Granta 120

Author: John Freeman
Publisher: Granta
ISBN: 1905881622
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 211

Book Description
From the chalky horse-pills of faceless pharmaceutical conglomerates to the hot toddy that was Grandmother's remedy for bruised knees, broken hearts and everything besides, here are stories about the ways we face our ailments and the ways we seek to cure ourselves. Rose Tremain contributes an extract from Merivel, a follow-up to her award-winning Restoration; Alice Munro writes a haunting, beautiful memoir about a strange phase in her childhood; Gish Jen tells a story about two brothers who are fixing up a house . . . but can't quite fix up the ageing parents who will live in it. The issue includes new poetry by Ben Lerner, Angela Carter, James Lasdun and Kay Ryan as well as non-fiction pieces by Terrence Holt and a highly regarded writer who breaks her silence about living with MS.

Blind Spot

Author: Teju Cole
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0399591079
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 353

Book Description
In this innovative synthesis of words and images, the award-winning author of Open City and photography critic for The New York Times Magazine combines two of his great passions. One of Time’s Top 10 Non-Fiction Books of the Year • One of Smithsonian.com’s Ten Best Photography Books of the Year When it comes to Teju Cole, the unexpected is not unfamiliar: He’s an acclaimed novelist, an influential essayist, and an internationally exhibited photographer. In Blind Spot, readers follow Cole’s inimitable artistic vision into the visual realm as he continues to refine the voice, eye, and intellectual obsessions that earned him such acclaim for Open City. Here, journey through more than 150 of Cole’s full-color original photos, each accompanied by his lyrical and evocative prose, forming a multimedia diary of years of near-constant travel: from a park in Berlin to a mountain range in Switzerland, a church exterior in Lagos to a parking lot in Brooklyn; landscapes and interiors, beautiful or quotidian, that inspire Cole’s memories, fantasies, and introspections. Ships in Capri remind him of the work of writers from Homer to Edna O’Brien; a hotel room in Wannsee brings back a disturbing dream about a friend’s death; a home in Tivoli evokes a transformative period of semi-blindness, after which “the photography changed. . . . The looking changed.” As exquisitely wrought as the work of Anne Carson or Chris Marker, Blind Spot is a testament to the art of seeing by one of the most powerful and original voices in contemporary literature. Praise for Blind Spot “Common things [are] made radiant by the quality of Cole’s looking. . . . In this new, luminous book, Cole shows himself to be really one of the best at seeing.”—The Guardian “This lyrical essay in photographs paired with texts explores the mysteries of the ordinary.”—The New York Times Books Review (Editors’ Choice) “Stunning . . . feels like the fulfillment of an intellectual project that has defined most of [Cole’s] career.”—Slate “Dazzling . . . cerebral yet intimate . . . combines personal essay, history, biography, journalism, and photography into a seamless package, capturing human dignity and grace through careful, clear-eyed reverence.”—Vice “An eclectically brilliant distillation of what photography can do, and why it remains an important art form.”—San Francisco Chronicle

Frissure

Author: Kathleen Jamie
Publisher: Birlinn
ISBN: 0857906550
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 68

Book Description
Frissure is an exquisite collection of prose-poems and illustrative work exploring healing, mortality, intimacy, memory and the natural world. It is about the intimate process of looking and seeing as it passes from one person - a cancer patient - looking at herself, from being 'examined' by a surgeon, to being looked at by an artist. In each situation a transformation occurs. The gaze of the patient on her own body and its post-operative scarring is objectified by that of the surgeon assessing the success of his work. But then the creative eye of the artist takes over and what was regarded as a mark of disease and of violation takes on an extraordinary flowering, and becomes a thing of beauty.

Gob's Grief

Author: Chris Adrian
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1400075823
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 400

Book Description
In the summer of 1863, Gob and Tomo Woodhull, eleven-year-old twin sons of Victoria Woodhull, agree to together forsake their home and family in Licking County, Ohio, for the glories of the Union Army. But on the night of their departure for the war, Gob suffers a change of heart, and Tomo is forced to leave his brother behind. Tomo falls in as a bugler with the Ninth Ohio Volunteers and briefly revels in camp life; but when he is shot clean through the eye in his very first battle, Gob is left to endure the guilt and grief that will later come to fuel his obsession with building a vast machine that will bring Tomo–indeed, all the Civil War dead–back to life. Epic in scope yet emotionally intimate, Gob’s Grief creates a world both fantastic and familiar and populates it with characters who breath on the page, capturing the spirit of a fevered nation populated with lost brothers and lost souls.

The Little Book Of The Sea

Author: Lorenz Schröter
Publisher: Granta Books
ISBN: 1847086764
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 216

Book Description
Have you ever wondered how many servings of fish and chips are sold in the UK every year? Why women, on average, catch bigger fish than men? Or what the last meal served onboard the Titanic consisted of? If so, enjoy this second helping of The Little Book of the Sea series, which gathers together facts, figures, lore and trivia about all things edible from the sea. From recipes gathered from around the world, to instructions for eating pufferfish (the world's deadliest delicacy), to the official explanation of how Popeye the Sailor discovered the strength-enhancing capabilities of spinach, The Little Book of the Sea: Food and Drink contains a smorgasbord of useful, useless and altogether intriguing information. So tie on a bib and pull up a chair - we're serving up a feast of delicious details about the ocean's greatest bounty: seafood!

