Search results for ""turtle point press""
Turtle Point Press Divining Poets: Yeats: A Quotable Deck from Turtle Point Press
This concentrated dose of the mystical wisdom of W.B. Yeats offers pleasure and insight to all who partake of it. “For nothing can be sole or whole / That has not been rent.”Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon carries on the influential tradition of Irish mystical poetry with the great words of William Butler Yeats. Yeats had a lifelong interest in Spiritualism; his work is rich in tarot and occult imagery. He asserted that a number of poems were “given” to him by supernatural powers. Yeats’s fierce ideas and images, coupled with his exquisite sense of rhyme, make for quotes that seekers will want to commit to memory. As Paul Muldoon explains, this poet is “supremely positioned to help us make sense of both the things of this world, the Otherworld, and the vast region between.” The Divining Poets Quotable Deck Series: Elegant, boxed sets of seventy-eight cards à la tarot decks, with oracular quotes from the world’s greatest visionary poets. Each card contains inspiring and provocative lines chosen for seekers to contemplate, memorize, or answer life questions. Complete with display stand and how-to instructions, this pocket-sized wisdom is perfect for the holiday season.
£14.99
Turtle Point Press Divining Poets: Dickinson: A Quotable Deck from Turtle Point Press
Turtle Point Press is pleased to introduce the Divining Poets Quotable Deck Series. These elegant, boxed sets of seventy-eight cards à la tarot decks feature short quotes meant to inspire, provoke, and guide users—to contemplate, memorize, or answer life questions. Here is the ever-astonishing Emily Dickinson. David Trinidad was struck by the Magic 8 Ball sound in his favorite bits from Emily Dickinson’s poems—mystical answers to questions one might ask about life and death. He chose seventy-eight, the number of cards in a tarot deck, and found they worked. This is a superlative selection of indelible gems to guide, ponder, and quote. The set includes a display stand, plus an instruction card with tips on how to use the deck. This is pocket-sized wisdom to give and to keep, here in perfect time for the holiday season.
£12.99
Turtle Point Press Divining Poets: Rumi: A Quotable Deck from Turtle Point Press
Turtle Point Press is pleased to introduce the Divining Poets Quotable Deck Series. These elegant, boxed sets of seventy-eight cards à la tarot decks feature short quotes meant to inspire, provoke, and guide users—to contemplate, memorize, or answer life questions. We begin with the great Rumi, in fresh and wonderfully accessible translations. Persian speakers often tell their fortunes and seek life advice by randomly choosing lines from their classical poets. Brad Gooch discovered why as he worked on Rumi’s Secret, his biography of the wisest poet of all, as well as his forthcoming Everyman's Library collaborative book of translations, Rumi: Unseen Poems, and his popular Twitter feed, @RumiSecrets. Speaking soul-to-soul, with cosmic intimacy, Rumi is always urgently telling us what we need to know on the journey of our lives in haunting, divine, radiant words. The set includes a display stand, plus an instruction card with tips on how to use the deck. This is pocket-sized wisdom to give and to keep, here in perfect time for the holiday season.
£12.99
Turtle Point Press Divining Poets: Clifton: A Quotable Deck from Turtle Point Press
Plainspoken, empowering, spare, wise beyond measure, Clifton’s words are a balm and a force of good for all: “The surest failure / is the unattempted walk.”Tracy K. Smith took a poetry workshop with Lucille Clifton following the death of her mother. The experience was an awakening. Clifton spoke of her own losses, centering not on the ideas of “letting go” or “making peace,” but of sustained communication with the departed. Clifton’s practices included using the Ouija board, or “spirit board,” as she called it, to make contact with the other world. “I sat rapt, envious, hopeful,” Smith writes, “listening to Clifton describe her own initiation into a fierce and forthright form of knowing.” Smith’s selections offer a gateway into the profound, moving, accessible, and useful notions of this essential poet. The Divining Poets Quotable Deck Series: Elegant, boxed sets of seventy-eight cards à la tarot decks, with oracular quotes from the world’s greatest visionary poets. Each card contains inspiring and provocative lines chosen for seekers to contemplate, memorize, or answer life questions. Complete with a display stand and how-to instructions, this pocket-sized wisdom is perfect for the holiday season
£14.99
Turtle Point Press (Solve for) X
Coles’s eighth collection probes the X of the unknown and of gender chromosomes with provocative smarts and sensitivity.Katharine Coles’s (Solve for) X opens a window in a room we did not realize was stuffy. The rigidity of knowledge yields to the beauty of the search, which is both captivating and mysterious. Organized as an abecedarium, the poems are couched in spare, emotionally charged diction that plumbs consciousness and moral responsibility. Coles meditates on an imaginary sister, impositions of the body on the mind, and the human mess that remains despite death or disaster. The mastery of how Coles writes and what she knows is matched only by her ease with the uncertain X. In (Solve for) X, she breaks down contrary ideas and reassembles them, harmoniously redesigned.
