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ULTIMATE LIBRARY – danse macabre, ex libris, grimm & co, fairy tales, art of reading, tales of mystery & imagination, sherlock holmes theatre, erotic poetry, ideal women

· Christine de Pisan: Belle, ce que j’ay requis · Julia Malye: La Louisiane (Roman) · Arno Holz: Auf einem Berg aus Zuckerkant · Vernietigen, nieuwe roman van Michel Houellebecq · BOEKENWEEK 2023: 11 t/m 19 maart · Anna Laetitia Barbauld: The Rights of Women (Poem) · Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Women Do Not Want It · Raoul Schrott: Die Erfindung der Poesie · The House of Twenty Thousand Books by Sasha Abramsky · Benjamin Heisenberg: ‘Lukusch’. Roman · Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Anti-Sufragists · G. K. Chesterton: A Fairy Tale

»» there is more...

Christine de Pisan: Belle, ce que j’ay requis

Belle, ce que j’ay requis

Belle, ce que j’ay requis
Or le vueilliez ottroier,
Car par tant de fois proier
Bien le doy avoir conquis.

Je l’ay ja si long temps quis,
Et pour trés bien emploier,
Belle, ce que j’ay requis.
Se de moy avez enquis,

Ne me devez pas noyer
Mon guerdon, ne mon loier;
Car par raison j’ai acquis,
Belle, ce que j’ay requis.

Christine de Pisan
(1364/1365 – 1430)
Belle, ce que j’ay requis
Rondeaux

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Julia Malye: La Louisiane (Roman)

Pour la première fois depuis trois mois, elles discernent enfin le sable que leur cachait l’eau lors de la traversée de l’Atlantique, ce fond de l’océan qu’elles ont brièvement aperçu ce matin en débarquant de La Baleine.

Personne ne leur a expliqué où elles seraient logées ce soir, dans combien de temps elles seraient fiancées. On ne dit pas tout aux femmes.

Paris, 1720. Marguerite Pancatelin, la Supérieure de la Salpêtrière, est mandatée pour sélectionner une centaine de femmes « volontaires » qui seront envoyées en Louisiane afin d’y épouser les colons français. Parmi elles, trois amies improbables : une orpheline de douze ans à la langue bien pendue, une jeune aristocrate désargentée et rejetée par sa famille ainsi qu’une femme condamnée pour avortement.

Comme leurs compagnes à bord de La Baleine , Charlotte, Pétronille et Geneviève ignorent tout de ce qui les attend au-delà des mers. Et n’ont pas leur mot à dire sur leur avenir.

Ces étrangères réunies par le destin devront braver l’adversité – maladie, guerre, patriarcat –, traverser une vie faite de chagrins d’amour, de naissances et de deuils, de cruauté et de plaisirs inattendus. Et d’une amitié forgée dans le feu.

Un roman d’une profondeur et d’une émotion saisissantes, qui nous transporte au cœur d’une terre impitoyable, aux côtés d’héroïnes animées d’une extraordinaire soif d’amour et de vie.

Julia Malye est née à Paris en 1994. Elle a publié son premier roman, La Fiancée de Tocqueville (éditions Balland), à l’âge de 15 ans. Diplômée de Sciences Po et de la Sorbonne en sciences sociales et lettres modernes, elle est également titulaire d’un Master of Fine Arts en creative writing de l’Université d’État de l’Oregon. Elle est traductrice de l’anglais pour Les Belles Lettres et, depuis 2018, elle enseigne l’écriture de fiction à Sciences Po. Son quatrième roman, La Louisiane, écrit parallèlement en français et en anglais, est en cours de traduction dans plus de vingt pays et sera adapté en série.

La Louisiane
par Julia Malye
Roman
Ed. Stock
Paru le: 03 Janvier 2024
Format: 138 x 216 mm
560 pages
Ean: 9782234094116
Prix: €23.90

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Arno Holz: Auf einem Berg aus Zuckerkant

Auf einem Berg aus Zuckerkant

Auf einem Berg aus Zuckerkant,
unter einem blühenden Machandelbaum,
blinkt mein Pfefferkuchenhäuschen.

