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A collection of brand-new short stories written by major
international writers and inspired by Kafka - to commemorate one
hundred years since his death Franz Kafka is widely regarded as one
of the greatest and most enigmatic geniuses of twentieth-century
literature. Few writers have inspired as much interpretation,
adaptation and imitation as he has - from films to novels to memes
- and very few artists in any field have created work that captures
so resonantly the fraught peculiarity of our existence. What
happens when Kafka's idiosyncratic imagination meets some of the
greatest literary minds writing in English across the globe today?
From a future society who ask their AI servants to construct a
giant tower to reach God; to a flat hunt that descends into a
comically absurd bureaucratic nightmare; to a population
experiencing a wave of anxiety attacks, these specially
commissioned stories speak powerfully to the strangeness of being
alive today.
‘Any new book by Yiyun Li is a cause for celebration’ Sigrid
Nunez ‘One of our finest living authors’ New York Times A
dazzling new collection of short stories written over a decade,
spanning loss, alienation, aging and the strangeness of
contemporary life – from Yiyun Li, the prize-winning author of
The Book of Goose A grieving mother makes a spreadsheet of everyone
she’s lost. A professor develops a troubled intimacy with her
hairdresser. And every year, a restless woman receives an email
from a strange man twice her age and several states away. In Yiyun
Li’s stories, people strive for an ordinary existence until doing
so becomes unsustainable, until the surface cracks and grand
mysterious forces – death, violence, estrangement – come to
light. And even everyday life is laden with meaning, studded with
indelible details: a filched jar of honey, a mound of wounded ants,
a photograph kept hidden for many years, until it must be seen. Li
is a breathtakingly original writer, an alchemist of opposites:
tender and unsentimental, metaphysical and blunt, funny and
horrifying, omniscient and yet acutely aware of just how much we
cannot know. Beloved for her novels and memoirs, she returns here
to her earliest form, gathering short stories and a remarkable
novella never before published in the UK. Taken together, the
stories in Wednesday's Child articulate the true cost of living
with all Li’s trademark unnerving beauty and searing wisdom.
'A dazzling, subtle, skilful knockout - I loved it' Charlotte
Mendelson 'One of our finest living authors ... propulsively
entertaining' New York Times 'Wonderfully strange and alive' Jon
McGregor A propulsive, seductive new novel about friendship,
exploitation and intimacy from the prize-winning author of Where
Reasons End Fabienne is dead. Her childhood best friend, Agnes,
receives the news in America, far from the French countryside where
the two girls were raised - the place that Fabienne helped Agnes
escape ten years ago. Now, Agnes is free to tell her story. As
children in a backwater town, they'd built a private world,
invisible to everyone but themselves - until Fabienne hatched the
plan that would change everything, launching Agnes on an epic
trajectory through fame, fortune, and terrible loss. A dark,
ravishing tale winding from the rural provinces to Paris, from an
English boarding school, to the quiet Pennsylvania home where Agnes
can live without her past. The Book of Goose is a story of intimacy
and obsession, friendship and rivalry perfect for fans of Elena
Ferrante, Ottessa Moshfegh and Kamila Shamsie. 'Beguiling ... A
shimmering, unsettling tale of exploitation and manipulation' Daily
Mail 'Brilliant ... A novel of deceptions and cruelty' Spectator
'For all its surface lushness, this is a novel of meticulous
philosophical inquiry...resonant with echoes of... My Brilliant
Friend, as well Elizabeth Strout... electrifying' Observer
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W-3 - A Memoir (Paperback)
Bette Howland; Introduction by Yiyun Li
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R250
R195
Discovery Miles 1 950
Save R55 (22%)
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Ships in 5 - 10 working days
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'Dazzlingly and daringly written' Rachel Cooke, Observer W-3 is a
small psychiatric ward in a large university hospital, a world of
pills and passes dispensed by an all-powerful staff, a world of
veteran patients with grab-bags of tricks, a world of dishevelled,
moment-to-moment existence on the edge of permanence. Bette Howland
was one of those patients. In 1968, Howland was thirty-one, a
single mother of two young sons, struggling to support her family
