A Feast for the Imagination
The Swan Thieves
by Elizabeth Kostova
Psychiatrist Andrew Marlowe has a perfectly ordered life – solitary, perhaps, but full of devotion to his profession and the painting hobby he loves. This order is destroyed when renowned painter Robert Oliver attacks a canvas in the National Gallery of Art and becomes his patient. Desperate to understand the secret that torments this genius, Marlowe embarks on a journey that leads him into the lives of the women closest to Oliver and a tragedy at the heart of French Impressionism. Kostova’s masterful new novel travels from American cities to the coast of Normandy; from the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth, from young love to last love.
The Swan Thieves is a story of obsession, history’s losses, and the power of art to preserve hope. From the author of the wonderful and atmospheric The Historian.
Little Bird of Heaven
by Joyce Carol Oates
Set in the mythical small city of Sparta, New York, this is a searing, vividly rendered exploration of the mysterious conjunction of erotic romance and tragic violence in late 20th-century America. When a young wife and mother named Zoe Kruller is found brutally murdered, the Sparta police target two primary suspects: her estranged husband Delray and her longtime lover Eddy Diehl. In turn, the Krullers’s son Aaron and Eddy’s daughter Krista become obsessed with one another, each believing the other’s father is guilty.
Told in two halves in the very different voices of Krista and Aaron, Little Bird of Heaven is classic Joyce Carol Oates, in which the lyricism of intense sexual love is intertwined with the anguish of loss, and tenderness is barely distinguishable from cruelty. By the novel’s end, the fated lovers, meeting again as adults, are at last ready to exorcise the ghosts of the past and come to terms with their legacy of guilt, misplaced love and redemptive yearning. With Little Bird of Heaven, Joyce Carol Oates once again confirms her place as one of the most outstanding writers at work today.
“A writer of extraordinary strengths.” Guardian
All My Friends are Superheroes
by Andrew Kauffman
All my Friends are Superheroes is Canadian writer, film-maker and radio producer Andrew Kaufman’s first novel. First published in 2003, it tells the story of Tom, whose friends really are superheroes. That’s how he met The Perfectionist. But at their wedding The Perfectionist’s jealous ex-boyfriend Hypno hypnotizes her and renders Tom invisible to her. Six months go by with no word from Tom, and so The Perfectionist decides to leave for Vancouver, start over, move on with her life. The truth is Tom has been by her side all along and now he has until the plane lands in Vancouver to make her see him or face losing her forever. This urban fable of love is sweet and endearing and sad and would have been the perfect gift for Valentine’s Day. Never too late, though…
“This is an adorable book: neat, sweet, petite. Your loved one will love you even more for buying it for them.” Toby Litt
Parrott and Olivier in America
by Peter Carey
Olivier is a French aristocrat, the traumatised child of survivors of the Revolution; Parrot the son of an itinerant printer who always wanted to be an artist but has ended up a servant. Born on different sides of history, their lives will be brought together by their travels in America. When Olivier sets sail for the New World, ostensibly to study its prisons but in reality to save his neck from one more revolution – Parrot is sent with him, as spy, protector, foe and foil. As the narrative shifts between the perspectives of Parrot and Olivier, and their picaresque travels together and apart – in love and politics, prisons and the world of art – Peter Carey explores the adventure of American democracy, in theory and in practice, with dazzling wit and inventiveness.
“An exhilarating tour de force…Fizzing with the fictional panache that has twice won him the Booker prize.” Sunday Times
“One hell of a ride…there are scenes here as dramatic and as poignant as any Carey has ever written…At the same time, Parrot and Olivier contains some wonderfully funny moments.” Sunday Telegraph
“One hell of a ride…there are scenes here as dramatic and as poignant as any Carey has ever written…At the same time, Parrot and Olivier contains some wonderfully funny moments.” Sunday Telegraph
“Carey is a wily and supremely confident storyteller on a grand scale…Within the covers is a complex discussion of the philosophy of democracy, and yet Parrot and Olivier is most strikingly beautiful at its most elemental.” The Times
“A brilliantly written ripsnorter of a yarn…Carey doesn’t so much reanimate history by back-projecting modern-day concerns on to the past as make it come alive in lurid living colour.” Irish Times
The Well and the Mine
by Gin Phillips
This wonderful debut novel has a rather grisly premise as nine year-old Tess sees someone dump a baby in the well on her family’s farm. But the truth turns out to be less horrific than one might imagine. Set in depression engulfed Alabama in the 1930s, this sensitive portrait of a family and the community in which they live is beautifully written peopled with characters who will stay with you long after you finish the final page. It’s easy to see why it won the Barnes and Noble Discover Prize and although fiction, it will appeal to those who loved Alexandra Fuller’s Legend of Colton H Bryant.
