Redmer Yska (2)

A Strange Beautiful Excitement

ISBN: 9780947522544

Author: Redmer Yska    Publisher: Otago University Press

How does a city make a writer? Described by Fiona Kidman as a ‘ravishing, immersing read’, A Strange Beautiful Excitement is a ‘wild ride’ through the W...


How does a city make a writer? Described by Fiona Kidman as a ‘ravishing, immersing read’, A Strange Beautiful Excitement is a ‘wild ride’ through the Wellington of Katherine Mansfield’s childhood. From the grubby, wind-blasted streets of Thorndon to the hushed green valley of Karori, author Redmer Yska, himself raised in Karori, retraces Mansfield’s old ground: the sights, sounds and smells of the rickety colonial capital, as experienced by the budding writer. Along the way his encounters and dogged research – into her Beauchamp ancestry, the social landscape, the festering, deadly surroundings – lead him (and us) to reevaluate long-held conclusions about the writer’s shaping years. They also lead to a thrilling discovery. This haunting and beautifully vivid book combines fact and fiction, biography and memoir, as Yska rediscovers Mansfield’s Wellington, unearthing her childhood as he goes, shining a new lamp on old territory. "It’s not enough to say I immensely enjoyed A Strange Beautiful Excitement … it’s simply splendid." – Dame Fiona Kidman "… the best account I have ever read of Wellington and Karori as they were in Mansfield’s day … Vivid and vigorous, it is a pleasure to read." – Kathleen Jones, KM biographer


Bind: hardback


Pages: 296


Dimensions: 150 x 198 mm


Publication Date: 24-07-2017


$39.95
Katherine Mansfield's Europe

ISBN: 9781990048531

Author: Redmer Yska    Publisher: Otago University Press

Beautifully written and illustrated, Katherine Mansfield’s Europe is part travelogue, part literary biography, part detective story and part ghost story. Guid...


Beautifully written and illustrated, Katherine Mansfield’s Europe is part travelogue, part literary biography, part detective story and part ghost story. Guided by Mansfield’s journals and letters, author Redmer Yska pursues the traces of her restless journeying in Europe, seeking out the places where she lived, worked and – a century ago this year – died. Along the way, he meets a cast of present-day Mansfield devotees who help shape his understanding of the impressions Mansfield left on their territories and how she is formally (and informally) commemorated in Europe. In Katherine Mansfield’s Europe, Yska takes us to the villas, pensions, hotels, spas, railway stations, churches, towns, beaches and cities where Mansfield wrote some of her finest stories. Hauntingly, these are also places where she suffered from piercing loneliness and homesickness, rooms in which she endured illness and extreme physical hardship, windows from which she gazed as she grappled with her mortality. With maps and stunning photography, this engaging and well-researched book richly illuminates Katherine Mansfield’s time in Europe and reveals her enduring presence in the places she frequented. Whether familiar or unfamiliar with Katherine Mansfield’s work and life, readers will find Yska’s account of her travels and travails in Europe freshly informative and deeply moving.


Bind: paperback


Pages: 272


Dimensions: 170 x 230 mm


Publication Date: 02-05-2023


Tags: New Release   Biography
$50.00
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