Search results for ""author jennifer russell""

In the four stories that make up The Dolls, characters are plagued by unexplained illnesses and oblique, human-made disasters and environmental losses. A big sister descends into the family basement. Another sister refuses her younger brother. A third sister with memory loss is on the run, seeking shelter at Notpla. A fourth set of siblings travel to Hungary with their late mother in a coffin. They each have a different version of their mother's story. Drawing on the likes of August Strindberg, Franz Kafka, Andrej Kurkov, Knut Hamsun, T.S. Eliot, Bela Tarr, and Hieronymus Bosch, Scavenius's universe is chilling and excruciatingly seductive. In it, nothing can be said to be true anymore. After all, anything can be propaganda today.

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Recently unearthed from the ground, Marble leaves her new lover in Copenhagen and travels to Athens. The city is overflowing with colour, steam and fragrance, cats cry like babies at night, the economic crisis is raging. In this volatile landscape, Marble grasps the world by exploring its immediate surfaces. Capturing specks of colour on ancient sculptures in the Acropolis Museum with an infrared camera, she simultaneously traces the pioneering sculptor Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen, who spent several months in the same place 110 years earlier. Far away from her husband and children, Carl-Nielsen showed that Archaic sculptures were originally painted in bright colours - a feat which meant defying Victorian gender roles and jeopardising her marriage. Sensuous and electric, yet admirably forensic in its approach to mineral life, Marble is a galvanizing novel about the materials life is made of, about korai and sponge diving, about looking and looking again, written in a spare and pellucid style.

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An artist in her thirties weaves and unravels connections between the loom and the computer, DNA and technology, dreams and decisions Thread Ripper is a multi-strand novel about weaving, women, and programming. In Copenhagen, a tapestry-weaver embarks on her first big commission, a digitally woven tapestry. As she works, she draws illuminating connections between all the stuff that life is made from - DNA, plant tissue, algorithms, text and textile - and that which disrupts it - radiation, pests, entropy and doubt. In another strand, we follow Ada Lovelace, the 1830s mathematician and pioneer of computer programming. And Penelope, the faithful wife of Odysseus, who wove and unpicked a shroud to put off her 108 suitors. Contemplative yet clear-sighted, Amalie Smith's hybrid textile of a novel bares the aching but crucial interwovenness of art and life.

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After giving birth, Anna is utterly lost. She and her family move to the unfamiliar, snowy city of Stockholm. Anxiety threatens to completely engulf the new mother, who obsessively devours online news and compulsively buys clothes she can't afford. To avoid sinking deeper into her depression, Anna forces herself to read and write. My Work is a novel about the unique and fundamental experience of giving birth, mixing different literary forms - fiction, essay, poetry, memoir, and letters - to explore the relationship between motherhood, work, individuality, and literature.

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