A Feast for the Eyes
Moscow and St Petersburg in Russia’s Silver Age
by John E Bowldt
This gorgeous book focuses on the visual and material culture of Moscow and St Petersburg at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. The twilight of Imperial Russia witnessed a sudden renaissance that left a profound imprint on all of the arts. Here was a Silver Age as luminous perhaps as the Golden Age of Russian literature many decades before.
Presented in roughly chronological sequence, this beautifully produced and illustrated book highlights the essential social and political developments of this turbulent era, which painting, poetry, music, dance and sculpture all refracted. A dazzling array of artists, writers, composers, actors, singers, dancers and designers are present in this context – including Tolstoy, Pasternak, Akhmatova, Rimsky-Korsikov, Nijinsky, Scriabin, Chaliapin, Stanislavsky, Diaghilev, Kandinsky, Mayakowsky and many more. A lush and fabulous book.
New York 400: A Visual History of America’s Greatest City with Images from the Museum of the City of New York
In the four hundred years since Henry Hudson’s arrival at the shores of what is present-day New York, the city has grown to be one of the most extraordinary cities of the world. New York 400 is a unique visual history of the city so great they named it twice!
The book focuses not just on landmarks but also on everyday city life over the past four centuries. The people, arts, culture, politics, and drama unfold through hundreds of never-before-seen photographs and a fascinating survey of the city that never sleeps, told through hundreds of rare photographs and essays by some of the most prominent New York writers of yesterday and today. The book includes essays from leading historians on the New York of yesterday and today. New York 400 takes us from the days of Peter Stuyvesant in the seventeenth century through to Mayors Rudy Guiliani, Michael Bloomberg, and the modern melting pot that is New York in the twenty-first century. The unparalleled collections of the Museum of the City of New York, including photography, sculpture, costumes, toys, and decorative arts, offer a rich, sophisticated and comprehensive portrait of this extraordinary city.
The Grateful Dead Scrapbook: The long, strange trip in stories, photos and memorabilia
by Ben Fong-Torres
Grateful Dead fans are legendary for their ˜Dead-ication’ (no, really) to the band and its enduring legacy of freewheeling musical exploration. The Grateful Dead Scrapbook collects a veritable trove of rare removable memorabilia and evocative images culled from the Grateful Dead Archives at the University of Santa Cruz, including never-before-published photos, flyers, fan letters, and other ephemera. To accompany the eye-popping visuals, renowned journalist Ben Fong-Torres contributes a rich text that tells the band’s story in a fresh way, centering each chapter on a pivotal song that encapsulates a certain era of the band’s songwriting, performance, and community, and drawing on his personal knowledge of the San Francisco music scene and the band. Bound in a slipcase and including an audio CD, The Grateful Dead Scrapbook is a fully illustrated volume as colorful as the band itself.
The KISS Kompendium
In 1977, blood from each member of the rock band KISS was drawn by a registered nurse and poured into vats of red ink used for printing the band’s first comic book. It was created by Marvel legend Stan Lee and was the beginning of a hugely successful KISS comic book franchise. All are now out of print. Now, for the first time, the KISS Kompendium combines the most breathtaking KISS comic books into a lush oversized collector’s compilation. Brought to life by graphic illustrations as riveting and hardcore as the band’s real-life fire-breathing line-up – the Demon (Gene Simmons), Starchild (Paul Stanley), and the other band members’ superhero alter egos defeat evil in over 1200 pages of stunning KISS comics! KISS founding members Gene Simmons, a rock legend and star of A&E’s Family Jewels, and Paul Stanley have contributed the forewords to this. The book also includes exclusive never-before-seen backstage photos from KISS’ newest tour along with commentary by the band-members. This is a must-have for every KISS fan eagerly awaiting the band’s new album, their first in over 10 years, and a perfect holiday gift for comic-book lover to pore over time and time again.
