{"title":"Seagull Library Of German Literature Ser","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"etudes-book-friederike-mayrcker-9781803091839","title":"etudes","description":"A diary-like sequence of poems from one of Austria’s best-known contemporary voices.   Exploring longing, lust for life, aging, mortality, grief, and flowers in her inimitable late style, études is a diary-like sequence of poems by one of the greatest living Austrian poets. Friederike Mayröcker’s almost daily entries give us a unique view into the interplay between desire and her motivation for writing. In Mayröcker’s case, she writes both to keep a vanished world present and to exploit the possibilities of being present for constant experimentation.     The poems in this volume are not only studies of how the mind works, moving from fragment to fragment, but also experiments with techniques of repetition, typography, collage, and quotation. Mayröcker transforms the humble page into spaces of radical openness. After all, she says, a poem is that which “opens everything up.” Each poem is date-stamped, and each date acts as a kind of permission for Mayröcker to pour in everything from notes on doctor’s visits to gorgeously structured elegies to obsessively repeating fragments of memory that act upon the whole like bits of recurring melody.     Rarely before has the intimate process of writing been so exquisitely laid bare than in études. Traversing the boundaries of literary forms with Mayröcker’s distinctive style, this important volume strikes an admirable balance between playfulness and serious inquiry.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49743195013393,"sku":"NGR9781803091839","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51054595506449,"sku":"NIN9781803091839","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1803091835.jpg?v=1751439667"},{"product_id":"biography-a-game-book-max-frisch-9781803092157","title":"Biography  A Game","description":"A reissue of a comic and tragic play that asks just how much of our life we could—or would—change if we got another chance. In this play by Swiss playwright and novelist Max Frisch, a middle-aged behavioral researcher Kürmann is given the opportunity to start his life over at any point he chooses and change his decisions and actions in matters both serious and mundane—He could save his marriage, become politically active, take better care of his health, or even change the color of his living room furniture. Despite his intention to apply the wisdom he has acquired with age, Kürmann finds himself inexorably trapped in the same decisions. Ultimately proving fatal, Kürmann’s life game interrogates how much of our own path is shaped by seemingly random factors and how much is in fact predetermined by our own limited, conditioned selves. The play’s central idea—that our lives are nothing but a self-conscious play with imaginary identities—is brilliantly captured in Biography’s dramaturgical form, setting up a theatre rehearsal as the metaphor for the endless possibilities and variables of the game of life.    Frisch’s own revised, dramatically heightened version of his play celebrates not only the theatre as a form of self-expression but also the human condition in all its potential and limitations as it showcases both comic and tragic outcomes that define all our lives.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49749543026961,"sku":"NGR9781803092157","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53012804927761,"sku":"NIN9781803092157","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1803092157.jpg?v=1750898653"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/seagull-library-of-german-literature-ser-book-series.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}