The Orphanage
Page 16
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The Piano Teacher
Elfriede Jelinek
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‘A bravura performance.’
Shena Mackay, Sunday Times
‘Good books, like haircuts, should fill you with awe, change your life, or make you long for another. Elfriede Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher manages to fulfil at least two of these demands in a reckless recital that is difficult to read and difficult to stop reading. The racy, relentless, consuming style is a metaphor for passion: impossible to ignore.’
Carole Morin, New Statesman & Society
‘Something of a land-mine … a brilliant, deadly book.’
Elizabeth J. Young, City Limits
‘Some may see, in the pain of this novel, its panic and its deep despair, a model of current writing. For others, The Piano Teacher will remain a perverse horror story of a mother’s love taken to its logical, deadly extreme.’
Angela McRobbie, The Independent
288 pages £7.95 (paper)
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The Passport
Herta Müller
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‘A haunting and original novel that’s both satire and elegy.’
Michèle Roberts, City Limits
‘Herta Muller’s language is the purest poetry. Every sentence has the rhythm of poetry, indeed is a poem or a painting.’
Nürnberger Nachrichten
‘Each short chapter has a title like a poem, and that is precisely what they are, cantos, prose poems, rhythmic texts.’
Neue Zürcher Zeitung
96 pages £4.95 (paper)
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The Turning Point
Klaus Mann
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‘The decay of France, the paranoia of Germany, the coming disasters, the shining myth of Europe … A sensitive, cultivated European looks at his world, his life and describes them in apt and telling phrase.’
New York Times
‘The book is a masterpiece, a brutal depiction of a civilization drowning in its own contradictions.’
The Voice
400 pages £9.95 (paper)
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Dreaming of Dead People
Rosalind Belben
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‘Rosalind Belben’s eye for the movement and texture of the natural world is extraordinarily acute and she has a poet’s ear for language. Her book, although apparently a cry of loneliness and deprivation, is also a confession of fulfilment, of endless curiosity for, and love of, life.’
Selina Hastings, The Daily Telegraph
‘Her heroine is a solitary woman who is suffering as she reconciles herself to loneliness and sterility. She tells of her past and recalls, often, the countryside, where being alone is not painful and, if there is no meaning to life, the call to the senses is immediate. The book is beautifully written … it will not, repeat not, make an acceptable Christmas gift for a person living alone.’
Hilary Bailey, The Guardian
‘So extraordinarily good that one wants more, recognizing a writer who can conjure an inner life spirit, can envisage, in unconnected episodes, a complete world: one unified not by external circumstances but by patterns of the writer’s mind.’
Isabel Quigly, The Financial Times
‘Some of the most memorable prose in contemporary fiction.’
Linda Brandon, The Independent
‘Rosalind Belben’s gift or burden is to press on to the painful edge of what is possible. It is an achievement to celebrate.’
Maggie Gee, The Observer
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Is Beauty Good
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Is Beauty Good
Rosalind Belben
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‘A startling record of life preserved in the face of increasing desolation … Rosalind Belben’s gift or burden is to press on to the painful edge of what is possible. It is an achievement to celebrate.’
Maggie Gee, The Observer
‘In her work Belben gives us glimpses of such beauty that one can only choose, like her, to celebrate life.’
Linda Brandon, The Independent
‘Spare, lucid prose, reminiscent of Woolfs The Waves.’
The Guardian
‘Belben has an ability to tap deeply into the process of thought itself with all its fragmentation, puns, jokes, obscenities and moments of transfiguration… In this case beauty is certainly good.’
Elizabeth J. Young, City Limits
128 pages £6.95 (paper)
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Marks of Identity
Juan Goytisolo
‘For me Marks of Identity was my first novel. It was forbidden publication in Spain. For twelve years after that everything I wrote was forbidden in Spain. So I realized that my decision to attack the Spanish language through its culture was correct. But what was most important for me was that I no longer exercised censorship on myself, I was a free writer. This search for and conquest of freedom was the most important thing to me.’
Juan Goytisolo, in an interview with City Limits
‘Juan Goytisolo is by some distance the most important living novelist from Spain… and Marks of Identity is undoubtedly his most important novel, some would say the most significant work by a Spanish writer since 1939, a truly historic milestone.’
The Guardian
‘A masterpiece which should whet the appetites of British readers for the rest of the trilogy.’
