Suryastra
Founded in 2006, Suryastra is an integral media company, representing classic, mythical, enlightening works to be expressed globally across media.
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History of Art / Art & Design StylesSeptember 2016Intersections
Women artists/surrealism/modernism
by Series edited by Amelia Jones, Marsha Meskimmon, Patricia Allmer
Featuring new essays by established and emerging scholars, Intersections: Women artists/surrealism/modernism redefines conventional surrealist and modernist canons by focusing critical attention on women artists working in and with surrealism in the context of modernism. In doing so it redefines critical understanding of the complex relations between all three terms. The essays address work produced in a wide variety of international contexts and across several generations of surrealist production by women closely connected to the surrealist movement or more marginally influenced by it. Intersections explores work in a wide range of media, from painting and sculpture to film and fashion, by artists including Susan Hiller, Maya Deren, Birgit Jurgenssen, Aube Elléouët, Dorothea Tanning, Claude Cahun, Elsa Schiaparelli, Joyce Mansour, Leonor Fini, Mimi Parent, Lee Miller, Leonora Carrington, Ithell Colquhoun and Eileen Agar.
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The ArtsApril 2010Humphrey Jennings
by Keith Beattie, Brian McFarlane, Neil Sinyard
Humphrey Jennings has been described as the only real poet that British cinema has produced. His documentary films are remarkable records of Britain at peace and war, and his range of representational approaches transcended accepted notions of wartime propaganda and revised the strict codes of British documentary film of the 1930s and 1940s. Poet, propagandist, surrealist and documentary filmmaker - Jennings' work embodies an outstanding mix of startling apprehension, personal expression and representational innovation. This book carefully examines and expertly explains the central components of Jennings' most significant films, and considers the relevance of his filmmaking to British cinema and contemporary experience. Films analysed include Spare Time, Words for Battle, Listen to Britain, Fires Were Started, The Silent Village, A Diary for Timothy and Family Portrait. ;
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Literature & Literary Studies2018There was no Stalin
by Borys Khersonsky
Borys Khersonsky is one of Ukraine's leading Russian-speaking poets, winner of numerous international awards. In recent years Khersonsky has written not only in Russian language but also in Ukrainian language as well translated his Russian-language poems into Ukrainian. The collection "There was no Stalin" includes both new poems written in Ukrainian and self-translations from Russian poems made in 2016 and 2017. The themes and stylistics of the poems are typical for the author - surrealist attempts to comprehend the history of totalitarianism, "biographical lyrics", essays on the life in the 50s and 60s of the 20s century. The poems are intertwined with the parallels made to the Middle Ages and biblical motifs. The attentive reader will also find reviews of classical examples of Ukrainian poetry.
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The ArtsNovember 2018Leonora Carrington and the international avant-garde
by Jonathan P. Eburne, Catriona McAra
Leonora Carrington (1917-2011) was an English surrealist artist and writer who emigrated to Mexico after the Second World War. This volume approaches Carrington as a major international figure in modern and contemporary art, literature and thought. It offers an interdisciplinary exploration of the intellectual, literary and artistic currents that animate her contribution to experimental art movements throughout the Western Hemisphere, including surrealism and magical realism. The book contains nine chapters from scholars of modern literature and art, each focusing on a major feature in Carrington's career. It also features a visual essay drawn from the 2015 Tate Liverpool exhibition Leonora Carrington: Transgressing Discipline, and two experimental essays by the novelist Chloe Aridjis and the scholar Gabriel Weisz, Carrington's son. This collection offers a resource for students, researchers and readers interested in Carrington's works.
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History of Art / Art & Design StylesJanuary 2017Leonora Carrington and the international avant-garde
by Edited by Jonathan P. Eburne, Catriona McAra
Leonora Carrington (1917-2011) was an English surrealist artist and writer who emigrated to Mexico after the Second World War. As the first comprehensive examination of Carrington's writing and art, this volume approaches her as a major international figure in modern and contemporary art, literature and thought. It offers an interdisciplinary exploration of the intellectual, literary and artistic currents that animate her contribution to experimental art movements throughout the Western Hemisphere, including surrealism and magical realism. In addition to a substantive editorial introduction, the book contains nine chapters from scholars of modern literature and art, each focusing on a major feature in Carrington's career. It also features a visual essay drawn from the 2015 Tate Liverpool exhibition Leonora Carrington: Transgressing Discipline, and two experimental essays by the novelist Chloe Aridjis and the scholar Gabriel Weisz, Carrington's son. This collection offers a resource for students, researchers and readers interested in Carrington's works, and contributes to her continued rise in global recognition.
