Nu-ILB: What books have you purchased lately?

The Faber Book of 20th Century German Poems (ed Michael Hofmann)

Interested to know what that's like--Hofmann's tastes as a translator are usually pretty reliable

The are several copies of this at Judd books, 4 quid.

Read Hofmann's intro and it isn't bad as it goes.

Similar collection for Italian but not Spanish.

Had a Judd run the other day, picked up:
Poems for the Millennium volume 3: didn't know about this - more recent volume of the v 90s avant garde/internationalist anthology, this one dedicated to the 19th century.
Lineages of the Absolutist State by Perry Anderson. I am thinking/hoping that the meat of this will be better than the old-school Marxist introduction, which follows charming antique tradition of laying out FIRST THING what Marx and/or Engels had to say about your topic, because that is your starting ground for discussion and thought. I suppose that's just what books were like in 1974. All books.

marxist books are still like that, but they start doing it in chapter 3 or so after their cool anarcho-spinozistic alternative has been introduced

Earlier today I remarked to my wife about how I'd like to read a short novel for a change, because it seems lately like everything I pick up is 700 to 900 pages long. Therefore I just came home from the local charity shop with a couple of Muriel Spark novels for $1 each: The Comforters (1957 - her first novel) and Aiding and Abetting (2000 - her penultimate novel). The first is 225 pages, the second 165 pages, god bless her.

Das Nibelungenlied (tr. Burton Raffel)
Franz Kafka - The Trial (tr. by Douglas Scott and Chris Walker and lol @ "adheres specifically to the tone and the style of the original German" - but yes I do get people dislike the Muir translations)
Hubert Selby - Last Exit to Brooklyn (don't know why the fuck I sold this in the first place). Have plans to do a run on all of Selby's books.

LRB shop 10% off night:

Petrarch - Songs and Sonnets (tr. Nicholas Kilmer)
Celine - Castle to Castle

just ordered jonathan meades' autobiography which is out tomorrow

^ Excited! Soured a bit on the guy after all the reactionary stuff in his France show and the whiny "architects should be allowed to do whatever" tone of the brutalism thing, but he's an interesting dude.

Gilead, Marilynne Robinson, in a used trade paperback in readable condition, for $7. I enjoyed Housekeeping and several ILBers have said Gilead is as good or better.

I love Gilead so much

Osip Mandelstam - The Noise of Time (so happy I scored this, really wanting to read this esp after post- discovery of Tsvetaeva's prose this year)

Celine - Death on Credit (another great score, can't wait to re-read but it'll probably be a late this year)

Hesse - Glass Bead Game

Collections of poems by:

Neruda (the classic multi-translator effort from the 70s, which I borrowed from the library last year, its nice to have this selection - even if its reduced).

Verlaine (tr. Joanna Richardson)
Milosz (tr. by Milosz and Lillian Vallee)
Baudelaire - Flowers of Evil (tr. Richard Howard)

LRB 10% off night for July:

Goethe - Roman Elegies (tr. Michael Hamburger)
Celine - Rigadoon (the last of his trilogy)

More cheap finds:

Gert Hofmann - The Film Explainer
Ernst Junger (spelt Juenger on the cover lol) - On the Marble Cliffs

Believe it has an umlaut in German, Jünger, which is why they would have put an 'e' after the 'u' in English.

Liked The Film Explainer, interested to see what you think. Translated by his son, you-know-who.

Thanks for clarifying - they spell it Jünger in the bio within (I couldn't be arsed to recall which Alt + is that again when spelling it here).

Film Explainer looks really good - get to that next week sometime.

The New Biographical Dictionary of Film (6th ed. but first for me)

Looking up Film Explainer, it sounds really good-0I must get a copy of this

Gyula Krudy - Sunflower
The Journals of Denton Welch (great one to score, can't wait to re-read)
Osip Mandeshtam - Selected Poems (tr. James Greene, with about 50 extra poems from the Clarence Brown edition)

The expanded edition of Carl Wilson's Lets Talk About Love.

Ooh! What are the expansions?

This new, expanded edition goes even further, calling on thirteen prominent writers and musicians to respond to themes ranging from sentiment and kitsch to cultural capital and musical snobbery. The original text is followed by lively arguments and stories from Nick Hornby, Krist Novoselic, Ann Powers, Mary Gaitskill, James Franco, Sheila Heti and others.

Including one ILXer!

Quite a coup by xyzzzz__

picked up 'cause they were cheap:

naomi mitchison/wyndham lewis - beyond this limit
alasdair gray: critical appreciations and a bibliography

what's the mitchison/lewis nlt?

very short fantasy novel published mid-thirties, text by mitchison with illustrations & some ideas from lewis. fairly sure i read a description of the period of its composition in paul o'keefe's lewis biog. given their completely divergent beliefs... should be interesting?

http://www.sternrarebooks.com/pictures/medium/25671P.jpg

maybe one day i'll even be able to bring myself to read the copy of left wings over europe i picked up god know how long ago :-/

hadn't heard of/had forgotten abt the mitchison tho have read the biog. be interested to hear what you think.

