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43 matches in All Departments
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Satantango (Paperback)
Laszlo Krasznahorkai; Translated by George Szirtes, Ottilie Mulzet
bundle available
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R290
Discovery Miles 2 900
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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In the darkening embers of a Communist utopia, life in a desolate
Hungarian town has come to a virtual standstill. Flies buzz,
spiders weave, water drips and animals root desultorily in the
barnyard of a collective farm. But when the charismatic Irimias -
long-thought dead - returns, the villagers fall under his spell.
Irimias sets about swindling the villagers out of a fortune that
might allow them to escape the emptiness and futility of their
existence. He soon attains a messianic aura as he plays on the
fears of the townsfolk and a series of increasingly brutal events
unfold.
Fresh Out of the Sky is a book of songs, dreams, laments,
narratives and comedies intertwined with passages about major life
changes involving country, identity and belonging. It is about
perpetually standing at the edge of change, anticipating it,
reflecting on it and dreaming about it. The title sequence of the
book returns to the terza rima theme of memory, following sequences
in his earlier books, such as those about early Budapest childhood
explored in Reel, and about growing to adulthood in England in An
English Apocalypse. Here the theme is arrival in England as a child
in 1956. These are wound around poems set in the aftermath of war,
upheaval, and life in contemporary England as tracked by a series
of dreamlike reports from the Covid bunkers we have been
inhabiting. Covid poems run through the collection like a thread
holding the book - and indeed the condition of England - together.
The thread embraces the second part of The Yellow Room, a
continuing poem of impossible questions about residual Jewishness
experienced as a dialogue with the poet's late father, as well as a
bestiary of transformations woven through Guillaume Apollinaire and
Graham Sutherland. The book ends on occasions of consolation,
delight and joy in the midst of darkness and uncertainty.
Winner of the 2015 Man Booker International Prize The Melancholy of
Resistance, Laszlo Krasznahorkai's magisterial, surreal novel,
depicts a chain of mysterious events in a small Hungarian town. A
circus, promising to display the stuffed body of the largest whale
in the world, arrives in the dead of winter, prompting bizarre
rumours. Word spreads that the circus folk have a sinister purpose
in mind, and the frightened citizens cling to any manifestation of
order they can find - music, cosmology, fascism. The novel's
characters are unforgettable: the evil Mrs. Eszter, plotting her
takeover of the town; her weakling husband; and Valuska, our
hapless hero with his head in the clouds, who is the tender centre
of the book, the only pure and noble soul to be found. Compact,
powerful and intense, The Melancholy of Resistance, as its
enormously gifted translator George Szirtes puts it, 'is a slow
lava flow of narrative, a vast black river of type.' And yet,
miraculously, the novel, in the words of Guardian, 'lifts the
reader along in lunar leaps and bounds.'
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The World Goes on
László Krasznahorkai; Translated by Ottilie Mulzet, George Szirtes
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R463
R383
Discovery Miles 3 830
Save R80 (17%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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War and War (Paperback, Main)
Laszlo Krasznahorkai; Translated by George Szirtes
1
bundle available
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R300
R264
Discovery Miles 2 640
Save R36 (12%)
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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Winner of the 2015 Man Booker International Prize War & War
begins at a point of danger: on a dark train platform Korim is on
the verge of being attacked and robbed by thuggish teenagers. From
here, we are carried along by the insistent voice of this nervous
clerk. Desperate, at times almost mad, but also keenly empathic,
Korim has discovered in a small Hungarian town's archives an
antique manuscript of startling beauty: it narrates the epic tale
of brothers-in-arms struggling to return home from a disastrous
war. Korim is determined to do away with himself, but before he
commits suicide, he feels he must escape to New York with the
precious manuscript and commit it to eternity by typing it all out
onto the world wide web. Following Korim with obsessive realism
through the streets of New York (from his landing in a Bowery
flophouse to his move far uptown with a mad interpreter), War and
War relates his encounters with a fascinating range of people in a
world torn between viciousness and mysterious beauty. Following the
eight chapters of War & War is a short 'prequel acting as a
sequel', 'Isaiah', which brings us to a dark bar, years before in
Hungary, where Korim rants against the world and threatens suicide.
