Summer 2025
Visceral, indelible landscapes
Altered states of consciousness
Embodied experiences
Reparation
The stuff of living
Copies of all the books included in our summer 15 Reads are available to browse at CAMPLE LINE or to borrow from Thornhill Library
This selection of books arose from reading Ursula K. Le Guin’s ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’, together with Donna Haraway’s companion essay. Both writers insist upon the value of stories as containers for ‘the stuff of living’, and storytelling as a means to explore ways of experiencing the world.
In these 15 Reads, this is often realised through a character’s altered state of consciousness. Truths, hidden histories and memories surface, or a character’s deepest, sometimes darkest emotions are released, creating moments of liberation, reparation, or deep connection.
As always, our 15 Reads express our commitment to independent publishers and celebrates women’s voices, stories from marginalised communities and works in translation.
Ursula K. Le Guin
The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction
It is human nature to put something practical or precious into a bag, basket or leaf, Ursula K. Le Guin tells us.
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, with an introduction by Donna Haraway and drawings by Lee Bul, Cosmogenesis, 2024.
It is human nature to put something practical or precious into a bag, basket or leaf, Ursula K. Le Guin tells us. Taking Elizabeth Fisher’s Carrier Bag Theory and Virginia Woolf’s desire to ‘tell a different’ story in ‘A Room of One’s Own’, Le Guin arrives at the notion of the book as a container, one for gathering and holding words. Containers such as these are not for collecting reductive, conflict narratives but instead they are for ‘beginnings without endings, of initiations, of losses, of transformations and translations’. A carrier bag of stories, Le Guin writes, is infinitely capacious, holding lightly the collected seeds and possibilities for dreaming.
Donna Haraway’s short companion essay is inspired by three bags (mochilas) she was given when working in Colombia, which she describes as containing ‘the stuff of living’. Haraway realises that by carrying and wearing these bags she has no choice but to respond to the stories of identity, visibility, reparation, pasts and futures they hold. As such, she insists upon the importance both for telling a particular kind of story and attending to how each story is told.
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, with an introduction by Donna Haraway and drawings by Lee Bul, Cosmogenesis, 2024.
It is human nature to put something practical or precious into a bag, basket or leaf, Ursula K. Le Guin tells us. Taking Elizabeth Fisher’s Carrier Bag Theory and Virginia Woolf’s desire to ‘tell a different’ story in ‘A Room of One’s Own’, Le Guin arrives at the notion of the book as a container, one for gathering and holding words. Containers such as these are not for collecting egoic, reductive, conflict narratives but instead they are for ‘beginnings without endings, of initiations, of losses, of transformations and translations’. A carrier bag of stories Le Guin writes, is infinitely capacious, holding lightly the collected seeds and possibilities for dreaming.
Donna Haraway’s companion essay or conversation with Le Guin’s essay is inspired by three bags (mochilas) she was given when working in Colombia, which she describes as containing ‘the stuff of living’. Haraway realises that by carrying and wearing these bags she has no choice but to respond to the stories of identity, visibility, reparation, pasts and futures they hold. As such, she insists upon the importance both for telling a particular kind of story and attending to how each story is told.
Alexis Wright Carpentaria
History, myth, magical realism and the ancient knowledge of the Dreamtime are part and parcel of life for the First Nations people living in shanty settlements beside the town of Desperance on the wild Gulf of Carpentaria, northern Australia.
Alexis Wright, Carpentaria, (2006), Constable, 2008.
History, myth, magical realism and the ancient knowledge of the Dreamtime are part and parcel of life for the First Nations people living in shanty settlements beside the town of Desperance on the wild Gulf of Carpentaria in northern Australia. Weaving the personal with the political, Alexis Wright, a descendent of the Waanji people of Carpentaria, draws upon her work on Aboriginal land rights to tell of a community in crisis. Caught up in the machinations of an international mining corporation whose violent acts are echoed in destructive storms, this is a story laced with humour, enduring love, and kinship bonds. Complex and always believable Wright’s characters shift between conscious states and the spirit world of the Dreaming, where the embodied knowledge of ancient pathways across land and sea ultimately ensure survival.
