Imprint: Jonathan Cape
Published: 29/10/2020
ISBN: 9781787332652
Length: 256 Pages
Dimensions: 217mm x 16mm x 165mm
Weight: 494g
RRP: £14.99
‘It is in very truth a sunny, misty, cloudy, dazzling, howling, omniform Day...’ – Samuel Taylor Coleridge to William Sotheby, 27 September 1802
This anthology of poems and prose ranges from literary weather – Homer’s winds, Ovid’s flood – to scientific reportage, whether Pliny on the eruption of Vesuvius or Victorian theories of the death of the sun. It includes imaginary as well as actual responses to what is transitory, and reactions both formal and fleeting – weather rhymes, journals and jottings, diaries and letters – to the drama unfolding above our heads.
The entries narrate the weather of a single capricious day, from dawn, through rain, volcanic ash, nuclear dust, snow, light, fog, noon, eclipse, hurricane, flood, dusk, night and back to dawn again. Rather than drawing attention to authors and titles, entries appear bareheaded, exposed to each other’s elements, as a medley of voices. Rather than adding to our image of nature as a suffering solid, the anthology attends to patterns, events and forces: seasonal and endless, invisible, ephemeral, sudden, catastrophic. And by assembling a chorus of responses (ancient and modern, East and West) to air’s manifold appearances, Gigantic Cinema offers a new perspective on what is the oldest conversation of all.
Imprint: Jonathan Cape
Published: 29/10/2020
ISBN: 9781787332652
Length: 256 Pages
Dimensions: 217mm x 16mm x 165mm
Weight: 494g
RRP: £14.99
A deliciously playful reminder that the greatest show on the planet is what happens in the skies and all around us.
Gigantic Cinema is a brilliant anthology...in which finite mortals struggle to express the mysteries of invisible forces that tangle the senses.
Superb.
The weather comes at you, page after page, with an almighty and unstoppable roar of terrifying magnificence
Gigantic Cinema is a brilliant anthology of disturbances and interruptions, in which finite mortals struggle to express the mysteries of invisible forces that tangle the sense.