Written like nothing else (turning single sentences into chapters),
War & War affirms W. G. Sebald's comment that Krasznahorkai's
prose far surpasses all the lesser concerns of contemporary
writing.
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The World Goes On (Paperback, Main)
Laszlo Krasznahorkai; Translated by Ottilie Mulzet, George Szirtes, John Batki
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bundle available
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R311
R267
Discovery Miles 2 670
Save R44 (14%)
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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Shortlisted for The Man Booker International Prize 2018 A Hungarian
interpreter obsessed with waterfalls, at the edge of the abyss in
his own mind, wanders the chaotic streets of Shanghai. A traveller,
reeling from the sights and sounds of Varanasi, encounters a giant
of a man on the banks of the Ganges ranting on the nature of a
single drop of water. A child labourer in a Portuguese marble
quarry wanders off from work one day into a surreal realm utterly
alien from his daily toils. In The World Goes On, a narrator first
speaks directly, tells twenty-one unforgettable stories, then bids
farewell ('for here I would leave this earth and these stars,
because I would take nothing with me'). As Laszlo Krasznahorkai
himself explains: 'Each text is about drawing our attention away
from this world, speeding our body toward annihilation, and
immersing ourselves in a current of thought or a narrative...' The
World Goes On is another masterpiece by the winner of the 2015 Man
Booker International Prize. 'The excitement of his writing,' Adam
Thirlwell proclaimed in the New York Review of Books, 'is that he
has come up with his own original forms-there is nothing else like
it in contemporary literature.'
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Hinterland 2019 - Autumn (Paperback)
Andrew Kenrick, Freya Dean; George Szirtes, Helen Szirtes, Anna Lachkaya, …
bundle available
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R247
Discovery Miles 2 470
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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The UEA Creative Writing MA presents its annual selection of new
young poets. Founded in 1992, students and tutors on the course
have included Owen Sheers, Kathy Simmonds, Hugo Williams and
Anthony Thwaite.
"The tiger growls, its eyes ablaze, but we too have our tiger ways,
we too can pad through the dark wood of the cosmic neighbourhood."
Leap with hares, call out to the sun, run with the wind, pull silly
faces with monkeys, watch out for the bear in the bathroom and meet
a burping princess! A fantastic new collection for younger children
from a prize-winning poet. These poems are perfect for curious
young minds, ready for adventures.
This short collection of poems considers that necessity and the
obstacles in its way: exile, distance, haunting, identity, despair,
killing... the list goes on.
The Delta is a densely populated place. Whole countries inhabit it,
exercising their powers and authority, presenting their offers of
complicity and compliance. Individuals move through the night and
come upon themselves in its mirrors. Dreamers and fantasists
repopulate its hidden corners: Rimbaud, Bruno Schultz, William
Blake, Arthur Schnitzler and the physicist Dennis Gabor lay claim
to their own visions of it. Animals gaze at their human companions
who gaze back. They try to puzzle each other out, looking to climb
into each other's eyes. They court each other, desire their own
species, are captivated both by each other's and their own beauty.
Life goes on its desultory way, finding itself between creeks and
cracks. And occasionally the world does crack open. Planes crash,
boats sink, weather changes, floodwaters rise, people vanish on
journeys. Anxiety remains: disaster zones persist into old age and
death, and into the life, death and resurrection of language
itself. At the core of the book is The Yellow Room, a sequence of
mirror poems contemplating the Jewishness of the poet's father. The
room constricts and glows.The poem breaks up across the page at
intervals then reassembles into its mirrors. Many of the poems are
formal haiku sequences. They are new parts of a personal Delta.
Others are in rhymed and broken stanzas. The Delta has to survive -
if it survives at all - on its broken patterns. Poetry Book Society
Choice.
