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This is a book about Christmas. But it's also a book about belonging, connection, self-care, joy and ordinary magic.
Spanning late November to early January, Calm Christmas embraces the festive build-up, the celebrations and the turn of the year in a holistic, nurturing way. Beth Kempton will whisk you away from the frenetic energy of the high street and invite you to come sit awhile by the fire, pausing to explore what a more mindful festive season could mean for you. Full of personal stories, tips and advice for slowing down, staying calm and connecting with others, it offers a welcome retreat from the pressure to create 'the perfect Christmas'. Instead of entering January exhausted, further in debt, and already regretting broken resolutions, you will begin the New Year with precious memories, feeling rested, rejuvenated and inspired. (Hardcover / 240 pages / $30) Being challenged in life is inevitable, but being defeated is optional...
Schoolboy rugby star Henry Fraser was 17 years old when a tragic accident severely crushed his spinal cord. Paralysed from the shoulders down, he has conquered unimaginable difficulty to embrace life and a new way of living. Through challenging adversity, he has found the opportunity to grow and inspire others. This book combines his wisdom and insight into finding the gifts in life's challenges, and will resonate with anyone facing an obstacle, no matter how big or small. It includes Henry's thoughts on how to look at the right things and avoid the wrong, finding progress in whatever you do, and acknowledging and accepting the darkness when it comes. Right at the heart of Henry's inspiring philosophy is his belief that every day is a good day.
(Hardcover / 192 pages / $30) Ai Weiwei has written a sweeping memoir that presents a remarkable history of China over the last hundred years while also illuminating his artistic process.
Once an intimate of Mao Zedong and the nation’s most celebrated poet, Ai Weiwei’s father, Ai Qing, was branded a rightist during the Cultural Revolution, and he and his family were banished to a desolate place known as “Little Siberia,” where Ai Qing was sentenced to hard labor cleaning public toilets. Ai Weiwei recounts his childhood in exile, and his difficult decision to leave his family to study art in America, where he befriended Allen Ginsberg and was inspired by Andy Warhol. With candor and wit, he details his return to China and his rise from artistic unknown to art world superstar and international human rights activist—and how his work has been shaped by living under a totalitarian regime. * Ai Weiwei’s sculptures and installations have been viewed by millions around the globe, and his architectural achievements include helping to design the iconic Bird’s Nest Olympic Stadium in Beijing. His political activism has long made him a target of the Chinese authorities, which culminated in months of secret detention without charge in 2011. Here, for the first time, Ai Weiwei explores the origins of his exceptional creativity and passionate political beliefs through his life story and that of his father, whose creativity was stifled. At once ambitious and intimate, 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows offers a deep understanding of the myriad forces that have shaped modern China, and serves as a timely reminder of the urgent need to protect freedom of expression. (400 pages / $35) Begun by the author when he was eighty-seven years old and mourning the loss of his wife, Our Story is a graphic memoir like no other: a celebration of a marriage that spanned the twentieth century in China, told in vibrant, original paintings and prose.
Rao Pingru was twenty-four-year-old soldier when he was reintroduced to Mao Meitang, a girl he’d known in childhood and now the woman his father had arranged for him to marry. One glimpse of her through a window as she put on lipstick was enough to capture Pingru’s heart: a moment that sparked a union that would last almost sixty years. Our Story is Pingru and Meitang’s epic but unassuming romance. It follows the couple through the decades, in both poverty and good fortune—looking for work, opening a restaurant, moving cities, mending shoes, raising their children, and being separated for seventeen years by the government when Pingru is sent to a labor camp. As the pair ages, China undergoes extraordinary growth, political turmoil, and cultural change. When Meitang passes away in 2008, Pingru memorializes his wife and their relationship the only way he knows how: through painting. In an outpouring of love and grief, he puts it all on paper. Spanning 1922 through 2008, Our Story is a tales of enduring love and simple values that is at once tragic and inspiring: an old-fashioned story that unfolds in a nation undergoing cataclysmic change. (With gorgeous full-color illustrations throughout, and a distinctive exposed spine emulating the original Chinese design.) (Hardcover / 368 pages / $51) Too often overlooked by humans, the trees that surround us every day support a huge interconnecting ecosystem and help nature thrive. In this evocative collection of essays, David George Haskell meditates on the theme of trees and their individual aromas.
Each essaycontains a practice the reader is invited to experience. For example, if you’ve ever hugged a tree when no one was looking, try breathing in the scents of different trees that live near you, the smell of pine after the rain, the refreshing, mind-clearing scent. Combining poetry, prose and science, Thirteen Ways to Smell a Tree will completely change how you view these giants of the natural world and encourage a fulfilling sensory connection with them through scent and aroma. (Hardcover / 192 pages / $22) Today many of us live indoor lives, disconnected from the natural world as never before. And yet nature remains deeply ingrained in our language, culture and consciousness. For centuries, we have acted on an intuitive sense that we need communion with the wild to feel well. Now, in the moment of our great migration away from the rest of nature, more and more scientific evidence is emerging to confirm its place at the heart of our psychological wellbeing. So what happens as we lose our bond with the natural world-might we also be losing part of ourselves?
Delicately observed and rigorously researched, Losing Eden is an enthralling journey through this new research, exploring how and why connecting with the living world can so drastically affect our health. Travelling from forest schools in East London to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault via primeval woodlands, Californian laboratories and ecotherapists' couches, Jones takes us to the cutting edge of human biology, neuroscience and psychology, and discovers new ways of understanding our increasingly dysfunctional relationship with the earth. Urgent and uplifting, Losing Eden is a rallying cry for a wilder way of life - for finding asylum in the soil and joy in the trees - which might just help us to save the living planet, as well as ourselves. (272 pages / $21) A modern classic with over 250,000 copies sold, Honey for a Child's Heart is a compelling, essential guide for parents who want to find the best books for their children ages 0-12.
A good book is a gateway into a wider world of wonder, beauty, delight, and adventure. But children don't stumble onto the best books by themselves. They need a parent's help. llustrated with drawings from dozens of children's favorites, Honey for a Child's Heart Updated and Expanded includes completely updated book lists geared to your child's age and filled with nearly one thousand longtime favorites, classics, wonderful new books, and audiobooks that will enrich your child's life. It will also show you how to: ~ Understand the importance of being a read-aloud family, enjoying books together by reading aloud ~ Give your children a large view of the world, of truth, and of goodness ~ Encourage each child's imagination and good use of language ~ Find the best books for your children Thousands of parents have used this guide to furnish their children's inner spirit with the wonder and delight of good reading. Updated and expanded to keep pace with the ever-changing world of children's literature, it is sure to enrich the cultural and spiritual life of your home. (272 pages / $38) A Poem a Day is a volume of Indian poetry like no other, selected and translated by Gulzar, one of India/s most renowned and respected poets.
This prestigious volume showcases 365 memorable poems a poem for every day of the year written over the seven decades since Independence by some of the leading poets of the Indian Subcontinent. Originally written by some 279 poets in 34 Indian languages (including Hindi, Urdu and English), the poems appear in bilingual versions: in English and in Hindustani, as translated by Gulzar himself. ** This wonderful selection, personally chosen by Gulzar and featuring the work of poets from the north, south, west and east of India, as well as the North-East, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal and Pakistan, presents a kaleidoscopic view of history, human experience and poetic expression since 1947. A true collectors item, A Poem a Day belongs on the shelf of any litterateur. (Hardcover/ 968 pages / S$94.00) At a time of great anxiety and uncertainty, while coping with the untimely death of his mother, Charlie Corbett realised his perspective on life was slipping. In a moment of despair, he found himself lying on the side of a hill in the rain, alone with his thoughts
Suddenly he hears the song of a skylark - that soaring, tinkling, joyous sound echoing through the air above - and he is transported away from his dark thoughts. Grounded by the beauty of nature, perspective dawns. No longer the leading role in his own private melodrama, merely a bit part in nature's great epic. Through twelve characterful birds, Charlie shows us there is joy to be found if we know where to look, and how to listen. From solitary skylarks to squabbling sparrows, he explores the place of these birds in our history, culture and landscape, noting what they look like and where you're most likely to meet them. By reconnecting with the wildlife all around him and learning to move with the rhythms of the natural world, Charlie discovered nature's powerful ability to heal. In this life-affirming and joyful guide to the birds living all around us, it might just heal you too. (304 pages / $23) Enjoy a whole year of the very finest nature writing, with one carefully selected piece to savour every day.
This beautifully illustrated daily anthology brings you the very best of nature writing from around the world and through the centuries, from Pliny the Elder’s Natural History to modern authors such as Helen Macdonald and Robert Macfarlane. Encompassing fact and fiction, essays and field guides, letters and diaries, it’s a rich banquet of prose, the perfect companion to help your mind escape into the world of nature every day. It contains descriptions of nature in all its guises: Virginia Woolf on snails, Kenneth Grahame on the charms of a riverbank, Willa Cather on the rolling American prairies, and, via L. M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables on Octobers. David Attenborough pops up to talk about our responsibility to the natural environment, Edith Holden provides evocative descriptions from The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady, and Henry David Thoreau, of course, sends dispatches from Walden Pond. We meet Rudyard Kipling’s jungle animals and Jack London’s wild dogs, and Mark Twain explains why a camel is not jumpable. Keep this wonderful celebration of nature by your bedside and it will become the perfect start or close to each day of the year. (Hardcover / 464 pages / $43) In the bitter winds of autumn 1963, Tove Jansson, helped by Brunstrom, a maverick fisherman, raced to build a cabin on a treeless skerry in the Gulf of Finland. The island was Klovharun, and for thirty summers Tove and her beloved partner, the graphic artist, Tuulikki Pietila, retreated there to live, paint and write, energised by the solitude and shifting seascapes.
Notes from an Island, published in English for the first time, is both a chronicle of this period and a homage to the mature love that Tove and 'Tooti' shared for their island and for each other. Tove's spare prose, and Tuulikki's subtle washes and aquatints combine to form a work of meditative beauty. The Finnish artist and author Tove Jansson (1914-2001) is best known as the creator of the world famous Moomin stories and as author of The Summer Book. For more than forty years she shared her life with the graphic artist and professor, Tuulikki Pietila (1917-2009). Klovharun was their summer island refuge. (Hardcover / 112 pages / $28) This is a madman’s library of eccentric and extraordinary volumes from around the world, many of which have been completely forgotten. Books written in blood and books that kill, books of the insane and books that hoaxed the globe, books invisible to the naked eye and books so long they could destroy the Universe, books worn into battle, books of code and cypher whose secrets remain undiscovered… and a few others that are just plain weird.
From the 605-page Qur'an written in the blood of Saddam Hussein, through the gorgeously decorated 15th-century lawsuit filed by the Devil against Jesus, to the lost art of binding books with human skin, every strand of strangeness imaginable (and many inconceivable) has been unearthed and bound together for a unique and richly illustrated collection ideal for every book-lover. (Hardcover/ 256 pages / $51) Watch this stunning book trailer and you will want to own a copy right away!
Lauren Groff, Elizabeth Kolbert, Pam Houston, Pico Iyer, T Kira Madden, Gregory Pardlo, Maggie Shipstead, and Peter Orner are among the 65 writers who grapple with this mystery: How can an ephemeral encounter leave an eternal mark?
