Granta 159: What Do You See?

Author: Sigrid Rausing
Publisher: Granta
ISBN: 1909889482
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 264

Book Description
From Nobel laureates to debut novelists, international translations to investigative journalism, each issue of Granta turns the attention of the world's best writers on to one aspect of the way we live now. This spring issue will feature award-winning writer William Atkins on the proposed nuclear power station Sizewell C, as well as memoir by Alejandro Zambra (tr. Megan McDowell), Lars Horn and Emmanuel Carrre (tr. John Lambert), and fiction by Adam Foulds and Rebecca Sollom. With photoessays by Raphaela Rosella introduced by Nicole R. Fleetwood, Muhammad Salah introduced by Esther Kinsky, and Phalonne Pierre Louis introduced by Jason Allen-Paisant.

Multiple Choice

Author: Alejandro Zambra
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143109197
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 130

Book Description
A "brilliant, innovative, beautiful" (The Guardian) book from the acclaimed author of Chilean Poet "Dazzling . . . a work of parody, but also of poetry." —The New York Times Book Review NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR, THE GUARDIAN, AND THE IRISH TIMES “Latin America’s new literary star” (The New Yorker), Alejandro Zambra is celebrated around the world for his strikingly original, slyly funny, daringly unconventional fiction. Now, at the height of his powers, Zambra returns with his most audaciously brilliant book yet. Written in the form of a standardized test, Multiple Choice invites the reader to respond to virtuoso language exercises and short narrative passages through multiple-choice questions that are thought-provoking, usually unanswerable, and often absurd. It offers a new kind of reading experience, one in which the reader participates directly in the creation of meaning, and the nature of storytelling itself is called into question. At once funny, poignant, and political, Multiple Choice is about love and family, authoritarianism and its legacies, and the conviction that, rather than learning to think for ourselves, we are trained to obey and repeat. Serious in its literary ambition and playful in its execution, it confirms Alejandro Zambra as one of the most important writers working in any language. NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE SUMMER BY THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, ELLE, THE HUFFINGTON POST, THE MILLIONS, VOX, LIT HUB, THE BBC, THE GUARDIAN AND PUREWOW

Granta 157: Should We Have Stayed at Home?

Author: William Atkins
Publisher: Granta
ISBN: 190988944X
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 321

Book Description
From Antarctica and the deserts of the US-Mexico border, to a Siberian whale-killing station and the alleyways of Taipei, these dispatches describe a world in perpetual motion (even when it is 'locked-down'). To travel, we are reminded, is to embrace the experience of being a stranger - to acknowledge that one person''s frontier is another's home. Granta 157 is guest-edited by award-winning travel writer William Atkins. It features: Jason Allen-Paisant remembers the trees of his childhood Jamaica from his home in Leeds Carlos Manuel lvarez navigates Cuba's customs system, translated by Frank Wynne Eliane Brum travels from her home in the Brazilian Amazon to Antarctica in the era of climate crisis, translated by Diane Grosklaus Whitty Francisco Cant and Javier Zamora: a former border guard travels to the US-Mexico border with a former undocumented migrant who crossed the border as a child Jennifer Croft's richly illustrated essay on postcards and graffiti, inspired by Los Angeles Bathsheba Demuth visits a whale-hunting station on the Bering Strait, Russia Sinad Gleeson visits Brazil with Clarice Lispector Kate Harris with the Tlingit people of the Taku River basin, on the border of British Columbia and Alaska Artist Roni Horn on Iceland Emmanuel Iduma returns to Lagos in his late father's footsteps, Nigeria Kapka Kassabova among the gatherers of the ancient Mesta River, Bulgaria Taran Khan with Afghan migrants in Germany and Kabul Jessica J. Lee in the alleyways of Taipei, Taiwan, in search of her mother's home Ben Mauk among the volcanoes of Duterte's Philippines Pascale Petit tracks tigers in Paris and India Photographer James Tylor on the legacy of whaling in Indigenous South Australia, introduced by Dominic Guerrera

The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise

Author: Olivia Laing
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393882012
Category : Gardening
Languages : en
Pages : 217