Seine Fensterchen sind aus Goldpapier,
aus seinem Schornstein raucht Watte.

Im grünen Himmel, über mir,
rauscht die Weihnachtstanne.

In meinem See aus Staniol
spiegeln sich alle ihre Engel, alle ihre Lichter!

Die kleinen Kinder stehn rum
und staunen mich an.

Ich bin der Zwerg Turlitipu.

Mein dicker Bauch ist aus Traganth,
meine Beinchen Streichhölzer,
meine listigen Äugelchen
Korinthen.

Arno Holz

(1863 – 1929)
Auf einem Berg aus Zuckerkant
(aus: “Phantasus”)

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Vernietigen, nieuwe roman van Michel Houellebecq

November 2026. De Franse presidentsverkiezingen komen er weer aan, de zittende president kan na zijn tweede termijn niet worden herkozen, dus het hele veld ligt open en radicaal rechts maakt een goede kans.

Dan verschijnt er op internet een onmogelijk realistische nepvideo waarin een van de voornaamste kandidaten wordt geëxecuteerd. De verantwoordelijkheid voor het onderzoek komt terecht bij topambtenaar Paul Raison, en over hem gaat dit boek: over zijn pogingen om een grote terroristische dreiging te pareren, maar vooral ook over zijn privéleven, zijn relatie met zijn vrouw, zijn familie.

Michel Houellebecq (1958) is Frankrijks onbetwiste sterschrijver van dit moment. Hij publiceerde essays en poëzie voordat hij zich in 1994 met de roman De wereld als markt en strijd, die bekroond werd met diverse prijzen, opwierp als belofte van de Franse letteren. Die status bevestigde hij met Elementaire deeltjes (Prix Novembre en Impact Dublin Literary Award), dat hem terecht de faam van groot schrijver bezorgde, en Platform. In 2011, 2015 en 2019 verschenen zijn grote romans De kaart en het gebied, Onderworpen en Serotonine. In juni 2022 verscheen een nieuwe editie van zijn essays onder de titel Nader tot de ontreddering. Zijn veelvuldig bekroonde en wereldwijd vertaalde werk is in het Nederlands vertaald door Martin de Haan.

Vernietigen
Michel Houellebecq
Roman
Vertaling: Martin de Haan
Nederlands
Uitgeverij De Arbeiderspers
Hardcover
2023
608 pagina’s
EAN 9789029545884
€29,99

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BOEKENWEEK 2023: 11 t/m 19 maart

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Anna Laetitia Barbauld: The Rights of Women (Poem)

   

The Rights of Women

Yes, injured Woman! rise, assert thy right!
Woman! too long degraded, scorned, opprest;
O born to rule in partial Law’s despite,
Resume thy native empire o’er the breast!

Go forth arrayed in panoply divine;
That angel pureness which admits no stain;
Go, bid proud Man his boasted rule resign,
And kiss the golden sceptre of thy reign.

Go, gird thyself with grace; collect thy store
Of bright artillery glancing from afar;
Soft melting tones thy thundering cannon’s roar,
Blushes and fears thy magazine of war.

Thy rights are empire: urge no meaner claim,—
Felt, not defined, and if debated, lost;
Like sacred mysteries, which withheld from fame,
Shunning discussion, are revered the most.

Try all that wit and art suggest to bend
Of thy imperial foe the stubborn knee;
Make treacherous Man thy subject, not thy friend;
Thou mayst command, but never canst be free.

Awe the licentious, and restrain the rude;
Soften the sullen, clear the cloudy brow:
Be, more than princes’ gifts, thy favours sued;—
She hazards all, who will the least allow.

But hope not, courted idol of mankind,
On this proud eminence secure to stay;
Subduing and subdued, thou soon shalt find
Thy coldness soften, and thy pride give way.

Then, then, abandon each ambitious thought,
Conquest or rule thy heart shall feebly move,
In Nature’s school, by her soft maxims taught,
That separate rights are lost in mutual love.

Anna Laetitia Barbauld
(1743 – 1825)
The Rights of Women
Anna Laetitia Barbauld wrote this poem in 1793,
in response to Mary Wollstonecraft’s ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman´.

