|
Showing 1 - 21 of
21 matches in All Departments
An intellectually stimulating yet accessible collection of short
vignettes on Russia and Germany by Alexander Kluge. Not just in
light of a contested pipeline during the war in Ukraine but also
after centuries of both exchange and rejection, Russia and Germany
were and are as far away from each other as they are intrinsically
linked. The geopolitical present seems critical, the signs pointing
towards conflict and polarity. In this hot climate, German author
Alexander Kluge makes Russia the exclusive subject of his latest
book, offering multiple perspectives: from that of the historical
German patriots of the Napoleonic Wars of Liberation to the
narrative point of view of Franz Kafka and Heiner Muller; from
messianic yearning and utopian expectations of the twentieth
century to the full-blown or near-miss catastrophes in the atomic
age. Composed in Kluge's characteristic short-prose vignette style,
interspersed with numerous images and often humorous asides, Russia
Container is yet another brilliant and thought-provoking work from
one of Europe's most prolific and deeply intellectual literary
genius. The volume includes a preface specially written to engage
with the current events in Ukraine, making Kluge's narratives even
more timely and topical.
|
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
Ludwig Wittgenstein; Translated by Alexander Booth
|
R442
R358
Discovery Miles 3 580
Save R84 (19%)
|
Ships in 9 - 15 working days
|
A novel at once about social justice, romance, and Gramsci. Is it
possible to fight for social justice if you’ve never really loved
another person? Can you save a country if you’re in
love? Forty-six-year-old Anton Stöver’s marriage is
broken. His affairs are a thing of the past, and his career at the
university has reached a dead end. One day he is offered the chance
to go to Rome to conduct research on Antonio Gramsci, at one time
the leading figure of Italian communism. Once there, he falls
obsessively in love with a young woman he has met while continuing
to focus his attention on the past: the frail and feverish Gramsci
recovering in a Soviet sanatorium. Though Gramsci is supposed to
save Italy from Mussolini’s seizure of power, he falls in love
with a Russian comrade instead. With a subtle sense of the absurd,
Nora Bossong explores the conflicts between having intense feelings
for another and fighting for great ideals.
|
Killing Happiness (Hardcover)
Friedrich Ani; Translated by Alexander Booth; Foreword by Ann Cleeves
|
R591
Discovery Miles 5 910
|
Ships in 12 - 17 working days
|
German author Friedrich Ani combines deep sorrow, human darkness,
and breath-taking tension in his latest crime novel. Happiness is
extinguished completely one cold November night when
eleven-year-old Lennard Grabbe fails to return home. Thirty-four
days later, he is found to have been murdered, and former inspector
Jakob Franck, the protagonist of Friedrich Ani's previous novel The
Nameless Day, is entrusted with delivering the most horrible news
any parent could ever dream of, setting off a chain reaction of
grief among family and friends. As the special task force is unable
to make any progress in the case and the family is unable to deal
with the loss, Franck-driven by the need to bring them clarity but
also by the painful memories of all the unsolved murder cases from
when he was still on active duty-buries himself in witness
statements and reports up to the point of exhaustion. He spends
hours at the crime scene and employs his special technique of
"thought sensitivity," an abstract, intuitive process that may very
well lead him to the "fossil"-that crucial piece of information he
needs to solve the case. Once again, Ani combines deep sorrow,
human darkness, and breath-taking tension in a novel whose
melancholy can hardly be surpassed.
An engaging exploration of romance focusing on disparate ages of
lovers. Sunday evening, Tegel Airport, Berlin: A woman strikes up a
conversation with a man, Robert Sturm, who is thirty-six years old
and eighteen years her junior. He is on his way to Siberia and will
return the following Saturday. She cannot wait . . . In 1981 she
came to West Berlin as an eighteen-year-old to study medicine and
met Viktor, who was twice her age. Though he opened the world up to
her, he remained closed himself. At the turn of the millennium and
thirty-six, she meets Johann. He is thirty-six too. They try to
make a life together, but their jobs aren’t the only things that
are precarious. Saturday morning, Tegel Airport again: For six
days, her everyday life and her memories have become entwined. Why
are the men in her life always thirty-six? Is she still the person
she remembers? Or, being someone who knows their way around the
mind, is she in fact what she has forgotten?
