George Szirtes

This special edition consists of two volumes on the art of Ana Maria Pacheco - Ana Maria Pacheco: Dark Night of the Soul by Sanda M. Miller and John Hedgecoe, and Exercise of Power: The Art of Ana Maria Pacheco by George Szirtes - in a slipcased set with Pacheco's signed, original, limited-edition print Hairy Legs of the Queen of Sheba. Ana Maria Pacheco grew up in Brazil, where she was surrounded by a culture that was richly influenced both by the Catholic religion and by the rituals of the indigenous population. Her suite of polychrome sculpture Dark Night of the Soul translates the legend of St Sebastian into a twentieth-century context. Ana Maria Pacheco: Dark Night of the Soul is the first book to trace the development of that work and its inspiration, and to document the finished piece through stunning and dramatic photography by John Hedgecoe. Exercise of Power: The Art of Ana Maria Pacheco traces the career of Ana Maria Pacheco from her origins and education in Brazil, through her arrival in England as a British Council scholar at the Slade in 1973, and her development over the next twenty-five years into one of the outstanding figurative artists of her time.

A powerful, surreal novel, in the tradition of Gogol, about the chaotic events surrounding the arrival of a circus in a small Hungarian town. The Melancholy of Resistance, L szl Krasznahorkai's magisterial, surreal novel, depicts a chain of mysterious events in a small Hungarian town. A circus, promising to display the stuffed body of the largest whale in the world, arrives in the dead of winter, prompting bizarre rumors. Word spreads that the circus folk have a sinister purpose in mind, and the frightened citizens cling to any manifestation of order they can find music, cosmology, fascism. The novel's characters are unforgettable: the evil Mrs. Eszter, plotting her takeover of the town; her weakling husband; and Valuska, our hapless hero with his head in the clouds, who is the tender center of the book, the only pure and noble soul to be found. Compact, powerful and intense, The Melancholy of Resistance, as its enormously gifted translator George Szirtes puts it, "is a slow lava flow of narrative, a vast black river of type." And yet, miraculously, the novel, in the words of The Guardian, "lifts the reader along in lunar leaps and bounds."