Jane Alison

"Doctors don't imitate Galen. Why should writers follow Aristotle? Jane Alison in her fresh, original book about narrative is our new Aristotle." --Edmund White, author of The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading As Jane Alison writes in the introduction to her insightful and appealing book about the craft of writing: "For centuries there's been one path through fiction we're most likely to travel--one we're actually told to follow--and that's the dramatic arc: a situation arises, grows tense, reaches a peak, subsides. . . . But: something that swells and tautens until climax, then collapses? Bit masculo-sexual, no? So many other patterns run through nature, tracing other deep motions in life. Why not draw on them, too?" W. G. Sebald's The Emigrants was the first novel to show Alison how forward momentum can be created by way of pattern, rather than the traditional arc--or, in nature, wave. Other writers of nonlinear prose considered in her "museum of specimens" include Nicholson Baker, Anne Carson, Marguerite Duras, Jamaica Kincaid, Clarice Lispector, Gabriel García Márquez, Susan Minot, David Mitchell, Caryl Phillips, and Mary Robison. Meander, Spiral, Explode is a singular and brilliant elucidation of literary strategies that also brings high spirits and wit to its original conclusions. It is a liberating manifesto that says, Let's leave the outdated modes behind and, in thinking of new modes, bring feeling back to experimentation. It will appeal to serious readers and writers alike.

Design and Pattern in Narrative

Meander, Spiral, Explode

Ovid encounters an almost otherworldly woman on the fringes of the Black Sea, who seems to embody the fictitious creations of his latest work, and becoming obsessed and flush with inspiration, he takes her back to Rome, but the pull of ambition leads him to bargain with fate and betray his newfound muse. Reprint. 25,000 first printing.

The Love-artist

Oswaldo fantasizes about avoiding the ravages of time that have beset him and his beloved Venice, while Max plans on leaving London for New Orleans in pursuit of a woman he barely knows, in this sweeping novel of love, loneliness, hope, and desperation. Reprint. 15,000 first printing.

A Novel

The Marriage of the Sea

From the author of Meander, Spiral, Explode, an astounding novel inspired by the collision of Irish designer Eileen Gray and famed Swiss architect Le Corbusier.

Villa E

A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2016 “Nine Island is a crackling incantation, brittle and brilliant and hot and sad and full of sideways humor that devastates and illuminates all at once.” —Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies Nine Island is an intimate autobiographical novel, told by J, a woman who lives in a glass tower on one of Miami Beach’s lush Venetian Islands. After decades of disaster with men, she is trying to decide whether to withdraw forever from romantic love. Having just returned to Miami from a monthlong reunion with an old flame, “Sir Gold,” and a visit to her fragile mother, J begins translating Ovid’s magical stories about the transformations caused by Eros. “A woman who wants, a man who wants nothing. These two have stalked the world for thousands of years,” she thinks. When not ruminating over her sexual past and current fantasies, in the company of only her aging cat, J observes the comic, sometimes steamy goings–on among her faded–glamour condo neighbors. One of them, a caring nurse, befriends her, eventually offering the opinion that “if you retire from love . . . then you retire from life.”

Nine Island

“A wrenching, luminous memoir” of how betrayal and divorce transformed two families and the lives of two young women (People). When Jane Alison was a child, her family met another that seemed like its mirror. Each had a father in the Foreign Service, a beautiful mother, and two little girls. The younger two—one of them Jane—even shared a birthday. With so much in common, the two families quickly became inseparable. Within months, affairs had ignited between the adults, and before long the pairs had exchanged partners—divorced, remarried, and moved on. As if in a cataclysm of nature, two families were ripped asunder, and two new ones were formed. Two pairs of girls were left in shock, a “silent, numb shock, like a crack inside stone, not enough to split it but inside, quietly fissuring.” And Jane and her stepsister were thrown into a state of wordless combat for the love of their fathers. This true story of their rivalry, and the tragic loss that ultimately followed, is a fascinating record of how adult behavior can shape, or shatter, a childhood. Spanning from Australia to the United States, it is “enormously compelling . . . [A] harrowing journey of identity” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).

