Deborah Levy - Böcker

The first in Deborah Levy's essential three-part 'Living Autobiography' on writing and womanhood. 'Unmissable. Like chancing upon an oasis, you want to drink it slowly . . . Subtle, unpredictable, surprising' Guardian_________________________________Taking George Orwell's famous essay, 'Why I Write', as a jumping-off point, Deborah Levy offers her own indispensable reflections of the writing life. With wit, clarity and calm brilliance, she considers how the writer must stake claim to that contested territory as a young woman and shape it to her need. Things I Don't Want to Know is a work of dazzling insight and deep psychological succour, from one of our most vital contemporary writers.The final two instalments in Deborah Levy's 'Living Autobiography', The Cost of Living and Real Estate, are available now._________________________________'Superb sharpness and originality of imagination. An inspiring work of writing' Marina Warner'An exciting writer, sharp and shocking as the knives her characters wield' Sunday Times'A writer whose anger and confusion in the face of the world transform into poetic flights of fancy . . . which always feel marvellously right' Independent

From one of the great thinkers and writers of our time, comes the unmissable final instalment in Deborah Levy's critically acclaimed 'Living Autobiography'.'A beautifully crafted and thought-provoking snapshot of a life' The Evening Standard_________________________________'I began to wonder what myself and all unwritten and unseen women would possess in their property portfolios at the end of their lives. Literally, her physical property and possessions, and then everything else she valued, though it might not be valued by society. What might she claim, own, discard and bequeath? Or is she the real estate, owned by patriarchy? In this sense, Real Estate is a tricky business. We rent it and buy it, sell and inherit it - but we must also knock it down.'Following the critical acclaim of Things I Don't Want to Know and The Cost of Living, this final volume of Deborah Levy's 'Living Autobiography' is an exhilarating, thought-provoking and boldly intimate meditation on home and the spectres that haunt it._________________________________'Real Estate is a book to dive into. Come on in, the water's lovely' The Daily Telegraph'Her reflections on domesticity, freedom and romance are so beautiful, I found myself underlining multiple sentences a page. Wry, warm and uplifting, it's a book I'll return to again and again' Stylist'[Levy's living autobiography series is] a glittering triple echo of books that are as much philosophical discourse as a manifesto for living and writing' Financial Times

From twice Booker-shortlisted author Deborah Levy, a moving and revelatory collection exploring the muses that have shaped her life and work as a writerIn The Position of Spoons, Deborah Levy traces and measures her life against the backdrop of the literary and artistic muses that have shaped her – including a letter to her dying mother and to an absent friend. This volume illuminates and celebrates a rich and varied intellectual inheritance – and reflects on how it has enriched the author’s own work. Taking in questions of mortality, language, gender, place, consumerism and everyday living, the acclaimed novelist invites her reader behind the curtain of a creative life, ‘in which the position of the spoon is always changing’.‘Levy’s writing is dreamy but diamond-sharp, prismatic, droll, [and] devastating . . . Each sentence precisely pins down a feeling’ Los Angeles Review of Books‘Writing is self-excavation, a painful digging into the archaeology of our own experience. Levy is good on the prices we find ourselves paying: for art, for love, for fitting in . . . [She] plunges into the depths, taking us with her’ Guardian

‘In one short and sly book after another, [Levy] writes about characters navigating swerves of history and sexuality, and the social and personal rootlessness that accompanies both’ AtlanticWho was Gertrude Stein?Avant-garde American poet and art collector who made her home in Paris, godmother of modernism, queer icon, friend to Picasso and Hemingway, self-declared genius — a writer who has baffled readers and critics for a century.And why does she matter?The narrator of Deborah Levy’s latest, dazzling fiction has gone to Paris to find out. There she meets Eva with the blinding gaze, an artist in a long-distance marriage, and Fanny, a sexually adventurous financier; together they cook, walk, read and argue late into the nights.As Paris sweeps her along in its ceaseless flow, she thinks – about what we have to lose to become modern, navigating anxiety, living with uncertainty, angry fathers, making a new life in another country, art and language – how all these things looked to Gertrude Stein in the early days of the twentieth century, and how they look to her and her friends in the early twenty-first.This is a book about how we put ourselves together— an exhilarating, witty, cosmopolitan meditation on the pleasures and challenges of friendship, desire and living with other people. But it is also crashes through genre to create an inspired portrait of Stein herself: a writer who experimented fearlessly with a new way of living and who wrestled herself free from the nineteenth century to invent a brand-new way of looking at the world.

