Bøger udgivet af Atopon Books

An open mouth...open to bear witness, to show what lives inside, to share what must come forward: the poems in this collection add one more voice to the human chorus that sings as proof of life - funky, messy, soulful, struggling, exhilarating life.

Do you secretly admire kids who talk back, who break the rules and defy their elders? Meet Bobby, age 11. He rules a castle and all the lands around it. No one tells him what to do. He refuses to go to school, eat spinach, or even take a bath. One thing eludes Bobby. He can't order people to like him. One day a wandering minstrel comes to town - Fahd, from faraway North Africa. He sings for small change and cures minor ailments. He has no possessions, but he quickly acquires a hundred fans and friends. What's his secret?Bobby vows to find out. He hits the road, destination unknown, as Fahd's assistant. Travelers, as they walk along, tell about their lives, and Bobby starts to feel a new sympathy for his fellow humans. He and Fahd then quit the music business and launch a grand risky scheme to make the world a better place.

This book aims to broaden Borgesian scholarship by presenting the ignored and suppressed juvenilia, 1919-1923-the poetry, essays, manifestos and criticism-of a "literary genius" who, two decades later, would become one of the twentieth century's most celebrated authors. Borges aficionados, upon reading this book, will have to accept that the introverted, half-blind, erudite author of Ficciones (1944) and El Aleph (1949) was once a young, passionate, aspiring ultraísta poet reveling in the streets of Madrid with comrades and brothers, rebellious and impulsive, conspiring to direct the course of Spain's poetic consciousness. Reproduced within these covers you will see the early works Borges published in avant-garde magazines that give a glimpse of the twenty-one-year-old posting manifestos on walls and café windows, reciting poems out loud in cafés, engaging in nightly literary discussions, wandering the echoing bannered streets, tipsy and boisterous, declaring Ultraísmo the new and Dario's Modernismo the old. A secondary purpose of this book is to explore the phenomenon of fiction writers such as Borges who began their career writing poetry but shifted to prose fiction. You will learn how Borges achieved the "overlap" of his poetry with his pseudo-essays and literary criticism to create the unique narratives for which he is beloved. Also included are plates showing covers of the magazines of the 1920s in which Borges published, all in an effort to bring you as close as possible to the spirit and age of Vanguardismo-the Modern age of literature.

One man's search for purpose and connection in a world where social insecurity is the rule, middle-class aspirations are out of reach, and genuine intimacy seems an all but forgotten dream.

In this book of poems, collages, and short inquiries, the poet wonders about the source of his voices, questioning those talking in the dreamlife, in the invisible world all around us, though he suspects the dream only continues in all of our conversations. How far can his work take him if, like Alice, his queries only encourage the paradox, as if our friends too were those mad characters making and changing the rules with authority? Has the poet become a timid version of the monster in a folk song, an individual whom the town must carefully subdue, enlisting Pete Seeger and his banjo and the child with the magic wand? Can he find Peace with Sgt. Pepper's Band and the beautiful, old baseball cards of the minor leagues, made in the time of his grandfather, the Polish tailor, or will Apollinaire's Parisian example prevail?Do the voices arise from a kind of divine gossip, which we all create and hear, accidentally or not, while the dreams reveal our alliances each night? The chance operations of the poet's serpentine collages picture lost circles of dream lives, hiding strange tasks and arrangements in the wide world, without a known religion behind them. Something needs fixing though, at the center, and the poet is getting tired out and a little mad at us, though he attempts to be courteous, like honest Alice. Someone could be fooling him, and who are the demons and angels of surveillance? Who is taking notes in the tower near the fields of lentils?Making his world into a book may have been futile, after all these years, for this older poet, but still, where privacy and dreams overlap maybe others will find something charming in his work, following along with curiosity. Is he reluctantly saying goodbye to his mother and the old world she helped make welcoming, the joy of belonging? As we read to the end, we may wonder, if we are skeptical, whether this poet will ever know exactly what he has gotten himself into, but we have his book to hold onto now and read again, perhaps thinking about all the questions that can't be answered, and how our own imaginations work.