When Colleen Kinder put out a call for authors to “write a letter to a stranger who haunts you,” she opened the floodgates. The responses—intimate and addictive, all in the form of letters, all written in the second person—began pouring in. These short, insightful essays by today’s best literary minds are organized around such themes as Gratitude, Wonder, and Farewell, and guide us both across the globe and through the mysteries of human connection. Bestselling author Leslie Jamison, who provides the foreword, reveals she has been haunted for years by a traveling magician she met in Nicaragua. Journalist Ted Conover writes his missive to a stranger he met on a New Yorker assignment in Rwanda. From the story of Vanessa Hua’s shoe shopper in China to the tale of Michelle Tea’s encounter in a Texas tattoo parlor, these pieces are replete with observations about how to live and what to seek, and how a stranger’s loaded glance, shared smile, or question posed can alter the course of our lives. Moving and unforgettable, Letter to a Stranger is an irresistible read for any literary traveler and the perfect gift for anyone who is haunted by a person they met once but will remember forever. (336 pages / $35) Be engaged, enlightened, and surprised by this unique book on suffering that gives control to the reader. Similar to novels that allow readers to choose their own "paths," Why Is There Suffering? by Bethany Sollereder invites readers to make choices that lead them on an exploration of theological possibilities about topics like:
Readers will face multiple possibilities regarding suffering and its theological explanations and have to make choices about which one they find most plausible. Each decision will lead to further complexities and new choices, helping readers see how theological choices lead to certain conclusions. This book does not offer final answers. Instead, it introduces the "theological" possibilities, both Christian and non-Christian, that readers can explore and wrestle with so they can make informed decisions about their beliefs. Taking an intentionally light-hearted approach to a heavy topic this accessible and winsome book presents an unusually helpful introduction to the problem of suffering and the most commonly offered responses to it. Suggestions for further reading are provided with each choice. (144 pages / $29) Bethany Sollereder is a Research Fellow at the Laudato Si’ Research Institute at Campion Hall. She specialises in theology concerning evolution and the problem of suffering and is currently working on the theological aspects of our changing climate. Bethany received her PhD in Theology from the University of Exeter and an MCS in interdisciplinary studies from Regent College, Vancouver. A UNIQUE APPRECIATION OF BOOK LOVE: This is a loving tribute to the wonderful and bizarre ways that books leave impressions on our souls, if not always perfectly in our memories.
Readers know all too well the comedy and tragedy of forgetting the name of a must-find book. Inspired by this torturous predicament, artist Marina Luz creates paintings of books based on the descriptions we use when we can't remember their titles--mining Internet book-search forums for the quirky, vague, and often hilarious language we come up with in these moments. This volume collects dozens of these imaginary books into a library all their own: Titles like "Cat, Possibly Named Henry," "It Was All a Dream," or "Something-Something, Beverly Hills" inspire dreaming up their contents, often as entertaining as trying to guess the real book behind them. A celebration of book love unlike any other, this petite book is a clever gift for bibliophiles and those who have worked in a bookstore. (Hardcover / 96 pages / $22) Fully-illustrated, The Passenger collects the best new writing, photography, art and reportage from around the world.
In Paris, nothing is quite what it seems, starting with its size: relatively small, but second in Europe if you consider the whole Isle-de-France. The distance between the city centre and its outskirts is even more marked, as Paris seems to push away new arrivals, banishing them to its geographical and social margins. The glare of the city lights can be blinding, as the Paris celebrated in books and films clashes with reality. And all the time the shadows are growing: the Bataclan terror attack, the violent protests of the gilet jaunes, rioting in the banlieues, Notre Dame in flames, record heatwaves, and the pandemic. Not just a series of unfortunate events, they are phenomena which all of the world's metropolis will have to face. But in Paris today there is an air of renewal: from planning and environmental revolution to a generation of chefs rebelling against the classist traditions of haute cuisine; from second generation immigrants reclaiming their rights to women's rejection of the stereotypes high fashion created for them. Does anyone really think they can teach Parisians how to start a revolution? (192 pages / $41) The epic story of how coffee connected and divided the modern world
Coffee is an indispensable part of daily life for billions of people around the world. But few coffee drinkers know this story. It centers on the volcanic highlands of El Salvador, where James Hill, born in the slums of Manchester, England, founded one of the world’s great coffee dynasties at the turn of the twentieth century. Adapting the innovations of the Industrial Revolution to plantation agriculture, Hill helped turn El Salvador into perhaps the most intensive monoculture in modern history—a place of extraordinary productivity, inequality, and violence. In the process, both El Salvador and the United States earned the nickname “Coffeeland,” but for starkly different reasons, and with consequences that reach into the present. Provoking a reconsideration of what it means to be connected to faraway people and places, Coffeeland tells the hidden and surprising story of one of the most valuable commodities in the history of global capitalism. (448 pages / $27) We rarely make the connection between our daily struggles with time and the ultimate time management problem: the question of how best to use our ridiculously brief time on the planet, which amounts on average to about four thousand weeks.
Four Thousand Weeks is an uplifting, engrossing and deeply realistic exploration of the challenge. Rejecting the futile modern obsession with 'getting everything done,' it introduces readers to tools for constructing a meaningful life by embracing rather than denying their limitations. And it shows how the unhelpful ways we've come to think about time aren't inescapable, unchanging truths, but choices we've made, as individuals and as a society. Its many revelations will transform the reader's worldview. Drawing on the insights of both ancient and contemporary philosophers, psychologists, and spiritual teachers, Oliver Burkeman sets out to realign our relationship with time - and in doing so, to liberate us from its tyranny. Embrace your limits. Change your life. Make your four thousand weeks count. (288 pages / $31) A mental health book unlike any you've seen before. Your Head is a Houseboat is a uniquely hilarious guide to what goes on in your brain.
The only truth we really know is that we're going to spend the rest of our lives in our own houseboat (our head) so it makes sense to make that houseboat as good as possible. The houseboat needs cleaning and maintenance, and it shouldn't be weighed down by junk (our own thoughts and other people's opinions). There's a bunch of bosses with different ideas about where you should be heading in the ocean of life, and a zoo of animalistic desires below the deck who are really steering. But it's your houseboat, so it's probably time for you to cast away and set sail (is that even how houseboats work?) on a journey to understanding it. In Your Head is a Houseboat, Cambell Walker demystifies brain functions, mental health, emotions, mindfulness and psychology – but with less complex terminology and more bizarre metaphors. It's a book filled with illustrations, journal exercises and words that will probably hit too close to home. At its core, this is a funny, accessible approach to understanding your head and making it a nicer place to live. (160 pages / Full colour illustrations / Out in November / $31) "Walker is today open about the fact he has experienced traumas: he was sexually abused as a child, survived a suicide attempt in his teens and suffered from a drug addiction. He also continues to manage bipolar disorder...He is one of many young Australians who are helping to change the way we talk about mental health, using relatable language and making it a normal part of conversation." Sydney Morning Herald A ground-breaking book on the art of pressed flowers and leaf works from leading flower artist, Jennie Ashmore.
Our love for flowers and leaves has never been more pronounced and in this book, we teach you how to make the most of the rediscovered pressed flower art, from choice of flowers (including roses, oak leaves and seaweed), the various ways of pressing them, designing with pressed flowers and leaves, achieving symmetry, the use of colour, and combining pressed flowers with watercolour and gouache, painted background, and gold and silver paper. The highly experienced author gives a range of insider tips from using the ribs of leaves to create pattern and movement, pressing both sides of a leaf, and capturing the seasons in one piece of work. She also provides templates to help you get started. A plant directory at the back of the book allows you to see what various plants look like when pressed. A stunningly beautiful book that opens up a traditional art to a very contemporary expression for all crafters and nature lovers. (144 pages / $40) Tools For Food explores the history of 250 of our most-loved and intriguing kitchen items and how they've changed the way we live.
From 12th century Mongolian fire pots, to 17th century Chinese scissors, from beloved Tupperware food containers to the iconic Alessi lemon squeezer, this culinary journey covers well-loved designs, as well as lesser known objects. The reader will be taken on a journey around the globe, exploring how and what we cook has changed over the centuries, showing similarities and diversity across times and cultures. From primitive necessities to specialized high-tech equipment, each image is accompanied by a text detailing its origin, as well as interesting facts about its relationship between culture and cooking. (Hardcover / 304 pages / $43) A glorious account of how the little things of life are, of course, the big things' - Richard Glover
My mother wasn't much of a housekeeper. She wasn't much of a cook either, although she tried. She longed to live a more unconventional life. Admirably high-minded, but it meant I never learnt to fold a towel. In these funny, sometimes poignant, stories, award-winning feature writer Fenella Souter celebrates the highs and lows of domestic life. With their distinctive wit, they will leave you smiling with recognition at the everyday dramas and dilemmas that can make or break friendships and marriages, turn a house into a home, or let chaos get the upper hand. (280 pages / $34) “I was tired of speed. I wanted to live tree time.” So writes Sumana Roy at the start of How I Became a Tree, her captivating, adventurous, and self-reflective vision of what it means to be human in the natural world.
Drawn to trees’ wisdom, their nonviolent way of being, their ability to cope with loneliness and pain, Roy movingly explores the lessons that writers, painters, photographers, scientists, and spiritual figures have gleaned through their engagement with trees—from Rabindranath Tagore to Tomas Tranströmer, Ovid to Octavio Paz, William Shakespeare to Margaret Atwood. Her stunning meditations on forests, plant life, time, self, and the exhaustion of being human evoke the spacious, relaxed rhythms of the trees themselves. Hailed upon its original publication in India as “a love song to plants and trees” and “an ode to all that is unnoticed, ill, neglected, and yet resilient,” How I Became a Tree blends literary history, theology, philosophy, botany, and more, and ultimately prompts readers to slow down and to imagine a reenchanted world in which humans live more like trees. (Hardcover / 248 pages / $37) The fascinating history of blindness, interweaving it with her the author's journey of losing her sight.
There Plant Eyes probes the ways in which blindness has shaped our ocularcentric culture, challenging deeply ingrained ideas about what it means to be “blind.” For millennia, blindness has been used to signify such things as thoughtlessness (“blind faith”), irrationality (“blind rage”), and unconsciousness (“blind evolution”). But at the same time, blind people have been othered as the recipients of special powers as compensation for lost sight (from the poetic gifts of John Milton to the heightened senses of the comic book hero Daredevil). Godin—who began losing her vision at age ten—illuminates the often-surprising history of both the condition of blindness and the myths and ideas that have grown up around it over the course of generations. She combines an analysis of blindness in art and culture (from King Lear to Star Wars) with a study of the science of blindness and key developments in accessibility (the white cane, embossed printing, digital technology) to paint a vivid personal and cultural history. A genre-defying work, There Plant Eyes reveals just how essential blindness and vision are to humanity’s understanding of itself and the world. (352 pages / $31) With a foreword by Professor Tommy Koh, Professor of Law, National University of Singapore, and Ambassador-at-Large, Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
How can the social ecosystem transform in the new normal? If a charity is in dire need of cash, should it accept a donation that might be tainted? What happens when we place a value on all things in our marketised society? Can the corporate beast be harnessed without reconstituting corporations? Should charities be allowed to run businesses? Willie Cheng provides his perspectives to these questions and more in his new book, a collection of essays on issues including the social ecosystem in Singapore, market values in society, the role and future of nonprofit organisations, corporate responsibility, “new capitalism”, volunteerism and values. His analyses and logic are supported by research, case studies and examples gleaned from his many years of experience in both the social and business sectors. Written in an easy, friendly and readable style, this book provides valuable insights for volunteers, executives and leaders in nonprofits and corporates who want to know how they can succeed in doing good better in the new world order. (396 pages / $37) About the author: Willie Cheng is a former managing partner of Accenture. Since his retirement in 2003, he has stayed involved with the business community through his directorships of listed and private companies, including Far East Hospitality Trust, Integrated Health Information Systems, NOL, NTUC FairPrice, NTUC Health, SingHealth, Singapore Press Holdings and UOB Bank. However, he spends the greater part of his time volunteering with nonprofit organisations, with an interest in governance. His nonprofit boards include apVentures, Caritas Singapore, Catholic Foundation, CHARIS, Council for Third Age, Lien Centre for Social Innovation, National Volunteer & Philanthropy Centre, SymAsia Foundation and The Courage Fund. He writes extensively on corporate governance and nonprofit issues. Previous titles include Doing Good Great: Thirteen Asian Heroes and their Causes; and The World that Changes the World: How Philanthropy, Innovation and Entrepreneurship are Transforming the Social Ecosystem. A simple walk around the block set journalist Spike Carlsen, off to investigate everything he could about everything we take for granted in our normal life—from manhole covers and recycling bins to bike lanes and stoplights.
