Fractals

Fractals
Author: Sudeep Sen
Publisher: Wings Press
Total Pages: 431
Release: 2016-04-01
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1609400453

Sudeep Sen's Fractals includes a wide swath of his poetry, from 1980 to the present, as well as a representative collection of his translations into English of other poets writing in Bengali, Hindu, Urdu and other languages. Sen's poems are both vivid observations and insightful meditations, often ekphrastic in that they are inspired by other art forms -- from modern European painters to classical Indian dancers. Narratives generally underlie his poems, giving us stories from around the world, past and present, from the grit of war to the mysteries of mythology.

We'll Never Have Paris

We'll Never Have Paris
Author: Andrew Gallix
Publisher: Repeater
Total Pages: 537
Release: 2019-05-14
Genre: Travel
ISBN: 1912248395

Fiction and essays inspired by Paris from more than 70 Anglophone writers -- A MoveableFeast for the twenty-first century. "When good Americans die, they go to Paris", wrote the Irish playwright Oscar Wilde in 1894. The French capital has always radiated an unmatched cultural, political and intellectual brilliance in the anglophone imagination, maintaining its status as the modern cosmopolitan city par excellence through the twentieth century to today. We'll Never Have Paris explores this enduring fascination with this myth of a bohemian and literary Paris (that of the Lost Generation, Joyce, Beckett and Shakespeare and Company) which also happens to be a largely anglophone construct -- one which the Eurostar and Brexit only seem to have exacerbated in recent years. Edited by Andrew Gallix, this collection brings together many of the most talented and adventurous writers from the UK, Ireland, USA, Australia and New Zealand to explore this theme through short stories, essays and poetry, in order to build up a captivating portrait of Paris as viewed by English speakers today -- A Moveable Feast for the twenty-first century. We'll Never Have Paris includes contributions from seventy-nine authors, including Tom McCarthy, Will Self, Brian Dillon, Joanna Walsh, Eley Williams, Max Porter, Sophie Mackintosh and Lauren Elkin.

My Town

My Town
Author: David Gentleman
Publisher: Penguin UK
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2020-03-05
Genre: Art
ISBN: 014199312X

David Gentleman has lived in London for almost seventy years, most of it on the same street. This book is a record of a lifetime spent observing, drawing and getting to know the city, bringing together work from across his whole career, from his earliest sketches to watercolours painted just a few months ago. Here is London as it was, and as it is today: the Thames, Hampstead Heath; the streets, canals, markets and people of his home of Camden Town; and at the heart of it all, his studio and the tools of his work. Accompanied by reflections on the process of drawing and personal thoughts on the ever-changing city, this is a celebration of London, and the joy of noticing, looking and capturing the world. 'David has spent a lifetime depicting with wit and affection a London he has made his own' Alan Bennett 'He delivers a poetry of exultant concentration ... The surface fusion of the sensuous and the sharply modern is echoed by Gentleman's imagery' Guardian 'The artist and illustrator has been responsible for some of the most-seen public artworks in this country' The Times 'Perhaps the last of the great polymath designer-painters' Camden New Journal

Yes Yes More More

Yes Yes More More
Author: Anna Wood
Publisher: Black Spot Books
Total Pages: 169
Release: 2021-05-06
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1911648292

Two schoolgirls in Bolton take acid just before their English class. A film journalist shares tea and a KitKat with Marcel Proust, more or less, during a long train journey. An afterparty turns into a crime scene. Colleagues, maybe in love, have lunch and don't quite talk about their relationship. A woman flees to New Orleans and finds unexpected treasures there. In her electric debut, Anna Wood skips through the decades of a woman's life, meeting friends, lovers, shapeshifters, and doppelgangers along the way. Delights and regrets pile up, time becomes non-linear, characters stumble and shimmy through moments of rupture, horror, and joy. Written with warmth, wit, and swagger, these stories glide from acutely observed comic dialogue to giddy surrealism and quiet heartbreak, and always there is music – pop songs as tiny portals into another world. Yes Yes More More is packed with friendship, memory, pleasure, and love.