Times Literary Supplement
352 pages £8.95 (paper)
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Landscapes After the Battle
Juan Goytisolo
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‘Juan Goytisolo is one of the most rigorous and original contemporary writers. His books are a strange mixture of pitiless autobiography, the debunking of mythologies and conformist fetishes, passionate exploration of the periphery of the West -in particular of the Arab world which he knows intimately — and audacious linguistic experiment. All these qualities feature in Landscapes After the Battle, an unsettling, apocalyptic work, splendidly translated by Helen Lane.’ Mario Vargas Llosa
‘Landscapes After the Battle … a cratered terrain littered with obscenities and linguistic violence, an assault on “good taste” and the reader’s notions of what a novel should be.’ The Observer
‘Fierce, highly unpleasant and very funny.’
The Guardian
‘A short, exhilarating tour of the emergence of pop culture, sexual liberation and ethnic militancy.’
New Statesman
‘Helen Lane’s rendering reads beautifully, capturing the whimsicality and rhythms of the Spanish without sacrificing accuracy, but rightly branching out where literal translation simply does not work.’
Times Literary Supplement
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Forties’ Child
Tom Wakefield
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‘Through his detailed, accurate and incisive observances and remembrances there exudes a natural unforced sentiment which proves both genuinely heartwarming and eminently readable … It�
�s one of those books that cannot be put down, and once finished demands to be read again.’
Time Out
‘Beautifully evoked, touching and immensely readable.’
Gay Times
‘He is able to touch base with the reader somewhere at some time and you know exactly what he means and why it is so important.’
City Limits
‘A tender and original recollection of the way a child puts the amazing world together.’
Edmund Blishen, The Guardian
‘I greatly enjoyed Tom Wakefield’s classic autobiographical account of a wartime Midlands boyhood.’ Bel Mooney, The Times
‘What disarmingly polished scenes they are. Tom Wakefield is one of our most engaging of novelists.’
Valentine Cunningham, TLS
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176 pages £5.95 (paper)
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The Variety Artistes
Tom Wakefield
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‘Wakefield possesses a keen sense of drama and draws some wonderful, almost theatrical “scenes” which can be re-read, enjoyed and savoured, and his characters are full-bodied, living creations who quickly become familiar and memorable. Warm, sensitive and witty.’
Time Out
‘A lovely story … a gentle, humorous parable that says: Watch out — given the chance, there could be a lot more to that compliant old woman than meets the eye.’
New Society
‘Full of humour, tenderness, humanity and confidence in life.’
Gay Scotland
‘Somewhat picaresque, intensely human, richly comic, The Variety Artistes is an absorbing and ultimately deeply moving novel.’
Gay Times
192 pages £6.95 (paper)
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Who Was That Man?
A Present for Mr Oscar Wilde
Neil Bartlett
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‘… touching and exasperating, it makes an elegant and intelligent shelfmate to Richard Ellmann’s biography. Whether or not you appreciate it may give a good indication of how you would really have felt about Wilde himself.’
TLS
‘Always intelligent, often moving but never sentimental, this is a book which is at once critical of, and beautifully sensitive to, gay culture.’
Gay Times
‘This is an extraordinary book. Part detective story, part literary criticism, part social history and part confessional, this “present for Mr Oscar Wilde” reveals what it is like to be gay in a city that, for the most part, pretends you don’t exist.’
i-D
‘A reflection on the links between gay lives today and those of Oscar Wilde, his friends, lovers and acquaintances.’
Capital Gay Book of the Year
256 pages £9,95 (paper) illustrated
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The Life of the Automobile
Ilya Ehrenburg
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‘A Futurist-Expressionist masterpiece, superbly translated.’
Sunday Times
‘A revelation.’
Alan Brien, New Statesman
4 A valuable historical document and an interesting exploration of the ground between analysis and the “fictional” narrative … readable and gripping.’
Huw Beynon, New Society
176 pages £5.95 (paper)
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photograph by Leonore Mau
Born in 1935 Hubert Fichte has, together with Günter Grass and Peter Handke, long been recognized as an outstanding German writer of the 1960s. The posthumous publication in Germany of his nineteen-volume ‘History of Sensitivity’, a counterpoint to Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, has established him as one of the great European writers of the twentieth century. Anthropologist, essayist, journalist and novelist, Hubert Fichte died in 1986.
Serpent’s Tail
4 Blackstock Mews
London N4
FIRST ENGLISH TRANSLATION
‘If I were to be asked who the most important German writers since the end of the Second World War were, I would be left with four names: Arno Schmidt, Günter Grass, Uwe Johnson, Hubert Fichte. In dissimilar forms and directions, four writers of radical innovation.’
Hans Meyer in Neue Rundschau
‘Hubert Fichte, whose work is little known outside Germany, is without a shadow of doubt one of the most individual and innovative European writers of the last twenty years.’
Jean-Luc Moreau in Magazine Littéraire
ISBN 1-85242-161-4
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£6.95/Fiction/US $10.95