Meet The Aldeburgh Bookshop Team
Over the summer months we have some new staff joining the existing team. They will introduce themselves and the books they love over the coming weeks.
First up is Ben Morgan. Ben has been with us since March and he's off at the beginning of August to start an MFA in Poetry at Brooklyn College, New York. Ben has been in charge of our poetry section, which explains why that department is looking a lot cheerier.
Fiction
Daisy Hildyard
Emergency
Fitzcarraldo (2022)
Paperback with French flaps, £12.99
Beautiful evocation of a rural childhood, spiked with eco-poetic urgency.
Uncannily lucid, Emergency blends the sensual reverberations of her narrator's early world with the developing awareness of its fragility, haunted by the abstracted forces of capital, 24/7 labour and globalisation as they come to infect the delicate relations between the human and 'non-human people' of her remote Yorkshire village. Rerouting the traditional trajectories of the novel into a mesmeric web of temporalities, enmeshments and co-dependencies, Hildyard, in spite of the urgency of the title, retains a meditative, gradually expansive pace, tracking the fragments, distortions and distensions of her childhood environment as she absorbs the loss of its bio-complexity. Without defaulting to the elegiac or didactic, Emergency stretches the reader's sensory threshold to engage the vast and granular scales of change in the Anthropocene, to see a world, in spite of the fire and darkness at the margins of the novel, 'irradiated with living'.
Natasha Brown
Assembly
Penguin (2022)
Paperback £9.99
Elliptical and electric novel that sketches the frayed edges of modern Britain's myth of social equity.
Shot through with impressionistic energy, social satire and moving introspection, Assembly navigates the concussive atmosphere of the privilege-ridden corporate sphere, with a prose compressed to surreal density by the accelerating stress of 21st century urban living. Against this encroaching backdrop, Brown outlines the unstable contours of a relationship, exploring its discourse with both sharpness and tenderness as it careers towards denouement in the boyfriend's big country house. There is a fierce intensity to Brown's clipped sentences, capable of disturbing the facade of an increasingly complacent liberalism, presenting the reader with the texture of a consciousness as it moves through a world still dominated by elitist sensibilities, playing across that strange membrane between what is felt and what is said, even when what is felt remains opaque to us, unstable, contingent and fugitive.
Poetry
Daisy Lafarge
Life Without Air
Granta (2020)
Paperback £10.99
Explores the shifting interfaces between lifeforms; acidified, warped and curative.
Lafarge hones the sharper edges of her scientific lexis to dissect the traditional terrain of the love poem, revealing the entanglements, molecular, human and nonhuman, vibrating beneath the visible. Still 'unabashedly love', these poems plot the steep gradients between intimacy and violence, the promiscuity of the material world, the incessant collisions of atoms as they swerve, combine and ignite to form feeling.
Rachael Allen
Kingdomland
Faber (2019)
Paperback £10.99
With haunting, hallucinogenic clarity, Allen dreams a turbulent world into being: 'where mayhem / in the slew / of interlocking / waters clarifies / into a vision'. Kingdomland is a miasmic landscape of contracted distances and impasses, where forms emerge, dissolve and reemerge changed.
Non-fiction
Teju Cole
Black Paper
University of Chicago Press (2023)
Paperback £9.99
Teju Cole turns his acute focus to the interplay of light and shadow in the work Caravaggio, the music of Beethoven, Mahler, and Kasse-Mady Diabate, and South-African and Japanese photography, exposing the process he develops to record what remains of the light in dark times.
Timothy Morton
Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People
Verso (2019)
Paperback £9.99
I read Morton slowly, with long breaks and no claims to any total understanding. Each chapter carries an ecstatic discharge rearranging my thinking patterns, tunes me into strange frequencies, pitches, vibrations, all directed toward the author's attempt to make the abstract uncannily tangible. Morton has range, for anyone interested in economics, ontology, phenomenology, climate change, music, abstract art, the gut, tech, the book meanders through an eclectic array of topics in its promotion of 'the symbiotic real', blurring the many boundaries we've erected to define ourselves, for a larger field of empathy and solidarity, the forms of engagement he suggests cost us the least and become our most valuable.
Upcoming Titles
Ben Lerner
The Lights
Granta Poetry (September 2023)
Paperback £12.99
Excited for Lerner's fifth poetry collection, fifteen years in the making. Since receiving The Hatred of Poetry from a friend, and writing my undergraduate dissertation on his poetics, Lerner's work has mesmerized and moved me. Looking forward to studying under his guidance at Brooklyn College.