Alan Warner0.0 It is the early 1970s in the Highlands of Scotland and for 16-year-old Simon Crimmons there's really not much to do. He can hang around with his pals or his first-ever girlfriend, Nikki, he can dream about a first motorbike to get him out of the Port and among the hills, but in truth he's going nowhere.
The only local drama and romance is provided by the rural railway, and Simon ends up working on the trains by chance, thrown into a community of jaded older men. But that summer he is introduced to a world far more glamorous and strange. He meets the louche, bohemian Alex, and his dark, gorgeous sister, Varie: all that remains of 'the doomed family' of the great house at Broken Moan, where their father, Andrew Bultitude, is Commander of the Pass. When Simon falls in love with the otherworldly Varie he is suddenly given a freedom and mobility that is both thrilling and vertiginous.
With The Deadman's Pedal, Alan Warner returns to the landscapes of Morvern Callar and his early novels: a world where the real and the surreal, grim trade unionists and the crazed aristocracy, live under the shadows of the same great mountains, along the same railway line. A demented comedy, a wild romantic fling - The Deadman's Pedal is another thrillingly imagined adventure by one of our finest novelists.
Кирсти Ганн0.0 The hills only come back the same: I don't mind . . .' begins Kirsty Gunn's The Big Music, a novel that takes us to a new understanding of how fiction can affect us.
Presented as a collection of found papers, appendices and notes, The Big Music tells the story of John Sutherland of 'The Grey House', who is dying and creating in the last days of his life a musical composition that will define it. Yet he has little idea of how his tune will echo or play out into the world - and as the book moves inevitably through its themes of death and birth, change and stasis, the sound of his solitary story comes to merge and connect with those around him.
In this work of fiction, Kirsty Gunn has created something as real as music or as a dream. Not so much a novel as a place the reader comes to inhabit and to know, The Big Music is a literary work of undeniable originality and power.
Jenni Fagan0.0 Anais Hendricks, fifteen, is in the back of a police car. She is headed for the Panopticon, a home for chronic young offenders. She can't remember what’s happened, but across town a policewoman lies in a coma and Anais is covered in blood. Raised in foster care from birth and moved through twenty-three placements before she even turned seven, Anais has been let down by just about every adult she has ever met. Now a counterculture outlaw, she knows that she can only rely on herself. And yet despite the parade of horrors visited upon her early life, she greets the world with the witty, fierce insight of a survivor.
Anais finds a sense of belonging among the residents of the Panopticon—they form intense bonds, and she soon becomes part of an ad-hoc family. Together, they struggle against the adults that keep them confined. But when she looks up at the watchtower that looms over the residents, Anais realizes her fate: She is an anonymous part of an experiment, and she always was. Now it seems that the experiment is closing in.
Ben Lerner4.1 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.
Татьяна Харрод0.0 The British studio potter Michael Cardew (1901-1983) was a man of paradox, a modernist who disliked modernity, a colonial servant who despised Empire, a husband and father who was also homosexual, and an intellectual who worked with his hands. Graduating from Oxford in 1923, training with the legendary Bernard Leach, he went on to lead a life of pastoral poverty in Gloucestershire, making majestic slipware and participating in the polarised design and political debates of the 1930s. A wartime project in Ghana turned him into a fierce critic of British overseas policies; he remained in West Africa intermittently until 1965, founding a local tradition of stoneware inspired by the ambient material culture, independent of European imports, made by Africans for Africans. He ended his days a ceramic magus, his pottery at Wenford Bridge, Cornwall, an outpost of the counterculture and a haven for disaffected youth. In North America, the Antipodes and sub-Saharan Africa he offered the egalitarianism of craft as an antidote to racism and inequality. As the novelist Angela Carter observed in 1977, he came to seem 'the Last Sane Man in a crazy world.'
Along with historians of Empire and civil rights, and art and design historians, readers with a general interest in British cultural history will want to read this book.
Майкл Горра0.0 Henry James (1843 1916) has had many biographers, but Michael Gorra has taken an original approach to this great American progenitor of the modern novel, combining elements of biography, criticism, and travelogue in re-creating the dramatic backstory of James 's masterpiece, Portrait of a Lady (1881). Gorra, an eminent literary critic, shows how this novel the scandalous story of the expatriate American heiress Isabel Archer came to be written in the first place. Traveling to Florence, Rome, Paris, and England, Gorra sheds new light on James 's family, the European literary circles George Eliot, Flaubert, Turgenev in which James made his name, and the psychological forces that enabled him to create this most memorable of female protagonists. Appealing to readers of Menand 's The Metaphysical Club and McCullough 's The Greater Journey, Portrait of a Novel provides a brilliant account of the greatest American novel of expatriate life ever written. It becomes a piercing detective story on its own.
Салман Рушди4.1 14 февраля 1989 года, в день святого Валентина, Салману Рушди позвонила репортерша Би-би-си и сообщил, что аятолла Хомейни приговорил его к смерти. Тогда-то писатель и услышал впервые слово "фетва". Обвинили его в том, что его роман "Шайтанские айяты" направлен "против ислама, Пророка и Корана". Так начинается невероятная история о том, как писатель был вынужден скрываться, переезжать из дома в дом, постоянно находясь под охраной сотрудников полиции. Его попросили придумать себе псевдоним, новое имя, которым его могли бы называть в полиции. Он вспомнил о своих любимых писателях, выбрал имена Конрада и Чехова. И на свет появился Джозеф Антон.
Как писатель и его родные жили те девять лет, когда над Рушди витала угроза смерти? Как ему удавалось продолжать писать? Как он терял и обретал любовь? Как повлияла такая отчаянная ситуация на его мысли и поступки, что может сбить его с курса, как он учился сопротивляться? В своих удивительных воспоминаниях Рушди впервые подробно рассказывает о своей нелегкой борьбе за свободу слова. Он делится иногда комичными, иногда удручающе серьезными подробностями совей жизни под охраной вооруженных полицейских, о том, как он пытался добиться поддержки и понимания от правительств, спецслужб, издателей, журналистов и братьев-писателей, и о том, как он вновь обрел свободу.
Это удивительно честная и откровенная книга, захватывающая, провокационная, трогательная и исключительно важная. Потому что то, что случилось с Салманом Рушди, оказалось первым актом драмы, которая по сей день разыгрывается в разных уголках Земли.
