Search results for ""author carol apollonio""
Northwestern University Press Dostoevsky's Secrets: Reading Against the Grain
When Fyodor Dostoevsky proclaims that he is a ""realist in a higher sense,"" it is because the facts are irrelevant to his truth. And it is in this spirit that Apollonio approaches Dostoevsky's work, reading through the facts-the text-of his canonical novels for the deeper truth that they distort, mask, and, ultimately, disclose. This sort of reading against the grain is, Apollonio suggests, precisely what these works, with their emphasis on the hidden and the private and their narrative reliance on secrecy and slander, demand.In each work Apollonio focuses on one character or theme caught in the compromising, self-serving, or distorting narrative lens. Who, she asks, really exploits whom in Poor Folk? Does ""White Nights"" ever escape the dream state? What is actually lost-and what is won-in The Gambler? Is Svidrigailov, of such ill repute in Crime and Punishment, in fact an exemplar of generosity and truth? Who, in Demons, is truly demonic? Here we see how Dostoevsky has crafted his novels to help us see these distorting filters and develop the critical skills to resist their anaesthetic effect. Apollonio's readings show how Dostoevsky's paradoxes counter and usurp our comfortable assumptions about the way the world is and offer access to a deeper, immanent essence. His works gain power when we read beyond the primitive logic of external appearances and recognize the deeper life of the text.
£37.19
Deep Vellum Publishing Offended Sensibilities
From political fictionalist Alisa Ganieva: a neo-noir portrait of a legal system in which everything is broken and no one is innocent. Offended Sensibilities chronicles a series of sudden deaths that occur among officials of a provincial Russian town. The events follow a notorious blasphemy law banning forms of expression that offend the sensibilities of religious believers – a law passed after Pussy Riot’s infamous 2013 church-side protest that resulted in their arrest. With this novel, Ganieva moves beyond the Dagestani setting of her previous award-winning books, published in English by Deep Vellum: The Mountain and the Wall and Bride and Groom. In Offended Sensibilities, Ganieva seeks to address nationalism, Orthodox religiosity, sexuality, and political corruption. Suffused with a light touch and at times rollicking sense of humor, this timely, entertaining and thought-provoking novel can be read as an allegory for the current political, social, religious, and cultural climate in Russia today.
£14.00
Dalkey Archive Press Maya Pill
German Sadulaev's follow-up to his acclaimed "I am a Chechen! "is set in a twenty-first century Russia, phantasmagorical and violent. A bitingly funny twenty-first century satire, "The Maya Pill" is strange, savage, bizarre, and uproarious.
£10.99
Deep Vellum Publishing The Mountain and the Wall
"Ganieva's writing has a kind of magic." -- Lauren Smart, Dallas Observer "Never before has Russian literature produced such an honest and complete picture of today's Caucasus."-- Kommersant Weekend (Russia) **One of the Dallas Observer's "10 Books To Read This Fall" ****World Literature Today Editor's Pick** This remarkable debut novel by a unique young Russian voice portrays the influence of political intolerance and religious violence in the lives of people forced to choose between evils. The Mountain and the Wall focuses on Shamil, a young local reporter in Makhachkala, and his reactions, or lack thereof, to rumors that the Russian government is building a wall to cut off the Muslim provinces of the Caucasus from the rest of Russia. As unrest spreads and the tension builds, Shamil's life is turned upside down, and he can no longer afford to ignore the violence surrounding him. With a fine sense for mounting catastrophe, Alisa Ganieva tells the story of the decline of a society torn apart by its inherent extremes.
£13.00