£13.14
Turtle Point Press Stella Maris: And Other Key West Stories
"One of the best social observers in American fiction." —John Freeman, Literary Hub “Mr. Carroll's world is a little vicious, slippery in its sexuality . . . strangely reminiscent of the hootier, hard-candy end of the Tennessee Williams spectrum. It is flat-out odd, fun, and seeming true.” —Padgett Powell When Cuban fishermen first spotted the Key West lighthouse floating in Florida waters, they called her Stella Maris, Star of the Sea. It’s a beacon that draws people from everywhere seeking the end-of-the-line bohemian oasis that can still be found amidst the condo share towers, chain stores, and Redneck Riviera clientele. And it’s a mecca for gay men and the women who love them. Sue Kaufman Prize- winning author Michael Carroll knows the territory intimately. His stories wind in and out of the bars and guesthouses and lives of this singular paradise: a memorial for a drag queen held at the vicar’s Victorian leads to uneasy encounters; two southern sisters on a cruise ship holiday are up against the ravages of alcohol, estrangement, and deadly weather. Newly divorced gay men (already a phenomenon) lick their wounds and bask in the island’s lasting social twilight. At the all-male, clothing-optional resort, guys of all ages fall into one another’s paths, enjoy themselves as they please, and surprise one another on their views and preconceptions. Stella Maris is about the verities of illness and death. The past and its prisoners, AIDS, the young and not so young man’s realization of his own mortality. It’s about the unpredictable nature of life, and of survival. It’s about new beginnings and final recognitions.
£13.74
Turtle Point Press Blackbird Dust: Essays, Poems and Photographs
Jonathan Williams is a poet, publisher, photographer, polemicist,champion correspondent and cross-country promenader.
£14.16
Turtle Point Press The Near Future
Ashby Porter creates a world of flowering sadness, Spanish Moss and trailer parks. It is a tale of love ruined under the burning Florida sun amid phantasmagorical settings where present and future, life and death, love and aggression become entangled. The Near Future is a little jewel of a book, a very funny novel about getting - among other things - old, and in Florida, and with less than one's entire dignity in tact. Porter's comic imagination is of the truly droll sort, he homes very closely upon the truth. - Richard Ford
£14.99
Turtle Point Press Phoebe 2002: An Essay in Verse
A groundbreaking deconstruction of the classic 1950 film All About Eve, Phoebe 2002 is a collaborative epic poem/essay that zings in and out of scenes and makes a thousand connections within the world of popular culture. Drawing from high and low sources, the poets relate All About Eve to everything from Paradise Lost and The Odyssey to Rosemary's Baby, Silence of the Lambs and Scooby-Doo. Inspired by nine muses, including Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, all of whom make appearances throughout, Phoebe 2002 seamlessly pushes the limits of poetry and film criticism.
£23.97
Turtle Point Press Clovis
A remarkable satire about a talking parrot written by Golden Age Hollywood screenwriter.
£8.94
Turtle Point Press The Marble Bed
A New York Times Book Review New & Noteworthy Selection "The Marble Bed is a vision; it is an ode to life."—Rowan Ricardo Phillips "Each poem in The Marble Bed journeys far, wandering the territory of love's psyche."—Yusef Komunyakaa "One of the permanent poets of her generation."—Harold Bloom Grace Schulman rises to new heights in these poems of lament and praise. In The Marble Bed, a couple dances on a shore that is at once a shining turf and a graveyard of sea toss, of cracked shells, a skull-like carapace, and emerald weed. Here things sparkle with newness: an orchid come alive when rescued from a trash bin; the new year hidden in an egret's wing; Coltrane's ecstatic flight; a seductive, come-hither angel; a meteor's arc; a rainbow's painted ribbons; a glacial rock that glowers in moonlight. Even the tomb sculptures in an Italian cemetery sparkle with vitality. Schulman, grieving for her late husband, believes passionately in the power of art to redeem human transience. Her faith in art enables her to move from mourning to joyful wonder of existence as she meditates on an injured world and concludes: "Because I cannot lose the injured world / without losing the world, / I'll have to praise it."
£12.99
Turtle Point Press A Piece of Me: My Childhood in Wartime Bavaria
Introduction by Andrew SolomonAs a young girl growing up in the ’40s on a vast estate near Munich, Trixi Ost lives a life that is charmed by talent and privilege yet scarred by turbulent times. She enjoys the attentions of a beloved grandfather who sings her songs and holds forth in Latin, the pig and the deer she keeps as pets, and a wide freedom to roam. But everyday routine is swiftly upended as the estate becomes temporary home to an unlikely collection of people displaced by the war: distant relatives, forced laborers, Prussian royals, Polish peasants, generals, and even a few spies. One bright afternoon, a band of Easterners arrive: The farm community gathered staring rigidly at the approaching strangers in their desiccated floral colors, the skin of their faces gaunt and gray like dusty paper . Who were they? Where were they coming from on this June day? Dachau, breathed the young man who led them, almost inaudibly.”Rendered with insight, humor, and an acute visual lyricism, and sprinkled with fairy tales, rhymes, and family photographs, My Father’s House is a unique exploration of the powers of sense memory and of a little-known chapter in the history of German private life.Style icon Beatrix Ost arrived in New York in 1975 and was swiftly discovered by the New York Times as one of the city's most elegant fusions of art and fashion. She has written screenplays, produced movies and theater, and acted in films and on the stage. She lives in New York City and Charlottesville, Virginia.
