peninsula press gb (158 risultati)

Paperback. Condizione: New.

Paperback. Condizione: New. An essay about politics, humility, and lossYou are a loser. For psychoanalysis, this isn't a personal slight, but an impersonal truth. So why have we come to fear losing?'Loser' was Donald Trump's favourite insult within a hotly contested field. But while progressives disdain his divisive politics, they have mostly failed to challenge meritocratic values that divide society into winners and losers. How might we truly escape our toxic political culture?In this powerful, wide-ranging essay, psychoanalyst and critic Josh Cohen suggests that the answer may lie in a notion of humility. Far from a sentimental moral virtue, humility may well be the most elusive, precarious, and indeed radical value of all, one which relies upon a full-hearted embrace of one's inner loser. Enlisting the help of a cast of unlikely comrades - Thomas Bernhard, Franz Kafka, and Robert Walser - Cohen shows how we might move beyond a culture based on enforced positivity, resentment, and humiliation.Praise'Josh Cohen has made perhaps the most pernicious, offensive and distracting word in the English language of amazing and illuminating interest. This is a remarkable and clarifying book.' - Adam Phillips'With compassion, skill and verve, Josh Cohen eloquently dismantles societal and personal delusions about winning and losing. This is exactly the conversation we need to be having right now.' - Deborah Levy'Eloquent, urgent, this breath-taking essay, bristles with wit and analytic understanding. Our social settlements, our lying politicians, our very language of winners and losers has never undergone this kind of rigorous dissection before. A tour de force - or should I say a loser's triumph.' - Lisa Appignanesi'Josh Cohen's Losers feels necessary: a profound meditation and an ethical salve for a world that wounds us with its increasing ethos of success-at-any-cost. With gentleness, he guides us through the paradoxes of humility, uncertainty, neutrality, and the excess of shame and humiliation that lurks behind today's peculiar brand of triumphalism.' - Jamieson Webster.

Paperback. Condizione: New. A personal essay on exposure, auto-fiction, internet feminism and the anxiety epidemic. Last year Olivia Sudjic published Sympathy, a novel about surveillance and connection in the internet age. If a debut novel is written by a woman, it is often read and discussed as if it were a memoir. Suddenly Sudjic found herself shoved under the microscope, subject to same surveillance apparatus she had dissected in her novel. In this incisive personal essay, Olivia Sudjic draws on her experience to examine the damaging expectations that attend any young female artist, as well the strategies by which they might be evaded.

Paperback. Condizione: New. An essay about politics, humility, and lossYou are a loser. For psychoanalysis, this isn't a personal slight, but an impersonal truth. So why have we come to fear losing?'Loser' was Donald Trump's favourite insult within a hotly contested field. But while progressives disdain his divisive politics, they have mostly failed to challenge meritocratic values that divide society into winners and losers. How might we truly escape our toxic political culture?In this powerful, wide-ranging essay, psychoanalyst and critic Josh Cohen suggests that the answer may lie in a notion of humility. Far from a sentimental moral virtue, humility may well be the most elusive, precarious, and indeed radical value of all, one which relies upon a full-hearted embrace of one's inner loser. Enlisting the help of a cast of unlikely comrades - Thomas Bernhard, Franz Kafka, and Robert Walser - Cohen shows how we might move beyond a culture based on enforced positivity, resentment, and humiliation.Praise'Josh Cohen has made perhaps the most pernicious, offensive and distracting word in the English language of amazing and illuminating interest. This is a remarkable and clarifying book.' - Adam Phillips'With compassion, skill and verve, Josh Cohen eloquently dismantles societal and personal delusions about winning and losing. This is exactly the conversation we need to be having right now.' - Deborah Levy'Eloquent, urgent, this breath-taking essay, bristles with wit and analytic understanding. Our social settlements, our lying politicians, our very language of winners and losers has never undergone this kind of rigorous dissection before. A tour de force - or should I say a loser's triumph.' - Lisa Appignanesi'Josh Cohen's Losers feels necessary: a profound meditation and an ethical salve for a world that wounds us with its increasing ethos of success-at-any-cost. With gentleness, he guides us through the paradoxes of humility, uncertainty, neutrality, and the excess of shame and humiliation that lurks behind today's peculiar brand of triumphalism.' - Jamieson Webster.

