Pretentiousness: Why It Matters

Author

Lucy Ellmann

LATTICING one cherry pie after another, an Ohio housewife tries to bridge the gaps between reality and the torrent of meaningless info that is the United States of America. She worries about her children, her dead parents, African elephants, the bedroom rituals of “happy couples”, Weapons of...

Author	Djuna Barnes
ISBN	0811216713

Nightwood, Djuna Barnes' strange and sinuous tour de force, "belongs to that small class of books that somehow reflect a time or an epoch" (TLS). That time is the period between the two World Wars, and Barnes' novel unfolds in the decadent shadows of Europe's great cities, Paris, Berlin, and Vienna—a...

Author	Mark Fisher
ISBN	1846943175

After 1989, capitalism has successfully presented itself as the only realistic political-economic system - a situation that the bank crisis of 2008, far from ending, actually compounded. The book analyses the development and principal features of this capitalist realism as a lived ideological...

Author	Susan Sontag
ISBN	0241339707

'The ultimate Camp statement: it's good because it's awful.'

These two classic essays were the first works of criticism to break down the boundaries between 'high' and 'low' culture, and made Susan Sontag a literary sensation.

Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering...

Author	Robbie Arnott
ISBN	1925603520

A young man named Levi McAllister decides to build a coffin for his twenty-three-year-old sister, Charlotte—who promptly runs for her life. A water rat swims upriver in quest of the cloud god. A fisherman named Karl hunts for tuna in partnership with a seal. And a father takes form from fire.

The...

Author	Deborah Levy
ISBN	1907903631

Marketed as a feminist response to Orwell’s “Why I Write,” Things I Don’t Want to Know tracks how a soft-spoken girl became a prolific writer. Across four fast-moving sections, novelist Deborah Levy recounts her childhood spent in South Africa at the height of apartheid, with her father incarcerated...