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In this riveting, heartfelt debut, a young woman assumes a new name to escape her dark past and find the redemption she desperately seeks.
“A terrific debut, told gently, honestly, and with a generous amount of hope.”—New York Times bestselling author Jamie Ford
Venus Black is a straitlaced A student fascinated by the study of astronomy—until the night she commits a shocking crime that tears her family apart and ignites a media firestorm. Venus refuses to talk about what happened or why, except to blame her mother. Adding to the mystery, Venus’s developmentally challenged younger brother, Leo, goes missing.
More than five years later, Venus is released from prison with a suitcase of used clothes, a fake identity, and a determination to escape her painful past. Estranged from her mother, and with her beloved brother still missing, she sets out to make a fresh start in Seattle, skittish and alone. But as new people enter her orbit—including a romantic interest and a young girl who seems like a mirror image of her former lost self—old wounds resurface, and Venus realizes that she can’t find a future while she’s running from her past.
In this gripping story, debut novelist Heather Lloyd brilliantly captures ordinary lives thrust into extraordinary circumstances. Told through a constellation of captivating voices, My Name Is Venus Black explores the fluidity of right and wrong, the pain of betrayal, and the meaning of love and family.
Heather Lloyd, who has spent many years working as an editor and writing coach, lives with her husband in New York City. My Name Is Venus Black is her first novel.
My Name Is Venus Black
A Novel
By Heather Lloyd
Category: Crime Mysteries
Hardcover : $27.00
Publ.: Feb 27, 2018
368 Pages
ISBN 9780399592188
Publ. by The Dial Press
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In the language of fan fiction, a ‘Mary Sue’ is an idealised and implausibly flawless character: a female archetype that can infuriate audiences for its perceived narcissism.
Such is the setting for this brilliant and important debut by Sophie Collins. In a series of verse and prose collages, Who Is Mary Sue? exposes the presumptive politics behind writing and readership: the idea that men invent while women reflect; that a man writes of the world outside while a woman will turn to the interior.
Part poetry and part reportage, at once playful and sincere, these fictive-factive miniatures deploy original writing and extant quotation in a mode of pure invention. In so doing, they lift up and lay down a revealing sequence of masks and mirrors that disturb the reflection of authority.A work of captivation and correction, this is a book that will resonate with anyone concerned with identity, shame, gender, trauma, composition and culture: everyone, in other words, who wishes to live openly and think fearlessly in the modern world.
Who Is Mary Sue? is a work for our times and a question for our age: it is a handbook for all those willing to reimagine prescriptive notions of identity and selfhood.
Sophie Collins is cofounder of tender, an online quarterly promoting work by female-identified writers and artists. She is carrying out research on poetry and translation at Queen’s University Belfast. Collins grew up in Bergen, North Holland, and now lives in Edinburgh. She is co-editor of tender, an online arts quarterly, and editor of Currently & Emotion (Test Centre, 2016), an anthology of contemporary poetry translations. small white monkeys, a text on self-expression, self-help and shame, was published by Book Works in 2017 as part of a commissioned residency at Glasgow Women’s Library.
Sophie Collins
Who Is Mary Sue?
8 February 2018
Published by Faber & Faber
Paperback
£10.99
112 pages
ISBN: 9780571346615
Poetry and prose
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Just in time for his 99th birthday, New Directions is proud to present a swift, terrific chronological selection of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s greatest poems.
Through this tight lens, it is now possible to see Ferlinghetti—a brilliant and prolific poet—in a richer, broader, and more complex way. From his very first landmark books—Pictures of the Gone World (City Lights, 1955) and A Coney Island of the Mind (New Directions, 1958)—to new work, Ferlinghetti’s Greatest Poems displays every stage of this multifaceted writer’s long and celebrated career. It’s exciting to revisit in one slender volume so much of the splendid, playful, and trenchant work of one of America’s greatest and most popular poets.
“A brave man and a brave poet.”––Bob Dylan
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, poet and founder of City Lights Books, author of A Coney Island of the Mind and Pictures of the Gone World, among numerous other books, has been drawing from life since his student days in Paris where he frequented the Academie Julien and where he did his first oil painting.
“Lawrence gets you laughing and then hits you with the truth.”––Francis Ford Coppola
Title: Ferlinghetti’s Greatest Poems
Author: Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Edited by Nancy J. Peters
Publisher New Directions Publishing Corporation
Format Hardcover, $16.95
144 pp.