The Graphic Eye: Photographs by Graphic Designers from Around the Globe
by Stefan G. Bucher
Selected from the personal photography portfolios of some of the world’s most innovative graphic designers including big international names such as Ed Fella, Jeri Heiden, and Marian Bantjes the images in The Graphic Eye offer a glimpse into the working methods and obsessions of this unique class of visual creatives. Detail-oriented and aesthetically demanding, graphic designers have a special way of looking at the world, and the photographic images they create for their own reference and enjoyment from micro details to monumental cityscapes, funny vignettes to found fashion are as unconventional as they are inspirational.
Language, Art and Symbols from the Land of the Dragon: The Cultural History of 100 Chinese Characters
by Ni Yibin
Much more than a book about language, 100 Chinese Characters interweaves history, culture and art to reveal one of the world’s greatest civilisations. Chinese characters have developed over thousands of years, captivating as much with their artistic expressiveness as with their intriguing layers of meaning. In this book the text is accompanied with calligraphy and full-colour reproductions of Chinese brush paintings, calligraphic scrolls cermaics and textiles, whilst each entry explores the meaning behind the character and its significance in Chinese culture, from words such as dragon, mountain and heaven, to abstract concepts such as love, beauty and trust. Drawing on the latest scholarship, this silk-bound edition is both engaging and informative – language as an art form; art as language.
Closer
Elinor Carucci
This first book by the 2001 recipient of the prestigious International Center of Photography’s Infinity Award for Young Photographer includes a three-page introductory essay by the artist (with cultural critic Gadi Taub) and 91 full-colour family portraits, self-portraits, and abstractions. The dated and captioned images cover a nine-year period in Carucci’s life, from 1993 until 2001. While the works in this monograph focus on the personal life of the 31-year-old photographer, who was born and educated in Israel, they also feature broader themes, such as love, marriage, intimacy, and privacy. The photographs are arresting and challenging in their attempt to examine and elevate everyday, and often overtly sexual, material to a fine art.
Crafty Superstar
by Grace Dobush
Homemade and handmade is making a comeback and many of us might have wondered how to go about selling those duck felt egg warmers we have been making for everyone as gifts to a wider public.
It is not often one would review a how-to book as a page-turner, but then you haven’t started on page one of Crafty Superstar yet. It’s a nifty and handy guide to running a (part-time) craft business with lots of advice and how-tos from various international (mostly American) crafters. Complete with checklists and adorable illustrations, you cannot help but fall in love with this book that reads like a breezy but informative chat with a roomful of helpful friends. And a homemade golden star to our own Jesse Breytenbach who is one of the crafters featured. The Book Lounge sells Jesse’s handprinted fabric notebooks, which are obviously so hot right now…
A Feast for the Mind
In Conversation: Encounters with 39 Great Writers
by Ben Naparstek
The editor of The Monthly, Naparstek has published in one book 39 interviews with well-known writers that he penned for the magazine. The interviews are short and snappy, but provide fascinating insights into some of the most interesting writers around. As always with this kind of book, there is joy in reading about writers you already admire as well as reading about writers whose work you haven’t yet read, but now might have to. Authors interviewed include Paul Auster, Robert Fisk, Michel Houellebecq, Elfriede Jelinek, Catherine Millet, Haruki Murakami Toni Morrison and Wole Soyinka. A lovely book for the bedside table.
Seeing Further: The Story of Science and the Royal Society: 350 Years of the Royal Society and Scientific Endeavour
Edited and introduced by Bill Bryson, with contributions from Richard Dawkins, Margaret Atwood, Richard Holmes, Martin Rees, Richard Fortey, Steve Jones, James Gleick and Neal Stephenson amongst others, this beautifully produced and illustrated book tells the story of science and the Royal Society, from 1660 to the present.