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Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Women Do Not Want It

Women Do Not Want It

When the woman suffrage argument first stood upon its legs,
They answered it with cabbages, they answered it with eggs,
They answered it with ridicule, they answered it with scorn,
They thought it a monstrosity that should not have been born.

When the woman suffrage argument grew vigorous and wise,
And was not to be answered by these opposite replies,
They turned their opposition into reasoning severe
Upon the limitations of our God-appointed sphere.

We were told of disabilities–a long array of these,
Till one could think that womanhood was merely a disease;
And “the maternal sacrifice” was added to the plan
Of the various sacrifices we have always made–to man.

Religionists and scientists, in amity and bliss,
However else they disagreed, could all agree on this,
And the gist of all their discourse, when you got down in it,
Was–we could not have the ballot because we were not fit!

They would not hear the reason, they would not fairly yield,
They would not own their arguments were beaten in the field;
But time passed on, and someway, we need not ask them how,
Whatever ails those arguments–we do not hear them now!

You may talk of suffrage now with an educated man,
And he agrees with all you say, as sweetly as he can:
‘T would be better for us all, of course, if womanhood was free;
But “the women do not want it”–and so it must not be!

‘T is such a tender thoughtfulness! So exquisite a care!
Not to pile on our frail shoulders what we do not wish to bear!
But, oh, most generous brother! Let us look a little more–
Have we women always wanted what you gave to us before?

Did we ask for veils and harems in the Oriental races?
Did we beseech to be “unclean,” shut out of sacred places?
Did we beg for scolding bridles and ducking stools to come?
And clamour for the beating stick no thicker than your thumb?

Did we ask to be forbidden from all the trades that pay?
Did we claim the lower wages for a man’s full work today?
Have we petitioned for the laws wherein our shame is shown:
That not a woman’s child–nor her own body–is her own?

What women want has never been a strongly acting cause,
When woman has been wronged by man in churches, customs, laws;
Why should he find this preference so largely in his way,
When he himself admits the right of what we ask today?

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
(1860-1935)
Women Do Not Want It
Suffrage Songs and Verses

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Raoul Schrott: Die Erfindung der Poesie

Ein solches Buch hat es noch nie gegeben.

Dass die Poesie eine alte Erfindung ist, ahnen wir; aber die wenigsten von uns wären imstande, die Spur der europäischen Dichtung bis an ihre Ursprünge zurückzuverfolgen.

Sie führt weit, bis ins Zweistromland, bis zu den Arabern, den Kelten und den Sizilianern. Wer wüßte schon, daß der älteste überlieferte Dichtername einer Frau gehört?

Wer kennt noch die wilden Lieder des Archilochos, den die Griechen die Skorpionzunge nannten?

Und so weiter – über Sappho und die römischen Elegiker Catull und Properz bis zu den Iren des achten, den Hebräern des elften, den Trobadors des zwölften und den Walisern des vierzehnten Jahrhunderts.

Raoul Schrott ist 1964 in Landeck geboren. Seine bisherigen Publikationen sind: Dada 21/22 (1988); Makama (1989); Die Legenden vom Tod (1990); Rime (1991); Dada 15/25 (1992); Sub rosa (1993); Hotels (1995); Finis terrae (1995), Die Musen. Fragmente einer Sprache der Dichtung (1997) und Poesie und Physis – Grazer Poetikvorlesungen (1997).

Schrott, Raoul
Die Erfindung der Poesie
Die Andere Bibliothek u.a.
Seitenanzahl: 536
Extradrucke
Bandnummer: 154
ISBN: 9783821847702
ca. 45,00 EUR (antiquarisch)

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The House of Twenty Thousand Books by Sasha Abramsky

A tender and compellling memoir of the author’s grandparents, their literary salon, and a way of life that is no more.

The House of Twenty Thousand Books is the story of Chimen Abramsky, an extraordinary polymath and bibliophile who amassed a vast collection of socialist literature and Jewish history. For more than fifty years Chimen and his wife, Miriam, hosted epic gatherings in their house of books that brought together many of the age’s greatest thinkers.