on the part-time salary of a librarian; and labouring day and night
at her typewriter to be a writer. One afternoon, while staying at
her friend Saul Bellow's apartment, she swallowed a bottle of
pills. W-3 is a vivid - and often surprisingly funny - portrait of
the extraordinary community of Ward 3 and a record of a defining
moment in a writer's life. The book itself would be her salvation:
she wrote herself out of the grave. Originally published in 1974
and rediscovered forty years later, this is the first edition of
W-3 to be published in the UK. With an original introduction by
Yiyun Li, author of Where Reasons End. 'W-3 is one hell of a debut'
Lucy Scholes, Paris Review 'Howland is finally getting the
recognition that she deserves' Sarah Hughes, iNews
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What Do I Know? - Essential Essays
Michel De Montaigne; Translated by David Coward; Introduction by Yiyun Li
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R441
R357
Discovery Miles 3 570
Save R84 (19%)
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Ships in 9 - 15 working days
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A selection of Michel de Montaigne's most profound, searching
essays, in a new translation and stunning hardback edition 'I
myself am the subject of my book'. So wrote Montaigne in the
introductory note to his Essays, the book that marked the birth of
the modern essay form. In works of probing intelligence and
idiosyncratic observation, Montaigne moved from intimate personal
reflection to roving theories of the conduct of kings and
cannibals, the effects of sorrow and fear, and the fallibility of
human memory and judgement. This new selection of Montaigne's most
ingenious essays appears in a lucid new translation by the
prize-winning David Coward. What Do I Know? offers the modern
reader profound insight into a great Renaissance mind.
'A dazzling, subtle, skilful knockout - I loved it' Charlotte
Mendelson 'One of our finest living authors ... propulsively
entertaining' New York Times 'Wonderfully strange and alive' Jon
McGregor A propulsive, seductive new novel about friendship,
exploitation and intimacy from the prize-winning author of Where
Reasons End Fabienne is dead. Her childhood best friend, Agnes,
receives the news in America, far from the French countryside where
the two girls were raised - the place that Fabienne helped Agnes
escape ten years ago. Now, Agnes is free to tell her story. As
children in a backwater town, they'd built a private world,
invisible to everyone but themselves - until Fabienne hatched the
plan that would change everything, launching Agnes on an epic
trajectory through fame, fortune, and terrible loss. A dark,
ravishing tale winding from the rural provinces to Paris, from an
English boarding school, to the quiet Pennsylvania home where Agnes
can live without her past. The Book of Goose is a story of intimacy
and obsession, friendship and rivalry perfect for fans of Elena
Ferrante, Ottessa Moshfegh and Kamila Shamsie. 'Beguiling ... A
shimmering, unsettling tale of exploitation and manipulation' Daily
Mail 'Brilliant ... A novel of deceptions and cruelty' Spectator
'For all its surface lushness, this is a novel of meticulous
philosophical inquiry...resonant with echoes of... My Brilliant
Friend, as well Elizabeth Strout... electrifying' Observer
'W-3 is one hell of a debut' Lucy Scholes, Paris Review 'At moments
dazzlingly and daringly written' Rachel Cook, Observer 'Howland is
finally getting the recognition that she deserves' Sarah Hughes,
iNews W-3 is a small psychiatric ward in a large university
hospital, a world of pills and passes dispensed by an all-powerful
staff, a world of veteran patients with grab-bags of tricks, a
world of dishevelled, moment-to-moment existence on the edge of
permanence. Bette Howland was one of those patients. In 1968,
Howland was thirty-one, a single mother of two young sons,
struggling to support her family on the part-time salary of a
librarian; and labouring day and night at her typewriter to be a
writer. One afternoon, while staying at her friend Saul Bellow's
apartment, she swallowed a bottle of pills. W-3 is a vivid - and
often surprisingly funny - portrait of the extraordinary community
of Ward 3 and a record of a defining moment in a writer's life. The
book itself would be her salvation: she wrote herself out of the
grave. Originally published in 1974 and rediscovered forty years
later, this is the first edition of W-3 to be published in the UK.
With an original introduction by Yiyun Li, author of Where Reasons
End. 'For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to
begin-real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way . .