ISBN-10 081122712X
ISBN-13 9780811227124
Publication Date 21 November 2017
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Rainer Maria Rilke feierte die Liebe, verschrieb sich ihr mit ganzer Seele. Die Frauen standen für ihn im Mittelpunkt.
Angefangen bei seiner innig geliebten Mutter Sophia und der gestrengen »Übermutter« Lou Andreas-Salomé über die Bildhauerin Clara Westhoff bis zu der großzügigen Mäzenin Fürstin von Thurn und Taxis. In seiner neuen, meisterlich geschriebenen Biografie erzählt Heimo Schwilk von diesen Frauen und ihren Schicksalen.
Ein Buch über die Liebe – und wie sie sich in großer Dichtung vollendet.
Heimo Schwilk, geboren 1952 in Stuttgart, Dr. phil., ist Autor zahlreicher Bücher über Politik und Literatur. Seine großen Biografien über Ernst Jünger und Hermann Hesse wurden im In- und Ausland hoch gelobt. Er war lange Jahre Leitender Redakteur der Welt am Sonntag und lebt in Berlin. 1991 wurde er mit dem Theodor-Wolff-Preis für herausragenden Journalismus ausgezeichnet.
Heimo Schwilk
Rilke und die Frauen
Biografie eines Liebenden
‘Piper’ Taschenbuch
Piper Verlag GmbH
Mit 22 Abbildungen
EAN: 9783492308878
ISBN: 3492308872
2016
336 Seiten
kartoniert
€ 11,00
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Gathered on the occasion of Robert Lowell’s one hundredth birthday, New Selected Poems offers a fresh and illuminating representation of one of the great careers in twentieth-century poetry.
The renowned and controversial author of many books of poems, plays, and translations, Lowell was one of the United States’ most honoured poets, winning the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1947 and 1974, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
His ongoing interrogation of his family legacy, his personal struggle with manic depression, and his mastery of the tradition of poetry in English formed the groundbreaking autobiographical foundation of Life Studies (1959) and the books that followed it, including For the Union Dead (1964), Near the Ocean (1967), History (1973), and Day by Day (1977).
Katie Peterson’s incisive selection of Lowell’s poems draws attention to ‘the perishability of life, its twinned quality of fragility and repetition, as framed by the structured evanescence of daily consciousness.’ Lowell’s own intense dramas and struggles are the substrate he drew on in his restless search to make sense of, and fix, shape-shifting experience – not his, but ours. As Peterson says, Lowell was ‘constitutionally immune to any stultifying permanence either of form or of spirit.’ Her brilliant new reading of Lowell shows us his work constantly breaking, renewing, transforming, as he strives restlessly, over and over, to find an elusive unity.
Robert Lowell (1917-1977) was born in Boston. He was recognised as an accomplished poet in his own lifetime, and along with Elizabeth Bishop, John Berryman and Sylvia Plath he created the fashion and generated the force of American poetry over the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. Life Studies, published in 1959, marked a watershed. It initiated an autobiographical project which would dominate his oeuvre thereafter, and is now regarded as one of the most influential books of the century. He received a Pulitzer Prize for Lord Weary’s Castle (1946) and another for The Dolphin (1973).
New Selected Poems
by Robert Lowell (Author),
Katie Peterson (Editor)
ISBN 9780571339488
Format Paperback
Published 03/08/2017
Length 272 pages
£14.99
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0374251339
ISBN-13: 978-0374251338
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An “astounding” (Terrance Hayes) debut collection of poems – Winner of the 2016 National Poetry Series Competition
In this powerful debut collection, sam sax explores and explodes the linkages between desire, addiction, and the history of mental health. These brave, formally dexterous poems examine antiquated diagnoses and procedures from hysteria to lobotomy; offer meditations on risky sex; and take up the poet’s personal and family histories as mental health patients and practitioners.
Ultimately, Madness attempts to build a queer lineage out of inherited language and cultural artifacts; these poems trouble the static categories of sanity, heterosexuality, masculinity, normality, and health. sax’s innovative collection embodies the strange and disjunctive workings of the mind as it grapples to make sense of the world around it.
About the Author: sam sax is a queer Jewish writer and educator. He’s received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Lambda Literary, The MacDowell Colony, the Blue Mountain Center, and the Michener Center for Writers. He’s the winner of the 2016 Iowa Review Award and his poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, Ploughshares, Poetry, and other journals.
