'It looks impossible to get out,' he says. And also: 'But we'll get out.' Two brothers, Big and Small, are trapped at the bottom of a well, stalked by madness and with no means of escape. Struggling for sustenance and clinging to sanity, Big forges a plan to free his little brother. Fast-paced and rich in metaphor, this extraordinary new story poses questions of fight, survival and solidarity when people are faced with devastation. Powerful, disquieting and highly original, Repila's unique allegory explores with bravery and emotion the depths of human desperation and, ultimately, our almost unending capacity for hope.
'It looks impossible to get out,' he says. And also: 'But we'll get out.' Two brothers, Big and Small, are trapped at the bottom of a well, stalked by madness and with no means of escape. Struggling for sustenance and clinging to sanity, Big forges a plan to free his little brother. Fast-paced and rich in metaphor, this extraordinary new story poses questions of fight, survival and solidarity when people are faced with devastation. Powerful, disquieting and highly original, Repila's unique allegory explores with bravery and emotion the depths of human desperation and, ultimately, our almost unending capacity for hope.
Arter initiated a new publication series, ARTER BACKGROUND, in 2019 to accompany exhibitions drawn from its collection, which holds more than 1.400 works of art. The fourth book of the series accompanies Locus Solus, which brings together selected works from the Arter Collection with several large-scale installations, including site-specific new productions, with an aim to explore the idea of “nature” through the lens of facts, fictions and emotions. In the book, excerpts of textual and visual contents selected around the ideas active in the curatorial process of the exhibition are complemented by new works produced specifically for this context. While the exhibition curated by Selen Ansen deals with the ways in which nature and culture permeate and affect each other, the accompanying publication, through its distinctive editorial structure, features texts pointing towards extinct territories, subconscious landscapes, foreign lands, fictive rooms, heres, elsewheres and nowheres, wonderlands, heavenly, earthly and subterranean realms, alongside commissioned essays by Sena Başöz, Pascal Janovjak and Su Pola. This book reflects the exhibition which it accompanies, and whose spaces and reflections on the idea of nature it extends. It amounts to a territory the contours of which are fluid, semi-autonomous, inhabited by a variety of spaces and times. One may peruse it while sitting, standing or lying down, in broad daylight or when the night has fallen, in clear or foul weather, in or outdoors – just as one would with any other book that fell into one’s hands. One will probably make one’s way into it unaccompanied, since it is customary to read alone and in silence. Once inside, it will be preferable to keep one’s eyes open in order to understand where one sets foot, yet not to neglect to close them so as to be able to wander off beyond its borders. This neither-too-long, neither-too-short book is also a body: a hybrid body composed of heterogeneous worlds and points of view, assembled according to the “good neighbour” principle, so cherished by Aby Warburg. It compiles fragments of texts uprooted from their original context, some of which are published as a whole, others devised within the framework of the exhibition. It also contains images, some speechless, others quite talkative, which, again, have been deterritorialised – moved out of their original context – in order to become reterritorialised in new surroundings. One will find less theory here than fiction, fewer essays than narrations, versified poetry and free prose, a manifesto, dictionary and encyclopaedia pages, more solitude than crowds, more vegetation than concrete, at least as many unspoken as vocalised thoughts. — Selen Ansen with contributions by Sena Başöz • John Berger • Jen Bervin • Karl Blossfeldt • Richard Brautigan • Charles Burns • Joseph Conrad • Julio Cortázar • Karel Čapek • Evliyâ Çelebi • Ferit Edgü • Helmut Eisendle • Gianni Guadalupi • Marlen Haushofer • Robert Hooke • Pascal Janovjak • Kamo no Chōmei • Gizem Karakaş • Tetsumi Kudo • D.H. Lawrence • Leo Lionni • Lucretius • Maurice Maeterlinck • Xavier de Maistre • Alberto Manguel • Winsor McCay • Claudio Morandini • Murathan Mungan • Barış Pirhasan • Pliny the Elder • Su Pola • Robert Pufleb • Jochen Raiß • Iván Repila • Raymond Roussel • Nadine Schlieper • Carl Seelig • Gertrude Stein • Michel Tournier • Robert Walser • Aby Warburg • Lynd Ward • Volkan Yalazay
Hay Festival, the British Council and Conaculta have joined forces to bring twenty young writers under the age of forty to an international readership. These exciting new voices come together in an anthology of short pieces, giving a glimpse of Mexico's outstanding literary culture. Following in the footsteps of the likes of Octavio Paz and Carlos Fuentes, the writers capture an era of shifting boundaries and growing violence, where the country's rapid modernization is often felt to be at the cost of its artistic heritage. Broken families, a man in a birdcage, a lone swimmer - all stories betray a quest for the self when the feeling of loss pervades. Pushkin Press is proud to present these vibrant and moving narratives: Contributors: DBC Pierre, Cristina Riverza Garza, Juan Pablo Anaya, Gerardo Arana, Nicolás Cabral, Verónica Gerber, Pergentino José, Laia Jufresa, Luis Felipe Lomelí, Brenda Lozano, Valeria Luiselli, Fernanda Melchor, Emiliano Monge, Eduardo Montagner Anguiano, Antonio Ortuño, Eduardo Rabasa, Antonio Ramos Revillas, Eduardo Ruiz Sosa, Daniel Saldaña, Ximena Sánchez, Echenique, Carlos Velázquez, Nadia Villafuerte.