Paperback. Condizione: New. A personal essay on exposure, auto-fiction, internet feminism and the anxiety epidemic. Last year Olivia Sudjic published Sympathy, a novel about surveillance and connection in the internet age. If a debut novel is written by a woman, it is often read and discussed as if it were a memoir. Suddenly Sudjic found herself shoved under the microscope, subject to same surveillance apparatus she had dissected in her novel. In this incisive personal essay, Olivia Sudjic draws on her experience to examine the damaging expectations that attend any young female artist, as well the strategies by which they might be evaded.

Paperback. Condizione: New. In 1937 the Nazis staged an exhibition of seized artworks to showcase the 'perverse Jewish spirit' pervading German culture. It contained work by Jewish artists, but also those were queer or foreign. It was an event that sought to define degeneracy and put it on display. This exhibition, Entartete Kunst, is just a single episode in a long running culture war, one that has always been fought on terms set by fascism. In A Nazi Word for a Nazi Thing, So Mayer gives us a new frame through which to view these intertwined yet disparate histories.

Paperback. Condizione: New. Sterling is arrested one morning without having done anything wrong. Plunged into a terrifying and nonsensical world, Sterling - with the help of their three best friends - must defy bullfighters, football players and spaceships in order to exonerate themselves and to hold the powers that be to account.Sterling Karat Gold is Kafka's The Trial written for the era of gaslighting - a surreal inquiry into the real effects of state violence on gender-nonconforming, working-class and black bodies.Following the Goldsmiths Prize-nominated We Are Made of Diamond Stuff, Isabel Waidner's latest novel proposes community, inventiveness and the stubborn refusal to lie low as antidotes against marginalisation and towards fiercer futures.Praise:'Ferocious and nebular, kind and strange-where strange means 'queer, surprising' and 'outside of'-Sterling Karat Gold crackles on the edge of new language(s) while simultaneously demolishing language altogether. Narrator Sterling (think a nonbinary young Genet in foam spikes) is fomenting and canny, bent on surviving the mania of a rapidly morphing and out of control British regime. But what to lob against murderous nationalist illogics? Like all Waidner's words, each verbal pulse is funneled velocity, gives no F's, scraps for its place on the page, belongs, glitters. As much an elegy to the loss of mother tongues as mothers (also anticapitalist spaceships, friends, bodies, generations to AIDS, self), Waidner makes soft bombs of binaries, shows again and again how violence against bipoc, migrant, queer life is not fiction, and that liberation and alliance are inseparable. Sterling Karat Gold is fervid, focused, felt in all of its wholly radical clamor. The stakes? Our chest bones and tender communities inside. The mode? A Born-in-Flames-style reckoning that changes futures/leaves no one behind, ie, love.' - Jess Arndt, author of Large Animals.

Paperback. Condizione: New. Shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize and the Republic of Consciousness PrizePolar bears emerge from t-shirts. Reeboks come to life. Nothing is normal in the house of Mother Normal.In Isabel Waidner's second novel, we follow an unnamed narrator who looks like Eleven from Stranger Things, but is in fact a 36-year-old migrant working for minimum wage in a run-down hotel on the Isle of Wight. Along with their best friend, Shae, the narrator faces Ukip activists, shapeshifting creatures, and despotic bosses while trying to hold down their job and preparing for their Life in the UK test.This is fiction that extends the avant-garde tradition beyond the upper-class experience that it usually chronicles - making it over as an ally of working-class queer experience. Set against a backdrop of austerity and decline, We Are Made of Diamond Stuff is an irreverent, boundary-erasing piece of work that celebrates the radical potential of resistance, ingenuity, and friendship.

Paperback. Condizione: New. When unambitious scholar Ramon Beltra receives a mysterious invitation to a lucrative six-month fellowship at the University of Lerna in Switzerland, he reluctantly complies with the unusual qualifying paperwork requiring several pages of detailed measurements and photographs of his entire body. Beltra soon finds himself in the deserted university town of Lerna, together with twenty-three other 'novices' subject to the same undisclosed project - all of them doppelgangers of Beltra himself. At first, Beltra is the only one to bristle at the school's dizzying array of rules and regulations, but this all changes with the onset of an uncontrollable epidemic, and the fellows begin dying off one by one.The Novices of Lerna is a meditation on identity, surveillance, and isolation that remains eerily relevant. Shot through with wry humour and tender absurdity, this novella offers a perfect introduction to Ángel Bonomini's incomparable body of work.

