Nu-ILB: What books have you purchased lately?

that babel collection is terrific and essential btw. i dunno if his actual polish front diaries were in earlier collections or not but having them backtoback w the red cavalry stories is revelatory, and the plays about jewish gangsters in odessa rule.

i wrote a huge undergrad seminar paper that was basically a glorified book report on that volume (with lots of quotes from lenin's telegrams, for history.)

^the babel arrived earlier today & looks to be pretty damn impressive. now just need to find the time to read it.

also picked up 2nd hand:

rayner heppenstall - two moons
wyndham lewis - the complete wild body
céline - journey to the end of the night

the celine's an old new directions edition... with a really early translation... think the copy i used to have was the ralph manheim version...

Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost Kurtz country.
>

THis was fascinating but I haven't read it in years. I know I read it amongst a load of things from the University library in the summer of 2003.
Belgium or the King of there felt it was missing out on the scrabble for Africa so decided it would claim to be trying to rid the area around the Congo of slavery. It instead created a hell on Earth for the local natives and provided then ship's captain Joseph Conrad a model for some of his writing including the up river of Kurtz. Conrad actually had dealings with the regime in being sent there to trade by the company he was working with. Or something similar.
It was all exposed by a Liverpool shipping clerk if I'm remembering rightly.
Think I have a copy of the book so I should reread it, but the to read list is pretty long.

Mark Twain wrote scathingly about King Leopold's misrule in the Congo at the time it was happening. Reading his denunciation was how I first learned of that bit of colonial history (though not at the time it was happening).

More 2nd hand madness:

Shirley Hazzard - The Bay of Noon (James do you like her?)
Nikolai Gogol - Dead Souls (love the Yale Uni paperbk)
Hrabal - Harlequin's Millions

Also: Tanizaki - The Reed Cutter and Captain Shigemoto's Mother.

Found and bought a copy of Procopius' Secret History today, as a used Penguin paperback, good condition, $2. Probably the second juiciest of the ancient histories, behind Suetonius.

attended a book sale, purchased some books ($1 each)

george meredith - the egoist
thomas hardy - the well-beloved, the distracted preacher & other tales
joyce carey - to be a pilgrim
anthony powell - hearing secret harmonies
children of albion: poetry of the underground in britain
fernando arrabal - plays volume 3
chris marker - owls at noon prelude: the hollow men
antonioni - l'avventura (illustrated script, interviews, essays, criticism)

What's on the Chris Marker? Is it his on writings?!

book version of his video installation of that name inspired by the eliot poem (music by takemitsu). also has a couple of short essays by others. toured here, but didn't make it down to where i am :-/

inspired by the eliot poem (music by takemitsu)

Went to an exhibit of Marker's work at the Whitechapel (some of it his video art) and don't recall that. It didn't make much of an impression overall :-( but on paper it sounds that piece sounds fantastic.

i bought MY BRILLIANT FRIEND on mah KINDLE

it was super cheap

ferrante seems p. good so far

also bought laurie penny's last book

again, super cheap

amazon hint hint

I had to cull my library, because I was beginning to make too many piles without being able to shelve them. This led me to sell a shopping bag full today. Which then meant I was in a bookstore with some money in my fist, with predictable results.

Outlaws of the Marsh in an abridged edition of ~400pp, translated from the Chinese by Sidney Shapiro. A classic from about 1450 AD. Trade paperback, $9. I could have bought a three volume hardcover set of the full story for $30, but backed off. I may regret it, but I have too many 1200 page magna opera still to read and didn't want to commit to another.

The Abbess of Crewe, Muriel Spark, paperback, $4.50. I'll save it for later, since I'm already reading a Spark novel atm.

