Juxtabook

Stanley and Elsie by Nicola Upson

Stanley and Elsie by Nicola Upson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Loved every page of this. Upson manages to make art that you can't see sing, and characters you should loath become sympathetic. The world Upson creates is so real you almost feel embarrassed looking in. Wonderful, wonderful writing!

View all my reviews

40% off books for today only

 

For Monday 31st August only we're having a 40% off sale. Note the discount code 40Aug19 to use at the checkout and then browse our site. (There are more details and the small print in our newsletter here)

Book catalogues you might enjoy:

Authors A-Z
Fiction
English local history by county
Children's Literature
Poetry and Criticism
Novels and Criticism
Classics
Language Studies
History
Philosophy
Movements and Themes in Literature
French Literature
Art and Photography

 

Heroines on Horseback: The Pony Book in Children's Fiction by Jane Badger

I have sung the praises of Jane Badger many times on here and on twitter: she is a fantastic bookseller, author and now publisher. Her book Heroines on Horseback: The Pony Book in Children's Fiction which was published by GGBP has been out-of-print in paperback for a little while but Jane now has it out as an e-book available for kindle here. I don't believe there is anyone who knows more about the pony book and its wider place in children's literature than Jane and her book is an intelligent, fun read.

A few months ago Jane Badger Books began bringing back out some hard-to-find pony books as e-books and in some cases paperback too making classic pony books available again from authors such as Patricia Leitch, Victoria Eveleigh, Diana Pullein-Thompson, Josephine Pullein-Thompson and Caroline Akrill. You browse some of the selection here.

Testament by Alis Hawkins

Long-time readers of Juxtabook will remember how much I enjoyed the time-shift novel Testament by Alis Hawkins. After the success of her Welsh historical crime series (The Harry Probert-Lloyd Mysteries - which I also highly recommend) Testament has just been re-issued by Sapere Books.

You can read my original review of Testament here. Ten years ago! How time flies!

You can follow Alis Hawkins on twitter.

40% off Book Sale - today only

For Monday 22nd April only we're having a 40% off sale. Scroll down for your discount code and further details and then browse our site.

 

 

 

The Brothers Powys by Richard Perceval Graves - signed

Oxford University Press, 1983. Hardback. 370pp. Inscribed by the author, “With best wishes, Richard Perceval Graves, March 1983”. First edition. Biography of three of the Powys brothers, John Cowper Powys, Theodore Francis Powys (rural novelist often compared with Mary Webb), and Llewellyn Powys (author of Earth Memories, Dorset Essays etc). A insight into this fascinating literary family. Includes a note on further reading. Indexed.

 

40% off books in stock* - today only

Use the code 40April19 at the checkout for a 40% discount on our book prices on Monday 22nd April only. There is no minimum purchase and no limit to how often you can use the code on the day so browse our site and enjoy!

There are a small number of exceptions - please read the 'small print' below.

Please feel free to pass the discount code onto friends or to your students.

 

 

No Go the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling and Making Mock by Marina Warner - signed

Chatt & Windus, 1998. Hardback. 435pp. First edition. Signed by the author to the title page. Two selections of colour plates. Some integral black and white illustrations.

 

For more book highlights please see our sale newsletter here.

 

The Small Print :

Valid until midnight on Monday 22nd April 2019

The offer does not apply to the small number of new books that we stock including Bay of Ghosts and An Almshouse for Linton.

Postage is extra. Because of the sizeable discount we cannot subsidise postage so large orders from outside the UK might require increased shipping costs. We will contact you to explain if there are any additional costs once your order has gone through, or you can email us before placing an order. You will be able to cancel the order if you're unhappy with the extra shipping.

The Traveller's Guide to Classical Philosophy by John Gaskin

 

 

The Traveller's Guide to Classical Philosophy by John Gaskin is one of my favourite discoveries in the last twelve months. Those of us who benefited from and '70s or '80s comprehensive school education avoided Latin. Many of my contemporaries may thank their lucky stars for this but, for me, lacking this entry level means to a classical education is a source of regret. You're not more than five minutes into an undergraduate English degree before you realise that our literary canon is under-pinned by thought developed from western Christianity and from the classical world. First year undergrad courses in philosophy (my subsidiary subject) hardly scratched the surface. My lack of knowledge on the latter has been a source of irritation since then.

