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Minor Detail
Book-of-the-Month
by Adania Shibli
Book of the Month
JUNE 2021BOOK-OF-THE-MONTH selection JUNE 2021: For our June selection, we have picked Minor Detail, and will be donating €2 from each sale to the Go Fund Me page helping to rebuild the Samir Mansour Book Store in Gaza, destroyed in recent airstrikes. -- ‘Though Minor Detail initially promises to be a kind of counterhistory or whodunit—a rescue of the victim’s story from military courts and Israeli newspapers–it turns out to be something stranger and bleaker. Rather than a discovery of hidden truths, or a search for justice, it is a meditation on the repetitions of history, the past as a recurring trauma ... For Shibli, the emblematic experience of occupation is the longue duree of ennui and isolation rather than a dramatic moment of crisis.’ — New York Review of Books Minor Detail begins during the summer of 1949, one year after the war that the Palestinians mourn as the Nakba – the catastrophe that led to the displacement and expulsion of more than 700,000 people – and the Israelis celebrate as the War of Independence. Israeli soldiers capture and rape a young Palestinian woman, and kill and bury her in the sand. Many years later, a woman in Ramallah becomes fascinated to the point of obsession with this ‘minor detail’ of history. A haunting meditation on war, violence and memory, Minor Detail cuts to the heart of the Palestinian experience of dispossession, life under occupation, and the persistent difficulty of piecing together a narrative in the face of ongoing erasure and disempowerment. Times Books of the Year 2020€15.90€15.90 -
The President Shop
LiteratureIn The President Shop, there is no telling what the future really holds in store as the beliefs of the past slowly start to crumble. “The President Shop is a marvelous, timeless book that sweeps between the personal and the panoramic as it asks, Does every family, or country, contain an axis, around which the rest of it spins? Can you hear the voice of a stone? How clearly can anyone see the past or future? For which tyrannies have we been unwittingly waving flags?” —Catherine Lacey, author of Pew and Certain American States The President, the founder of the Nation, is an old man now, but his young and unifying spirit stands steadfastly at the heart of, Vesna Maric’s debut novel. Images of and tributes to the President are found in all homes in the Nation, procured from stores like the one Ruben and Rosa run. The couple met as partisans, fighting to forge the Nation in the crucible of conflict. But even though their pride shines as brightly as the gilded bust of the President, the younger generation has questioned whether the Nation really has its citizens best interests in mind. Ruben’s brother is actively working to avoid mandatory military service as he pines away for another man, and Ruben and Rosa’s daughter Mona is too busy adjusting to womanhood to get caught up in state-mandated nostalgia. To further exacerbate the family tension, an elderly uncle claims to have invented a machine to see into the future, which he stores in the basement of the family’s apartment building. But there is no telling what the future really holds in store as the beliefs of the past slowly start to crumble.€18.00€18.00 -
Second Place
Book-of-the-Month
by Rachel Cusk
Book of the Month
MAY 2021BOOK-OF-THE-MONTH selection MAY 2021: A haunting fable of art, family, and fate from the author of the Outline trilogy. A woman invites a famous artist to use her guesthouse in the remote coastal landscape where she lives with her family. Powerfully drawn to his paintings, she believes his vision might penetrate the mystery at the center of her life. But as a long, dry summer sets in, his provocative presence itself becomes an enigma—and disrupts the calm of her secluded household. Second Place, Rachel Cusk’s electrifying new novel, is a study of female fate and male privilege, the geometries of human relationships, and the moral questions that animate our lives. It reminds us of art’s capacity to uplift—and to destroy.€16.00“Her genius is that in deliberately blurring a boundary of her own – that between a writer and her subject, between the expectation of autobiography so often attached to writing by women, and the carapace of pure invention so often unthinkably afforded to men – she tricks us into believing that her preoccupations and failings, her privileges and apparent assumptions, are not our own. By the time we realize what has happened, it is too late: our own surface has been disturbed, our own complacent compartment dismantled. It is a shock, but as the narrator of Second Place reminds us, 'shock is sometimes necessary, for without it we would drift into entropy.' Cusk is necessary too – deeply so, and Second Place, exquisite in the cruelty of its rightness, reminds us why.”—Sam Byers, The Guardian€16.00 -
Diary of a Film
Book-of-the-Month
by Niven Govinden
Book of the Month
APRIL 2021BOOK-OF-THE-MONTH selection April 2021: A book fizzling with energy, the vibrancy of potencial and artistic discovery, with the joys and pains of creation, the melancholy of longing, of having given oneself fully, of love. It’s a book we all need right now. It gives me hope every time I open it.€19.50"Precision engineered European modernism from a master stylist. It walks us into a luminous and loving conversational drama, rich with complex erotics and interwoven private agonies. He writes exquisitely about art making, about obsession and responsibility. It's a gorgeous novel."SYNOPSIS:An auteur, together with his lead actors, is at a prestigious European festival to premiere his latest film. Alone one morning at a backstreet café, he strikes up a conversation with a local woman who takes him on a walk to uncover the city’s secrets, historic and personal. As the walk unwinds, a story of love and tragedy emerges, and he begins to see the chance meeting as fate. He is entranced, wholly clear in his mind: her story must surely form the basis for his next film. This is a novel about cinema, flâneurs, and queer love – it is about the sometimes troubled, sometimes ecstatic creative process, and the toll it takes on its makers. But it is also a novel about stories, and the ongoing question of who has the right to tell them.€19.50 -
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The Raffle / Sorteo
Literature€2.00🌞 SORTEO de VERANO 🌗 🌞 THE SUMMER RAFFLE 🌗
NOW CLOSED MARIANA ENRIQUEZ FIRMADO /SIGNED
En nuestro sorteo de verano podrás ganar una copia firmada de Nuestra parte de la noche una libreta de DESPERATE LITERATURE y un totebag de tela para llevarlos contigo!
