Rachel Cusk

From the exhilarating mind of Rachel Cusk, author of the Outline trilogy, Parade disturbs and defines the novel. Midway through his life, an artist begins to paint upside down. Eventually, he paints his wife upside down. He also makes her ugly. The paintings are a great success. In Paris, a woman is attacked by a stranger in the street. Her attacker flees, but not before turning around to contemplate her victim, like an artist stepping back from a canvas. When a mother dies, her children confront her legacy: the stories she told; the roles she assigned to them; the ways she withheld her love. Her death is a kind of freedom. An artist takes on a series of pseudonyms to conceal his work from his mother and father. His brother does the opposite. They share the same parents, but they’ve inherited different things. Parade is a story that confronts and demolishes the conventions of storytelling. It surges past the limits of identity, character, and plot to tell a true story—about art, family, morality, gender, and how we compose ourselves. Rachel Cusk is a writer and visionary like no other, who turns language upside down to show us our world as it really is.

A Novel

Parade

Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2021

Second Place

The Bradshaw variations

Edith Wharton

The Age of Innocence

La seconda casa

Saving Agnes

Catalina Martínez Muñoz

Segunda casa

Un trabajo para toda la vida

Kay Cicellis

First published in 1961, The Way to Colonos recasts three seminal plays by Sophocles into tales of modern women and warfare, probing their characters with savage intimacy. Antigone—a stylish woman in her thirties—wheeling her father, Oedipus, onto the ferry to Colonos, is disgusted by his self-absorption, guilt, and evasions. A suburban Electra dreams of a bloody confrontation with her mother, Clytemnestra, that may never come to pass. Philoctetes, a castaway soldier, navigates shifting allegiances in a guerrilla war that divided Greece after World War II.

As Rachel Cusk writes in her foreword to this new edition, Cicellis was a woman before her time, whose work—written in English, her second language—offers particularly “shocking insight into the secret lives of young women” and is only now “free to reach readers with an appetite for female artistic authority, who wish to see the world through sharp fresh eyes.”

The Way to Colonos: Sophocles Retold

Stella Benson, anxious to leave London and begin a new life, journeys to rural Sussex to work as an au pair for a decidedly overwhelming family, leading to questions about the true motivations for her extreme actions. Tour.

The Country Life

From the exhilarating mind of Rachel Cusk, author of the Outline trilogy, Parade disturbs and defines the novel.

Midway through his life, an artist begins to paint upside down. Eventually, he paints his wife upside down. He also makes her ugly. The paintings are a great success.

In Paris, a woman is attacked by a stranger in the street. Her attacker flees, but not before turning around to contemplate her victim, like an artist stepping back from a canvas.

When a mother dies, her children confront her the stories she told; the roles she assigned to them; the ways she withheld her love. Her death is a kind of freedom.

An artist takes on a series of pseudonyms to conceal his work from his mother and father. His brother does the opposite. They share the same parents, but they’ve inherited different things.

Parade is a story that confronts and demolishes the conventions of storytelling. It surges past the limits of identity, character, and plot to tell a true story—about art, family, morality, gender, and how we compose ourselves. Rachel Cusk is a writer and visionary like no other, who turns language upside down to show us our world as it really is.

Parade 

Über Ehe und Trennung

Danach

Coventry

Nadine Monem

Steph Donse

Sophia Sapouna

Marble in Metamorphosis contemplates the physical and cultural life of marble. It explores the ethics, politics and symbolism of its use and deliberates over the spirit of the material and why some cultures so revere and desire it. In reflecting on the deep relationship between marble and human culture, it considers the social and historical function of the material throughout time.Marble in Metamorphosis features a new essay on marble and its uses written by acclaimed novelist and writer Rachel Cusk, who - while on a trip to a marble bearing island in Greece's Aegean sea - writes on the modern notion of classicism, the fate of monuments through history and the tension between classicism and realism in art and architecture. Chris Kontos' of Kennedy Magazine photographic series explores two landscapes marked by marble and its uses: the island of Tinos, with its long tradition of marble mining and craft; and Athens, which has an ancient and enduring connection to marble evident in its ubiquitous presence throughout the city. These photographs tell a story of extraction, craft, tradition, and how meaning is made and remade through marble as a material in the city.

