A Book Of My Own
A Book Of My Own
Scholastique Mukasonga
Isolarii
2023
Softcover
11 x 7 x 1.5
176 pages
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For those who, despite everything, have decided to live, there will always be a home” A work on the experience of exile and migration, memory and selfhood, from legendary French-Rwandan storyteller Scholastique Mukasonga.
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About ISOLARII:
isolarii revive an extinct literary genre, the Renaissance "island books" of the same name. Together, they form an archipelago of today's avant-garde movements and figures.
The humanism of the past five hundred years is dead. Believing man was exceptional, it opened the abyss of extinction. A new approach is needed to re-enchant the world and establish the commonality of all life on Earth. This is not just the task of politics and philosophy. It requires the effort of all those who tear down convention in order to preserve what is meaningful. That is, the preservation not just of environments, but myth, irrationality, autonomy, and joy—whether by direct or poetic means. New islands—of thought, literature, art—are already emerging. They are the necessary minimum for this re-beginning. We find these points of orientation, mapping a scattered community that spans continents and disciplines. To represent a world of many worlds, not a globe.
Our books revive the extinct genre of the same name—the ‘island books’ that emerged at the start of the Renaissance. Bound together were poems, stories, and artworks—each a supposed island, a space that held a singular idea. Although this spatial form of literature was eclipsed by the novel, it continued to inspire writers from Thomas More to Georges Perec. As the historian George Tolias writes, isolarii “seem to reflect an ‘underground’ geographical culture...that flourished in the experimental and tolerant climate of the Renaissance but has now slipped out of our grasp.”
Six hundred years after the first isolarii were published, we take up this genre-bending format to navigate the turbulence of our times. Each book is a ready-to-hand island. Together, they are a growing archipelago. Islands from which to view the world anew.
