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Observatory Mansions was once the Orme family's ancestral home, a magnificent residence with beautiful grounds. Now it is a crumbling apartment block, stranded on a roundabout and inhabited by eccentrics. Francis Orme, an odd little man who makes a living as a human statue in the centre of the decaying city, lives in Observatory Mansions with his parents and the other equally maladjusted misfits, all of them taking comfort in their solitude and curious harmony. In the cellar is Francis' treasured Exhibition. Carefully catalogued are all the items he has ever stolen. But the arrival of a new resident upsets the delicate balance of Observatory Mansions and Francis finds himself taking drastic measures to protect the secrets of his past and the sanctity of his collection.
Once the Orme family’s magnificent ancestral estate, Observatory Mansions is now a crumbling apartment complex, home to an eccentric group of misfits. One of them is Francis Orme, who earns his livelihood as a living statue. When not practicing “inner and outer stillness,” Francis steals the cherished possessions of others to add to his private museum. The other tenants are equally as odd: his mother and father, who haven’t interacted in years; a man who continually sweats and cries; a recluse who prefers television to reality; and a woman who behaves like a dog. When Anna Tapp arrives among them she stirs their souls, bringing long forgotten memories to the surface–and arousing fears that this new resident intends to provoke a metamorphosis. Reminiscent of Beckett, Ionesco, and Millhauser but startlingly original, Observatory Mansions is also unexpectedly beguiling. Upon its publication in England, it was a literary sensation, and John Fowles called it “easily the most brilliant fiction I’ve seen this year.”
We surround ourselves with material things that are invested with memories but can only stand for what we have lost. Physical objects—such as one’s own body—situate and define us; yet at the same time they are fundamentally indifferent to us. The melancholy of this rift is a rich source of inspiration for artists. Peter Schwenger deftly weaves together philosophical and psychoanalytical theory with artistic practice. Concerned in part with the act of collecting, The Tears of Things is itself a collection of exemplary art objects—literary and cultural attempts to control and possess things—including paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe and René Magritte; sculpture by Louise Bourgeois and Marcel Duchamp; Joseph Cornell’s boxes; Edward Gorey’s graphic art; fiction by Virginia Woolf, Georges Perec, and Louise Erdrich; the hallucinatory encyclopedias of Jorge Luis Borges and Luigi Serafini; and the corpse photographs of Joel Peter Witkin. However, these representations of objects perpetually fall short of our aspirations. Schwenger examines what is left over—debris and waste—and asks what art can make of these. What emerges is not an art that reassembles but one that questions what it means to assemble in the first place. Contained in this catalog of waste is that ultimate still life, the cadaver, where the subject-object dichotomy receives its final ironic reconciliation. Peter Schwenger is professor of English at Mount St. Vincent University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He is the author of Fantasm and Fiction: On Textual Envisioning, Letter Bomb: Nuclear Holocaust and the Exploding Word, and Phallic Critiques: Masculinity and Twentieth-Century Literature.
Part one of an unusual and astonishing new fantasy trilogy that blends fine literary fare with a terrific romp through the reimagined outskirts of Victorian-era London In the imaginary borough of Filching, the extensive Iremonger family (“kings of mildew, moguls of mould”) have made a fortune from junk, building a dark and sprawling mansion from salvage scrap. Heap House is surrounded by the dangerous, noxious, shifting Heaps that stretch beyond its bounds. And within its walls, certain objects begin to display strange signs of life. Young Clod Iremonger is about to be "trousered" and betrothed (unwillingly) to his cousin Pinalippy when he meets the plucky orphan servant Lucy Pennant, with whose help he begins to uncover the dark secrets of his family’s empire. Mystery, romance and the perils of the Heaps await! Gorgeously (and ghoulishly) illustrated by the author, Heap House is peopled with unforgettable characters with delightfully skewed names--anxious, animal-loving Tummis with his pet seagull; menacing cousin Moorcus; dreadful Aunt Rosamud and more. As Carey writes, “Every life is thick with rubbish, but the Iremongers did it with a difference.”
Realist Critiques of Visual Culture by Edward Barnaby Pdf
Have industrial-age technologies and visual discourses transformed us into spectators of the real, and can realist fiction make that transformation visible to us? This book brings Situationist Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle and an array of cultural criticism into dialogue with novels by Hardy, Forster, Woolf, Rushdie, Carey and Barnes to foreground literary realism’s critique of visual culture, including Gothic architectural revival, neoclassicism, tourism, historical pageantry, postcolonial cinema and photography, museums, preservationism, urbanism and artisanal neo-folk movements. Barnaby advances the concept of meta-spectacle to distinguish realist fiction that engages ethically with visual discourses from realist-ic fiction that reproduces the visible veneer of reality for aesthetic consumption. He highlights the limitations of artistic critiques of spectacle, considers their resilience toward a culture industry that continuously repackages iconoclasm as iconicity, and reflects upon the process of reorienting the reader to comprehend realist gestures. By heightening the capacity to recognize our own immersion within objectified representations of the real, Realist Critiques of Visual Culture demonstrates how literary realism remains vital within a society that is so deeply invested in visually replicating and archiving lived experience.