£14.04
Turtle Point Press Nomadologies
Nomadologies is a complex and brilliant evocation of the fractured and hyphenated mindset of the contemporary Turkish writer and thinker. Erdag Göknar takes us on a dazzling virtual world tour encompassing history, aesthetics, and politics, from Bosnia to Chechnya to the Silk Road to Union Square and back to the place that was once the center of the civilized world, Istanbul/Constantinople. Turkophiles like myself have been waiting for years for Göknar to publish his findings from the multilayered world he inhabits, and here it is. This is a book I shall be returning to often.Richard Tillinghast, author of An Armchair Traveller’s History of Istanbul and cotranslator of Dirty August by Edip CanseverThe poems in Nomadologies connect moments of separation and union in a life lived between Turkey and America. Taking its organizing principle from the grammar of nomadic life, Nomadologies reveals that mobility is the most efficient strategy for sustaining contradictory existences. Here, we learn that poetry is a landscape of inhabitation, and perpetual exile is one's home.Erdag Göknar is a scholar, writer, and translator. He is best known for his award-winning translation of Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk's novel My Name Is Red. He is a faculty member at Duke University where he researches, teaches, and writes on Turkish Studies.
£12.74
Turtle Point Press More Than Everything: My Voyage with the Gods of Love
Beatrix uses words like she uses paint. . .with brush strokes so vivid and rich I feel as if I’m there watching as her story unfolds. I love this book!” Sissy SpacekBeatrix Ost’s memoir of her artistic awakening and early marriage opens on the heels of Germany’s recovery from the self-imposed disasters of World War II. She is part of the new generation that dances disobediently in the bombed-out villas and underground jazz caverns of Munich. Beatrix rides the dynamic decade up through the world of art, fashion, and cinema into the revolution of politics and consciousness.Marriage to the self-made prodigy and archaeologist, Ferdinand, impresario of the Hot Club, draws her into the mystical realm of the ancient Mexican gods. Soon, two sons are born. They make an odyssey through Mexico where, under the wing of the artistic elite, their homes full of Riveras and Kahlos, the initial impression is intoxicating. But the further they press inland, the more Ferdinand loses himself in his obsession and addictions.Ost draws us into the vortex of human craving to portray the complexities of her early marriage to a man scarred by the war, climbing the magical mountain of his own desires.Accompanied by the author’s artwork and photographs from her private collection, Ost shakes free of an impossibly dark life as the wife of an alcoholic brushes off the stardust of romance and, stepping back in the light, comes into her own.” (Barbara Epler, President, New Directions Publishing)
£13.96
Turtle Point Press What It Is Like: New and Selected Poems
Charles North is the master of the relaxed, urban and often wistful lyrical line. This new collection will delight fans and newcomers alike.
£17.99
Turtle Point Press The Story I Am: Mad About the Writing Life
"This is a gorgeous book, one that will inspire anyone to make the next sentence."—Jericho Brown, Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry 2020"A hymn of praise for the craft of weaving words in order to survive."—Kitty Kelley Roger Rosenblatt has always been “mad about the writing life.” In this new collection, he shares the stories and insights about writing that have inspired him, as a journalist, a columnist for The Washington Post, an essayist for Time magazine and The New Republic, and then as the author of best-selling books like Making Toast, Rules for Aging, Kayak Morning, and Unless It Moves the Human Heart. The new and beloved pieces in The Story I Am: Mad About the Writing Life, drawn from his vast body of work, celebrate the art, the craft, and the soul of writing.Here are essays and excerpts on the rewards and punishments of the life of a writer, along with thoughts on how to write, what to write, and why writing lies at the heart of human hope and experience. Reviewing Rosenblatt’s memoir The Boy Detective in the New York Times Book Review, Pete Hamill said Rosenblatt “writes the way a great jazz musician plays, moving from one emotion to another.” For Rosenblatt, writing, like jazz, is the art of improvisation. Rosenblatt writes that “Writing makes justice desirable, evil intelligible, grief endurable, and love possible.” In a nutshell, it’s worth a life.