French-American artist Marc Fichou takes us on a fascinating journey into his creative process with this publication of his Carnet, one of many notebooks he has filled with the thoughts, puzzles, and lines of inquiry that have guided his work over the years in a variety of media, from video installation to sculpture and painting. This book lies in between image and text but also philosophy and art, even memoir and fiction. Do we look at it or read it? Or do we practice both at once, wrestling with the differences between seeing and thinking, contemplation and action, beauty and truth? Fichou takes this ambivalent experience as a starting point for explorations of a personhood that, defined since Descartes as a subjective "inner life" (core or essence) we control and express, feels increasingly decentered, networked, and cybernetic. At the interfaces of the human and the machinic, the organic and the technical, he looks to the imaginative possibilities as well as the dangers that exist for people who no longer exactly know themselves through traditional categories of identity, intention, autonomy. . .and even art itself. ***L'artiste franco-américain Marc Fichou nous invite à un voyage fascinant au sein de son processus créatif avec cette publication de Carnet, un carnet parmi les nombreux qu'il a rempli de pensées, questionnements, et recherches qui ont guidé son travail sur les années dans une variété de médiums, de l'installation vidéo à la sculpture et la peinture. Ce livre se situe entre l'image et le texte, la philosophie et l'Art, la nature et l'artifice, l'humain et la technique (sans mentionner le français et l'anglais), et même entre le journal intime et la fiction. Le regarde-t-on ou le lit-on ? Ou pratiquons-nous les deux à la fois, confrontant les différences entre voir et penser, la contemplation et l'action, la beauté et la vérité ? Fichou prend cette expérience ambivalente comme le point de départ d'explorations d'une identité individuelle, définie depuis Descartes comme vie intérieure subjective (noyau ou essence) que nous contrôlons et exprimons, qui se ressent de plus en plus comme décentrée, en réseau et cybernétique. Son livre est rempli de paradoxes, qui pour lui témoignent de ce changement spatio-temporel : des rubans de Moebius, des ensembles infinis, des hypercubes, des formes en tore, des boucles de rétroaction; tous pointent vers les possibilités émergentes qui existent pour ceux qui ne se reconnaissent plus tout à fait dans les catégories traditionnelles de l'identité, de l'intention, de l'autonomie ... et d'ailleurs de l'art lui-même.

The first year of the story is 2073 in England. Lionel Verney and Perdita Verney are siblings who struggle to survive after the death of their parents. Adrian, the Earl of Windsor, discovers them and gives them a place to live. Raymond is in love with Perdita and asks her to marry him. She loves Raymond intensely, and they marry. Lionel deeply loves Adrian's sister Idris, and when she comes to Lionel to save her from being taken to Germany, he rescues her and they marry. Adrian has been ill in Scotland since Evadne left England, but he returns to England and regains his health.The extended family lives together for five happy years. Children are born to the couples, and their lives are blissful. When it is time for a new Lord Protector of England to be elected, Raymond decides to leave Windsor with his family to live in London. He becomes the new Lord Protector, and he is full of plans to improve the country. But he grows bored, and his life begins to fall apart. He leaves for Greece with Adrian, and when Perdita learns that Raymond is missing in Greece, she immediately leaves to find him. Lionel goes with her.Lionel Verney, Perdita Verney, and Raymond's daughter Clara go to Greece to find Raymond. He wants to retake command of the Greek army and defeat the Turks who rule over Greece. He leads the army to victory in Rodosto and then proceeds to Constantinople to claim that city for the Greeks. The plague has entered the city, and all its inhabitants are dead. Raymond enters the city to place the Greek flag at the top of St. Sophia, but he dies from the plague. His wife commits suicide.When Lionel and Clara return to England, life at Windsor proceeds without immediate threat from the plague. Adrian becomes energized and takes over the protectorate. He encourages the aristocracy to allow their lands to be farmed for food. When the plague reaches Italy and France, immigrants come north to England. Lionel and his family take care of many of them at Windsor. The approach of summer in England inspires a decision in Lionel. He wants to take his family south and out of England.Many English people arrive at the coast to go to France, but there is a storm that detains them for three days. A group of English people arrives from Paris to tell them they should not go there. In Paris there are only about a hundred survivors. Adrian, Lionel, and their group of about 1,500 survivors leave Versailles for a colder climate where they believe the plague will not be as virulent. They travel to Switzerland, but by the time they reach the Alps there are only 50 people remaining in the group. There are no survivors in Switzerland. The plague has lasted for seven years. Eventually, there are only four remaining survivors including Lionel, Adrian, Clara, and Evelyn. The four of them travel to Lake Como in Italy where Evelyn dies. Lionel, Adrian, and Clara leave Lake Como for Rome.The three survivors travel through Venice and decide to go by boat to Greece instead of going to Rome. There is a ferocious storm, and Adrian and Clara drown. Lionel is able to swim to shore. He realizes he is the last man on earth.