Alexis Wright, Carpentaria, (2006), Constable, 2008.
History, myth, magical realism and the ancient knowledge of the Dreamtime are part and parcel of life for the First Nations people living in shanty settlements beside the town of Desperance on the wild Gulf of Carpentaria in northern Australia. Weaving the personal with the political, Alexis Wright, a descendent of the Waanji people of Carpentaria, draws upon her work on Aboriginal land rights to tell of a community in crisis. Caught up in the machinations of an international mining corporation whose violent acts are echoed in destructive storms, this is a story laced with humour, enduring love, and kinship bonds. Complex and always believable Wright’s characters shift between conscious states and the spirit world of the Dreaming, where the embodied knowledge of ancient pathways across land and sea ultimately ensure survival.
Tarjei Vesaas
The Ice Palace
It is wintertime when Unn arrives at the school. The lake is frozen, and the ice palace is forming from the freezing waterfall. Quiet and self-contained, Unn attracts Siss, the most popular girl in the class.
Tarjei Vesaas, The Ice Palace, (1963), translated by Elizabeth Rokkan, Penguin Classics, 2018.
It is wintertime when Unn arrives at the school. The lake is frozen, and the ice palace is forming from the freezing waterfall. Quiet and self-contained, Unn attracts Siss, the most popular girl in the class. They spend an unforgettable evening together during which a promise is made, one which Siss holds onto at all costs. It is only with the coming of Spring, the lengthening days and the thawing of the intoxicatingly beautiful ice palace that Siss understands forgiveness is possible and is consequently released from her own mental darkness.
Tarjei Vesaas, The Ice Palace, (1963), translated by Elizabeth Rokkan, Penguin Classics, 2018.
It is wintertime when Unn arrives at the school. The lake is frozen, and the ice palace is forming from the freezing waterfall. Quiet and self-contained, Unn attracts Siss, the most popular girl in the class. They spend an unforgettable evening together during which a promise is made, one which Siss holds onto at all costs. It is only with the coming of Spring, the lengthening days and the thawing of the intoxicatingly beautiful ice palace that Siss understands forgiveness is possible and is consequently released from her own mental darkness.
For younger readers: Barbara Newhall Follett
The House Without Windows
‘She landed on a beach of white sand, so fine that it was impossible to hold’ and ‘Far off the snow-topped mountains were sea waves capped with foam’ are two chapter titles in Barbara Newhall Follett’s The House Without Windows.
Barbara Newhall Follett, The House Without Windows, (1927), illustrated by Jackie Morris, Hamish Hamilton, 2019
‘She landed on a beach of white sand, so fine that it was impossible to hold’, ‘Far off the snow-topped mountains were sea waves capped with foam’ are two chapter titles in Barbara Newhall Follett’s The House Without Windows, begun when she was just 8 years old, and finished in 1926 at the age of 12. The original version was lost in a fire and she painstakingly re-wrote it using her father’s typewriter. On publication, it became a best seller. Filled with the wide-eyed wonder of childhood, it tells of the adventure of Eepersip, a young girl who runs away into the wild where she revels in new-found freedom and her proximity to wild creatures. Written in her room, the book is an imaginative escape into a world where humans and nature are not separate, and being in nature is complete immersion. Eepersip moves through the story like a butterfly, flitting lightly amongst nature, pursuing her adventure, but also settling to absorb, observe and be still. In 1939, Follett walked out of her home and was never seen again, the mystery of her disappearance never solved.
Barbara Newhall Follett, The House Without Windows, (1927), illustrated by Jackie Morris, Hamish Hamilton, 2019
‘She landed on a beach of white sand, so fine that it was impossible to hold’, ‘Far off the snow-topped mountains were sea waves capped with foam’ are two chapter titles in Barbara Newhall Follett’s The House Without Windows, begun when she was just 8 years old, and finished in 1926 at the age of 12. The original version was lost in a fire and she painstakingly re-wrote it using her father’s typewriter. On publication, it became a best seller. Filled with the wide-eyed wonder of childhood, it tells of the adventure of Eepersip, a young girl who runs away into the wild where she revels in new-found freedom and her proximity to wild creatures. Written in her room, the book is an imaginative escape into a world where humans and nature are not separate, and being in nature is complete immersion. Eepersip moves through the story like a butterfly, flitting lightly amongst nature, pursuing her adventure, but also settling to absorb, observe and be still. In 1939, Follett walked out of her home and was never seen again, the mystery of her disappearance never solved.