Paperback. Condizione: New. "Today the ideal home remains a site of illusory ease, a space that can be wiped clean of the residues of living." In this radical and elegiac essay, Sam Johnson-Schlee invites readers to consider the dreams and fantasies we have about our homes, and their underlying reality.Living Rooms blends history, theory, and memoir as it moves between the colonial trade in house plants, Proustian reminiscence, and razor-sharp critique of rentier capitalism. Johnson-Schlee suggests that, by looking closely at the places where we live, we can confront political realities that extend out into the world. In the way we furnish our homes, might we be unconsciously imagining a different kind of life? In the way we arrange our sofas, picture frames, and our pot plants, are we dreaming of a better world? And what would it mean to reject the notion that a house should be a commodity, and to embrace the idea of a truly living room?

Paperback. Condizione: New. Moments of clarity are rare and fleeting; how can we become comfortable outside of them, in the more general condition of uncertainty within which we make our lives? Written by critic Emily Ogden while her children were small, On Not Knowing forays into this rich, ambivalent space. Each of her sharply observed essays invites the reader to think with her about questions she can't set aside: not knowing how to give birth, to listen, to hold it together, to love. Unapologetically capacious in her range of reference and idiosyncratic in the canon she draws on, Ogden moves nimbly among the registers of experience, from the operation of a breast pump to the art of herding cattle; from one-night stands to the stories of Edgar Allan Poe. Committed to the accumulation of knowledge, Ogden nonetheless finds that knowingness for her can be a way of getting stuck, a way of not really living. Rather than the defensiveness of wilful ignorance, On Not Knowing celebrates the defencelessness of not knowing yet - which, Ogden suggests, may be a form of love.

Paperback. Condizione: New. "It's mid morning. Cool. Not many coffee bars open. I, the brave one, god of any telephone kiosk, walk down Dean Street, see the man of the day; raincoat, shoulders round, hair black, falling out; heavenly blue eyes cast down into his own hell. Bold as brass I cross the road stopping dead in front of him. He raises his eyes, so sadly that I love him for it."Leda is lost. Bouncing from job to job, from coffee bar to house party, he spends his days watching the hours pass and waiting for the night to arrive. Trysts in the rubble of a bombsite follow hours spent in bedsits with near strangers, as Leda is forced to find intimacy in unusual places.Semi-homeless and estranged from his given family, he relies on the support of his chosen one: a community of older gay men and divorced women who feed and clothe him, gently encouraging him to find a foothold in a society which excludes him at every turn. And then there is Daniel, a buttoned-up man of the Lord, for whom Leda nurses an unrequited obsession - one which sends him spiralling into self-destruction.With a foreword by Huw Lemmey, this newly discovered, never-before-published novel - which pre-dates the Sexual Offences Act of 1967 - is a portrait of lost a Soho, as well as an important document of queer, working-class life, from a voice long overlooked.

Paperback. Condizione: New. A young woman reorients her relationship to the world in the wake of sudden deafness in this mesmerizing debut novel for readers of Rachel Cusk, Clarice Lispector, and Fleur JaeggyWhen the narrator of The Hearing Test, an artist in her late twenties, awakens one morning to a deep drone in her right ear, she is diagnosed with Sudden Deafness, but is offered no explanation for its cause. As the spectre of total deafness looms, she keeps a record of her year - a score of estrangement and enchantment, of luck and loneliness, of the chance occurrences to which she becomes attuned - while living alone in a New York City studio apartment with her dog.Through a series of fleeting and often humorous encounters - with neighbours, an ex-lover, doctors, strangers, family members, faraway friends, and with the lives and works of artists, filmmakers, musicians, and philosophers - making meaning becomes a form of consolation and curiosity, a form of survival. At once a rumination on silence and a novel on seeing, The Hearing Test is a work of vitalizing intellect and playfulness which marks the arrival of a major new literary writer with a rare command of form, compression, and intent.