On a damp weeknight in November, 350 years ago, a dozen or so men gathered at Gresham College in London. Christopher Wren, not well known at the time, was giving a lecture on astronomy. As his audience listened, they considered the formulation of a Society to promote the accumulation of knowledge. With that, the Royal Society was born. Since its birth, the Royal Society has pioneered scientific exploration and discovery -counting among its fellows Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Robert Hooke, Robert Boyle, Joseph Banks, Humphry Davy, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, John Locke, Alexander Fleming. The Royal Society continues in its achievements to the present day – its members have split the atom, discovered the double helix, the electron, the computer and the World Wide Web. Seeing Further celebrates its momentous history and achievements, bringing together the very best of science writing. Filled with illustrations of treasures from the Society’s archives, this is a beautiful and suitable reflection of the immense achievements of science.
Just Kids
by Patti Smith
“It was the summer that Coltrane died. The summer Jimi Hendrix set his guitar in flames and China exploded the H-bomb. There were riots in Newark and marches against the war in Vietnam. The world was on the brink of change. It was the summer of love. And the summer of a chance encounter that would change the course of my life. It was the summer I met Robert.”
Just Kids is the story of two innocents who shed sheltered lives and braved the city in search of art and freedom. In each other Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith found kindred spirits and pursued their mutual dreams, from Brooklyn to the Chelsea Hotel and on into the world. Each would eventually reach the pinnacle of artistic achievement and their vow to always care for one another survived painful trials and separations. Intimate and broadly evocative of New York in the early 70s, Just Kids – part romance, part elegy – is finally about friendship in the truest sense, and the artist’s calling.
Concerning E.M. Forster
by Frank Kermode
Over the past half-century Frank Kermode has established himself as one of the finest literary critics of his generation. When he delivered the Clark Lectures at Cambridge in 2007, he chose as his subject E.M. Forster – eighty years after Forster gave the same series of lectures, which became his Aspects of the Novel. Kermode’s lectures form the core of this book: he assesses the influence and meaning of all of Forster’s novels as well as his criticism, reflects on his profound musicality (Britten thought Forster the most musical of all writers) and offers a fascinating interpretation of his greatest work, A Passage to India.
The second part of the book takes the form of a causerie, a brilliant and wide-ranging series of loosely organised, interweaving discussions in which Forster is reduced in size and placed in the wider context of his times. Kermode reflects not only on Forster’s considerable talent but on the social and personal circumstances that restricted it, on the dizzying changes in English society in the first half of the twentieth century, and the preoccupations and uncertainties of those, like Forster, who found themselves caught between two worlds. Taking Forster as his starting point, Kermode also casts a spotlight on many of his great contemporary writers – Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Arnold Bennett, D.H. Lawrence and H.G. Wells. The product of a lifetime’s reading and thinking by one of our most distinguished critics, this is both a stimulating and original portrait of E.M. Forster and a unique panorama of twentieth-century English letters.
The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia
by Laura Miller
Laura Miller is a professional critic who was given an assignment to write about the book that has most influenced her. Whenever she’d read similar pieces , they had been about one of the ˜great’ novels, but Laura felt she wanted to be honest and talk about the book that genuinely had the biggest influence on her as a reader. The Magician’s Book explores Miller’s changing attitudes to C.S. Lewis’ Narnia stories throughout her life as a reader. She also interviews many well known authors about what the Narnia stories meant to them. It is a fascinating look at what and why we read – and not only as children. You don’t have to fit the stereotype of “a nerdy child with no friends who had to resort to reading” to appreciate this book, though Miller does help you understand why you might occasionally prefer to spend time in the magical world of Narnia rather than sharing another pizza with your family and friends.
History’s Worst Inventions and
History’s Worst Decisions
Even some of the world’s greatest inventors have their bad days. History’s Worst Inventions by Eric Chaline introduces fifty of humanity’s most dangerous discoveries and dreadful gadgets, not to mention the occasional success that was born of failure.
Starting with Icarus’s ill-fated flight, the author takes you on a tour of humanity’s creativity, greed, stupidity and inventiveness. From the ancient discoveries of asbestos and tobacco, to such modern-day mistakes as the subprime mortgage, History’s Worst Inventions revisits such intriguing but luckless contraptions as the steam-powered car and the atmospheric railway.