Madness
By Sam Sax
Part of National Poetry Series
Category: Poetry
Published by Penguin Books
Paperback
Sep. 2017
96 Pages
$18.00
ISBN 9780143131700
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A powerful new collection of poetry from the National Book Critics Circle Award nominee and recipient of the Forward Poetry Prize.
In The Unaccompanied, Armitage gives voice to the people of Britain with a haunting grace.
We meet characters whose sense of isolation is both emotional and political, both real and metaphorical, from a son made to groom the garden hedge as punishment, to a nurse standing alone at a bus stop as the centuries pass by, to a latter-day Odysseus looking for enlightenment and hope in the shadowy underworld of a cut-price supermarket.
We see the changing shape of England itself, viewed from a satellite “like a shipwreck’s carcass raised on a sea-crane’s hook, / nothing but keel, beams, spars, down to its bare bones.”
In this exquisite collection, Armitage X-rays the weary but ironic soul of his nation, with its “Songs about mills and mines and a great war, / lines about mermaids and solid gold hills, / songs from broken hymnbooks and cheesy films”–in poems that blend the lyrical and the vernacular, with his trademark eye for detail and biting wit.
Simon Armitage was born in West Yorkshire and is Professor of Poetry at the University of Sheffield. A recipient of numerous prizes and awards, he has published eleven collections of poetry, including Seeing Stars, Paper Aeroplane: Selected Poems 1989 – 2014, and his acclaimed translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
The Shout: Selected Poems, was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and his translation of the medieval poem Pearl received the 2017 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. He writes extensively for radio and television, has published three best-selling non-fiction titles, and his theatre works include The Last Days of Troy, performed at Shakespeare’s Globe in London. He has taught at the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop, and in 2015 was appointed Professor of Poetry at Oxford University.
Simon Armitage
The Unaccompanied
Poems
Published by Knopf
Hardcover
$27.00
Aug. 2017
96 Pages
ISBN 9781524732424
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The year 1818 saw the publication of one of the most influential science-fiction stories of all time.
Frankenstein: Or, Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley had a huge impact on gothic horror and science-fiction genres, and her creation has become part of our everyday culture, from cartoons to Hallowe’en costumes. Even the name ‘Frankenstein’ has become a by-word for evil scientists and dangerous experiments. How did a teenager with no formal education come up with the idea for an extraordinary novel such as Frankenstein?
Clues are dotted throughout Georgian science and popular culture. The years before the book’s publication saw huge advances in our understanding of the natural sciences, in areas such as electricity and physiology, for example. Sensational science demonstrations caught the imagination of the general public, while the newspapers were full of lurid tales of murderers and resurrectionists.
Making the Monster explores the scientific background behind Mary Shelley’s book. Is there any science fact behind the science fiction? And how might a real-life Victor Frankenstein have gone about creating his monster? From tales of volcanic eruptions, artificial life and chemical revolutions, to experimental surgery, ‘monsters’ and electrical experiments on human cadavers, Kathryn Harkup examines the science and scientists that influenced Shelley, and inspired her most famous creation.
Kathryn Harkup is a chemist and author. Kathryn completed a PhD then a postdoc at the University of York before realising that talking, writing and demonstrating science appealed far more than spending hours slaving over a hot fume-hood. Kathryn went on to run outreach in engineering, computing, physics and maths at the University of Surrey, which involved writing talks on science and engineering topics that would appeal to bored teenagers, and she is now a science communicator delivering talks and workshops on the quirky side of science.
Making the Monster
The Science Behind Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
By: Kathryn Harkup
Published: 08-02-2018
Format: Hardback
Edition: 1st
Extent: 304 pp
ISBN: 9781472933737
Imprint: Bloomsbury Sigma
Illustrations: 11 black and white illustrations
Dimensions: 216 x 135 mm
£16.99
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Old Angel Midnight is a treasure trove of Kerouac’s experiments with automatic writing, a method he practiced constantly to sharpen his imaginative reflexes.
Recorded in a series of notebooks between 1956-1959, what Kerouac called his “endless automatic writing piece” began while he shared a cabin with poet Gary Snyder.
