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Cover of Mary McCarthy: The Complete Fiction

Library of America

Mary McCarthy: The Complete Fiction

Mary McCarthy

€75.00

Seventy-five years ago Mary McCarthy provoked a scandal with her electrifying debut novel, The Company She Keeps (1942), announcing the arrival of a major new voice in American literature. A candid, thinly-veiled portrait of the late-1930s New York intellectual scene, its penetrating gaze and creative fusion of life and literature — mutual plagiarism, she called it—became the hallmark of McCarthy's fiction, which the Library of America now presents in full for the first time in deluxe collector's edition.

The Oasis (1949), a wicked satire about a failed utopian community, and The Groves of Academe (1952), a pioneering campus novel depicting the insular and often absurd world of academia, burnished her reputation as an acerbic truth-teller, but it was with A Charmed Life (1955), a searing story of small-town infidelity, that McCarthy fully embraced the frank and avant-garde treatment of gender and sexuality that would inspire generations of readers and writers.

In McCarthy's most famous novel, The Group (1963), she depicts the lives of eight Vassar College graduates during the 1930s as they grapple with sex, sexism, money, motherhood, and family. McCarthy's final two novels— Birds of America (1971), a coming of age tale of 19-year-old Peter Levi, who travels to Europe during the 1960s, and Cannibals and Missionaries (1979), a thriller about a group of passengers taken hostage on an airplane by militant hijackers—are both concerned with the state of modern society, from the cross-currents of radical social change to the psychology of terrorism.

Also included are all eight of McCarthy's short stories, four from her collection Cast a Cold Eye (1950), and four collected here for the first time. As a special feature, the second volume contains McCarthy's 1979 essay The Novels that Got Away, on her unfinished fiction.

Published in 2017 ┊ 2220 pages ┊ Language: English

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Cover of Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge

Dorothy, a publishing project

Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge

Renee Gladman

Fiction €16.00

“Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge is the third volume of Renee Gladman’s magnificent, melancholy series about the city-state of Ravicka, or about the architectures of its absence. It is tempting to read the Ravickian books as an extended allegory—of architecture itself, perhaps, except that architecture is already half-allegorical, its every element raised to prefigure whatever meanings can make their way to them. If any can. In Ravicka, meanings—indeed most contact of any kind—remain in abeyance, building, in absentia, the constitutive negative spaces of the narrative. There is a plot; it lays out zones of sheer ambience. Experiences, of which there are many, unfold as a redolent lingering in the structures of immateriality, the radical realities of the insubstantial. Gladman is a philosopher of architecture, though not that of buildings. Rather, she thinks (and writes) the drifts, partitions, and immobilities of identity, affect, communication, the very possibility of being human. Profound, compelling—haunting, even—the story of Ravicka is astonishingly ours.” - Lyn Hejinian

Cover of The Infinite Now

HELA Press

The Infinite Now

Taras Gembik

Fiction €14.00

In The Infinite Now, Taras Gembik crafts an intimate meditation on solitude, faith, and the search for meaning, ten years in the making. Moving between Ukraine and Poland, these twenty-five poems trace a decade-long journey of self-discovery.

Through stark winter evenings and quiet conversations, Gembik's verses explore ancient and universal questions of existence and identity: the nature of God, the comfort of walls and communion with others, the circular path of memory. The collection transforms everyday moments into profound reflections on love, displacement, how to build community, and the possibility of finding home in transience.

Taras Gembik (born Kamin-Kashyrskyi, 1996, lives in Warsaw, Poland) is a poet, curator, performer, and activist. He is the curator of the public programme at Zachęta National Gallery of Warsaw, where in 2024 he also curated, together with Joanna Kordjak, Siergiej Parajanov's retrospective. Since 2018, he has worked with the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw to provide a platform for refugees and those afflicted by the homelessness crisis. After Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, he co-created the Sunflower Solidarity Community Centre, praised in an extensive profile in Frieze Magazine, as part of a dossier on "Forms of Resistance".

Cover of The Rupture Files

Hajar Press

The Rupture Files

Nathan Alexander Moore

Fiction €18.00

Across multiple worlds in upheaval, a curious cast of Black queer characters must choose between what they already know themselves to be and what they might yet become in the cataclysm. A shapeshifter learns to embrace their body as it changes through a lunar cycle. A stranger’s visit disturbs three sisters sheltering from monsters that stalk the land. An archivist hears an irresistible call to the rising ocean as she uncovers a surprising history. A mysterious fire sparks whispers of revolution in the mind of a vampire’s captive consort.

At once tender and audacious, Nathan Alexander Moore’s debut collection tells the stories of extraordinary creatures making impossible but human decisions. Traversing apocalypses both big and small, these captivating tales vibrate with the tensions between loss and growth; self and community; precarity and possibility.

Nathan Alexander Moore is a Black transfemme writer. She is an assistant professor at the University of Colorado Boulder whose research explores Black transfemininity, speculative fictions and temporality. Their debut chapbook, small colossus, was published in 2021, and their fiction was shortlisted for the 2022 Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Award. She was a 2023 Lambda Literary Fellow in poetry.

Cover of We Both Laughed in Pleasure

Nightboat Books

We Both Laughed in Pleasure

Lou Sullivan

Fiction €22.00

Drawn from Lou Sullivan’s meticulously kept journals, this landmark book records the life of arguably the first publicly gay trans man to medically transition.

We Both Laughed In Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan narrates the inner life of a gay trans man moving through the shifting social, political, and medical mores of the second half of the 20th century. Sullivan kept comprehensive journals from age eleven until his AIDS-related death at thirty-nine. Sensual, lascivious, challenging, quotidian and poetic, the diaries complicate and disrupt normative trans narratives. Entries from twenty-four diaries reveal Sullivan’s self-articulation and the complexity of a fascinating and courageous figure.

Edited by: Ellis Martin and Zach Ozma
Introduction by: Susan Stryker

Cover of The Letters of Mina Harker

Semiotext(e)

The Letters of Mina Harker

Dodie Bellamy

Fiction €18.00

In Dodie Bellamy's imagined "sequel" to Bram Stoker's fin de siècle masterpiece Dracula, Van Helsing's plain Jane secretarial adjunct, Mina Harker, is recast as a sexual, independent woman living in San Francisco in the 1980s. The vampire Mina Harker, who possesses the body of author Dodie Bellamy, confesses the most intimate details of her relationships with four vastly different men through past letters. Simultaneously, a plague is let loose in San Francisco-the plague of AIDS.

Bigger-than-life, half goddess, half Bette Davis, Mina sends letter after letter to friends and co-conspirators, holding her reader captive through a display of illusion and longing. Juggling quivering vulnerability on one hand and gossip on the other, Mina spoofs and consumes and spews back up demented reembodiments of trash media and high theory alike. It's all fodder for her ravenous libido and "a messy ambiguous place where pathology meets pleasure." Sensuous and captivating, The Letters of Mina Harker describes one woman's struggles finding the right words to explain her desires and fears without confining herself to one identity.