Described as 'haunting' by Sunday Times, The Swallowed Man is a dark reimagining of Pinocchio, told from inside the belly of a fish. ‘Profound and delightful' Max Porter, author of Grief is the Thing with Feathers I am writing this account, in another man’s book, by candlelight, inside the belly of a fish. I have been eaten. I have been eaten, yet I am living still. From the acclaimed author of Little comes this beautiful and haunting imagining of the years Geppetto spends within the belly of a sea beast. Drawing upon the Pinocchio story while creating something entirely his own, Carey tells an unforgettable tale of fatherly love and loss, pride and regret, and of the sustaining power of art and imagination.
"An amazing achievement. . . A compulsively readable novel, so canny and weird and surfeited with the reality of human capacity and ingenuity that I am stymied for comparison. Dickens and David Lynch? Defoe meets Margaret Atwood? Judge for yourself." —Gregory Maguire, New York Times-bestselling author of Wicked The wry, macabre, unforgettable tale of an ambitious orphan in Revolutionary Paris, befriended by royalty and radicals, who transforms herself into the legendary Madame Tussaud. In 1761, a tiny, odd-looking girl named Marie is born in a village in Switzerland. After the death of her parents, she is apprenticed to an eccentric wax sculptor and whisked off to the seamy streets of Paris, where they meet a domineering widow and her quiet, pale son. Together, they convert an abandoned monkey house into an exhibition hall for wax heads, and the spectacle becomes a sensation. As word of her artistic talent spreads, Marie is called to Versailles, where she tutors a princess and saves Marie Antoinette in childbirth. But outside the palace walls, Paris is roiling: The revolutionary mob is demanding heads, and . . . at the wax museum, heads are what they do. In the tradition of Gregory Maguire's Wicked and Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus, Edward Carey's Little is a darkly endearing cavalcade of a novel—a story of art, class, determination, and how we hold on to what we love.
A Brush with the Real by Marc Valli,Margherita Dessanay Pdf
Presents a survey of key contemporary artists who have each embraced painting and are working within a realist tradition. Through individual interviews, discusses their methods, motives and sources, from art history to the Internet and the language of film.
Palm Springs now joins Los Angeles, San Diego, Orange County, San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley in California’s Noir Series arena. "Contrary to popular belief, noir doesn’t require a bleak city street for its setting. Nor water, for that matter. Noir thrives on secrets, lies and lust, all flowing plentifully through the jewel in the Coachella Valley’s fragile crown...For all the playfulness of the genre and the location, the wisecracks and the kidney-shaped pools, there is an unmanageable darkness waiting to seep in, like so much blood in the pool water." --Los Angeles Times "Conjure up images of Palm Springs and you’ll probably think of pastel-colored pool floaties, midcentury chic architecture, a gigantic Marilyn Monroe that watches over the city like its guardian angel. But you don’t need to scratch deep to find darkness in the desert--and even Palm Springs, with its endless well of pools, violently colored cocktails, and impossibly green lawns, is no exception." --Los Angeles Review of Books "An appealing anthology of 14 stories about life and crime in the Mojave Desert's playground to the stars." --MysteryScene Magazine "Palm Springs Noir features a collection of short stories set in a cross-section of desert cities and written primarily by authors with Coachella Valley ties." --Palm Springs Life "This compilation is a roller coaster ride that's filled with loads of suspense, mystery, and steamy sexiness. Brilliantly conceived, DeMarco-Barrett and the other contributing authors effortlessly transport the reader to the edgy, moody, and sleazier side of one of Southern California's most renowned and iconic locales. A sure thing bestseller and a must-have summer read, Palm Springs Noir unquestionably brings the heat." --New York Journal of Books Akashic Books continues its award-winning series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir. Each book comprises all new stories, each one set in a distinct location within the geographic area of the book. Palm Springs Noir features brand-new stories by: T. Jefferson Parker, Janet Fitch, Eric Beetner, Kelly Shire, Tod Goldberg, Michael Craft, Barbara DeMarco-Barrett, Rob Roberge, J.D. Horn, Eduardo Santiago, Rob Bowman, Chris J. Bahnsen, Ken Layne, and Alex Espinoza. From the introduction: The best noir writers make us feel the heat of the sun, the touch of a lover. Setting can be gritty but can also be sublime, no longer relegated to urban locales and seedy hotel rooms but also mansions and swimming pools. Hence, Palm Springs, which may seem like an odd setting for a collection of dark short stories--it’s so sunny and bright here. The quality of light is unlike anywhere else, and with an average of three hundred sunny days a year, what could go wrong?... The stories in this collection come on like the wicked dust storms common to the area. More than half are by writers who live here full-time; all have homes in Southern California. They know this place in ways visitors and outsiders never will. These are not stories you'll read in the glossy coffee-table books that feature Palm Springs's good life. There is indeed a lush life to be found here, but for the characters in these stories, it’s often just out of reach.