A GUARDIAN BEST BOOK OF THE 21ST CENTURYWINNER OF THE PRIX FEMINA ETRANGER 2020Following on from the critically acclaimed Things I Don't Want to Know, discover the powerful second memoir in Deborah Levy's essential three-part 'Living Autobiography'.'I can't think of any writer aside from Virginia Woolf who writes better about what it is to be a woman' Observer_________________________________'Life falls apart.We try to get a grip and hold it together.And then we realise we don't want to hold it together . . .'The final instalment in Deborah Levy's critically acclaimed 'Living Autobiography', Real Estate, is available now._________________________________'I just haven't stopped reading it . . . it talks so beautifully about being a woman' Billie Piper on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs'It is the story of every woman throughout history who has expended her love and labour on making a home that turns out to serve the needs of everyone except herself. Wonderful' Guardian'Wise, subtle and ironic, Levy's every sentence is a masterpiece of clarity and poise . . . a brilliant writer' Daily Telegraph'A graceful and lyrical rumination on the questions, "What is a woman for? What should a woman be?"' Tatler'Extraordinary and beautiful, suffused with wit and razor-sharp insights' Financial Times

Selected for the 2012 Man Booker Prize shortlistAs he arrives with his family at the villa in the hills above Nice, Joe sees a body in the swimming pool. But the girl is very much alive. She is Kitty Finch: a self-proclaimed botanist with green-painted fingernails, walking naked out of the water and into the heart of their holiday. Why is she there? What does she want from them all? And why does Joe's enigmatic wife allow her to remain? Profound and thrilling, Swimming Home reveals how the most devastating secrets are the ones we keep from ourselves.

Shortlisted for the 2013 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award‘Elisa said Yes and I said Yes. We said Yes in all the European languages. Yes. We said yes we said yes, yes to vague but powerful things, we said yes to hope which has to be vague, we said yes to love which is always blind, we smiled and said yes without blinking.’ (‘A Better Way to Live’)How does love change us? And how do we change ourselves for love – or for lack of it? Ten stories by acclaimed author Deborah Levy explore these delicate, impossible questions. In Vienna, an icy woman seduces a broken man; in London, a bird mimics an old-fashioned telephone; in adland, a sleek copywriter becomes a kind of shaman. These are twenty-first century lives dissected with razor-sharp humour and curiosity, stories about what it means to live and love, together and alone.

A SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLERBOOK OF THE YEAR 2023 ACCORDING TO FINANCIAL TIMES, GUARDIAN, INDEPENDENT, TIME MAGAZINE'Levy's lyrical, pitch-perfect prose is an exploration of our reasons for living, the forces that drive us and the inner music that controls the rhythms of our dance through life and love' IndependentThe mesmerising new novel from the twice Booker-shortlisted author of Hot Milk and Swimming HomeAt the height of her career, concert pianist Elsa M. Anderson - former child prodigy, now in her thirties - walks off the stage in Vienna, mid-performance.Now she is in Athens, watching as another young woman, a stranger but uncannily familiar - almost her double - purchases a pair of mechanical dancing horses at a flea market. Elsa wants the horses too, but there are no more for sale. She drifts to the ferry port, on the run from her talent and her history.So begins a journey across Europe, shadowed by the elusive woman who bought the dancing horses.A dazzling portrait of melancholy and metamorphosis, August Blue uncovers the ways in which we seek to lose an old story, find ourselves in others and create ourselves anew.'Deborah Levy writes like a dream and I mean that quite literally' Stuart Kelly, The Scotsman'A virtuosic novel of identity and breakdown . . . [it] flickers constantly between comedy and darkness. You know you'll read August Blue again' M John Harrison, GuardianSunday Times bestseller, May 2023

NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE STARRING EMMA MACKEY AND FIONA SHAWSHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2016SHORTLISTED FOR THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE 2016Plunge into this hypnotic tale of female sexuality and power - from the author of Swimming Home and The Man Who Saw Everything'Propulsive, uncanny, dreamlike. A feverish coming-of-age novel' Daily Telegraph'A triumph of storytelling' Literary Review_________________________________'Today I dropped my laptop on the concrete floor of a bar built on the beach. My laptop has all my life in it and knows more about me than anyone else. So what I am saying is that if it is broken, so am I . . .'Two women arrive in a village on the Spanish coast. Rose is suffering from a strange illness and the doctors are mystified. Her daughter Sofia has brought her here to find a cure with the infamous and controversial Dr Gomez - a man of questionable methods and motives. Intoxicated by thick heat and the seductive people who move through it, both women begin to see their lives clearly for the first time in years.Through the opposing figures of mother and daughter, Deborah Levy explores the strange and monstrous nature of womanhood. Dreamlike and utterly compulsive, Hot Milk is a delirious fairy tale of feminine potency, a story both modern and timeless._________________________________'Perfectly crafted. So mesmerising that reading it is to be under a spell' Independent on Sunday'Hot Milk treads a sweaty, sun-drenched path into the history books. A properly great novel' Romola Garai'Hot Milk is an extraordinary novel, beautifully rich, vividly atmospheric and psychologically complex... Every man and woman should read it' Bernardine Evaristo'Hypnotic... This novel has a transfixing gaze and a terrible sting that burns long after the final page is turned' Observer'Terrific, sizzling with heat and sexuality . . . You devour it in one sitting' Radio Times

A hypnotising summer novel from the twice Booker-shortlisted author of Hot Milk and Swimming Home_________________________________A group of hedonistic West European tourists gather to celebrate Christmas in a remote French chateau. Then an Englishwoman is brutally murdered, and the sad, eerie child Tatiana declares she knows who did it.The subsequent inquiry into the death proves to be more of an investigation into the nature of love, insatiable rage and sadistic desire. The Unloved offers a bold and revealing look at some of the events that shaped European and African history, and the perils of a future founded on concealed truth._________________________________'Brave and brilliant, measured and lyrical' Independent'Levy's prose throbs its way into the imagination' Observer'Startling, compelling, cool' The Times'Levy's sense of dramatic form is unerring, and her precise, dispassionate prose effortlessly summons people and landscapes' New Yorker

A stunning early novel by the twice Booker-shortlisted author of Hot Milk and Swimming Home, Deborah Levy.Like her namesake Jack Kerouac, J.K. is always on the road, travelling Europe with her typewriter in a pillowcase. From J.K.'s irreverent, ironic perspective, Levy charts a new, dizzying, end-of-the-century world of shifting boundaries and displaced peoples._________________________________'An exciting writer, sharp and shocking as the knives her characters wield' Sunday Times'Levy is a brilliant writer' Telegraph 'Levy's strength is her originality of thought and expression' Jeanette Winterson

A SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLERBOOK OF THE YEAR 2023 ACCORDING TO FINANCIAL TIMES, GUARDIAN, INDEPENDENT, TIME MAGAZINEThe mesmerising new novel from the twice Booker-shortlisted author of Hot Milk and Swimming HomeAt the height of her career, concert pianist Elsa M. Anderson - former child prodigy, now in her thirties - walks off the stage in Vienna, mid-performance.Now she is in Athens, watching as another young woman, a stranger but uncannily familiar - almost her double - purchases a pair of mechanical dancing horses at a flea market. Elsa wants the horses too, but there are no more for sale. She drifts to the ferry port, on the run from her talent and her history.So begins a journey across Europe, shadowed by the elusive woman who bought the dancing horses.A dazzling portrait of melancholy and metamorphosis, August Blue uncovers the ways in which we seek to lose an old story, find ourselves in others and create ourselves anew.'A writer at the peak of her talents' Lisa Appignanesi'There's no one touching the brilliance of Deborah Levy's prose today' Lee Rourke'Levy's strength is her originality of thought and expression' Jeanette Winterson