In this celebration of the seemingly mundane, Carlsen opens our eyes to the engineering marvels, human stories, and natural wonders right outside our front door. He guides us through the surprising allure of sewers, the intricacies of power plants, the extraordinary path of an everyday letter, and the genius of recycling centers—all the while revealing that this awesome world isn’t just a spectator sport. Engaging as it is endearing, A Walk Around the Block will change the way you see things in your everyday life. Join Carlsen as he strolls through the trash museum of New York City, explores the quirky world of squirrels, pigeons, and roadkill, and shows us how understanding stoplights, bike lanes, and fine art of walking can add years to our lives. In the end, he brings a sense of wonder into your average walk around the block, wherever you are. Guaranteed. (336 pages / $29) "...Shakespearean shines because it provides an intensely personal and engaging account of life lived with Shakespeare at its core." Open Letters Review
When Robert McCrum began his recovery from a life-changing stroke, he discovered that the only words that made sense to him were snatches of Shakespeare. Unable to travel or move as he used to, McCrum found the First Folio became his 'book of life', an endless source of inspiration through which he could embark on 'journeys of the mind', and see a reflection of our own disrupted times. An acclaimed writer and journalist, McCrum has spent the last twenty-five years immersed in Shakespeare's work, on stage and on the page. During this prolonged exploration, Shakespeare's poetry and plays, so vivid and contemporary, have become his guide and consolation. In Shakespearean he asks: why is it that we always return to Shakespeare, particularly in times of acute crisis and dislocation? What is the key to his hold on our imagination? And why do the collected works of an Elizabethan writer continue to speak to us as if they were written yesterday? Shakespearean is a rich, brilliant and superbly drawn portrait of an extraordinary artist, one of the greatest writers who ever lived. Through an enthralling narrative, ranging widely in time and space, McCrum seeks to understand Shakespeare within his historical context while also exploring the secrets of literary inspiration, and examining the nature of creativity itself. Witty and insightful, he makes a passionate and deeply personal case that Shakespeare's words and ideas are not just enduring in their relevance - they are nothing less than the eternal key to our shared humanity. (400 pages / $25) Renee Lee and Liew Chin Choy, two of Singapore’s foremost arts management professionals and educators, provide an in-depth look into local arts and cultural policies.
From understanding the fundamentals of arts management to audience development and branding in the arts business, this book will teach you all you need to know about navigating the colourful landscape of arts management. (304 pages / $37) Paperbacks from Hell chronicles the history of the horror paperback publishing boom that started in the early Seventies with the release of Rosemary's Baby, The Exorcist, and The Other and died in the early Nineties as serial killers lured horror publishing into their murder basements.
Page through dozens and dozens of amazing book covers featuring well-dressed skeletons, evil dolls, and knife-wielding killer crabs! Read shocking plot summaries that invoke devil worship, satanic children, and haunted real estate! Complete with story summaries and artist and author profiles, this unforgettable volume dishes on familiar authors like V. C. Andrews and R. L. Stine, plus many more who’ve faded into obscurity. Also included are recommendations for which of these forgotten treasures are well worth your reading time and which should stay buried. (256 pages / $40) The Devil’s Atlas is an illustrated guide to the heavens, hells and lands of the dead as imagined throughout history by cultures and religions around the world. Packed with colourful maps, paintings and captivating stories, the reader is taken on a compelling tour of the geography, history and supernatural populations of the afterworlds of cultures around the globe.
Whether it’s the thirteen heavens of the Aztecs, the Chinese Taoist netherworld of ‘hungry ghosts’, or the ‘Hell of the Flaming Rooster’ of Japanese Buddhist mythology (in which sinners are tormented by an enormous fire-breathing cockerel), The Devil’s Atlas gathers together a wonderful variety of beliefs and representations of life after death. These afterworlds are illustrated with an unprecedented collection of images, ranging from the marvellous ‘infernal cartography’ of the European Renaissance artists attempting to map the structured Hell described by Dante and the decorative Islamic depictions of Paradise to the various efforts to map the Garden of Eden and the spiritual vision paintings of nineteenth-century mediums. The Devil’s Atlas accompanies beautiful images with a highly readable trove of surprising facts and narratives, from the more inventive torture methods awaiting sinners, to colourful eccentric catalogues of demons, angels and assorted death deities. A traveller’s guide to worlds unseen, The Devil’s Atlas is a fascinating study of the boundless capacity of human invention, a visual chronicle of man’s hopes, fears and fantasies of what lies beyond. (Hardcover / 258 pages / $58) Nietzsche's devastating demolition of religion would have seismic consequences for future generations. With God dead, he envisages a brilliant future for humanity: one in which individuals would at last be responsible for their destinies.
(128 pages / $13) A pastor's wife's shattering yet ultimately hopeful story of her husband's death by suicide, her journey to understand mental illness, and the light she found in the darkness.
On August 25, 2018, Kayla Stoecklein lost her husband, Andrew--megachurch pastor of Inland Hills Church in Chino, California--to suicide. In the wake of the tragedy, she embarked on a brave journey to better understand his harrowing battle with mental illness and, ultimately, to overcome the stigma of suicide. Fear Gone Wild is her intimate account of all that led to that tragic day, including her husband's panic attacks and debilitating bouts of anxiety and depression. Despite their deep faith in God and the countless prayers of many believers, Andrew was never healed of his illness. Turning to Scripture for answers, she discovered that God uses wilderness experiences to prepare His children--including Jesus--for his greater purpose and to work miracles inside our souls.
With a clear-eyed acknowledgment of how misguided and misinformed she was about mental illness, Kayla Stoecklein shares her story in hopes that anyone walking through the wilderness of mental illness will be better equipped for the journey and will learn to put their hope in Jesus through it all. Fear Gone Wild is her intimate account of all that led to that tragic day, including her husband's panic attacks and debilitating bouts of anxiety and depression. Despite their deep faith in God and the countless prayers of many believers, Andrew was never healed of his illness. Turning to Scripture for answers, she discovered that God uses wilderness experiences to prepare His children--including Jesus--for his greater purpose and to work miracles inside our souls.
With a clear-eyed acknowledgment of how misguided and misinformed she was about mental illness, Kayla Stoecklein shares her story in hopes that anyone walking through the wilderness of mental illness will be better equipped for the journey and will learn to put their hope in Jesus through it all. (256 pages / $33) This is the first book to come out of the Cloud Appreciation Society in seven years.
Spending a few moments a day with your head in the clouds can have a profound effect on your well-being, which is why Gavin's Cloud Appreciation Society sends a cloud image and story every day to its members. A Cloud A Day features 365 cloud images to inspire a moment of calm atmospheric contemplation each day. The cloud images are accompanied with a short piece of cloud science, an inspiring sky quotation or a detail of the sky depicted in a classic painting. The book helps explain almost every kind cloud type in easy laymen terms, from fair weather cumulus to the lenticularis cloud. From Rupert Brooke 'Clouds' poem to Nasa images of Actinoform clouds, which are radial, leaf-like patterns of clouds only visible from space. From suggested explanations of the skies painted by Van Gogh to the various names given to crepuscular rays (beams of light from between clouds that are called Jacob's ladder in much of the Western world, but Buddha's rays in Sri Lanka).
The perfect dip-in-and-out book for anyone who wants to de-stress and reconnect with nature, A Cloud A Day will inspire you to open your eyes to the everyday beauty above and to spend a moment each day with your head in the clouds. (Hardcover / 368 pages / $43) About the author: Gavin Pretor-Pinney is a renowned journalist and cofounder of The Idler magazine in England. A former science nerd and a graduate of Oxford University, he has been obsessed with clouds since childhood. Gavin is the founder and chair of The Cloud Appreciation Society. “You have to have joy in your life, or you won’t make it. Resistance is difficult work. You have to understand everything that is wrong in order to try and fix it. You need joy to keep going.” Now in her 70s, JEB is still deeply committed to fighting for social justice. (The camera as a “revolutionary tool”: Joan. E. Biren on unifying lesbians in their struggle for freedom) In 1979, JEB (Joan E. Biren) self-published her first book, Eye to Eye: Portraits of Lesbians. Revolutionary at that time, JEB made photographs of lesbians from different ages and backgrounds in their everyday lives―working, playing, raising families, and striving to remake their worlds. The photographs were accompanied by testimonials from the women pictured in the book, as well as writings from icons including Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich and a foreword from Joan Nestle.
Eye to Eye signaled a radical new way of seeing―moving lesbian lives from the margins to the center, and reversing a history of invisibility. More than just a book, it was an affirmation of the existence of lesbians that helped to propel a political movement. Reprinted for the first time in forty years and featuring new essays from photographer Lola Flash and former soccer player Lori Lindsey, Eye to Eye is a faithful reproduction of a work that continues to resonate in the queer community and beyond. (Hardcover / 88 pages / $51) My adult life can be divided into two distinct parts,’ Eula Biss writes, ‘the time before I owned a washing machine and the time after.’ Having just purchased her first home, she now embarks on a roguish and risky self-audit of the value system she has bought into. The result is a radical interrogation of work, leisure and capitalism.
Described by the New York Times as a writer who ‘advances from all sides, like a chess player’, Biss brings her approach to the lived experience of capitalism. Playfully ranging from IKEA to Beyoncé to Pokémon, across bars and laundromats and universities, she asks, of both herself and her class, ‘In what have we invested? (336 pages / $25) 'When I play with my cat, how do I know she is not passing time with me rather than I with her?' Montaigne
There is no real evidence that humans ever 'domesticated' cats. Rather it seems that at some point cats saw the potential value to themselves of humans. John Gray's (Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics) wonderful new book is an attempt to get to grips with the philosophical and moral issues around the uniquely strange relationship between ourselves and these remarkable animals. Feline Philosophy draws on Gray's own wide reading to give fascinating examples of the complex and intimate links that have defined how we react to and behave with this most unlikely 'pet'. At the heart of the book is a sense of gratitude towards cats as perhaps the species that more than any other - in the essential loneliness of our position in the the world - gives us a sense of our own animal nature. (128 pages / $22) The classic The Care of the Soul addresses the needs of those providing soul care to others—therapists, psychiatrists, ministers, spiritual directors, teachers, and even friends—sharing his insights for incorporating a spiritual or soulful dimension into their work and practices.
Soul Therapy is the culmination of Thomas Moore’s work. In his previous acclaimed books, he explored the soul in important areas of our lives—work, sex, marriage, family, religion, and aging. In this wise guide, he now returns to his core vocation: teaching practitioners—therapists, psychiatrists, ministers, spiritual directors, and others—how to offer soul care to those they assist. A training manual infused with a lifetime’s worth of wisdom, Soul Therapy is divided into five sections: ~ What therapy or “soul care” is and how it works; ~ What soul work is required of the helper to be able to address the needs of others; ~ How to access and move forward the spiritual dimension; ~ How to apply this work to specific areas, such as work, marriage, parenting, or teaching; ~ How to deal with other issues that arise, such as developing a therapeutic style, dealing with one’s shadow, and the need for self-care. Profound yet practical, enlightened yet grounded in real-world experience, Soul Therapy will become a definitive resource for caregivers and practitioners for years to come. (304 pages / $33) In Strangers on a Pier, acclaimed author Tash Aw explores the panoramic cultural vitality of modern Asia through his own complicated family story of migration and adaptation, which is reflected in his own face.