Granta 117

Author: John Freeman
Publisher: Granta
ISBN: 1905881452
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 253

Book Description
The Horror issue features original cover artwork by Jake and Dinos Chapman and a line-up of contributors that includes some of the greatest names in contemporary fiction. Stephen King tells the story of a retired judge with a deadly secret. Don DeLillo imagines a moviegoer-turned-stalker and Paul Auster writes of his mother's death. Rajesh Parameswaran dips into the mind of a tiger who escapes from a zoo and terrorizes a neighbourhood. Will Self writes of his blood disease and Daniel Alarcon explores the phenomenon of staged, high-camp blood baths. Mark Doty ruminates on a close encounter between Walt Whitman and Bram Stoker. CONTRIBUTORS: Daniel Alarcon, Paul Auster, Tom Bamforth, Roberto Bolano, Don DeLillo, Mark Doty, Sarah Hall, Stephen King, Kanitta Meechubot (artist), Julie Ostuka, D.A. Powell (poem), Rajesh Parameswaran, Santiago Roncagliolo, Will Self, Joy Williams.

The Topeka School

Author: Ben Lerner
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
ISBN: 0771049331
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Book Description
A NEW YORK TIMES, TIME, GQ, Vulture, and WASHINGTON POST TOP 10 BOOK of the YEAR ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVOURITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award Shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize Winner of the Hefner Heitz Kansas Book Award From the award-winning author of 10:04 and Leaving the Atocha Station, a tender and expansive family drama set in the American Midwest at the turn of the century, hailed by Maggie Nelson as Ben Lerner's "most discerning, ambitious, innovative, and timely novel to date." Adam Gordon is a senior at Topeka High School, class of '97. His mother, Jane, is a famous feminist author; his father, Jonathan, is an expert at getting "lost boys" to open up. They both work at a psychiatric clinic that has attracted staff and patients from around the world. Adam is a renowned debater, expected to win a national championship before he heads to college. He is one of the cool kids, ready to fight or, better, freestyle about fighting if it keeps his peers from thinking of him as weak. Adam is also one of the seniors who bring the loner Darren Eberheart--who is, unbeknownst to Adam, his father's patient--into the social scene, to disastrous effect. Deftly shifting perspectives and time periods, The Topeka School is the story of a family, its struggles and its strengths: Jane's reckoning with the legacy of an abusive father, Jonathan's marital transgressions, the challenge of raising a good son in a culture of toxic masculinity. It is also a riveting prehistory of the present: the collapse of public speech, the trolls and tyrants of the New Right, and the ongoing crisis of identity among white men.

The Thoughtful Dresser

Author: Linda Grant
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439171645
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 149

Book Description
“You can’t have depths without surfaces,” says Linda Grant in her lively and provocative new book, The thoughtful Dresser, a thinking woman’s guide to what we wear. For centuries, an interest in clothes has been dismissed as the trivial pursuit of vain, empty-headed women. Yet, clothes matter, whether you are interested in fashion or not, because how we choose to dress defines who we are. How we look and what we wear tells a story. Some stories are simple, like the teenager trying to fit in, or the woman turning fifty renouncing invisibility. Some are profound, like that of the immigrant who arrives in a new country and works to blend in by changing the way she dresses, or of the woman whose hat saved her life in Nazi Germany. The Thoughtful Dresser celebrates the pleasure of adornment and is an elegant meditation on our relationship with what we wear and the significance of clothes as the most intimate but also public expressions of our identity.

The Age of Wire and String

Author: Ben Marcus
Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
ISBN: 9781564781963
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 168

Book Description
"A rare, genius-struck achievement . . . filled with great beauties, high themes, enormous sorrows." Kirkus Reviews

Leaving the Atocha Station

Author: Ben Lerner
Publisher: Coffee House Press
ISBN: 1566892929
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 191

Book Description
Adam Gordon is a brilliant, if highly unreliable, young American poet on a prestigious fellowship in Madrid, struggling to establish his sense of self and his relationship to art. What is actual when our experiences are mediated by language, technology, medication, and the arts? Is poetry an essential art form, or merely a screen for the reader's projections? Instead of following the dictates of his fellowship, Adam's "research" becomes a meditation on the possibility of the genuine in the arts and beyond: are his relationships with the people he meets in Spain as fraudulent as he fears his poems are? A witness to the 2004 Madrid train bombings and their aftermath, does he participate in historic events or merely watch them pass him by? In prose that veers between the comic and tragic, the self-contemptuous and the inspired, Leaving the Atocha Station is a portrait of the artist as a young man in an age of Google searches, pharmaceuticals, and spectacle. Born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1979, Ben Lerner is the author of three books of poetry The Lichtenberg Figures, Angle of Yaw, and Mean Free Path. He has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the Northern California Book Award, a Fulbright Scholar in Spain, and the recipient of a 2010-2011 Howard Foundation Fellowship. In 2011 he became the first American to win the Preis der Stadt Münster für Internationale Poesie. Leaving the Atocha Station is his first novel.