Featuring non-fiction by Mary Gaitskill, James Pogue, Susan Pedersen, Christian Lorentzen and Snigdha Poonam. Fiction by Fleur Jaeggy (translated by Gini Alhadeff), J.M. Coetzee, Sophie Collins, Kevin Brazil, Victor Heringer (translated by James Young) and Alexandra Tanner. Poetry by Najwan Darwish, Zoe Hitzig, Tamara Nassar and Bernadette Van-Huy. Photography by Rosalind Fox Solomon (introduced by Lynne Tillman), Jesse Glazzard (introduced by Anthony Vahni Capildeo) and Debmalya Ray Choudhuri (introduced by John-Baptiste Oduor). Cover art by Simon Casson.
Hailed in the Times Literary Supplement as 'probably the finest piece of non-fiction to come out of South Africa since the end of apartheid', The Dream Deferred is back in print and updated with a brilliant new epilogue. The prosperous Mbeki clan lost everything to apartheid. Yet the family saw its favourite son, Thabo, rise to become president of South Africa in 1999. A decade later, Mbeki was ousted by his own party and his legacy is bitterly contested – particularly over his handling of the AIDS epidemic and the crisis in Zimbabwe. Through the story of the Mbeki family, award-wining journalist Mark Gevisser tells the gripping tale of the last tumultuous century of South Africa life, following the family's path to make sense of the liberation struggle and the future that South Africa has inherited. At the centre of the story is Mbeki, a visionary yet tragic figure who led South Africa to freedom but was not able to overcome the difficulties of his own dislocated life. It is 15 years since Mbeki was unceremoniously dumped by the ANC, giving rise to the wasted years under Jacob Zuma. With the benefit of hindsight, and as Mbeki reaches the age of 80, Gevisser examines the legacy of the man who succeeded Mandela. '...essential reading for anyone intrigued by South Africa's complex philosopher-king.' - The Economist
SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL WRITING Long before the pandemic, care work has been underpaid and its values disregarded. In this remarkable and compassionate book, Madeleine Bunting speaks to those on the front line of the care crisis, struggling to hold together a crumbling infrastructure. A combination of extraordinary first-hand accounts of caring with a history of care and its language, Labours of Love is an impassioned call for change at a time when we need it most.
A GRANTA BEST OF YOUNG BRITISH NOVELIST 2023 'Hallucinogenic, electric and sharp.' JESSICA ANDREWS 'Will make most readers howl with laughter and/or shut their eyes in horror.' GUARDIAN **Pre-order Eliza Clark's next novel, PENANCE, now** Irina is in a rut. She obsessively takes explicit photographs of average-looking men she scouts from the streets of Newcastle while her dead-end bar job slips away; she's more interested in drugs, alcohol, and extreme cinema. When she's offered an exhibition at a fashionable London gallery which promises to revive her career in the art world, it should feel like an escape. But the news triggers a self-destructive tailspin, drawing in her obsessive best friend and a shy young man from her local supermarket who has attracted her attention . . . BOY PARTS is the incendiary debut novel from Eliza Clark, a pitch-black comedy both shocking and hilarious, fearlessly exploring the taboos of sexuality and gender roles in the twenty-first century. 'Smart, stylish, and very funny.' LARA WILLIAMS 'Boundaries are for breaking and if anyone can crash through and reinterpret the fear of our time, Eliza Clark can.' MSLEXIA 'A carnival funhouse ride: terrifying, feverish, hilarious.' JULIA ARMFIELD WHAT READERS ARE SAYING: 'A dark, funny, nasty book. Brilliantly written, annoyingly good.' 5* reader review 'I am obsessed.' 5* reader review 'Both shocking and darkly funny, this razor-sharp debut is unlike anything I've read before.' 5* reader review 'I loved this, properly loved it!!' 5* reader review 'Left me both in awe and totally disturbed. Wow.' 5* reader review
The seas are filled with migrants risking their lives on perilous crossings; Europe is engulfed by xenophobia and fear. In the cities and towns, in the schools and shops, strange children are starting to appear: enigmatic and unnerving, they disappear like ghosts, causing uproar. Amid mounting paranoia, Khaled, a young teenager from a war-torn Middle Eastern country, by chance meets Karolina in a discount store in Brussels. She buys him a red suitcase, and they part ways: Karolina to both mourn and search for her missing son, whose laptop betrays his entanglement with extremist groups; Khaled to head south, against the flow of other refugees - travelling with urgent intent, desperately protecting the contents of his suitcase. At once a ghost story, a morality tale and a quest narrative, From Another World is a striking reflection on loss, grief and the struggle to brave love in a world seized by fury.
In this wide-ranging and intellectually lively essay, Amber Husain asks if our obsession with replacement is the very thing that is keeping the world in stasis. And, if so, with what might we replace our obsession with replacement? With references spanning the avant-garde art tec--futurism, and Effective Altruism, and taking in writers from Aristotle to Anne Boyer, Replace Me is a celebration of the possibilities for political transformation inherent in the act of embracing one's own replaceability.
