Catherine Taylor - Böcker

Winner of the 2024 TLS Ackerley Prize'Part poignant memoir of time and place. Part record of the violence, and indifference, against which most girls grow up. The Stirrings is a pleasure and a shock' Eimear McBride'A superb, moving and disturbing memoir - haunting and unforgettable' Jonathan CoeThis is a story about one young woman coming of age, and about the place and time that shaped her: the North of England in the 1970s and 80s.About the scorching summer of 1976 - the last Catherine Taylor would spend with both her parents in their home in Sheffield.About the Yorkshire Ripper, the serial killer whose haunting presence in Catherine's childhood was matched only by the aching absence of her own father.About a country thrown into disarray by the nuclear threat and the Miners' Strike, just as Catherine's adolescent body was invaded by a debilitating illness.About 1989's 'Second Summer of Love', a time of sexual awakening for Catherine, and the unforeseen consequences that followed it.About a tragic accident, and how the insidious dangers facing women would became increasingly apparent as Catherine crossed into to adulthood.

These beautiful, unsettling and playful photographs show how certain sci-fi tropes—from digital servants to sex robots—have been consistently gendered as femaleThe latest photobook from Brooklyn-based photographer Hannah Whitaker (born 1980) imagines the embodied forms of personified technology which have long been central to sci-fi narratives: digital servants, sex robots, machine-learning projects.Ursula addresses the consistency with which these figures are gendered as female, subservient and sexualized, and slyly points to our society's insidious failures to fully see women without imposing such roles and distinctions.Immersed in techno-futuristic design tropes, Whitaker's photographs—at once playful, maximalist and estranging—are accompanied by texts by David Levine and Dawn Chan.

A meditation on the meaning of text–image collaboration, from the author of Sprawl and Margaret the FirstAuthor Danielle Dutton's A Picture Held Us Captive asks what it means for a writer to work "with" someone or something else—to make art in dialogue with an energy not one's own. Dutton (born 1975) explores ekphrastic fiction, looking at a wide range of writers and artists including John Keene and Edgar Degas; Eley Williams and Bridget Riley; Ben Lerner and Anna Ostoya; Amina Cain and Bill Viola; Lydia Davis and Joseph Cornell; as well as her own textual responses to visual artists Richard Kraft and Laura Letinsky. A Picture Held Us Captive—which includes a series of images at once illustrative and refusing simple illustration—considers the ways in which ekphrasis operates as a diptych. A work of both commentary and self-reflection, Dutton considers a dialectic between art’s ability to make strange what has grown familiar and the writer’s desire to make recognizable the experience of one artwork in the space of another.Danielle Dutton is an American writer and the cofounder of the feminist press Dorothy. Born in California in 1975, Dutton now resides in Missouri where she teaches creative writing at Washington University in St Louis. She has authored four books, including Sprawl and Margaret the First. She contributed the text to Here Comes Kitty: A Comic Opera, a book of collages by Richard Kraft. Her fiction has appeared in major publications such as the Paris Review, Harper's and Guernica.

A call-and-response between Lutz’s photography of labor conditions in America and Saunders’ writings In Orange Blossom Trail, American writer George Saunders (born 1958) and American photographer Joshua Lutz (born 1975) offer an alternately poetic and searing evocation of the cruelty and tender beauty of contemporary American life. Lutz (whose photobooks, including Mind the Gap and Hesitating Beauty, have been named Best Art Books by Time and PhotoEye) and Saunders (Man Booker Prize–winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo and MacArthur Award recipient) first met on a magazine assignment, where they discovered a shared interest in both the psychological and material conditions of the laboring individual and the Buddhist teachings of attachment and the sacredness of existence. Through Lutz’s photos and three texts by Saunders, the book asks: When do we zoom in and when do we zoom out from the individual lives whose labor supports other lives? Orange Blossom Trail is a meditation, in two voices, on the alienation of the industrialized landscape and the brutality of American inequality. Replete with a cover printed in four-color silkscreen, white foil-stamped text and textured colored endpapers, the volume is treated with special touches while remaining affordable.

Image Text Music by writer and editor Catherine Taylor is a series of textual and photographic essays that explore our encounters with the place where the visual meets the verbal. Taylor riffs on and subverts Roland Barthes’ classic 1977 essay collection, Image Music Text, using his title as playful points of departure for her thinking.

*Starred review: "An engrossing saga of love set against a subtly drawn, disturbing depiction of Hitler’s tyranny... Taylor’s sprawling narrative is a coming-of-age story with the highest possible stakes, a tense wartime thriller, a study of faith in extremis... and an unusually intimate portrait of life in Germany as Nazism corrupts friendships and families" — Kirkus"An immersive tale of enduring love between a British woman and a German Catholic seminarian on the eve of WWII... WWII fiction fans will be riveted" — Publishers WeeklyIn the last golden years before Europe erupts intoWWII a young English writer and a German Roman Catholic priest-in-training meetby chance on the small British island of Guernsey - and are drawn into aforbidden, all-consuming love. Then history and duty intrude, forcing them tochoose between complicity and courage in a fight for truth, freedom - and eachother. A sweeping and devastating, morally complex love story that will stay with you longafter the last page, from Catherine Taylor, author of no. 1 best seller BeyondThe Moon.In 1936 Kitty Garland-Fry moves to Guernsey withher bohemian, artist parents and unruly siblings. Marooned amid her family'schaotic lifestyle, Kitty, a passionate writer of fairy tales, fears she'll dieof boredom and frustration if she cannot find a life of her own. In NaziBerlin, meanwhile, Lukas von Harnitz, an idealistic and devout Roman Catholicseminarian, is reluctantly leaving for Guernsey, too, forced to interrupt hispriestly studies for a year to take his newly widowed English-born mother backhome to safety. Fiercely anti-Nazi, he can't help feeling that he's abandoningboth his country and his calling at a moment of gathering darkness.Two fish out of water together, Kitty and Lukas aredrawn together in their shared loneliness. Bonding over poetry and books, theirdays unfold like a quiet, sunlit dream on white sand beaches beneath endlessblue skies, sheltered from both the pull of responsibility and the gatheringstorm of war. But then friendship begins to deepen into something more, andLukas is forced into a devastating choice between God and the woman he loves,while fate also forces Kitty onto a new path that will take her into the veryheart of Nazi Germany. As the world fractures around them and Lukas witnessesthe shameful, real-life historical collusion of the Church he loves withNazism, he's forced to reevaluate all he once believed sacred, while at thesame time Kitty, trying to fashion a future for herself built on compromise andhope, discovers that conscience will not be silenced. And as the consequencesof their choices finally come due, both Kitty and Lukas must decide who, andwhat, they truly believe in - and what they are willing to lose.Charting the road to war from both the British andGerman perspectives, The Many Seas to Guernsey is an emotional,character-driven epic that grapples with themes of faith, conscience, moralcourage and the power of love in an age of extremes. Moving from the secludedturquoise coves of Guernsey to the towering Bavarian Alps, then to the Gestapocells of pre-war Berlin and finally the hellish beaches of the 1940 Dunkirkevacuation. The Many Seas to Guernsey is the first in a planned duology andwill appeal to fans of novels like All the Light We Cannot See, Crooked Cross, Suite Francaise and The Nightingale.