{"title":"Books by Carol Mavor","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"9781789149500","title":"Serendipity – The Afterlife of the Object","description":"Carol Mavor’s first ‘happy accident’ occurred in 1980 when visiting New York’s Serendipity 3, a dessert café favoured by Andy Warhol. Mavor’s memory of eating a frozen hot chocolate became food for thought, nurturing accidental discoveries about art and literature.   The book’s happy, yet dark, accidents include Anne Frank’s journal, discovered in the Secret Annex after the Second World War; Emily Dickinson’s poems, scribbled on salvaged envelopes, hidden in a drawer; and Lolita, rescued from incineration by Nabokov’s wife Véra.   Mavor’s writing is dependent on serendipity’s layers of happenstance, rousing feelings of something that she did not exactly know she was looking for until she found it. All history is about loss, and in the case of this book, much of it is tragic – but Serendipity also offers the happiness that can be found in unexpected discoveries.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44583120601266,"sku":"9781789149500","price":25.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781789149500_98231d57-d492-4751-9754-1459e3d45345.jpg?v=1786026740"},{"product_id":"9781531509545","title":"Like the Sea","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eAn exploration of the mythical Mary Glass—her art, her life, and her times\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eMary Glass (1946–2021) was an innovative modern dancer and choreographer, quietly instrumental to the San Francisco Bay Area art scene of the 1960s and ’70s—barely known today—admired for her experimental movements based on sounds and images of the Pacific.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs a child, Mary Glass took her first dance class with Anna Halprin on her famed redwood dance deck in Marin County’s Kent Woodlands. Dancing with the blue sky as her ceiling—surrounded by magical madrones and redwoods—the effect on Mary Glass was seismic. Fittingly, Halprin called her classes \"\"dance experiences.\"\" \u003cbr\u003eMary Glass’s lifestyle, her anxieties, and her dance reflect the human geography of Northern California: Happenings, Zero Population Growth (ZPG), feminism, same-sex love, civil rights, Vietnam, environmentalism. Cascading in the waves of the politics of the time was Mary Glass’s anorexia, an unexpected pregnancy, and her life-long love affair with the Black painter Eliza Vesper.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eToday Mary Glass is remembered by an increasingly diminishing handful of devotees. Author Carol Mavor is one of them.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn this daring work of fictocriticism, where \"\"feelings are facts,\"\" \u003ci\u003eLike the Sea \u003c\/i\u003easks its readers—just as Anna Halprin asked of each of her young students as they were leaving class—\"\"What are you taking with you from the natural world?\"\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHalprin’s words will resonate in Mary’s mind her entire lifetime and beyond.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn the after-time of the prescient Mary Glass—with its decline of sea kelp and warm Decembers— Mavor herself considers the Anthropocene, tasting extinction as if swallowing the long-gone abalone mollusks of her own Bay-Area childhood: salty, like the sea, but strangely sweet. And from it, Mavor delivers the reader to the far-away country of the not-so-distant past to help envision a future.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThere are no photographs or films of Mary Glass dancing. The life of Mary Glass is nearly forgotten, her memory on the edge of extinction. In meditative, dazzling and lyrical prose, \u003ci\u003eLike the Sea \u003c\/i\u003etells us—like the ocean’s music in our ear—we need to remember extinction to imagine our way out of it.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56303214362997,"sku":"9781531509545","price":15.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781531509545_8285aad6-f155-4faf-b630-426408e57c07.jpg?v=1786023436"},{"product_id":"9781531509941","title":"Like a Lake","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eA vivid, imaginative response to the sensual and erotic in postwar American photography, with attention to the beauty of the nude, both male and female\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWhen photographer Coda Gray befriends a family with a special interest in a young boy, the motivation behind his special attention is difficult to grasp, \"\"like water slipping through our fingers.\"\" Can a man innocently love a boy who is not his own?\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eUsing fiction to reveal the truths about families, communities, art objects, love, and mourning, \u003ci\u003eLike a Lake\u003c\/i\u003e tells the story of ten-year-old Nico, who lives with his father (an Italian- American architect) and his mother (a Japanese-American sculptor who learned how to draw while interned during World War II). Set in the 1960s, this is a story of aesthetic perfection waiting to be broken. Nico’s midcentury modern house, with its Italian pottery jars along the outside and its interior lit by Japanese lanterns. The elephant-hide gray, fiberglass reinforced plastic 1951 Eames rocking chair, with metal legs and birch runners. Clam consommé with kombu, giant kelp, yuzu rind, and a little fennel—in each bowl, two clams opened like a pair of butterflies, symbols of the happy couple. Nico’s boyish delight in developing photographs under the red safety light of Coda’s \"\"Floating Zendo\"\"— the darkroom boat that he keeps on Lake Tahoe.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe lives of Nico, his parents, and Coda embody northern California’s postwar landscape, giving way to fissures of alternative lifestyles and poetic visions. Author Carol Mavor addresses the sensuality and complexity of a son’s love for his mother and that mother’s own erotic response to it. The relationship between the mother and son is paralleled by what it means for a boy to be a model for a male photographer and to be his muse. Just as water can freeze into snow and ice, melt back into water, and steam, love takes on new forms with shifts of atmosphere. \u003ci\u003eLike a Lake\u003c\/i\u003e’s haunting images and sensations stay with the reader.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56304437100917,"sku":"9781531509941","price":15.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781531509941_bd8f20be-6185-4c9e-bd44-f931319c30d8.jpg?v=1786023449"},{"product_id":"black-and-blue-2","title":"Black and Blue","description":"\u003cp\u003eAudacious and genre-defying, \u003ci\u003eBlack and Blue\u003c\/i\u003e is steeped in melancholy, in the feeling of being blue, or, rather, black and blue, with all the literality of bruised flesh. Roland Barthes and Marcel Proust are inspirations for and subjects of Carol Mavor's exquisite, image-filled rumination on efforts to capture fleeting moments and to comprehend the incomprehensible. At the book's heart are one book and three films-Roland Barthes's \u003ci\u003eCamera Lucida\u003c\/i\u003e, Chris Marker's \u003ci\u003eLa JetÉe\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eSans soleil\u003c\/i\u003e, and Marguerite Duras's and Alain Resnais's \u003ci\u003eHiroshima mon amour\u003c\/i\u003e-postwar French works that register disturbing truths about loss and regret, and violence and history, through aesthetic refinement.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePersonal recollections punctuate Mavor's dazzling interpretations of these and many other works of art and criticism. Childhood memories become Proust's \"small-scale contrivances,\" tiny sensations that open onto panoramas. Mavor's mother lost her memory to Alzheimer's, and \u003ci\u003eBlack and Blue\u003c\/i\u003e is framed by the author's memories of her mother and effort to understand what it means to not be recognized by one to whom you were once so known.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57484153028981,"sku":"9780822352716","price":26.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780822352716.jpg?v=1786266191"},{"product_id":"forevering","title":"Forevering","description":null,"brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":57504774717813,"sku":"9781478039877","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"Hardback","offer_id":57682687099253,"sku":"9781478034940","price":72.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781478039877.jpg?v=1793082681"}],"url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/collections\/author-carol-mavor.oembed","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}