. At last it had dawned on me that these obstacles were my life.'
A dazzling new collection of short stories written over a decade, spanning loss, alienation, ageing and the strangeness of contemporary life – from Yiyun Li, the prize-winning author of The Book of Goose.
A grieving mother makes a spreadsheet of everyone she’s lost. A professor develops a troubled intimacy with her hairdresser. And every year, a restless woman receives an email from a strange man twice her age and several states away. In Yiyun Li’s stories, people strive for an ordinary existence until doing so becomes unsustainable, until the surface cracks and grand mysterious forces – death, violence, estrangement – come to light. And even everyday life is laden with meaning, studded with indelible details: a filched jar of honey, a mound of wounded ants, a photograph kept hidden for many years, until it must be seen.
Li is a breathtakingly original writer, an alchemist of opposites: tender and unsentimental, metaphysical and blunt, funny and horrifying, omniscient and yet acutely aware of just how much we cannot know. Beloved for her novels and memoirs, she returns here to her earliest form, gathering short stories and a remarkable novella never before published in the UK. Taken together, the stories in Wednesday's Child articulate the true cost of living with all Li’s trademark unnerving beauty and searing wisdom.
A collection of brand-new short stories written by major
international writers and inspired by Kafka - to commemorate one
hundred years since his death Franz Kafka is widely regarded as one
of the greatest and most enigmatic geniuses of twentieth-century
literature. Few writers have inspired as much interpretation,
adaptation and imitation as he has - from films to novels to memes
- and very few artists in any field have created work that captures
so resonantly the fraught peculiarity of our existence. What
happens when Kafka's idiosyncratic imagination meets some of the
greatest literary minds writing in English across the globe today?
From a future society who ask their AI servants to construct a
giant tower to reach God; to a flat hunt that descends into a
comically absurd bureaucratic nightmare; to a population
experiencing a wave of anxiety attacks, these specially
commissioned stories speak powerfully to the strangeness of being
alive today.
The second collection of stories from Yiyun Li, author of the
Guardian First Book Award-winning A Thousand Years of Good Prayers
and The Vagrants. The stories in this collection, like the stories
in A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, are mostly set in China. The
country portrayed here is the China of the 21st century, where
economic development has led to new situations unknown to previous
decades: residents in a shabby apartment building witnessing in awe
the real estate boom; a local entrepreneur-turned-philanthropist
sheltering women in trouble in her mansion; a group of retired
women discovering fame late in their lives as private investigators
specialising in extramarital affairs; a young woman setting up a
blog to publicise the alleged affair of her father. Underneath the
veneer of prosperity and opportunity, however, lie the struggles of
characters trying to reorient themselves in the unfamiliar
landscapes of modern China: a widower, reminiscing about his wife,
confronts a young unmarried woman purchasing condoms in a pharmacy;
a new wife makes a plea to have a baby with her husband who was to
be executed only to discover that she has become an instant
celebrity; a middle-aged couple in America, who, upon losing their
only daughter, return to their hometown in China to hire a young
woman as a surrogate mother. These characters' fates are affected
as much by the historical moments in which they reside as by the
choices they make. Yiyun Li's new collection of stories is a report
from the front-line of a changing world, and confirms Li to be a
writer not to be missed.
