Little Labours
Описание книги
AN OBSERVER BOOK OF THE YEARA droll and dazzling compendium of observations, stories, lists, and brief essays about babies.‘Beguiling … A wunderkabinett of baby-related curios … A peculiar book, and astonishing in its effect.’ Boston GlobeOne August day, a baby was born, or as it seemed to Rivka Galchen, a puma moved into her apartment. Her arrival felt supernatural, she seemed to come from another world. And suddenly, the world seemed ludicrously, suspiciously, adverbially sodden with meaning.But Galchen didn’t want to write about the puma. She had never been interested in babies, or in mothers before. Now everything seemed directly related to them and she specifically wanted to write about other things because it might mean she was really, covertly, learning something about babies, or about being near babies.The result is Little Labours, a slanted enchanted miscellany. Galchen writes about babies in art (with wrongly shaped head) and babies in literature (rarer than dogs or abortions, often monstrous); about the effort of taking a passport photo for a baby not yet able to hold up her head and the frightening prevalence of orange as today’s chic colour for baby gifts; about Frankenstein as a sort of baby and a baby as a sort of Godzillas. In doing so she opens up an odd and tender world of wonder.
Оглавление
Rivka Galchen. Little Labours
Copyright
Children’s books
The crystal child
A long, long time ago, in late August
A reason to apologize to friends
What drug is a baby?
Dynasty
Cargo cult
Mysteries of taste
Cravings
Religious aspects of the baby
Head shape
The romantic comedy
Wiped out
The species
Literature has more dogs than babies
More Frankenstein
And movies
Princess Kaguya
Rumpelstiltskin
How the puma affects others, one
How the puma affects others, two
Notes on some twentieth-century writers
Other people’s babies
Other people’s babies, two
Other people’s babies, three
Other people’s babies, four
Reversals
Mother writers
When the baby came home
When the empress moved
Screens
iPhone footage
Lots of writers have children
In Flagstaff, one
In Flagstaff, two
New variety of depression
A baby is an ideal vector for a revenge plot
A modern anxiety
Things that one was misleadingly told were a big part of having a baby
Babies in art
Video games
Orange
More babies in art
Sometimes it can seem like many hours with a baby
Stranger danger
How the puma affects others, three
Most of the great women writers of the twentieth century
Women writers
Baby girls and men
A friend who is not a close friend
I never
A Doll’s House
People who get along well with babies
The beginning of misunderstanding
A new citizen
Money and babies
American Innovations
Atmospheric Disturbances
About the Publisher