Reading Room catalogue

In Lovers of Today, Garrett Caples is his most playful and heartfelt. Here are poems that generously place the reader in a particular poetic moment that is both elegiac and also wildly entertaining. Taken from a bar of the same name in the Lower East Side in New York City, Lovers of Today is a collection of poetry that pays tribute to friendships including Kevin Killian, John Ashbery, Joanne Kyger, and Bill Berkson, among others, wherein each poem is a celebration of life’s ephemerality.

Ši dokumentinė knyga – 1940-ųjų birželio dviejų savaičių kaleidoskopas, pašėlusiai įsukantis į to meto Lietuvos ir jos žmonių realijas.

1940 m. birželį Lietuvos žmonės planavo derlių, atostogas, išleistuves ir savo ateitį. Vasaros savaitgaliai buvo numatyti gegužinėms, ekskursijoms, įvairiausių organizacijų suvažiavimams, sportui, poilsiui ir, žinoma, žemės ūkiui. Vyriausybė taip pat nesnaudė – palaimino šalies elektrifikacijos ir susisiekimo gerinimo projektus bei patvirtino didžiausią metinį biudžetą. Bažnyčia su nerimu laukė svarbios reformos – civilinės santuokos įteisinimo. Visa Lietuva jaukinosi išsvajotąjį Vilnių ir Vilniją. Darbais, idėjomis ir gandais kunkuliuojanti šalis jau buvo kiek apsipratusi su Europoje vykstančiu karu. Nepaisant to, prie radijo imtuvų, dienraščių puslapių ar pieninių vyrai pasipypkiuodami aptarinėjo vokiečių žygį Paryžiaus link. Kaip pasisuks karo švytuoklė? Ar rekordiškai speiguotą žiemą iškentusioje šalyje sužydės sodai? Kokia bus vasara?

“I started writing books about and for my friend George Miles because whenever I would speak about him honestly like I am doing now I felt a complicated agony beneath my words that talking openly can’t handle.”

For most of his life, Dennis Cooper believed the person he had loved the most and would always love above all others was George Miles. In his first novel in ten years, Dennis Cooper writes about George Miles, love, loss, addiction, suicide, and how fiction can capture these things, and how it fails to capture them. Candid and powerful, I Wished is a radical work of shifting forms. It includes appearances by Santa Claus, land artist James Turrell, sentient prairie dogs, John Wayne Gacy, Nick Drake, and George, the muse for Cooper’s acclaimed novels Closer, Frisk, Try, Guide, and Period, collectively known as “The George Miles Cycle.” In revisiting the inspiration for the Cycle, Dennis has written a masterwork: the most raw, personal, and haunted book of his career.

Getting Lost is the diary kept by Annie Ernaux during the year and a half she had a secret love affair with a younger, married man, an attaché to the Soviet embassy in Paris. Her novel, Simple Passion, was based on this affair, but here her writing is immediate and unfiltered. In these diaries it is 1989 and Annie is divorced with two grown sons, living in the suburbs of Paris and nearing fifty. Her lover escapes the city to see her there and Ernaux seems to survive only in expectation of these encounters. She cannot write, she trudges distractedly through her various other commitments in the world, she awaits his next call; she lives merely to feel desire and for the next rendezvous. When he is gone and the moment of desire has faded, she feels that she is a step closer to death.

Lauded for her spare prose, Ernaux here removes all artifice, her writing pared down to its most naked and vulnerable. Translated brilliantly for the first time by Alison L. Strayer, Getting Lost is a haunting record of a woman in the grips of love, desire and despair.

Regos nervas – knyga apie žiūrėjimą, susidedanti iš akylų žvilgsnių į paveikslus ir į juos nutapiusius dailininkus. Taip pat – istorija apie Mariją, argentinietę meno kritikę ir gidę, kuri klajoja po Buenos Airių muziejus ir po savo pačios atsiminimus, o kertinius praeities taškus jungia su ją sukrėtusiais meno kūriniais.

Taip šiuose puslapiuose nugula pasakojimai apie El Greco, Courbet, Foujitą, Toulouse-Lautrecą, apie Picasso iškeltą pokylį Henri Rousseau garbei ar pašaipai, apie miglotas priežastis, dėl ko Rothko galėjo atsisakyti užbaigti milijoninį paveikslų užsakymą restoranui „Four Seasons“, apie Florencijos mediumės seansus lankantį Augusto Schiavoni. Visi šie meno istorijos epizodai prikelia pačios pasakotojos patirtis: ligoninę, kurioje jos vyrui buvo atliekama chemoterapija ir kur naktimis po palatas vaikštinėdavo prostitutė, vaikystėje namuose kilusį gaisrą, su laiku blėstančią draugystę, brolio mirtį ir skrydžių baimę.

Užburiantis ir melancholiškas Regos nervas – debiutinis argentiniečių meno kritikės, prozininkės Maríos Gainzos romanas, autofikciją išmoningai derinantis su naratyvine eseistika, intymiai narpliojantis mįslingus ryšius tarp meno kūrinio ir jį stebinčio žmogaus.

“Marigold was absorbed in her book; she had gotten as far as the V.” So begins Marigold and Rose, Louise Gluck’s astonishing chronicle of the first year in the life of twin girls. Imagine a fairy tale that is also a multigenerational saga; a piece for two hands that is also a symphony; a poem that is also, in the spirit of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, an incandescent act of autobiography.