Clarice Lispector
Near to the Wild Heart
Joanna exists for the most part beyond love (yet at times she loves intensely), beyond God (yet religion is a constant point of reference), beyond lasting human relations (although she achieves fleeting moments of communion).
Clarice Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart, (1943), edited and with an introduction by Benjamin Moser, translated by Alison Entrekin, Penguin Modern Classics, 2012.
Joanna exists for the most part beyond love (yet at times she loves intensely), beyond God (yet religion is a constant point of reference), beyond lasting human relations (although she achieves fleeting moments of communion). Her life is relayed in fragments, each a discrete often sharply contrasting state moving from dreamlike sequences to febrile bodily consciousness, from incandescent joy to alienation. Despite recognising the impossibility of maintaining lasting sympathetic connection with others, Joanna arrives at a self-acceptance, promising that she will come into her own to become sure, fearless, strong, brutal, whole, beautiful. In short, a woman. As Clarice Lispector charts Joanna’s journey from childhood to maturity she reaches for a language which can express Joanna’s shifting conscious states. Absorbing her readers in her character’s world we see that there is little in the fabricated material world which can satisfy and nourish the soul, but instead Lispector shows us that fulfilment lies in reparation with ourselves and in meaningful relationships with others.
Clarice Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart, (1943), edited and with an introduction by Benjamin Moser, translated by Alison Entrekin, Penguin Modern Classics, 2012.
Joanna exists for the most part beyond love (yet at times she loves intensely), beyond God (yet religion is a constant point of reference), beyond lasting human relations (although she achieves fleeting moments of communion). Her life is relayed in fragments, each a discrete often sharply contrasting state moving from dreamlike sequences to febrile bodily consciousness, from incandescent joy to alienation. Despite recognising the impossibility of maintaining lasting sympathetic connection with others, Joanna arrives at a self-acceptance, promising that she will come into her own to become sure, fearless, strong, brutal, whole, beautiful. In short, a woman. As Clarice Lispector charts Joanna’s journey from childhood to maturity she reaches for a language which can express Joanna’s shifting conscious states. Absorbing her readers in her character’s world we see that there is little in the fabricated material world which can satisfy and nourish the soul, but instead Lispector shows us that fulfilment lies in reparation with ourselves and in meaningful relationships with others.
Katherine Mansfield
Bliss and Other Stories
The worlds Katherine Mansfield creates are places of shifting emotions where beauty and betrayal exist in equal measure, where the sentient life of the mind is often more vivid, more vital, more alive than life’s realities.
Katherine Mansfield, Bliss and Other Stories, (1920), Mint Editions, 2020.
The worlds Katherine Mansfield creates are places of shifting emotions where beauty and betrayal exist in equal measure, where the sentient life of the mind is often more vivid, more vital, more alive than life’s realities. Finely calibrated, Mansfield’s characters exist mostly in spiritual isolation coming together for a moment before their new-found affinity collapses into disillusionment. Locations in New Zealand, France, Germany and London mirror Mansfield’s peripatetic life, whilst her swift character sketches reveal the eye of an acute observer of those like herself who lived on the periphery.
Katherine Mansfield, Bliss and Other Stories, (1920), Mint Editions, 2020.
The worlds Katherine Mansfield creates are places of shifting emotions where beauty and betrayal exist in equal measure, where the sentient life of the mind is often more vivid, more vital, more alive than life’s realities. Finely calibrated, Mansfield’s characters exist mostly in spiritual isolation coming together for a moment before their new-found affinity collapses into disillusionment. Locations in New Zealand, France, Germany and London mirror Mansfield’s peripatetic life, whilst her swift character sketches reveal the eye of an acute observer of those like herself who lived on the periphery.
Marianne Moore
New Collected Poems of Marianne Moore
The bloody battle of Kurukshetra has ended, but as the funeral pyres burn and the mourning rituals are conducted, five women, widows of foot soldiers killed in the battle, are taken to the royal palace as dasis to the newly widowed young princess.
