Λογοτεχνία

Sam Riviere is a past master of taking and exploiting 'found' content and process and transforming it into poetry that captivates and unsettles. Here, he harnesses anxiety about AI only to exploit it for his own extraordinary ends. In this case, Generative Pre-trained Transformer 2 (GPT-2), an open source neural network , is used to produce poems that, stripped of the usual authorial clutter, find themselves nonetheless cohering around a voice that speaks of the uncertainties, fears and desires of a world that is desperately, poignantly and recognisably human.

The Cazalet Chronicles continues with the third in the series, Confusion, set in the height of the Second World War and where chaos has become a way of life for the Cazalet family. It's 1942 and the dark days of war seem never-ending. Scattered across the still-peaceful Sussex countryside and air-raid-threatened London, the divided Cazalets begin to find the battle for survival echoing the confusion in their own lives. Headstrong, independent Louise surprises the whole family when she abandons her dreams of being an actress and instead makes a society marriage. Polly and Clary, now in their late teens, finally fulfil their ambition of living together in London. But the reality of the city is not quite what they imagined, and Polly is struggling to come to terms with the death of her mother and manage her grieving father. Clary, meanwhile, is painfully aware that what she lacks in beauty she makes up for in intelligence, and is the only member of the family who believes that her father might not be dead. With cover artwork exclusively designed by artist Luke Edward Hall, this is the heartbreaking and heartwarming third instalment of Elizabeth Jane Howard's bestselling series. It is followed by the fourth book, Casting Off. 'Charming, poignant and quite irresistible . . . to be cherished and shared' - The Times

A comical cast of outlandish characters has gathered in the small English town of Crome for a social outing at the estate of Henry Wimbush. Among the odd, learned guests are a highly prolific writer; an idealist with plans for a "Rational State"; and a sensitive poet haplessly in love with Wimbush's niece.

1971, New York City. Trash piles up on the streets, crime is at an all-time high, the city is going bankrupt, and a shooting war has broken out between the NYPD and the Black Liberation Army. Furniture store owner and ex-fence Ray Carney is trying to keep his head down, his business up and his life straight. But then he needs Jackson 5 tickets for his daughter May and he decides to hit up an old police contact, who wants favours in return. For Ray, staying out of the game gets a lot more complicated - and deadly. 1973. The old ways are being overthrown by the thriving counterculture, but Pepper, Carney's enduringly violent partner in crime, is a constant. In these difficult times, Pepper takes on a side gig doing security on a Blaxploitation shoot in Harlem, finding himself in a world of Hollywood stars and celebrity drug dealers, in addition to the usual cast of hustlers, mobsters and hit men. These adversaries underestimate the seasoned crook - to their regret. 1976. Harlem is burning, while the country gears up for the Bicentennial. Carney is trying to come up with a celebratory July 4th advertisement he can actually live with, while his wife Elizabeth is campaigning for her childhood friend, rising politician Alexander Oakes. When a fire seriously injures one of Carney's tenants, he enlists Pepper to look into who may be behind it, navigating a crumbling metropolis run by the shady, the violent and the utterly corrupt. In scalpel-sharp prose and with unnerving clarity and wit, Colson Whitehead writes about a city that runs on cronyism, threats, ego, ambition, incompetence and even, sometimes, pride. Crook Manifesto is a kaleidoscopic portrait of Harlem, and a searching portrait of how families work in the face of chaos and hostility.

THESSALONIKI: the crossroads between East and West… And in the turbulent, trouble- torn 20th century the city in which four lives cross, directly or indirectly…
Nikos Bakolas tells how ordinary men and women struggled to survive during a period of Greek history- roughly from the 1930s to the late 1940s- marked by oppression and violence and political polarities: the fascist dictatorship of Metaxas, the German Occupation, the Civil War. Against this backgound Fotis, jack-of-all-trades and adventurer, Christos, struggling journalist, Yannis, ambiguous scion of a well-to-do family, and Angela, orphan refugee from Asia Minor,-as well as Fotis’s son and Christos’s three children –grow to maturity and taste both sweetness and pain.
 Interspersed between the chapters of this 20th century story is an imaginative and impressionistic recreation of a period of turbulence that occurred in Thessaloniki 600 years earlier- the Zealots’ uprising of the 1340s.

Characters, events and a bittersweet love story in the Middle Ages closely parallel those of the more recent past.
Finally, to complete this complex interweaving of history and fiction, the footnotes provide a third dimension: fact, in the form of personal memories.
Crossroads describes a time of cruelty, suffering and violence, yet with its compassionate tone the novel is a quiet celebration of the courage and endurance of the human spirit.

It’s 23 December 1971, and the Hildebrandts are at a crossroads. Fifteen-year-old Perry has resolved to be a better person and quit dealing drugs to seventh graders. His sister Becky, the once straight-laced high school social queen, has veered into counterculture, while at college, Clem is wrestling with a decision that might tear his family apart. As their parents – Russ, a suburban pastor, and Marion, his restless wife – tug against the bonds of a joyless marriage, Crossroads finds a family, and a nation, struggling to do the right thing.

The Crump family is adrift. Widowed Godfrey is under the spell of Sweet Father Divine, while his daughters, Ernestine and Ermina, immerse themselves in Hollywood illusions to escape racial prejudice. But things change when free-spirited Aunt Lily shows up.

Cry the Beloved Country is the deeply moving story of the Zulu pastor Stephen Kumalo and his son Absalom, set against the background of a land and a people riven by racial injustice. Remarkable for its contemporaneity, unforgettable for character and incident, Cry the Beloved Country is a classic work of love and hope, courage and endurance, born of the dignity of man.

Travelling in Europe with her family, Daisy Miller, an exquisitely beautiful young American woman, presents her fellow-countryman Winterbourne with a dilemma he cannot resolve. Is she deliberately flouting social convention in the outspoken way she talks and acts, or is she simply ignorant of those conventions? When she strikes up an intimate friendship with an urbane young Italian, her flat refusal to observe the codes of respectable behaviour leave her perilously exposed. In Daisy Miller James created his first great portrait of the enigmatic and dangerously independent American woman, a figure who would come to dominate his later masterpieces.

From her home on the California coast, Dalva hears the broad silence of the Nebraska prairie where she was born and longs for the son she gave up for adoption years before. Beautiful, fearless, tormented, at forty-five she has lived a life of lovers and adventures. Now, Dalva begins a journey that will take her back to the bosom of her family, to the half-Sioux lover of her youth and to a pioneering great-grandfather whose journals recount the bloody annihilation of the Plains Indians. On the way, she discovers a story that stretches from East to West, from the Civil War to Wounded Knee and Vietnam, and finds the balm to heal her wild and wounded soul. One of Harrison's most ambitious novels, Dalva explores an extraordinary family through the strong, engaging voice of an unforgettable woman, confirming Harrison as one of America's most memorable writers.