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In The Mathematics of the Breath and the Way, Charles Bukowski considers the art of writing, and the art of living as writer.
Bringing together a variety of previously uncollected stories, columns, reviews, introductions, and interviews, Mathematics finds him approaching the dynamics of his chosen profession with cynical aplomb, deflating pretentions and tearing down idols armed with only a typewriter and a bottle of beer.
Beginning with the title piece—a serious manifesto disguised as off-handed remarks en route to the racetrack—Mathematics runs through numerous tales following the author’s adventures at poetry readings, parties, film sets, and bars, and also features an unprecedented gathering of Bukowski’s singular literary criticism.
From classic authors like Hemingway to underground legends like d.a. levy to his own stable of obscure favorites, Bukowski uses each occasion to expound on the larger issues around literary production.
The book closes with a handful of interviews in which he discusses his writing practices and his influences, making Mathematics a perfect guide to the man behind the myth and the disciplined artist behind the boozing brawler.
The method behind the madness, revealing the critical acumen of everyone’s favorite Dirty Old Man.
“Genius could be the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way, or even to say a simple thing in a simpler way.”—Charles Bukowski
Charles Bukowski was born in Andernach, Germany on August 16, 1920, the only child of an American soldier and a German mother. At the age of three, he came with his family to the United States and grew up in Los Angeles. He attended Los Angeles City College from 1939 to 1941, then left school and moved to New York City to become a writer. His lack of publishing success at this time caused him to give up writing in 1946 and spurred a ten-year stint of heavy drinking. After he developed a bleeding ulcer, he decided to take up writing again. He worked a wide range of jobs to support his writing, including dishwasher, truck driver and loader, mail carrier, guard, gas station attendant, stock boy, warehouse worker, shipping clerk, post office clerk, parking lot attendant, Red Cross orderly, and elevator operator. He also worked in a dog biscuit factory, a slaughterhouse, a cake and cookie factory, and he hung posters in New York City subways.
Bukowski published his first story when he was twenty-four and began writing poetry at the age of thirty-five. His first book of poetry was published in 1959; he went on to publish more than forty-five books of poetry and prose, including Pulp (Black Sparrow, 1994), Screams from the Balcony: Selected Letters 1960-1970 (1993), and The Last Night of the Earth Poems (1992), and the following books with City Lights Publishers: Notes of a Dirty Old Man (1981), The Most Beautiful Woman in Town & Other Stories (1983), Tales of Ordinary Madness (1984), Portions from a Wine-Stained Notebook: Uncollected Stories and Essays, 1944-1990 (2008), Absence of the Hero: Uncollected Stories and Essays, Vol. 2: 1946-1992 (2010), More Notes of a Dirty Old Man: The Uncollected Columns (2011), and The Bell Tolls for No One (2015). He died of leukemia in San Pedro on March 9, 1994.
Title: The Mathematics of the Breath and the Way
Subtitle: On Writers and Writing
Author: Charles Bukowski
Introduction by David Stephen Calonne
Edited by David Stephen Calonne
Publisher: City Lights Publishers
Format Paperback
ISBN-10 0872867595
ISBN-13 9780872867598
250 Pages
List Price $16.95
Publication Date 15 May 2018
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From the beginning of 1914 until his death in 1944, Mondrian wrote more than a hundred essays on the subject of art and society.
He wrote in Dutch, French and English, his choice of language often depending on his place of residence.
All of Mondrian’s writings proclaim his conviction that art paves the way to a better society.
Many of his texts have been published, but the original versions were often translated, edited, and polished.
This book aims to present the painter’s words as he wrote them, going back to the original sources of all of Mondrian’s manuscripts, typescripts, and personal papers.
Piet Mondrian
The Complete Writings
Louis Veen Ed.
Publisher Primavera Pers
ISBN 9789059972384
640 p,
ills colour & bw,
18 x 25 cm, hb,
Dutch/French/English
€49.50
Piet Mondrian / Mondriaan
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W is de hoofdpersoon in de gedichten van De jongenskamer die samen één verhalend gedicht vormen.
Het begint in de jaren voor de Tweede Wereldoorlog en eindigt in de onherkenbaar veranderde wereld van nu – maar wel met een liefdesgedicht.
De kamer achter de werkplaats van W’s vader, een kleermaker, is de plek waar onder invloed van de tijd en de geschiedenis de eerste ideeën van W en zijn broers ontstaan over liefde, vriendschap, kunst en sport – én over de politieke en sociale werkelijkheid en de rol die het individu daarin kan spelen.