In this unexpectedly hilarious social novel, a misguided thirty-something tries to beat his girlfriend at her own game: becoming the ultimate feminist. When he first meets Najwa at a lecture by Siri Hustvedt—whom he’s never read—our hero discovers a whole new world of feminist thought. Determined to impress her, he sets out sincerely on his journey to allyship. His mother confides in him about the dreams she had to sacrifice because of the patriarchy, and he laments the violence and oppression women face. But he can’t help but notice that they’re going about their activism the wrong way… So our hero does what any good ally should: he gathers the worst of the macho men in town and begins a campaign to provoke the feminists. By “putting them in their place” with this phallic club—pelting demonstrators with raw eggs, posting obscene, threatening manifestos—he’s convinced he can make women understand, and get them to fight harder for the cause. Following him as his plan spectacularly fails, The Ally mixes humor, clever storytelling, and hard-core feminist theory to lampoon the macho superiority complex and our modern gender wars.
With contributions from seven of Mexico's finest journalists, this is reportage at its bravest and most necessary - it has the power to change the world's view of their country, and by the force of its truth, to start to heal the country's many sorrows. Supported the Arts Council Grant's for the Arts Programme and by PEN Promotes Veering between carnival and apocalypse, Mexico has in the last ten years become the epicentre of the international drug trade. The so-called "war on drugs" has been a brutal and chaotic failure (more than 160,000 lives have been lost). The drug cartels and the forces of law and order are often in collusion, corruption is everywhere. Life is cheap and inconvenient people - the poor, the unlucky, the honest or the inquisitive - can be "disappeared" leaving not a trace behind (in September 2015, more than 26,798 were officially registered as "not located"). Yet people in all walks of life have refused to give up. Diego Enrique Osorno and Juan Villoro tell stories of teenage prostitution and Mexico's street children. Anabel Hernández and Emiliano Ruiz Parra give chilling accounts of the "disappearance" of forty-three students and the murder of a self-educated land lawyer. Sergio González Rodríguez and Marcela Turati dissect the impact of the violence on the victims and those left behind, while Lydia Cacho contributes a journal of what it is like to live every day of your life under threat of death. Reading these accounts we begin to understand the true nature of the meltdown of democracy, obscured by lurid headlines, and the sheer physical and intellectual courage needed to oppose it.
"A harrowing, humane, and very beautiful book.” —Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to You A searing dystopian vision of a young boy's flight through an unnamed, savaged country, searching for sanctuary and redemption—a debut novel from one of Europe's bestselling literary stars. A young boy has fled his home. He’s pursued by dangerous forces. What lies before him is an infinite, arid plain, one he must cross in order to escape those from whom he’s fleeing. One night on the road, he meets an old goatherd, a man who lives simply but righteously, and from that moment on, their paths intertwine. Out in the Open tells the story of this journey through a drought-stricken country ruled by violence. A world where names and dates don’t matter, where morals have drained away with the water. In this landscape the boy—not yet a lost cause—has the chance to choose hope and bravery, or to live forever mired in the cycle of violence in which he was raised. Carrasco has masterfully created a high stakes world, a dystopian tale of life and death, right and wrong, terror and salvation.
The award-winning and haunting novel from Rodrigo Hasbún, the literary star Jonathan Safran Foer calls, “a great writer,” about an unusual family’s breakdown—set in South America during the time of Che Guevara and inspired by the life of Third Reich cinematographer Hans Ertl. Inspired by real events, Affections is the story of the eccentric, fascinating Ertl clan, headed by the egocentric and extraordinary Hans, once the cameraman for the Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl. Shortly after the end of World War II, Hans and his family flee to Bolivia to start over. There, the ever-restless Hans decides to embark on an expedition in search of the fabled lost Inca city of Paitití, enlisting two of his daughters to join him on his outlandish quest into the depths of the Amazon, with disastrous consequences. “A one-sitting tale of fragmented relationships with a broad scope, delivered with grace and power” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review), Affections traces the Ertls’s slow and inevitable breakdown through the various erratic trajectories of each family member: Hans’s undertakings of colossal, foolhardy projects and his subsequent spectacular failures; his daughter Monika, heir to his adventurous spirit, who joins the Bolivian Marxist guerrillas and becomes known as “Che Guevara’s avenger”; and his wife and two younger sisters left to pick up the pieces in their wake. “Hasbún writes with patience and precision, revealing the family’s most intimate thoughts and interactions: first smokes, blind love, and familial devotion. This is a novel to savor for its richness and grace and its historical and political scope” (Booklist, starred review)—a masterfully layered tale of how a family’s voyage of discovery ends up eroding the affections that once held it together.
