Caring for Japanese Art at the Chester Beatty Library is a memoir of Yoshiko Ushioda , looking back at more than five decades of life in Dublin. Both inspiring and heartfelt, Mrs. Ushioda's memoir will be of interest to both lovers of Japanese Art and those interested in Irish-Japanese relations.
The Formality of the Page is a collection of powerfull and meditative poems tracking the emotional histories of ageing, love, family, and the artist's life. Alongside these personal reflections, Roberts looks back on the many writers and artists with a role in shaping his sensibility, including Catullus, Dickinson, Melville, and Wallace Stevens.
Mosley's Rainbow People is a masterful,powerful book about borders, politics, andhope.
The twenty-first century doesn¿t much care for subtlety. Now is the era of the gist, the elevator pitch, the big idea boiled down. This is precisely why Christopher Woodall¿s fiction gives such pleasure. His meticulous stories about love, death, fidelity, friendship, and human solitude do not wave their narrative arms wildly, demanding unwarranted attention. They speak in a calm voice, inviting the reader closer¿inviting him not merely to react but to feel and think. Sweets and Toxins is the first collection of short fiction to be published by this talented novelist (November) and it marks him as a writer whose sharp eye for detail and feeling for people is a rare commodity indeed. He is one of the major English authors writing today.
As young Jake Horner's mind became an increasingly paralyzing cobweb of dark thoughts, he turned for help to an extraordinary doctor-part saint, part evil-genius, a weird combination of faith healer, magician, and devil. And in so doing Jake found himself following a drastic prescription that was to draw him into a strange, compulsive relationship. It is around the startling results of Jake Horner's "cure" and its amazing mastermind-a doctor almost surely designed to become one of the most remarkable characters in modern fiction-that this brilliant, imaginative novel hinges. John Barth is a young writer of unusual talent whose uncanny insight into the dark mazes of the human mind has given The End of the Road a haunting and troubling reality.
Caterva (meaning "throng" or "horde") tells the story of seven erudite, homeless, and semi-incompetent radicals traveling from city to city in an attempt to foment a revolution: conspiring with striking workers, setting off bombs, and evading the local authorities. But this is no political thriller. Like his literary "descendant" Julio Cortazar--who mentions this book in Hopscotch--Filloy is far more concerned with his characters' occasionally farcical inner lives than with their radical machinations. With its encyclopedic feel, and its satirical look at both solidarity and nonconformity, Caterva is considered to be among Filloy's greatest achievements.
This novella recounts the imagination of a lonely old man who becomes obsessed by a beautiful young girl in his village. His every moment is filled with thoughts and fantasies about her. Eventually lines cross as this fantasy becomes a reality, paternal feeling and sexual urges combining as they become lovers. This is a brialliant, poetic account of the wanderings of an old man's mind
"Atavisms" is an original and unsettling portrait of Quebec, from the hinterland to the metropolis, from colonial times to the present, and beyond. These thirteen stories, though not linked in the traditional sense, abound in common threads. Like family traits passed down through the generations, the attitudes and actions of a rich cast of characters reverberate, quietly but deeply, over generations. Here is a group portrait of the individual lives that together shape a collective history. "Atavisms" has been shortlisted for the 2014 Jan Michalski Prize for Literature.
With Flann O'Brien now widely acknowledged as a subversive genius of early post-modernism, Flore Coulouma gives the "question of language" a central position in his literary identity. Tracing O'Brien's philosophy of language to the convoluted structure of his writing, Coulouma demonstrates how his bilingualism and ambiguous relation to language inspired his satirical fiction and chronicles, and develops a series of narrative oppositions: orality and literacy, truth and fiction, authority and legitimacy, native and national language(s). Using such dialectical oppositions to stage O'Brien's literary representation of the diglossic relationship of speakers to their native tongue, this book casts light on O'Brien's own intuitions about the failures and achievements of language, the logic of fiction, the relation between language and knowledge, and the impossibility of a nation cut off from its original tongue finding its linguistic identity.
"Addendum to a Photo Album" is the saga of the births, deaths, and disappearances within the eccentric Mandrykin family. Following patriarch Malach, a Cossack captain, his wife Annushka, and his many sons all born with sideburns, the novel details their fraught relationships, particularly when sitting for family photographs. Vladislav Otroshenko's flowing sentences and rich metaphorical language describe characters whose concerns embrace the heroic, the metaphysical, and the mundane, as they fulfill their duties as Cossack warriors and family members. Otroshenko draws on his upbringing in Novocherkassk, a city on the Don River, creating a world and a book inhabited with absurdity, filial love, and unusual facial hair.