Al de liefdeservaringen, de vriendschappen, de boeken, de reizen die het leven van W bepalen, lijken toch altijd met onzichtbare draden verbonden met de eerste waarnemingen uit de jongenskamer.
Willem van Toorn (Amsterdam, 1935) is dichter, schrijver en vertaler. Hij publiceerde een groot aantal romans en verhalen- en gedichtenbundels, en was redacteur van het literair tijdschrift Raster.
Willem van Toorn
De jongenskamer.
Een gedicht
Uitgeverij: Querido
Paperback
ISBN: 9789021409351
Prijs: € 17,99
Publicatiedatum: 13-02-2018
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Here, for the first time, is a volume that gathers the published verse of Allen Ginsberg in its entirety, a half century of brilliant work from one of America’s great poets.
As the chief figure among the Beats, Ginsberg changed the course of American poetry, liberating it from closed academic forms with the creation of open, vocal, spontaneous, and energetic postmodern verse. Ginsberg’s raw tones and attitudes of spiritual liberation also helped catalyze a psychological revolution that has become a permanent part of our cultural heritage, profoundly influencing not only poetry, popular song, and speech but also our view of the world.
Allen Ginsberg (1926 – 1997) was the son of Naomi Ginsberg, Russian émigré, and Louis Ginsberg, lyric poet and school teacher, in Paterson, N.J. To these facts Ginsberg adds: “High school in Paterson till 17, Columbia College, merchant marine, Texas and Denver copyboy, Times Square, amigos in jail, dishwashing, book reviews, Mexico City, market research, Satori in Harlem, Yucatan and Chiapas 1954, West Coast 3 years. Later Arctic Sea trip, Tangier, Venice, Amsterdam, Paris, read at Oxford Harvard Columbia Chicago, quit, wrote “Kaddish” 1959, made tape to leave behind & fade in Orient awhile. Carl Solomon to whom “Howl” is addressed, is a intuitive Bronx dadaist and prose-poet.”
Title: Collected Poems 1947-1997
Author: Allen Ginsberg
Publisher: Harper Perennial Modern Classics
Title First Published: 2007
Format: Paperback
ISBN-10 0061139750
ISBN-13 9780061139758
1216 pages
$25.99
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De oude Van de Velde wordt 85 jaar. Z’n vrouw organiseert een feest, waarvoor familieleden en enige vrienden zijn uitgenodigd.
Een andere invité is een verrassingsgast, een beroemde man van wie vader Van de Velde een groot bewonderaar is. Als deze gast arriveert in het midden van de niet al te best functionerende familie Van de Velde gaan de poppen pas echt aan het dansen.
Feest bij de familie Van de Velde is een typische Herman Brusselmans-roman, met een vermenging van tragiek en het komieke, gevuld met wijsheden en inzichten, en geschreven in een stijl die sinds 1982 uniek is in Vlaanderen en Nederland.
Herman Brusselmans
Feest bij de familie Van de Velde
Literaire roman, novelle
Verschenen 26-02-18
Druk 1
Paperback
ISBN 9789044636116
Uitgever Prometheus
Omvang 224 p.
€ 19,99
Feest bij de familie Van de Velde is een typische Herman Brusselmans-roman, met een vermenging van tragiek en het komieke, gevuld met wijsheden en inzichten, en geschreven in een stijl die sinds 1982 uniek is in Vlaanderen en Nederland. Herman Brusselmans (1957) publiceerde al vijfenzeventig romans. Hij wordt zowel verguisd als verafgood.
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From the self-illustrated, unpublished work written in 1947 to hardboiled contributions to 1980s adult magazines, The Bells Tolls for No One presents the entire range of Bukowski’s talent as a short story writer, from straight-up genre stories to postmodern blurring of fact and fiction.
An informative introduction by editor David Stephen Calonne provides historical context for these seemingly scandalous and chaotic tales, revealing the hidden hand of the master at the top of his form.
Born in Andernach, Germany, and raised in Los Angeles, Charles Bukowski published his first story when he was twenty-four and began writing poetry at the age of thirty-five. His first book of poetry was published in 1959; he would eventually publish more than forty-five books of poetry and prose. He died of leukemia in San Pedro, California on March 9, 1994.
David Stephen Calonne is the author of several books and has edited three previous collections of the uncollected work of Charles Bukowski for City Lights: Absence of the Hero, Portions from a Wine-Stained Notebook, and More Notes of a Dirty Old Man.