I know from my sales of Latin and Greek books that there are many autodidacts out there, but most them are going back in their retirement to subjects begun at school in the '40s and '50s. In a busy life the motivation to start from scratch is sadly lacking. And here's where the wonderful The Traveller's Guide to Classical Philosophy comes in. Firstly it is based on lectures: hard stuff based on the spoken word originally is always easier for a tired brain to take in, and often much more entertaining. Secondly it is big on historical and literary context which for a literary critic coming to philosophy in some trepidation is excellent. And lastly, and this may seem trivial, it is short being a beautifully brief tour at 192pp. This, you see, is exactly what I am after.

It has a great first chapter, "A Scheme of Things Entire", being a detailed chronology bigger on explanation than dates, that I keep dipping back into for context. I'm now thoroughly enjoying Part II: The Ideal of Homer and the Ideas of the Philosophers which is clear, well paced and enlivened with drawings. Other elegant features include a proper index (I'm amazed how often indexes are missed out these days) and a gazetteer making it literally a traveller's companion. A review copy that is definitely a keeper.

Offer: free P+P on UK orders of this book until the end of January. The book is £8.99. Just send me a message to order.

We also have a couple of thousand out of print and hard to find philosophy books in stock. You can browse the philosophy shelves here.

Literary Landscapes: Charting the Real-Life Settings of the World's Favourite Fiction

 

Literary Landscapes: Charting the Topography of Classic Literature edited by John Sutherland is not the first to chart this kind literary geography but it is certainly one of the most wide-ranging. Dozens of novels are explored here, with settings across the world. As well as the obvious Brontës in Haworth, Dickens' London, John Steinbeck's Cannery Row, Harper Lee's Alabama, or even A. A. Milnes' '100 Aker Wood' here we also find essays on Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain (set in the Swiss Alps), Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavrandsatter set in the Gudbrand Valley, Norway, Orphan Pamuk's Snow set in Kars, Turkey, Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart set in Onitsha, Nigeria, and Tim Winton's Cloudstreet set in Perth, Australia. If you look the evocation of place then this not just a place to catch-up with old favourites but to find new ones too.

 

 

The format is by movement and era: Romanticism, Modernism, etc. This gives the book both a thematic as well as a chronological structure. The vast number of essays mean that each treatment is fairly short, but there is no sense of hurry amongst the essays themselves. I assume the range and organisation are down to Sutherland and both features are a strength of the book.

Also standout are the visual production values. It is lavishly illustrated with contemporary photographs (in colour for the more modern books), author photographs, stills from films, maps, and images of books covers. As a book dealer I particularly like the page of evocative mid-twentieth century William Faulkner covers and the full page given over to the anniversary edition cover of La Colmena (The Hive) by Camilo José Cela.

Each essay is bordered by wide margins finely filled with more detail on the authors and their books. Beautifully presented and meaning the essay writers don't have to waste time on background before the exposition on the place in the novel. I like this feature and it is especially useful as for those authors you are less familiar with (and there will be quite a few).

The obvious essay for me to focus on is Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, set as it is fairly close to where I am typing and an area I know well. The essay is excellent: it immediately brings together the weather and landscape, not simply the oft mentioned cruelty of the landscape which is really the landscape combined with its weather. We certainly get a lot of weather round here (in the never that extreme rather British way). I remember an American book blogger who visited here commenting that until she'd ventured up on the moors behind Haworth she had no idea wind could come from so many directions at once. The moors do take your breath away. Sutherland (for this is one of the literary critic's own essays) then finds a rather lovely sunny quote by contrast that has me reaching for Wuthering Heights again to re-live some its texture. The skies aren't always grey over Haworth.

 

The essay is finished off beautifully with a double page spread of a painting by L.S. Lowry, The Witherns near Haworth; this Lancashire painter is an unexpected choice but the blue-grey-khaki palette of Lowry fits the essay's themes extremely well.