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W-3 (Paperback)
Bette Howland; Introduction by Yiyun Li
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R334
Discovery Miles 3 340
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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'Profoundly moving. An astonishing book, a true work of art' Max
Porter, author of Grief is the Thing with Feathers From the
critically acclaimed author of The Vagrants, a devastating and
utterly original novel on grief and motherhood 'Days: the easiest
possession. The days he had refused would come, one at a time. They
would wait, every daybreak, with their boundless patience and
indifference, seeing if they could turn me into an ally or an enemy
to myself.' A woman's teenage son takes his own life. It is
incomprehensible. The woman is a writer, and so she attempts to
comprehend her grief in the space she knows best: on the page, as
an imagined conversation with the child she has lost. He is as
sharp and funny and serious in death as he was in life itself, and
he will speak back to her, unable to offer explanation or solace,
but not yet, not quite, gone. Where Reasons End is an extraordinary
portrait of parenthood, in all its painful contradictions of joy,
humour and sorrow, and of what it is to lose a child. 'A
masterpiece. This book haunts me more than any other novel I've
read in recent years' Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to
You 'Heart-wrenching, fearless, and unlike anything you've ever
read' Esquire 'I sit here shaken and, I think, changed by this
work' Katherine Boo, author of Behind the Beautiful Forevers 'A
devastating read, but also a tender one, filled with love,
complexity, and a desire for understanding' Nylon 'The most
intelligent, insightful, heart-wrenching book of our time' Sean
Andrew Greer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Less 'Captures the
affections and complexity of parenthood in a way that has never
been portrayed before' The Millions 'Ethereal and electric,
radiating unthinkable pain and profound love' Buzzfeed
The much-anticipated first novel from the Guardian First Book
Award-winning Chinese writer. In the provincial town of Muddy
Waters in China, a young woman named Gu Shan is sentenced to death
for her loss of faith in Communism. She is twenty-eight years old
and has already spent ten years in prison. The citizens stage a
protest after her death and, over the following six weeks, the town
goes through uncertainty, hope and fear until eventually the
rebellion is brutally suppressed. They are all taken on a painful
journey, from one young woman's death to another. We follow the
pain of Gu Shan's parents, the hope and fear of the leaders of the
protest and their families. Even those who seem unconnected to the
tragedy - an eleven-year-old boy seeking fame and glory, a
nineteen-year-old village idiot in love with a young and deformed
girl, an old couple making a living by scavenging the town's
garbage cans - are caught up in a remorseless turn of events. Yiyun
Li's novel is based on the true story which took place in China in
1979.
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Must I Go (Paperback)
Yiyun Li
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R270
R211
Discovery Miles 2 110
Save R59 (22%)
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Ships in 5 - 10 working days
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Richly expansive and deeply moving, an intimate novel of secret
lives and painful histories from one of the finest storytellers we
have 'This brilliant novel examines lives lived, losses
accumulated, and the slipperiness of perception. Yiyun Li writes
deeply, drolly, and with elegance about history, even as it's
happening. She is one of my favorite writers, and Must I Go is an
extraordinary book.' Meg Wolitzer Lilia Liska is 81. She has
shrewdly outlived three husbands, raised five children and seen the
arrival of seventeen grandchildren. Now she has turned her keen
attention to a strange little book published by a vanity press: the
diary of a long-forgotten man named Roland Bouley, with whom she
once had a fleeting affair. Increasingly obsessed by this fragment
of intimate history, Lilia begins to annotate the diary with her
own rather different version of events. Gradually she undercuts
Roland's charming but arrogant voice with an incisive and deeply
moving commentary. She reveals to us the surprising, long-held
secrets of her past. And she returns inexorably to her daughter,
Lucy, who took her own life at the age of 27. Must I Go is an
unconventional epistolary novel, a gleefully one-way correspondence
between the very-much-alive Lilia and the long-departed Roland.
Though mortality is ever-present, this is ultimately a novel about
life, in all its messy glory. Life lived, for the extraordinary
Lilia, absolutely on its own terms. With exquisite subtlety and
insight, Yiyun Li navigates the twin poles of grief and resilience,
loss and rebirth, that compass a human heart.
Read the "Time" magazine review about "the most significant
Penguin Classic ever published."
In the early twentieth century, as China came up against the
realities of the modern world, Lu Xun effected a shift in Chinese
letters away from the ornate, obsequious literature of the
aristocrats to the plain, expressive literature of the masses. His
celebrated short stories assemble a powerfully unsettling portrait
of the superstition, poverty, and complacency that he perceived in
late imperial China and in the revolutionary republic that toppled
the last dynasty in 1911. This volume presents Lu Xun's complete
fiction in bracing new translations and includes such famous works
as "The Real Story of Ah-q," "Diary of a Madman," and "The
Divorce." Together they expose a contradictory legacy of
cosmopolitan independence, polemical fractiousness, and anxious
patriotism that continues to resonate in Chinese intellectual life
today.
