Recommendations based on "Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, The Flesh, and L.A. (New York Review Books Classics)"

From the twice-Man Booker Prize-shortlisted author of Hot Milk and Swimming Home :Dazzling, essential, entirely unlike anything else -- a memoir on modern womanhood, rejecting oppressive social expectations and turning instead towards a thrilling, transformative freedomWhat does it mean to be free - as an artist, a woman, a mother or daughter? And what is the price of that freedom?In this dazzling memoir, Deborah Levy confronts the essential questions of modern womanhood with humour, pragmatism, and profoundly resonant wisdom. Reflecting on the period when she wrote the Man Booker Prize-shortlisted Hot Milk - when her mother was dying, her daughters were leaving home, her marriage was coming to an end - she is characteristically eloquent on the social expectations and surreal realities of daily life. And expanding far beyond these bounds, she describes a uniquely frank, wise and thrilling manifesto for female experience: embracing the exhilarating terror of freedom, seeking to understand what that freedom could mean and how it might feel.

'Unmissable. Like chancing upon an oasis, you want to drink it slowly... Subtle, unpredictable, surprising' GuardianThings I Don't Want to Know is the first in Deborah Levy's essential three-part 'Living Autobiography' on writing and womanhood.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.'Superb sharpness and originality of imagination. An inspiring work of writing' Marina Warner

Paperback. Pub Date :2011-11-10 Pages: 300 Language: English Publisher: HarperCollins UK A ruthless and unflinching examination of American life in the late 1960s. from the author of The Year of Magical Thinking.Somewhere out beyond Hollywood. hollowed- out actress Maria Wyeth's life plays out in a numbing routine of perpetual freeway driving.Anaesthetized to pain and pleasure. she is seemingly unaffected by her fraught personal history.In her early thirties. divorced from her husband. dislocated from friends. and somehow detached from her past and future. Wyeth epitomises a generation made ill by too much freedom.Set beyond good and evil - literally in Los Angeles and the barren wastescapes of the Mojave desert. and figuratively in the landscapes of a broken spirit - Play It As It Lays is an immaculately wrought vision of Californian culture on the cusp of the 1970s.Three d...

The Feminine Mystique

'Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.'This landmark missive from one of the greatest activists in history calls for direct, non-violent resistance in the fight against racism, and reflects on the healing power of love.Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.

'Three bicycles. Seven ghosts. A crumbling apartment block on the hill. Fame. Tenderness. The statue of Peter Pan. Silk. Melancholy. The banana tree. A Pandemic. A love story.'From one of the great thinkers and writers of our time, comes the highly anticipated final installment in Deborah Levy's critically acclaimed '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 on The Cost of LivingFollowing the international critical acclaim of 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.'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.''Wise, subtle and ironic, Levy's every sentence is a masterpiece of clarity and poise... A brilliant writer' Daily Telegraph on The Cost of Living'Extraordinary and beautiful, suffused with wit and razor-sharp insights' Financial Times on The Cost of Living

Powerful stories of dislocation, longing and desire which depict a disenchanted and rebellious urban fringe generation that is groping for human connection. (Or, more simply put, the angst of people-who-wear-black.)

The National Book Award–winning author of Year of the Monkey, Just Kids, and M Train offers a rare, intimate account of her own creative process“Devotion is short enough to devour at one enjoyable sitting and thought-provoking enough to deserve re-reading.”—Suzi Feay, Financial Times“Devotion shows rather than tells what it means to give a life to writing.”—Katherine Cooper, HyperallergicA work of creative brilliance may seem like magic—its source a mystery, its impact unexpectedly stirring. How does an artist accomplish such an achievement, connecting deeply with an audience never met? In this groundbreaking book, one of our culture’s beloved artists offers a detailed account of her own creative process, inspirations, and unexpected connections.Patti Smith, a National Book Award–winning author, first presents an original and beautifully crafted tale of obsession—a young skater who lives for her art, a possessive collector who ruthlessly seeks his prize, a relationship forged of need both craven and exalted. She then takes us on a second journey, exploring the sources of her story. We travel through the South of France to Camus’s house, and visit the garden of the great publisher Gallimard, where the ghosts of Mishima, Nabokov, and Genet mingle. Smith tracks down Simone Weil’s grave in a lonely cemetery, hours from London, and winds through the nameless Paris streets of Patrick Modiano’s novels. Whether writing in a café or on a train, Smith generously opens her notebooks and lets us glimpse the alchemy of her art and craft in this arresting and original book.The Why I Write series is based on the Windham–Campbell Lectures, delivered annually to commemorate the awarding of the Donald Windham–Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prizes at Yale University.

It was a cloudless summer day in the year nineteen hundred.Everyone at Appleyard College for Young Ladies agreed it was just right for a picnic at Hanging Rock. After lunch, a group of three of the girls climbed into the blaze of the afternoon sun, pressing on through the scrub into the shadows of Hanging Rock. Further, higher, till at last they disappeared.They never returned.Whether Picnic at Hanging Rock is fact or fiction the reader must decide for themselves.

An Observer Best Debut of the Year A Granta Best Young British Novelist 'I loved this book' JULIA ARMFIELD 'Exhilarating' MONICA HEISEY 'Astonishing' ANDREA LAWLOR 'Should be on everyone's summer reading list' iNEWS 'Scorching ... One of our favourite reads' TIME OUT A Guardian Essential Summer Read A sensual debut novel of the forbidden love between a young woman and a headmaster's wife, unfolding across a single heatwave summer. In an elite English boarding school where the girls kiss the marble statue of the famous dead author who used to walk the halls, a young Australian woman arrives to take up the antiquated role of 'matron'. There she meets Mrs S, the headmaster's wife, a woman who is her polar opposite: assured, sophisticated, a paragon of femininity. Over the course of a long, restless heatwave, the matron finds herself irresistibly drawn ever closer into the older woman's world with their unspoken desire blooming into an illicit affair of electric intensity. But, as the summer begins to fade, both know that a choice must finally be made. 'Desire crackles through these pages like fire' TELEGRAPH 'Wildly sexy ... I kept forgetting to exhale' CHARLOTTE MENDELSON 'There's nothing else like it out there' THE TIMES 'Compulsively readable ... beautiful, brilliant' OBSERVER 'Moody, generous and brilliant' JESSIE BURTON 'Rare and thrilling' SARAH WINMAN