Marianne Moore, New Collected Poems of Marianne Moore, edited by Heather Cass White, Faber, 2017.
There is a finely calibrated liberation to be found in Marianne Moore’s poetry. In her close attention to things in unexpected contexts, Moore moves with ease between a household object or a wild creature to considerations of ethics, history, art and war. Her use of collected phrases from popular culture, her ability to show the enormity of life in the smallest of moments, the most modest of objects, creatures, or situations, is both intimate and expansive: The mind ‘is an enchanted thing/like the glaze on a katydid-wing/subdivided by sun/til the nettings are legion’. Hers is ‘a vision of the world that never stoops to mere fancy’, John Burnside wrote of Moore’s poetry, for she ‘understands the power of the mind to illuminate and constantly to renew the given’.
Marianne Moore, New Collected Poems of Marianne Moore, edited by Heather Cass White, Faber, 2017.
There is a finely calibrated liberation to be found in Marianne Moore’s poetry. In her close attention to things in unexpected contexts, Moore moves with ease between a household object or a wild creature to considerations of ethics, history, art and war. Her use of collected phrases from popular culture, her ability to show the enormity of life in the smallest of moments, the most modest of objects, creatures, or situations, is both intimate and expansive: The mind ‘is an enchanted thing/like the glaze on a katydid-wing/subdivided by sun/til the nettings are legion’. Hers is ‘a vision of the world that never stoops to mere fancy’, John Burnside wrote of Moore’s poetry, for she ‘understands the power of the mind to illuminate and constantly to renew the given’.
For younger readers: Frances Hodgson Burnett
The Secret Garden
Orphaned Mary Lennox is sent from India to live in her uncle’s gloomy house on the Yorkshire Moors. Lonely and lost with only her maid for company, Mary is forced to seek distraction in the gardens.
Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden, (1911), Cherrystone Publishing, 2024.
Orphaned Mary Lennox is sent from India to live in her uncle’s gloomy house on the Yorkshire Moors. Lonely and lost with only her maid for company, Mary is forced to seek distraction in the gardens. There she takes a liking to a robin whose antics lead her to discover a key buried in the soil; the key to the garden which she had heard tell has been locked for ten years. The discovery marks the beginning of Mary’s transformation from an unhappy contrary little girl and heralds an encounter with another of the house’s secrets. This is a story of reparation, of friendship, of childhood autonomy and the healing power of the natural world.
Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden, (1911), Cherrystone Publishing, 2024.
Orphaned Mary Lennox is sent from India to live in her uncle’s gloomy house on the Yorkshire Moors. Lonely and lost with only her maid for company, Mary is forced to seek distraction in the gardens. There she takes a liking to a robin whose antics lead her to discover a key buried in the soil; the key to the garden which she had heard tell has been locked for ten years. The discovery marks the beginning of Mary’s transformation from an unhappy contrary little girl and heralds an encounter with another of the house’s secrets. This is a story of reparation, of friendship, of childhood autonomy and the healing power of the natural world.
Judith Hermann
We Would Have Told Each Other Everything
Three auto fictional essays written for the annual Poetics Lectures at the Goethe University, Frankfurt. Three interconnected pieces which examine the processes and psychological states which writing demands.
Judith Hermann, We Would Have Told Each Other Everything, (2023), translated by Kathy Derbyshire, Granta, 2025.
Three auto fictional essays written for the annual Poetics Lectures at the Goethe University, Frankfurt. Three interconnected pieces which examine the processes and psychological states which writing demands. Three parts exploring the act of writing and the necessary dreamlike state in which, for Judith Hermann, memory becomes story. This is a ‘sentient’, ‘haptic’ state in which she seeks ‘the ungraspable reality’, where she waits ‘for a widening of the world’. It is on this threshold between memory and story, dream and lived experience that hidden truths are revealed during recollections about family, relationships and the places she has called home. Hermann tells us however that not everything in life translates into story, for only ambiguity opens possibilities for story-telling.
Judith Hermann, We Would Have Told Each Other Everything, (2023), translated by Kathy Derbyshire, Granta, 2025.
