Search results for ""author david boyd""
New Directions Publishing Corporation The Factory
The English-language debut of one of Japan's most exciting new writers, The Factory follows three workers at a sprawling industrial factory. Each worker focuses intently on the specific task they've been assigned: one shreds paper, one proofreads documents, and another studies the moss growing all over the expansive grounds. But their lives slowly become governed by their work—days take on a strange logic and momentum, and little by little, the margins of reality seem to be dissolving: Where does the factory end and the rest of the world begin? What's going on with the strange animals here? And after a while—it could be weeks or years—the three workers struggle to answer the most basic question: What am I doing here? With hints of Kafka and unexpected moments of creeping humor, The Factory casts a vivid—and sometimes surreal—portrait of the absurdity and meaninglessness of the modern workplace.
£11.48
Paul Holberton Publishing Ltd Augustus John: Drawn from Life
In the first three decades of the 20th century Augustus John (1878–1961) was widely considered one of the greatest living British artists, famous almost as much for his extraordinary Bohemian lifestyle as for his outstanding portraits, etchings and drawings. John was born in Wales in 1878 and educated at the Slade School of Art in London in the 1890s, where the onus of teaching was on the daily life class and a close study of the Old Masters. He soon emerged as a wonderfully gifted draughtsman – indeed, the American painter John Singer Sargent would declare that John’s youthful drawings were amongst the fi nest seen since the Renaissance. Dividing his life between England, Wales and France, and reaching his prime in the years immediately before the outbreak of the Great War, by 1910 John would be likened to a British Gauguin, a Welsh Post-Impressionist using bold colours and a willfully naïve and primitive style to explore the complex combination of romanticism, escapism and alienation engendered by 20th-century life. The great American collector John Quinn considered John and his sister Gwen key European artists, and his work would be included in the infl uential Armory Show in New York in 1913. After the War he would become Britain’s leading society portraitist, earning a fortune in commissions – though it was his more personal paintings of friends, lovers, family and fellow artists and writers such as W.B. Yeats, T.E. Lawrence, Dylan Thomas, Ottoline Morrell and his muse/ mistress Dorelia McNeill that best revealed his great talents.Published to coincide with exhibitions at Poole Museum in Dorset in the summer of 2018 and at Salisbury Museum in Wiltshire in the summer of 2019, Augustus John: Drawn from Life re-examines the life and work of this signifi cant but increasingly overlooked Britishartist. Focusing on around sixty works drawn from private and public collections, including the Tate, the National Portrait Gallery and the National Museum of Wales, the book will off er new insights into John’s life and development as an artist from the late 1890s to theoutbreak of the Second World War.
£22.50
Old Street Publishing I Am Spain
£25.00
Lund Humphries Publishers Ltd Brilliant Destiny: The Age of Augustus John
Considered by John Singer Sargent to be the best British draughtsman since the Renaissance, Augustus John was the first of the British ‘Post-Impressionists’. Such was his importance that Virginia Woolf declared in 1921 that by 1908 ‘The age of Augustus John was dawning,’ and Wyndham Lewis would dub the ten years leading up to 1914 ‘the Augustan decade'. Handsome, unconventional and full of brilliant promise and Bohemian spirit, John was the man almost every young British art student wanted to emulate. This book reveals why, telling his extraordinary story from his birth in south Wales in 1878 through to the end of his youth in the closing stages of the First World War. Interweaving his biography are the personalities who surrounded John, and the book looks at their influence on him, and his upon them. They include his fellow students at the Slade School of Art – his sister Gwen John and future wife Ida Nettleship, and his friends William Orpen, Ambrose McEvoy, Spencer Gore and Percy Wyndham Lewis – all of whom would become prominent artists in their own right. This book is a long overdue, new interpretation of this singular figure, who was both at the heart of the British artistic milieu, and yet set apart from its movements and manifestos.
