Davis’s poems are empowering and vulnerable, honest and embodied. In Late Summer Ode, Olena Kalytiak Davis writes from a heightened state of ambivalence, perched between past and present tensions. With Chekovian humor and metered pathos, from a garden in Anchorage not pining for Brooklyn, these poems “self -protest, -process, -recede.” Davis is a conductor of sound and meaning, precise to the syllable: a commanding talent in contemporary poetry.
Celebrating 50 years of Tove Jansson's classic, bestselling novel Featured in the BBC 2 Between the Covers Bookclub Special (Eurovision series 2023) 'Distils the essence of summer' Robert Macfarlane 'Magical, life-affirming' Elizabeth Gilbert The Worldwide Classic about a tiny island and larger love. An elderly artist and her six-year-old grand-daughter while away a summer together on a tiny island in the gulf of Finland. As the two learn to adjust to each other's fears, whims and yearnings, a fierce yet understated love emerges - one that encompasses not only the summer inhabitants but the very island itself. Written in a clear, unsentimental style, full of brusque humour, and wisdom, The Summer Book is a profoundly life-affirming story. Tove Jansson captured much of her own life and spirit in the book, which was her favourite of her adult novels. With a foreword by Esther Freud and an afterword by Sophia Jansson (on whom the child 'Sophia' is based) who returns to the island during the pandemic at the point of becoming a grandmother herself. Includes a 15pp epilogue by Tove's niece Sophia Jansson - the inspiration for 'Sophia' - on a personal and moving return to the island. 'Eccentric, funny, wise, full of joys and small adventures. This is a book for life.' Esther Freud 'Tove Jansson was a genius. This is a marvellous, beautiful, wise novel, which is also very funny.' Philip Pullman
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"The poems of Landau's stunning second collection are dark, urgent, sexy, deeply sad, and, above all, powerful."--Publishers Weekly, starred review "Landau's intimate, lonely poems are profoundly engaged with the experience of the self in its starkest moments: when it is deprived, nocturnal, barely lingual...She creates a deeply erotic and resonant encounter between the lyric I and its solitude." --The Boston Review "She is both confessional and direct, like Sylvia Plath and Allen Ginsberg. Her taut, elegant, highly controlled constructions meditate upon yearning and selfhood... Landau reminds us of the nuanced beauty of language as, through their directness, her tight, graceful poems make readers feel as if they spoke only to them." --Booklist "These beautiful harrowing poems are new-minted and young, but also age-old, broken and wise. She has found the perfect tone for her 'city of interiors.'"--Huffington Post "Hooray for a writer who can weave presence and absence, longing and loss of longing, into a tapestry of language as rich, honest, and compelling as this."--Naomi Shihab Nye "Landau registers the intensities of the flesh: pleasure, desire, limitation, and, ultimately, disappearance."--Mark Doty It is "always nighttime" in Deborah Landau's second collection--a series of linked lyric sequences, including insomniac epistolary love poems to an elusive "someone." Here is a haunted singing voice, clear and spare, alive with memory and desire, yet hounded by premonitions of a calamitous future. The speaker in this "ghost book" is lucid and passionate, even as everything is disappearing. blame the egg blame the fractured stones at the bottom of the mind blame his darkblue glare and craggy mug the bulky king of trudge and stein how I love a masculine in my parlor his grizzly shout and weight one hundred drums in this everywhere of blunt and soft sinking I am the heavy hollow snared the days are spring the days are summer the days are nothing and not dead yet Deborah Landau was educated at Stanford University, Columbia University, and Brown University, where she was a Javits Fellow and received a PhD in English and American literature. She co-hosts "Open Book" on Slate.com and is the Director of the NYU Creative Writing Program. She lives in the Soho neighborhood of New York City.
BUZZFEED BEST SUMMER BEACH READ PICK From one of Brazil’s most important living writers, a powerful reflection on the effects of isolation and feelings of inadequacy in our time. Sick and abandoned by his wife and son, Oséias decides to go back to his hometown after twenty years away. During this time apart, he has heard about his family only through sporadic phone calls from his younger sister, Isabela. The shadow of the suicide of their sister Lígia, when she was fifteen, lingers over Oséias as he tries to reestablish contact with his siblings. Each of them is absorbed in their own world: Rosana and her obsession with fitness; Isabela and her struggle to survive; João Lúcio and his isolation. All of them are branded by loneliness, but most of all Oséias, who, misunderstood by his family members and old acquaintances, decides to put an end to his journey. Late Summer can be read as both the realistic story of a displaced man tortured by his unsuccessful attempt to redeem his past, and as a portrait of contemporary society, in which social classes have ruptured any form of dialogue between them, and people have become rogue planets whose paths cross occasionally, risking mutual destruction.