A twist on the Irish literary classic Ulysses, told through Nicolas
Mahler's distinctive graphic novel style. Dublin, 16 June 1904:
through a day in the life of the advertising agent Leopold Bloom
and the sensations of the ordinary, James Joyce created a maximal
book from a minimum of matter. Ulysses, the most important novel of
modernity, is a defining book of the twentieth century. Joyce's
creation-also spectacularly innovative in form-inspired Nicolas
Mahler to attempt a literary retelling that is not a mere
illustration or adaption of the novel but an independent and
equally as inventive work. Using comics, Mahler transforms the
various literary techniques of the original. He assembles his
images with humorous and philosophical verve, quoting and rambling
along in the spirit of Joyce. With this graphic interpretation of
the modern classic, which also constitutes a homage to the golden
era of the newspaper comic strip, Ulysses can be newly discovered
in a delightfully unexpected form.
A twist on the classic tale of Alice in Wonderland told through
Nicolas Mahler's distinctive graphic novel style. Alice is back in
Wonderland. Here she meets the White Rabbit, who leads her down
into his rabbit hole in search of an illustrated edition of H. C.
Artmann's Frankenstein in Sussex. Over the course of the novel,
Alice repeatedly runs into the Rabbit, who quotes freely from other
literary works by the likes of Herman Melville and E. M. Cioran.
Unlike in Lewis Carroll's classic, Alice is not traveling the
Wonderland we know. Rather, in Nicolas Mahler's whimsical graphic
novel retelling, she is in a house deep beneath the ground. On
subsequent floors, she encounters the famous creations of Lewis
Carroll: the Hookah-Smoking Caterpillar, the Cheshire Cat, the Mock
Turtle, and many others. One after the other, these creatures
address the terrors of childhood and youth. It is only when Alice
reaches the ground floor of the house that we arrive at the
inevitable climax: face to face with Frankenstein's Monster.
Ju rgen Becker's The Sea in the Radio is a collection of "journal
sentences" divided into three sections called notebooks. In this
great concert of a novel, language has been pared down to a
minimum: fragments, phrases, and short sentences combine and make
up a life both banal and profound. It is a life in which many of
the details remain unstated or, as in miniatures, float just beyond
the edges of the frame. Though at first the narrative may seem to
move in a relatively harmless manner, soon enough we begin to
realize that the story to be told may indeed be more unsettling
than we had suspected. The Sea in the Radio is a novel that bears
witness not only to one's final years but also to one's place
within history in general and Germany's cataclysmic
twentieth-century past in particular.
|
Poetry and Time (Hardcover)
Joachim Sartorius, Max Neumann; Translated by Alexander Booth
|
R667
Discovery Miles 6 670
|
Ships in 12 - 17 working days
|
For nearly half a century, German artist Max Neumann has worked to
create, hone, and elaborate a visual vocabulary that is dark,
compulsive, and forceful. A lifelong collaborator, Neumann's
paintings have accompanied the work of Cees Nooteboom, Seamus
Heaney, Fernando Pessoa, and Laszlo Krasznahorkai, among many
others. In Poetry and Time, Neumann's haunting images are
accompanied by a lyrical and penetrating text from poet Joachim
Sartorius, who notes that a certain silence is at the very heart of
poems, stating: "They know what it is they do, but do not say it."
Exploring this mystery, he considers examples from Dickinson,
Rilke, and Shakespeare, among others, and examines the realities of
transience and mortality at the center of poems' reasons for being,
their urge to form their own reality and abolish time while being
inextricably bound to time. Sartorius's ruminations beautifully
complement Neumann's series of thirty poignant paintings, making
this volume is an extraordinarily rare and exquisite book.
A twist on the French literary classic In Search of Lost Time told
through Nicolas Mahler's distinctive graphic novel style. Marcel
Proust's In Search of Lost Time is one of the most important works
of French literature-if not the most important. Reading it can be
life-changing. Nicolas Mahler's comic is not a retelling of this
classic, nor a shortened version of Proust's monumental work.