From a taxi ride in present-day Bangkok, to eating Kentucky Fried Chicken in 1980s Kuala Lumpur, to his grandfathers' treacherous boat journeys to Malaysia from mainland China in the 1920s, Aw weaves together stories of insiders and outsiders, images from rural villages to megacity night clubs, and voices in a dizzying variety of languages, dialects, and slangs, to create an intricate and astoundingly vivid portrait of a place caught between the fast-approaching future and a past that won't let go. (Hardcover / 96 pages / $19) Wonderworks reveals that literature is among the mightiest technologies that humans have ever invented, precision-honed to give us what our brains most want and need.
Literature is a technology like any other. And the writers we revere - from Homer to Shakespeare, Austen to Ferrante - each made a unique technical breakthrough that can be viewed as both a narrative and neuroscientific advancement. But literature's great invention was to address problems we could not solve: not how to start a fire or build a boat, but how to live and love; how to maintain courage in the face of death; how to account for the fact that we exist at all. Based on Angus Fletcher's own research, Wonderworks tells the story of the greatest literary inventions through the ages, from ancient Mesopotamia to modern-day America. It draws on cutting-edge neuroscience to demonstrate that the inventions really work: they enrich our lives with joy, hope, courage and energy, and they help our brains heal from grief, loneliness and even trauma. Wonderworks walks us through the evolution of literature's crucial blueprints, and offers us a new understanding of its power. (464 pages / $28) A journey through the minds of some of the most creative people on the planet reveals that creativity is rarely a “lightbulb moment” and instead arrives through a process of making and self-understanding.
In this insightful and informed book, Lorne M. Buchman, an international leader in art and design education and president of ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California, guides readers through stories of a diverse and talented group of artists, entrepreneurs, innovators, and designers. Make to Know: From Spaces of Uncertainty to Creative Discovery will change the way you think about creativity. The book upends popular notions of innate artistic and visionary genius and probes instead the event of discovery that happens through the act of making. In contrast to the classic tale of Michelangelo, who 'saw the angel in the stone', the artists and designers Buchman interviews for this book talk about knowing their work as they engage in the doing. Make to Know explores the revelatory nature of the creative journey itself. As Buchman weaves together the vivid stories of his multiple conversations, we learn about writers of all stripes as they confront creative spaces of uncertainty - 'the blank page'; about visual artists and what they understand from the materials they encounter; about designers and architects and the iterative process of solving problems; and about actors and musicians facing the surprises of improvisational performance. Make to Know presents a way of thinking that democratizes creativity and uncovers a process that leads to knowing both one's work and oneself. It is relevant to anyone interested in why creativity matters. (Hardback / 224 pages / 50 illustrations / $43) A cheerful, optimistic handbook for parents and carers shaping the next generation of responsible global citizens - ready to change the world for the better!
Our children have the energy, capacity, and passion to create and nurture a global culture in which inclusion, acceptance, respect, and participation are the core values that underpin a human being's every interaction. As parents and carers, our job is to help our children take their first steps along that path. Raising truly globally minded, and socially conscious children happens at home and in the community. Children can be inspired, equipped, and mobilized to make a difference in the world. By encouraging values such as responsible and kind use of social media, respect, open mindedness, empathy, a sense of community, parents can help to shape a new generation of emotionally intelligent, outward-looking, politically ethical world citizens. Relevant to parents of children of all ages - from toddlers to teens - the book gives practical advice on how to talk to your children, the vocabulary to use, and activities and projects you can undertake with your children, from planting a tree to keeping a gratitude diary to cooking themed cuisines. And you'll find out how to model global citizenship through your own day-to-day actions.
(224 pages / $28) Sometimes it can feel overwhelming thinking about all that needs to be done to save our planet. This book is the antidote to that feeling. Easy to read and easy to do – here’s all the information and inspiration you need to make a difference, simply by making smart choices about everyday objects, tasks and habits.
Environmental scientist Dr Tara Shine guides you from room to room and occasion to occasion with environmentally friendly solutions, backed by science. This book busts persistent myths and will once and for all show that living sustainably can be both fun and convenient. Besides, it will not only have a positive impact on the environment, but your wellbeing too! (Hardcover / 256 pages / $38) The Chinese artist Liu Ye’s meticulous, colorful canvases convey his love of literature in the first publication dedicated to his paintings of books.
The Beijing-based artist Liu Ye is known for his precise, deftly rendered representational paintings. In this new publication devoted to his book paintings, the artist examines the book as both a physical object and cultural totem. Playing with geometry and perspective, Liu creates extraordinary and disorienting portraits of this most familiar subject. Liu’s Book Painting series, begun in 2013, depicts close-up views of books that are turned open to reveal empty pages, an approach that emphasizes the object’s form over its content. Rendering books’ material structure—endpapers, binding, spine—in sensual detail, these paintings indicate an obsession with the book as an object and a lifelong love of literature. Liu’s father was a children’s book author who introduced him to Western writers at a young age, fueling his curiosity and imagination. Many of the books in Liu’s father’s collection were banned in Cultural Revolution–era China and the artist read them secretly throughout his childhood. This formative experience figures in his popular Banned Books series and in his book paintings in general.
Published on the occasion of a solo exhibition presented at David Zwirner, New York, in 2020, this catalogue includes new writing by the acclaimed poet Zhu Zhu, who traces the evolution of the book form in Liu’s work, as well as an interview with the artist by Hans Ulrich Obrist. About the artist:
The Beijing-born painter Liu Ye (b. 1964) combines abstraction and figuration to create bold, meditative paintings that investigate the intersections of history and representation through a distinct vocabulary that transcends traditional Eastern and Western art-historical categories. Drawing on both his childhood memories of China and his early education in Europe, the artist’s carefully balanced, methodical compositions play on perspective and ways of seeing, while also referencing a diverse range of aesthetic, literary, and cultural sources. Among these are the fairy-tale worlds of Hans Christian Andersen and Lewis Carroll; literature by Leo Tolstoy and Vladimir Nabokov; and modernist painting, architecture, and design, from Balthus to the Bauhaus. These various points of reference have inspired Liu’s artistic output for more than twenty-five years, resulting in a body of work that is at once rich in its historical quotations and singularly his own. (Hardcover / 192 pages / 21 × 28 cm / 67 illustrations / $86) |
The Witch's Garden describes over 50 of the world's most powerful, harmful, legendary and storied plants – from the screaming mandrake to calming St John's Wort, to predicting the weather with seaweed, the creation of salves for broken hearts, sore heads, protection from evil spirits and to even induce immortality.
Wise women, apothecaries, witches, herbalists: whatever you like to call them, those who cultivate plants for their apparent mystical properties have existed for thousands of years. The Witch's Garden tells the story of our folkloric fascination with these magical specimens, documenting the beliefs and rituals surrounding the natural world. Illustrated with pages from herbals held within the archives of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, along with botanical illustrations and archival images depicting magic and mayhem, The Witch's Garden beautifully evokes the bewitching nature of mysterious plants. (Hardcover / $36 / 208 pages) I want to live on foot, by hand, by pencil, at ease, responsive to whatever I meet, loose like the air that moves around my body as I walk or like a graceful swimming stroke. I want to remain astonished.
Join Antonio Munoz Molina for a walk through Madrid, Paris, London and New York, where the past and the present live side by side in the literature of newspaper headlines, billboards, casual glances and overheard conversation. This is the digital metropolis, captured in notebooks, recorded on the iPhone, where Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Charles Baudelaire, Thomas de Quincey, Fernando Pessoa and Walter Benjamin step beside us, all of us writing the unfinished poem of the crowded city. (Hardcover / 496 pages /$37) A personal and critical work that celebrates the pleasure of books and reading.
Largely unknown to readers today, Sir Philip Sidney’s sixteenth-century pastoral romance Arcadia was long considered one of the finest works of prose fiction in the English language. Shakespeare borrowed an episode from it for King Lear; Virginia Woolf saw it as “some luminous globe” wherein “all the seeds of English fiction lie latent.” In Gallery of Clouds, the Renaissance scholar Rachel Eisendrath has written an extraordinary homage to Arcadia in the form of a book-length essay divided into passing clouds: “The clouds in my Arcadia, the one I found and the one I made, hold light and color. They take on the forms of other things: a cat, the sea, my grandmother, the gesture of a teacher I loved, a friend, a girlfriend, a ship at sail, my mother. These clouds stay still only as long as I look at them, and then they change.” (160 pages / $34) How does a nonya use a yam stalk to control the sexual powers of her wayward baba? Why are Baba children never given sugarcane to chew at twilight? What does it mean if a baba has five hairs growing from a mole on his face?
The answer to these and other fascinating details of Baba folk beliefs and superstitions are told here. Wake with a Baba family and observe their daily rituals and taboos. Gain insight into their world of symbols. Witness the ancient Wangkang ceremonies. Stand on the fringes of their spiritual realms. Enjoy the humour of their cheeky folk wisdom. Well flavoured with memorable anecdotes, this book reveals the pantang (superstition) and pertua (folk wisdom) ensconced in the traditional Baba mind. (156 pages / $15 / Available locally) A lighthouse on the top of a 25-storey apartment block, a unique rocky area that looks like Guilin in China, the remains of a Shinto shrine built in the jungle by prisoners of war, houses from the Ming and Qing periods donated by Jackie Chan, the bottoms of soya-sauce bottles used to decorate the Sultan Mosque, the “leaning tower” of Singapore, the last remaining stretch of natural beach, a forgotten bomb shelter under a national monument, the beautiful modernist door of a former biscuit factory, a hidden kampong (rural village) dwarfed by residential towers, the splendidly preserved old Changi prison gates, the stately Masons Hall inside the Freemasons' headquarters …
Far from the crowds and the usual clichés, Singapore still has a number of hidden treasures for people who know how to wander off the beaten track. This is an indispensable guide for those who think they know Singapore … or who want to discover another side to the city. (256 pages / $30 / Available locally) A beautiful new edition of the classic culinary memoir by Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein’s romantic partner, with a new introduction by beloved culinary voice Ruth Reichl.
When Alice B. Toklas was asked to write a memoir, she initially refused. Instead, she wrote The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book, a sharply written, deliciously rich cookbook memorializing meals and recipes shared by Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Wilder, Matisse, and Picasso—and of course by Alice and Gertrude themselves. While The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas—penned by Gertrude Stein—adds vivid detail to Alice’s life, this cookbook paints a richer, more joyous depiction: a celebration of a lifetime in pursuit of culinary delights. In this cookbook, Alice supplies recipes inspired by her travels, accompanied by amusing tales of her and Gertrude’s lives together. In “Murder in the Kitchen,” Alice describes the first carp she killed, after which she immediately lit up a cigarette and waited for the police to come and haul her away; in “Dishes for Artists,” she describes her hunt for the perfect recipe to fit Picasso’s peculiar diet; and, of course, in “Recipes from Friends,” she provides the recipe for “Haschich Fudge,” which she notes may often be accompanied by “ecstatic reveries and extensions of one’s personality on several simultaneous planes.” With an updated look and feel, and a heartwarming introduction from Gourmet’s famed Editor-in-Chief Ruth Reichl, this much-loved, culinary classic is sure to resonate with food lovers and literary folk alike. (368 pages / $30) A modern classic cherished by many of the greatest artists of our time, The Gift is a brilliant, life-changing defense of the value of creative labor.