The atheist son of one of the century’s most important rabbis, Chimen was born in 1916 near Minsk, spent his early teenage years in Moscow while his father served time in a Siberian labor camp for religious proselytizing, and then immigrated to London, where he discovered the writings of Karl Marx and became involved in left-wing politics.

He briefly attended the newly established Hebrew University in Jerusalem, until World War II interrupted his studies.

Back in England, he married, and for many years he and Miriam ran a respected Jewish bookshop in London’s East End. When the Nazis invaded Russia in June 1941, Chimen joined the Communist Party, becoming a leading figure in the party’s National Jewish Committee. He remained a member until 1958, when, shockingly late in the day, he finally acknowledged the atrocities committed by Stalin. In middle age, Chimen reinvented himself once more, this time as a liberal thinker, humanist, professor, and manuscripts’ expert for Sotheby’s auction house.

Journalist Sasha Abramsky re-creates here a lost world, bringing to life the people, the books, and the ideas that filled his grandparents’ house, from gatherings that included Eric Hobsbawm and Isaiah Berlin to books with Marx’s handwritten notes, William Morris manuscripts and woodcuts, an early sixteenth-century Bomberg Bible, and a first edition of Descartes’s Meditations. The House of Twenty Thousand Books is a wondrous journey through our times, from the vanished worlds of Eastern European Jewry to the cacophonous politics of modernity.

The Book includes 43 photos.

“Sasha Abramsky’s account of his grandfather’s devotion to books and reading is a moving testimonial to the persistance of human curiosity in a world that seems to drift farther and farther from the delight of intellectual pursuits. It is a moving, instructive, astonishing account of one man’s love for the printed word that all readers will appreciate. The House of Twenty Thousand Books deserves twenty hundred thousand readers.”
— Alberto Manguel

Sasha Abramsky was born and raised in the UK, studied politics, philosophy and economics at Balliol College, Oxford, and moved to the US in my early 20s. He has lived and worked in London, New York, and in California. His writings have been published in the Nation magazine, the New Yorker online, the New York Times, Atlantic, Mother Jones, Truthout, Sacramento Magazine, Slate, Salon, and many other publications in the US. In the UK he has written for a number of publications, including the Guardian, the Observer, the Sunday Telegraph, and the New Statesman.

The House of Twenty Thousand Books
by Sasha Abramsky, with a new preface by the author
Publisher: ‎ New York Review Books
Reprint edition 2017
Language: ‎ English
Paperback
376 pages
ISBN-10: ‎ 1681371138
ISBN-13: ‎ 978-1681371139
$17.95

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Benjamin Heisenberg: ‘Lukusch’. Roman

Benjamin Heisenbergs Roman «Lukusch» ist eine wilde und witzige Fahrt durch die unfassbare Geschichte des jungen Schachtalents Anton Lukusch und seines grobschlächtigen Sidekicks Igor.

Klug und lässig zugleich spielt dieser Roman mit den Möglichkeiten des Erzählens und sprengt dabei seine eigenen Grenzen.

Anton Lukusch war ein ganz normaler Junge aus Prypjat – bis zur Reaktorkatastrophe von Tschernobyl 1986. Gemeinsam mit anderen Kindern wird er von der Hilfsorganisation Shelta nach Westdeutschland gebracht, um der hohen Strahlenbelastung zu entkommen.

Dort beginnt für ihn ein ganz neues Leben: Durch Zufall wird Lukuschs analytisches Talent beim Schachspielen entdeckt. Ein Überflieger, ein Wunderkind – die Bundesrepublik jubelt! Vor den Augen der Öffentlichkeit gewinnt er eine Partie gegen Bundeskanzler Helmut Kohl, knackt ein scheinbar unlösbares Rätsel bei Wetten, dass … und wird sogar von internationalen Konzernen als Berater verpflichtet.

