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Lament for the Death of a Bullsighter and other poems
GIFTS, Literature, Rare items
Federico García LorcaLondon and Toronto William Heinemann Ltd. English translation of Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías 1938 Early printing "In his Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, Lorca expresses all the colour, pride and deep sorrow Spain. No other Spanish poet has drawn so heavily upon popular inspiration to such splendid ends." CONTACT US at hello@desperateliterature.com for more info or to book a visit!€70.00€70.00 -
Casualties of Peace
GIFTS, Literature, Rare items
Edna O’BRIEN
dedicated to Geraldine ChaplinJonathan Cape, London, 1966 This particular copy is signed to Geraldine Chaplin, daughter of Charlie Chaplin, who for many years lived in Madrid! We acquired a good part of her Madrid collection last year and this is one of the treats. Acquired before Edna O'Brien's passing, we removed the post-it note with her telephone number!€225.00
CONTACT US at hello@desperateliterature.com for more info or to book a visit! €225.00 -
El general en su laberinto
GIFTS, Literature, Rare items
Gabriel García Márquez
FIRMADOEdiciones del Equilibrista, México 1989 FIRMADO / SIGNED€1,000.00
CONTACT US at hello@desperateliterature.com for more info or to book a visit! €1,000.00 -
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Journal du Voleur
GIFTS, Literature, Rare items
Jean GENET
SIGNEDThe terribly hard to find first edition of Journal du Voleur, here no. 377 of 400, signed by Genet upon the request of Jean-Paul Sartre in his petition to free Genet from jail!€850.00
CONTACT US at hello@desperateliterature.com for more info or to book a visit! €850.00 -
Jeux pour acteurs et non-acteurs
GIFTS, Literature, Rare items
Augusto Boal
SIGNEDEditions La Découverte, 1978 SIGNED. Rare indeed to find a signed Boal! Here his Jeux pour acteurs et non-acteurs - Pratique du théâtre de l'opprimé suivi de l'expérience en France, including exercises, games and techniques for actors!€250.00
CONTACT US at hello@desperateliterature.com for more info or to book a visit! €250.00 -
Alejandro Zambra (SIGNED)
GIFTS, Hotcakes, Literature€20.00To help raise funds for our imminent move, this month we're selling our signed Alejandro Zambra translations. There's the added bonus of the copies also being signed by Zambra's translator, Megan McDowell!
There's a limited amount, so get them while you can!
...and of course we'll throw in some merch for good measure... ALL EDITIONS IN ENGLISH
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Bookland Passport
Literature, Rare itemsThe Bookland Passport Issued by Typewronger books in Edinburgh, this is your passport to, from, in and out of indie bookshops around the world! Get it stamped, signed, or whatever you like, wherever you find an independent bookshop! Riso printed and beautifully illustrated€12.00
All about Bookland:
Bookland is a country you reach through reading, through talking about books with your friends, and through hanging out in your local bookshop. Though we issue passports for Bookland, the territory it encompasses spans the entire known world, plus quite a few as yet unexplored dimensions, and also exists across the totality of the Temporal Realm. Bookland's National Motto is LIBRI SINE TERMINO, which can translate two ways, either as "Books Without Borders" or "Books Without End". All indie bookshops are unofficial Embassies of Bookland, and any can become an Official Embassy simply by issuing passports which can be supplied by emailing the mysterious Secretary to the Grand High Ambassador of Bookland. Citizens of Bookland don't need documentation to prove their status... but it sure is fun! €12.00 -
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The Naked Lunch
Literature, Rare items
William Burrough
SIGNEDThe Olympia Press, 1959 First edition, SIGNED. This carries a stamped 18NF over the original 1500F price. France adopted the nouveau franc in 1963, so we can assume that this edition didn't sell until after this point!€2,750.00
CONTACT US at hello@desperateliterature.com for more info or to book a visit! €2,750.00 -
Ariel
Literature, Rare items
Sylvia Plath