Three auto fictional essays written for the annual Poetics Lectures at the Goethe University, Frankfurt. Three interconnected pieces which examine the processes and psychological states which writing demands. Three parts exploring the act of writing and the necessary dreamlike state in which, for Judith Hermann, memory becomes story. This is a ‘sentient’, ‘haptic’ state in which she seeks ‘the ungraspable reality’, where she waits ‘for a widening of the world’. It is on this threshold between memory and story, dream and lived experience that hidden truths are revealed during recollections about family, relationships and the places she has called home. Hermann tells us however that not everything in life translates into story, for only ambiguity opens possibilities for story-telling.
John Berger and Jean Mohr
A Fortunate Man: The Story of a Country Doctor
A remarkable book first published in 1967, with text by John Berger and photographs by Jean Mohr, A Fortunate Man follows the daily working life of rural local GP Dr John Sassall, as he visits patients and responds to local emergencies.
John Berger and Jean Mohr, A Fortunate Man: The Story of a Country Doctor, (1967), Granta, 1989 edition
A remarkable book first published in 1967, with text by John Berger and photographs by Jean Mohr, A Fortunate Man follows the daily working life of rural local GP Dr John Sassall, as he visits patients and responds to local emergencies. Sassall invited Berger and Mohr to live with him and his family for six weeks and, with his patients’ permission, join him at the clinic and on visits and call-outs. He attends to a woodman whose leg is trapped under a fallen tree; an elderly woman with pneumonia; to Hugh who he diagnoses with an infection possibly indicating diabetes, and so forth. The outcome was deeply original and revelatory of the dynamics between the doctor and the community body that he served – what Berger himself referred to as a ‘sociological study of a medical country practice.’ Jean Mohr’s photographs of Sassall at work and of community members in various settings – the surgery, the village hall and the surrounding landscape – are powerfully humanising: ‘Sometimes a landscape seems to be less a setting for the life of its inhabitants than a curtain behind which their struggles, achievements and accidents take place.’
John Berger and Jean Mohr, A Fortunate Man: The Story of a Country Doctor, (1967), Granta, 1989 edition
A remarkable book first published in 1967, with text by John Berger and photographs by Jean Mohr, A Fortunate Man follows the daily working life of rural local GP Dr John Sassall, as he visits patients and responds to local emergencies. Sassall invited Berger and Mohr to live with him and his family for six weeks and, with his patients’ permission, join him at the clinic and on visits and call-outs. He attends to a woodman whose leg is trapped under a fallen tree; an elderly woman with pneumonia; to Hugh who he diagnoses with an infection possibly indicating diabetes, and so forth. The outcome was deeply original and revelatory of the dynamics between the doctor and the community body that he served – what Berger himself referred to as a ‘sociological study of a medical country practice.’ Jean Mohr’s photographs of Sassall at work and of community members in various settings – the surgery, the village hall and the surrounding landscape – are powerfully humanising: ‘Sometimes a landscape seems to be less a setting for the life of its inhabitants than a curtain behind which their struggles, achievements and accidents take place.’
Marcia Douglas
The Jamaica Kollection of the Shante Dream Arkive. being dreamity, algoriddims, chants and riffs
The arrival of the mango in the ‘salt-and-sugar’ island of Jamaica; Zora Neale Hurston’s lost camera; a sealed box of truths, a sealed box of lies; atoms of runaway slaves in empty rum bottles; the noise of ‘herstory’, are some of the endangered entries in the dream arkive, collected together with 20A’s journey across America in retreat from immigration officers
Marcia Douglas The Jamaica Kollection of the Shante Dream Arkive. being dreamity, algoriddims, chants and riffs, New Directions Publishing, 2025.
The arrival of the mango in the ‘salt-and-sugar’ island of Jamaica; Zora Neale Hurston’s lost camera; a sealed box of truths, a sealed box of lies; atoms of runaway slaves in empty rum bottles; the noise of ‘herstory’, are some of the endangered entries in the dream arkive, collected together with 20A’s journey across America in retreat from immigration officers. Here in this ‘arkive of the unarkivable’, memory is as fleeting as the migrating dragonfly. Here the past blurs with or fissures through the present and the land holds three hundred years of running, hurricane, ecological change, losing and finding. To recover these stories is to journey deep into the ‘dreamstate’ expressed on the page in poetry, prose, reggae rhythms and image. In this altered state a slave child’s laugh ‘reverbs’, catching ‘the echo of a dub tune on a radio/a dog’s broken bark/in a riff of a dreaming yard/bromeliads blooming/the heh-heh of a woman come back from the dead’.