The Paris Review:
“Bukowski’s The Bell Tolls for No One, recently released in a comic-book-like paperback, follows the hardboiled genre bent that reached its surreal apotheosis in his final novel, Pulp. The obvious influence is to Hemingway—see: the title—but perhaps more interestingly, the editor David Stephen Calonne notes Bukowski’s debt to the crime writer James M. Cain, who had also, unbeknownst to me, shaped the style of Camus’s The Stranger. The book includes some of Bukowski’s roughly drawn illustrations, which fall somewhere close to pornographic Ziggy or adult-themed New Yorker cartoons. One features an asthmatic customer at an adult bookstore asking the cashier to inflate his blow-up doll for him; another shows an expressionistically drawn party girl surrounded by gawking men with the caption “God, a woman could get bored.” The subject matter is a more amplified version of the usual Bukowski fare—stalwart, sleazebag protagonists; spectral, deathly women with emphatically described upper legs. As always, the most one can hope for in Bukowski’s universe is “a grim yet comfortable isolation.”—Casey Henry in The Paris Review
“He had a good wife. I remember one time they cleaned
up my face with cotton and some kind of sterilizer when
it was all smashed-in from a bad night out. They seemed
very tender and concerned and serious about my smashed-
in face, and it was a very odd feeling to me, that care.
Anyhow, the drinking got to Mick, and it gets to each
of us differently. With him, the body swelled up, doubled,
tripled in size in various places. He couldn’t zip his pants
and had to cut slits in the pant legs. His story was that they
didn’t have a bed for him in the vet’s hospital. My feeling
was that he didn’t want to go there. Anyhow, one day he
made a foolish move and tried the General Hospital.
After a couple of days he phoned me. “Jesus Christ,
they’re killing me! I’ve never seen a place like this. No doc-
tors anywhere and nurses don’t give a damn and just these
fruit orderlies running around like snobs and happy that
everybody’s sick and dying. What the fuck is this place?
They’re carrying the dead out by the dozens!”
-Charles Bukowski
Title: The Bell Tolls for No One
Author: Charles Bukowski
Edited by David Stephen Calonne
Publisher City Lights Publishers
Format Paperback
ISBN-10 0872866823
ISBN-13 9780872866829
Publication Date 14 July 2015
308 pages
Price $14.95
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In this magisterial study of the relationship between illness and art, the best-selling author of An Unquiet Mind, Kay Redfield Jamison, brings an entirely fresh understanding to the work and life of Robert Lowell (1917-1977), whose intense, complex, and personal verse left a lasting mark on the English language and changed the public discourse about private matters.
In his Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry, Robert Lowell put his manic-depressive illness (now known as bipolar disorder) into the public domain, creating a language for madness that was new and arresting. As Dr. Jamison brings her expertise in mood disorders to bear on Lowell’s story, she illuminates not only the relationships among mania, depression, and creativity but also the details of Lowell’s treatment and how illness and treatment influenced the great work that he produced (and often became its subject).
Lowell’s New England roots, early breakdowns, marriages to three eminent writers, friendships with other poets such as Elizabeth Bishop, his many hospitalizations, his vivid presence as both a teacher and a maker of poems—Jamison gives us the poet’s life through a lens that focuses our understanding of his intense discipline, courage, and commitment to his art. Jamison had unprecedented access to Lowell’s medical records, as well as to previously unpublished drafts and fragments of poems, and she is the first biographer to have spoken with his daughter, Harriet Lowell. With this new material and a psychologist’s deep insight, Jamison delivers a bold, sympathetic account of a poet who was—both despite and because of mental illness—a passionate, original observer of the human condition.
Kay Redfield Jamison is the Dalio Family Professor in Mood Disorders and a professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, as well as an honorary professor of English at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. She is the author of the national best sellers An Unquiet Mind, Night Falls Fast, and Touched with Fire, and is the coauthor of the standard medical text on bipolar disorder, Manic-Depressive Illness: Bipolar Disorders and Recurrent Depression. Dr. Jamison is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Royal Society of Edinburgh and is a recipient of the Lewis Thomas Prize, the Sarnat International Prize in Mental Health from the National Academy of Medicine, and a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship. She is married to Thomas Traill, a cardiologist at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.
Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire
A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character
By Kay Redfield Jamison
Literary Figure Biographies & Memoirs
Paperback
Feb 06, 2018
560 Pages
$18.95
Published by Vintage
ISBN 9780307744616
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The Man Booker International Prize has revealed the ‘Man Booker Dozen’ of 13 novels in contention for the 2018 prize, which celebrates the finest works of translated fiction from around the world.