Childhood play, scarlet fever, a first kiss, befriending a Nazi spy--the narrative of "Past Habitual" roams through experiences both commonplace and formative, all under the uneasy canopy of wartime Ireland. Moving with ease between the voices of a young child, a German immigrant, an I.R.A member, and colloquial chatter, MacLochlainn forms a web of interactions that expose a century's tensions. A combination of traditional prose, poetry, monologue, and music, "Past Habitual" is an engaging and fascinating depiction of an Ireland struggling through the effects of war--both distant and on her doorstep.
A dazzling collection of essays--on reading, writing, form, and thought--from one of America's master writers. Beginning with personal, both past and present, it emphasizes William H. Gass's lifelong attachment to books and then moves on to ponder the work of some of his favorite writers (among them Kafka, Nietzsche, Henry James, Gertrude Stein, and Proust). An essential addition to the Gassian canon, Life Sentences shows William H. Gass at his best.
Park Min-gyu has been celebrated and condemned for his attacks upon what he perceives as the humorlessness of contemporary Korean literature. Pavane for a Dead Princess is his attack upon the beauty-fetish that reigns over popular culture, detailing the relationship between a man with matinee-idol good looks and "the ugliest woman of the century." To complicate matters further, Park also includes a so-called "writer's cut" of the same story, offering alternate versions of the facts, giving the reader the opportunity to imagine all the different ways this same novel might have been written.
At last available in English translation, "Soy Realidad" is Toma alamun's twenty-first collection of poetry, originally published in 1985. Showing a maturing poet at home as a citizen of the world, "Soy Realidad" ranges far from alamun's Slovenia, combining his native language with Latin, French, English, and Spanish, as well as evoking such places as Belize, the Sierra Nevada, and Mexico City. From sex to God, from landscape to literature, alamun's poetry is as ever a restless and witty inquisitor, peeling back the layers of the world.
Short stories about men and women, love and hate, sex and disappointment, cynicism and hope--perhaps unique in that none of the stories reveal the time or place in they occur: the world is too small now for it to matter. A disillusioned woman, the narrator doesn't mince words about the imperfection of her life, her relationships, her prospects; yet what might in other hands seem discouraging is presented with such humor the reader can't help but feel there may yet be hope... for most of us.
Published posthumously in 1995, Mrs. Ted Bliss tells the story of an eighty-two-year-old widow starting life anew after the death of her husband. As Dorothy Bliss learns to cope with the mundane rituals of life in a Florida retirement community, she inadvertently becomes involved with a drug kingpin trying to use her as a front for his operations. Combining a comic plot with a deep concern for character, Elkin ends his career with a vivid portrait of a woman overcoming loss, a woman who is both recognizable and as unique as Elkin's other famous characters.
Written in an unadorned style, Kjell Askildsen's devastating stories convey in few words life and thought as they are actually experienced, balanced between despair and hope, memories and expectations. He is widely recognized as one of the greatest Norwegian writers of the twentieth century and among the greatest short-story authors of all time.
In France, Alain Robbe-Grillet's final novel was sold in shrink-wrap, labeled with a sticker warning readers that this perverse fairy tale might offend certain sensibilities. It tells the story of Gigi, also known as Djinn, who is being schooled by her father to be a perfect slave and mistress. Running the gamut of unacceptable subject matter from incest to torture, this book abounds with vignettes that explore taboos and their representation in fiction, from the Brothers Grimm to the Marquis de Sade. It is titillating and disgusting, the work of a dirty old man or brilliant agent provocateur--or both.
Man + Doctor is Nick Wadley s wordless story of encounters with doctors, from the patient s attempts to avoid the scalpel, to, once surgery becomes inevitable, watching himself learn to cope with days and weeks spent in hospital beds.
Oliver Rohe's first novel is a word-crazed monologue in the mind of a man named Selber flying back to his wartorn native country for the first time in years. Grappling with his fear of flying and increasingly possessed by reminiscences of his long-dead childhood friend Roman, the narrator begins to wonder if any of his thoughts, or the decisions he has made in his life, are truly his own. From meditations upon loss, violence, repetition, and individuality, to explicit homages to the works of Thomas Benhard, Without Origin is a remarkable and incisive debut.
