Engelska

Perspectives On Aesthetics, Art And Culture - Essays In Honour Of Lars-olof Åhlberg [Bok / Häftad]

<b>In this poignant, funny, and illuminating essay collection from the hosts of the <i>Podcrushed </i>podcast, Penn Badgley, Sophie Ansari, and Nava Kavelin tackle stories from adolescence and beyond, exploring what it means to come of age at every stage of our lives.</b><br/><br/>In their debut essay collection, Penn Badgley, Sophie Ansari, and Nava Kavelin flip the script on their hit <i>Podcrushed </i>podcast--which features guests' stories about their formative teenage experiences--to share their own stories of heartbreak, anxiety, and self-discovery for the first time.<br/><br/>From first crushes to first jealousies, from dreams realized to dreams deferred, <i>Crushmore </i>dives into the simultaneous awkwardness and joy of growing up. With humour, compassion, and insight, Penn, Sophie, and Nava unravel the ups and downs of their own coming of age, and highlight how we can find healing--and even inspiration--from our awkward adolescent selves long after we thought we left them behind.

'Tawada's <b>strange, exquisite</b> book toys with ideas of language, identity and what it means to own someone else's story or one's own' <i><b>The New Yorker</b> </i>on Tawada's <i>Memoirs of a Polar Bear</i><br/><br/>How perfect that Tawada's first essay collection in English dives deep into her lifelong fascination with the possibilities opened up by cross-hybridizing languages. Tawada famously writes in both Japanese and German, but her interest in language reaches beyond any mere dichotomy. The term 'exophonic', which she first heard in Senegal, has a special allure for the author: 'I was already familiar with similar terms, 'immigrant literature,' or 'creole literature,' but 'exophonic' had a much broader meaning, referring to the general experience of existing outside of one's mother tongue.'<br/><br/>Tawada revels in explorations of cross-cultural and intra-language possibilities (and along the way deals several nice sharp raps to the global primacy of English). The accent here, as in her fiction, is the art of drawing closer to the world through defamiliarization. Never entertaining a received thought, Tawada seeks the still-to-be-discovered truths, as well as what might possibly be invented entirely whole cloth.<br/><br/><i>Exophony </i>opens a new vista into Yoko Tawada's world, and delivers more of her signature erudite wit - at once cross-grained and generous, laser-focused and multidimensional, slyly ironic and warmly companionable.

Zen In The Art Of Writing [Bok / Häftad]

Considered by many to be the iconic French memoirist's defining work, <em>The Years </em>is a narrative of the period 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present, cultural habits, language, photos, books, songs, radio, television, advertising and news headlines. Annie Ernaux invents a form that is subjective and impersonal, private and communal, and a new genre - the collective autobiography - in order to capture the passing of time. At the confluence of autofiction and sociology, <em>The Years</em> is 'a <em>Remembrance of Things Past </em>for our age of media domination and consumerism' (<em>New York Times</em>), a monumental account of twentieth-century French history as refracted through the life of one woman.

A powerful meditation on ageing and familial love, <i>I Remain in Darkness</i> recounts Annie Ernaux's attempts to help her mother recover from Alzheimer's disease, and then, when that proves futile, to bear witness to the older woman's gradual decline and her own experience as a daughter losing a beloved parent. Haunting and devastatingly poignant, <i>I Remain in Darkness</i> showcases Ernaux's unique talent for evoking life's darkest and most bewildering episodes.

In 1963, Annie Ernaux, 23 and unattached, realizes she is pregnant. Shame arises in her like a plague: understanding that her pregnancy will mark her and her family as social failures, she knows she cannot keep that child. This is the story, written forty years later, of a trauma Ernaux never overcame. In a France where abortion was illegal, she attempted, in vain, to self-administer the abortion with a knitting needle. Fearful and desperate, she finally located an abortionist, and ends up in a hospital emergency ward where she nearly dies. In <i>Happening</i>, Ernaux sifts through her memories and her journal entries dating from those days. Clearly, cleanly, she gleans the meanings of her experience.