Our fifth offer is a special bundle deal on previous PBS Choice Books! When you buy any two of Sophie Collins' Who is Mary Sue?, Vahni Capildeo's Venus as a Bear and Ellen Hinsey's The Illegal Age, you will get the second absolutely free of charge!* This is applied automatically at check-out from now until the 17th.
In the language of fan fiction, a ‘Mary Sue’ is an idealised and implausibly flawless character: a female archetype that can infuriate audiences for its perceived narcissism. Such is the setting for this important debut by Sophie Collins. In a series of verse and prose collages, Who Is Mary Sue? exposes the presumptive politics behind writing and readership: the notion that men invent while women reflect; that a man writes of the world outside while a woman will turn to the interior.
Vahni Capildeo's new book lives with things - carefully, lovingly: with glass, with moss, with stone. Venus as a Bear places the non-human world at its centre, tenderly disclosing the ways in which it is alive. We have feelings for familiar or strange creatures, objects, or places, but where do these affinities come from? For Capildeo the answers formed at their own pace, while waiting for lambing at a friend's farm, on a tour with poets around the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, criss-crossing the British Isles with the `Out of Bounds' poetry project; or hearing of Africa and the Romans in Scotland, of Guyana and Shakespeare, while standing over-the-boots deep in a freezing sea off the coast of Wales. This book considers how things, as things, affect us, remaining mysterious while making themselves known.
Ellen Hinsey's new book-length sequence, The Illegal Age, is a powerful investigation into the twentieth-century's dark legacy of totalitarianism and the rise of political illegality. It explores the enduring potential for human beings to set neighbour against neighbour and commit final acts of violence. A book of lyrical reflection and prophesy, The Illegal Age chronicles the arrival of a new, disquieting reality unfolding in our midst.
Simply buy any two of these - or more! - and this special offer will be applied at check-out.
*Please note that the least expensive book will be free of charge.