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Powell's Staff:
Five Book Friday: In Memoriam
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Every year, the booksellers at Powell’s submit their Top Fives: their five favorite books that were released in 2023. It’s a list that, when put together, shows just how varied and interesting the book tastes of Powell’s booksellers are. I highly recommend digging into the recommendations — we would never lead you astray — but today...
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Brontez Purnell:
Powell’s Q&A: Brontez Purnell, author of ‘Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt’
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Rachael P.:
Starter Pack: Where to Begin with Ursula K. Le Guin
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Customer Comments
Andrew Daily has commented on (8) products
On Late Style Music & Literature Against the Grain
by
Edward W Said
Andrew Daily
, May 16, 2009
It is fitting that Edward Said's long-promised meditation on "late work" - works of art produced in the twilight of an artist's career - is itself a "late work," uncompleted before his untimely death in 2003. What we have then is only fragments - appropriately, fragments are what Said is most interested in in this book. Taking Theordor Adorno's essays on late-period Beethoven as a starting point, Said attempts to theorize some properties of the late work of art: it is discordant; it is fragmented, in that it does not achieve a total, holistic, coherent unity; it is produced primarily for the interest of the artist, with little care for the work's reception; and it is often "late" in that is is ahead of its time. Said offers as an example the way in which certain moments in Beethoven's 9th Symphony and late sonatas constitute an uncanny glimpse at what Mahler and Schoenberg would explore almost a century later. Said continues his discussion across a number of artists - including Thomas Mann, Benjamin Britten, Lampedusa, Visconti, Mozart, Richard Strauss and Jean Genet, among others. It is a fascinating little book, and a break from many of Said's more familiar works in that it lacks any immediate political import. The Palestine/Israel struggle, on which Said wrote extensively, is almost totally absent from this return to aesthetic reflection. It is as if Said returns full-circle to his early critical work in "Beginnings." I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in music, film and literature, particularly in those late works of famous artists, those "catastrophes" as Adorno said, that both recap a life and point forward to future lives. It can be read in an afternoon.
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Under the Sign of Saturn: Essays
by
Susan Sontag
Andrew Daily
, August 05, 2008
Of Sontag's work, her collection "Against Interpretation" and the long essay "On Photography" are the most popular. For my money, however, "Under the Sign of Saturn" contains her most brilliant work. From the opening essay - ostensibly about Paul Goodman - in which she extols the virtues of solitude and hard thinking, through a penetrating essay on the fetishism of fascism, on to a superb encomium to Roland Barthes, every essay sparkles with Sontag's characteristic wit and insight. This volume also contains one of the single best essays (alongside Hannah Arendt's introduction to "Illumination") on the much-celebrated Walter Benjamin. And, as is the case with all her work, Sontag unfolds difficult ideas in clear and direct prose.
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Q
by
Luther Blissett
Andrew Daily
, August 04, 2008
What a strange beast of a book this is. Part historical novel, part spy thriller, part philosophical rumination, part radical political manifesto, this book portrays the history of the radical reformation as an allegory of our own troubled days. All written by four authors posing as one. The book opens at Frankenhausen, the climactic battle of the German Peasant's War (1524/5). A charismatic former monk, Thomas Muntzer, led a largely unarmed peasant army against the forces of the Holy Roman Empire, believing God would intervene and bring victory. The result is not hard to predict. We meet the main character (whose name varies) attempting to escape the resulting massacre. The rest of the book follows the narrator's trail across Europe, from one heretical sect to another, all plotting to overthrow the existing powers and establish a heaven on earth, contra the landlords and the Church. He is haunted and blocked at every turn by Q, a sinister papal agent. The book is an allegory of the fortunes of radical, particularly radical Italian politics, in the late 20th/early 21st centuries. The novel's closest contemporaries are Umberto Eco and Thomas Pynchon, in that it is a crowded, sprawling, entertaining, hilarious, anarchic, messy joy of a novel, one that pleases at many levels, from straight-ahead thriller on to a novel of ideas.
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Notebook Of A Return To The Native Land
by
Aime Cesaire
Andrew Daily
, April 20, 2008
Aimé Césaire died on Thursday, at the age of 94. Discussions are ongoing about transferring his remains to the Pantheon in Paris - France' s highest honor to her poets, statesmen and heroes (others buried there include Victor Hugo, Voltaire, Rousseau, Zola, Jaurès, Schoelcher). This book will remain his lasting testament, a long prose poem, simultaneously enigmatic and topical, that more than any other captured the vicissitudes of being both French and black, of existing at that liminal space between Europe and the America. This poem overflows with imagery, coined words, long lines and unique meters, thunderous ideas: the whole of life, of Martinique, of France, of the great dilemmas of the 20th century are in here. André Breton thought it might be the greatest poem of the 20th century. I have no doubts. A thousand years from now, when our civilization fades to a distant memory, Césaire, alongside Picasso and Schoenberg, will, I believe, be remembered as capturing the true predicament of our 20th century lives.