Book Description
An Oprah Daily Summer Reading Recommendation • Named one of the most anticipated books of 2024 by the BBC, The Observer, Irish Times, The Guardian, and The Millions. Inspired by the restoration of her own garden, "imaginative and empathetic critic" (NPR) Olivia Laing embarks on an exhilarating investigation of paradise. In 2020, Olivia Laing began to restore an 18th century walled garden in Suffolk, an overgrown Eden of unusual plants. The work brought to light a crucial question for our age: Who gets to live in paradise, and how can we share it while there’s still time? Moving between real and imagined gardens, from Milton’s Paradise Lost to John Clare’s enclosure elegies, from a wartime sanctuary in Italy to a grotesque aristocratic pleasure ground funded by slavery, Laing interrogates the sometimes shocking cost of making paradise on earth. But the story of the garden doesn’t always enact larger patterns of privilege and exclusion. It’s also a place of rebel outposts and communal dreams. From the improbable queer utopia conjured by Derek Jarman on the beach at Dungeness to the fertile vision of a common Eden propagated by William Morris, new modes of living can and have been attempted amidst the flower beds, experiments that could prove vital in the coming era of climate change. The result is a humming, glowing tapestry, a beautiful and exacting account of the abundant pleasures and possibilities of gardens: not as a place to hide from the world but as a site of encounter and discovery, bee-loud and pollen-laden.

Ways of Going Home

Author: Alejandro Zambra
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 146682820X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 122

Book Description
Alejandro Zambra's Ways of Going Home begins with an earthquake, seen through the eyes of an unnamed nine-year-old boy who lives in an undistinguished middleclass housing development in a suburb of Santiago, Chile. When the neighbors camp out overnight, the protagonist gets his first glimpse of Claudia, an older girl who asks him to spy on her uncle Raúl. In the second section, the protagonist is the writer of the story begun in the first section. His father is a man of few words who claims to be apolitical but who quietly sympathized—to what degree, the author isn't sure—with the Pinochet regime. His reflections on the progress of the novel and on his own life—which is strikingly similar to the life of his novel's protagonist—expose the raw suture of fiction and reality. Ways of Going Home switches between author and character, past and present, reflecting with melancholy and rage on the history of a nation and on a generation born too late—the generation which, as the author-narrator puts it, learned to read and write while their parents became accomplices or victims. It is the most personal novel to date from Zambra, the most important Chilean author since Roberto Bolaño.

The Inland Sea

Author: Madeleine Watts
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1646220188
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 201

Book Description
In this "eloquent debut," a young Australian woman unable to find her footing in the world begins to break down when the emergencies she hears working as a 911 operator and the troubles within her own life gradually blur together, forcing her to grapple with how the past has shaped her present (Publishers Weekly). Drifting after her final year in college, a young writer begins working part-time as an emergency dispatch operator in Sydney. Over the course of an eight-hour shift, she is dropped into hundreds of crises, hearing only pieces of each. Callers report car accidents and violent spouses and homes caught up in flame. The work becomes monotonous: answer, transfer, repeat. And yet the stress of listening to far-off disasters seeps into her personal life, and she begins walking home with keys in hand, ready to fight off men disappointed by what they find in neighboring bars. During her free time, she gets black-out drunk, hooks up with strangers, and navigates an affair with an ex-lover whose girlfriend is in their circle of friends. Two centuries earlier, her great-great-great-great-grandfather--the British explorer John Oxley--traversed the wilderness of Australia in search of water. Oxley never found the inland sea, but the myth was taken up by other men, and over the years, search parties walked out into the desert, dying as they tried to find it. Interweaving a woman's self-destructive unraveling with the gradual worsening of the climate crisis, The Inland Sea is charged with unflinching insight into our age of anxiety. At a time when wildfires have swept an entire continent, this novel asks what refuge and comfort looks like in a constant state of emergency.

The Weak Spot

Author: Lucie Elven
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1593766386
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 111

Book Description
A woman discovers something toxic at work in the isolated village where she is apprenticing as a pharmacist, in this fable-like novel about power, surveillance, prescriptions, and cures by a captivating debut voice. On a remote mountaintop somewhere in Europe, accessible only by an ancient funicular, a small pharmacy sits on a square. As if attending confession, townspeople carry their ailments and worries through its doors, in search of healing, reassurance, and a witness to their bodies and their lives. One day, a young woman arrives in the town to apprentice under its charismatic pharmacist, August Malone. She slowly begins to lose herself in her work, lulled by stories and secrets shared by customers and colleagues. But despite her best efforts to avoid thinking and feeling altogether, as her new boss rises to the position of mayor, she begins to realize that something sinister is going on around her. The Weak Spot is a fable about our longing for cures, answers, and an audience--and the ways it will be exploited by those who silently hold power in our world.