I can't remember the exact status of LWOE - '30s "populist" pamphlet? (Lewis' populism is weird). I seem to recall it's usually seen as one of the most damning testaments to Lewis' German Nazi sympathies (x-ref with the favourite fascists ILB thread).

Was it the Krudy that was a coup alimosina? Its a NYRB title which is widely available. Just that I normally get my books 2nd hand.

More finds:

Eugenio Montale - Poems (this is the European Modern Poets, and its a compilation of his three main books!)
Arthur Schnitzler - Selected shorter fiction (don't know why I sold this)
The Existential Imagination - From De Sade to Sartre (talk about this in some other thread) but its a compilation of 'existential' bits of fiction.

all 3 volumes of proust's "remembrance of things past" for $3
jean rhys' "wide sargossa sea"

A whole bunch of out-of-print Hungarian fiction (in English trans) for around $5 a book - will report back

Relocation sale at Blackwell's in Charing Cross road. Everything's half price, mostly picked up stuff for my late-blooming interest in theory/philosophy:
Badiou - Being and event
Derrida - Writing and Difference
Deleuze - Difference and repetition
Foucault - Order of things
Jameson - Late Marxism
Skinner - Foundations of Modern Political Thought v2
Godelier - Rationality and irrationality in economics

Hey, I also just bought Being and Event, as I said in the Zizek-thread. Also, 'Jean-Luc Godard - Cinema Historian' the first english-languauge monograph on Histoire(s) du Cinema, which should be very good. And I got a collection of short stories by Julio Cortazar from my book club.

I am also a fan of Denton Welch! From the journals, I think, I vaguely remember art school in London and later his companion darning socks with colored thread, sort of any which way ...

the Denton welch journals are excellent. he's a good writer. part of a v slender 20th C strand of v late aestheticism.

will have to swing by blackwells on Saturday but feels like it might be gone all gone by then.

It was Burroughs, a major fan, who led me to Denton Welch. I have a very nice old (expurgated) hardcover of Welch's journals, with a cover photo of him that looks like something out of Peake, or Beardsley.

Am also looking forward to that 'Jean-Luc Godard - Cinema Historian' monograph - late Godard studies is really becoming its own thing, now.

Who was it that called Denton Welch 'Our Proust' again?

Just looked this up: Richard Hell said of him: Denton Welch is like a British baby Proust in his astounding grasp of his own (usually mundane) experience. Nothing much happens in his books but the most wonderful writing.

oh huh when i was in the blackwells it was only 30%. got the penguin modern classics celan. did they have much philosophy left?

and will they be still be there on sunday when i am next in london

Yeah, philosophy was ok – the routledge & verso display seemed pretty full, so there's that, and philosophy itself wasn't anything like picked clean – a fair bit of secondary and some canonical-primary stuff (blue Cambridge Kant paperbacks, for instance).

Poetry and lit crit was disappointing, but I might pick up some Arden 3rd series if I can get back tonight.

I took the following from the Lewisham Way book phonebooth scheme:

Lewis Mumford - The City in History
Gary Indiana - Three Month Fever: The Andrew Cunanan Story

Anyone read either?

long time ILMer, first time ILBer, with a question for the stoners out there. Is it a thing when high to order books online at such a rate that you'll never catch up? i couldn't believe it when a fellow pot head was like, oh yeah, that's a definite thing

you don't have to be high

Lots of art books, in particular, in the last couple of days.

The Book Of Miracles*
Fritz Kahn*
The Nuremberg Chronicle*
Architecture Now 9*
Green Architecture Now*
Heavenly Bodies ~ Paul Koudounaris
World Film Locations: Moscow
Art Nouveau*
Vienna: Art & Architecture
Rookie: Yearbook Two
Aquatopia: The Imaginary Of The Ocean Deep
An Encyclopaedia Of Myself ~ Jonathan Meades
Wholeness And The Implicate Order ~ David Bohm
The Occult Philosophy In The Elizabethan Age ~ Frances Yates
Folk Devils and Moral Panics ~ Stanley Cohen
British Folk Tales and Legends ~ Katharine Briggs
Aztecs ~ Inga Clendinnen
Anthony Burgess ~ Complete Enderby
Anthony Burgess ~ A Dead Man In Deptford
I Was Jack Mortimer ~ Alexander Lernet~Holenia
The Other ~ Thomas Tryon (NYRB)
Russian Criminal Tattoos vol.3 ~ Danzig Baldaev

*Taschen

Likely to have forgotten a few.

Patrick O'Brian - Master and Commander (on this now - it's great so far)
Christina Stead - Letty Fox: Her Luck
Helen Vendler - Dickinson
Northrop Frye - Anatomy of Criticism

I was mainly out looking for something on Japanese art, but couldn't find anything I wanted. :/

Sold a bunch for:

D.H. Lawrence - The Princess and Other Stories/This Mortal Coil and other Stories
Salvatore Quasimodo - Selected Poems (Penguin Modern European poets)

50% off @ Blackwells:

Malaparte - The Skin
Miklos Szentkuthy - Marginalia on Casanova

I was looking for The Skin. You must have beaten me to it.