£14.43
Turtle Point Press Punk Rock Is Cool for the End of the World: Poems and Notebooks of Ed Smith
The irreverent, tweetable, ludicrous, painful, wondrous work of the L.A. punk poet—widely available for the first time. In Punk Rock Is Cool for the End of the World, David Trinidad brings together a comprehensive selection of Ed Smith’s work: his published books; unpublished poems; excerpts from his extensive notebooks; photos and ephemera; and his timely “cry for civilization,” “Return to Lesbos”: put down that gun / stop electing Presidents. Ed Smith blazed onto the Los Angeles poetry scene in the early 1980s from out of the hardcore punk scene. The charismatic, nerdy young man hit home with his funny/scary off-the-cuff-sounding poems, like “Fishing”: This is a good line. / This is a bad line. This is a fishing line. Ed’s vibrant “gang” of writer and artist friends—among them Amy Gerstler, Dennis Cooper, Bob Flanagan, Mike Kelley, and David Trinidad—congregated at Beyond Baroque in Venice, on LA’s west side. They read and partied and performed together, and shared and published each others’ work. Ed was more than bright and versatile: he worked as a math tutor, an animator, and a typesetter. In the mid-1990s, he fell in love with Japanese artist Mio Shirai; they married and moved to New York City. Despite productive years and joyful times, Ed was plagued by mood disorders and drug problems, and at the age of forty-eight, he took his own life. Ed Smith’s poems speak to living in an increasingly dehumanizing consumer society and corrupt political system. This “punk Dorothy Parker” is more relevant than ever for our ADD, technology-distracted times.
£18.80
Turtle Point Press Strange Paradise: Portrait of a Marriage
A New York Times Book Review New & Noteworthy Selection "Grace Schulman makes me want to live to be four hundred years old, because she makes me feel there is so much out there, and it's unbearable to miss any of it."Wallace Shawn Grace Schulman is an award-winning poet and the author of seven collections of poems. She has had long posts as Poetry Editor of the Nation magazine, Director of the Poetry Center at the 92nd Street Y, and Distinguished Professor at CUNY’s Baruch College, where she still teaches. But her love for her scientist husband and her care for him through his long illness proved to be among her greatest inspirations. It called forth her deepest grief at his loss. How did Schulman maintain the independence, solitude, and freedom she required within the bounds of marriage? And what made her marriage endure through a decade of living apart? “In my experience, the phrase ‘happy marriage’ is a term of opposites, like ‘friendly fire’ or ‘famous poet.’ My marriage has been a feast of contradiction . . . ” Strange Paradise looks at this, Schulman’s remarkable career, her friendships with great writers, her work as an historic impresario at the Y, her religious and philosophical leanings, and her grand love affair with New York—all in her magical prose.
£14.00
Turtle Point Press Berlin The City And The Court
The first English translation of BERLIN by the great French poet Jules Laforgue, whose works greatly influenced T S Eliot and Ezra Pound. Shortly before his death, Laforgue, who has been called the French Keats, was appointed the daily French Reader' to the Empress Augusta, a descendant of Catherine the Great and a German princess who despised most things German. This book is a precise, witty detail of everyday Berlin life in the 1880's.'
£13.87
Turtle Point Press Taken by the Shawnee
"A masterpiece of women’s frontier experience!" —KATHY SCHULZ, author of The Underground Railroad in Ohio"This is an amazing book, and I couldn’t stop reading it." —JOAN SILBER, PEN/Faulkner and National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of Secrets of Happiness and Improvement"An awesome account of female survival at a horrific time." —BOOKLISTA most unusual portrait of early America based on a rare family document, in which a young mother’s years in captivity with the Shawnee prove to be the best years of her life.It''s 1779 and a young white woman named Margaret Erskine is venturing west from Virginia, on horseback, with her baby daughter and the rest of her family. She has no experience of Indians, and has absorbed most of the prejudices of her time, but she is open-minded, hardy, and men
£12.99
Turtle Point Press Taliban Beach Party
"As adept working with the sonnet and sestina as with loose-fitting lines, Howard produces poems of great immediacy that stir with emotional depth. . . . [His] vision of our post-9/11 culture is offbeat, yet 'wisdomtight.'"—David Trinidad Eric Howard’s debut poetry collection reveals the secrets that bind office work to war, Gidget to the damned, the Bible to popular song, mythology to fact, and Los Angeles to Ovid. On a bicycle ride through heavy traffic, it versifies the last days of a failed pimp, gives a tarot reading to warplanes, and deciphers the hieroglyphics of lost empire.Eric Howard is an LA-based poet and editor. His work has appeared in the Birmingham Poetry Review, Caveat Lector, Conduit, Gulf Stream Magazine, Hawaii Pacific Review, Plainsong, The Sun, and in the anthology Wide Awake: Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond.
