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Showing 1 - 6 of
6 matches in All Departments
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Herbert (Hardcover)
Nabarun Bhattacharya; Translated by Sunandini Banerjee
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R485
Discovery Miles 4 850
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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May 1992. In Russia, Boris Yeltsin is showing millions of
communists the specter of capitalism. Yugoslavia is disintegrating.
United Germany is uncertain about their next move, and communism is
collapsing all around. And in a corner of old Calcutta, Herbert
Sarkar, sole proprietor of a company that delivers messages from
the dead, decides to give up the ghost. Decides to give up his aunt
and uncle, his friends and foes, his fondness for kites, his aching
heart that broke for Buki, his top terrace from where he stared up
at the sky, his Ulster overcoat with buttons like big black medals,
his notebook full of poems, his Park Street every evening when the
sun goes down, his memory of a Russian girl running across the
great black earth as the soldiers lift their guns and get ready to
fire, his fairy who beat her wings against his window and filled
his room with blue light . Surreal, haunting, painful, beautiful
and astonishing in turn, and sweeping us along from Herbert's early
orphan years to the tumultuous Naxalite times of the 1970s to the
explosive events after his death, Bhattacharya's groundbreaking
novel is now available in a daring new translation and holds up
before us both a fascinating character and a plaintive city.
Four classical Greek myths retold with unexpected twists by an East
German dissident. Franz Fuhmann's subversive retellings of four
Greek legends were first published in East Germany in 1980. In
them, Fuhmann plumbs the ancient tales' depths and makes them his
own. Attuned to conflict and paradox, he sheds light on the
complexities of sex and love, art and beauty, politics and power.
In the title story, the love of the goddess Eos for the mortal
Tithonos reveals the blessing and curse of transience, while "Hera
and Zeus" probes the divine couple's tumultuous relationship and
its devastating consequences for a world embroiled in war.
Fuhmann's unflinching account of Marsyas' flaying by Apollo has
been widely read as a dissident political statement that has lost
none of its incisive force. At times charged with sensuality, and
at others honed to a keen analytical edge, Fuhmann's shimmering
prose is matched by Sunandini Banerjee's exquisite collages.
Science has given us several explanations for how humans evolved
from walking on four limbs to two feet. None, however, is as
riveting as what master storyteller Ngugi wa Thiong'o offers in The
Upright Revolution. Blending myth and folklore with an acute
insight into the human psyche and politics, Wa Thiong'o conjures up
a fantastic fable about how and why humans began to walk upright.
It is a story that will appeal to children and adults alike,
containing a clear and important message: "Life is connected."
Originally written in Gikuyu, this short story has been translated
into sixty-three languages--forty-seven of them African--making it
the most translated story in the history of African literature.
This new collector's edition of The Upright Revolution is richly
illustrated in full color with Sunandini Banerjee's marvellous
digital collages, which open up new vistas of imagination and add
unique dimensions to the story.
"Not writing is always a relief and sometimes a pleasure. Writing
about what cannot be written, by contrast, is the devil's own job."
In this unusual text, a blend of essay, fiction, and literary
genealogy, South African novelist Ivan Vladislavic explores the
problems and potentials of the fictions he could not bring himself
to write. Drawing from his notebooks of the past twenty years,
Vladislavic records here a range of ideas for stories--unsettled
accounts, he calls them, or case studies of failure--and examines
where they came from and why they eluded him. In the process, he
reveals some of the principles that matter to him as a writer, and
pays tribute to the writers-- such as Walser, Perec, Sterne, and
DeLillo--who have been important to him as both a reader and an
author. At the heart of the text, like a brightly lit room in a
field of debris, stands Vladislavic's Loss Library itself, the
shelves laden with books that have never been written. On the page,
Vladislavic tells us, every loss may yet be recovered. An
extraordinary book about both the nature of novels and the process
of writing, The Loss Library will appeal to anyone seeking to
understand the almost magical and mythical experience of breathing
life into a new work of fiction. Praise for Vladislavic "In the
tradition of Elias Canetti, a tour de force of the
imagination."--Andre Brink "The prose is stunning. It gives the
impression of the words and the phrases having been caught from the
inside--as though the author lives on the other side of language,
where every word is strange and dancing, and the way they are put
together produces complicated patterned exchanges like
minuets."--Tony Morphet
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Monk's Eye (Hardcover)
Cees Nooteboom; Translated by David Colmer; Illustrated by Sunandini Banerjee
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R422
Discovery Miles 4 220
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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Cees Nooteboom wrote the poems that make up Monk's Eye on two
islands: he began them on the Dutch island of Schiermonnikoog and
finished them on the Spanish island of Minorca, where he has spent
summers for decades. The poems--which can be read individually or,
all together, as the record of a poet's life--are about the two
islands. But they're also about islands as an archetype, about the
serenity that we can find on beaches and amid dunes, the sea
sweeping imperturbably around us. Accompanied by Sunandini
Banerjee's collages, the poems in this volume are rich in allusion;
they address the past, memories, illusions, dreams, and the heart
of all poetry--which Nooteboom locates in the opening line of
Plato's Phaedrus, when Socrates, walking with his admirer, asks,
"My dear Phaedrus, whence came you, and whither are you going?"
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In Dreams (Hardcover)
Diane Meur; Translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan; Illustrated by Sunandini Banerjee
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R552
Discovery Miles 5 520
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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In Paris, Montreal, Seville, Berlin, and towns large and small,
Diane Meur has dreamt - and she has remembered her dreams. In this
small volume the author shares her dreams of the years 2008-10, a
time of global upheaval that happened to coincide with upheavals in
her own life. As she writes in the preface, "They are not my life,
they are not my writing, they are just the dreams I had,
remembered, and noted down: all of them, and every part of them,
without censure or omission." Some dreams are humorous: peeling a
scorpion like a shrimp and finding it isn't half bad; some are
poignant: a tiny doll-like baby encountered in a train; and, as in
many dreams, there is much anxiety: old boyfriends encountered
again; children in distress; unusual, threatening spaces and
people. Though dreamt by the author, Meur's dreams share a common
human intimacy - in them we recognize our own innermost thoughts,
concerns, desires, and fears. Accompanied by the otherworldly
illustrations of collage artist Sunandini Banerjee, Meur's dreams
come alive, inspiring our own reveries and becoming part of our
nocturnal imaginings.
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