Marcia Douglas The Jamaica Kollection of the Shante Dream Arkive. being dreamity, algoriddims, chants and riffs, New Directions Publishing, 2025.
The arrival of the mango in the ‘salt-and-sugar’ island of Jamaica; Zora Neale Hurston’s lost camera; a sealed box of truths, a sealed box of lies; atoms of runaway slaves in empty rum bottles; the noise of ‘herstory’, are some of the endangered entries in the dream arkive, collected together with 20A’s journey across America in retreat from immigration officers. Here in this ‘arkive of the unarkivable’, memory is as fleeting as the migrating dragonfly. Here the past blurs with or fissures through the present and the land holds three hundred years of running, hurricane, ecological change, losing and finding. To recover these stories is to journey deep into the ‘dreamstate’ expressed on the page in poetry, prose, reggae rhythms and image. In this altered state a slave child’s laugh ‘reverbs’, catching ‘the echo of a dub tune on a radio/a dog’s broken bark/in a riff of a dreaming yard/bromeliads blooming/the heh-heh of a woman come back from the dead’.
Leonora Carrington
The Debutante and Other Stories
Nothing is sacred with no situation beyond satire in Leonora Carrington’s darkly comic, surreal and decadent tales, where childlike innocence and the horrific are interchangeable. Drawing upon her own extraordinary life, the everyday is transformed into wild transgressive journeys into the subconscious.
Leonora Carrington, The Debutante and Other Stories, with a foreword by Sheila Heti, an afterword by Marina Warner and an alphabetical biography by Chloe Aridjis, Silver Press, 2017.
Nothing is sacred with no situation beyond satire in Leonora Carrington’s darkly comic, surreal and decadent tales, where childlike innocence and the horrific are interchangeable. Drawing upon her own extraordinary life, the everyday is transformed into wild transgressive journeys into the subconscious. There, in what Marina Warner describes as Leonora Carrington’s ‘polymorphously organic universe’, liberation from social expectation occurs often in the company of animals or through animalistic transformation. In each newly enchanted world, social codes and religious teachings are transgressed, as passions, fears and pleasures are released.
Leonora Carrington, The Debutante and Other Stories, with a foreword by Sheila Heti, an afterword by Marina Warner and an alphabetical biography by Chloe Aridjis, Silver Press, 2017.
Nothing is sacred with no situation beyond satire in Leonora Carrington’s darkly comic, surreal and decadent tales, where childlike innocence and the horrific are interchangeable. Drawing upon her own extraordinary life, the everyday is transformed into wild transgressive journeys into the subconscious. There, in what Marina Warner describes as Leonora Carrington’s ‘polymorphously organic universe’, liberation from social expectation occurs often in the company of animals or through animalistic transformation. In each newly enchanted world, social codes and religious teachings are transgressed, as passions, fears and pleasures are released.
Wieslaw Myśliwski
Stone Upon Stone
Irreverent yet pragmatic, Szymek Pietruska is a born survivor whose memories centre around an unnamed Polish village. His is a character whose past is as vivid as his present situation: crippled by an injury but attempting to build a family tomb.
Wieslaw Myśliwski, Stone Upon Stone, (1999), translated by Bill Johnstone, Archipelago Books, 2011.
Irreverent yet pragmatic, Szymek Pietruska is a born survivor whose memories centre around an unnamed Polish village. His is a character whose past is as vivid as his present situation: crippled by an injury but attempting to build a family tomb. Spanning the violence and upheavals of the twentieth century, Szymek’s life is marked by endurance and resistance, his memories encompassing family, partisan struggles, feuds, inebriated evenings and a life-long attempt to escape the drudgery of subsistence farming. Ironically, although Szymek begrudges working the land, he understands that it is the earth which gives him life and to which he will be returned: ‘It rocks you and rocks you till you’re unborn, unconceived, once again.’
