On the heels of I Am the Brother of XX and These Possible Lives, here is Jaeggy's fabulously witchy first book in English, with a new Peter Mendelsund cover A novel about obsessive love and madness set in postwar Switzerland, Fleur Jaeggy’s eerily beautiful novel begins innocently enough: “At fourteen I was a boarder in a school in the Appenzell.” But there is nothing innocent here. With the off-handed remorselessness of a young Eve, the narrator describes her potentially lethal designs to win the affections of Fréderique, the apparently perfect new girl. In Tim Parks’ consummate translation (with its “spare, haunting quality of a prose poem,” TLS), Sweet Days of Discipline is a peerless, terrifying, and gorgeous work.
Brief in the way a razor’s slice is brief, remarkable essays by a peerless stylist New Directions is proud to present Fleur Jaeggy’s strange and mesmerizing essays about the writers Thomas De Quincey, John Keats, and Marcel Schwob. A renowned stylist of hyper-brevity in fiction, Fleur Jaeggy proves herself an even more concise master of the essay form, albeit in a most peculiar and lapidary poetic vein. Of De Quincey’s early nineteenth-century world we hear of the habits of writers: Charles Lamb “spoke of ‘Lilliputian rabbits’ when eating frog fricassse”; Henry Fuseli “ate a diet of raw meat in order to obtain splendid dreams”; “Hazlitt was perceptive about musculature and boxers”; and “Wordsworth used a buttery knife to cut the pages of a first-edition Burke.” In a book of “blue devils” and night visions, the Keats essay opens: “In 1803, the guillotine was a common child’s toy.” And poor Schwob’s end comes as he feels “like a ‘dog cut open alive’”: “His face colored slightly, turning into a mask of gold. His eyes stayed open imperiously. No one could shut his eyelids. The room smoked of grief.” Fleur Jaeggy’s essays—or are they prose poems?—smoke of necessity: the pages are on fire.
Family, obsession, and privilege boiled down by the icy-hot Swiss-Italian master stylist Fleur Jaeggy Even among Fleur Jaeggy’s singular and intricate works, The Water Statues is a shiningly peculiar book. Concerned with loneliness and wealth’s odd emotional poverty, this early novel is in part structured as a play: the dramatis personae include the various relatives, friends, and servants of a man named Beeklam, a wealthy recluse who keeps statues in his villa’s flooded basement, where memories shiver in uncertain light and the waters run off to the sea. Dedicated to Ingeborg Bachmann and fleshed out with Jaeggy’s austere yet voluptuous style, The Water Statues—with its band of deracinated, loosely related souls (milling about as often in the distant past as in the mansion’s garden full of intoxicated snails)—delivers like a slap an indelible picture of the swampiness of family life.
As concentrated as bullets, new stories by the inimitable Fleur Jaeggy Fleur Jaeggy is often noted for her terse and telegraphic style, which somehow brews up a profound paradox that seems bent on haunting the reader: despite a sort of zero-at-the-bone baseline, her fiction is weirdly also incredibly moving. How does she do it? No one knows. But here, in her newest collection, I Am the Brother of XX, she does it again. Like a magician or a master criminal, who can say how she gets away with it, but whether the stories involve famous writers (Calvino, Ingeborg Bachmann, Joseph Brodsky) or baronesses or 13th-century visionaries or tormented siblings bred up in elite Swiss boarding schools, they somehow steal your heart. And they don’t rest at that, but endlessly disturb your mind.
A fifteen-year-old girl and her father, Johannes, take a cruise to Greece on the Proleterka. Jaeggy recounts the girl's youth in her distinctively strange, telescopic prose: the remarried mother, cold and unconcerned; the father who was allowed only rare visits with the child; the years spent stashed away with relatives or at boarding school. For the girl and her father, their time on the ship becomes their 'last and first chance to be together.' On board, she becomes the object of the sailors' affection, receiving a violent, carnal education. Mesmerised by the desire to be experienced, she crisply narrates her trysts as well as her near-total neglect of her father. Proleterka is a ferocious study of distance, diffidence and 'insomniac resentment.'
A dementedly prim wife spies on her husband and is hammered to death by his paramour of the moment; a seemingly kind maid who mothers a wealthy orphan sets the house on fire; a retired couple are about to celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary when the husband throws himself out the window, or does his wife give him a little help? Set in mundane, repressed middle-class environments, these tales pivot on terrible slips off the leash.
How to Build Self-Discipline and Become More Successful (365 Powerful Thoughts From the World’s Brightest Minds) Its lack makes you unable to achieve your goals. Without it, you’ll struggle to lose weight, become fit, wake up early, work productively and save money. Not embracing it in your everyday life means that you’ll never realize your full potential. Ignoring it inevitably leads to regret and feeling sad about how more successful and incredible your life could have been if you had only decided to develop it. What is this powerful thing? Self-discipline. And if there’s one thing that self-discipline is not, it’s instant. It takes months (if not years) to develop powerful self-control that will protect you from impulsive decisions, laziness, procrastination, and inaction. You need to exhibit self-discipline day in, day out, 365 days in a year. What if you had a companion who would remind you daily to stay disciplined and persevere, even when the going gets tough? 365 Days With Self-Discipline is a practical, accessible guidebook for embracing more self-discipline in your everyday life. You’ll learn how to do this through 365 brief, daily insights from the world’s brightest minds, expanded and commented upon by bestselling personal development author Martin Meadows. This isn’t just an inspirational book; most of the entries deliver practical suggestions that you can immediately apply in your life to become more disciplined. Here are just some of the things you’ll learn: - why living your life the hard way makes it easy (and other suggestions from a successful entrepreneur and longevity scientist); - how to overcome your initial resistance and procrastination based on the remark made by one of the most renowned Renaissance men; - why, according to an influential neurosurgeon, it’s key to see problems as hurdles instead of obstacles (and how to do that); - how to embrace an experimental mindset to overcome a fear of failure (a technique recommended by a successful entrepreneur and musician); - how to quit in a smart way, according to a world-famous marketing expert; - how to improve your productivity at work by implementing the advice from one of the most successful detective fiction writers; - how a trick used by screenwriters can help you figure out the first step needed to get closer to your goals; - how to maintain self-discipline in the long-term by paying attention to what a bestselling non-fiction author calls necessary to survive and thrive; - how your most common thoughts can sabotage your efforts (and other valuable insights from one of the most respected Roman Stoics); and - how to overcome temporary discouragement and look at your problems from the proper perspective, as suggested by a well-known public speaker and author. If you’re ready to finally change your life and embrace self-discipline — not only for the next 365 days, but for the rest of your life — buy this book now and together, let’s work on your success! Keywords: self-discipline handbook, self-control book, willpower book, success journal, mental resilience, become successful, achieve your goals
The debut novel from PEN/Faulkner award-winning author of Call Me Zebra and Savage Tongues is a comic psychological thriller, an absurdist journey into the heart of darkness. A man purchases a house, the house of Fra Keeler, moves in, and begins investigating the circumstances of the latter's death. Yet the investigation quickly turns inward, and the reality it seeks to unravel seems only to grow stranger, as the narrator pursues not leads but lines of thought, most often to hideous conclusions.
