NEW RELEASES (2.2.24)
New books for a new month!
Thunderclap: A memori of art and life & sudden death by Laura Cumming $75
”We see with everything that we are.” On the morning of 12 October 1654, a gunpowder explosion devastated the Dutch city of Delft. The thunderclap was heard over seventy miles away. Among the fatalities was the painter Carel Fabritius, dead at thirty-two, leaving only his haunting masterpiece ‘The Goldfinch’ and barely a dozen known paintings. For the explosion that killed him also buried his reputation, along with answers to the mysteries of his life and career. What happened to Fabritius before and after this disaster is just one of the discoveries in a book that explores the relationship between art and life, interweaving the lives of Laura Cumming, her Scottish painter father, who also died too young, and the great artists of the Dutch Golden Age. Thunderclap takes the reader from Rembrandt's studio to wartime America and contemporary London; from Fabritius's goldfinch on its perch to de Hooch's blue and white tile and the smallest seed in a loaf by Vermeer. This is a book about what a picture may come to mean: how it can enter your life and change your thinking in a thunderclap. For the explosion of the title speaks not only to the precariousness of our existence, but also to the power of painting: the sudden revelations of sight.
”No one writes art like Laura Cumming.” —Philip Hoare
”I shall never look at any painting in the same way again.” —Polly Morland
About ‘The Goldfinch’, which features in Donna Tartt’s novel The Goldfinch.
The Singularity by Balsam Karam (traslated from Swedish by Saskia Vogel) $38
In an unnamed coastal city filled with refugees, the mother of a displaced family calls out her daughter's name as she wanders the cliffside road where the child once worked. The mother searches and searches until, spent from grief, she throws herself into the sea, leaving her other children behind. Bearing witness to the suicide is another woman — on a business trip, with a swollen belly that later gives birth to a stillborn baby. In the wake of her pain, the second woman remembers other losses — of a language, a country, an identity--when once, her family fled a distant war. Balsam Karam weaves between both narratives in this formally ambitious novel and offers a fresh approach to language and aesthetic as she decenters a white European gaze.
”Lyrical, devastating and completely original, The Singularity is a work of extraordinary vision and heart. Balsam Karam's writing is formally inventive and stylistically breathtaking, and Saskia Vogel's translation does shining justice to its poetic precision and depths.” —Preti Taneja
”Balsam Karam writes at the limits of narrative, limning the boundary of loss where ‘no space remains between bodies in the singularity’. With a lucid intimacy, Karam braids a story of witness and motherhood that fractures from within only to rebuild memory and home on its own terms. The Singularity is a book of conviction where those who have been made to disappear find light and keep their secrets too.” —Shazia Hafiz Ramji
The Bridge by Eva Lindström $38
A pig drives by looking for a bridge but ends up the houseguest of two wolves in the woods. Who are they? What do they want? And where is the pig rushing off to, anyway? Written and illustrated in Lindström's laconic, razor-sharp, and darkly comical style, The Bridge is a droll, fast-paced, and ever-so-slightly-sinister story in which, as in a classic fairy tale, an ordinary chance encounter suddenly morphs into an adventure that feels both wildly improbable and true to life.
"The Bridge is so many things at once. It is very funny, it is very mysterious, it is very beautiful, and it is like no book I've ever seen. I love it very much." —Jon Klassen
Shame by Annie Ernaux (translated from French by Tanya Leslie) $28
"My father tried to kill my mother one Sunday in June, in the early afternoon," begins Shame, the probing story of the 12-year-old girl who will become the author herself, and the single traumatic memory that will echo and resonate throughout her life. With the emotionally rich voice of great fiction and the diamond-sharp analytical eye of a scientist, Annie Ernaux provides a powerful reflection on experience and the power of violent memory to endure through time, to determine the course of a life.
”Shame and The Young Man deserve to be read widely. Her work is self-revealing, a series of pitiless auto-autopsies. Their disparate achievements work together to illuminate something perennially fascinating about Ernaux: her relationship to revelation and visibility. These are deeply intimate books, but in another way, Ernaux brings a disquieting impersonality to her project.” —Megan Nolan, The Times
”Exceptionally deft and precise, the very epitome of all that language can do…a surprisingly tender evocation of a bright, passionate and self-aware young girl growing up in her parents’ ‘cafe-haberdashery-grocery’ in a small town in Normandy.” —Julie Myerson, Observer
The Young Man by Annie Ernaux (translated from French by Alison L. Strayer) $20
In her latest work, Annie Ernaux recounts a relationship with a student thirty years her junior — an experience that transforms her, briefly, back into the ‘scandalous girl’ of her youth. When she is with him, she replays scenes she has already lived through, feeling both ageless and closer to death. Laid like a palimpsest on the present, the past’s immediacy pushes her to take a decisive step in her writing — producing, in turn, the need to expunge her lover. At once stark and tender, The Young Man is a taut encapsulation of Ernaux’s relationship to time, memory and writing.