Paperback. Condizione: New. The City of Durham, 1434. Out of a storm, an aging minstrel arrives at the cathedral to entertain the city's most powerful men. Mother Naked is his name, and the story he's come to tell is the Legend of the Fell Wraith: the gruesome 'walking ghost' some say slaughtered the nearby village of Segerston forty years earlier.But is this monster only a myth, born from the dim minds of toiling peasants? Or does the Wraith - and do the murders - have roots in real events suffered by those fated to a lifetime of labour? As Mother Naked weaves the strands of the mystery - of class, religion, art, and ale - it starts to seem as though the chilling truth might be closer to his privileged audience than they could ever imagine.Taking its inspiration from a single payment entered into Durham's Cathedral rolls, 'Modyr Nakett' was lowest-paid performer in over 200 years of records. Set against the traumatic shadow of the Black Death and the Peasant's Revolt, Mother Naked speaks back from the margins in a fury of imaginative recuperation.

Paperback. Condizione: New. From the author of Weird Fucks, a witty, bleak, and outrageous account of American girlhood. Haunted Houses is the story of three young women. Jane's occasionally violent father reads her the Gettysburg Address at bedtimes, while Emily's parents are FDR Democrats who only privately concede she may be normal. Grace believes her dolls come alive at night and talk against her, and has a mother who likes animals more than people. Tillman charts the girls' unsteady drift into womanhood, revealing the multiple forms of inheritance - family, gender, culture - that a girl must swallow or rebel against. Haunted Houses is about the past within the present, the inescapability of private memory and public history. In prose that is uncanny and precise, it showcases Lynne Tillman at her boldest and most trenchant.

Paperback. Condizione: New. In Lovebug, Daisy Lafarge explores metaphors of love and disease as she seeks to understand human vulnerability and our intimacy with microbial life. Turning to microbiology, mysticism, and psychoanalysis - as well as the raw materials of love and life - Lafarge navigates the uncomfortable intimacy between the human body and the many bacteria, vi-ruses, and parasites to which it is host. Lovebug is a book about the poetics of infection, and about how we can learn to live with multispecies ambivalence. How might we forge non-phobic relationships to our 'little beasts'? How might we re-wild our imaginations? In weaving the personal with the pathological, Lovebug complicates the idea of coherent selfhood, revealing life as a site of radical vulnerability and an ongoing negotiation with limit.

Paperback. Condizione: New. 'Our lives do not start entirely with our births.'Prussia, the early 19th century. As he attempts to bury his recently deceased wife, Redo Hauptshammer uncovers the frozen body of a uniformed soldier. As he continues to dig, the bodies start to pile up - all of them fallen cavalrymen bearing the secrets of an earlier era.For readers of W. G. Sebald and Agustin Fernandez Mallo, this archaeological novel digs into Europe's soil, uncovering a long history of violence and expropriation. Mora's writing is audacious, melancholy, and formally experimental. Each chapter is longer than the one that precedes it - as the bodies proliferate, the story keeps getting more complicated.In a bold yet lyrical translation by Rahul Bery, Centroeuropa introduces English-speaking readers to one of Europe's pre-eminent experimental prose writers currently at work.

Paperback. Condizione: New. Amna, Nimo, Mouna - these are all names for a single Egyptian woman whose life has mirrored that of her country. After her death in 2015, her son, Nour, climbs to the attic of their house where he glimpses her in a series of ever more immersive visions: Amna as a young woman forced into an arranged marriage in the 1950s; as a coquettish student of French known to her confidants as Nimo; a self-made divorcee and a lover; a 'pious mama' donning her hijab; and, finally, as a feminist activist during the Arab Spring. Charged and renewed by these visions of a woman he has always known as Mouna, Nour begins a series of fevered letters to his sister - who has been estranged from Mouna and from Egypt for many years - in an attempt to reconcile what both siblings know about this mercurial woman, their country, and the possibility for true revolution after so much has failed. Hallucinatory, stylish, and erotic, The Dissenters is a transcendent portrait of a woman and an era that explodes our ideas of faith, gender roles, freedom, and political agency.