Understanding Madness explores the singular moods, fears, and synaesthetic experiences of a poet from the Pacific Northwest who also suffers from schizophrenia. It includes original collages that mirror the author's poetic sensibility on the cusp between word and image, reading and seeing, understanding and hallucination. A poignant, sincere, beautiful evocation of life on the edges of the normal, the consensual, and the rational.

French-American artist Marc Fichou invites us on a fascinating journey into his creative process with this publication of his Carnet, or "Notebook," one of many he has filled with the thoughts, puzzles, and lines of inquiry that have guided his work over the years in a variety of media, from video installation to sculpture and painting. This book lies in between image and text, philosophy and art, nature and artifice, the human and the technical - not to mention French and English, even diary and fiction. Do we look at it or read it? Or do we practice both at once, wrestling with the differences between seeing and thinking, contemplation and action, beauty and truth? Fichou takes this ambivalent experience as a starting point for explorations of a personhood that, defined since Descartes as a subjective "inner life" (core or essence) we control and express, feels increasingly decentered, networked, and cybernetic. His book is filled with paradoxes that for him attend this spatiotemporal change: Mobius strips, infinite sets, hypercubes, Torus shapes, and feedback loops all point to the emergent possibilities that exist for people who no longer exactly know themselves through traditional categories of identity, intention, autonomy. . .and indeed art itself. L'artiste franco-américain Marc Fichou nous invite à un voyage fascinant au sein de son processus créatif avec cette publication de Carnet, un carnet parmi les nombreux qu'il a rempli de pensées, questionnements, et recherches qui ont guidé son travail sur les années dans une variété de médiums, de l'installation vidéo à la sculpture et la peinture. Ce livre se situe entre l'image et le texte, la philosophie et l'Art, la nature et l'artifice, l'humain et la technique (sans mentionner le français et l'anglais), et même entre le journal intime et la fiction. Le regarde-t-on ou le lit-on ? Ou pratiquons-nous les deux à la fois, confrontant les différences entre voir et penser, la contemplation et l'action, la beauté et la vérité ? Fichou prend cette expérience ambivalente comme le point de départ d'explorations d'une identité individuelle, définie depuis Descartes comme vie intérieure subjective (noyau ou essence) que nous contrôlons et exprimons, qui se ressent de plus en plus comme décentrée, en réseau et cybernétique. Son livre est rempli de paradoxes, qui pour lui témoignent de ce changement spatio-temporel : des rubans de Moebius, des ensembles infinis, des hypercubes, des formes en tore, des boucles de rétroaction; tous pointent vers les possibilités émergentes qui existent pour ceux qui ne se reconnaissent plus tout à fait dans les catégories traditionnelles de l'identité, de l'intention, de l'autonomie ... et d'ailleurs de l'art lui-même.¿

Fox is the teenage son of a single mom who has grown up poor and transient until he arrives in Orange, California, with his first chance at a sense of belonging. He soon meets Axel, an eccentric loner with a hyperactive imagination who introduces him to the fenced off no-man's land of a riverbed that winds through the suburban neighborhood where they live. There fantasy and reality collide in the stories they invent, the games they play, and the powers they resist. When Axel gets into trouble with the authoritarian pastor of his church, he runs away both for real and into his own fantasies. Fox goes looking for him in more ways than one, accompanied by his friend Angel, a Latin-X girl with a critical mind and a lot of experience in adult hypocrisy. What they all end up finding is the courage to be themselves and to care for one another in a world that doesn't much value either. The Riverbed tells the story of three intelligent young people coming to learn about the darker sides of the suburban dream they call home. Written in a fabulating style but with a realist's eye for the details of place, history, and nature, it combines the playfulness (if not the largeness) of a Salman Rushdie novel with the moral seriousness of J. D. Salinger. It will be loved by readers of all predilections - those with their heads in the clouds no less than those with their feet on the ground.