From twice Booker-shortlisted author Deborah Levy, a moving and revelatory collection exploring the muses that have shaped her life and work as a writerIn The Position of Spoons, Deborah Levy invites the reader into the interiors of her world, sharing her most intimate thoughts and experiences, as she traces and measures her life against the backdrop of the literary and artistic muses that have shaped her.From Marguerite Duras to Colette and Ballard, and from Lee Miller to Francesca Woodman and Paula Rego, we can relish here the richness of their work and, in turn the richness of the author’s own.Each page draws upon Levy’s life in exalting ways, encapsulating the wonderful precision and astonishing depth of her writing, as she seamlessly shifts between and meditates on questions of mortality, language, suburbia, gender, consumerism and the poetics of every day living. From the child born in South Africa, to her teenage years in Britain, to her travels across the world as a young woman, each page is a beautiful, tender composition of the questioning self: a portrait of Deborah Levy’s writing life and intellectual vitality in all of its dimensions.

Early Levy comprises two pioneering early works by Man Booker-shortlisted writer Deborah Levy.BEAUTIFUL MUTANTS Lapinski, a manipulative and magical Russian exile, summons forth a number of highly contemporary urban pilgrims. Through them, Levy explores broken dreams and self-destructive desires in a shimmering, dislocated allegory of its times.& SWALLOWING GEOGRAPHY Like her namesake Jack Kerouac, J.K. is always on the road, travelling Europe with her typewriter in a pillowcase. From J.K.'s irreverent, ironic perspective, Levy charts a new, dizzying, end-of-the-century world of shifting boundaries and displaced peoples.'She storms through the back door, refusing to be weighed down with rationalist and aesthetic baggage . . . [This] is a world on the brink of destruction but it's going down with a barnyard laugh and an explosive extravagance of imagination' Blitz'It throbs its way into the imagination like the unguided missile it decries' Observer on Beautiful MutantsDeborah Levy writes fiction, plays and poetry. Her work has been staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company, and she is the author of numerous highly praised books including Things I Don't Want to Know and The Unloved, both of which are now published by Penguin. Her novel Swimming Home was shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize, 2012 Specsavers National Book Awards (UK Author of the Year) and 2013 Jewish Quarterly Wingate Prize.

LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2019SHORTLISTED FOR THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE 2019 'An ice-cold skewering of patriarchy, humanity and the darkness of 20th century Europe' The Times_________________________________'It's like this, Saul Adler.''No, it's like this, Jennifer Moreau.'In 1988, Saul Adler is hit by a car on the Abbey Road. Apparently fine, he gets up and poses for a photograph taken by his girlfriend, Jennifer Moreau. He carries this photo with him to East Berlin: a fragment of the present, an anchor to the West. But in the GDR he finds himself troubled by time - stalked by the spectres of history, slipping in and out of a future that does not yet exist. Until, in 2016, Saul attempts to cross the Abbey Road again . . ._________________________________'A time-bending, location-hopping tale of love, truth and the power of seeing. Thoroughly gripping' Sunday Telegraph'Writing so beautiful it stops the reader on the page' Independent'Levy splices time in artfully believable, mesmerizing strokes' Lambda Literary'Skewering totalitarianism - from the state, to the family, to the strictures of the male gaze - Levy explodes conventional narrative to explore the individual's place and culpability within history' Guardian'An utterly beguiling fever dream' Daily Telegraph

