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  1. Best of 2020: The backlist edition

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  • Best of 2020: The backlist edition

Best of 2020: The backlist edition

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Known and Strange Things by Teju Cole

$22.99 AUD

Category: Anthologies, Essays & Journals

Shortlisted for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay A blazingly intelligent first collection of essays from the award-winning author of Open City and Every Day Is for the Thief. With these pieces on politics, photography, travel, history and literature, Teju Cole solidifies his place as one of today's most powerful and original voices, covering subjects as diverse as Virginia Woolf, W.G Sebald, Instagram, Barack Obama and Boko Haram. Persuasive and provocative, erudite yet accessible, Known and Strange Things is an opportunity to live within Teju Cole's wide-ranging enthusiasms, curiosities and passions, and a chance to see the world in surprising and affecting new frames. ...Show more

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Large_9780330359719

Tirra Lirra by the River by Jessica Anderson

$22.95 AUD

Category: Fiction

Liza used to say that she saw her past life as a string of roughly-graded balls, and so did Hilda have a linear conception of hers, thinking of it as a track with detours. But for some years now I have likened mine to a globe suspended in my head, and ever since the shocking realisation that waste is ir retrievalbe, I have been careful not to let this globe spin to expose the nether side on which my marriage has left its multitude of images.Nora Porteous has spent most of her life waiting to escape. Fleeing from her small-town family and then from her stifling marriage to a mean-spirited husband, Nora arrives finally in London where she creates a new life for herself as a successful dressmaker.Now in her seventies, Nora returns to Queensland to settle into her childhood home.But Nora has been away a long time, and the people and events of her past are not at all like she remembered them. And while some things never change, Nora is about to discover just how selective her 'globe of memory' has been.Tirra Lirra by the River is a moving account of one woman's remarkable life, a beautifully written novel which displays the lyrical brevity of Jessica Anderson's award-winning style. ...Show more

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The Long Prospect by Elizabeth Harrower

$12.95 AUD

Category: Fiction | Series: Text Classics | Reading Level: very good

Sharply observed, bitter and humorous, The Long Prospect is a story of life in an Australian industrial town. Growing up neglected in a seedy boarding house, twelve-year-old Emily Lawrence befriends Max, a middle-aged scientist who encourages her to pursue her intellectual interests. Innocent Emily will face scandal, suburban snobbery and psychological torment. Originally published in 1958, The Long Prospect was described as ranking second only to Patrick White's Voss in postwar Australian literature. ...Show more

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Large_9780141199344

The Time Machine: Penguin English Library by H. G. Wells

$14.99 AUD

Category: Science Fiction & Fantasy | Series: The Penguin English Library

The Penguin English Library Edition of The Time Machine by H. G. Wells 'Great shapes like big machines rose out of the dimness, and cast grotesque black shadows, in which dim spectral Morlocks sheltered from the glare' Chilling, prophetic and hugely influential, The Time Machine sees a Victorian scienti st propel himself into the year 802,701 AD, where he is delighted to find that suffering has been replaced by beauty and contentment in the form of the Eloi, an elfin species descended from man. But he soon realizes that they are simply remnants of a once-great culture - now weak and living in terror of the sinister Morlocks lurking in the deep tunnels, who threaten his very return home. H. G. Wells defined much of modern science fiction with this 1895 tale of time travel, which questions humanity, society, and our place on Earth. The Penguin English Library - 100 editions of the best fiction in English, from the eighteenth century and the very first novels to the beginning of the First World War. ...Show more

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Large_9780140147476

Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner

$19.99 AUD

Category: Fiction

Hotel du Lac is the classic Booker Prize winning novel by Anita Brookner. Into the rarefied atmosphere of the Hotel du Lac timidly walks Edith Hope, romantic novelist and holder of modest dreams. Edith has been exiled from home after embarrassing herself and her friends. She has refused to sacrifice her ideals and remains stubbornly single. But among the pampered women and minor nobility Edith finds Mr Neville, and her chance to escape from a life of humiliating spinsterhood is renewed..."A classic ...a book which will be read with pleasure a hundred years from now". (Spectator). "A smashing love story. It is very romantic. It is also humorous, witty, touching and formidably clever". (The Times). "Hotel du Lac is written with a beautiful grave formality, and it catches at the heart". (Observer). "Her technique as a novelist is so sure and so quietly commanding". (Hilary Mantel, Guardian). "She is one of the great writers of contemporary fiction". (Literary Review). Anita Brookner was born in south London in 1928, the daughter of a Polish immigrant family. She trained as an art historian, and worked at the Courtauld Institute of Art until her retirement in 1988. She published her first novel, A Start in Life, in 1981 and her twenty-fourth, Strangers, in 2009. Hotel du Lac won the 1984 Booker Prize. As well as fiction, Anita Brookner has published a number of volumes of art criticism. ...Show more

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Large_9781590176139

Speedboat by Renata Adler

$28.00 AUD

Category: Fiction | Series: NYRB Classics Ser. | Reading Level: very good

"It has been more than thirty-five years since Renata Adler’s Speedboat charged through the literary establishment, blasting genre walls and pointing the way for a newly liberated way of writing. This unclassifiable work is simultaneously novel, memoir, commonplace book, confession, and critique. It is the story of every man and woman cursed with too much consciousness and too little comprehension, and it is the story of Jen Fein, a journalist negotiating the fraught landscape of contemporary urban America. Her voice is cuttingly perceptive, darkly funny, and always fiercely intelligent as she breaks narrative convention to send dispatches back from the world as she finds it. This new edition of Speedboatwill include an interview between Renata Adler and Guy Trebay discussing the genesis and composition of the book. enata Adler's collage novel Speedboatcaptivates by its jagged and frenetic changes of pitch and tone and voice. She confides, reflects, tells a story, aphorizes, undercuts the aphorism, then undercuts that. If she's cryptic in one paragraph, she's clear in the next. She changes subjects like a brilliant schizophrenic, making irration ...Show more