Wieslaw Myśliwski, Stone Upon Stone, (1999), translated by Bill Johnstone, Archipelago Books, 2011.
Irreverent yet pragmatic, Szymek Pietruska is a born survivor whose memories centre around an unnamed Polish village. His is a character whose past is as vivid as his present situation: crippled by an injury but attempting to build a family tomb. Spanning the violence and upheavals of the twentieth century, Szymek’s life is marked by endurance and resistance, his memories encompassing family, partisan struggles, feuds, inebriated evenings and a life-long attempt to escape the drudgery of subsistence farming. Ironically, although Szymek begrudges working the land, he understands that it is the earth which gives him life and to which he will be returned: ‘It rocks you and rocks you till you’re unborn, unconceived, once again.’
Dorthe Nors
A Line in the World: A Year on the North Sea Coast
Part travelogue, part a search for identity, part an accounting of the fallout of southern Africa’s complex colonial history, this is a story told from multiple perspectives, the main protagonists being documentary film maker Laurentina and her boyfriend.
Dorthe Nors, A Line in the World: A Year on the North Sea Coast, (2021), translated by Caroline Waight, with illustrations by Signe Parkins, Pushkin Press, 2023.
The journey begins with a line, a line of ‘living coastline’; the ‘fragile’ borderland between wild sea and exposed landscape, a line that is ‘always becoming, always, dying’ as storms shape its contours and the characteristics of its people. This is a line encompassing geographical, historical and bodily knowledge, extending from Skagen in the north, along the Jutland coast, to Amsterdam’s canals. This is a cartography which holds stories of migration and return, of survival and loss and Nors’ own origin story. Understood not as a geography to be conquered, managed or conversely romanticised, but as a line which is felt, understood and travelled along as Nors attempts to grasp its essence.
Dorthe Nors, A Line in the World: A Year on the North Sea Coast, (2021), translated by Caroline Waight, with illustrations by Signe Parkins, Pushkin Press, 2023.
The journey begins with a line, a line of ‘living coastline’; the ‘fragile’ borderland between wild sea and exposed landscape, a line that is ‘always becoming, always, dying’ as storms shape its contours and the characteristics of its people. This is a line encompassing geographical, historical and bodily knowledge, extending from Skagen in the north, along the Jutland coast, to Amsterdam’s canals. This is a cartography which holds stories of migration and return, of survival and loss and Nors’ own origin story. Understood not as a geography to be conquered, managed or conversely romanticised, but as a line which is felt, understood and travelled along as Nors attempts to grasp its essence.
Solvej Balle
On the Calculation of Volume
Here is a character in existential crisis, who somehow slipped out of progressive time, awakening each day to the same 18 November, reliving the same weather patterns, the same bird song, the same activities her husband undertakes
Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume, Book 1, (2020), translated by Barbara J. Haveland, Faber, 2024.
Here is a character in existential crisis, who somehow slipped out of progressive time, awakening each day to the same 18th November, reliving the same weather patterns, the same bird song, the same activities her husband undertakes. But she is the only one who recognises these diurnal repetitions, and she is the only one able to create variety in the day. At first this brings freedom as nothing matters for there are no consequences, but as the same day continues to replicate, Tara becomes increasingly isolated. As she searches for a means to restore time’s flow, Tara records each variation in her otherwise monotonous day: the burn on her hand healing, objects remaining where she leaves them, planets continuing to orbit the sun.
Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume, Book 1, (2020), translated by Barbara J. Haveland, Faber, 2024.
Here is a character in existential crisis, who somehow slipped out of progressive time, awakening each day to the same 18th November, reliving the same weather patterns, the same bird song, the same activities her husband undertakes. But she is the only one who recognises these diurnal repetitions, and she is the only one able to create variety in the day. At first this brings freedom as nothing matters for there are no consequences, but as the same day continues to replicate, Tara becomes increasingly isolated. As she searches for a means to restore time’s flow, Tara records each variation in her otherwise monotonous day: the burn on her hand healing, objects remaining where she leaves them, planets continuing to orbit the sun.