Natives And Exotics

A gardener flees the violence of the Clearances in early nineteenth-century Scotland for the Portuguese Azores, unaware that he will have a hand in destroying the earthly paradise he finds there. In 1929 his great-great-granddaughter, helping to settle the wilds of Australia, confronts troubling traces of her country's past. Forty years later her own granddaughter is ravished by the beauty of a South American country her diplomat parents are engaged in despoiling. In the manner of W. G. Sebald's The Emigrants, the novel follows these three characters, linked by blood and legacy, through four stories that span a period from the discovery of the first dinosaur bones to the unsettling revelation that the continents drift. With cameo appearances by Alexander von Humboldt and Charles Darwin, Natives and Exotics is a hypnotic meditation on our passionate, uneasy affair with nature, in which we restlessly search for home.

Literature & Fiction

Alison, Jane

Literary

Houghton, mifflin, harcourt

A gorgeous and deeply intimate memoir about families breaking apart
When Jane Alison was a child, her family met another that seemed like its mirror: a father in the Foreign Service, a beautiful mother, and two little girls, the younger two (one of them Jane) sharing a birthday. The families became inseparable almost instantly. Within months, however, affairs ignited between the adults, and before long the parents exchanged partners, then divorced, remarried, and moved on. Two pairs of girls were left in shock, a “silent, numb shock, like a crack inside stone, not enough to split it but inside, silently fissuring” that would prove tragic.

The Sisters Antipodes

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

In the manner of W. G. Sebald's The Emigrants, Natives and Exotics follows three characters, linked by blood and legacy, as they wander a world scarred by colonialism. Transplanted halfway around the globe in 1970, nine-year-old Alice, the child of diplomats, is ravished by the beauty of Ecuador, a country her parents are helping to despoil. Forty years earlier, Alice's newlywed grandmother Violet confronts troubling traces of her country's past as she makes a home in the wilds of Australia. And before that, in early nineteenth-century Scotland, Violet's great-great-grandfather George flees the violence of the Clearances for the Portuguese Azores, unaware that he will have a hand in destroying the earthly paradise there. The third novel by the author of the critically acclaimed The Marriage of the Sea and The Love-Artist, Natives and Exotics is a hypnotic meditation on our passionate, uneasy affair with nature, in which we restlessly search for home.

United States

Harper Paperbacks

Ovid's stories melt moral conventions, explore ambiguities, and dissolve boundaries between men, women, animals, gods, plants, and the mineral world; in doing so they contrive to seduce readers. Ovid's dark pleasure in telling such stories with a full register of tones is palpable. But the stories of sexual encounter in the Metamorphoses are also infused with deep questions. What does it mean to have thoughts and passions trapped inside a changeable body? What is a self, and where are its edges? If someone can pierce you in sex and in love, how do you survive? And if your outer form changes, what lasts? In Change Me, Jane Alison, critically acclaimed author of The Love-Artist, renders substantial portions of Ovid's great epic into elegant and remarkably faithful English. Her focus is on episodes that involve desire, sexuality, and the transformations brought about by powerful emotion; because these themes are so central to the Metamorphoses, Alison introduces them with a selection of elegies from Ovid's Amores, the collection with which the poet launched his career. When these selections are taken together, Alison's Ovid comes alive; the Roman poet's great ability to perform contemporary themes through mythical subject matter, and vice versa, is Alison's guiding principle and Muse. Change Me will transform forever readers' experience of this most ingenious of poets. FEATURES The thematically organized translations are lucid, apt, precise, and playful Elaine Fantham's Foreword places Ovid in his Augustan context Alison Keith's introduction offers an overview of gender and sexuality in the ancient world Incorporates sixteen color plates from classical antiquity that illustrate Ovidian themes Audio recordings (read by Alison) of sixteen selected passages are available at www.oup.com/us/alison

Change Me: Stories of Sexual Transformation from Ovid

Keith, Alison

Oxford University Press

Why was Ovid, the most popular poet of his day, banished from Rome? Why do only two lines survive of his play Medea, reputedly his most passionate, most accomplished work? Between the known details of Ovid’s life and these enigmas, Jane Alison has created a haunting drama of psychological manipulation, and an ingenious meditation on love, art and immortality. When Ovid encounters a woman who embodies the fictitious creations of his soon-to-be published Metamorphoses, he is enchanted, obsessed, and inspired. Part healer, part witch, she seems to be myth come to life, and Ovid lures her away from her home by the Black Sea to Rome. But the inexorable pull of ambition leads him to make a Faustian bargain with fate that will betray his newfound muse.