____________________THE FIRST COLLECTION OF PLAYS BY ONE OF BRITAIN'S LEADING WRITERS____________________This stunning collection of plays from the talented Deborah Levy includes Pax; Clam; The B File; Pushing the Prince into Denmark; Honey, Baby; and Macbeth: False Memories.'[Levy] does not deal with realism, she does not deal with magic realism, rather she draws out a new territory, and if we follow we will find ourselves suspended over views we have not seen before' - Jeanette Winterson, Observer'An ironic, funny, lonely and challenging survey into the loss of cultural identity among young adult females in post modernist Europe' - The Guardian on The B File 'It has a spine tingling force' - Independent on Macbeth: False Memories'Pioneering writing which unlocks the colours of the imagination and subverts the structure, style and content of our new drama' - City Limits on Pax'A budding genius' - City Limits on Clam 'Levy understands the underbelly, the wild, strange and the emotional' - Melbourne Age on Honey, Baby____________________

From the author of Swimming Home, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize ____________________'A postmodern tragicomedy of childhood, original as always' - Michele Roberts, Independent on Sunday Books of the Year'It's profoundly serious, combining massive abstractions - love, desire, the universality of pain - with the diminutive in a way that's often witty, sometimes lyrical and, amazingly, very rarely trivialising' - Guardian'Sharp, savage and spry, Levy shows us what kinship is really about in this strange, touching and totally original novel' - Darian Leader____________________In the Freezerworld toy section, all the girl princess dolls stand proud in their tiny gold shoes. Big hair and luned-out stares. Girl says, listen, one day I will have a kingdom too.Billy and his sister, Girl, are clever, stylish and damaged. They live somewhere in England and are searching for their missing mother. They think she might be lurking in Freezerworld, a mega superstore on the edge of a motorway. Yet it is a young woman stocking the shelves in this 'frozen world' who attracts their attention. Girl, who wants a proper name, feels a special bond with her as she gazes at the name tag on her uniform. Will she lead them to their mother? Billy & Girl is both a joyful contemporary fairy tale and a hard hitting critique of the beginning of frantic consumerism in the 1990s.

From the author of Billy and Girl, this collection of stories explores the emptiness at the center of the characters' lives and their attempts to fill this lack. In "Cave Girl" Cass goes through a sex change, not to become a man, but rather to become "less of a real girl and more of a pretend woman." Her surgery transforms her into a woman desired by all men--including her brother. "Conversations with Famous Artists I Have Known" relates an afternoon discussion between two women, one who chose motherhood and a routine life at the expense of her creativity, the other a world famous, self-centered artist. In these stories about friendship, motherhood, and the search for enduring love, rules about decency and kindness are broken and repaired as men and women attempt to achieve an elusive sense of fulfillment.

In this brilliant, inventive, tragic farce, Deborah Levy creates the ultimate dysfunctional kids, Billy and his sister Girl. Apparently abandoned years ago by their parents, they now live alone somewhere in England. Girl spends much of her time trying to find their mother, going to strangers' doors and addressing whatever Prozac woman who answers as "Mom." Billy spends his time fantasizing a future in which he will be famous, perhaps in the United States as a movie star, or as a psychiatrist, or as a doctor to blondes with breast enlargements, or as the author of "Billy England's Book of Pain." Together they both support and torture each other, barely able to remember their pasts but intent on forging a future that will bring them happiness and reunite them with the ever-elusive Mom. Billy and Girl are every boy and girl reeling from the pain of their childhoods, forgetting what they need to forget, inventing worlds they think will be better, but usually just prolonging nightmares as they begin to create—or so it seems—alternative personalities that will allow them to survive and conquer and punish. In the end, the reader is as bewildered as Billy and Girl—have they found Mom and a semblance of family, or are they completely out of control and ready to explode?

Things I Don't Want to Know is a unique response to George Orwell from one of our most vital contemporary writers. Taking Orwell's famous list of motives for writing as the jumping-off point for a sequence of thrilling reflections on the writing life, this is a perfect companion not just to Orwell's essay, but also to Levy's own, essential oeuvre.Deborah Levy writes: 'Perhaps when Orwell described sheer egoism as a necessary quality for a writer, he was not thinking about the sheer egoism of a female writer. Even the most arrogant female writer has to work over time to build an ego that is robust enough to get her through January, never mind all the way to December.'