Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett
By Fitzcarraldo Editions
Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett
By Fitzcarraldo Editions
Claire Louise-Bennett selects the books that inspired her debut collection of immersive short stories, Pond.
‘Wielding a wry but implacable logic, Claire-Louise Bennett dives under the surface of “ordinary” experiences and things to reveal their supreme and giddy illogic. Like Gail Scott and Lydia Davis before her, she writes an impeccable affect-less prose that almost magically arrives at something extraordinary.’
— Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick
A Book Of Silence
Granta and Sara Maitland
£9.99 £9.49"Pond was written out of a place of quiet and solitude, mostly. Maitland's exploration of similar circumstances draws upon personal experience and a range of cultural and spiritual traditions that have tapped into the power of silence. While reading it being alone no longer felt like a situation marked by absence, it became a potent condition that engendered a mode of attention that enabled me to really connect with the things around me in ways that were profound, surprising, and occasionally destabilising."
The Poetics of Space
Gaston Bachelard
£12.99 £12.34"This book was a treasure to me. I'd never come across anything like it. My imagination has always been fascinated by rooms, doors, furniture, décor, objects - often more than it is by the people moving among them - and it is these facets of the domestic scene that Bachelard's study focuses on, to utterly magical effect."
Six Memos for the Next Millennium
Italo Calvino
£9.99 £9.49"In this manifesto Calvino sets out those elements that he considers to be essential to a literary text if it is to have any life in it at all. He doesn't go on about plot and character, his notion of vitality is more cosmological and exciting than that, extolling as it does phenomenal qualities such as lightness, multiplicity, and visibility. I was already conceptualising text as something almost geological, this visionary collection of essays spurred me onwards and provided me with new ways to think about how an unconventional body of work could be structured."
Species of Spaces and Other Pieces
Georges Perec
£10.99 £10.44'Question your teaspoons' advises Perec. A recommendation that succinctly illustrates the French writer's attitude towards everyday life. Rather than hanker after the exotic we should pay attention to the banal and the ordinary. Take nothing for granted - question your spoons! In doing so everything around us has a chance to suddenly flare up with a strange and quickening beauty."
The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis
Lydia Davis
£12.99 £12.34"I remember where I was, and what I was wearing, when I first opened this book. It was a hot day and I sat in a green and white striped deckchair with a bowl of warm apricots beside me. Bliss. By the end of the first page I was crying. With joy I think. This was it. This was writing. This was what writing that is free and adventurous and distilled could do."