£29.99
Old Street Publishing I Am Spain
£9.99
Pushkin Press Slow Boat
A startling novella from the heir to Haruki Murakami and Gabriel Garcia Marquez Trapped in Tokyo, left behind by a series of girlfriends, the narrator of Slow Boat sizes up his situation. His missteps, his violent rebellions, his tiny victories. But he is not a passive loser, content to accept all that fate hands him. He attempts one last escape to the edges of the city, holding the only safety net he has known - his dreams. Filled with lyrical longing and humour, Slow Boat captures perfectly the urge to get away and the necessity of finding yourself in a world which might never even be looking for you.
£11.24
Enchanted Lion Books The Little One
A Bank Street College of Education Best Book of 2022On her way home, a young girl meets a little figure that only she can see. Join the pair on an afternoon filled with tea and adventures, friendship and magic!One day, a young girl sees a mysterious little figure sitting on a wall. It seems to be following her through town on her way back home, so, curious, she goes to say hello: "Hello, little one, what are you doing here?" It's now her turn to follow the little one as it leads her to a garden and a cup of tea. And then, the pair enter a pitch-black closet and close their eyes, opening them to reveal... a magical attic that contains roots to hop over, trunks to hide in, vines to climb, branches to slide down. There's even an enormous, cuddly creature, so soft and warm and perfect for napping and dreaming! Though silent and unnoticed by anyone else, the little one forms a beautiful friendship with the young girl in the space of an afternoon, showing her affection and care and sharing with her the fun and healing that comes out of imagination and play. Each illustration in this beautiful book was created via a delicate copperplate etching by author-illustrator Kiyo Tanaka, lovingly crafted to depict a dream-like world full of friendship, where anything is possible.
£11.69
Verso Books Hit Parade of Tears
A new collection of stories from the cult author of Terminal Boredom.Izumi Suzuki had ideas about doing things differently, ideas that paid little attention to the laws of physics, or the laws of the land. In this new collection, her skewed imagination distorts and enhances some of the classic concepts of science fiction and fantasy.A philandering husband receives a bestial punishment from a wife with her own secrets to keep; a music lover finds herself in a timeline both familiar and as wrong as can be; a misfit band of space pirates discover a mysterious baby among the stars; Emma, the Bovary-like character from one of Suzuki's stories in Terminal Boredom, lands herself in a bizarre romantic pickle.Wryly anarchic and deeply imaginative, Suzuki was a writer like no other. These eleven stories offer readers the opportunity to delve deeper in this singular writer's work.
£14.95
Vintage Publishing Diary of a Void: A hilarious, feminist read from the new star of Japanese fiction
For the sake of women everywhere, Ms Shibata is going to pull off the mother of all deceptions...'Incredibly thought-provoking... you'll love Yagi's writing' STYLISTMs Shibata refuses to clear away the coffee at work one day, because she's pregnant and can't bear the smell. The only thing is . . . Ms Shibata is not pregnant.Being a mother-to-be isn't easy. Ms Shibata has a nine-month ruse to keep up. Before long, it becomes all-absorbing, and with the help of towel-stuffed shirts and a diary app that tracks every stage of her 'pregnancy', the boundary between her lie and her life begins to dissolve.Discover this prizewinning, thrillingly subversive new novel that's perfect for fans of Convenience Store Woman and Breasts and Eggs.'A subversive, surreal read that will strike a cord' RED'One of the most passionate cases I've ever read for female interiority, for women's creative pulse and rich inner life' NEW YORKERTranslated from the Japanese by David Boyd and Lucy North
£9.99
Enchanted Lion Books Every Color of Light: A Book about the Sky
A Publishers Weekly Best Picture Book of 2020A Kirkus Best Book of 2020A Shelf Awareness Best Children's Book of 2020Best Illustrator Award, 2021 Northern Lights Book AwardsPoetic and sparse, a bedtime story told by the elements.Gentle and lyrical, Every Color of Light is a bedtime story told by the elements.Every Color of Light opens on a lush, green forest in the rain. Illustrated by the masterful Ryoji Arai, the calm is shattered when the wind picks up and lightning cuts the sky. Yet out of this turbulence, the day blooms bright, the flowers open, and raindrops roll and drip down to the forest floor. The sun sets. The moon rises, and in a pool of water we see its reflection. We go to sleep with the forest, sinking into the pool, into the calm reflection of the moon. Harmonizing our human experience to the natural world, Arai invites the reader to hold imaginative space for our oneness with the natural world.