Rather, it is a surprisingly funny graphic novel, comically
disrespectful of the celebrated work yet completely permeated by
Proustian spirit. Complemented by his clear and sparse
illustrations, Mahler's minimal nature of text use is easy on the
eye, even for those uninitiated into graphic novels. For long-time
fans of graphic novels, it is a perfect entry into a beloved
literary classic. A compact picture stream through time and space,
Mahler's In Search of Lost Time is a brilliantly complex house of
mirrors replete with Proustian motives and perceptions.
A novel at once about social justice, romance, and Gramsci. Is it
possible to fight for social justice if you've never really loved
another person? Can you save a country if you're in love?
Forty-six-year-old Anton Stoever's marriage is broken. His affairs
are a thing of the past, and his career at the university has
reached a dead end. One day he is offered the chance to go to Rome
to conduct research on Antonio Gramsci, at one time the leading
figure of Italian communism. Once there, he falls obsessively in
love with a young woman he has met while continuing to focus his
attention on the past: the frail and feverish Gramsci recovering in
a Soviet sanatorium. Though Gramsci is supposed to save Italy from
Mussolini's seizure of power, he falls in love with a Russian
comrade instead. With a subtle sense of the absurd, Nora Bossong
explores the conflicts between having intense feelings for another
and fighting for great ideals.
A highly engaging exploration of existential questions, written in
the midst of the Coronavirus pandemic. The Book of
Commentary / Unquiet Garden of the Soul confronts the reader with
questions of existential meaning, questions rendered all the more
potent by the backdrop of the Coronavirus pandemic: How fragile are
we as human beings? How fragile are our societies? What is a
“self,” an “I,” a “community”? How are we to
orient ourselves? And what, if any, role does commentary play? In a
fashion that will be familiar to longtime admirers of Alexander
Kluge, the book stretches both back in time to the medieval
glossators of Bologna and forward into interstellar space with
imagined travel to the moon Europa. Kluge’s characteristic brief,
vignette-like prose passages are interspersed with images from his
own film work and QR codes, forming a highly engaging, thoroughly
contemporary read.
Now in paperback, the thrilling, psychological tale of a
twenty-year-old cold case and the detective committed to solving
it. After years on the job, police detective Jakob Franck has
retired. Finally, the dead-with all their mysteries-will no longer
have any claim on him. Or so he thinks. On a cold autumn afternoon,
a case he thought he'd long put behind him returns to his life-and
turns it upside down. The Nameless Day tells the story of that
twenty-year-old case, which began with Franck carrying the news of
the suicide of a seventeen-year-old girl to her mother, and holding
her for seven hours as, in her grief, she said not a single word.
Now her father has appeared, swearing to Franck that his daughter
was murdered. Can Franck follow the cold trail of evidence two
decades later to see whether he's telling the truth? Could he live
with himself if he didn't? A psychological crime novel certain to
thrill fans of Henning Mankell and Jo Nesbo, The Nameless Day is a
masterpiece, a tightly plotted story of contemporary alienation,
loss, and violence.
After years on the job, police detective Jakob Franck has retired.
Finally, the dead with all their mysteries will no longer have any
claim on him. Or so he thinks. On a cold autumn afternoon, a case
he thought he'd long put behind him returns to his life and turns
it upside down. The Nameless Day tells the story of that
twenty-year-old case, which began with Franck carrying the news of
the suicide of a seventeen-year-old girl to her mother, and holding
her for seven hours as, in her grief, she said not a single word.
Now her father has appeared, swearing to Franck that his daughter
was murdered. Can Franck follow the cold trail of evidence two
decades later to see whether he's telling the truth? Could he live
with himself if he didn't? A psychological crime novel certain to
thrill fans of Henning Mankell and Jo Nesbo, The Nameless Day is a
masterpiece, a tightly plotted story of contemporary alienation,
loss, and violence.
Poetic prose meditations translated superbly into English.
Austrian poet Friederike Mayröcker is widely considered one of the
most important European poets of the twentieth and twenty-first
centuries. The last book of hers to be published during her
lifetime, as mornings and moosgreen I. Step to the window is an
elliptical and, if at times cryptic, deeply personal, playful, and
highly poetic collection of experiences, memories, dreams, desires,
fears, visions, observations, and peregrinations through landscapes
both real and imagined. The volume bears witness to her unique late
lyrical style of pyrotechnical cut-up. Among many others, her
beloved Derrida, Duchamp, Hölderlin, and Jean-Paul all appear,
almost like guides, as Mayröcker bravely makes her way through
infirmity, old age, and loneliness, prolonging her time as a
prolific writer as much as possible.