So far I can heartily recommend, but I do have a few quibbles. The essays are very uneven - not surprising perhaps when there are so many - although the Brontë one is one of the best and I love the one on Anne of Green Gables. In addition, some of the sub-editing choices are poor - Wuthering Heights is on the Yorkshire Moors apparently. That phrase, particularly with a capital M, usually refers to the North York Moors. (See this for an example, and this). This is a National Park and Haworth is not in it nor particularly even near it, Yorkshire being a huge county. Obviously Yorkshire moors could be used to described any upland Yorkshire area. This rogue capital letter is small point but an irritating one (why didn't they look at an OS map and call it Haworth Moor?) There are other little quibbles like this on the books / places I know well so there must be others on those I don't.

The most significant problem though is the lack of attribution of the essays. It is possible to eventually find out who wrote what only by turning to the the back where there is an A-Z of contributors, where you have to read through each one till you find who wrote the essay you're interested in. This hassle could have been solved by the use of the old-fashioned by-line.

Having moaned about the difficulty of discovering the contributors, they are generally of a high quality though, which probably means you've never heard of them, as they are mostly academics like Sutherland. They include people like Daniel Hahn (Oxford Companion to Children's Literature), Julie Curtis (Professor of Russian Literature at Wolfson College, Oxford), Andrew Watts (Senior Lecturer in French Studies, University of Birmingham, The Cambridge Companion to Balzac), etc., as well as more general writers such as the ubiquitous Robert Macfarlane.

Overall all, I enjoyed this beautiful book. It is a worthy successor to last years' Literary Wonderlands: A Journey through the Greatest Fictional Worlds Ever Created from the same publisher, and an excellent addition to what you might call the book-list genre.

 

 

Literary Landscapes: Charting the Real-Life Settings of the World’s Favourite Fiction

General Editor: John Sutherland

Published 25 October 2018 – Price: £25 hardback, full-colour illustration.

You could buy this from your local book shop or by using the Amazon link in the text, or directly from me (who is also assessed for Uk tax!). I can offer free UK postage on pre-orders until the 24th October. Just contact me to order.

You could win a copy too: Follow @modernbooks and tweet your own favourite #LiteraryLandscape for a chance to win a copy of Literary Landscapes.

Blog tours can be a bit samey but there is so much to read and discuss in this book that this one might well be worth following.

 

House Keeping Notes

I've been having a long overdue play with the content and layout of this blog. I've gone back to having two side bars to enable more links and more books to be displayed. I've also been checking links removing dead ones an d updating others whilst adding lost more. It is a work in progress and not quite finished but I hope it will be more readable and more useful to you.

A few things to draw your attention to: there are new indie booksellers listed in the Independent Booksellers links, there are new links for UK book fairs, and the Book Care and Repair links are definitely worth a look. I've yet to check the literary societies and I want to add more books to the right side bar. I may add some of my own stock over there.

I read all the time but often don't have time to review so I have moved the Books on the Bedside Table further up on the left - hopefully that is easier to see and may flag up books you never get to see reviewed.

I have very mixed feelings about my current read:

 

but it needs little introduction.

 

If you have suggests for links - your favourite independent book shop for example? Then please add them to the comments and I'll see what I can do.

40% Off Books Bank Holiday Sale

For Monday 27th August only we're having a 40% off sale. Scroll down for your discount code and further details and then browse our site.

 

 

40% off books in stock* - today only

Use the code 2018aug40 at the checkout for a 40% discount on our book prices on Monday 27th August only. There is no minimum purchase and no limit to how often you can use the code on the day so browse our site and enjoy!

Please feel free to pass the discount code onto friends or to your students.

 

 

Books shown:

Rosamond Lehmann: An Appreciation

The Wool-Pack by Cynthia Harnett

and below Rápúnzell [the classic Ladybird Rapunzel in Gaelic]

 

 

 

Book catalogues you might enjoy:

Authors A-Z
Fiction
English local history by county
Children's Literature
Poetry and Criticism
Novels and Criticism
Classics
Language Studies
History
Philosophy
Movements and Themes in Literature
French Literature
Art and Photography
Architecture

Angela Carter

One of the pleasures of being a book dealer is feeling the resurgence of interest in one particular writer or genre. Over the last year it has been Angela Carter. Not that Carter has been particularly neglected since her death but now is the point, a couple of decades on, when writers can start to drop off the public's radar. I have noticed however that Carter sells well at fairs, and I'm often asked for particular works. One gentleman told me he worshipped at the feet of Angela Carter! She was also the author about whom I sold most books at the last fair I attended.