A Memoir

The Sisters Antipodes

Tom Dixon

Anna Ferrari

Striking photographs and archive drawings trace the history and the famous design features of the flats and the multi-arts centre, the largest in Europe. The book includes commentaries by Tom Dixon, Mike Leigh, Jonathan Meades, Eric Parry and Vivienne Westwood. This book celebrates the Barbican Estate, one of London's most important Modernist landmarks.

life, history, architecture

Barbican

Alison Keith

Ovid

Elaine Fantham

Ovid's stories melt moral conventions, explore ambiguities, and dissolve boundaries between men, women, animals, gods, plants, and the mineral world; in doing so they contrive to seduce readers. Ovid's dark pleasure in telling such stories with a full register of tones is palpable. But the stories of sexual encounter in the Metamorphoses are also infused with deep questions. What does it mean to have thoughts and passions trapped inside a changeable body? What is a self, and where are its edges? If someone can pierce you in sex and in love, how do you survive? And if your outer form changes, what lasts? In Change Me, Jane Alison, critically acclaimed author of The Love-Artist, renders substantial portions of Ovid's great epic into elegant and remarkably faithful English. Her focus is on episodes that involve desire, sexuality, and the transformations brought about by powerful emotion; because these themes are so central to the Metamorphoses, Alison introduces them with a selection of elegies from Ovid's Amores, the collection with which the poet launched his career. When these selections are taken together, Alison's Ovid comes alive; the Roman poet's great ability to perform contemporary themes through mythical subject matter, and vice versa, is Alison's guiding principle and Muse. Change Me will transform forever readers' experience of this most ingenious of poets. FEATURES The thematically organized translations are lucid, apt, precise, and playful Elaine Fantham's Foreword places Ovid in his Augustan context Alison Keith's introduction offers an overview of gender and sexuality in the ancient world Incorporates sixteen color plates from classical antiquity that illustrate Ovidian themes Audio recordings (read by Alison) of sixteen selected passages are available at www.oup.com/us/alison

Amores

This landmark volume offers a major re-assessment of the art that emerged in Britain in the twenty years following the end of the Second World War: a period of anxiety, profound social change and explosive creativity. Published to coincide with the Barbican Centre’s 40th anniversary, it draws together the work of fifty artists, exploring a period straddled precariously between the horror of the past and the promise of the future. Spanning painting, sculpture, architecture, ceramics and photography, Postwar Modern will explore a rich field of experiment which challenges the idea that Britain was a cultural backwater at this time. Through new texts by Jane Alison, Hilary Floe, Ben Highmore, Hammad Nassar and Greg Salter, the book looks afresh at celebrated artists such as Francis Bacon, David Hockney, Lucian Freud and Eduardo Paolozzi, shown in dialogue with lesser-known figures. These will include those, like Francis Newton Souza, Avinash Chandra and Robert Adams, who were acclaimed by contemporaries but neglected in subsequent history-making; others, like Kim Lim, Anwar Jalal Shemza and Franciszka Themerson, are only now attracting the attention they deserve. Throughout their work, vital shared preoccupations become visible: gender, class, race and nationhood; the body, the bombsite, and the home. It is a period resonating strongly with our own: as the UK emerges from more than a decade of austerity and confronts the challenges of post-pandemic reconstruction, society is asking similarly deep questions about who we want and need to be.

New Art in Britain 1945-65

Postwar Modern

Meglio sole che nuvole. Leggere Ovidio a Miami

Barbican Art Gallery

"This multi-disciplinary and cross-generational project explores the central importance of the house within surrealism and its legacies. It brings the first surrealists together with contemporary artists, film-makers and architects. Through a strategy of accumulation and poetic contamination, each informs the other."--Back cover.

The Surreal House

A multi-generational story follows the experiences of a nineteenth-century Scottish gardener and two of his descendants in an examination of the uneasy relationship between humankind and nature.

Natives and Exotics

Coralie Malissard

This fascinating, interdisciplinary, and generously illustrated book presents creative pairings that defy the idea of the modern artist as a solitary genius. In the art world, pairs of individuals often inspire each other's works. These intimate relationships are explored in all their various forms--obsessional, conventional, mythic, fleeting, life-long--in this book that illuminates the works of painters, sculptors, photographers, designers, poets, writers, musicians, dancers, and performers of the modern era. In addition to introductory essays, each couple is profiled in brief chapters that feature candid portraiture, illustrations of the works that illuminate the impact each had on the other, and an introductory text that pinpoints the significance of the relationship. Two additional chapters focus on surrealist couples and the Temple of Friendship in Paris to explore the common traits of collaboration, friendship, anti-establishment notions and radicalism that variously characterized these largely literary groups. Reflecting a contemporary view of sexuality and relationships, this book also offers a counterpoint to the notion of the female as muse, highlighting instead female empowered relationships and emphasizing a new balance between male and female creative output. Featuring artists across a wide variety of disciplines, this volume also reveals how creative individuals came together to overcome the constraints of their time, reshape art, redefine gender stereotypes, and forge new ways of living.

Art, Intimacy and the Avant-Garde

Modern Couples

Three generations of one Australian family become "exotics" in foreign lands as nine-year-old Alice moves to Ecuador with her parents, while her grandmother makes a home in the hinterlands of Australia.

Jane Alison

Books

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