Bøker utgitt av Daunt Books

Lamps, penknives, paperbacks, mechanical pencils, inflatable headrests. Marcin Wicha's mother Joanna was a collector of everyday objects. She found intrinsic - and often idiosyncratic - value in each item. When she dies and leaves her apartment intact, Wicha is left to sort through her things.The objects are the seemingly ordinary possessions of an ordinary life. But through them, Wicha begins to construct an image of Joanna as a Jewish woman, a mother, and a citizen. As Poland emerged from the Second World War into the material meanness of the Communist regime, shortages of every kind shaped its people in deep and profound ways. What they chose to buy, keep - and, arguably, hoard - tells the story of contemporary Poland.Joanna's Jewishness, her devotion to work, her formidable temperament, her weakness for consumer goods, all accumulate into an unforgettable portrait of a woman and, ultimately, her country. Things I Didn't Throw Out is an intimate, unconventional and very funny memoir about everything we leave behind.

In a letter to her six-year-old daughter, Julietta Singh writes toward a tender vision of the world, offering children's radical embrace of possibility as a model for how we might live. In order to survive looming political and ecological disasters, Singh urges, we must break from the conventions we have inherited and begin to orient ourselves toward more equitable and revolutionary paths.The Breaks celebrates queer family-making, communal living, and Brown girlhood, complicating the stark binaries that shape contemporary US discourse. With nuance and generosity, Singh reveals the connections among the crises humanity faces-climate catastrophe, extractive capitalism, and the violent legacies of racism, patriarchy, and colonialism-inviting us to move through the breaks toward a tenable future.

A woman leaves the man she lives with and moves to a low stone cottage in a university town. She joins an academic department and, high up in her office on the thirteenth floor, begins a research project on the poet Paul Celan. She knows nothing of Celan, still less of her new neighbours or colleagues.She is in self-imposed exile, hoping to find dignity in her loneliness. Like everywhere, the abiding feeling in the city is one of paranoia. The weather is deteriorating, the ordinary lives of women are in peril, and an unexplained curfew has been imposed.But then she meets Clara, a woman who is her exact opposite: decisive, productive and assured. As their friendship grows in intimacy Clara suggests another way of living - until an act of violence threatens to sever everything between them. Reminiscent of Thomas Bernhard, Rachel Cusk and Gwendoline Riley, The Coming Bad Days is a penetrating portrait of feminine vulnerability and cruelty. It announces the arrival of a startling new voice in fiction: intelligent, brutal, sure, and devastatingly funny.'Raw, dazzling and bracingly new. A vividly original novel about the fractured difficulty of living.' - Rebecca Tamas, author of Strangers: Essays on the Human and Nonhuman

'Bear,' she cried. 'I love you. Pull my head off.'Lou is a shy and diligent librarian at the local Heritage Institute. She lives a mole-like existence, buried among maps and manuscripts in her dusty basement office. With nothing and no one to go home to, she resigns herself to passionless sex on her desk with the Institute's Director.When she is summoned to a remote island to inventory the house and estate of the late Colonel Jocelyn Cary, she takes it as an opportunity to head north and get out of the city, hoping for an industrious summer of cataloguing.Colonel Cary left many possessions behind, but no one warned her about the bear. Lou soon begins to anticipate the bear's needs for food and company. But as summer blooms across the island and Lou shakes off the city, she realises the bear might satisfy some needs of her own.

'Unusual, finely judged and wrought work... has reminded us of the beauty that can be discovered in the ordinary and in ordinary speech.' -- Lydia Davis on AUG 9-FOGA collection of innovative and ambitious short stories from a visionary young writer In The Dominant Animal - Kathryn Scanlan's adventurous, unsettling debut collection - compression is key. Sentences have been relentlessly trimmed, tuned and teased for maximum impact. A ferocious attention to rhythm and sound results in a palpable pulse of excitability and distress. In these forty very short stories, the ordinary shifts into the uncanny: in living rooms and in hotel rooms, on suburban lawns and on the surgeon's chair, characters - human and animal - eat, breathe, provoke and injure one another. Grandmothers sit tethered to the couch in a blue spell, lonesome men crouch among thorny shrubs, pets expire slowly or suddenly, and the nature of love is questioned at a golf course, a flower shop, an all-you-can-eat buffet. With exquisite control, Scanlan moves from expansive moods and fine afternoons to unease and violence. Disturbances accrue as the collection progresses. No mercy, a character says - and these stories are merciless and strange and absolutely masterful.'Unusual, finely judged and wrought work has reminded us of the beauty that can be discovered in the ordinary and in ordinary speech.' -- Lydia Davis on AUG 9-FOG'In these flawless, gripping, beautiful stories Kathryn Scanlan gives us a picture of life's true uneasy heart.' -- David Hayden, author of Darker with the Lights On'The Dominant Animal left me feeling uneasy, off-balance and immeasurably better for having read it.' -- Julia Armfield, author of salt slow'Elegantly spare yet exhilarating... A startling, arresting debut.' -- Nicole Flattery, author of Show Them a Good Time 'I read The Dominant Animal in a single sitting and finished it hungry for more of the mercurial, singular, surprising magic Kathryn Scanlan is creating.' -- Megan Nolan'All of life's absurdities and violences are here, dressed up and pulsing with an inimitable energy and intellect that sticks.' -- Rachael Allen, author of Kingdomland