Kerouac tried to emulate Snyder’s daily Buddhist meditation discipline, using the technique of “letting go” to free his mind for pure spontaneous writing, annotating the stream of words flowing through his consciousness in response to auditory stimuli and his own mental images.
Kerouac continued his exercise in spontaneous composition over the next three years, including a period spent with William Burroughs in Tangiers. He made no revisions to the automatic writing entries in his notebooks, which were collected and transcribed for publication as originally written.
Old Angel Midnight attests to the success of Kerouac’s experiment and bears witness to his commitment to his craft, and to the pleasure he takes in writing: “I like the bliss of mind.”
“Kerouac’s ambition to capture the living moment (crucially for him, recapitulating memory) developed poetic form in 1954 with his collection San Francisco Blues, and it reached greater fulfilment with the sixty-seven free-association passages of Old Angel Midnight. This new edition from City Light Books adds one more, found among Kerouac’s papers by John Sampas, concluding ‘Eyes of Ray Charles see Me here realize O Holy.’ Mostly written during April 1956 when Kerouac shared a shack with Gary Snyder in rural Mill Valley, outside San Francisco, Old Angel Midnight was likely facilitated by the ‘letting go’ technique he observed from Snyder’s Buddhist meditation.” – Jules Smith – The Times Literary Supplement
“Tried to warn all of you, essence of stuff wont do
— God why did you make the world?
Answer: –Because I gwt pokla renamash ta va in
ming the atss are you forever with it?
I like the bliss of mind.
Awright I’ll call up all the fuckin Gods, right now!
Parya! Arrive! Ya damn hogfuckin lick lip twillerin
fishmonger! Kiss my purple royal ass baboon! Poota!
Whore! You and yr retinues of chariots & fucks! Devadatta!
Angel of Mercy! Prick! Lover! Mush! Run on
ya dog eared kiss willying nilly Dexter Michigan ass—
warlerin ratpole! The rat in my cellar’s an old canuck who
wasnt fooled by rebirth but b God gotta admit I was born for
the same reason I bring this glass to my lip — ?
Rut! Old God whore, the key to ecstasy is forevermore
furthermore blind! Potanyaka! God of Mercy!”
Excerpt from ‘Old Angel Midnight’ by Jack Kerouac
Old Angel Midnight
Jack Kerouac
Preface by Ann Charters, Michael McClure
Collection City Lights/Grey Fox
Publisher City Lights Publishers
Paperback, $13.95
Pages 94
Publication 2016
ISBN-10 087286703X
ISBN-13 9780872867031
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Het Joods Historisch Museum markeert het honderdste geboortejaar van kunstenares Charlotte Salomon (1917-1943) met een bijzondere tentoonstelling gewijd aan haar artistieke nalatenschap: het kunstwerk Leven? of Theater?
Charlotte Salomon was 22 jaar toen ze in december 1938 vanuit Berlijn als vluchteling bij haar grootouders in Zuid-Frankrijk aankwam. Toen bij het uitbreken van de Tweede Wereldoorlog haar grootmoeder zelfmoord pleegde, begon Charlotte aan een ‘totaal waanzinnig project’ om mentaal te overleven. In vele honderden gouaches herschiep ze haar leven als een geschilderd theaterstuk. Charlotte Salomon werd in 1943 in Auschwitz vermoord.
Na de Tweede Wereldoorlog vonden haar vader en zijn vrouw Leven? of Theater? in Zuid-Frankrijk. Zij schonken het in 1971 aan het Joods Historisch Museum. De afgelopen decennia reisden delen van het werk langs musea wereldwijd. Salomons levenswerk heeft altijd intense reacties opgeroepen bij het publiek en inspireerde kunstenaars, filmers, schrijvers en choreografen tot eigen creaties. Het Joods Historisch Museum toont nu voor het eerst het werk in zijn totaal – ruim 800 gouaches.
Charlotte Salomon;
Leven? of theater?
Nog t/m 25 maart 2018
Joods Historisch Museum en JHM Kindermuseum
Nieuwe Amstelstraat 1
1011 PL Amsterdam
# meer info op website joods historisch museum
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“Stellt euch vor, ich bin fort” wurde in der englischsprachigen Presse «atemraubend» genannt, «überwältigend und herzzerreißend», wurde als «Literatur höchsten Ranges» gefeiert und für den Pulitzer Preis, den National Book Award und den National Book Critics Circle Award nominiert. Ein moderner Familienroman in der Tradition einer welthaltigen und weltläufigen US-Literatur.