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The ArtsNovember 2013After Dada
Marta Hegemann and the Cologne avant-garde
by Dorothy Rowe
What happened in 1920s Cologne 'after Dada'? Whilst most standard accounts of Cologne Dada simply stop with Max Ernst's departure from the city for a new life as a surrealist in Paris, this book reveals the untold stories of the Cologne avant-garde that prospered after Dada but whose legacies have been largely forgotten or neglected. It focuses on the little-known Magical Realist painter Marta Hegemann (1894-1970). By re-inserting her into the histories of avant-garde modernism, a fuller picture of the gendered networks of artistic and cultural exchange within Weimar Germany can be revealed. This book embeds her activities as an artist within a gendered network of artistic exchange and influence in which Ernst continues to play a vital role amongst many others including his first wife, art critic Lou Straus-Ernst; photographers August Sander and Hannes Flach; artists Angelika Fick, Heinrich Hoerle, Willy Fick and the Cologne Progressives and visitors such as Kurt Schwitters and Katherine Dreier. The book offers a significant addition to research on Weimar visual culture and will be invaluable to students and specialists in the field. ;
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The ArtsDecember 2013Simulating the marvellous
Psychology - surrealism - postmodernism
by David Lomas
Simulating the marvellous presents important new research on Surrealism and the culture from which it arose. Offering fresh interpretations of Surrealist art and literature based around the theme of simulation, the book shows, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, that the notion of simulation arose in a number of discrete contexts, in relation to hysteria and war neuroses; more broadly it shadows the emergence of our concept of 'the unconscious'. Acknowledging simulation's relevance to Surrealism, this book argues, radically alters our understanding of the Surrealists' project and the terms in which one gauges its success or failure. It leads one to question the naïve assumption that automatic writing or drawing represent an authentic outpouring of the unconscious and gives renewed significance to a figure such as Salvador Dalí who embraced simulation and made it the basis of his art and aesthetic. Resonances are also explored with postmodern theory and art practice, around the themes of simulation and the simulacrum.It also points to one of the ways in which Surrealism chimes with a core preoccupation of contemporary art and theory. Written accessibly, and ranging across many of the core ideas of Surrealism, David Lomas balances coverage of both Surrealist art and literature, looking at such figures as Dalì, Eluard, Masson, Desnos, Brouillet, Picasso, Tanning and Janet, as well as Glenn Brown, Douglas Gordon and Sarah Lucas. The book will interest not only art historians and theorists, but also students and those with a general interest in Surrealism. ;
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Bearing Witness
by Vinita Ramani, Griselda Gabriele
Suffering from postpartum depression after the birth of her first child, a 42-year old musters up the courage to try for another baby. Struggling through two trimesters of nausea, exhaustion and recurrent, intense dreams, she hopes to hit the 20-week milestone and see light at the end of the tunnel, only to discover during the routine ultrasound scan, that her baby has passed away. She is hospitalised to induce labour, and give birth to her little 20-week old son. And so begins a surreal life on the other side of loss, where grief and ecstasy are often bedfellows, tears come from nowhere, other people’s babies become the objects of intense affection and where the baby that never came to be, shows up in stars, stones, seeds and her toddler’s imagination.
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The ArtsNovember 2009René Magritte
Beyond painting
by Patricia Allmer
René Magritte: Beyond painting offers a rethinking of Magritte's art from a position informed by contemporary developments in art theory. The book employs a wide range of literary and philosophical/cultural theoretical frameworks to analyse Magritte's art. It offers close readings of specific images, paying attention to neglected aspects of Magritte's work, discussing the significance of cabinets of curiosities and encyclopaedias, trompe l'oeil, framing and forgeries. It addresses a range of intertextual relations between Magritte's work and that of other Surrealist artists and the art-historical tradition. This book explores how Magritte's art challenges conventional notions of originality, canonicity and coherence, revealing his work as being shaped by co-operations and co-options. It demonstrates that uncertainty, incoherence and negation lie at the core of Magritte's oeuvre. ;
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Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945)2018Cerebro
by Andriy Bondar
Cerebro, a new collection of short prose by Andrii Bodnar, introduces readers to the strange world of small human adventures. Random meetings and everyday situations that can happen to anyone start you thinking, making decisions and acting. It is a peculiarity of these texts that some of them are copied from real life experience, while others, completely fictitious, are macabre and phantasmagorical. The collection is compiled to start with completely realistic texts, but with each subsequent text this realism is extinguishing or gains new features. There are biographical texts, and then the usual reality departs and the reality of parable appears. The book is a path from realism to phantasmagoria and the sphere of magic. Compositionally it is a path from the real to the unreal world, culminating in a parable about what awaits us at the end of life.