'Looking back, Mrs Fitzgibbons could not recall which of the major changes in her life had come about first, the discovery that she possessed a gift for persuasive speech, or the sudden quickening of her libido.'Forty-five-year-old Frances Fitzgibbons is a loan officer at a New England bank, known for her polite discretion and kindly, tolerant disposition. Suddenly she transforms almost overnight: seducing a high-school student, usurping her boss as vice president, and firing anyone who crosses her.Once Frankie has found her voice - which arrives fully-formed, without hesitation or thought - resistance is futile. It's not long before she has a gang of devoted acolytes, including her hairdresser and son-in-law, and her plans to obliterate the competition can run unchecked, to horrifying effect.First published in 1990 and set against the financial crisis of 1987, Ride a Cockhorse is a rollicking cautionary tale brimful with snappy dialogue and gleeful obscenity - and an irresistibly compelling antiheroine.

'I took the revolver out of his desk drawer and shot him between the eyes.'Four years before she shoots her husband and walks to a cafe for a coffee, a lonely young woman living in a boarding house meets an older man called Alberto. They go for long walks along the river and on the outskirts of the city; they look like lovers, although they're not.Alberto doesn't tell her anything about himself and she asks few questions. Still, with little else to distract her, she lets her imagination run wild and convinces herself to fall in love. Though he doesn't feel the same, Alberto asks her to marry him and they have a baby. But Alberto is a man who tires quickly of everything.The Dry Heart is a short, dark and psychologically rich novel that forensically examines how an unhappy marriage comes to end in murder.

Delia is one of five children, growing up in a poor Italian village. She is 17, and dreams of marrying a rich man, living in a grand apartment in the city and wearing silk stockings. To escape her father's neglect and her mother's sadness, she begins to take the dusty road to the city every day, accompanied by Nini,her sweet and mysterious cousin.When Nini takes a job in a factory and moves in with a city woman, Delia sees another way of being. But when she discovers she's pregnant, she agrees to marry the father, seduced by the promise of wealth and comfort.Nothing, not even Nini's desperate declaration of love, can stop her - but her rejection will be his undoing. The Road to the City is a short, poignant novel about the dreamsof youth, and the cruelty it takes to make them come true.

From one of contemporary Russia's finest writers, a spellbinding collection of eighteen stories. Tolstaya's ecstatic and witchy imagination is in full force in autobiographical stories of delivering telegrams in Soviet Russia, conducting an affair with a man who may or may not exist and imagining a world without Italy.

Like one in six people in India, Sujatha Gidla was born an untouchable. While most untouchables are illiterate, her family was educated by Canadian missionaries in the 1930s, making it possible for Gidla to attend elite schools and move to America at the age of twenty-six. It was only then that she saw how extraordinary - and yet how typical - her family history truly was. Her mother, Manjula, and uncles Satyam and Carey were born in the last days of British colonial rule. They grew up in a world marked by poverty and injustice, but also full of possibility. In the slums where they lived, everyone had a political side, and rallies, agitations, and arrests were commonplace. The Independence movement promised freedom. Yet for untouchables and other poor and working people, little changed. Satyam, the eldest, switched allegiance to the Communist Party. Gidla recounts his incredible transformation from student and labour organizer to famous poet and founder of a left-wing guerrilla movement. And Gidla charts her mother's battles with the harsh oppression of women. A moving portrait of love, hardship, and struggle, Ants Among Elephants is a personal history of modern India, told from the bottom up.