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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 Harry Potter Quiz⚡️
Events€10.00"IT'S BACK" - Cornelius Fudge Fri Jan 12th | 20h
HOW IT WORKS:
- Choose your house and play for the glorious house cup: there'll be giggle water, there'll be questions harder than Hagrid's rock cakes and there'll be fire whisky to boot.* - Drinks and wizard snackery included. *2 HOUSE POINTS for every person in fancy dress (proper fancy dress, mind!)
HOW MUCH IT COSTS:
€10/person (including your beverages, of course)...
THE PRIZES:
The Hermione Granger Prize:
The top student will receive a €25 credit voucher to Desperate Literature
1st place:
A bottle of fire whiskey + some HP swag for the team*
*As many Harry Potter goodies as we can get together! Think: stickers, posters flyers, and maybe even Tote Bags
2nd Place:
We'll give you a reduced goody bag, including some stickers and posters!
🏳️⚧️ 20% of all ticket sales are donated to COGAM in support of LGBTQI+ rights in Madrid 🏳️⚧️
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Juana y La Cibernética (edición bilingüe)
No Category€2.00THE FIRST ENGLISH LANGUAGE TRANSLATION OF A CHILEAN MASTERPIECE
Juana y la cibernetica is a proto-cyberfeminist, proleterian, machine-loving work of solitary confinement by Elena Aldunate, "La Dama Chilena de la ciencia-ficción".BILINGUAL EDITION EDICIÓN BILINGÜE
The edition comes with parallel bilingual texts and a fiction response by author Jo Lindsay Walton.
María Elena Aldunate Bezanilla (1925-2005) was born in Santiago, Chile, and wrote under the name of Elena Aldunate. She became associated with the science fiction scene in Chile in the 1960s and 1970s, publishing a number of short fiction works and anthologies. These include Juana y la cibernética (1963), El señor de las mariposas (1967), Angélica y el delfín (1976) and Del cosmos las quieren vírgenes (1977).Jo Lindsay Walton is a writer, editor and Research Fellow in Critical and Cultural Theory in the Sussex Humanities Lab. He is interested in the intersection of culture, technology, and economics. With Polina Levontin, he co-edits Vector, the critical journal of the British Science Fiction Association, and with Samantha Walton, he runs the poetry press Sad Press. @jolwalton
Our print edition will be a limited edition riso production made by Do The Print, Barcelona Translation by Ana Baeza Ruiz and Elizabeth Stainforth Cover design by Terry Craven 44 pages €8 - limited edition riso print version (OUT OF PRINT) €2 - .pdf edition€2.00 -
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‘Eleven Stories 2020’
Literary PrizeEleven Stories 2020 collects the shortlist from our third short fiction prize and is available in either:
PDF - €2.50 PRINT - €10 / a limited edition risography edition, numbered and stamped by our fine selves.
DON'T FORGET: you get €2.50 off a prize entry with your purchase!
Here's what the magnificent Rachel Cusk and Niven Govinden have to say about our selection:
‘I thoroughly enjoyed reading these submissions, which surprised me with their honest poise, their integrity, and their understated adherence to the values of literature. In the hands of some of these writers, the story form was brought to bear on the modern scene in new and astute ways.’ – Rachel Cusk ‘I was bowled over by the power, inquiry, and humour of these stories. They shine brightly in the mind after reading.’ – Niven Govinden
44 pages Risoprinted at Dotheprint, Barcelona
