living alone and low on cash, does not have the life he dreams of.With a cigarette stuck to the corner of his mouth and wearing his perpetual black suit, he has carried out the same morning routine for 17 years: entering the lottery with his lucky numbers, then knocking back a pint of beer at Café Monico before his shift as the delivery driver for a dry cleaners.His days are brightened only by newsagent Maryvonne and her young daughter. He dreams of winning the lottery to give them a better life.When a routine delivery leads him to knock on the door of a countryside mansion, he enters the scene of a crime whose remains consist of a dozen bodies and a bag full of banknotes. What François chooses to do next could change his fate for good...Visually stunning, atmospheric and replete with the smoking irony of European noir, Dry Cleaned is a masterful tale about an anti-hero radically stepping out of his routine.
When Joan Vole, an indie folksinger forever teetering on the edge of fame, sexually assaults a fan onstage, she fears it will doom her career. She abandons her beloved Martin parlour guitar and flees New York, seeking refuge at a writing camp for teenagers in rural Virginia where phones are forbidden.With the threat of an internet storm looming over her, Joan is forced to examine her toxic relationship to artmaking and the sexual kink she has been hiding for decades, while finding new hope in her students and a deepening intimacy with a nonbinary cartoonist called Sparrow.Suffused with flashbacks that evoke a musical underworld as seductive as it is seedy, we are immersed in Joan's relationships. From her complicated friendship with Paige, the teenage runaway she mentored whose success has outstripped hers, to the secret ex-boyfriend who inspired Joan's biggest hit, which cemented her status as a queer icon after she implied it was about a woman.Lydi Conklin boldly explores queer appropriation, fame hunger, cancel culture, trans nonbinary identity and how to make art without ego, all the while asking how Joan might forge a new future for herself.A propulsive character study of a flawed and fascinating artist, Songs of no Provenance is a visceral, gutsy and profound debut novel about love, self-acceptance and clawing oneself to safety.
Multi-prizewinning and internationally acclaimed Yan Lianke -- 'China's most controversial novelist' (New Yorker) -- returns with a campus novel like no other following a young Buddhist as she journeys through worldly temptationTo tell the truth, religious faith is really just a matter of believing stories. The world is governed by stories, and it is for the sake of stories that everyone lives on this earth.Yahui is a young Buddhist at university. But this is no ordinary university. It is populated by every faith in China: Buddhists, Daoists, Catholics, Protestants and Muslims who jostle alongside one another in the corridors of learning, and whose deities are never far from the classroom.Her days are measured out making elaborate religious papercuts, taking part in highly charged tug-of-war competitions between the faiths and trying to resist the daily temptation to return to secular life and abandon the ascetic ideals that are her calling. Everything seems to dangle by a thread. But when she meets a Daoist student called Mingzheng, an inexorable romance of mythic proportions takes hold of her.In this profoundly otherworldly novel, Chinese master Yan Lianke remakes the campus novel in typically visionary fashion, dropping readers into an allegorical world ostensibly far from our own, but which reflects our own questions and struggles right back at us.** Beautiful edition illustrated throughout with beautiful original papercuts **'One of China's greatest living authors' Guardian'His talent cannot be ignored' New York Times'China's foremost literary satirist' Financial Times
Diaspora is witnessing a murder without getting blood on your shirt.***WINNER OF THE FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST COLLECTION******FINALIST FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES YOUNG WRITER OF THE YEAR AWARD******WINNER OF THE SKY ARTS AWARD FOR POETRY***'Exceptional... Mehri is a truly transnational poet of the twenty-first century'BERNARDINE EVARISTO, author of Girl, Woman, Other'A once in a generation poet'CALEB FEMI, author of PoorThe definition of diaspora is the dispersion of people from their original homeland. But what does it mean to write diaspora poetry? Momtaza Mehri's debut collection poses this question, taking us from Mogadishu to Naples, Lampedusa to London. Mixing her own family's experience with the stories of many others across nineteenth- and twentieth-century Somalia, Bad Diaspora Poems confronts the ambivalent nature of speaking for those who have been left behind.We meet the poet, the translator, the refugee, the exile, and the diaspora kid attempting to transcend their clichéd angst. Told in lyric, prose and text messages, and taking place in living rooms and marketplaces, on buses and balconies, on transatlantic journeys and online, these are essential poems about our diasporic age.
Graham Greene, the great twentieth-century novelist, also wrote exceptional short stories.SELECTED AND INTRODUCED BY YIYUN LITwenty-two of his very best stories are collected here, each of them bearing the hallmark themes that characterise Greene's great novels: betrayal and vengeance, love and hate, pity and violence. Writer and Greene aficionado Yiyun Li has arranged the stories in pairs to create an ingenious new collection: unexpected, surprising and wide-ranging, but always the unmistakable work of one of the twentieth century's greatest and most adored storytellers.'One of the most important British writers of the twentieth century' Daily Telegraph
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