£12.89
Turtle Point Press The Lisbon Syndrome: A Novel
A WORLD LITERATURE TODAY NOTABLE TRANSLATION OF 2022A sudden catastrophe in Europe exposes the slow-motion destruction of a generation of Venezuelans and their struggle against repression. In The Lisbon Syndrome, a disaster annihilates Portugal's capital. In Caracas, Lisbon's sister city and home to many thousands of Portuguese, few details filter through the censored state media. Fernando runs a theater program for young people in Caracas, teaching and performing classics like Macbeth and Mother Courage. His benefactor, Old Moreira, is a childless Portuguese immigrant who recalls the Lisbon of his youth. Fernando’s students suffer from what they begin to call “the Lisbon syndrome,” an acute awareness that there are no possibilities left for them in a country devastated by a murderous, criminal regime. A series of confrontations between demonstrators and government forces draw the students and their teacher toward danger. One disappears into the state secret prisons where dissidents are tortured. The arts center that was their sanctuary is attacked, and Fernando is pulled into the battle in the streets. The Lisbon Syndrome is the most trenchant contemporary novel to offer a glimpse of life and death in Venezuela. But Sánchez Rugeles’s bleak vision is lightened by his wry humor, and by characters who show us the humanity behind stark headlines.
£13.35
Turtle Point Press Warning Track: New Poems
"Playful, brooding, skeptical, ironic—Sanders turns high-jinks edginess into compassionate art in this crafty and urgent book of warnings."—Edward Hirsch
£12.32
Turtle Point Press The Shape Of A City
The most original book of Julien Gracq's later output is about Nantes. It begins with a quotation from Beaudelaire that is repeated and distorted. Nantes, still haunted by Andr© Breton, Jacques Vache and Rimbaud behind them is reconstructed from a remembered image in which the lyc©e Cl©menceau occupies the centre. Pathos filtered through humour guides the author as he writes of a child's experience of the hierarchy of urban spaces. This is a beautiful work, provocative and powerfully set amid verifiable and equally moving land- and cityscapes.
£13.49
Turtle Point Press Widow's Dozen
Widow's Dozen, Marek Waldorf's mind-bending, genre-blending short story collection, offers 11 coruscating stories from a past that never was to a future too late to forestall. Subtle lives - nostalgia lit, lovingly textured - bridge currents in catastrophe from the impossible to the remote to the inevitable. A captivating vision of America's dismembered states, that is less science fiction than future-shock treatment.
£14.99
Turtle Point Press That Crazy Perfect Someday
The year is 2024. Climate change has altered the world’s wave patterns. Drones crisscross the sky, cars drive themselves, and surfing is a new Olympic sport. Mafuri Long, UCSD marine biology grad, champion surfer, and only female to dominate a record eighty-foot wave, still has something to prove. Having achieved Internet fame, along with sponsorship from Google and Nike, she’s intent on winning Olympic gold. But when her father, a clinically depressed former Navy captain and widower, learns that his beloved supercarrier, the USS Hillary Rodham Clinton, is to be sunk, he draws Mafuri into a powerful undertow. Conflicts compound as Mafuri’s personal life comes undone via social media, and a vicious Aussie competitor levels bogus doping charges against her. Mafuri forms an unlikely friendship with an awkward teen, a Ferrari-driving professional gamer who will prove to be her support and ballast. Authentic, brutal, and at times funny, Mafuri lays it all out in a sprightly, hot-wired voice. From San Diego to Sydney, Key West, and Manila, That Crazy Perfect Someday goes beyond the sports/surf cliché to explore the depths of sorrow and hope, yearning and family bonds, and the bootstrap power of a bold young woman climbing back into the light.Michael Mazza is a San Francisco-area fiction writer whose stories have appeared in Other Voices, WORDS, Blue Mesa Review, TINGE, and ZYZZYVA. He is also an internationally acclaimed art and creative director working in the advertising industry. That Crazy Perfect Someday is his first novel.
£14.64
Turtle Point Press Blue Stranger With Mosaic Background
Koestenbaum's book of poems minces memory and culture into titbits to propose a new 'nude' poetics. The collection draws upon his signature themes - stardom, scapegoating, aestheticism, nudism, exaltation - and cuts them into serial strips. Using techniques such as pointillism, mosaic, aphorism, litany and philosophical investigation, the poet trips through a memory theatre whose luminaries range from Yvonne De Carlo to Hannah Arendt and assembles melancholy tesserae into tidily stanzaic sacrificial offerings.
£9.99
Turtle Point Press Broken Irish
A passionate, heartbreaking story of authority and revenge, alcoholism and futile redemption set in South Boston in the late 1990s. Told in short, tight, intertwined chapters, Broken Irish gives voice to the voiceless, portraying the shattered hopes of a disintegrating neighbourhood dominated by dependence on alcohol, revenge and the ghostly presence of a secretive, hypocritical church. Exploring pertinent issues of abuse within the Catholic church, it will appeal to a wide audience, while its graceful, spellbinding style will not go unnoticed in literary circles.
£15.99
Turtle Point Press All Aboard: Short Stories
Ventures into new, sometimes unprecedented, territory - from the luxe restraint of Merrymount through the stops-out eroticism of Pending and the distilled heebie-jeebies of Dream On. Here, reading, travel and sexual orientation (and disorientation) loom larger than before in Porter and the dialogue gives new play for what Harry Mathews has called Porter's golden ear'.'