Paperback. Condizione: New. A mesmerising and unsettling novel from a powerful new voice Seeking release from their small-town existence, two teenagers drive north on a vaguely plotted road trip. Adam and Teddy hope to leave boyhood behind. But they carry with them all the upsets and resentments they have accrued in their unhappy lives to date. As the pair's journey progresses, the mood fluctuates as each of them sets out to prove himself. The dynamics of their friendship begin to unravel, culminating in an act of devastating - and all too familiar - violence. In taut and stylish prose, The Passenger Seat examines how men learn and perform masculinity. Rejecting easy answers, it keeps our eyes trained on the vanishing point where vulnerability edges into violence, alienation into aggression.

Paperback. Condizione: New. 'Raised from babydom into doubt, I'm as feminine as Rousseau. I, Hazel Brown, eldest daughter of a disappearing class, penniless neophyte stunned by the glamour of literature, tradeless, clueless, yet with considerable moral stamina and luck, left my family at seventeen to seek a way to live. It was the month of June in 1979. I was looking for Beauty: I didn't exactly care about art, I simply wanted not to be bored and to experience grace. So I thought I would write.'One morning, Hazel Brown wakes in a badly decorated hotel room to find that she's written the complete works of Charles Baudelaire. In her bemusement the hotel becomes every cheap room she ever stayed in during her youthful perambulations in 1980s Paris. This is the legend of a she-dandy's life.Woven into the reminiscences of Hazel's early life are episodes from Baudelaire's youth, as well as reflections on the history of tailoring, the passion of reading and 19th century painting. Lisa Robertson's debut novel is an exploration of life lived in pursuit of beauty, and a celebration of the mind of a girl.

Paperback. Condizione: New. 'It would be better if we took a moment to be really grateful for this beautiful spacecraft which used to be so perfect for us. Which was built especially for us. When we got too big for Earth.'The spaceship Audition is hurtling towards an event horizon. Squashed immobile into its rooms are three giants: Alba, Stanley, and Drew. If they talk, the spaceship keeps moving; if they are silent, they resume growing.So they talk, and as they do, Alba, Stanley, and Drew recover shared memories of the injustices faced back on Earth by their former selves. Or are they constructing those selves from memory-scripts that have been implanted in them?At once speculative and grimly realistic, formally experimental and politically urgent, Audition asks how we live with each other's violences, and what happens when systems of power decide someone takes up too much space.

Paperback. Condizione: New. When CAConrad's reverence for the King puts them on a trip to Memphis, the result is this wild joyride of a book, a homage that is bursting with love and twisted sincerity.Drawing on sources as disparate as graffiti, talk-show interviews, phone messages, and poetry, Conrad assembles a collage that celebrates while laughing with the cult of Elvis.Advanced Elvis Course is a psychedelic road trip - a transcendental portrait of a man who changed music and America forever, seen through the eyes of those for whom he still lives.

Paperback. Condizione: New. Following the death of her mother, twenty-two-year-old Anastasia King leaves Paris to return to Dublin. In the time that she has been away, her estranged father has died. On arriving to her family home, Anastasia is met by her paternal grandmother, who, filled with bitterness and spite, has determined never to forgive Anastasia for fleeing with her mother. As her days fill up with little humiliations, it becomes clear that, while Anastasia thinks she has come home to stay, for the vengeful Mrs King she is an unwelcome visitor. Written while Brennan was still in her twenties, this novella is a masterpiece of compression, a terse and haunting account of the personal and political factors that impinge on a young woman's freedom. Presented here with a new introduction by Lynne Tillman, The Visitor seals Maeve Brennan's reputation as one of the twentieth century's finest writers, and one of its most unflinching documentarians of the human heart.

Paperback. Condizione: New. From the brilliantly original novelist and cultural critic Lynne Tillman comes Mothercare, an honest and beautifully written account of a sudden, drastically changed relationship to one's mother, and of the time and labor spent navigating the American healthcare systemWhen a mother's unusual health condition, normal pressure hydrocephalus, renders her entirely dependent on you, your sisters, caregivers, and companions, the unthinkable becomes daily life. In Mothercare, Tillman describes doing what seems impossible: handling her mother as if she were a child and coping with a longtime ambivalence toward her.In Tillman's celebrated style and as a 'rich noticer of strange things' (Colm Toibin), she describes, without flinching, the unexpected, heartbreaking, and anxious eleven years of caring for a sick parent.Mothercare is both a cautionary tale and sympathetic guidance for anyone who suddenly becomes a caregiver. This story may be helpful, informative, consoling, or upsetting, but it never fails to underscore how impossible it is to get the job done completely right.