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Satantango (Paperback)
Laszlo Krasznahorkai; Translated by George Szirtes
bundle available
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R443
Discovery Miles 4 430
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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Now in paperback, Satantango, the novel that inspired Bela Tarr's
classic film, is proof that the devil has all the good times. Set
in an isolated hamlet, the novel unfolds over the course of a few
rain-soaked days. Only a dozen inhabitants remain in the bleak
village, rank with the stench of failed schemes, betrayals,
failure, infidelity, sudden hopes, and aborted dreams. "Their
world," in the words of the renowned translator George Szirtes is
"rough and ready, lost somewhere between the cosmic and tragic, in
one small insignificant corner of the cosmos. Theirs is the dance
of death." Into this world comes, it seems, a messiah...
A rediscovered masterwork from the famed Hungarian novelist Sandor
Marai, "Portraits of a Marriage" is in fact a startling exploration
of a triangle of entanglement.
A wealthy couple in bourgeois society, Peter and Ilonka appear to
enjoy a fine union. Their home is tastefully decorated; their
clothes are well tailored; they move in important circles. And yet,
to hypersensitive Ilonka, her choice in decor is never good enough,
and her looks are never fair enough to fully win the love of her
husband, who has carried with him a secret that has long tormented
him: Peter is in love with Judit, a peasant and servant in his
childhood home. For Judit, however, even Peter's affection cannot
transcend that which she loves most--the prospect of her own
freedom and a future without the constraints of the society that
has ensnared all three in a vortex of love and loss.
Set against the backdrop of Hungary between the wars, "Portraits of
a Marriage" offers further "posthumous evidence of Marai's]
neglected brilliance" ("Chicago Tribune") and his exquisite,
acutely observed evocations of sacrifice and longing.
"From the Hardcover edition."
George Szirtes came to Britain as an eight-year-old refugee after
the Hungarian Uprising in 1956. Educated in England, he trained as
a painter, and has always written in English. This comprehensive
retrospective of his work covers poetry from over a dozen
collections written over four decades, with a substantial gathering
of new poems. It is published on his 60th birthday at the same time
as the first critical study of his work, "Reading George Szirtes"
by John Sears. Haunted by his family's knowledge and experience of
war, occupation and the Holocaust, as well as by loss, danger and
exile, all of Szirtes' poetry covers universal themes: love, desire
and illusion; loyalty and betrayal; history, art and memory; and,
humanity and truth. Throughout his work there is a conflict between
two states of mind, the possibility of happiness and apprehension
of disaster. These are played out especially in his celebrated long
poems and extended sequences, "The Photographer in Winter",
"Metro", "The Courtyards", "An English Apocalypse" and "Reel", all
included here.
In this innovative series of public lectures at Newcastle
University, leading contemporary poets speak about the craft and
practice of poetry to audiences drawn from both the city and the
university. The lectures are then published in book form by
Bloodaxe, giving readers everywhere the opportunity to learn what
the poets themselves think about their own subject. George Szirtes'
three lectures form an arc on the nature of historical knowledge in
the poem. 'Our knowledge' says Elizabeth Bishop in 'At the
Fishhouses', 'is historical, flowing and flown.' The sea in her
poem is so cold it burns hand and tongue, a parodox explored in his
first lecture, 'Cold dark deep and absolutely clear: poetic
knowledge as uncertainty'. Beginning with this understanding of
knowledge, his second lecture, 'Life is Elsewhere: knowing in
opposition', shifts to notions of historical responsibility,
especially as perceived by poets in the West at the time of the
Cold War. Szirtes considers questions of betrayal and fidelity and
the role of irony and quietism. In his third lecture, 'Flowing and
flown: in the world of superfluous knowledge', Szirtes seeks
exemplars and connections in works by George Seferis, Derek Mahon
and poets of Eastern Europe from the period immediately before 1989
as well as briefly afterwards, to enquire into the nature of
repression, returning to Bishop's story 'In the Village' for its
conclusion, where 'The hammer echoes with the icy black sea. Cold,
dark deep and absolutely clear' ending with Bishop's affirming cry:
'Oh beautiful sound, strike again!'
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Iza's Ballad (Paperback)
Magda Szabo; Introduction by George Szirtes; Translated by George Szirtes
bundle available
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R510
R432
Discovery Miles 4 320
Save R78 (15%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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