The Love-Artist: A Novel

Contemporary

Picador

In a damp Venetian palace, Oswaldo contemplates the ravages of time to his body and his beloved city. In New York, Lach savors his freedom, having just dropped Vera to join his new love, Francesca, in Venice. In rainy London, Max packs for New Orleans, in pursuit of Lucinde, a woman he barely knows. From New Orleans, Lucinde flies to the aid and comfort of Vera, who has accepted a grant to paint in Venice. While elsewhere in the Crescent City, Anton, leaving for Venice, sketches a good-bye upon the slumbering body of his wife, Josephine. With wit, sympathy, and surpassing deftness, Jane Alison choreographs an intricate dance among these characters, whom love and loneliness, aspiration and desperation, have drawn to two famously romantic, venal, and elusive cities of water.

The Marriage of the Sea: A Novel

As alluring as The Love-Artist, a contemporary tale of love and ambition, betrayal and revenge, set in two gloriously watery cities In a damp Venetian palace, Oswaldo contemplates the ravages of time to his body and his beloved city, and dreams up a way to hold mortality at bay. In New York, Lach steps out into the crisp, clear night to savor his new freedom, having just dropped Vera to join his new love, Francesca, in Venice. In rainy London, Max packs for a precipitous move to New Orleans, in pursuit of Lucinde, a woman he barely knows. From New Orleans, Lucinde flies to the aid and comfort of Vera, who, betrayal or no, has accepted a grant to go paint in . . . Venice. And elsewhere in the Crescent City, Anton, leaving to seek his big break in that other renowned city of water—Venice, of course—sketches a good-bye upon the slumbering body of his wife, Josephine. With wit, sympathy, and surpassing deftness, Jane Alison choreographs an intricate minuet among these characters, whom love and loneliness, aspiration and desperation, have drawn to two famously romantic, venal, and elusive cities of water.

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

Ovid encounters an almost otherworldly woman on the fringes of the Black Sea, who seems to embody the fictitious creations of his latest work, and becoming obsessed and flush with inspiration, he takes her back to Rome, but the pull of ambition leads him to bargain with fate and betray his newfound muse. A first novel.

The Love-Artist

Farrar. Straus & Giroux

An indispensable and innovative resource for anyone involved in contemporary architecture and urban development. Cities are the ultimate and most complex manifestations of human civilization. For millennia, architects and builders have attempted to rationalize them into well-functioning and livable places for their inhabitants. While many aspects of a city evolve naturally, other facets result from masterful human interventions and radical imagination. Future City celebrates the visionary urban plans that have preoccupied architects trying to create a better world from the 1950s to the present. The book features hundreds of seminal and influential works by some sixty architects, ranging from the groundbreaking experiments of Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid, Peter Cook, and Daniel Libeskind to a new generation of rising stars, including Asymptote, NOX, UN Studio, and Greg Lynn. 500+ illustrations.

Future City: Experiment and Utopia in Architecture

Politics & Social Sciences

Spiller, Neil

Migayrou, Frederic

Brayer, Marie-Ange

Social Sciences

Thames&Hudson

The Sisters Antipodes: A Memoir

Harper-perennial

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Alison, Jane. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Alison, Jane

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Alison, Jane. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Natives And Exotics

The Sisters Antipodes

Natives And Exotics

Change Me: Stories of Sexual Transformation from Ovid

The Love-Artist: A Novel

The Marriage of the Sea: A Novel

The Marriage of the Sea: A Novel

The Love-Artist

Future City: Experiment and Utopia in Architecture

The Sisters Antipodes: A Memoir