Paperback. Condizione: New. Over the past decade, we have begun to talk more openly about the widespread harm inflicted by men on women. But little has been said about the fact that many of these men are also fathers. In Daddy Issues Katherine Angel draws on thinkers and writers from D. W. Winnicott to Valerie Solanas, from Virginia Woolf to Alison Bechdel, as she examines the place of fathers in contemporary culture. She tracks how the relationship between fathers and daughters is so often presented as a twisted romance, with the burden falling always on the daughter. Bold, challenging and nuanced, Daddy Issues asks how the mixture of love and hatred we feel towards our fathers can be turned into a relationship that is generative rather than destructive. If we are to effectively dismantle patriarchy, it is vital that fathers are kept on the hook.

Paperback. Condizione: New. A piercing meditation on love and music, and the silence and inscrutability which underpins the performance of each. Luc has lived a long time as a soloist. She has not seen Billy for many years. A visit to a major show of his sculptures sends her arrowing back to a younger version of herself: to a time when she had to make room to love him when she'd felt no room within herself. To a time when she was forced to make a choice between being one thing or another. To a time when he was a sculptor, but she was not yet a cellist. In exquisite and crystalline prose, The Cellist explores how you might make room for beauty and mastery for yourself, and still leave space for someone else. It asks what love and companionship costs: what happens when you are forced to cast yourself in the distorting light of another person's needs?

Paperback. Condizione: New. Juggling with our perception of time and reality, Still Life tells the story of an author struggling to write a biography of Scottish poet and abolitionist Thomas Pringle. In her efforts to resurrect Pringle, the writer summons the spectre of Mary Prince, the West Indian slave whose History Pringle published, along with Hinza, his adopted black South African son. As these voices vie for control over the text and the lines between life writing and fiction-making begin to blur, yet another voice enters the chorus: Sir Nicholas Greene, the self-regarding poet from Virginia Woolf's novel Orlando. Their adventures through time and space, from Victorian South Africa and London to the author's desk in Glasgow in the present day, offer a poignant yet often playful exploration of colonial history and racial oppression.

Paperback. Condizione: New. A young woman drifts through a series of one night stands and truncated love affairs. Finding herself in a series of increasingly bizarre situations, she turns her curious and savage eye out on the foibles of the world around her. The men of this world evade and simper, they prey, and preen, and fall hopelessly in love. Through these snapshots we get a biting psychopathology, not just of masculinity in its various masks, but of sex and desire in the early 1970s.

Paperback. Condizione: New. Berlin is changing. Economic inequality is spiralling out of control, the party is moving on. Anja and Louis live on the mountain - an eco-community built and run by the corporation Anja works for. It is an experiment in green living. But soon enough the mountain begins to malfunction. Across the city, the weather becomes increasingly unpredictable. Louis has become obsessed with a secret project: a pill called Oval that temporarily rewires the user's brain to be more generous. While Anja is horrified, Louis believes he has found the solution to Berlin's income inequality.

Paperback. Condizione: New. 'And at last Min was released from the duty she had imposed on herself, to remain with him as long as he needed her.'In the stories that compose this collection, Maeve Brennan turns her anatomist's eye to the ugly feelings that teem just beneath the surface of family life - doing so, however, with an attention to detail that makes these unsparing portraits luminous and exquisite. Brennan's subjects are ordinary people worn down by life, by its disappointments, its little humiliations. Yet they are also dreamers, defiantly hopeful of one day overstepping the narrow confines of the situations in which, unaccountably, they find themselves. These are stories that ache; pitting imagination against circumstance, they are at once claustrophobic and expansive, heartbreaking and miraculous. With a new introduction by acclaimed novelist Claire-Louise Bennett, The Springs of Affection reveals Maeve Brennan to be one of the 20th century's most innovative and important writers.