Drawing on examples from folklore and literature, history and tribal customs, economics and modern copyright law, Lewis Hyde demonstrates how our society—governed by the marketplace—is poorly equipped to determine the worth of artists’ work. He shows us that another way is possible: the alternative economy of the gift, which allows creations and ideas to circulate freely, rather than hoarding them as commodities. Illuminating and transformative, The Gift is a triumph of originality and insight—an essential book for anyone who has ever given or received a work of art. (480 pages / $29) This title can be posted to you within 7 working day "You can ban my books, you can ban my cartoons, but you cannot ban my mind. I will keep drawing until the last drop of my ink" Zunar This book chronicles Zunar's fight through cartoons from 2009 to 2018. Peppered within the pages of this book are some of Zunar's timeless philosophies on cartooning, which have kept him going despite the odds stacked against him – arrests, court charges, banning of books, travel ban.
In this book, Zunar also sheds light on the methodological approach he utilises in his cartoons to effectively deliver his messages. From the conception of a cartoon right down to inking it, Zunar bares what goes on his mind when he draws these cartoons. From being labelled controversial to becoming an award-winning cartoonist, this is Zunar's fight through cartoons in his own words. ~ Zunar is a political cartoonist from Malaysia, who has been drawing editorial cartoons for over 30 years. With his slogan, “How Can I be Neutral, Even My Pen Has a Stand”, he exposes corruption and abuse of power committed by the government of Malaysia through his art. Zunar has been arrested and detained for drawing cartoons that challenged official views. His books have been banned by the Malaysian government and his office raided by law enforcement officers. The factories that printed his books have also been raided and vendors throughout the country were often warned not to sell his books. In 2015, Zunar was selected by Amnesty International as the first Malaysian for their biggest annual international campaign, ‘Write for Rights (#W4R) 2015′. His various international awards received over the years include the Cartooning For Peace Award 2016 (Geneva) and the International Press Freedom Award 2015 (New York). (256 pages /$30) A brilliant, young con artist offered to help the world’s most traveled people reach the planet’s last untouched frontiers; instead, they were taken for a wild ride that turned into a costly lesson on the perils of wanderlust.
At twenty-three, William Simon Baekeland was well on his way to becoming the world’s best traveled person. The “billionaire” heir to a great plastics fortune had already visited 163 countries, but his real passion was finding ways to visit the world’s most challenging destinations—war torn cities, disputed territories, and remote or officially off-limits islands at the margins of the map. He earned rock-star status in the world of extreme travel by finding ingenious ways to bring the world’s most widely traveled people to difficult-to-reach and forbidden places. But when his story began to unravel, an eccentric group of hyper-well-traveled country collectors were left wondering how they had allowed their obsession to blind them to the warning signs that William Baekeland wasn’t who they thought he was. Mad Travelers: A Tale of Wanderlust, Greed and the Quest to Reach the Ends of the Earth delves deep inside the subculture of country collecting, taking readers to danger zones like Mogadishu and geographical oddities like Norway’s nearly impossible-to-reach Bouvet Island. Along the way, this raucous tale of adventure and international intrigue illuminates the perils and pleasures of wanderlust while examining a fundamental question: why are some people compelled to travel, while others are content to stay home?
Mad Travelers is a perceptive and at times hilarious account of how the pursuit of everywhere put the world’s greatest travelers at the mercy of a brilliant young con man. (256 pages / $30) One sunny spring morning in the 1970s, an unlikely Englishman set out on a pilgrimage that would take him across the entire length of Japan. Travelling only along small back roads, Alan Booth (1946 - 1993) travelled on foot from Soya, the country's northernmost tip, to Sata in the extreme south, traversing three islands and some 2,000 miles of rural Japan. His mission: 'to come to grips with the business of living here,' after having spent most of his adult life in Tokyo.
The Roads to Sata is a wry, witty, inimitable account of that prodigious trek, vividly revealing the reality of life in off-the-tourist-track Japan. Journeying alongside Booth, we encounter the wide variety of people who inhabit the Japanese countryside - from fishermen and soldiers, to bar hostesses and school teachers, to hermits, drunks and the homeless. We glimpse vast stretches of coastline and rambling townscapes, mountains and motorways; watch baseball games and sunrises; sample trout and Kilamanjaro beer, hear folklore, poems and smutty jokes. Throughout, we enjoy the wit and insight of a uniquely perceptive guide, and more importantly, discover a new face of an often-misunderstood nation. (336 pages / $24) W. J. T. Mitchell’s memoir tells the story—at once representative and unique—of one family’s encounter with mental illness and bears witness to the life of the talented young man who was his son.
Gabriel Mitchell was diagnosed with schizophrenia at age twenty-one and died by suicide eighteen years later. He left behind a remarkable archive of creative work and a father determined to honor his son’s attempts to conquer his own illness. Before his death, Gabe had been working on a film that would show madness from inside and out, as media stereotype and spectacle, symptom and stigma, malady and minority status, disability and gateway to insight. He was convinced that madness is an extreme form of subjective experience that we all endure at some point in our lives, whether in moments of ecstasy or melancholy, or in the enduring trauma of a broken heart. Gabe’s declared ambition was to transform schizophrenia from a death sentence to a learning experience, and madness from a curse to a critical perspective. Shot through with love and pain, Mental Traveler shows how Gabe drew his father into his quest for enlightenment within madness. It is a book that will touch anyone struggling to cope with mental illness, and especially for parents and caregivers of those caught in its grasp. (Hardcover / 192 pages / University of Chicago Press / $36) On March 3, 2017, Amy Krouse Rosenthal penned an op-ed piece for the New York Times’ “Modern Love” column —”You May Want to Marry My Husband.” It appeared ten days before her death from ovarian cancer. A heartbreaking, wry, brutally honest, and creative play on a personal ad—in which a dying wife encouraged her husband to go on and find happiness after her demise—the column quickly went viral, reaching more than five million people worldwide.
In My Wife Said You May Want to Marry Me, Jason describes what came next: his commitment to respecting Amy’s wish, even as he struggled with her loss. Surveying his life before, with, and after Amy, Jason ruminates on love, the pain of watching a loved one suffer, and what it means to heal—how he and their three children, despite their profound sorrow, went on. Jason’s emotional journey offers insights on dying and death and the excruciating pain of losing a soulmate, and illuminates the lessons he learned. As he reflects on Amy’s gift to him—a fresh start to fill his empty space with a new story—Jason describes how he continues to honor Amy’s life and her last wish, and how he seeks to appreciate every day and live in the moment while trying to help others coping with loss. My Wife Said You May Want to Marry Me is the poignant, unreserved, and inspiring story of a great love, the aftermath of a marriage ended too soon, and how a surviving partner eventually found a new perspective on life’s joys in the wake of tremendous loss. (240 pages / $29) A new anthology of some of the most important science literature of our age.
At a time when science can seem complex and remote, it has a greater impact on our lives, and to the future of our planet, than ever before. It really matters that its discoveries and truths should be clearly and widely communicated. That its enemies, from the malicious to the muddled, the self-deluding to the self-interested, be challenged and exposed. That science should be brought out of the laboratory, taken into the corridors of power and defended in the maelstrom of popular culture. No one does this better than Richard Dawkins. In bringing together his forewords, afterwords and introductions to works by some of the leading thinkers of our age - Carl Sagan, Lawrence Krauss, Jacob Bronowski, Lewis Wolpert - and a selection of his reviews, both admiring and critical, of a wide range of scientific and other works, Books do Furnish a Life celebrates the writers who communicate the ideas of science and the natural world in both fiction and non-fiction. It celebrates the courage of those who write about their experiences of escaping religion and embracing rationality, of protecting the truths of science and analytical rigour against charlatanry and obfuscation. (464 pages / $32) In Icebergs, Zombies, and the Ultra Thin, Matthew Soules issues an indictment of how finance capitalism dramatically alters not only architectural forms but also the very nature of our cities and societies.
We rarely consider architecture to be an important factor in contemporary economic and political debates, yet sparsely occupied ultra-thin "pencil towers" develop in our cities, functioning as speculative wealth storage for the superrich, and cavernous "iceberg" homes extend architectural assets many stories below street level. Meanwhile, communities around the globe are blighted by zombie and ghost urbanism, marked by unoccupied neighborhoods and abandoned housing developments. Learn how the use of architecture as an investment tool has accelerated in recent years, heightening inequality and contributing to worldwide financial instability: • See how investment imperatives shape what and how we build, changing the very structure of our communities • Delve into high-profile projects, like the luxury apartments of architect Rafael Viñoly's 432 Park Avenue • Understand the convergence of technology, finance, and spirituality, which together are configuring the financialized walls within which we eat, sleep, and work Includes dozens of photos and drawings of architectural phenomena that have changed the way we live. Essential reading for anyone interested in architecture, design, economics, and understanding the way our world is formed. (Hardcover / 240 pages / Published by Princeton Architectural Press / $47) This collection is an intoxicating mix of memoir and music writing, spanning the golden age of vinyl and the streaming era, and showing how a single LP can shape a writer's mind.
Our favourite albums are our most faithful companions: we listen to them hundreds of times over decades, we know them far better than any novel or film. These records don't just soundtrack our lives but work their way deep inside us, shaping our outlook and identity, forging our friendships and charting our love affairs. They become part of our story.
In Long Players, fifty of our finest authors write about the albums that changed their lives, from Deborah Levy on Bowie to Daisy Johnson on Lizzo, Ben Okri on Miles Davis to David Mitchell on Joni Mitchell, Sarah Perry on Rachmaninov to Bernardine Evaristo on Sweet Honey in the Rock. Part meditation on the album form and part candid self-portrait, each of these miniature essays reveals music's power to transport the listener to a particular time and place. REM's Automatic for the People sends Olivia Laing back to first love and heartbreak, Bjork's Post resolves a crisis of faith and sexuality for a young Marlon James, while Fragile by Yes instils in George Saunders the confidence to take his own creative path. Featuring writing from Ali Smith, Marlon James, Deborah Levy, George Saunders, Bernardine Evaristo, Ian Rankin, Tracey Thorn, Ben Okri, Sarah Perry, Neil Tennant, Rachel Kushner, Clive James, Eimear McBride, Neil Gaiman, Daisy Johnson, David Mitchell, Esi Edugyan, Patricia Lockwood, among many others. (Hardcover / 224 pages / $33) Most of us live our lives in our clothes without realizing their power. But in the hands of artists, garments reveal themselves. They are pure tools of expression, storytelling, resistance and creativity: canvases on which to show who we really are.
In What Artists Wear, style luminary Charlie Porter takes us on an invigorating, eye-opening journey through the iconic outfits worn by artists, in the studio, on stage, at work, at home and at play. From Yves Klein's spotless tailoring to the kaleidoscopic costumes of Yayoi Kusama and Cindy Sherman; from Andy Warhol's signature denim to Charlotte Prodger's casualwear, Porter's roving eye picks out the magical, revealing details in the clothes he encounters, weaving together a new way of understanding artists, and of dressing ourselves. Part love letter, part guide to chic, and featuring generous photographic spreads, What Artists Wear is both a manual and a manifesto, a radical, gleeful, inspiration to see the world anew-and find greater pleasure and possibility in the clothes we all wear. (376 pages / $33) Charlie Porter is a writer, fashion critic, art curator and lecturer in Fashion at the University of Westminster. He has contributed to titles such as Financial Times, Guardian, New York Times, GQ, Luncheon, i-D and Fantastic Man, and has been described as one of the most influential fashion journalists of his time. An unforgettable memoir of a trailblazing Caribbean woman who forged a new life and career in post-war London is a rediscovered classic.