Insurrecto

Insurrecto
Author: Gina Apostol
Publisher: Soho Press
Total Pages: 369
Release: 2019-08-20
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1641290927

"A bravura performance."—The New York Times Histories and personalities collide in this literary tour-de-force about the Philippines’ present and America’s past by the PEN Open Book Award–winning author of Gun Dealers’ Daughter. Two women, a Filipino translator and an American filmmaker, go on a road trip in Duterte’s Philippines, collaborating and clashing in the writing of a film script about a massacre during the Philippine-American War. Chiara is working on a film about an incident in Balangiga, Samar, in 1901, when Filipino revolutionaries attacked an American garrison, and in retaliation American soldiers created “a howling wilderness” of the surrounding countryside. Magsalin reads Chiara’s film script and writes her own version. Insurrecto contains within its dramatic action two rival scripts from the filmmaker and the translator—one about a white photographer, the other about a Filipino schoolteacher. Within the spiraling voices and narrative layers of Insurrecto are stories of women—artists, lovers, revolutionaries, daughters—finding their way to their own truths and histories. Using interlocking voices and a kaleidoscopic structure, the novel is startlingly innovative, meditative, and playful. Insurrecto masterfully questions and twists narrative in the manner of Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch, and Nabokov’s Pale Fire. Apostol pushes up against the limits of fiction in order to recover the atrocity in Balangiga, and in so doing, she shows us the dark heart of an untold and forgotten war that would shape the next century of Philippine and American history.

The Rapids

The Rapids
Author: Yogesh Patel
Publisher: London Magazine Editions
Total Pages: 96
Release: 2021-10-05
Genre:
ISBN: 9781919618173

Yogesh's poems are Jazz! The poems in The Rapids express the living movement of thoughts rushing between rocky outcrop of words. This is also a secret of Yogesh's new poetic form. He cracks his poems open in the knowledge that they will cohere somewhere in the mind of the reader. He does so in the knowledge that this will let in air and light, and the scared water of the Wandle. - Philip Richard Hall What falls to pieces does not need to disseminate into darkness or pandemonium. Like harnessed rapids, as in an exhilarating ride, coherence can emerge. Meaningful living can be assimilated from it. Past coexists with our present. So, the allusions to mythological characters and folklore help extend the meaning and become participants. They do not just dress up our reality; they allow us to connect to our heritage. These intricate poems take this aboard and explore the loss of someone or love, displacements, a crisis of identity, belonging, breakups, and social and political engagement. Dabbed in ruffled sadness, but bridging through reasoning, they negotiate a passage to the emotional sanctuary.

Poor

Poor
Author: Caleb Femi
Publisher: Penguin UK
Total Pages: 160
Release: 2020-11-05
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 0141992166

WINNER OF THE FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST COLLECTION Chosen as a Book of the Year by New Statesman, Financial Times, Guardian, Observer, Rough Trade and the BBC Shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize Longlisted for the Jhalak Prize 'Restlessly inventive, brutally graceful, startlingly beautiful ... a landmark debut' Guardian 'Oh my God, he's just stirring me. Destroying me' Michaela Coel 'A poet of truth and rage, heartbreak and joy' Max Porter 'Takes us into new literary territory ... impressive' Bernardine Evaristo, New Statesman (Books of the Year) 'It's simply stunning. Every image is a revelation' Terrance Hayes What is it like to grow up in a place where the same police officer who told your primary school class they were special stops and searches you at 13 because 'you fit the description of a man' - and where it is possible to walk two and a half miles through an estate of 1,444 homes without ever touching the ground? In Poor, Caleb Femi combines poetry and original photography to explore the trials, tribulations, dreams and joys of young Black boys in twenty-first century Peckham. He contemplates the ways in which they are informed by the built environment of concrete walls and gentrifying neighbourhoods that form their stage, writes a coded, near-mythical history of the personalities and sagas of his South London youth, and pays tribute to the rappers and artists who spoke to their lives. Above all, this is a tribute to the world that shaped a poet, and to the people forging difficult lives and finding magic within it. As Femi writes in one of the final poems of this book: 'I have never loved anything the way I love the endz.'