This is not only a wonderful travel book following the coast of the North Sea from the Kattegat to Amsterdam, but like other outstanding place-writing books these days a meditation on the pitfalls of history and memory and how we face it individually.
Not an escapist book, but still perfect reading for the dark season when rain or snow howl around the house and you're snug inside, reading on the sofa.
Me, my notebook and my love of the wild and desolate. I wanted to do the opposite of what was expected of me. It's a recurring pattern in my life. An instinct.
There is a line that stretches from the northernmost tip of Denmark to where the Wadden Sea meets Holland in the south-west. Dorthe Nors, one of Denmark's most acclaimed writers, is a descendant of this line; for generations, her family lived among the storm-battered trees and wind-blasted beaches of the North Sea coast. Returning after decades of inhabiting cities, she chronicles a year spent travelling up and down…
I really enjoy essays and writing about different forms of art, about the genesis of an artwork and the humans who create them, and Ian Penman's book on German director Reiner Werner Fassbinder is among the best of its kind that I've read in recent years.
Written in four weeks to emulate the frantic way Fassbinder scripted and directed his films, this is not a dry, super-detailed biography but a romp through the 1970s and 80s Western European art and history and, at the same time, an ode to the bright screen in the dark room and its powers.
A kaleidoscopic study of Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
Melodrama, biography, cold war thriller, drug memoir, essay in fragments, and mystery, Thousands of Mirrors is cult critic Ian Penman’s long-awaited first full-length book: a kaleidoscopic study of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Written over a short period "in the spirit" of RWF, who would often get films made in a matter of weeks or months, Thousands of Mirrors presents the filmmaker as Penman’s equivalent of what Baudelaire was to Benjamin: an urban poet in the turbulent, seeds-sown, messy era just before everything changed. Beautifully written and extraordinarily compelling, echoing the fragmentary works of Roland…
The Russian war of aggression against Ukraine has brought many of the shortcomings of the West into focus, and the warnings of Russian Neo-imperialism by countries that experienced Russian or Soviet occupation in the past, like the Baltic States or Poland.
For us in the West, it is often difficult to understand how the intricacies of dictatorship and oppression played out in the daily lives of the people in these countries.
So I'm glad I read Nora Ikstena's wonderful novel, which charts the journey of Latvia from occupation in 1944 to independence in 1989 by following the often sad but never despairing story of a mother born in the year of occupation and her daughter born in 1969 navigating the obstacles of oppression—an important read.
The literary bestseller that took the Baltics by storm now published for the first time in English.
This novel considers the effects of Soviet rule on a single individual. The central character in the story tries to follow her calling as a doctor. But then the state steps in. She is deprived first of her professional future, then of her identity and finally of her relationship with her daughter. Banished to a village in the Latvian countryside, her sense of isolation increases. Will she and her daughter be able to return to Riga when political change begins to stir?
The New Frontier is a landmark publication of writing from the Irish Border, composed of non-fiction, fiction, and poetry – it is a chorus of voices from some of the island’s greatest writers that convey in its multiplicity the true meaning of our Border.
At a time when the division of our shared island has once again become an international concern, the Border now a threshold between Europe and the United Kingdom,
The New Frontier seeks to explore the meaning of this partition in the 21st century for those who inhabit that divide.