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Large_9781784871932

The Master and Margarita (Vintage Classics Russians series) by Mikhail Bulgakov

$22.99 AUD

Category: Classics | Series: Vintage Classic Russians Series

THE ORIGINAL AND BEST TRANSLATION BY MICHAEL GLENNY 50th Anniversary Edition Afterwards, when it was frankly too late, descriptions were issued of the man: expensive grey suit, grey beret, one green eye and the other black. He arrives in Moscow one hot summer afternoon with various alarming accomplice s, including a demonic, fast-talking black cat. When he leaves, the asylums are full and the forces of law and order are in disarray. Only the Master, a man devoted to truth, and Margarita, the woman he loves, can resist the devil's onslaught. Brilliant and blackly comic, The Master and Margarita was repressed by Stalin's authorities and only published after the author's death. The Vintage Classic Russians Series: Published for the 100th anniversary of the 1917 Russian Revolution, these are must-have, beautifully designed editions of six epic masterpieces that have survived controversy, censorship and suppression to influence decades of thought and artistic expression. ...Show more

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About Love and Other Stories by Anton Chekhov

$21.95 AUD

Category: Classics | Series: Oxford World's Classics

'the greatest short story writer who has ever lived' Raymond Carver's unequivocal verdict on Chekhov's genius has been echoed many times by writers as diverse as Katherine Mansfield, Somerset Maugham, John Cheever and Tobias Wolf. While his popularity as a playwright has sometimes overshadowed his achie vements in prose, the importance of Chekhov's stories is now recognized by readers as well as by fellow authors. Their themes - alienation, the absurdity and tragedy of human existence - have as much relevance today as when they were written, and these superb new translations capture their modernist spirit. Elusive and subtle, spare and unadorned, the stories in this selection are among Chekhov's most poignant and lyrical. They include well-known pieces such as 'The Lady with the Little Dog', as well as less familiar work like 'Gusev', inspired by Chekhov's travels in the Far East, and 'Rothschild's Violin', a haunting and darkly humorous tale about death and loss. ...Show more

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Portrait with Keys by Ivan Vladislavic

$24.95 AUD

Category: Travel

n the wake of Apartheid, the flotsam and jetsam of the divided past flow over Johannesburg and settle, once the tides recede, all around Ivan Vladislavic, who, patrolling his patch, surveys the changed cityscape and tries to convey for us the nature and significance of those changes. He roams over the g rassy mine-dumps, sifting memories, picking up the odd glittering item here and there, before everything of value gets razed or locked away behind one or other of the city's fortifications. For this is now a city of alarms, locks and security guards, a frontier place whose boundaries are perpetually contested, whose inhabitants are 'a tribe of turnkeys'. Vladislavic, this magpie of mementoes, stands still, watches, and writes: and his astonishing city comes within our reach. ...Show more

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Large_riverjacket

River by Esther Kinsky

$32.99 AUD

Category: Fiction

`After many years I had excised myself from the life I had led in town, just as one might cut a figure out of a landscape or group photo. Abashed by the harm I had wreaked on the picture left behind, and unsure where the cut-out might end up next, I lived a provisional existence. I did so in a place whe re I knew none of my neighbours, where the street names, views, smells and faces were all unfamiliar to me, in a cheaply appointed flat where I would be able to lay my life aside.' In RIVER, a woman moves to a London suburb for reasons that are unclear. She takes long, solitary walks by the River Lea, observing and describing her surroundings and the unusual characters she encounters. Over the course of these wanderings she amasses a collection of found objects and photographs and is drawn into reminiscences of the different rivers which haunted the various stages of her life, from the Rhine, where she grew up, to the Saint Lawrence, the Hooghly, and the banks of the Oder. Written in language that is as precise as it is limpid, RIVER is a remarkable novel, full of poignant images and poetic observations, an ode to nature, edgelands, and the transience of all things human. ...Show more

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Three Novels by Cesar Aira by Cesar Aira

$29.99 AUD

Category: Fiction

3 X Cesar Aira combines three short novels by the cult Argentinian writer in one beautifully designed box set. Irreverent, playful, provocative and prolific, Argentinian author Cesar Aira has written over seventy books and has been acknowledged internationally to be one of the most original and provocat ive authors in world literature. Collected here are three of his novellas, to be published for the very first time in the UK. In Ghosts, an immigrant worker's family are squatting on the haunted construction site of a luxury condominium building. All of the workmen and their families see the ghosts which float around the place, but one teenage girl's interest in them becomes so intense that her mother realizes her life is in the balance. An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter tells of a point in the life of German painter Johann Moritz Rugendas, when he visits Latin America to paint its spectacular landscapes. There, a strange episode interrupts his trip and irreversibly marks him for life. And in The Literary Conference, a young translator called Cesar Aira travels to a literary conference, intent on world domination...Praise for Cesar Aira: "Once you've started reading Aira, you don't want to stop". (Roberto Bolano). "Aira is firmly in the tradition of Jorge Luis Borges and W. G. Sebald". (Los Angeles Times). Cesar Aira was born in Coronel Pringles, Argentina, in 1949, and has lived in Buenos Aires since 1967. One of the most prolific writers in Argentina, Aira has published more than seventy books. ...Show more

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