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'A book that will make the night sky your lifelong passion. An
invitation to immerse yourself in the nature around you and the
universe beyond.' - Professor Brian Cox The Secret World of
Stargazing is the ultimate astronomy book to set you on your epic
journey around the cosmos - it's a simple guide to the skies and
makes stargazing fun, easy and enjoyable for all - absolutely no
equipment is required! Adrian West, AKA the internet sensation
VirtualAstro, will take you through the seasons, showing you
exactly what you can spot in the sky throughout the year, whether
you're in your back garden or sitting on an exotic beach somewhere!
While you're learning how to spot constellations, meteors and
comets, you will be switching off your busy mind, sitting still in
nature and paying attention to the small details that make up the
big picture of life. You'll finish reading this beautiful book and
come away with a sense of grounding, connection, knowledge and a
whole new appreciation of the sky above and the world outside your
own - it will soothe your soul. 'An excellent, readable, bright
guide to the night sky.' - Dara O'Briain 'A superb introduction to
astronomy.' - Chris Packham
White peaches, red broom, pomegranates tumbling down the escalator
steps: with these delicately rendered details, Josef Winkler's
Natura Morta begins. In Stazione Termini in Rome, Piccoletto, the
beautiful black-haired boy whose long eyelashes graze his
freckle-studded cheeks, steps onto the metro and heads toward his
job at a fish stand in Piazza Vittorio Emanuele. The sights and
sounds of the market, a melange of teeming life amid the ever
present avatars of death, is the backdrop for Winkler's innovative
prose, which unfolds in a series of haunting images and baroque,
luxuriant digressions with pitch-perfect symmetry and intense
visual clarity. Reminiscent of the carnal vitality of Pasolini, and
taking inspiration from the play between the sumptuous and fatal in
the still lives of the late Renaissance, Natura Morta is a unique
experiment in writing as stasis, culminating in the beatification
of its protagonist. In awarding this book with the 2001 Alfred
Doblin Prize, Gunter Grass singled out Winkler's commitment to the
writer's vocation and praised Natura Morta as a work of dense
poetic rigor. "Magnificent. A poetic study of the transience of
being. A deeply sensuous book." - Marcel Reich-Ranicki "A hypnotic
novel." - Edmund White
In the years before the Second World War, a man throws a statue of
the crucified Christ over a waterfall. Later, in Hitler's trenches,
he loses his arms to an enemy grenade. The blasphemer, screaming in
agony, presided over by Satan, who pours a cup of gall into his
open mouth, is portrayed amid the flames of Hell in a painting by
the parish priest that is mounted on a calvary where the two
streets in the cross-shaped village meet. Thus begins When the Time
Comes, Josef Winkler's chronicle of life in rural Austria written
in the form of a necrology, tracing the benighted destiny of a
community through its suicides and the tragic deaths that befall
it, punctuated by the invocation of the bone-cooker whose viscous
brew is painted on the faces of the work horses and the haunting
stanzas of Baudelaire's "Litanies of Satan." In a hypnotic,
incantatory prose reminiscent at times of Homer, at times of the
Catholic liturgy, at times of the naming of the generations in the
book of Genesis, When the Time Comes is a ruthless dissection of
the pastoral novel, laying bare the corruption that lies in its
heart. Writing in the vein of his compatriots Peter Handke, and
Elfriede Jelinek, but perhaps going further in his relentlessness
and aesthetic radicalism, Josef Winkler is one of the most
significant European authors working today.
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The Art of Flying (Hardcover)
Antonio Altarriba; Illustrated by "Kim"; Translated by Adrian West
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R554
R458
Discovery Miles 4 580
Save R96 (17%)
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When published in 2009, The Art of Flying was hailed as a landmark
in the history of the graphic novel in Spain for its deeply
touching synthesis of individual and collective memories. A deeply
personal testament, Altarriba's account of what led his father to
commit suicide at the age of ninety is a detective novel of sorts,
one that traces his father's life from an impoverished childhood in
Aragon, to service with Franco's army in the Civil war, escape to
join the anarchist FAI, exile in France when the Republicans are
defeated, to return to Spain in 1949 and the stultifying existence
to which Republican sympathisers were consigned under Francoism.
The Art of Flying is immensely moving and vivid, beautifully drawn
by Kim. It was highly praised in Spain on first publication, where
it was compared to Art Spiegelman's Maus. It went on to win six
major prizes, including the 2010 National Comic Prize.
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