£14.99
Turtle Point Press Wild Punch
The linked stories of Wild Punch portray the revelatory moments of small-timers, clergymen, hot-heads, labourers, motorcycle racers, loggers, young veterans and horse farmers across Northern New England. Sometimes quiet and sometimes raucous, Creston Lea's stories chronicle lives changing course. Lea is an author who clearly loves his characters. He understands their contradictions and their stark daily realities and he writes about them with an authority based on authenticity, generosity, grace and sharply observed humanity.
£14.99
Turtle Point Press By Myself, An Autobiography
A daring collaborative celebrity autobiography by two of America's finest poets, D.A. Powell and David Trinidad
£8.48
Turtle Point Press Digging to Wonderland: Memory Pieces
This suburban California coming of age navigates Trinidad’s personal history in the shadow of Hollywood, against the dramas of the 1960s and ’70s.“Trinidad’s pieces teach us how memory and history are forms of yearning, and about what can and cannot be recovered.” —Amy Gerstler “This is the writing of a poet who loves the world into language.” —Aaron Smith Poet David Trinidad’s past is rich fodder for a collection of memory pieces that wind the reader through the underbelly of 1960s and ’70s America—and Southern California, more specifically. In Trinidad’s recollections, the proximity to Hollywood both glamorizes and condemns the bustling suburbs. Stains of the Manson murders and adoration for The Boys in the Band are documented with the same care as fascinations with Barbie dolls and twelve-cent comic books. The struggles of an awkward gay teenager meld into the weighty anecdotes of a young man who befriends famous writers, acts as a historian for familial legacies, and confronts the limitations of desire. The title piece, “Digging to Wonderland,” presents a young David Trinidad and his friend Nancy as they tunnel into the ground of her backyard, in search of the next great adventure. Ultimately, we witness a childhood spent under the threat of annihilation: “So the ‘twinkly lights’ in the hills above Chatsworth were actually missiles armed with nuclear warheads. And without knowing it, I grew up under their spell.”
£13.93
Turtle Point Press A Line of Driftwood: The Ada Blackjack Story
A BOOKLIST EDITORS' CHOICE, 2021 Diane Glancy once again puts Indigenous women at the center of American history in her account of a young Inupiat woman who survived a treacherous arctic expedition alone. "This moving retelling of a heroic woman’s journey demonstrates that history lives through an intimate connection between two women beyond time’s borders."—Booklist, starred review In September 1921, a young Inupiat woman named Ada Blackjack traveled to Wrangel Island, 200 miles off the Arctic Coast of Siberia, as a cook and seamstress, along with four professional explorers. The expedition did not go as planned. When a rescue ship finally broke through the ice two years later, she was the only survivor. Diane Glancy discovered Blackjack’s diary in the Dartmouth archives and created a new narrative based on the historical record and her vision of this woman’s extraordinary life. She tells the story of a woman facing danger, loss, and unimaginable hardship, yet surviving against the odds where four “experts” could not. Beyond the expedition, the story examines Blackjack’s childhood experiences at an Indian residential school, her struggles as a mother and wife, and the faith that enabled her to survive alone on a remote island in the Arctic Sea. Glancy’s creative telling of this heroic tale is a high mark in her award-winning hybrid investigations of suffering, identity, and Native American history.
£12.52
Turtle Point Press Cold Moon: On Life, Love, and Responsibility
A New York Times Book Review New and Noteworthy Selection."A booster shot of wisdom when we need it most."—Alan Alda "Cold Moon knocked me on my ass then held out its hand and hauled me back up, tossing me into the brawling fray, joyous and more hopeful than ever." —Paul Harding, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Tinkers The Cold Moon occurs in late December, auguring the arrival of the winter solstice. Approaching the winter solstice of his own life, Roger Rosenblatt offers a book dedicated to the three most important lessons he has learned over his many years: an appreciation of being alive, a recognition of the gift and power of love, and the necessity of exercising responsibility toward one another. In a rough-and-tumble journey that moves like the sea, Rosenblatt rolls from elegy to comedy, distilling a lifetime of great tales and moments into a tonic for these perilous and fearful times. Cold Moon: a book to offer purpose, to focus the attention on life’s essentials, and to lift the spirit.
£12.82
Turtle Point Press Look Both Ways: A Double Journey Along My Grandmother's Far-Flung Path
"Tense, abundantly researched, and heartbreaking . . . Coles makes sense of the unique forces that shaped women in the twentieth century." —Foreword Reviews Walter Link and Miriam Wollaeger, a young geologist couple in 1920s Wisconsin, set out to find oil to supply the surging U.S. demand. This exciting work will allow them to build their lives in South and Central America, Indonesia, and Cuba. But from the first posting in Columbia, they quickly discover that no women are working in the field in these places. While Walter faces the hardships and thrills of exploration in the jungles and mountains, and eventually becomes chief geologist for Standard Oil, Miriam is left behind in the colonial capitals during Walter’s often lengthy times away. She defines herself through the limited means left to a woman within their small societies: playing bridge or polo by day and dancing into the wee hours with early KLM pilots, diplomats, and the footloose sons of moneyed Americans and the European aristocracies. She also raises three children, has intimate involvements, learns the local languages, and takes up teaching. But she is not satisfied. And finally she does something about it. Following in her grandparents’ footsteps, author Katharine Coles looks backward and forward, through documents and imagination. She looks at their journeys and hers, and mingling their words with her own, examines the delicate balances that must exist in a successful marriage and a feminist life.