Sean O'Brien, COLLECTED POEMS

Shakeapeare - The Sonnets

Couple of new books:

Josep Pla - Life Embitters
Dostoevsky - Demons

bunch of 2nd hand stuff:

céline - london bridge
cortázar - 62: a model kit
pinget - mahu or the material
walser - institute benjamenta (a.k.a. jakob von gunten)
nabokov - collected stories (think i've read most of these in separate volumes)
géza csáth - the magician's garden and other stories (early 20th century hungarian décadent)

géza csáth - the magician's garden and other stories (early 20th century hungarian décadent)
and also MURDERER

nice haul, btw

i purchased a different (not different) edition of a book i already own, because i am a sick man

i bought to the lighthouse yday - never read any woolf before - i read some critic on electric literature talking about her and that was enough to prompt me.

The Day oF the Peacock a book on British men's fashion from 1963 to 1973 tied in to a V&A museum exhibition a few years ago.
I really like fashion from the period and this was recommended alongside a couple of other things.

Summer of '69 by Mike Keleher (sp?) a memoir of time an Irish ex-pat spent in the US army in the mid to late 60s. Picked this up from a charity shop. Would never of heard of it otherwise.

THe Complete Prose of Woody Allen, another charity shop find. I think I may have already had a copy of this but it may be long lost.

The Robert Fisk book on Lebanon the name of which escapes me at the moment. I still never got through The Great War For Civilisation his book on Afghanistan possibly 10 years after buying it, but I do think he is a pretty good writer. I keep meaning to sit down and get through it but it is pretty thick, possibly twice the size of this which isn't exactly slim.

Stevolende, I don't know if this would interest you, but there's a publisher called Four Corners who did an edition of Wilde's Dorian Gray formatted like a 1970s men's fashion magazine: http://www.fourcornersbooks.co.uk/#/books/the_picture_of_dorian_gray/familiar
http://www.fourcornersbooks.co.uk/img/booksbig/244/w/dorian4b.jpg

I read (and loved) 'To The Lighthouse' in college. I don't think my classmates thought that much of it though.

i obviously know of woolf but i hadn't really read anyone talking about it, but as soon as i read about it this week i had that instinctive feeling that it'll be something i like.

I recently d/l the Complete Works of Plutarch to my Kindle, which includes the Greek text as well as translations to English. I already had a good printed copy of his Lives of Noble Greeks and Romans, but lately I've been interested in reading a few more of his Moralia, or essays.

This collection included all the Loeb Classical Library translations of the Moralia, which would cost me a mint in hardcover volumes. It cost me $2.51.

My Autobiographty Charles Chaplin in a hardback version from 1964. Could be interesting, haven't looked very far into it yet.

The Killer Within by Philip Carlo autobiography of the writer/Investigative reporter who wrote about the Ice Man and a couple of other killers. He was diagnosed with a disease called amyotrophic lateral sclerosis which would slowly cause all the muscles of his body to atrophy. Haven't read much of this yet either but it was €1 from a charity shop so I thought I'd take the plunge. Not sure how long it's going to take to get to it, if i do. But sounds interesting.

Great 2nd hand haul today:

Platonov - The Portable Platonov (this has a few poems, stories, a play and a couple of excerpts from the untranslated Chevengur). Also scored a copy of the Harvill ed of Happy Moscow
Han Kang - The Vegetarian
Hjalmar Soderbergh - The Serious Game

aimless how is the greek display?

The greek typeface on my Kindle is clear and legible, properly accented and resizable.

I can't comment on the critical apparatus or whether it has reference numbers that match standard texts, because my greek is limited to knowing the alphabet, moderately correct pronunciation, and knowing the meaning of a handful of words, so these scholarly necessities are meaningless to me. It lacks any notes, as far as I can see. It should be good enough for rough-and-ready reading, if you can read ancient greek.