Here are the elements you’d expect to find in a story of infant twins: Father and Mother, Grandmother and Other Grandmother, bath time and naptime-but more than that, Marigold and Rose is an investigation of the great mystery of language and of time itself, of what is and what has been and what will be. “Outside the playpen there were day and night. What did they add up to? Time was what they added up to. Rain arrived, then snow.” The twins learn to climb stairs, they regard each other like criminals through the bars of their cribs, they begin to speak. “It was evening. Rose was smiling placidly in the bathtub playing with the squirting elephant, which, according to Mother, represented patience, strength, loyalty and wisdom. How does she do it, Marigold thought, knowing what we know.”

Simultaneously sad and funny, and shot through with a sense of stoic wonder, this small miracle of a book, following thirteen books of poetry and two collections of essays, is unlike anything Gluck has written, while at the same time it is inevitable, transcendent.

Described as ‘a rich, reverberative dance with memories of a haunted city’ (LA Times), the poems of the prize-winning debut Dancing in Odessa by Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic, draw on archetype, myth and Russian literary figures. Tightly realised domestic settings are invigorated with a contemporary relevance, humour and torment, and a distinctive, transcendent music.

A memoir of gay life in 1970s Long Island by one of the leading proponents of the New Narrative movement.

Fascination brings together an early memoir, Bedrooms Have Windows (1989) and a previously unpublished prose work, Bachelors Get Lonely, by the poet and novelist Kevin Killian, one of the founding members of the New Narrative movement. The two together depict the author’s early years struggling to become a writer in the sexed-up, boozy, drug-ridden world of Long Island’s North Shore in the 1970s. It concludes with Triangles in the Sand, a new, previously unpublished memoir of Killian’s brief affair in the 1970s with the composer Arthur Russell. Fascination offers a moving and often funny view of the loneliness and desire that defined gay life of that era—a time in which Richard Nixon’s resignation intersected with David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs—from one of the leading voices in experimental gay writing of the past thirty years. “Move along the velvet rope,” Killian writes in Bedrooms Have Windows, “run your shaky fingers past the lacquered Keith Haring graffito: ‘You did not live in our time! Be Sorry!’”

Jonas Mekas (1922–2019) – vienas didžiausių nepriklausomo avangardinio kino meistrų, poetas, dramaturgas, eseistas, kritikas. Pirmame „Raštų“ tome publikuojama visa lietuviškai ir angliškai kurta jo poezija. Į lietuvių kalbą angliškus Jono Meko eilėraščius vertė Kornelijus Platelis.

„Turbūt tai iš viso viena geriausių, klasikinių lietuvių poezijos knygų“, – sako „Raštų“ pratarmėje Tomas Venclova apie pirmąjį J. Meko poezijos rinkinį „Semeniškių idilės“.

Knygą palydi QR kodas, kurį nuskaičius, galima paklausyti Jono Meko skaitomų „Semeniškių idilių“.

Jono Meko (1922–2019), rašytojo ir avangardinio kino kūrėjo, antrame „Raštų“ tome publikuojama lietuviškai ir angliškai kurta jo proza. Tekstų rinktinę sudarė režisierius, poetas, Jono Meko bičiulis Julius Ziz.

Jono Meko (1922–2019) – poeto, prozininko, pasaulyje pripažinto avangardinio kino kūrėjo – trečiame „Raštų“ tome publikuojami jau kino klasika tapusių filmų scenarijai ir lietuviškai parašyta pjesė „Pati pradžios pradžia“.

Sudarė ir įžanginį žodį parašė režisierius, poetas, Jono Meko bičiulis Julius Ziz.

Iš anglų kalbos scenarijus vertė rašytojai Vidas Morkūnas ir Dominykas Norkūnas.

“Alice Notley has become one of America’s greatest living poets. She has long written in narrative and epic and genre-bending modes to discover new ways to explore the nature of the self and the social and cultural importance of disobedience. The artist Rudy Burckhardt once wrote that Notley may be “our present-day Homer.”

In February, I met Alice Notley at a cafe near where she lives in Paris to talk about making a book with Fivehundred places. She was about to tour America reading in support of her book “For the Ride” a tour truncated by the universal collective situation of Covid. She managed to return to Paris in April. Our conversation from the start was to publish something that was written in the past but never published. “At the Foot At the Belt of the Raincoat” was written in 1979 in New York,Notley told me in the summer that it was a poem that Eileen Myles has asked about from time to time since Alice read it at the Poetry project in the 70’s. I asked Eileen what their memory of the poem was, and they wrote the following “Alice writes the most romantic poem of all time, everyone thinks it’s about them and bodies floating through walls and everything that you dreamed actually did happen in a painting or a whispered dark, articles of clothing transmit, people are born and die passionately, nothing forgets, everything is lost, in a corner, in a crowded room,whispering, dropping this note, it is so leafy and tragic and direct.” — David Wallace for the New Yorker

In the mid-eighteenth century, as new ideas begin to sweep the continent, a young Jew of mysterious origins arrives in a village in Poland. Before long, he has changed not only his name but his persona; visited by what seem to be ecstatic experiences, Jacob Frank casts a charismatic spell that attracts an increasingly fervent following. In the decade to come, Frank will traverse the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires, throngs of disciples in his thrall as he reinvents himself again and again, converts to Islam and then Catholicism, is pilloried as a heretic and revered as the Messiah, and wreaks havoc on the conventional order, Jewish and Christian alike, with scandalous rumours of his sect’s secret rituals and the spread of his increasingly iconoclastic beliefs. In The Books of Jacob, her masterpiece, 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Olga Tokarczuk writes the story of Frank through the perspectives of his contemporaries, capturing Enlightenment Europe on the cusp of precipitous change, searching for certainty and longing for transcendence.