The 2018 longlist:
• Laurent Binet (France), Sam Taylor, The 7th Function of Language (Harvill Secker)
• Javier Cercas (Spain), Frank Wynne, The Impostor (MacLehose Press)
• Virginie Despentes (France), Frank Wynne, Vernon Subutex 1 (MacLehose Press)
• Jenny Erpenbeck (Germany), Susan Bernofsky, Go, Went, Gone (Portobello Books)
• Han Kang (South Korea), Deborah Smith, The White Book (Portobello Books)
• Ariana Harwicz (Argentina), Sarah Moses & Carolina Orloff, Die, My Love (Charco Press)
• László Krasznahorkai (Hungary), John Batki, Ottilie Mulzet & George Szirtes, The World Goes On (Tuskar Rock Press)
• Antonio Muñoz Molina (Spain), Camilo A. Ramirez, Like a Fading Shadow (Tuskar Rock Press)
• Christoph Ransmayr (Austria), Simon Pare, The Flying Mountain (Seagull Books)
• Ahmed Saadawi (Iraq), Jonathan Wright, Frankenstein in Baghdad (Oneworld)
• Olga Tokarczuk (Poland), Jennifer Croft, Flights (Fitzcarraldo Editions)
• Wu Ming-Yi (Taiwan), Darryl Sterk, The Stolen Bicycle (Text Publishing)
• Gabriela Ybarra (Spain), Natasha Wimmer, The Dinner Guest (Harvill Secker)
‘The longlist introduces a wealth of talent, a variety of forms and some writers little known in English before. It has great writing and translating energy and we hope readers take as much pleasure in discovering the work as we did.’
Lisa Appignanesi, chair of the 2018 judges
The prize is now awarded every year for a single book, which is translated into English and published in the UK. Both novels and short-story collections are eligible. The work of translators is equally rewarded, with the £50,000 prize divided between the author and the translator of the winning entry. In addition, each shortlisted author and translator will receive £1,000 each. The judges considered 108 books.
The longlist was selected by a panel of five judges, chaired by Lisa Appignanesi OBE, author and cultural commentator, with Michael Hofmann, poet, reviewer and translator from German; Hari Kunzru, author of five novels including The Impressionist and White Tears; Tim Martin, journalist and literary critic, and Helen Oyeyemi, author of novels, plays and short stories including The Icarus Girl.
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“Once upon a time, men, women and (secretly) children smoked.”
Following the success of Cataract, John Berger, one of the great soothsayers of seeing, joins forces again with Turkish illustrator Selcuk Demirel. This charming pictorial essay reflects on the cultural implications of smoking. A subtle and beautifully illustrated prose poem, Smoke lingers in the mind.
This charming illustrated work reflects on the cultural implications of smoking, and suggests, through a series of brilliantly inventive illustrations, that society’s attitude to smoke is both paradoxical and intolerant. It portrays a world in which smokers, banished from public places, must encounter one another as outlaws. Meanwhile, car exhausts and factory chimneys continue to pollute the atmosphere. Smoke is a beautifully illustrated prose poem that lingers in the mind.
“A cigarette is a breathing space. It makes a parenthesis. The time of a cigarette is a parenthesis, and if it is shared you are both in that parenthesis. It’s like a proscenium arch for a dialogue.” – John Berger (in interview)
In contemporary English letters John Berger seems to me peerless. Not since D. H. Lawrence has there been a writer who offers such attentiveness to the sensual world with responsiveness to the imperatives of conscience.
—Susan Sontag
In his ceaselessly inventive work, Selçuk often uses parts of the body in ways that are characteristically Turkish…as if the comedy of the human condition were there in the human body, in the melancholy of anatomy.
—John Berger, on Selçuk Demirel
Smoke
by John Berger (Author)
and Selcuk Demirel (Illustrator)
Hardcover, $18.95
Available in Hardcover on May 8, 2018
ISBN10 1910749478
ISBN13 9781910749470
From Notting Hill Editions
70 pages
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Toon Tellegen: ‘Iedereen bewonderde mijn broer, maar ik het meest van iedereen.’
Als kleine jongen keek Toon Tellegen op tegen zijn zes jaar oudere broer, die onverzettelijk was, alle regels aan zijn laars lapte en zijn eigen weg ging. Toen die broer in 2016 overleed, begon hij zijn herinneringen op te schrijven aan de tijd dat ze allebei nog thuis woonden. Zijn grote broer kon alles, hij durfde alles en vaak liep dat uit de hand.