Marble in Metamorphosis

On Becoming a Mother

Life's Work

In the wake of family collapse, a writer and her two young sons move to London. The process of upheaval is the catalyst for a number of transitions - personal, moral, artistic, practical - as she endeavours to construct a new reality for herself and her children. In the city she is made to confront aspects of living she has, until now, avoided, and to consider questions of vulnerability and power, death and renewal, in what becomes her struggle to reattach herself to, and believe in, life. Filtered through the impersonal gaze of its keenly intelligent protagonist, Transit sees Rachel Cusk delve deeper into the themes first raised in her critically acclaimed Outline, and offers up a penetrating and moving reflection on childhood and fate, the value of suffering, the moral problems of personal responsibility and the mystery of change. In this precise, short and yet epic cycle of novels, Cusk manages to describe the most elemental experiences, the liminal qualities of life, through a narrative near-silence that draws language towards it. She captures with unsettling restraint and honesty the longing to both inhabit and flee one's life and the wrenching ambivalence animating our desire to feel real.

Transit

Olivia Manning

Eduardo Jordá

Una pareja inglesa de recién casados, Guy y Harriet Pringle, llega a Bucarest, la llamada París del Este, en el otoño de 1939, apenas unas semanas después de la invasión alemana de Polonia. Los habitantes de esta ciudad llena de contrastes, inmersa en la incertidumbre por la guerra y la inestabilidad política, se aferran a una vibrante vida cotidiana mientras el caos se apodera de Rumanía y del resto de Europa. Entretanto, Harriet empezará a conocer realmente a su marido, un extrovertido profesor universitario que se rodea de un animado círculo social, y tratará de encontrar su lugar dentro de ese peculiar elenco formado por estirados diplomáticos, damas acaudaladas, pícaros seductores y arribistas.

La gran fortuna

** AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER NOW ** From the critically-acclaimed author of the Outline trilogy, an irresistible novel of fame, power, beauty and truth -- and a blazing renovation of the form. A little while ago, I told the actor M that I was thinking of writing her autobiography. She liked the idea. She's a good sport. Would you just make it up? she said. The film star M is one of the most recognizable faces of our time. Her image is everywhere. It has been like that since she was a child. With such fame, her life has the appearance of freedom: people are instantly obliging, spaces are altered to accommodate her, time can be rearranged. M may live in the same places as real people. She may meet her friends or collect her children from school or walk her dogs as they do. But it seems the rules of reality have melted away. Now, a writer has decided to pay close attention to M's life, in the hope of understanding who she really is. It is hard not to feel ugly next to M, hard not to feel insignificant. But what truths-about the very experience of living-might this proximity allow the writer to briefly capture? Is M to play a character in the book, or is it the writer who is acting the role of M? In this astonishing, explosive novel, Rachel Cusk hunts for the nature of truth without ever swerving away into self-deceptions. She investigates who we are, and pretend to be, at this late stage of modern life when we are hypnotized, more and more effectively, by the images we see everywhere. She shows us that the real value of life might lie not in beauty but in ugliness; in having a self that has survived the violence of the world. Life of M is a beautiful piece of music, audible in a world of noise and spectacle. '[Cusk] is a disciple of the truth, and she helps us to see.' Lucy Jones, Independent 'Roll up, wave a flag and join the crowds to watch Rachel Cusk continue her relentless march through life.' Irish Times

From the Author of the Outline Trilogy

Life of M

«Una sorvegliatissima chat letteraria tra estranei, una lunga serie di pettegolezzi, digressioni, dialoghi interrotti che insieme compongono il Grande Discorso (dove fascino e banalità si contendono la scena) da cui, nostro malgrado, ci ritroviamo a essere parlati senza rendercene conto». Nicola Lagioia, «Robinson - la Repubblica» Precisi e incandescenti, i tre romanzi che hanno consacrato Rachel Cusk sono un affresco imperfetto, e per questo straordinariamente vero, della natura umana. In tutti e tre a parlare è Faye, una scrittrice di mezza età che gira il mondo tra convegni e festival letterari. E approfitta di questi viaggi per annotare e condividere con il lettore le confessioni, gli sfoghi, i borbottii delle persone che incontra sulla propria strada. I libri sono quindi una catena di dialoghi, piú o meno superficiali, piú o meno rivelatori, che Faye scambia con perfetti sconosciuti in aereo, in taxi, nei ristoranti o nei locali. Prima in occasione di una summer school ad Atene, poi durante le settimane di un trasloco londinese e infine nel corso di un tour letterario in due città europee, il fiume di voci che attraversa Resoconto, Transiti e Onori è fatto di anime fragili che si incrociano nel flusso della vita e provano a dirsi qualcosa, ciascuna con le proprie verità da svelare, le proprie sconfitte personali e i propri piccoli traumi: un'umanità confusa, scissa tra ciò che teme di essere e ciò che sceglie di mostrare.

Rachel Cusk

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