£12.99
Pan Macmillan Heaven: Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize
Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2022From the bestselling author of Breasts and Eggs and international literary sensation Mieko Kawakami comes a sharp and illuminating novel about a fourteen-year-old boy subjected to relentless bullying.In Heaven, a fourteen-year-old boy is tormented for having a lazy eye. Instead of resisting, he chooses to suffer in silence. The only person who understands what he is going through is a female classmate, Kojima, who experiences similar treatment at the hands of her bullies. Providing each other with immeasurable consolation at a time in their lives when they need it most, the two young friends grow closer than ever. But what, ultimately, is the nature of a friendship when your shared bond is terror?Unflinching yet tender, sharply observed, intimate and multi-layered, this simple yet profound novel stands as yet another dazzling testament to Mieko Kawakami’s uncontainable talent. TIME's 100 Must-Read Books of the Year'Mieko Kawakami is a genius' - Naoise Dolan, author of Exciting Times'An expertly told, deeply unsettling tale of adolescent violence' - VogueTranslated from the Japanese by Sam Bett and David Boyd.
£9.99
Pan Macmillan Breasts and Eggs
A beguiling novel about three women struggling to determine their own lives in contemporary Tokyo.'Breathtaking' – Haruki Murakami author of Norwegian WoodA New York Times 'Notable Book of the Year' and one of Elena Ferrante's 'Top 40 Books by Female Authors'. Shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation.On a hot summer’s day in a poor suburb of Tokyo we meet three women: thirty-year-old Natsuko, her older sister Makiko, and Makiko’s teenage daughter Midoriko. Makiko, an ageing hostess despairing the loss of her looks, has travelled to Tokyo in search of breast enhancement surgery. She's accompanied by her daughter, who has recently stopped speaking, finding herself unable to deal with her own changing body and her mother’s self-obsession. Her silence dominates Natsuko’s rundown apartment, providing a catalyst for each woman to grapple with their own anxieties and their relationships with one another.Eight years later, we meet Natsuko again. She is now a writer and finds herself on a journey back to her native city, returning to memories of that summer and her family’s past as she faces her own uncertain future.In Breasts and Eggs Mieko Kawakami paints a radical and intimate portrait of contemporary working class womanhood in Japan, recounting the heartbreaking journeys of three women in a society where the odds are stacked against them. Translated from the Japanese by Sam Bett and David Boyd.'Bold, modern and surprising' – An Yu, author of Braised Pork'Incredible and propulsive' – Naoise Dolan, author of Exciting Times
£9.99
Pan Macmillan All The Lovers In The Night
From literary sensation and International Booker Prize-shortlisted author Mieko Kawakami, the bestelling author of Breasts and Eggs and Heaven comes All the Lovers in the Night, an extraordinary, deeply moving and insightful story set in contemporary Tokyo.'A brief, compelling study of alienation and friendship; I binge-read it in one sitting.' - Rebecca F Kuang, bestselling author of BabelFuyuko Irie is a freelance proofreader in her thirties. Living alone in an overwhelming city and unable to form meaningful relationships, she has little contact with anyone other than her colleague, Hijiri. But a chance encounter with a man named Mitsutsuka awakens something new in her. Through their weekly meetings, Fuyuko starts to see the world in a different light and still, painful memories from her past begin to resurface. As Fuyuko realizes she exists in a small world of her own making she begins to push at her own boundaries. But will she find the strength to bring down the walls that surround her?Pulsing and poetic, modern and shocking, this is an unforgettable novel from Japan’s most exciting writer.‘Mieko Kawakami is a genius’ - Naoise Dolan, author of Exciting TimesAll the Lovers in the Night is translated from the Japanese by Sam Bett and David Boyd.
£9.99