Shaun Levin

Mark Gertler

The first of The Nobile Folios explores Bathers 1917-18 by the acclaimed British painter Mark Gertler (1891-?1939). The painting is set alongside Shaun Levin's original short story 'Trees at a Sanatorium'. Mark Gertler was born in Spitalfields in London's East End in 1891, the youngest son of Jewish immigrant parents. Bathers 1917-18 was painted when Gertler was only 26 and dates from a period of intensive research into Cézanne. Bathers is amongst his seminal works from the World War I period. Shaun Levin's story 'Trees at a Sanatorium' was written specifically for this publication. It is a meditation on landscape and the importance of intimacy in artistic creation. Levin wrote this story visiting places where Gertler stayed--whether out of choice or necessity--from the sanatorium at Banchory in Scotland, to Catalonia, to Paris and the gardens at Garsington Manor.

Bathers 1917-18 - Trees at a Sanatorium

Alone with a Man in a Room is a collection of fiction and creative-nonfiction pieces written and published in various anthologies and journals over the past 20 years. Pieces about love, obsession, promiscuity, paranoia, and desire. Set in bedrooms, hotels, bathhouses, and public parks, in London, Tel Aviv, New York, and Sitges. from the Introduction Many of these pieces have been with me for so long I can't remember whether they're fact or fiction. Most are probably a combination of the two. I remember the time and place of their conception: those sweltering afternoons in London writing in an overgrown Abney Park Cemetery, a trip to Lille for writing and sex, the holiday in Almería on my way to Fundación Valparaíso for a writing retreat. Some pieces have been incomplete for so long, they'll remain in a state of becoming forever. This book is a love letter to London and Tel Aviv, a stock-taking of work that has accumulated over the past twenty years. It's a farewell card and a thank-you note, a restrospective of stories and essays written in the first twenty years of this new century. (Shaun Levin, Madrid 2021)

Alone with a Man in a Room

An affair that begins in an Internet chatroom takes the narrator and his lover, Martin, further into love than either could have imagined. Disturbingly honest and intensely erotic, Seven Sweet Things is as much an exploration of love as it is the lovers' exploration of London. Eking out a living by selling cakes and desserts, the narrator loves reading Plato, sitting on park benches, and feeding his beloved. Each meeting between them is framed by the making, or the promise of a sweet thing (chocolate-coconut fudge bars, oatmeal cookies, rum-glazed chocolate cake, meringues). The landscape shifts from hidden archaeological mysteries in London to a fantastical stay in an old house in Yorkshire, and from Clissold Park in North London to Roslyn Glen in Scotland, where the narrator gets invited to prepare extravagant desserts for an aristocratic family.

A Novella with Recipes

Seven Sweet Things

It contains a series of writing prompts, suggestions on structuring your book, and enough blank pages in which to write it.

Shaun Levin

Books

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