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Children's & YA2017Lucy and Mum's Shoes
by Emily Child
Lucy and Mum's Shoes (written by Emily Child and illustrated by Warwick Kay) is the story a girl who hears the world a little differently. She is fascinated by the sounds around her, especially the sound of shoes. She dreams of a life where she is surrounded by high-heels. She dreams of being grown-up. Feeling brave one morning, Lucy sneaks into her mother’s cupboard and tries on her favourite pair of stilettos. An unusual and dreamlike day of high-heeled hope, happiness and hindrance follows, leaving Lucy a little less certain that she wants to feel grown-up after all… Lucy invites children (and adults) to be a part of her unique and quirky soundscape. Infused with a surreal eccentricity, this story uncovers what it means to “love the shoes you’re in”.
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February 1994Papirnik
Stories
by Doron Rabinovici
Doron Rabinovicis Prosadebüt Papirnik vereint zehn Geschichten, die ihre Herkunft nicht verleugnen, Papirnik, das sind Stories teils aus dem Wiener jüdischen Ambiente, zuweilen aus dem Kriminal, zuweilen surreal. Der junge Autor Doron Rabinovici, dessen ungewöhnliche erzählerische Begabung zu entdecken ist, schreibt vor dem Hintergrund der eigenen Biographie, die den Blick auf Gebürtigkeiten und mißklingende Gegenwärtigkeiten geschärft hat. Amüsant-leichtfüßig und in elegant-plauderndem Ton erzählt, verkehrt sich alle Harmlosigkeit dieser Geschichten sehr rasch, und bizarr Unerwartetes oder Abgründiges tut sich auf: ein Bankier wird zum Finanzier eines Banküberfalls, ein Liebesbrief enthält die Geständnisse eines Serienmörders, zwei Blinde führen sich durch den Nebel, Frauen verlassen ihre Männer oder Freunde betrügen einander. Mühelos und unverkrampft versteht es Rabinovici, in seinen Stories von Liebe und Zeitgeistigem genauso wie von Tod und Bedrohlichem zu erzählen.
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The ArtsNovember 2007So exotic, so homemade
Surrealism, Englishness and documentary photography
by Ian Walker, John Taylor
In his previous book City Gorged with Dreams (2002), Ian Walker challenged established ideas about Surrealist photography by emphasising the key role played by documentary photographs in Parisian Surrealism. Now Walker turns his attention to the arrival of Surrealism in England in 1936. Examining for the first time the surprising relationship between Surrealism and English documentary photography and film, the book shows that some of the most interesting work of the period was made in the ambiguous spaces between them. One of the key themes in this book is the relationship between the 'homely' and the 'exotic', in the innovative mix of poetry and ethnography in Mass-Observation for example, or the shadowed England constructed in the work of Bill Brandt. Based on extensive archival research, interviews and visits to sites where the photographs were made, this book is rich in detailed analysis yet written in an accessible and often witty style. ;
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The ArtsJuly 2010Richard Lester
by Neil Sinyard, Brian McFarlane, Neil Sinyard
Richard Lester is of the most significant yet misunderstood directors of the post-war era. Indelibly associated with the Beatles and the 'swinging Sixties' because of his direction of A Hard Day's Night and Help and his joyous sex comedy The Knack, Lester has tended to be categorised as a modish director whose heyday passed when that decade's optimism slid into disillusionment and violence. This book offers a critical appreciation and reappraisal of his work, arguing that it had much greater depth and variety than he has been given credit for. His versatility encompasses the Brechtian anti-heroics of How I Won the War; the surreal nuclear comedy of The Bed-Sitting Room and the swashbuckling adventure of The Musketeers films. He has even, in his instinctively iconoclastic manner, cut Superman down to size. The book should win new admirers for a director with a gift of making movies whose visual wit and imaginative imagery reveal an intelligent and enquiring scepticism about heroes and society. Including comments from Lester himself and illustrations from his own private collection, the book is a must for film scholars and enthusiasts alike. ;
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Humanities & Social SciencesJune 2005Reading Walter Benjamin
Writing through the catastrophe
by Richard Lane
