Search results for ""author marie darrieussecq""

Plagued by insomnia for twenty years, Marie Darrieussecq turns her attention to the causes, implications and consequences of sleeplessness: a nocturnal suffering that culminates at 4 a.m. and then defines the next day. In Sleepless, she recounts her own experiences alongside those of fellow insomniacs, mostly writers – ‘as if writing were not sleeping’ – Ovid, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Marguerite Duras, Franz Kafka, Georges Perec and others. With her inimitable humour, she describes her dealings with a somnologist and her attempts to find a remedy – trying sleeping pills, cannabis, alcohol, bedtime rituals, acupuncture, yoga, hypnosis, psychoanalysis, a gravity blanket and a range of sleep-aid devices. Darrieussecq considers bedrooms, beds, clinophilia (‘the tendency to remain in a prone position without sleeping for prolonged periods of time’), her need to be alone in bed, those without beds, the homeless, refugees, trauma and capitalism’s role in sleeplessness, our constant wakefulness online, the forest as a hypnagogic zone and how our relationship with animals is connected to our sleep, or lack of it. Ranging between autobiography, clinical observation and criticism, Sleepless is a graceful, inventive meditation by one of the most daring, inventive novelists writing today.

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Pig Tales is a brilliant satirical novel about a stunning young woman working in a beauty 'massage' parlour. She enjoys extraordinary success at bringing home the bacon (in part due to her increasingly rosy and irresistible backside) until she slowly metamorphoses - into a pig. Rejected by her boyfriend, left to wander the sewers and forage for food in public parks, she takes up with a werewolf with insatiable appetites. They share everything (pizza is a particular favourite; she gets the pizza, he gets the delivery boy) until someone alerts the authorities and tragedy strikes . . . Gender, politics and social hypocrisy all come under scrutiny in this entertaining and enlightening novel. Pig Tales is a Metamorphosis for the present day, a dark fable of political and sexual corruption, and a grim warning of what can happen in a society without a soul.

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It is 2015. Edmée and Pete are engineers on a remote research station in Antarctica. Both are running from tragic events at home.In this setting of magnificent desolation, just fifteen kilometres from the South Pole, a love affair begins to flourish - until there is a catastrophic power failure at the base . . .

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What would you think if your husband, one day, with no word of explanation or warning, vanished? When would you begin to panic - the first hour, the first night? A deceptively simple story about a deserted woman, My Phantom Husbandis Marie Darrieussecq's eerie follow-up to Pig Tales, showing her to be a writer of great subtlety and depth. When her husband goes to buy fresh bread and never returns, the young narrator's life changes for ever. Night after night she has to learn to be alone, to sleep alone, to live in a space she has shared with a man for seven years. Yet who was he, her husband, and did they really have much in common? Why can't she remember her love for him - or even what he looked like? Dragged into a world of visions, she is besieged by childhood terrors - monsters behind the furniture, vampires floating around in the dark, strangers walking in other rooms. She begins to see her husband, or an apparition of him. Is he a supernatural visitation or the product of madness - or a figment of her guilty conscience? My Phantom Husband is a profoundly unsettling parable about the way love appears and disappears, about the absences and evasions that can lie hidden in any relationship.

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An in-depth look at the work and career of this fascinating artist, who is having a profound impact on contemporary painting Nigel Cooke is known for his complex paintings, which thematically explore the meeting point between creative labour, consciousness, art history, consumer culture, and nature. Primarily centred on meticulously painted, large-scale urban landscapes, which he calls 'hybrid theatrical spaces', Cooke's work employs disparate styles, often integrating trompe l'oeil miniature rocks and trees with backdrops of graffiti-marked buildings, to create scenes conveying obscure and macabre narratives. This survey of Cooke’s career to date explores the artist's style, approach, and impact on contemporary art and includes his very latest works, completed shortly before publication.

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Nathalie Djurberg (*1978) and Hans Berg (*1978) create animated worlds with objects, music and moving images – dreamlike realms where we might lose ourselves. Their playfully told fables hold both humour and darkness, putting any moral laws of gravity out of action. Djurberg’s vibrant stop-motion animations and sculpture groups accompanied by Berg’s electronic music form scenic installations in a surrealist vein. These intense chamber pieces enact fragments of memories repressed between innocence and shame, or feverish daydreams of role play and desire. The shadowy landscapes, sealed rooms and harshly-lit scenes of their films are inhabited by a group of possessed figures seemingly set on devouring one another. The exhibition and fully illustrated catalog describe an inner voyage, an attempt to make existence more understandable in a flow of impulses and impressions.Exhibitions: Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 16.6.–9.9.2018Museo d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto (MART), Rovereto, 5.10.2018–13.1.2019Kunsthalle Schirn, Frankfurt, 28.2.–26.5.2019

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