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year "Full of insights, marvelously entertaining . . . haunting and beautifully written." --The New York Review of Books "I lived in Athens, at the intersection of a prostitute and a saint." So begins Patricia Storace's astonishing memoir of her year in Greece. Mixing affection with detachment, rapture with clarity, this American poet perfectly evokes a country delicately balanced between East and West. Whether she is interpreting Hellenic dream books, pop songs, and soap operas, describing breathtakingly beautiful beaches and archaic villages, or braving the crush at a saint's tomb, Storace, winner of the Whiting Award, rewards the reader with informed and sensual insights into Greece's soul. She sees how the country's pride in its past coexists with profound doubts about its place in the modern world. She discovers a world in which past and present engage in a passionate dialogue. Stylish, funny, and erudite, Dinner with Persephone is travel writing elevated to a fine art--and the best book of its kind since Henry Miller's The Colossus of Maroussi. "Splendid. Storace's account of a year in Greece combines past and present, legend and fact, in an unusual and delightful whole. " --Atlantic Monthly
Called “remarkable” (The Wall Street Journal) and “an ambitious, colossal debut novel” (Publishers Weekly), Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai is back in print at last Helen DeWitt’s 2000 debut, The Last Samurai, was “destined to become a cult classic” (Miramax). The enterprising publisher sold the rights in twenty countries, so “Why not just, ‘destined to become a classic?’” (Garth Risk Hallberg) And why must cultists tell the uninitiated it has nothing to do with Tom Cruise? Sibylla, an American-at-Oxford turned loose on London, finds herself trapped as a single mother after a misguided one-night stand. High-minded principles of child-rearing work disastrously well. J. S. Mill (taught Greek at three) and Yo Yo Ma (Bach at two) claimed the methods would work with any child; when these succeed with the boy Ludo, he causes havoc at school and is home again in a month. (Is he a prodigy, a genius? Readers looking over Ludo’s shoulder find themselves easily reading Greek and more.) Lacking male role models for a fatherless boy, Sibylla turns to endless replays of Kurosawa’s masterpiece Seven Samurai. But Ludo is obsessed with the one thing he wants and doesn’t know: his father’s name. At eleven, inspired by his own take on the classic film, he sets out on a secret quest for the father he never knew. He’ll be punched, sliced, and threatened with retribution. He may not live to see twelve. Or he may find a real samurai and save a mother who thinks boredom a fate worse than death.
*** A NEW YORK TIMES "100 Notable Books of 2020" *** A stunning, complex narrative about the fractured legacy of a decades-old double murder in rural West Virginia—and the writer determined to put the pieces back together. In the early evening of June 25, 1980 in Pocahontas County, West Virginia, two middle-class outsiders named Vicki Durian, 26, and Nancy Santomero, 19, were murdered in an isolated clearing. They were hitchhiking to a festival known as the Rainbow Gathering but never arrived. For thirteen years, no one was prosecuted for the “Rainbow Murders” though deep suspicion was cast on a succession of local residents in the community, depicted as poor, dangerous, and backward. In 1993, a local farmer was convicted, only to be released when a known serial killer and diagnosed schizophrenic named Joseph Paul Franklin claimed responsibility. As time passed, the truth seemed to slip away, and the investigation itself inflicted its own traumas—-turning neighbor against neighbor and confirming the fears of violence outsiders have done to this region for centuries. In The Third Rainbow Girl, Emma Copley Eisenberg uses the Rainbow Murders case as a starting point for a thought-provoking tale of an Appalachian community bound by the false stories that have been told about. Weaving in experiences from her own years spent living in Pocahontas County, she follows the threads of this crime through the complex history of Appalachia, revealing how this mysterious murder has loomed over all those affected for generations, shaping their fears, fates, and desires. Beautifully written and brutally honest, The Third Rainbow Girl presents a searing and wide-ranging portrait of America—divided by gender and class, and haunted by its own violence.
Reissue of J. A. Baker's extraordinary classic of British nature writing Despite the association of peregrines with the wild, outer reaches of the British Isles, The Peregrine is set on the flat marshes of the Essex coast, where J A Baker spent a long winter looking and writing about the visitors from the uplands - peregrines that spend the winter hunting the huge flocks of pigeons and waders that share the desolate landscape with them. Including original diaries from which The Peregrine was written and its companion volume The Hill of Summer, this is a beautiful compendium of lyrical nature writing at its absolute best. Such luminaries as Richard Mabey, Robert Macfarlane, Ted Hughes and Andrew Motion have cited this as one of the most important books in 20th Century nature writing, and the bestselling author Mark Cocker has provided an introduction on the importance of Baker, his writings and the diaries - creating the essential volume of Baker's writings. Since the hardback was published in 2010, papers, maps, and letters have come to light which in turn provide a little more background into J A Baker's history. Contemporaries - particularly from while he was at school in Chelmsford - have kindly provided insights, remembering a school friend who clearly made an impact on his generation. In the longer term, there is hope of an archive of these papers being established, but in the meantime, and with the arrival of this paperback edition, there is a chance to reveal a little more of what has been learned. Among fragments of letters to Baker was one from a reader who praised a piece that Baker had written in RSPB Birds magazine in 1971. Apart from a paper on peregrines which Baker wrote for the Essex Bird Report, this article - entitled On the Essex Coast - appears to be his only other published piece of writing, and, with the kind agreement of the RSPB, it has been included in this updated new paperback edition of Baker's astounding work.