Maar al berusten Tellegens kleurrijke herinneringen voor een groot deel op waarheid, zijn fantasie geeft de stoere heldendaden een nog absurdistischere wending. Moeten we al die heldendaden geloven? Ja, want als het niet echt gebeurd is, had het wel zo kúnnen gebeuren!
Net als in Een vorig leven roept Tellegen in De seringenboom de wereld van zijn jeugd op, en wekt hij die voorbije tijd tot leven in mooie, ontroerende en grappige verhalen.
Toon Tellegen (Brielle, 1941) is dichter, kinderboekenschrijver en schrijver van proza en toneel voor volwassenen.
Toon Tellegen
De seringenboom.
Herinneringen aan mijn broer
Uitgeverij Querido
Hardcover
ISBN: 9789021408897
Prijs: € 18,99
Publicatiedatum: 06-03-2018
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Jakub Shapiro ist ein hoffnungsvoller junger Boxer und überhaupt sehr talentiert.
Das erkennt auch der mächtige Warschauer Unterweltpate Kaplica, der Shapiro zu seinem Vertrauten macht. Doch rechte Putschpläne gegen die polnische Regierung bringen das Imperium Kaplicas in Bedrängnis; er kommt in Haft, als ihm ein politischer Mord angehängt wird. Im Schatten dieser Ereignisse bricht ein regelrechter Krieg der Unterwelt los. Jakub Shapiro muss die Dinge in die Hand nehmen: Er geht gegen Feinde wie Verräter vor, beginnt – aus Leidenschaft und Kalkül – eine fatale Affäre mit der Tochter des Staatsanwalts, muss zugleich seine Frau und Kinder vor dem anschwellenden Hass schützen – und nimmt immer mehr die Rolle des Paten ein.
Der Aufstieg eines Verbrecherhelden zwischen Gewalt, Eleganz und Laster, seine Verletzlichkeit als Jude im Vorkriegs-Warschau: «Der Boxer» ist grandios angelegt und fast filmisch erzählt, ein Panorama mit Sportlern und Schurken, einem Mann mit zwei Gesichtern, glamourösen Huren und charismatischen Gangstern. Ein überragender, thrillerhafter Roman, der eine eruptive Epoche geradezu körperlich erlebbar macht.
Mit Szczepan Twardoch ist Polen zurück auf der Bühne der Weltliteratur.
-Die Welt
Szczepan Twardoch, geboren 1979, ist einer der herausragenden Autoren der polnischen Gegenwartsliteratur. Mit «Morphin» (2012) gelang ihm der Durchbruch, das Buch wurde mit dem Polityka-Passport-Preis ausgezeichnet, Kritik und Leser waren begeistert. Für den ebenfalls hochgelobten Roman «Drach» wurden Twardoch und sein Übersetzer Olaf Kühl 2016 mit dem Brücke Berlin Preis geehrt. Bei polnischen Lesern wie Kritikern übertraf «Der Boxer» diese Erfolge sogar noch. Szczepan Twardoch lebt mit seiner Familie in Pilchowice/Schlesien.
Szczepan Twardoch
Der Boxer
Übersetzt von: Olaf Kühl
Deutsche Erstausgabe
Hardcover
€22,95
Verlag: Rowohlt Berlin
464 Seiten
ISBN: 978-3-7371-0008-3
Erscheinungstermin: 24.01.2018
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A fascinating account by one of the world’s leading neurologists of the profound influence of William Burroughs on his medical career.
Lees relates how Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch and troubled drug addict, inspired him to discover a ground-breaking treatment for Parkinson’s Disease. Lees journeys to the Amazonian rainforest in search of cures, and through self-experimentation seeks to find the answers his patients crave. He enters a powerful plea for the return of imagination to medical research.
A fascinating personal account by one of the world’s leading neurologists of the profound influence of William Burroughs on his medical career. Lees journeys to the Amazonian rainforest in search of cures, and through self-experimentation seeks to find the answers his patients crave. ‘The inevitable comparison with the late, great Oliver Sacks is entirely just.’ – Professor Raymond Tallis
Mentored by a Madman:
The William Burroughs Experiment
by A.J. Lees (Author),
James Grauerholz (Foreword)
Hardcover
Pages: 236
$16.11
September 12, 2017
Series: Notting Hill Editions
ISBN: 9781910749104
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