Natalia LL radically broke with the cool rationalism of conceptual art in the 1970s. With her series of pictures of young women eating bananas, sausages or ice cream with relish she created iconic feminist images: Consumer Art. The promise of sensuality and eroticism in conventional advertising messages is articulated in her works as a self-confident feminist stance. The themes of longing and fantasies, dreams and the irrational are important points of reference in Natalia LL's oeuvre. She expands the boundaries of rational experience and sexualised physicality into realms of the mystical, shamanistic and transcendental in the manner of a performance and documentary. The catalogue is accompanying the retrospective "The Mysterious World - Natalia LL", at Francisco Carolinum in Linz.

Natalia and her friends are off to Budapest for a wild weekend in celebration of her roommate's wedding engagement. Whenever Natalia Nicolaeva is involved, though, you know that trouble is going to find her and things go off the rails very quickly. Does Natalia have it in her this time to somehow set things right?

Finally back in print, a frighteningly lucid feminist horror story about marriage The Dry Heart begins and ends with the matter-of-fact pronouncement: “I shot him between the eyes.” As the tale—a plunge into the chilly waters of loneliness, desperation, and bitterness—proceeds, the narrator's murder of her flighty husband takes on a certain logical inevitability. Stripped of any preciousness or sentimentality, Natalia Ginzburg's writing here is white-hot, tempered by rage. She transforms the unhappy tale of an ordinary dull marriage into a rich psychological thriller that seems to beg the question: why don't more wives kill their husbands?

New York Times Book Review • Editors' Choice Entertainment Weekly • Best Books of the Month Buzzfeed • Spring Books We Couldn't Put Down One of Finland’s most dynamic novelists bursts onto the American literary scene with this erotic story of an ambitious therapist’s sessions with an unforgettable patient. Natalia cannot stop thinking about sex. With this mesmerizing tale of one woman’s potent affliction, award-winning Finnish writer Laura Lindstedt makes her American debut. Narrated by an unnamed, ungendered therapist who leaps at the chance to employ their most experimental methods, My Friend Natalia offers a gripping examination of the power dynamics always present but rarely ever spoken about in therapy. “Something flared within me,” the therapist notes, “and it wasn’t merely sympathy, the emotion I feel for most of my clients. It was more like a sudden experience of harmony, wholly inappropriate given the circumstances.” It is clear from the moment Natalia barges into her new therapist’s office that she has motives beyond simply fixing her sex life. She is quick to mention that the same exact painting hanging on the therapist’s wall—an abstract piece titled Ear-Mouth—once hung in her grandmother’s living room. This comment deeply unsettles the therapist, as does the large alarm clock that Natalia brings with her, intent on timing the sessions herself. And the tape recorder. At first, Natalia seems to play along with the rules of therapy. She partakes in the therapist’s pain-displacement exercises, word games, and even produces a few anatomical illustrations. She muses on the art of pornography, and boldly examines seminal figures like Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, about whom she poses the question, “Did Jean-Paul consider Simone a woman at all? Or was she nothing but a pencil sharpener?” By combining philosophy and literature, repressed childhood memories and explicitly unrepressed erotic experiences, the sessions quickly shed all inhibitions. Still, the therapist can’t help but wonder: What does Natalia really want? Brilliantly translated by the award-winning David Hackston, My Friend Natalia buzzes in prose charged with sharp banter and double entendres as the therapist hurls strange—and hilarious—experimental exercises at Natalia, and their work builds to an explosive climax. In taking a deconstructive yet utterly scintillating approach to the self-help narratives of our time, Laura Lindstedt emerges as a rare and unflinching international literary talent.

In this #1 international bestseller, a young woman leaves everything behind to work as a librarian in a remote French village, where she finds her outlook on life and love challenged in every way. Prudencia Prim is a young woman of intelligence and achievement, with a deep knowledge of literature and several letters after her name. But when she accepts the post of private librarian in the village of San Ireneo de Arnois, she is unprepared for what she encounters there. Her employer, a book-loving intellectual, is dashing yet contrarian, always ready with a critique of her cherished Jane Austen and Louisa May Alcott. The neighbors, too, are capable of charm and eccentricity in equal measure, determined as they are to preserve their singular little community from the modern world outside. Prudencia hoped for friendship in San Ireneo but she didn't suspect that she might find love—nor that the course of her new life would run quite so rocky or would offer challenge and heartache as well as joy, discovery, and fireside debate. Set against a backdrop of steaming cups of tea, freshly baked cakes, and lovely company, The Awakening of Miss Prim is a distinctive and delightfully entertaining tale of literature, philosophy, and the search for happiness.

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A global survey of Pop art that reassesses its roots, impact, and legacy This groundbreaking book surveys the concurrent engagements with the spirit of Pop throughout the world, from the frequently studied activity in the United States, England, and France to less well-known developments in Central and Eastern Europe, Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. One of the first publications to examine Pop art with this global scope, The World Goes Pop explores the wide-ranging movements that developed on different continents, such as Nouveau Réalisme, Neo Dada, New Figuration, and Spiritual Pop. This unique presentation offers the opportunity to compare how Pop art around the world differed due to geography, local traditions, and different cultures' social and political underpinnings. Fascinating essays touch upon key themes that factored into various Pop movements, including feminism, political representation, sexual politics, and seriality. A bold design and 200 striking illustrations showcase pieces by more than 60 artists, many of whose works have never been exhibited outside their home nations. The book also features a combined interview with a number of the living artists featured within, giving important insight into the thoughts and processes of Pop's international practitioners.