The Ninth ‘Giornale Nuovo’ Free Book Giveaway

It’s high time for the ninth of the Giornale’s free book giveaways. Peruse the mixed bag of books below. If you’d like one of them, check the comments to see whether your choice has already been claimed: and, if it hasn’t, then leave a comment of your own stating which of the books it is that you want. Once you have laid claim to the volume of your choice, send me an e-mail (to mr.h@spamula.net) which contains your snail-mail address. I’ll sort through the requests to decide who gets what: in most cases, it’ll simply happen that the first person to claim a book will be the one who receives it. I’ll mail out the books within a week or so (I will pay all postage costs). I’m limiting the offer to one book per recipient.

 

1. The Writings of John Evelyn, edited by Guy de la Bédoyère. This handy volume includes several of the famous diarist’s works, including some early satirical screeds, such as his 1656 Character of England, his anti-pollution tract Fumifugium, and the first edition of his famous work on arboriculture: Sylva, (‘Or, a Discourse of Forest-Trees, and the Propagation of Timber in his Majesties Dominions’). I had ordered a copy from the publisher, only to receive a reply that they were out-of-stock. Assuming the order to have been cancelled, I was surprised when they delivered a copy a few months later, after I’d meanwhile tracked down another one. This is an unjacketed hardback: ISBN: 0851156312; 435pp.

2. Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves. I remember this as the last-but-one book I read before leaving England for Sweden, back in 2000. I found the central storyline, what Danielewski calls ‘The Navidson Record,’ intriguing enough, but was bored and irritated by the affected manner of its presentation, and didn’t much care for the narrative frame in which it was parcelled: I can’t recall now how it ended. Some people loved it, however: Brett Easton Ellis’s jacket-copy exclaims ‘A great novel. A phenomenal début. Thrillingly alive, sublimely creepy, distressingly scary, breathtakingly intelligent.’ My copy is from the original standard UK paperback edition of the book, published under the Anchor imprint. ISBN: 1862301107; 736pp.

 

3. Scepsis Scientifica, or Confest Ignorance, the Way to Science by Joseph Glanvill. Having read Glanvill’s Saducismus Triumphatus: ‘or, Full and Plain Evidence Concerning Witches and Apparitions’ I sought out a couple more of this author’s works. This volume contains a lengthy pro-Cartesian, anti-Aristotelian argument, bound together with a similarly polemical defence of an earlier volume of his, The Vanity of Dogmatizing. Much as I enjoy the tenor of seventeenth-century prose, I couldn’t help finding this volume for the most part rather dry. It’s a facsimile of a 1665 edition, reprinted by Georg Olms Verlag in 1985, as vol III. of their series of Glanvill’s Collected Works. ISBN: 3487026899 approx. 324 pp.

4. The Flea Palace by Elif Shafak, translated from the Turkish by Müge Gõçek. ‘Every now and again an absolute gem of a novel arrives and is tragically ignored by all and sundry,’ wrote one reviewer of Shafak’s tale, set in a run-down Istanbul apartment-block. I can’t say I ignored it, but nor could I get into it, and abandoned the book after a few dozen pages: the writing (or, perhaps, the translation) seeming rather stilted to me. This is a cheaply-made paperback edition published by Marion Boyars in 2004. ISBN 0714531014; 448pp.

 

5. Caitlín R. Kiernan’s To Charles Fort, With Love. I’d seen a good deal of praise for Kiernan’s writing: one blurb has it that ‘Kiernan ranks as one of today's finest practitioners of “the art of disquiet,” […] Her enigmatic short stories are written in lyrical prose that sweeps the reader completely into strange dark worlds where characters choose to embrace madness over the mundane.’ Words like these helped steer this collection of tales into my cart when I placed an order at the Subterranean Press a few months ago. I was quite disappointed, though, when I came to read it: to my eye, only a couple of these pieces really sparkled. Of course, the usual disclaimer applies, that such a disappointment likely owes more to my limitations as a reader than to hers as a writer. ISBN: 1596060344; 270pp

6. A selection of the Poems of Edith Södergran, translated from the Swedish by Gounil Brown, illustrated with drawings by Joy Griffiths. I’ve owned this little volume of poetry by the tubercular Södergran for many years, but it’s been a long while since I last looked into it: her poems are often (understandably) suffused with a melancholy gloom, but are lit up here & there by occasional flashes of visionary insight. Brown has posted a few of her translations on-line, here. This (paperback) book was published by the Zena Press in 1990. ISBN: 0951106953; 102pp.

 

7. The Complete Short Stories of Ambrose Bierce. In the words of the publisher’s blurb: ‘Before he trailed off into the wilds of Mexico, never to be heard from again, Ambrose Bierce achieved a public persona as “bitter Bierce” and “the devil’s lexicographer.” He left behind a nasty reputation and more than ninety short stories that are perfect expressions of his sardonic genius’ While I’d greatly enjoyed the morsels of Bierce’s prose that I’d read prior to buying this collection, I found it surprisingly difficult to digest, and ultimately off-putting—I haven’t felt like returning to Bierce’s work since reading this six or seven years ago. This paperback edition is courtesy of the University of Nebraska Press’s Bison imprint. ISBN: 0803260717; 496pp.

8. The Rampage by Miroslav Holub, translated from the Czech by David Young and Dana Hábová. This was the last volume of Holub’s poetry to appear in English before his death in 1998. While I’d often perused the immunologist-poet’s collections Poems Before & After and Vanishing Lung Syndrome, I found I was much less often drawn into this one, perhaps because by the time it was published, I was reading considerably less poetry of all kinds than I had in my early twenties, say. This is a copy of the 1997 Faber & Faber paperback edition. ISBN: 057119253X; 84pp.

 

9. The Portrait of Eccentricity (‘Arcimboldo and the Mannerist Grotesque’), by Giancarlo Maiorino. This book is concerned with a corner of art-history of particular interest to me, yet it is written in such an obfuscatory (I suppose neo-mannerist) dialect of academic-ese that I found reading it a chore which I soon abandoned. I would have kept the book for its illustrations, had they not all been black-&-white. If you are comfortable with phrases like ‘'a metalanguage of artificial exaggerations of the “Other,”’ then this could be the book for you! It’s a paperback issued by the Penn State University Press. ISBN: 0271023201; 182pp.

10. Stuart Kauffman’s At Home in the Universe, subtitled ‘The Search for Laws of Self-organisation and Complexity.’ This has been sitting on my shelves since I read it circa 1998. I don’t remember much about the book, beyond that I found Kauffman’s treatment of complexity theory very interesting, but that meanwhile its combination of above-my-head theory and flattish prose made it feel a bit like hard work. ‘Kaufmann brilliantly weaves together the excitement of intellectual discovery and a fertile mix of insights to give the general reader a fascinating look at this new science—and at the forces for order that lie at the edge of chaos,’ says the blurb. This is a UK Penguin paperback. ISBN: 1892295962; 332pp.