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G.: A Novel (Man Booker Prize Winner)
by
John Berger
Andrew Daily
, October 13, 2007
John Berger's "G" is one of the stranger novels of the 20th century, and certainly one of the strangest to capture the Booker prize. Putatively a retelling of the Don Juan myth, Berger's account of the eponymous anti-hero's sexual conquests also unwraps the history of the opening decades of the 20th century. The novel could be considered postmodern in structure and style, but its spirit belongs to both the social novels of the 19th century, and to the Marxian-inspired cultural criticism of Berger's critical works. The book seems to redeem the promise of his oft-quoted line, that "never again will a single story be told as though it were the only one." This approach fractures the narrative, between G's story, long digressions on the history of flight, the Italian working class and Italian nationalism, as well as Berger's own musings on sex, history and death. The novel can be a hard slog but the payoff is immense. It captures, without the pomposity or pedantry of recent postmodern "total" novels, the whole breadth of the experience of an individual human life.
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In The Skin Of A Lion
by
Michael Ondaatje
Andrew Daily
, May 10, 2007
Ondaatje's "The English Patient", winner of the Booker Prize and adapted into a wildly popular (and unfairly melodramatic) movie, is his best known and most popular novel. Those who have come to love his prose, however, almost always point to "In the Skin of a Lion" as his greatest work. It is in this book that we first meet Hannah, Hannah's father Patrick (only alluded to, in death, in "English Patient") and the thief Caravaggio. In spare, poetic prose, Ondaatje traces Patrick from his boyhood in a rural lumber camp through his life, loves, and eventual fatherhood in Toronto's immigrant community of the interwar period. In the process, through Patrick's loves, friends, job, and eventual desperate act, Ondaatje also weaves the story of Toronto's rise as a city, the joys and pains of its multi-ethnic working classes, and its history of radical politics. "In the Skin of a Lion" is Ondaatje's finest book, and forms a pair with "The English Patient." It in truth lends "EP" a greater resonance and depth, filling in some of the allusions and passions that go unexplained in the latter novel. It is my suspicion that Ondaatje won the Booker on the strength of this novel, and that the award to "EP" was to make up for the previous slight.
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Austerlitz
by
W G Sebald
Andrew Daily
, April 04, 2007
Theodor Adorno once speculated whether there could be any art after Auschwitz. After having stared deep into the abyss, was there enough light left for humanity to stagger forward? Was beauty still possible and the sublime still accessible? Primo Levi's books on his experience immediately put paid to that speculation by rediscovering humanity in the struggle against horror, whether through the occasional instances of solidarity between victims or the overwhelming resilience of Levi himself in resisting annihilation. Sebald's books continue this tradition: attempting to discover what enables men and women to keep on going in the face of, or haunted by the memory of, unspeakable horror. Austerlitz tells the story of a man who wanders across Europe searching for his true origins. A beneficiary of the 'kindertransport' - the organized evacuation of Jewish babies from Central Europe to 'safe' Western European homes - Austerlitz works to uncover the fate of his family. His search stands in for Europe's collective difficulty in dealing with its past. Sebald's style is spare and crystalline; his works of fiction resemble works of non-fiction, puncuated by his own status as the narrator of his fictions, and buttressed by the pictures that accompany the text, underlining his observations with visual evidence. The book is achingly beautiful and expresses a style of comportment, current among many intellectuals, a melancholy, that Americans frequently misinterpret as weakness, but is ultimately thoughtful and memorial, facing fully up to Europe's 'dark century.'
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Wanderlust: A History Of Walking
by
Rebecca Solnit
Andrew Daily
, February 28, 2007
Solnit's book is a masterpiece in sustained mediatation on a single, seemingly inconsequential topic: walking. Beginning with recent discussions among primatologists and anthropologists that the bipedal walking is not only typical of, but fundamental to what it means to be human, Solnit launches into a cultural and political history of walking. She veers from the English romantics to Parisian flaneurs, from religious pilgrimage to protest marches, with diversions such as the history of English parks and gardens, and the regulation of prostitution. Personalities as diverse as Wordsworth, Austen, Baudelaire, Breton, Jack the Ripper, Moses, Frank O'Hara, and Solnit herself make appearances. This book was unfairly lost in the crowd of micro-microhistories that flooded shelves a few years ago - of salt, of cod, etc. - but it stands above the rest as Solnit blends personal account, literary history, and political passion into a fascinating and compelling homage and plea for ambulatory culture and ethics. Read this book as the precursor to her more recent "A Field Guide to Getting Lost."
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(15 of 19 readers found this comment helpful)
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