Beryl Gilroy's new life wasn't what she had expected. In 1952, she moved from Guyana to London to pursue her dream of teaching, only to experience Britain's racist post-war society. After finally securing a teaching post, she faced fear and curiosity from her pupils, bigoted abuse from parents, and semi-segregation among staff. But over the course of her trailblazing career, Gilroy only grew braver, learning the value of education in combating prejudice and rising to become a pioneering headmistress. One of the only books ever published by a Caribbean woman in twentieth-century Britain, Gilroy's 1976 memoir is a lost classic. As vivid, entertaining, and unflinching today as it was almost fifty years ago, Black Teacher is a testament to how one woman's dignity, humour, and spirit transcended her era. Introduced by Bernardine Evaristo, it will inspire a new generation. (Hardcover / 288 pages / $28) Read the fascinating story of one of the greatest unsung figures of the nature conservation movement, founder of the RSPB and icon of early animal rights activism, Etta Lemon.
A heroine for our times, Etta Lemon campaigned for fifty years against the worldwide slaughter of birds for extravagantly feathered hats. Her legacy is the RSPB, grown from an all-female pressure group of 1889 with the splendidly simple pledge: Wear No Feathers. Moving from the feather workers’ slums to high society, from the first female political rally to the rise of the eco-feminist, it restores Etta Lemon to her rightful place in history – the extraordinary woman who saved the birds. (320 pages / $23) A powerful new theory of human nature suggests that our secret to success as a species is our unique friendliness
Since Charles Darwin wrote about “evolutionary fitness,” the idea of fitness has been confused with physical strength, tactical brilliance, and aggression. In fact, what made us evolutionarily fit was a remarkable kind of friendliness, a virtuosic ability to coordinate and communicate with others that allowed us to achieve all the cultural and technical marvels in human history. Advancing what they call the “self-domestication theory,” Brian Hare, professor in the department of evolutionary anthropology and the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at Duke University and his wife, Vanessa Woods, a research scientist and award-winning journalist, shed light on the mysterious leap in human cognition that allowed Homo sapiens to thrive. But this gift for friendliness came at a cost. Just as a mother bear is most dangerous around her cubs, we are at our most dangerous when someone we love is threatened by an “outsider.” The threatening outsider is demoted to sub-human, fair game for our worst instincts. Hare’s groundbreaking research, developed in close coordination with Richard Wrangham and Michael Tomasello, giants in the field of cognitive evolution, reveals that the same traits that make us the most tolerant species on the planet also make us the cruelest. Survival of the Friendliest offers us a new way to look at our cultural as well as cognitive evolution and sends a clear message: In order to survive and even to flourish, we need to expand our definition of who belongs. (304 pages / $26) Celebrating the 400th anniversary of Burton's masterpiece, this fully edited, modern edition is published as a landmark hardback volume in Penguin Classics.
Robert Burton's labyrinthine, beguiling, playful masterpiece is his attempt to 'anatomize and cut up' every aspect of the condition of melancholy, from which he had suffered throughout his life. Ranging over beauty, digestion, the planets, alcohol, demons, kissing, poetry and the restorative power of books, among many other things, The Anatomy of Melancholy has fascinated figures from Samuel Johnson to Jorge Luis Borges since the seventeenth century, and remains an incomparable examination of the human condition in all its flawed, endless variety. (Hardcover / 1376 pages / $86) It’s right there in the Book of Job: “Man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward.” Suffering is an inescapable part of the human condition—which leads to a question that has proved just as inescapable throughout the centuries: Why? Why do we suffer? Why do people die young? Is there any point to our pain, physical or emotional? Do horrors like hurricanes have meaning?
In Seven Ways of Looking at Pointless Suffering, Scott Samuelson tackles that hardest question of all. To do so, he travels through the history of philosophy and religion, but he also attends closely to the real world we live in. While always taking the question of suffering seriously, Samuelson is just as likely to draw lessons from Bugs Bunny as from Confucius, from his time teaching philosophy to prisoners as from Hannah Arendt’s attempts to come to terms with the Holocaust. He guides us through the arguments people have offered to answer this fundamental question, explores the many ways that we have tried to minimize or eliminate suffering, and examines people’s attempts to find ways to live with pointless suffering. Ultimately, Samuelson shows, to be fully human means to acknowledge a mysterious paradox: we must simultaneously accept suffering and oppose it. And understanding that is itself a step towards acceptance. Wholly accessible, and thoroughly thought-provoking, Seven Ways of Looking at Pointless Suffering is a masterpiece of philosophy, returning the field to its roots—helping us see new ways to understand, explain, and live in our world, fully alive to both its light and its darkness. (Hardcover / 272 pages / University of Chicago Press/ $41) About the author:
Dr. Scott Samuelson studied philosophy at Grinnell College (BA, 1995, valedictorian) and Emory University (PhD, 2001). Since 2000 he has taught at Kirkwood Community College in Iowa. In 2014 he was named Distinguished Humanities Educator by the Community College Humanities Association. Inspired by his students, he wrote his first book The Deepest Human Life: An Introduction to Philosophy for Everyone. On top of his job at Kirkwood, he teaches philosophy at the Iowa Medical and Classification Center (a.k.a. Oakdale Prison). Dr. Scott Samuelson was the recipient of the 2015 Hiett Prize in the Humanities. Seven Ways of Looking at Pointless Suffering is his second book. An insightful guide for any writer who's ever wondered if they're talented, creative, lovable, or worthy enough.
As hard as the craft of writing is, the greatest challenges writers face are often within ourselves. Comparison, self-doubt, isolation, and other internal struggles can derail a writer's progress, at any stage in the writing life. Author, essayist, and speaker William Kenower knows these struggles first-hand, and hears them from writers everywhere he teaches and appears. In this candid and encouraging book, he dismantles the myth that some writers have talent and others don't, and shares relatable stories, wisdom, and best practices for reengaging with our passion, following our curiosity, and staying connected to what matters most. If you've ever wondered whether you're "really" a writer, or should retreat to a safer, more conventional path, this enlightening and accepting book will spark renewed purpose and joy on your writing journey. (240 pages / $33) In 2019, Singapore had 400 reported suicides, with an increasing number of young people choosing to take their lives. Globally, 800,000 people kill themselves every year. The COVID-19 pandemic has forced more people, in Singapore and around the world, to seek help for mental health issues. While much has been said about the toll on mental health, there is little understanding of why people choose to kill themselves, especially when many, like Anthony Bourdain and Kate Spade, had so much to live for.
Author Mahita Vas has battled suicidal thoughts for all her adult life. She even lost one of those battles and tried to kill herself, only to be rescued within seconds of breathing her last. It is difficult for those left behind to understand why their loved one would choose to die. A Good Day to Die will give readers a glimpse into an anguished mind. It is based on her personal experience, combined with academic reports and medical studies. (176 pages / $20) Life is a turbulent journey, fraught with confusion, heartbreak, and inconvenience. This collection of wit and wisdom from Lemony Snicket is unlikely to help.
Looking for wit, wisdom, and inspiration all within the pages of one useful book? Read Something Else. It includes a new introduction filled with curious aphorisms, a handful of never-before-seen-or-heard quotations, and fan favorites from works over the years. These dubious offerings, collected from Snicket’s books, unpublished papers, and more, have been made pleasing to the eye by illustrations, select fan art, and design flourishes. (Hardcover / 176 pages / $26) Getting lost in the setting of a good book can be half the pleasure of reading, and Decorating a Room of One’s Own brings literary backdrops to the foreground in this wryly affectionate satire of interior design reporting.
English professor and humorist Susan Harlan spoofs decorating culture by reimagining its subject as famous fictional homes and “interviews” the residents who reveal their true tastes: Lady Macbeth’s favorite room in the castle, or the design inspiration behind Jay Gatsby’s McMansion of unfulfilled dreams. Featuring 30 entries of notable dwellings, sidebars such as “Setting Up an Ideal Governess’s Room,” and four-color spot illustration throughout, Decorating a Room of One's Own is the ideal book for readers who appreciate fine literature and a good end table. (Hardcover / 208 pages / $34) An exploration of why we don't talk to strangers, and the wonderful things that would happen if we did.
When was the last time you spoke to a stranger? In cities, we stand in silent buses and train carriages, ignoring each other. Online, we retreat into silos and carefully curate who we interact with. In our politics, we are increasingly consumed by a fear of people we've never met. But what if strangers, long believed to be the cause of our problems, were actually the solution? With the help of sociologists, psychologists, philosophers, political scientists and more, Joe Keohane sets out to investigate why we don't talk to strangers, and what happens when we do. From enhancing empathy, happiness and cognitive development to easing loneliness and isolation, passing encounters can root us in the world, deepening our sense of belonging. Warm, witty and profound, this book will make you reconsider how you see others, and in doing so show us how talking to strangers is not just a way to live, it's a way to survive. (Hardcover / 288 pages / $36) Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. For details of each title, click here.
As a veteran of the First World War, and an expert in art history and medicine, Hans Prinzhorn was uniquely placed to explore the connection between art and madness. The work he collected—ranging from expressive paintings to life-size rag dolls and fragile sculptures made from chewed bread—contained a raw, emotional power, and the book he published about the material inspired a new generation of modern artists, Max Ernst, André Breton, and Salvador Dalí among them. By the mid-1930s, however, Prinzhorn’s collection had begun to attract the attention of a far more sinister group.
Modernism was in full swing when Adolf Hitler arrived in Vienna in 1907, hoping to forge a career as a painter. Rejected from art school, this troubled young man became convinced that modern art was degrading the Aryan soul, and once he had risen to power he ordered that modern works be seized and publicly shamed in “degenerate art” exhibitions, which became wildly popular. But this culture war was a mere curtain-raiser for Hitler’s next campaign, against allegedly “degenerate” humans, and Prinzhorn’s artist-patients were caught up in both. By 1941, the Nazis had murdered 70,000 psychiatric patients in killing centers that would serve as prototypes for the death camps of the Final Solution. Dozens of Prinzhorn artists were among the victims. The Gallery of Miracles and Madness is a spellbinding, emotionally resonant tale of this complex and troubling history that uncovers Hitler’s wars on modern art and the mentally ill and how they paved the way for the Holocaust. Charlie English tells an eerie story of genius, madness, and dehumanization that offers readers a fresh perspective on the brutal ideology of the Nazi regime. (Hardcover / 336 pages / $38) Fast fashion leaves behind a trail of human and environmental exploitation. Our wardrobes don't have to be the finish line; they can be a starting point. We can all care, repair and rewear. Do you accept the challenge?
This book will equip you with a myriad of ways to mend, rewear and breathe new life into your wardrobe to achieve a more sustainable lifestyle. By teaching you to scrutinise your shopping habits and make sustainable purchases, she will inspire you to buy better, care more and reduce your carbon footprint by simply making your loved clothes last longer. Following Orsola's practical tips to lavish care and attention on the clothes you already own will not only have a positive environmental impact, but will be personally rewarding too. (288 pages / $19) About the author: After founding Fashion Revolution in 2013, Orsola de Castro pioneered a global campaign in response to the Rana Plaza factory collapse and became an internationally recognised opinion leader in sustainable fashion. In 1841 the 'peasant poet' John Clare escaped from an asylum in Epping Forest, where he had been kept for four years, and walked over eighty miles home to Northamptonshire. Suffering from poor mental health, Clare was attempting to return to his idealized first love, Mary, unaware that she had died three years earlier.
In 1995, with his life in crisis and his own mental health fragile, Robert decides to retrace Clare's route along the Great North Road over a punishing four-day walk. As he walks he reflects on the changing landscape and on the evolving shape of his own family, on fatherhood and masculinity, and on the meaning of home. Part memoir, part travel-writing, part literary criticism, A Length of Road is a deeply profound and poetic exploration of class, gender, grief and sexuality through the author's own experiences and through the autobiographical writing of poet John Clare. (336 pages / $30) 'I thought that there were two rules in life - never count the cost, and never do anything unless you can do it wholeheartedly. Now is the time to live.'