American Odysseys is an anthology of twenty-two novelists, poets, and short-story writers drawn from the shortlist for the 2011 Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Literature. Including Ethiopian-born Dinaw Mengestu, the recipient of the Prize; Yugoslavian-born Téa Obreht, the youngest author to receive the Orange Prize in Fiction; and Chinese-born Yiyun Li, a MacArthur Genius grantee, what these authors all have in common¿and share with US Poet Laureate Charles Simic, who has contributed a foreword¿is that they are immigrants to the United States, now excelling in their fields and dictating the terms by which future American writing will be judged by the world. Running the gamut from desperate realism to whimsical fantasy¿from Miho Nonakäs poetry, inspired by fourteenth-century Noh theater, to Ismet Prcic¿s wrenching stories set in the aftermath of the Bosnian war¿American Odysseys is proof, if any be needed, that the heterogeneity of American society is its greatest asset.
The Attic is Danilo Kis's first novel. Written in 1960, published in 1962, and set in contemporary Belgrade, it explores the relationship of a young man, known only as Orpheus, to the art of writing; it also tracks his relationship with a colorful cast of characters with nicknames such as Eurydice, Mary Magdalene, Tam-Tam,and Billy Wise Ass. Rich with references to music, painting, philosophy, and gastronomy, this bohemian Bildungsroman is a laboratory of technique and style for the young Kis at once a depiction of life in literary Belgrade, a register of stylistic devices and themes that would recur throughout Kis's oeuvre, and an account of one young man's quest to find a way to balance his life, his loves, and his art.
Mathea Martinsen has never been good at dealing with other people. After a lifetime, her only real accomplishment is her longevity: everyone she reads about in the obituaries has died younger than she is now. Afraid that her life will be over before anyone knows that she lived, Mathea heads out into the world.
Tor Ulven is one of the most renowned Norwegian authors of the twentieth century, beginning his career writing poetry and ending it with unclassifiable explorations of the possibilities of prose, reminiscent of writers such as Ingeborg Bachmann and Peter Handke. Replacement, his only novel, published two years before Ulven's suicide, is a miniature symphony, wherein the perspectives of unrelated characters are united into what seems a single narrative voice: each personality, directing the book in turn; each replacing its predecessor and forming another link in a chain leading nowhere. These people reminisce, reflect, observe, and talk to themselves; each stuck in their respective traps, each dreaming of escape. A masterpiece of compression and confession, Replacement dramatizes the tension between the concrete realities we think we cannot alter, and our interior lives, where we feel anything might still be possible.
A major work of contemporary Turkish literature, Istanbul Was a Fairy Tale tells the stories of three generations of a Jewish family from the 1920s to the 1980s. Istanbul is their only home, and yet they live in a state of alienation, isolating themselves from the world around them. As witness, observer, and protagonist, the narrator-at once inside and outside of his story-records their many tales, as well as those of their friends and neighbors, creating an expansive mosaic of characters, each doing their best to survive the twentieth century.
At several points in the haunting Dukla, Andrzej Stasiuk claims that what he is trying to do is "e;write a book about light."e; The result is a beautiful, lyrical series of evocations of a very specific locale at different times of the year, in different kinds of weather, and with different human landscapes. Dukla, in fact, is a real place: a small resort town not far from where Stasiuk now lives. Taking an usual form-a short essay, a novella, and then a series of brief portraits of local people or events-this book, though bordering on the metaphysical, the mystical, even the supernatural, never loses sight of the particular time, and above all place, in which it is rooted. Andrzej Stasiuk is one of the leading writers of Poland's younger generation, and is currently one of the most popular Polish novelists in English translation.
Moving through a variety of locales and adventures, The Truth about Marie revisits the unnamed narrator of Toussaint's acclaimed Running Away, reporting on his now disintegrated relationship with the titular Marie-the story switching deftly between first- and third-person as the narrator continues to drift through life, and Marie does her best to get on with hers. Like all of Toussaint's novels, The Truth about Marie's plot matters far less than its pace and tempo, its chain of images, its sequence of events. From pouring rain in Paris to blazing fires on the island of Elba, from moments of intense action to perfectly paced lulls, The Truth about Marie relies on a series of contrasts to tell a beguiling, and finally touching, story of intimacy forever being regained and lost.
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