The recent biography (and a good recent biography obviously always helps a writer's reputation) The Invention of Angela Carter: A Biography by Edmund Gordon won or was shortlisted for a number of different awards and comes in and out of stock very quickly. I have some first editions of it in stock at the moment including this one.

 

 

The interest in her though is as much academic as popular. There is a new Angela Carter Society with a very academic board, and the hopes of an Angela Carter conference with a request for proposals for hosting. There are a number of useful twitter feeds for those wanting to keep up-to-date with all things Carter including this one and this one. Recent books include Decadent Daughters and Monstrous Mothers: Angela Carter and European Gothic by Rebecca Munford which would also be of interest to those researching Ann Radcliffe, Edgar Allan Poe, the Marquis de Sade and Baudelaire; and Inside The Bloody Chamber: On Angela Carter, the Gothic and other Weird Tales by Christopher Frayling.

More of Carter's own work, other than her widely available novels, has been produced in accessible well-edited collections including Shaking A Leg: Collected Journalism and Writings edited by Jenny Uglow. And I have found copies of her radio plays sell so well I have difficulty keeping them in stock.

As if to prove my point on the boom in Carter interest, I've noticed whilst composing this post that there is a TV programme, Angela Carter: Of Wolves & Women, on BBC2 at 9pm on Saturday.

It is very much the Gothic/fairy tale element that seems to be fuelling the interest, rather than Carter being simply pigeon-holed as a woman writer. And this adult interest in the creative push we get from fairy tales is evident in the work of Marina Warner (I noticed Karen at Cornflower had a Marina Warner video up recently) as well as in other genres such as this fabulous (in all senses) work on fashion:

 

To browse all our Angela Carter books click here. To browse more critiques of fairy tales please click here. To browse more Marina Warner books please click here.

Bay of Ghosts by Rob Hawley

 

 

As those of you who get our regular newsletter will know my husband Rob has what they used to call a 'slim volume' out. Bay of Ghosts by Rob Hawley is the second of Bradford based Graft Poetry's new series of poetry pamphlets.

It is very hard when you are interested in landscape to write about the north of England after Ted Hughes, and it is hard to write about growing up in the north of England post Simon Armitage, and yet I am proud that Rob has found a way though this and writes about scenes from Yorkshire and Lancashire, past and present, in his own voice. Even with a wife's prejudice I can see Bay of Ghosts does not particularly innovate, but that allows theme and subject to rise above form in a very readable way. Interestingly the northern poet it reminds me most of is actually Andrew Marvell, with dialogues, and personification, and dealing with matters ecological as much as theological, historiographical as well as as metaphysical, the slight echo is there.

I've heard Tom Paulin use the phrase, 'white Gothic', and I think such intense shocks of white and light, form part of the charm of Bay of Ghosts, from the white wraiths of the past to the repeated glimmers of water and flickers of fire and candles. Snapshots appear, drawing heavily on mindfulness, but the whole reaches repeatedly back into the past and constantly pushes at ideas of the future, keeping, at the back of the reader's mind, a conceit of the ebb and flow of time beyond the fashionable idea of the 'moment'.

As to subject matter, there are poems here on Morecambe Bay and the Yorkshire Dales, on Maria and Elizabeth Bronte, on books and collecting, on teaching and reading to children, on a death his grandmother witnessed as a young married woman (the deceased is a husband named only in relation to his wife; a sort of reverse second Mrs de Winter), on trees, on John Clare, and more. Overall, it is a thoughtful and entertaining 28 pages and I am delighted Graft Poetry were keen to publish it.

Should any of that pique your interest, copies of Bay of Ghosts are available in my online shop and at book fairs. £4 plus postage. If you require a signed copy that is easily arranged.

Finally, I should add that the haunting photograph of Morecambe Bay that illustrates the cover is by the wonderful Joe Nash.