Artist and wanderer Everett Ruess left home at the age of sixteen to immerse himself in the harsh desert landscapes of the American Southwest. With only his donkeys for company, driven by an insatiable longing for beauty and experience, he ventured ever further from civilisation and into the wilderness of Navajo country.. In 1934, at the age of twenty, he vanished without trace in Utah, a disappearance that remains unsolved to this day. Through letters, diary excerpts and poems - charting not only his rugged adventures and his exquisite nature writing but his progression as a writer, and into adulthood.
(304 pages / $30) Ten years ago, Hosanna Wong packed her life into suitcases and started traveling the country to talk to people about Jesus. Along the way she discovered lies she had believed that held her back from actually sharing God’s love. Lies such as
Through faithfully studying God’s Word and fumbling through her own flawed progress, Hosanna uncovered what the Bible actually says about revealing God’s love in our everyday lives. With honesty and humor, Hosanna will help you:
(224 pages / $33) Hosanna Wong is an author, speaker, and spoken-word artist who grew up in an urban ministry on the streets of San Francisco. From there to her years of touring the country sharing Jesus through spoken-word poetry and on to becoming a sought-after speaker in churches and conferences around the world. For a whole year on his train to work, Stig Abell read books from across genres and time periods during his 50 minute commute. Then he wrote about them, and their impact on our culture and his own life.
The result is a work of many things: a brisk guide to the canon of Western literature; an intimate engagement with writers from Shakespeare to JK Rowling, Marcel Proust to Zora Neale Hurston; a wise and funny celebration of the power of words; and a meditation on mental unrest and how to tackle it. It will help you discover new books to love, give you the confidence to give up on those that you don’t, and remind you of ones that you already do. (336 pages / $26) A first-hand account of what it's like to live, work, sleep, eat - and stay sane - in one of the most extreme man-made environments on the planet.
Imagine a world without natural light, where you can barely stand up straight for fear of knocking your head, where you have no idea of where in the world you are or what time of day it is, where you sleep in a coffin-sized bunk and sometimes eat a full roast for breakfast. Now imagine sharing that world with 140 other sweaty bodies, crammed into a 430ft x 33ft steel tube, 300ft underwater, for up to 90 days at a time, with no possibility of escape. And to top it off, a sizeable chunk of your living space is taken up by the most formidably destructive nuclear weapons history has ever known. This is the world of the submariner. This is life under pressure. As a restless and adventurous 18-year-old, Richard Humphreys joined the submarine service in 1985 and went on to serve aboard the nuclear deterrent for five years at the end of the Cold War. Nothing could have prepared him for life beneath the waves. Aside from the claustrophobia and disorientation, there were the prolonged periods of boredom, the constant dread of discovery by the Soviets, and the smorgasbord of rank odours.
But even in this most pressurised of environments, the consolations were unique: where else could you sit peacefully for hours listening to whale song, or... (304 pages / $21) Shelley Klein grew up in the Scottish Borders, in a house designed on a modernist open-plan grid. With colourful glass panels set against a forest of trees, it was like living in a work of art. Her father, Bernat Klein, was a textile designer whose pioneering colours and textures were a major contribution to 1960s and 70s style.
Thirty years on, Shelley moves back home to care for her father, now in his eighties: the house has not changed and neither has his uncompromising vision - or his distinctive way of looking at the world. Told with great tenderness and humour, this is Shelley's account of looking after an adored yet maddening parent and a piercing portrait of the grief that followed his death. (272 pages / $24) Statues stand as markers of collective memory connecting us to a shared sense of belonging. When societies fracture into warring tribes, we convince ourselves that the past is irredeemably evil. So, we tear down our statues. But what begins with the destruction of statues, ends with the killing of people.
This remarkable book is a compelling history of love and hate spanning every continent, religion and era, told through the destruction of 21 statues. Dr Peter Hughes’ original approach, blending philosophy, psychology and history, explores how these symbols of our identity give us more than an understanding of our past. In the wars that rage around them, they may also hold the key to our future. The 21 statues are Hatshepsut (Ancient Egypt) Nero (Suffolk, UK) Athena (Syria) Buddhas of Bamiyan (Afghanistan), Hecate (Constantinople) Our Lady of Caversham (near Reading, UK) uitzilopochtli (Mexico) Confucius (China) Louis XV (France) Mendelssohn (Germany) The Confederate Monument (US) Sir John A. Macdonald (Canada) Christopher Columbus (Venezuela) Edward Colston (Bristol, UK) Cecil Rhodes (South Africa) George Washington (US) Stalin (Hungary) Yagan (Australia) Saddam Hussein (Iraq) B. R. Ambedkar (India) Frederick Douglass (US) The book includes a black and white illustration of each statue and an illustrated map showing their geographical location. A History of Love and Hate in 21 Statues is a profound and necessary meditation on identity which resonates powerfully today as statues tumble around the world. (Hardcover / 256 pages / $43) In 1990, while covering a story about homelessness for the New Orleans Times-Picayune, Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Ted Jackson encountered a drug addict sleeping under a bridge. After snapping a photo, Jackson woke the man. Pointing to the daily newspaper by his feet, the homeless stranger looked the photojournalist in the eye and said, “You ought to do a story about me.” When Ted asked why, he was stunned by the answer. “Because, I’ve played in three Super Bowls.”
That chance meeting was the start of Ted’s thirty-year relationship with Jackie Wallace (b 1951), a former NFL star who rose to the pinnacle of fame and fortune, only to crash and lose it all. Getting to know Jackie, Ted learned the details of his life, and how he spiraled into the “vortex of darkness” that left him addicted and living on the streets of New Orleans.
Ted chronicles Jackie's life from his teenage years in New Orleans through college and the NFL to the end of his pro career and the untimely death of his mother--devastating events that led him into addiction and homelessness. Throughout, Ted pays tribute to the enduring friendship he shares with this man he has come to know and also look at as an inspiration. But Ted is not naïve; he speaks frankly about the vulnerability of such a relationship: Can a man like Jackie recover, or is he destined to roam the streets until his end? Tragic and triumphant, inspiring and unexpected, You Ought to Do a Story About Me offers a rare glimpse into the precarious world of homelessness and the lingering impact of racism and poverty on the lives of NOLA’s citizens. Lyrical and evocative, Ted's account is pure, singular, and ambitious—a timeless tale about loss, redemption, and hope in their multifarious forms. (336 pages / $28) The Fran Lebowitz Reader brings together two of the famed author's bestsellers, Metropolitan Life and Social Studies.
Fran Lebowitz is a New York legend. Arriving in the city over fifty years ago, she made her name as a columnist on Andy Warhol's Interview magazine, before publishing two bestselling collections of essays. She's one of America's most insightful social commentators, a sought-after public speaker, a style icon, wit and flaneur.
In "elegant, finely honed prose" (The Washington Post Book World), Lebowitz limns the vicissitudes of contemporary urban life—its fads, trends, crazes, morals, and fashions. By turns ironic, facetious, deadpan, sarcastic, wry, wisecracking, and waggish, Fran Lebowitz is always wickedly entertaining. ($33 / 336 pages) How to Enjoy Art: A Guide for Everyone provides the tools to understand and enjoy works of art. Debunking the pervasive idea that specialist knowledge is required to understand and appreciate art, instead How to Enjoy Art focuses on experience and pleasure, demonstrating how anyone can find value and enjoyment in art.
Examples from around the world and throughout art history—from works by Fra Angelico and Berthe Morisot to Kazuo Shiraga and Kara Walker—are used to demonstrate how a handful of core strategies and skills can help enhance the experience of viewing art works. With these skills, anyone can encounter any work of art—regardless of media, artist or period—and find some resonance with their own experiences. How to Enjoy Art encourages us to rediscover the fundamental pleasure in viewing art. (Hardcover / 160 pages / Yale University Press / $28) Ben Street is an art historian and writer. He has worked as an art history lecturer and educator at a wide variety of institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and Tate and The National Gallery, London. He is author of a number of books on art, for both children and adult audience
How does touch shape our perception of the world?
Touch is Really Strange is a science-based graphic therapeutic comic exploring touch as a fundamental human experience, and why it is essential for health. Used positively, touch can change pain and trauma, communicate compassion and love and generate social bonding. Get it wrong and it can be abusive and terrifying.
Touch helps us feel real. Knowledge comes through our body as we engage with space and with others. Before we have language, our concepts are formed as we meet a world full of edges and textures. Touch is Really Strange celebrates the power of inward touch (interoception) and looks at how we can use skilful contact to promote feelings of joy, connection and vitality. "Writer Steve Haines mixes cold hard scientific facts on the senses and how our body works, alongside philosophical musings, pop culture quotes and quirky real world anecdotes. When allied with the beautiful artwork of illustrator Sophie Standing it makes for a really compelling and engaging read." Pipedream comics
(32 pages / $21) Why is this book timely? "Lockdown has been a massive experiment in non-touching. The stories of people isolated in hospital with only a screen to communicate to loved ones or the images of people on either side of plastic barriers are heart-breaking. Idiocy is all around us: whether it's the uncle spouting conspiracy theories, the colleagues who repeat your point but louder, or the commuters who still can't count two metres, our lives are beset by idiots. But what is the answer to this perpetual scourge?
Maxime Rovere is a philosopher who has dedicated his life to studying the ways we interact, and the Early Enlightenment. Here he turns his attention to the murkiest of intellectual corners. With warmth, wit and wisdom, he illuminates a new understanding of idiots, one which examines our relations to others and our own ego, offers tools and strategies to dismantle the most desperate of idiotic situations, and even reveals how to stop being the idiots ourselves (because we're always someone else's idiot). Expertly translated by David Bellos, this is an erudite, enjoyable and much-needed solution to a most familiar vexation. (Hardcover / 160 pages / $26) About the author: Maxime Rovere is a philosopher who has dedicated his life to studying the way we interact, through both the history of philosophy (Spinoza and others in the Early Enlightenment) as well as in contemporary ethics, before turning his attention to idiots. He is associate-researcher at the Ecole Normale Superieure (Lyon) and teaches French Literature and Comparative Literature at Princeton University. A leading psychiatrist's professional and personal reflections on mental illness - beautifully written, informative and accessible.
For many of us, mental illness is often shrouded in mystery, misconception and fear. Baumann spent decades as a psychiatrist at Valkenberg Hospital and, through his personal engagement with patients' various forms of psychosis, he describes the lived experiences of those who suffer from schizophrenia, depression, bipolar and other disorders. Baumann argues cogently for a more inclusive way of making sense of mental health. With sensitivity and empathy, his enquiries into the territories of art, psychology, consciousness, otherness, free will and theories of the self reveal how mental illness raises questions that affect us all. (352 pages / $22) Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Non-fiction
How do you tell the real story of someone misremembered - an icon and idol - alongside your own? Jenn Shapland's celebrated debut is both question and answer: an immersive, surprising exploration of one of America's most beloved writers, alongside a genre-defying examination of identity, queerness, memory, obsession, and love. Shapland is a graduate student when she first uncovers letters written to Carson McCullers by a woman named Annemarie. Though Shapland recognizes herself in the letters, which are intimate and unabashed in their feelings, she does not see McCullers as history has portrayed her. Her curiosity gives way to fixation, not just with this newly discovered side of McCullers's life, but with how we tell queer love stories. Why, Shapland asks, are the stories of women paved over by others' narratives? What happens when constant revision is required of queer women trying to navigate and self-actualize in straight spaces? And what might the tracing of McCullers's life? her history, her secrets, her legacy?reveal to Shapland about herself? In smart, illuminating prose, Shapland interweaves her own story with McCullers's to create a vital new portrait of one of our nation's greatest literary treasures, and shows us how the writers we love and the stories we tell about ourselves make us who we are. (288 pages / $33) |
The astonishing true story of two First World War prisoners who pulled off one of the most ingenious escapes of all time.