Ihn selbst scheint seine spektakuläre Erfolgsgeschichte kaum zu interessieren. Wie ferngesteuert löst Anton alle ihm gestellten Aufgaben, lächelt brav in die Kameras und lässt sich von seinem Umfeld herumreichen wie ein teures Spielzeug, mit dem man im Scheinwerferlicht glänzen kann. Ist dieser Junge wirklich «nur» ein herausragendes Talent, und was hat es mit seinem ständigen Schatten Igor auf sich? Antons spurloses Verschwinden ist nur der Anfang höchst kurioser Entwicklungen …

Benjamin Heisenberg, geboren 1974 in Tübingen, arbeitet als Regisseur, Autor und bildender Künstler. Seine Arbeiten erhielten namhafte Auszeichnungen.

Heisenberg, Benjamin
Lukusch
Roman
Publisher: ‎ C.H.Beck; 1st edition
15 Sept. 2022
Language: ‎German
Hardcover: ‎270 pages
ISBN-10: ‎340679095X
ISBN-13:‎ 978-3406790959
Dimensions: ‎14.2 x 2.6 x 21.9 cm
€25.00

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Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Anti-Sufragists

 

The Anti-Sufragists

Fashionable women in luxurious homes,
With men to feed them, clothe them, pay their bills,
Bow, doff the hat, and fetch the handkerchief;
Hostess or guest; and always so supplied
With graceful deference and courtesy;
Surrounded by their horses, servants, dogs–
These tell us they have all the rights they want.

Successful women who have won their way
Alone, with strength of their unaided arm,
Or helped by friends, or softly climbing up
By the sweet aid of “woman’s influence”;
Successful any way, and caring naught
For any other woman’s unsuccess–
These tell us they have all the rights they want.

Religious women of the feebler sort–
Not the religion of a righteous world,
A free, enlightened, upward-reaching world,
But the religion that considers life
As something to back out of !– whose ideal
Is to renounce, submit, and sacrifice.
Counting on being patted on the head
And given a high chair when they get to heaven–
These tell us they have all the rights they want.

Ignorant women–college bred sometimes,
But ignorant of life’s realities
And principles of righteous government,
And how the privileges they enjoy
Were won with blood and tears by those before–
Those they condemn, whose ways they now oppose;
Saying, “Why not let well enough alone?”
Our world is very pleasant as it is”–
These tell us they have all the rights they want.

And selfish women–pigs in petticoats–
Rich, poor, wise, unwise, top or bottom round,
But all sublimely innocent of thought,
And guiltless of ambition, save the one
Deep, voiceless aspiration–to be fed!
These have no use for rights or duties more.
Duties today are more than they can meet,
And law insures their right to clothes and food–
These tell us they have all the rights they want.

And, more’s the pity, some good women too;
Good, conscientious women with ideas;
Who think–or think they think–that woman’s cause
Is best advanced by letting it alone;
That she somehow is not a human thing,
And not to be helped on by human means,
Just added to humanity–an “L”–
A wing, a branch, an extra, not mankind–
These tell us they have all the rights they want.

And out of these has come a monstrous thing,
A strange, down-sucking whirlpool of disgrace,
Women uniting against womanhood,
And using that great name to hide their sin!
Vain are their words as that old king’s command
Who set his will against the rising tide.
But who shall measure the historic shame
Of these poor traitors–traitors are they all–
To great Democracy and Womanhood!

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
(1860-1935)
The Anti-Sufragists
Suffrage Songs and Verses

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G. K. Chesterton: A Fairy Tale

A Fairy Tale

All things grew upwards, foul and fair:
The great trees fought and beat the air
With monstrous wings that would have flown;
But the old earth clung to her own,
Holding them back from heavenly wars,
Though every flower sprang at the stars.

But he broke free: while all things ceased,
Some hour increasing, he increased.
The town beneath him seemed a map,
Above the church he cocked his cap,
Above the cross his feather flew
Above the birds and still he grew.

The trees turned grass; the clouds were riven;
His feet were mountains lost in heaven;
Through strange new skies he rose alone,
The earth fell from him like a stone,
And his own limbs beneath him far
Seemed tapering down to touch a star.

He reared his head, shaggy and grim,
Staring among the cherubim;
The seven celestial floors he rent,
One crystal dome still o’er him bent:
Above his head, more clear than hope,
All heaven was a microscope.

G. K. Chesterton
(1874-1936)
A Fairy Tale

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