First EditionFirst edition, First Impression Faber and Faber, 1965 An ex-library edition, But with perhaps the brightest dust jacket we've ever handled A lovely edition fit for anybody's shelf! CONTACT US at hello@desperateliterature.com for more info or to book a visit!€325.00€325.00 -
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Fulgor y muerte de Joaquín Murieta
Literature, Rare items
Pablo Neruda
SIGNEDFirst edition of Fulgor y muerte de Joaquín Murieta, Santiago de Chile, 1967, signed by Pablo Neruda. This copy has travelled a little, though not quite as far and as poorly as Joaquín Murieta, and so shows some soiling and with a slightly faded signature, but is a nice example of this title with Neruda's typical cursive! COMES WITH A FIRST PRESSING VINYL of Fulgor y muerte de Joaquín Murieta recorded by Sergio Ortega Here it here.€1,200.00
CONTACT US at hello@desperateliterature.com for more info or to book a visit! €1,200.00 -
Pequeña Antologia
Literature, Rare items
Gabriela Mistral
SIGNEDLovely copy of this signed First Edition of Gabriela Mistral's unpublished poems. Inscribed by the author on the front free page to the Chilean poet Milo Navarro. Comes with a black and white photo from a Lunch at Escuela de Artes Graficas in Santiago de Chile. Picture at the center is Gabriela Mistral. Four from right is the Chilean poet Milo Navarro. Pages are clean with no marks or inscriptions. The Chilean poet, educator, diplomat, and feminist was the First Latin American (and, so far, the only Latin American woman) to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1945. These Anthology of unpublished poems exemplify Mitral's interest in awakening in her contemporaries love for the essences of their American identity.€1,750.00
CONTACT US at hello@desperateliterature.com for more info or to book a visit! €1,750.00 -
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Madrid will be their Tomb:
Literature
the English language launch€0.00FREE ENTRY 1st December 20h00 Limited Tickets - 30
We're thrilled to host the Madrid launch of 'Madrid will be their Tomb', the English language translation of Elizabeth Duval's first novel! ‘Modest and powerfully beautiful, this is writing which illuminates human mystery and lifts the reader into the air, leaving them on an edge where their convictions tremble and shake.’ —JUAN MANUEL DE PRADA. ABC. About the book: Two occupied buildings: one the former headquarters of the NO-DO (a Francoist propaganda outlet) that has been taken over by a small group of fascists, the other the ruins of some abandoned film studios that have been converted into the barracks of a Marxist-Leninist cell. Drifting between these two spaces are Santiago and Ramiro; two characters who, although finding solace in two polarised political groups, cross paths and change each other’s lives. Discursive and devastating, Duval’s first novel is imbued with the same traits as the era she portrays. A sad, passionate, and all too real portrait of an ever more divided world, Duval’s story, in her powerful, shocking, yet considered prose, reminds us of the uncomfortable, but somewhat comforting similarities we may find with the “enemy”. About the author: Elizabeth Duval is an author and the spokesperson for Feminism, Equality and LGTBI+ rights for Sumar. In 2020 she published Reina, the first memoir in Spain by a woman from GenZ, as well as Exception, a verse poem. In 2021 she published the essay Después de lo trans and the novel Madrid será la tumba. In 2023 she published Melancolía, a sociopolitical essay on how to recover hope when facing a grim future. She is also a regular contributor for national media outlets like eldiario.es, Público, El País, and La Sexta. About the translator: Alice Banks is a translator from Spanish and French based in Madrid. In December 2022, Alice’s translation, Deranged As I Am, by Ali Zamir, was published by Fum d’Estampa Press. When she is not translating, Alice also works as a publisher at Fum d’Estampa Press and an Editorial Assistant for The European Literature Network, where she writes the monthly column, ‘La Española’. ‘A marvellous novel.’ —NADAL SUAU, EL ESPAÑOL.€0.00 -
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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
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