Granta 155: Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists 2

Author: Valerie Miles
Publisher: Granta
ISBN: 1909889407
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 394

Book Description
Granta 155: Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists 2 showcases the work of twenty-five of the most exciting young writers in the Spanish speaking world, chosen by judges Chloe Aridjis, Horacio Castellanos Moya, Rodrigo Fresn, Aurelio Major, Gaby Wood and guest editor Valerie Miles. Granta 155 is published simultaneously with Granta en Espaol 23: Los Mejores Narradores Jvenes en Espaol 2, in Spain and in the US. Andrea Abreu (Spain) trans. Julia Sanches Jos Adiak Montoya (Nicaragua) trans. Samantha Schnee David Aliaga (Spain) trans. Daniel Hahn Carlos Manuel lvarez (Cuba) trans. Frank Wynne Jos Ardila (Colombia) trans. Lindsay Griffiths and Adrin Izquierdo Gonzalo Baz (Uruguay) trans. Christina MacSweeney Miluska Benavides (Peru) trans. Katherine Silver Martn Felipe Castagnet (Argentina) trans. Frances Riddle Andrea Chapela (Mexico) trans. Kelsi Vanada Camila Fabbri (Argentina) trans. Jennifer Croft Paulina Flores (Mexico) trans. Megan McDowell Carlos Fonseca (Costa Rica/Puerto Rico) trans. Megan McDowell Mateo Garca Elizondo (Mexico) trans. Robin Myers Aura Garca-Junco (Mexico) trans. Lizzie Davis Munir Hachemi (Spain) trans. Nick Caistor Dainerys Machado Vento (Cuba) trans. Will Vanderhyden Estanislao Medina Huesca (Equatorial Guinea) trans. Mara Faye Lethem Cristina Morales (Spain) trans. Kevin Gerry Dunn Alejandro Morelln (Spain) trans. Esther Allen Michel Nieva (Argentina) trans. Natasha Wimmer Mnica Ojeda (Ecuador) trans. Sarah Booker Eudris Planche Savn (Cuba) trans. Margaret Jull Costa Irene Reyes-Noguerol (Spain) trans. Lucy Greaves Aniela Rodrguez (Mexico) trans. Sophie Hughes Diego Ziga (Chile) trans. Megan McDowell

White Sands

Author: Geoff Dyer
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1101870869
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 184

Book Description
From “one of our most original writers” (Kathryn Schulz, New York magazine) comes an expansive and exacting book—firmly grounded but elegant, often hilarious, and always inquisitive—about travel, unexpected awareness, and the questions we ask when we step outside ourselves. Geoff Dyer’s restless search—for what? is unclear, even to him—continues in this series of fascinating adventures and pilgrimages: with a tour guide who may not be a tour guide in the Forbidden City in Beijing; with friends in New Mexico, where D. H. Lawrence famously claimed to have had his “greatest experience from the outside world”; with a hitchhiker picked up on the way from White Sands; with Don Cherry (or a photo of him, at any rate) at the Watts Towers in Los Angeles. Weaving stories about places to which he has recently traveled with images and memories that have persisted since childhood, Dyer tries “to work out what a certain place—a certain way of marking the landscape—means; what it’s trying to tell us; what we go to it for.” With 4 pages of full-color illustrations.

How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read

Author: Pierre Bayard
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1596917148
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 129

Book Description
In this delightfully witty, provocative book, literature professor and psychoanalyst Pierre Bayard argues that not having read a book need not be an impediment to having an interesting conversation about it. (In fact, he says, in certain situations reading the book is the worst thing you could do.) Using examples from such writers as Graham Greene, Oscar Wilde, Montaigne, and Umberto Eco, he describes the varieties of "non-reading"-from books that you've never heard of to books that you've read and forgotten-and offers advice on how to turn a sticky social situation into an occasion for creative brilliance. Practical, funny, and thought-provoking, How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read-which became a favorite of readers everywhere in the hardcover edition-is in the end a love letter to books, offering a whole new perspective on how we read and absorb them.