£15.46
Turtle Point Press Follow the Sun
"Follow the Sun is just plain fantastic. Edward J. Delaney has orchestrated a tight, tense page-turner and a harrowing, deeply imagined literary portrait of an entire family. . . . What a knockout read." —Paul Harding"In this pungent, gritty novel, hardscrabble lives are rendered with utter realism, terrific dialogue, and a slow-burning tenderness for all concerned. Delaney's knowledge of this milieu is never in doubt, and his control of the material is masterful." —Phillip Lopate Quinn Boyle is a lobsterman afloat in a shambled vessel, haunted by his battles with lobsters and with heroin, and ever behind on his child support. Since Quinn lost a man off his boat and served time for possession, only naïve beginners will work with him. On his final lobster run, Quinn's down to his last options. He hires on an old nemesis, Freddy Santoro, who's facing prison time of his own. Three days later, they're both gone, lost without a trace.Robbie Boyle, a small-time local sportswriter, looked after his younger brother as best he could. Now that Quinn has disappeared, Robbie reaches out to Quinn's estranged daughter, Christine, and assumes the fatherly role his brother never shouldered. A year later, as they admit they might be better off without Quinn's complicated presence in their lives, Robbie gets a strange tip: Santoro is apparently living in the Pacific Northwest. Telling no one and risking everything, Robbie sets out to find Santoro and determine what happened to Quinn. What he discovers will remap the course of their lives.Edward J. Delaney is an award-winning journalist, filmmaker, and author of three previous works of fiction. He has received the PEN/New England Award, the O. Henry Prize, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. His short fiction has appeared in the Atlantic and Best American Short Stories, in anthologies, and on PRI's Selected Shorts program. Born and raised in Massachusetts, Delaney lives and teaches in Rhode Island.
£20.39
Turtle Point Press The Scapegoat
"Jocelyn Brooke is a great writer. . . . If you care enough for literature, seek out The Scapegoat."—Elizabeth Bowen "Brooke marked out his magical, personal kingdom, different from any other writer."—Anthony Powell
£11.99
Turtle Point Press Touch Wood
Pulitzer Prize-nominee Joe Ashby Porter has created a new collection of innovative short stories which range across the US and Europe and acknowledge the sway of chance and contingency in our lives. |Porter's stories fuse fact and unlikelyhood, reality and the uncanny. They are irresistibly readable| - Richard Wilbur |One of the most consistently rewarding writers in the US and among the most intelligently exciting| - Stephen Dixon |It's his humanity that astonishes me| - E. White
£14.99
Turtle Point Press Eternity On Hold
This collection has the dizzying vividness of heightened perception. In poem after poem, solitude, war, exile and pain are illuminated with unforgettable subtlety, poignancy and detail. In the midst of war and chaos Susko maintains a spirit of wonder in his exquisitely crafted verse. |Conversation|, a poem in this collection, was shortlisted for the prestigious Guardian Forward Poetry Prize.
£14.99
Turtle Point Press Posthumous Diary (diario Postumo)
Introduction and Translation by Jonathan Galassi Montale's 'Posthumous Diary', now available for the first time in an English translation, is a collection of brief poems to a woman named Annalisa Cima that, when published 15 years after his death in 1981, created an unprecedented uproar in the world of Italian literature. Winner of the 1975 Nobel Prize for Literature, this volume of Montale's most private poems deal with death and solitude, but also with friendship and the consolations of art that unify us and shield us from despair.
£14.99
Turtle Point Press Havana without Makeup: Inside the Soul of the City
"Part memoir, part history and part travelogue, Havana without Makeup … take[s] you places you would never find in a guide book."Mimi Whitefield, Miami Herald "The story Portocarero weaves here is rich and fascinating, and vital to understanding an often mysterious place."Patrick Oppmann, CNN Havana Correspondent and Bureau Chief Havana without Makeup is the ultimate insider’s view of Havana, a wide-ranging exploration of its complex facets as seen by few. Its aim is to capture the soul of a city and a society that have evolved on their own terms at the moment before they face inevitable transformations. Opening on the eve of the announcement of reconciliation between the U.S. and Cuba, the book then looks back at the cultural, political, economic, and religious influences that led up to this historic moment and beyond. Readers are led by a brilliant renaissance man and writer who has been at the vanguard of the city’s struggles for more than twenty years. Portocarero’s anti-tourist guide to Havana examines the built environment of the most sensual ruin on the planet”: why are large parts of the city so neglected, and what changes may we see over the coming years? Examining all things Cubania--racial issues, la revolución, baseball, Hemingway, communism, synagogues, Santeria, Cimarron culture, and much more--Portocarero overturns every stone in his endeavor to bring us inside the city he loves. Illustrated with original photographs, this is a unique and essential account of Havana’s history, its present, and what its future may hold. Herman Portocarero is a Belgian-born writer and diplomat of Spanish and Portuguese descent. He has published more than twenty works of fiction and nonfiction, including the Hercule Poirot Prize-winning crime novel New Yorkse NachtenNew York Nights). Between 1995 and 2017, he was ambassador in Havana for his native country and later for the European Union, where he developed a deep professional and personal relationship with Cuba, Havana, and her people.
