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Nonetheless, I offer the following in the hope it does not strike you as disheveled or depressing . . .\"","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57555353534837,"sku":"9780811241359","price":8.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}]},{"product_id":"security-questions","title":"Security Questions","description":"\u003cp\u003e\"It was through writing this book,\" Osdany Morales says, \"that I realized I carried many memories in literary form-that exile had established a past I could already recount without waiting for old age. Exile and poetry made me look not exactly backward, but inward.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe poems from \u003cem\u003eSecurity Questions\u003c\/em\u003e (originally published as \u003cem\u003eEl pasado es un pueblo solitario\u003c\/em\u003e) are, on the one hand, a lyric sequence shaped by the poet's coming of age in small-town Cuba during the late stages of Fidel Castro's regime, and on the other a testament of exile and immigration, traces that remain in the wake of forsaking a homeland for the uncertainties of a new place. Each poem in this playful and trenchant collection unfolds as a reply to its title, and each title is a question in English that echoes actual online prompts for newly arrived immigrants to establish official identity and security in the United States. With a mix of humor, irony, and sincerity vividly captured by the translator Harry Bauld, Morales transforms these absurd and interrogative bureaucratic authentication questions into the radiant poetry of a new \"American\" persona.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57555353665909,"sku":"9780811241380","price":11.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}]},{"product_id":"majestic-speedlube","title":"Majestic Speedlube","description":"\u003cp\u003eKathryn Scanlan's\u003cem\u003e Majestic Speedlube \u003c\/em\u003efollows Happy and Early, couriers eking out a living driving unshippable objects-a taxidermied bear, a two-hundred pound crystal, a custom tombstone-across the country in their \"club-cab bed-capped\" rig. The resulting linguistic joy ride, powered by Scanlan's signature live-wire style, is a hectic confluence of billboards, user reviews, overheard conversations, receipts, bumper stickers, bills of lading, diner orders and a very talkative radio-a discordant, clanking music of simulated gunfire, bleating microwaves, squealing dry vans and trains blasting their grievous mourning horns. Yet in the din of the novel are clearings and rest stops for bright bursts of pleasure-moments of stillness and profundity in nature, with animals, with children: a silent steel-haired couple dance a waltz, a woman saves a snapping turtle from getting crushed on the road, and light comes in \"godly shafts through the trees.\" Here the usual givens of the novel form are sidestepped in service to a narrative that pays precise, epiphanic and capacious attention to the vast and the infinitesimal in a feat of distilled radical empathy. \u003cem\u003eMajestic Speedlube\u003c\/em\u003e, as it barrels along-restless and relentless, lean and prickly-hums with power and mystery, with language that's alive and kicking. It's at once a comedy, a lament, an ecological elegy, an account book, a pastoral, a protest song-the Great American Novel thundering with consumption, where \"the whole kit of life\" can be seen through busted-out windows-and a new vision of how the \"pure products of America \/ go crazy.\"\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57555353796981,"sku":"9780811241410","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}]},{"product_id":"ingeborg-bachmann-the-complete-stories","title":"Ingeborg Bachmann: The Complete Stories","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eComplete Stories\u003c\/em\u003e spans three decades of work from one of the most important German-language writers of the last century. Each of these short stories, beautifully translated by Philip Boehm and Tess Lewis, depict people at a crossroads, facing decisions about life, truth, love, and death. In addition to the collections \"Three Paths to the Lake\" and \"The Thirtieth Year,\" this volume includes many stories that have never appeared in English before.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn this collection, we find Ingeborg Bachmann exploring the limits of language and experience, grappling with the maladies of modern civilization, with love and sex, with patriarchy and its brutalities: “Where does fascism begin? It doesn’t begin with the first bombs that were dropped. It begins in relationships between people. Fascism lies at the root of the relationship between a man and a woman….”\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57629191930229,"sku":"9780811238793","price":17.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}]},{"product_id":"on-the-calculation-of-volume-book-v","title":"On the Calculation of Volume (Book V)","description":"\u003cp\u003eIt's been a while since Tara Selter was all alone in her repeating November day. It's been even longer since she was one half of a unit called T\u0026amp;T Selter, an antiquarian book dealership she ran with her beloved husband Thomas. Her hazy days of confusion are behind her, and so are her desperate and doomed attempts to reattach herself to linear time. Tara has begun to settle into a new life, with new habits, and new people, and so have the many other time-trapped individuals who have joined her along the way. And yet we can't help but wonder whether she and her fellow travelers will ever find their way out of a trap so inexplicable and profound-and will they even still want to? In Balle's hands the time loop becomes a parable of loss, longing, marital loneliness, and our own mortality. With gradual, breathtaking power, Balle deftly explores a series of existential and philosophical questions, and grapples with the form of the novel itself, charging full steam ahead in reinventing and reinvigorating its possibilities.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAnd now we've arrived at the thrilling fifth book of Solvej Balle's septology.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"It's a sensation.\" (\u003cem\u003eThe New York Times Magazine\u003c\/em\u003e).\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57629191995765,"sku":"9780811240383","price":11.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}]}],"url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/collections\/publisher-new-directions.oembed","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}