”Annie Ernaux’s work is proof of how expertly autobiography can be done. The Young Man does offer a taste of what’s so unique and astonishing about her honesty, her intelligence, the deceptive simplicity of her narratives. And for those who have been reading her for decades, it adds invaluable information to what we have already learned about the sources of her energy and courage, about the complex connections between her life and her work, her lived experience and the grace with which she transforms memory into art.” —Francine Prose, Guardian
”Annie Ernaux is one of my favourite contemporary writers, original and true. Always after reading one of her books, I walk around in her world for months.” —Sheila Heti
Ludwig and the Rhinoceros: A philosophical bedtime story by Noemi Schneider, illustrated by Golden Cosmos $38
"There's a rhinoceros in my room!" Ludwig claims. His father doesn't think so. He looks for the huge pachyderm in every corner, but he just can't find it. There CANNOT be a rhinoceros in Ludwig's room. It's way too small for a rhinoceros. But Ludwig shows his father that it is impossible to be certain that something isn’t there. This enjoyable picture book replicates the 1911 argument between Ludwig Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell on whether knowability is a property of the actual world or of the set of epistemological propositions we make about it.
Not a River by Selva Almada (translated by Annie McDermott) $38
Three men go out fishing, returning to a favourite spot on the river despite their memories of a terrible accident there years earlier. As a long, sultry day passes, they drink and cook and talk and dance, and try to overcome the ghosts of their past. But they are outsiders, and this intimate, peculiar moment also puts them at odds with the inhabitants of this watery universe, both human and otherwise. The forest presses close, and violence seems inevitable, but can another tragedy be avoided? Rippling across time like the river that runs through it, Selva Almada’s latest novel is the finest expression yet of her compelling style and singular vision of rural Argentina.
"A virtuoso literary work. Flashbacks and side scenes deepen the story which curls and twines like a thrusting tropical vine through the past, roping in sisters, wives, old lovers, boyhood adventures, and jealousies." —Annie Proulx
”Told with the hallucinatory atmosphere of a dream, this astonishing, stark novel doesn't turn away from the hypnotic and disturbing effects of violence. Not a River plunges us straight into the depths of its silences, bracingly so — the longer the quiet goes, the more terrible the rupture." —Manuel Munoz
Corner by Zo-O $38
A crow finds itself in an empty corner and begins to make the space its own. First, it furnishes the corner with a bed, a bookshelf, a rug, even a potted plant. In the newly decorated space, the crow reads and eats, listens to music and waters the plant, but something's missing. What is it? The crow decides to decorate more, drawing geometric patterns on the walls in yellow. The corner is filled with colour and shapes, but something is still missing. The crow adds a window, and finally discovers what it needed all along — a way to connect with the world outside and to make a new friend. This highly original, almost-wordless picture book cleverly uses the gutter of the book to make the crow’s corner. Soft, detailed illustrations of the cosy corner will inspire children to express themselves in their own spaces, and the crow's problem-solving skills encourage readers to think about how they can comfortably step outside of their comfort zone.
Opinions: A decade of arguments, criticism, and minding other people’s business by Roxane Gay $38
Outstanding non-fiction pieces from The New York Times and elsewhere on politics, feminism, the culture wars, gender, sexuality, and equality.
”Gay has a gift for clean, well-ordered prose, and strong feelings on matters of race, gender, and sexuality. Most important, she possesses a fearlessness essential to doing the job right; though she can observe an issue from various angles, she never wrings her hands or delivers milquetoast commentaries. She comes to her opinions more out of empathy than ideology.” Fierce and informed riffs on current events and enduring challenges.” —Kirkus
Can I Sit in the Middle? by Susanne Strasser $19
It’s story time, but first everyone needs to arrive and everyone needs to find their place on the sofa. Just when everyone seems ready, a clumsy and very real rhinoceros comes looking for its slippers. How will the story ever be read? Board book.
Marilyn Webb: Folded in the Hills edited by Lauren Gutsell, Lucy Hammonds and Bridget Reweti $70
Featuring over 80 colour plates from throughout Webb’s career, from 1968 to 2005, this impressive monograph includes essays by curators Lucy Hammonds, Lauren Gutsell, and Bridget Reweti, extant poems by Cilla McQueen and Hone Tuwhare and two new ekphrastic poems by Essa May Ranapiri and Ruby Solly.
Poor Things by Alasdair Gray $25
A life without freedom to choose is not worth having. In Alasdair Gray’s postmodern metaphysical lampoon of Frankenstein, Godwin Baxter's scientific ambition to create the perfect companion is realised when he finds the drowned body of the beautiful Bella, who he brings back to life in a Frankenstein-esque feat, and with the brain of an infant. His dream is thwarted by Dr. Archibald McCandless's jealous love for his ‘creation’. But what does Bella think? Gray’s novel, with its dual narratives by Bella and McCandless, is an unsparing but hilarious exploration of traditional power imbalances between the sexes and the ways in which women are crushed both by men’s imposed notions of ‘propriety’ and by their projected fantasies of ‘impropriety’. How can true liberation and fulfillment be achieved?
”A magnificently brisk, funny, dirty, brainy book.” —London Review of Books