From the Man Booker Prize-shortlisted author of Swimming Home, a
single volume comprising her first two novels: Beautiful Mutants, long
out of print, and Swallowing Geography, never before published in the
United States.
Beautiful Mutants, Deborah Levy's surreal first novel, introduces a
manipulative and magical Russian exile who summons forth a series of
grotesques--among them the Poet, the Banker, and the Anorexic Anarchist.
Levy explores the anxieties that pervaded the 1980s: exile and
emigration, broken dreams, crazed greed and the first seeds of the
global financial crisis, self-destructive desires, and the
disintegration of culture. It is a feverish allegory written in prose so
beautiful and acrobatic that it could only come from a poet. This
remarkable and pioneering debut is as much about language as it is the
world that ensnares and alienates us.
In Swallowing Geography, J. K., like her namesake Jack Kerouac, is
always on the road, traveling Europe with her typewriter in a
pillowcase. She wanders, meeting friends and strangers, battling her
raging mother, and taking in the world through her uniquely irreverent,
ironic perspective. Levy blends fairytale with biting satire, pushing at
the edges of reality and marveling at where the world collapses in on
itself. In this stunningly original novel, Deborah Levy searches deep
into the heart of the late-twentieth century and does not hold back on
what she finds there.