Alles beginnt mit einem Unglück auf einer Landpartie in Maine. Nein, früher: Es beginnt in den 1960er Jahren in London, als die junge Amerikanerin Margaret erfährt, dass John, ihr Verlobter, nicht einfach verschwunden, sondern manisch-depressiv in eine psychiatrische Klinik eingewiesen worden ist. Vor die Wahl gestellt, entscheidet sie sich für ein Leben an seiner Seite, ein Leben mit seiner Krankheit. Was daraus folgt, ist die Geschichte einer Familie über zwei Generationen, die Geschichte einer erblichen bipolaren Störung, einer mal glanzvollen und häufiger noch prekären Existenz, durchzogen von den Spuren eines großen Verlusts.
Adam Haslett erzählt von Mutterliebe und Geschwisterbanden mit derselben Glaubwürdigkeit und Präzision wie vom Hummerfischen, von Clonazepam oder Funk, Techno und House. “Stellt euch vor, ich bin fort” ist ein Meisterwerk des psychologischen Realismus, genauso einfühlsam wie einfallsreich, ein Roman, der unseren Blick auf die Menschen, die uns am wichtigsten sind, dauerhaft verändern kann.
Adam Haslett, geboren 1970, studierte Literatur und Jura in Yale, Swarthmore und an der University of Iowa. Seine Bücher wurden in achtzehn Sprachen übersetzt und unter anderem mit dem PEN/Malamud-Award ausgezeichnet. Der Erzählungsband “Hingabe” gelangte nicht nur auf die Shortlist des Pulitzer Preises, sondern auch auf die des National Book Award. Für den Roman “Union Atlantic” erhielt Adam Haslett den Lambda Literary Award. “Stellt euch vor, ich bin fort”, sein zweiter Roman, wurde für den Pulitzer Preis, den National Book Award und den National Book Critics Circle Award nomininiert. Adam Haslett lebt in New York City.
Autor: Adam Haslett
Titel: Stellt euch vor, ich bin fort
Roman.
Originaltitel: Imagine Me Gone.
Übersetzt von Dirk van Gunsteren
Rowohlt Verlag GmbH
12. Januar 2018
gebunden
460 Seiten
€ 22,95
ISBN: 3498030280
EAN: 9783498030285
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*Walt Whitman Award Winner 2016
*One of The New Yorker’s Poetry I Was Grateful For in 2017, selected by Dan Chiasson
*One of The Brooklyn Rail’s Best Books of 2017
“[Afterland] reminds us what a distinctive instrument the human imagination is, no matter what tune it plays. There is a story in this book, and an important one. . . . Vang writes strikingly, often chillingly visual poems, their images projected one at a time, like slides in a lecture, or perhaps in a trial. . . . Afterland works its wonders with an intentionally rationed vocabulary, its counters combined and recombined in poem after poem: stars, water, hair, bones, fire. . . . The style creates an atmosphere of impending marvels, and many of Vang’s poems perform, in words, the transformations that they describe . . . . [Afterland] is among the most satisfying débuts by an American poet in some time.” — The New Yorker
“When I make the crossing, you must not be taken no matter what the current gives. When we reach the camp,
there will be thousands like us.?
If I make it onto the plane, you must follow me to the roads and waiting pastures of America.
We will not ride the water today on the shoulders of buffalo as we used to many years ago, nor will we forage? for the sweetest mangoes.
I am refugee. You are too. Cry, but do not weep.” — from “Transmigration”
“Afterland has haunted me. I keep returning to read these poems aloud, hearing in them a language at once atavistic, contemporary, and profoundly spiritual. Mai Der Vang confronts the Secret War in Laos, the flight of the Hmong people, and their survival as refugees. That a poet could absorb and transform these experiences in a single generation—incising the page with the personal and collective utterances of both the living and the dead, in luminous imagery and a surprising diction that turns both cathedral and widow into verbs, offering both land and body as swidden (slashed and burned)—is nothing short of astonishing.Here is deep attention, prismatic intelligence, and fearless truth.” — Carolyn Forché, judge’s statement for the Walt Whitman Award
Mai Der Vang
Afterland. Poems
Pages: 104
Pub Date: April 4, 2017
Poetry
Paperback, $16.00
ISBN: 978-1-55597-770-2
2016 Walt Whitman Award winner
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