€2/billete Fecha limite: 1 de septiembre Envío Internacional por correos incluido*
"La herencia, el deseo de pervivir, la paternidad, el horror, lo íntimo y lo político. Una novela libre y osada, hechizante y genial."
For our summer raffle you can win a signed copy of Nuestra parte de la noche a DESPERATE LITERATURE notebook and a totebag to carry it all about!
€2/ticket End date: September 1st Worldwide shipping by post included*
*shipping is uninsured and untracked (though you can pay for tracking!) available wherever the Spanish correos can ship! THE WINNER Elena Espada
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In Full Velvet
LiteratureSinuous and sensual, the poems of In Full Velvet interrogate the nuances of desire, love, gender, ecology, LGBTQ lineage and community, and the tension between a body’s material limits and the forms made possible by the imagination.€17.00"Maybe a voice from the ancients whispers to Jenny Johnson—Sappho or the Muse Euterpe—how to sing of love and death and joy and reality in as many registers as they come in life. Or maybe Johnson is just a genius." — Brenda Shaughnessy
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The Unamuno Author Series Festival Anthology
GIFTS, LiteratureIn 2019, over eighty poets and academics came to Madrid to form the city’s first anglophone literary festival.
Containing works from local performance poets and pulitzer prize winners alike, this bilingual collection represents a body of work capturing a glimpse of the itinerant anglophone poetry community that has passed through Madrid in recent years.
‘An unprecedented organization of writers from around the world ... I hope many more poets, writers, and readers get to benefit from this truly exceptional point of exchange.’ —Gregory Pardlo
‘..an international reading series which is inclusive, eccentric, very inspiring, which has been instigated by somebody who not only loves and understands poetry, but loves and understands people. That’s a rare thing, and something that should be celebrated.’ —Caitríona O’Reilly
Details: 320 pages 170mm x 240mm 0.626 kg
Cover art by Mark Strand An Unamuno Author Series and Desperate Literature title
Including work by:Carl Adamshick, Nico Amador, Francisco Aragón, David Baker, Layla Benitez-James, Richard Blanco, Peg Boyers, Jericho Brown, Barney Bush, Rafael Carvajal, Mario Chard, Scott Cunningham; Joanne Diaz, Mark Doty, Michael Dumanis, Mary Moore Easter, Kit Fan, Joseph Fasano, Monica Ferrell, Joan Fleming, Kathleen Flenniken, Carolyn Forché, Livia Franchini, Forrest Gander, Dana Gioia, Aracelis Girmay, Rigoberto González, Jennifer Grotz, Christian Gullette, Marilyn Hacker, Tom Healy, Travis Helms, Marie Howe, Jenny Johnson, Marjorie Kanter, John Koethe, Shara Lessley, Su Smallen Love, Sheila Maldonado, Campbell McGrath, Ricardo Menes, Naomi Mulvihill, Luis Muñoz, Pádraig Ó Tuama, Sharon Olds, Caitríona O’Reilly, Gregory Pardlo, Elena Penga, Emilia Phillips, Dana Prescott, Ruben Quesada, Octavio Quintanilla, Spencer Reece, Paisley Rekdal, Luis J. Rodríguez, Steven Sanchez, Annie Schumacher, Richard Scott, Martha Serpas, Bruce Snider, Page Hill Starzinger, Fiona Sze-Lorrain, Jeremy Voigt, Clarissa Watson, Michael White, Mark Wunderlich, Monica Youn, Maya Jewell Zeller, Mark Strand