£13.99
Turtle Point Press Droll Tales
In fourteen witty, surreal, and wildly original interrelated stories, Iris Smyles joyfully interrogates the paradoxes of life and language and gives us a new view of our world. Welcome to the world of Droll Tales, in which reality is a mutually agreed-upon illusion, and life is painful, enigmatic, beautiful, and brief. With an oddball cast of characters who reappear in various guises, Smyles gives us a tour of an enchanted, absurd, off-kilter world with its own workings and ways of expression—one that overlaps our own. A young suburban woman runs away to Europe to become a living statue, Mallarmé is at long last translated into pig Latin, a house full of surrealists compete for love on a reality TV show, a list of fortune cookie messages reveals the inner world of the young man employed to write them, and a story of love and betrayal is told through the sentence diagrams on a fifth grader’s grammar test. Romantic, dark, and ironic, Droll Tales is a book like none you have read. It is a philosophical vaudeville, a cabinet of curiosities, a puzzle in fourteen pieces, and a tragicomic riddle articulated in Smyles’s singular style, with the mystery of the human heart at its center.
£13.99
Turtle Point Press Lord Of Dark Places
A detective story, a black comedy, a tragedy, and out of print for over 25 years, this monumental tour-de-force is a dissertation on the histories and stereotypes that conspire to man and to unman black Americans by a Faulkner Award-winning writer.
£12.99
Turtle Point Press It's My Party: A Memoir
Born into a celebrity family (her father was Watson's son, who turned the company into the powerhouse it still is today, and her mother, Olive, had dated Howard Hughes and John F. Kennedy), Jeannette Watson's larger-than-life family hid a number of secrets. Behind a facade of order and glamour, Tom Watson often experienced dark moods; his depression was something he passed on to his daughter. Jeannette felt she could never measure up to her mother-a legendary beauty-and kept her nose buried in books.Through her years as a debutante, then young wife and mother, Watson kept her feelings under wraps until she had a mental breakdown. As part of her fight to heal herself, she left her husband, taking their son and moving to New York City to experience its heady 1970s freedoms. She opened the legendary Upper East Side bookstore Books & Co., which became a gathering place for literati. Her personal life soared once more when she met her second husband, Alex Sanger, grandson of Planned Parenthood's founder, with whom she had two more sons. After a long and fulfilling run, the bookstore closed and Watson found her way down a new path to become a spiritual healer.It's My Party is a portrait of another era, a guide to dealing with depression, and one woman's deep effort to understand herself.
£15.18
Turtle Point Press The Drug Of Choice
Christopher Cahill's debut collection is intensely seductive and inventively disquieting. An omnivore of poetry, Cahill's influences range from contemporary poetry, Irish poetry, Victorian poetry to Classical Latin. Described as the heir of James Schuyler and Phillip Larkin, Cahill's verse heightens and degrades at the same time; his tone is one of nostalgia and scorn. The Drug of Choice is a lush and lacerating debut collection of poetry.
£12.41
Turtle Point Press Peyton Place: A Haiku Soap Opera
For Peyton Place: A Haiku Soap Opera, poet David Trinidad watched all 514 episodes of the infamous 1960s 'adult' primetime soap opera and wrote a haiku for everyone. Fraught relationships, courtroom cliffhangers and sensational storylines are condensed into 17-syllable episodes, as stereotypic characters weather the passing TV seasons. This haiku 'soap epic' is ingenious, funny and totally addictive.
£14.99
Turtle Point Press A Voyage To The Island Of The Articoles
Originally written in 1928, A Voyage to the Island of the Arcticoles is a wildly imaginative work from the French biographer, novelist, essayist Andre Maurois. Somewhere between Hawaii and Tahiti, en route to the Marquesas, a couple find their ship blown off course by a storm. They land in the harbour of the privately-owned island of the Articoles, where society is highly ordered and the only people who are really looked up to are the literary descendents of the original literary settlers. A fantastical novella which is a sly critique of the snobbisms of writing communities.
£10.99
Turtle Point Press Marbles
A collection of lucid, whimsical, wise, succint and sometimes biting musings by a young Australian living in New York. Author James Guida revives an old form, the aphorism, in order to turn his eye to 21 century scenarios. The comedy of internet dating, email fiascos and improvised postmodern mores - whatever the subject, Guida's conclusions are independent minded and go against the grain.
£13.99