Published to accompany the major retrospective exhibition on Hung
Liu, "Summoning Ghosts" is a comprehensive look at the work of this
extraordinary Chinese-American artist. A pioneer in Chinese
contemporary art before the Chinese avant-garde came into being,
Lui's life spanned two centuries and bridged two totally different
economic situations. The wide-ranging essays in this book, which
features 140 color illustrations, reflect on how Hung Liu's
evocative art is inextricably bound to her equally rich and complex
life. While considering the artist's primary work as a painter, the
contributors also celebrate her murals, permanent and temporary
installations, photography, and video.
'A dazzling, subtle, skilful knockout - I loved it' Charlotte
Mendelson 'One of our finest living authors ... propulsively
entertaining' New York Times 'Wonderfully strange and alive' Jon
McGregor A propulsive, seductive new novel about friendship,
exploitation and intimacy from the prize-winning author of Where
Reasons End Fabienne is dead. Her childhood best friend, Agnes,
receives the news in America, far from the French countryside where
the two girls were raised - the place that Fabienne helped Agnes
escape ten years ago. Now, Agnes is free to tell her story. As
children in a backwater town, they'd built a private world,
invisible to everyone but themselves - until Fabienne hatched the
plan that would change everything, launching Agnes on an epic
trajectory through fame, fortune, and terrible loss. A dark,
ravishing tale winding from the rural provinces to Paris, from an
English boarding school, to the quiet Pennsylvania home where Agnes
can live without her past. The Book of Goose is a story of intimacy
and obsession, friendship and rivalry perfect for fans of Elena
Ferrante, Ottessa Moshfegh and Kamila Shamsie. 'Beguiling ... A
shimmering, unsettling tale of exploitation and manipulation' Daily
Mail 'Brilliant ... A novel of deceptions and cruelty' Spectator
'For all its surface lushness, this is a novel of meticulous
philosophical inquiry...resonant with echoes of... My Brilliant
Friend, as well Elizabeth Strout... electrifying' Observer
'Profoundly engaging in depth, with remarkable subtlety and rare,
limpid beauty. A must-read' - Mary Gaitskill A luminous memoir
about reading, writing and how to find meaning in a life Written
over two years while the author battled depression, Dear Friend is
a painful and yet richly affirming examination of what makes life
worth living. Interweaving personal memoir with a wide-ranging
celebration of writers and books, this is a journey of recovery
through literature. From William Trevor and Katherine Mansfield to
Kierkegaard and Larkin, Yiyun Li traces the themes of time and
transformation, presence and absence. Drawing on personal
experiences from her difficult childhood in China, she constructs a
beautiful, interior exploration of selfhood and what is required to
choose life.
Brilliant and original, ‘A Thousand Years of Good Prayers’
introduces a remarkable first collection of stories about China
from an author set to become a major literary talent. In this
extraordinary first collection, Yiyun Li brings us a modern China
facing up to a complex history of repression and guilt. In
'Immortality', winner of the Paris Review prize, a young man bears
a striking resemblance to the dictator, and so finds a strange kind
of calling. In 'Extra', first published in the New Yorker, a
Chinese woman, alone in middle age, befriends a young boy who has
become an outcast in a remote country school. In their friendship,
we see how love can begin to overcome the strictures that dominate
their lives. In turn horrifying and breathtakingly lyrical, Yiyun
Li, a new and talented young Chinese writer, confronts the silence
that dominated the history of her country, and illuminates how
mythology, politics, history and culture intersect with
personality. She leaves us with an enduring vision of a country
undergoing tremendous change.
In these spellbinding stories, Yiyun Li, a Hemingway
Foundation/PEN Award winner, a MacArthur Fellow, and one of "The
New Yorker"'s top 20 fiction writers under 40, gives us exquisite
stories in which politics and folklore magnificently illuminate the
human condition. A professor introduces her middle-aged son to a
favorite student, unaware of the student's true affections. A
lifelong bachelor finds kinship with a man wrongly accused of an
indiscretion. Six women establish a private investigating agency to
battle extramarital affairs in Beijing. Written in lyrical prose
and with stunning honesty, "Gold Boy, Emerald Girl "introduces us
to worlds strange and familiar, creating a mesmerizing and vibrant
landscape of life.
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