History, too, is a catalogue of errors, and History’s Worst Decisions by Stephen Weir shines a light on fifty of the biggest. Starting with Adam and Eve’s original blunder in eating the apple, Weir takes you on a tour from the Trojan War to the Enron scandal, meeting such famous culprits as Cleopatra, Winston Churchill and Robert Mugabe along the way.
History’s Worst Decisions doesn’t just point the finger at individuals; the actions of governments and corporations are also placed under scrutiny. The underlying motivations – often sinister, sometimes naïve – that propelled those responsible to commit their mistakes are unveiled, as is the lasting impact that their decisions have had on the world that we live in today.
The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man
by Herbert Marshall McLuhan
This book details how sex was first used to sell industrial hardware, how Orphan Annie still keeps the world on track, and how an Arabian Nights wonderland of mass entertainment and suggestion makes information irrelevant, and sends us to bed at night too dazed to question whether we are happy or not. We live in an age in which legions of highly educated professionals dedicate themselves to the task of getting inside the collective public mind with the object of manipulating, exploiting and controlling.
Although it was published in 1951, the critical analysis of advertising saturation that McLuhan presents in this book still applies very much in the 21st century. Although the mechanisms of media delivery have changed, the message that they deliver has not. This is an important book for those who feel keenly the strong yet covert affects of marketing and the media in our lives today.
A Feast for the Funny Bone
The Worst Date Ever: War Crimes, Hollywood Heartthrobs and other Abominations
by Jane Bussman
Rising British comedy writer Jane Bussmann moved to Hollywood hoping to break into the movies; instead she found herself stuck on the celebrity tabloid circuit, writing formulaic pieces on vacuous starlets – and hating herself for it. The first third of this outrageously, wickedly funny memoir is a gleeful stream of savage anecdotes about this Hollywood life, but the story really takes off when she meets – and develops a huge crush on – a dashing peacemaker named John Prendergast. Shamelessly stalking him, Jane eventually blags her way into a foreign correspondent’s assignment to Uganda, of all places. While waiting for the God(ot) – like John to arrive, she starts to cover the government’s campaign against Joseph Kony’s Lord Resistance Army – and there is some seriously good reportage about this conflict here, despite Bussmann’s best attempts to hide it behind her ingenuous frivolity.
In short, this is one of the most satisfying reads around: funny and frivolous, outrageous and scandalous; but also serious and poignant; a war story and – above all – a love story.
The Goon Show Compendium Volume 3 (Audio CD)
Immensely popular, iconic and hugely influential, the groundbreaking series The Goon Show changed the face of British comedy. This box set collection presents the episodes in chronological order as they were scheduled to be broadcast. This third volume includes: The Secret Escritoire, The Lost Emperor, Rommel’s Treasure, The International Christmas Pudding, The Greenslade Story and more. Also featured in this title are some rare archive bonus items, including Peter Sellers in The Listening Room playing Spike Milligan’s classic nonsense song I’m Walking Backwards for Christmas. Two illustrated booklets tell the story of the show’s development with reference to original archive paperwork, plus the history of the recordings themselves. In addition, this box set contains four limited edition postcards featuring characters from The Goon Show as Spike Milligan imagined them. Remastered using new material and the latest technology to give the best possible sound quality, this is a wonderful collection for all Goons fans. Ying-Tong-iddle-i-po!
F My Life: And You thought You had a Bad Day
The idea is simple: in a few sentences, people describe the various moments that have ruined their day. From the sublime and ridiculous to the truly mortifying, these snapshot anecdotes are all 100 per cent genuine, and very, very funny. -
“Today, I went to my first strip club for my friend’s birthday. I also found out what my girlfriend does for a living. FML”,
”Today, I fell asleep. I felt something on my face. I batted it away. It was my hamster. It died from hitting the wall. FML.”
“Today, my girlfriend dumped me proclaiming she wanted someone more like her ‘Edward’. I asked her who Edward was. She held up a copy of her Twilight book. She was talking about a fictional vampire. FML.”
“Today, I went to my hairdresser to get my hair cut. When she asked me what I wanted, I told her “The usual”. She confused me with another customer and gave me a mullet. FML.”
As addictive as it is mortifying, as shocking as it is funny – the creators of this book truly know human nature.