'Reading Walter Benjamin' explores the persistence of absolute in Benjamin's work by sketching-out the relationship between philosphy and theology apparent in his diverse writings, from the early youth-movement essays to the later books, essays and fragments. The book examines Benjamin from two main perspectives: a history-of-ideas approach situating Benjamin in relation to the new German-Jewish thinking at the turn of the twentieth-century, as well as the German youth movements, Surrealism and the 'Georgekreis'; and a conceptual approach examining more critical issues in relation to Benjamin and Kant, modern aesthetics and narrative order. Chapters cover: 'Kulturpessimismus' and the new thinking; metaphysics of youth: Wyneken and 'Rausch'; history: surreal Messianism; Goethe and the 'Georgekreis'; Kant's experience; casting the work of art; disrupting textual order; and exile and the time of crisis. The book uses new translations of Benjamin's essays, fragments and his 'Arcades Project', and makes substantial reference to previously untranslated material. Lane's text allows the non-specialist entry into complex areas of critical theory, simultaneously offering original readings of Benjamin and twentieth-century arts and literature. ;
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March 1996Eleutheria
by Samuel Beckett, Simon Werle
»Eleutheria« (Freiheit) ist das erste Theaterstück, das Samuel Beckett Ende 1940 geschrieben hat. Als er dem französischen Regisseur Roger Blin dieses und sein zweites Stück, »Warten auf Godot«, zur Aufführung anbot, entschied sich Blin für das zweite, weniger darstellerreiche Stück. Die Uraufführung 1953 war ein großer Erfolg, und Beckett zog daraufhin »Eleutheria« zurück; es wurde bis heute nicht aufgeführt. Victor, der Held der Geschichte und der unglückliche Sohn, hat seine bourgeoise Familie, Mutter und Vater Krap, verlassen. Dadurch aber, daß die beiden Schauplätze des Stückes, Victors Pension und der Krapsche Salon, nebeneinanderliegen, ineinander übergehen, gleichzeitig zu sehen sind, bleibt jederzeit ›gegenwärtig‹, was der verlorene Sohn tut, wie im Salon ›andererseits‹ recht merkwürdige Besucher vor sich hin und aneinander vorbei räsonieren. Im zweiten Akt in Victors Pension erfährt er durch seine Mutter und seine Verlobte vom Tode seines Vaters, und die Handlung wird nun immer absurder, um schließlich im dritten Akt einem verrückten Höhepunkt entgegenzusteuern. Zwar sind in dieser brillanten, bitterbösen Familienstudie Situationen, Figuren und Themen angelegt, die in den folgenden Werken ausgefeilt, ergänzt oder verkürzt wiederkehren, nicht aber derart jugendlich impulsiv und surreal wie in diesem ersten Theaterstück von Samuel Beckett."
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Literature & Literary StudiesApril 2008El laberinto de la soledad by Octavio Paz
by Catherine Davies, Anthony Stanton
If one had to identify one central, defining text from modern Mexican culture, it would be Octavio Paz´s famous essay, El laberinto de la soledad. This fully annotated edition includes the complete text in Spanish (with the author's final revisions), and notes and additional material in English. The editor's introduction contextualizes the essay and discusses central features: autobiographical and textual origins, intellectual sources, reception and canonization, generic ambiguity, structure, and governing symbols. The intellectual sources identified range from Marx, Nietzsche and Freud to the more contemporary ones of the French College of Sociology (Caillois), the Surrealist movement, the ideas of D. H. Lawrence, previous essays from writers in Mexico (such as Samuel Ramos) and Latin America. Several lines of interpretation are examined to show how the work can be read as a psycho-historical essay, an autobiographical construct or a modern literary myth. Transdisciplinary by nature, this literary essay is both an imaginative construction of personal and national identity, and also a critical deconstruction of dominant stereotypes. It seeks to redefine the complex relationships that exist between psychology, myth, history and Mexican culture. This edition also includes excerpts of the author's opinions on his essay, a time-line of Mexican history, a selected vocabulary, and themes for discussion and debate. Paz's first full-length prose work remains his most well-known and widely read text, and this edition will appeal to sixth-form and university students, teachers, researchers and general readers with a knowledge of Spanish. ;