In the Land of Punctuation by Christian Morgenstern Pdf
First published in 1905, German poet Christian Morgenstern's Im Reich der Interpunktionen (In the Land of Punctuation) is a comic poem on the flow of language--and the breaks in it. Punctuation signs are markers of pauses, interruptions, asides and stops. But they also point to intonation, intent and emotion ... a fact used brilliantly by Morgenstern to turn them into characters with their own agendas, in a drama that careens towards an inevitable end. It is a fun romp, and yet the political undertones are unmistakable, suggesting menacing systems of control. Adding a new dimension to the connection between marks and meaning, graphic designer Rathna Ramanathan illustrates this tranlated version of the poem with punctuation signs. She evokes older traditions like calligrams and the art of the Russian Constructivists, while developing her own ingenious--and very contemporary--idiom. Her visual grammar balances bold experimentation with precise communication, creating an artist's book at the crossroads of language, graphic design and politics. This signed, limited edition book has been silkscreen-printed and bound by hand on recycled handmade paper, at Tara Books' print workshop, run on fair trade practices."--Back cover.
The city of Entralla – along with Gondal, Brobdingnag and the Emerald City – is not somewhere you are likely to have visited. Only one guidebook to the place exists, despite its historic landmarks and the considerable civic pride of its inhabitants. Alva and Irva are identical twin sisters, and Entralla is their home. By nature, Alva is an explorer, and longs to travel the world. Irva is a recluse, for whom every step outside the house is an ordeal. But the twins belong together and cannot survive without each other. It is when Irva refuses to leave the house at all that the major work of their lives begins: Alva wanders the city streets, observing, taking notes, measuring, and reporting her findings to Irva, who painstakingly recreates a miniature Entralla. In Alva and Irva, Edward Carey takes the reader on an enchanting journey through a city of the imagination; the twins are mesmerizing heroines whose conflicting desires contain the seeds of both their destruction and their salvation.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER! NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY: O Magazine * Good Housekeeping * Real Simple * Vulture * Chicago Tribune NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE SUMMER BY: “The Today Show” * “Good Morning America” * Wall Street Journal * San Francisco Chronicle * Southern Living An INDIE NEXT LIST Pick Shortlisted for the 2020 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize Long-listed for the 2020 Tournament of Books "Fun, hilarious, and extremely touching."—NPR A beautifully observed and deeply funny novel of May Attaway, a university gardener who sets out on an odyssey to reconnect with four old friends over the course of a year. At forty, May Attaway is more at home with plants than people. Over the years, she's turned inward, finding pleasure in language, her work as a gardener, and keeping her neighbors at arm's length while keenly observing them. But when she is unexpectedly granted some leave from her job, May is inspired to reconnect with four once close friends. She knows they will never have a proper reunion, so she goes, one-by-one, to each of them. A student of the classics, May considers her journey a female Odyssey. What might the world have had if, instead of waiting, Penelope had set out on an adventure of her own? RULES FOR VISITING is a woman's exploration of friendship in the digital age. Deeply alert to the nobility and the ridiculousness of ordinary people, May savors the pleasures along the way—afternoon ice cream with a long-lost friend, surprise postcards from an unexpected crush, and a moving encounter with ancient beauty. Though she gets a taste of viral online fame, May chooses to bypass her friends' perfectly cultivated online lives to instead meet them in their messy analog ones. Ultimately, May learns that a best friend is someone who knows your story—and she inspires us all to master the art of visiting.
Born in 1906, Huguette Clark grew up in her family's 121-room Beaux Arts mansion in New York and was one of the leading celebrities of her day. Her father William Andrews Clark, was a copper magnate, the second richest man in America, and not above bribing his way into the Senate. Huguette attended the coronation of King George V. And at twenty-two with a personal fortune of $50 million to her name, she married a Princeton man and childhood friend William MacDonald Gower. Two-years later the couple divorced. After a series of failed romances, Huguette began to withdraw from society--first living with her mother in a kind of Grey Gardens isolation then as a modern-day Miss Havisham, spending her days in a vast apartment overlooking Central Park, eating crackers and watching The Flintstones with only servants for company. All her money and all her real estate could not protect her in her later life from being manipulated by shady hangers-on and hospitals that were only too happy to admit (and bill) a healthy woman. But what happened to Huguette that turned a vivacious, young socialite into a recluse? And what was her life like inside that gilded, copper cage?
Export edition (World excluding US and Canada). From little beginnings: the extraordinary story of a singular, diminutive crumb of a servant girl turned entertainment mogul.