Something for the Children
17 Things I am Not Allowed to do anymore
by Jenny Offill, illustrated by Nancy Carpenter
Young children are nothing if not crafty in their approach to finding boundaries. And this book is a brilliant example of exactly that exploration. Our young heroine learns not to staple her brother’s hair to the pillow, not to do unwanted reports on beavers for her teacher, not to treat her mom like a waitress, but just as it seems that nothing good could happen, she learns the lesson of saying sorry and telling her mom how much she loves her. The text tackles so many of the ways children push boundaries, with hilarious word play that emphasises the often funny outcome to a potentially disastrous happening. Nancy Carpenter’s illustration style is bright and upbeat with little details that add so much to the humorous element of the story. She uses a combination of ink and collage, with the best picture definitely the page with a plastic mom stuck inside a volcano…which of course can happen any day if you have small children in the house.
A Feast for the Loungers
Some exciting giveaways for February – to enter please email, stating which draw you are interested in, to booklounge@gmail.com
Peter James and Margie Orford
March the 3rd sees a spectacular evening of mystery and derring-do at the Book Lounge. Internationally acclaimed crime writer Peter James will be here, in conversation with our very own glamorous queen of crime, Margie Orford.
To celebrate and get you in the mood, we have 3 delicious little bundles of suspense to give away – featuring the new Peter James Dead Tomorrow and Margie’s latest Daddy’s Girl. Just drop us a mail to enter, and the winner will be picked on March 1st 2010.
Thankyou so much to Pan MacMillan and Jonathan Ball for these books.
Marlene Dumas
Our friends at Book Promotions have kindly given us a SIGNED copy of the beautiful Phaidon monograph on Marlene Dumas, one of our favourite local artists, by Dominic van den Boogerd, which we would like to pass on to one of you – let us know.
Evita Bezuidenhout
In Evita’s Kossie Sikelela, Tannie Evita invites the world to her table where everybody can feast on dishes like green bean bredie, cumin chicken with sweet potatoes, pampoenkoekies, walnut balls and baked apple clowns. And liewe aarde, you will definitely want to try the orange trifle and Tannie’s melktert. Evita is always well prepared and includes recipes for diabetics and vegetarians, Halaal and Kosher dishes, and even recipes to keep as fit as she does.
With a preface by none other than Sophia Loren and richly illustrated by artist Linda Vicquery, this cookbook promises to be a treat – it also comes with a free poster of Tannie Evita dining with some of her most famous family members.
For many years in the old South Africa, Evita Bezuidenhout was the ambassadress of the bantustan Bapetikosweti. In the new democratic South Africa she is still the most famous white woman in SA and often finds herself in the company of the powerful and famous.
Pieter-Dirk Uys lives, like Evita, in Darling. He is a well-known playwright and has, for decades, created memorable characters for one-man shows locally and abroad. He has been promoting Aids prevention under teenagers for many years.
We have one copy to give away – drop us a mail.
And some super event giveaways too…
Independent designers’ Network
Angi Law from the Independent designers’ Network magazine (IdN) is jetting in from Hong Kong, and on Thursday, 25 February, she will help us launch the 15th Anniversary Edition of their book What Do You Love?, featuring specially commissioned work from 250+ of the highly talented creators who have collaborated with them over the last decade and a half, and including a 154-minute DVD.
We have one copy of this beautiful book to give away at the launch – many thanks to Stephan Philips for this.
Mike Nicol
Mike Nicol is a journalist and writer, a denizen of Cape Town’s peninsular city. He teaches a course at the Centre for Creative Writing at the University of Cape Town and has been a writer-in-residence both at UCT and the University of Essen, Germany. In 1997 he was a recipient of a German Academic Exchange Service’s Artists-in-Berlin grant. Mike also works occasionally as an editor.
Although his crime novels are set in his home town, he has a soft spot for Johannesburg and everything in between, particularly the dry reaches of the Karoo, that strange heart of the country.
Following the publication of Payback in 2008, the second book in the Revenge Trilogy featuring Mace and Pylon, Killer Country, is now available.
Mike will be at the Book Lounge on Friday 19th March. We will have a copy each of Payback and Killer Country to give to one lucky Lounger on the night – many thanks to Random House for these.