£10.99
On Freedom: The electrifying new book from the author of The Argonauts
‘One of the most electrifying writers at work in America today, among the sharpest and most supple thinkers of her generation’ OLIVIA LAING
What can freedom really mean? In this invigorating, essential book, Maggie Nelson explores how we might think, experience or talk about the concept in ways that are responsive to our divided world. Drawing on pop culture, theory and the intimacies and plain exchanges of daily life, she follows freedom – with all its complexities – through four realms: art, sex, drugs and climate. On Freedom offers a bold new perspective on the challenging times in which we live.
‘Tremendously energising’ Guardian
‘This provocative meditation…shows Nelson at her most original and brilliant’ New York Times
‘Nelson is such a friend to her reader, such brilliant company… Exhilarating’ Literary Review
* A New York Times Notable Book *
* A Guardian and TLS ‘Books of 2021’ Pick *
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The play concerns two brothers who must return to the home of their deceased father prior to its destruction to dispose of the furniture crammed into the attic. Exhibiting many features characteristic of Miller’s work including sibling rivalry, confrontation with the past and with their memories, the effects of the Great Depression and the war in Vietnam, the pursuit of a dream, and the responsibility one must assume for one’s own life, The Price is recognised as one of Miller’s major works.
Growlery
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Growlery conjures a place haunted by flooded villages, broken ankles, ovarian health and factories. It dwells on a world of civic tensions, in the twilit zone between city and country, the human and the natural. Here, Brexit is a city with streets ‘worn into themselves like grafted skin’, corpse flowers bloom in America, and urban foundations crumble into cisterns.
Horrex – whose poems found an enthusiastic readership via Carcanet’s New Poetries series – unpicks the illusion that order upholds society and reveals the true ramshackle complexion of things. Her debut collection reimagines the ‘growlery’ of Dickens’ Bleak House by looking at the concept of internal space in a twenty-first century which is both connected and disjointed.
Tenderfoot
£11.99A Tenderfoot is a novice, unaccustomed to hardship. Here, he is a white boy growing up in 1960s Ethiopia, a place he loves even as he learns his own privilege and foreignness. He hears rumours of a famine in the mountains and imagines a boy his own age living through it, surviving on angry couplets. Years after, he sees this famine-boy grown up and questions him.
A sequel to Ethiopia Boy, Beckett’s first Carcanet book, Tenderfoot sounds with praise-shouts for Asfaw the cook, for the boys living as minibus conductors or chewing-gum sellers, even for Tenderfoot’s own stomach that hangs ‘like a leopard in a thorn acacia tree’. Featuring storms and droughts, hunger and desire, donkeys who quote Samuel Johnson and a red bicycle that invites you on a poem tour of Addis Ababa, Tenderfoot takes in what is happening around but also inside the boy’s mind and body – a human transformation.
FURY
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FURY sees the Ted Hughes Award winner David Morley once more seeking to give imaginative voice to the natural world and to those silenced or overlooked in modern society, ranging from the Romany communities of past and present Britain, to Tyson Fury and Towfiq Bihani, one of the forgotten inmates of the Guantanamo bay detention centre. In poems that bristle with linguistic energy and that celebrate poetry’s power to give arresting voice to the unspoken and the untold, in ourselves and our societies, FURY is David Morley’s most powerfully political work. It is a passionate testament to poetry’s capacity to speak to, and for, us and our place in the world – its power to be an outreached hand, like the ‘trembling hands’ of the magician in ‘The Thrown Voice’ or the ‘living hand’ of the poets celebrated in ‘Translations of a Stammerer’.
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