Richard Dadd the Artist and the Asylum.
Meant to grab this when it came out. Was doing other stuff so forgot. Got it now and its got a lot less of the fairy/magical art than I hoped. So wondering if there is more available somewhere outside of the 70s exhibition catalogue which is now pretty expensive.

xp if the text is taken from the loebs as well, then iirc the most they tend to add is the occasional note on textual variants, interpretations, etc. (of the nature of 'h.m.s. oldmother says OUXI here, we say OU KI'), so there's not a lot of value added even for people who can read ancient greek; i was just thinking more about the text flow, hilightability on a par w/ latin text, etc.

sounds good then, it would be nice to have the moralia in an accessible form

I should also note that I haven't found any easy way to switch back and forth between the greek text and its translation, so there's just no duplicating the facing pages of the Loeb printed text. For me that is not much of a problem, since the greek text is little more than a curiosity for me.

ow, that kinda renders it 90% useless to me

but still, $2.51 for the english ain't bad at all

Lately, Samuel Delany's Neveryóna, or: The Tale of Signs and Cities, Carla Speed McNeil's Finder: Third World, merritt kopas's series of collages and bitter jokes about gender politics, THESE WERE FREE ON MY BLOG, and some issues of Em Rose's perzine Ghost Lungs, still in transit.

collected Raymond Carver, which I have hardly read at all yet, just one essay about his father that's near the back of the book. mustve read the majority of his stories at one time or another, just nice to have them collected. i go to victoria bc quite a lot, on a clear day you can look across the strait of juan de fuca and see port angeles, wa, where Carver spent the last part of his life. i always feel like going over on a ferry for the day and checking it out, though apparently there's not much to the town, and little remnant or memorial of Carver other than his grave.

tristes tropiques by levi-strauss. quite enjoying this, one of those books ive been meaning to read since i was a teenager.

Found super cheap:

Willa Cather, My Antonia
George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss

Paid a visit to the LRB bookshop as I wanted to get hold of Sergio Pitol - The Art of Flight. Been reading about him for weeks and the marketing worked! (oh and the excerpt I linked to on the Spanish Lit therad was great)

Then a half price find at Skoob: Miklos Szentkuthy - Towards the One and Only Metaphor.

3/$10:
Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

https://goo.gl/photos/Cs88s4eyKLAyZxtb6

All opshopopshop cheap or free, so about $10 all up

THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY
MARY BARTON
A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD (spare copy)

10p each !

Some cheapie paperbacks I bought yesterday, all in good condition:

The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin, $1.
The Poetic Edda, trans. Carolyne Larrington, 50 cents.
The Big Money, John Dos Passos, 50 cents.

I just bought a used hardcover copy of Lyrics of the Troubadours and Trouveres, Frederick Goldin, for $25 online. I used to own a copy decades ago, but sold it. I've missed it more than I thought I would. This is a small press reprint of the Anchor Doubleday edition I once owned.

I also bought a used paperback copy of Gunslinger, Edward Dorn, from the Wingbow Press, 1975, for $8.95. I notice now that it claims to be one of 4500 copies of a first paperback edition, released simultaneously with 500 hardcover copies, but I basically bought it just to read and the whole first edition thing has never impressed me.

New

Lauren Berlant & Lee Edelman, Sex, or The Unbearable
Mary Gaitskill, Bad Behaviour
Mary Gatiskill, Because They Wanted To
Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House
Lorrie Moore, Anagrams
Lorrie Moore, Like Life
Flannery O'Connor, Collected Works (Library of America collection)

Used

Pat Barker, Regeneration
Sara Jeannette Duncan, The Imperialist
Jamaica Kinkaid, A Small Place
Margaret Laurence, The Stone Angel
Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
John Richardson, Wacousta
Sinclair Ross, As For Me and My House
Sheila Watson, The Double Hook
Virginia Woolf, Orlando

Bought Boutique London by Paul Lester last night. Will be a while before I get it though. Book about the clothes shops of London from 60s to 70s. It was recommended by the same people who recommended Day of The Peacock the thing about male dandyism at the time.

Franco Moretti, THE BOURGEOIS

new hardback for just £6 from Oxfam

Andre Gide - Diaries 1889-1949. This is a selection from the four-volume set. Never got into Gide but Sontag so rates this I'll give it a go.
Joseph Roth - Hotel Savoy, w/the old terrific Picador cover, has a couple of other stories I've not read.

Chris Kraus - Summer of Hate
Leslie Marmon Silko - Almanac of the Dead
Annie Mok - Ley Lines #1: Unholy Shapes