Widely regarded as one of the most influential philosophical works
of the twentieth century, Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus is a succinct yet wide-ranging exploration of
language and logic, science and mysticism, which has inspired
generations of thinkers, artists and poets. In a series of short,
bold statements, Wittgenstein seeks to define the limits of
language, its relation to logic, its power and its inherent
failings. Originally published in the early 1920s, it is the only
book-length work the renowned philosopher published in his
lifetime. In this thrilling new translation, Alexander Booth
displays an extraordinary sensitivity to the subtle influence on
Wittgenstein's gem-like prose - at once specialist and, often,
remarkably plain-spoken - of his background in mechanical
engineering, while highlighting the underlying poetry of this
seminal text.
|
Moor (Paperback)
Gunther Geltinger; Translated by Alexander Booth
|
R408
R273
Discovery Miles 2 730
Save R135 (33%)
|
Ships in 9 - 15 working days
|
It's the early 1970s and Dion Katthusen, thirteen, is growing up
fatherless in a small village in northern Germany. An only child
plagued with a devastating stutter, Dion is ostracized by his peers
and finds solace in the company of nature, collecting dragonflies
in a moor filled with myths and legends. On the precipice of
adulthood, Dion begins to spill the secrets of his heart-his
burning desire for faultless speech and his abiding relationship
with his mother, a failed painter with secrets of her own. Even as
Dion spins his story, his speech is filled with fissures and
holes-much like the swampy earth that surrounds him. Nature, though
so often sublime, can also be terribly cruel. Moor is Dion's
story-a story of escaping the quicksand of loneliness and of the
demands we make on love, even as those surrounding us are hurt in
their misguided attempts to bear our suffering. Powerfully tuned to
the relationship between human and nature, mother and son, Moor is
a mysterious and experimental portrait of childhood. Written by
up-and-coming German novelist Gunther Geltinger, the novel received
critical acclaim in Germany and is now presented in English for the
first time by translator Alexander Booth. Evocative and bold,
Dion's story emerges from the forces of nature, his voice rising
from the ground beneath the reader's feet, not soon to be
forgotten.
Widely considered to be among the most important Italian poets of
the twentieth century, Sandro Penna was born and raised in Perugia
but spent most of his life in Rome. Openly gay, Penna wrote verses
celebrating homosexual love with lyrical elegance. His writing
alternates between whimsy and melancholia, but it is always full of
light. Juggling traditional Italian prosody and subject matter with
their gritty urban opposites in taut, highly concentrated poems,
Penna's lyrics revel in love and the eruption of Eros together with
the extraordinary that can be found within simple everyday life.
There is something ancient in Penna's poetry, and something
Etruscan or Greek about the poems, though the landscape is most
often of Rome: sensual yet severe, sinuous yet solid, inscrutable,
intangible, and languorous, with a Sphinx-like and sun-soaked
smile. Penna's city is eternal-a mythically decadent Rome that
brings to mind Paris or Alexandria. And though the echoes
resound-from Rimbaud, Verlaine, and Baudelaire to Leopardi,
D'Annunzio, and Cavafy-the voice is always undeniably and
wonderfully Penna's own.
Now in paperback, a story of teenage love in Cold War-era Germany.
For a fifteen-year-old, falling in love can eclipse everything else
in the world, and make a few short weeks feel like a lifetime of
experience. In Love Writ Large, Navid Kermani captures those
intense feelings, from the emotional explosion of a first kiss to
the staggering loss of a first breakup. As his teenage protagonist
is wrapped up in these all-consuming feelings, however, Germany is
in the crosshairs of the Cold War-and even the personal dramas of a
small-town grammar school are shadowed by the threat of the nuclear
arms race. Kermani's novel manages to capture these social tensions
without sacrificing any of the all-consuming passion of first love
and, in a unique touch, sets the boy's struggles within the larger
frame of the stories and lives of numerous Arabic and Persian
mystics. His becomes a timeless tale that reflects on the multiple
ways love, loss, and risk weigh on our everyday lives.
|
You may like...
Dune: Part 1
Timothee Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson, …
Blu-ray disc
(4)
R631
Discovery Miles 6 310
|