Imprisoned in a remote Turkish POW camp during the First World War, two British officers, Harry Jones and Cedric Hill, cunningly join forces. To stave off boredom, Jones makes a handmade Ouija board and holds fake seances for fellow prisoners. One day, an Ottoman official approaches him with a query: could Jones contact the spirits to find a vast treasure rumoured to be buried nearby? Jones, a lawyer, and Hill, a magician, use the Ouija board - and their keen understanding of the psychology of deception-to build a trap for their captors that will lead them to freedom. The Confidence Men is a nonfiction thriller featuring strategy, mortal danger and even high farce - and chronicles a profound but unlikely friendship
(Hardcover / 352 pages / $36) After spending a lifetime together, Irvin and Marilyn Yalom confront in alternating chapters the reality of Marilyn's terminal cancer diagnosis in this profoundly moving, tender and loving memoir. From Irvin's work in psychotherapy examining our fear of death, compounded with personal experience, A MATTER OF DEATH AND LIFE seeks to answer questions that we all hold about the end of our lives: How much are we willing to bear to stay alive? How can we end our days as painlessly as possible? How can we gracefully leave this world to the next generation?
Told at first in alternating chapters between them, completed in the aftermath of Marilyn's death, A MATTER OF DEATH AND LIFE is an unforgettable portrait of love and unflinchingly examines what it means to live and die well. (240 pages / $33) In this original study, John Batchelor explores the artistry with which Kipling created the Just So Stories, using each tale as an entry point into the writer’s life and work—including the tragedy that shadows much of the volume, the death of his daughter Josephine.
Batchelor details the playful challenges the stories made to contemporary society. In his stories Kipling played with biblical and other stories of creation and imagined fantastical tales of animals' development and man's discovery of literacy. Richly illustrated with original drawings and family photographs, this account reveals Kipling’s public and private lives—and sheds new light on a much-loved and tremendously influential classic. (Hardcover / 240 pages / $41) Diaries keep secrets; they harbour fantasies and fictional histories. They are substitute boyfriends, girlfriends, husband and wives and sometimes children. But in the 21st century, diary writing is on the wane. The dignified space of the private diary has been replaced by a culture of public blurting.
The Private Life of the Diary: from Pepys to Tweets will trace the death of the diary as an ancient practice. Diaries are a form of biography; they record lives as they are lived, moment to moment. They indulge our fondness for self-dramatisation and display. In the twenty-first century, self-disclosure is big business, as the recent best- selling on-line diary of prostitute Belle de Jour indicates. Since 1999 there has been an explosion of online weblog, radio and video diaries. Young people are the most frequent users of online diaries or blogs, a clear indication that diaries, both online and off, function as workshops for building identities. Who or What am I in relation to the world? This is the basic question of the juvenile diary, coupled with the realisation that you might need to go outside yourself to find an answer. The diary or journal offers a place for that question to be explored, and this book will trace the diarist’s journey towards knowing who they are. (256 pages / $23) “I have an imagination. It is my most precious possession” In April 1925 at the age of fifteen, Jean Lucey Pratt started a journal that she kept until just a few days before her death in 1986, producing over a million words in 45 exercise books. What emerges is a portrait of a truly unique, spirited woman and writer. Never before has an account so fully, so honestly and so vividly captured a single woman’s journey through the twentieth century.
(736 pages / $32) Jean Lucey Pratt was born in 1909 in Wembley, Middlesex and lived much of her life in a small cottage on the edge of Burnham Beeches in Buckinghamshire. She was a trainee architect, she was a publicist, she gardened, she took in lodgers, she read copiously, she wrote criticism, and in later years she ran a bookshop. But above all, she kept track of her life in the most lyrical of ways, from the age of 15 until just a few days before her death in 1986.
An edgy and insightful look at Barack Obama, Keanu Reeves, and the mixed-race experience in our divided world. At once personally revealing and politically astute, author Will Harris reflects on the lives of two very different supermen: Barack Obama and Keanu Reeves. In an era where a man endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan can sit in the White House, Harris argues that the mixed-race of both Obama and Reeves gave them a cultural shapelessness that was a form of resistance. Reeves, as Neo in The Matrix, portrayed the chosen one on the silver screen, while Obama, for a brief moment, was a real-life superhero on the world stage.
Drawing on his own personal experience and examining the way that these two men have been embedded in our collective consciousness, Harris asks what they can teach us about race and heroism. (128 pages / $26) Featuring over 700 scents, from vintage perfumes to department store classics, rarities and niche boutique fragrances, Perfume is a true portal into the beautiful world of perfume. The further you go on this journey, the more you will be amazed by how many beautiful creations do exist if you take the time to look.
"It's not very often that you encounter a writer's prose that can pull up the hairs on your skin and make the breath stop in your throat. I sometimes think of this as cinematic writing because it's the kind of work that ceases to be words on a page and leaps into celluloid, then into real time. Add to that the mysterious trails of perfume, and suddenly you have shifted yourself, unbeknownst, to a virtual world. Neil Chapman is such a writer." ~ Frangrantica (Hardcover / 288 pages / $37) Throughout history, women (and men) have applied make-up to enhance, alter, conceal, and even to disguise their appearance. Also, to a greater or lesser degree over time, cosmetics have been used as a visible marker of social status, gender, wealth, and well-being. A closer look at the world of make-up gives us not only a mirror reflecting day-to-day life in the past, but also an indicator of the culture and politics of earlier periods in history.
Susan Stewart guides the reader through the bewildering, fascinating and complex story of cosmetics, from the ancient world to the present day. Anyone who has ever wondered how the Romans used algae to color their faces and urine to whiten their teeth, how Radium came to be a popular 1930s beauty trend, or how make-up survived the war, will enjoy this colorful journey through the human obsession with improving how we look. (288 pages / $23) We can't stop shopping but we must stop shopping - the consumer dilemma that defines our lives and our future. This ground-breaking work of reporting and thought-experiment explores what would happen if we did.
We are using up the planet at almost double the rate it can regenerate. To support our economies, we're told we must shop now like we've never shopped before. And whilst we can do it more responsibly, the scale of our consumption remains the biggest factor in the ruination of the planet. Yet our reliance on stuff continues to grow. But what would our world look like if we stopped? Would civilisation collapse? Would the planet's ecology be reborn? What would happen to the way we think, make products, use time, express our individuality? Would life be better - or worse? Visiting places where economies have experienced temporary shut-downs, artisan producers, zero-consumption societies and bringing together a host of expert views, this is both a deeply reported thought-experiment, a history of our relationship with consumption, and a story about the future. Our private choices are putting the world in peril. The Day the World Stops Shopping is an essential exploration of who we are and what we use, and a vision of a more sustainable world. (336 pages / $32) A city struggling with the cost of its appetites. A rubbish mountain eighteen stories high. And the people who call it home.
All of Mumbai's memories and castaway possessions come to die at the Deonar garbage mountains. And among these vast, teetering piles of discarded things - medical waste, rotten food, old clothes, broken glass and twisted metal - a small, forgotten community lives and works. Scouring the dump for whatever can be resold or recycled, waste pickers also mark the familiar milestones of babies born, love found, illnesses suffered and recovered from. Like a mirror image, their stories are shaped by the influx of unwanted things from the world outside. But now, as Deonar's toxic halo becomes undeniable, a change is coming. And as officials try to close it, the lives that the pickers have built on the Mountain seem more fragile than ever. (Hardcover / 304 pages / $36) Rummage tells the overlooked story of our throwaway past. Emily Cockayne extracts glittering gems from the rubbish pile of centuries past and introduces us to the visionaries, crooks and everyday do-gooders who have shaped the material world we live in today - like the fancy ladies of the First World War who turned dog hair into yarn, or the Victorian gentlemen selling pianofortes made from papier-mache, or the hapless public servants coaxing people into giving up their railings for the greater good.
In this original and fascinating new history, Cockayne illuminates our relationship to our rubbish: from the simple question of how we reuse and recycle things (and which is better), to all the weird and wonderful ways it's been done in the past. She exposes the hidden work (often done by women) that has gone into shaping the world for each future generation, and she shows what lessons can be drawn from the past to address urgent questions of our waste today. (304 pages / $20) A few years ago, Erica Heller, daughter of novelist Joseph Heller, realized how universal the longing is for one more moment with a lost loved one. It could be a parent, a sibling, a mentor, or a friend, but who wouldn’t love the opportunity to sit down, break bread, and just talk? Who wouldn’t jump at the chance to ask those enduring questions, or share those unvoiced feelings?
In One Last Lunch, Heller, an acclaimed memoirist herself, has asked friends and family of authors, artists, musicians, comedians, actors, and others, to recount one such fantastic repast. Muffie Meyer and her documentary subject Little Edie Beale go to a deli in Montreal. Kirk Douglas asks his father what he thought of him becoming an actor. Sara Moulton dines with her friend Julia Child. The Anglican priest George Pitcher has lunch with Jesus. These richly imagined stories are endlessly revealing, about the subject, the writer, the passage of time, regret, gratitude, and the power of enduring love. (Hardcover / 352 pages / $43) 'One swallow does not make a summer; neither does one day. Similarly neither can one day, or a brief space of time, make a man blessed and happy'
How can one live well in the world? What does it mean to be happy? In this selection from The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle probes the nature of happiness and virtue in a quest to divine an ethical value system. Exploring ideas of community, responsibility, courage, friendship, agency, reasoning, desire and pleasure, these are some of the most profound and lasting ancient writings on the self to have influenced Western thought. (128 pages / $13) Barack Obama has written extensively about his father but credited his mother for "what is best in me." Still, little is known about this fiercely independent, spirited woman who raised the man who became the first biracial president of the United States. This book is that story.
In A Singular Woman, award-winning New York Times reporter Janny Scott tells the story of this unique woman, Stanley Ann Dunham, who broke many of the rules of her time, and shows how her fierce example helped influence the future president-and can serve as an inspiration to us all. (400 pages / $28) Though we might not realise it, our collective memory of the twentieth century was defined by the poets who lived and wrote in it. At every significant turning point we find them, pen in hand, fingers poised at the typewriter, ready to distil the essence of the moment, from the muddy wastes of the Western front to the vast reckoning that came with the end of empire.
This is the first and only history of twentieth century poetry, by the acclaimed poet, author and academic John Burnside. Bringing together poets from times and places as diverse as Tsarist Russia, 1960's America and Ireland at the height of the Troubles, The Music of Time reveals how poets engaged with and shaped the most important issues of their times - and were in their turn affected by their context and dialogue with each other. This is a major work of scholarship, that on every page bears witness to the transformative beauty and power of poetry. (528 pages / $26 ) John Burnside is a poet, novelist and Professor of English at the University of St Andrews. He has published 14 books of poetry, and has won the Geoffrey Faber Prize, the Whitbread Poetry Prize, the Petrarca Preis and, most recently, the Forward and T.S. Eliot Prizes for his poetry. He has also published eight novels and a memoir.
"One day, as I was daydreaming on the boulevard Beaumarchais, I had the idea--it came and went in a flash, almost in spite of myself--of doing a Google search to find out what I had been up to and where I had been the previous evening, since my own recollections were confused."
So begins Maël Renouard's Fragments of an Infinite Memory, a provocative and elegant inquiry into life in a wireless world. Renouard is old enough to remember life before the Internet but young enough to have fully accommodated his life to the Internet and the gadgets that support it. Here this young philosopher, novelist, and translator tests a series of conjectures on how human experience, especially the sense of self, is being changed by our continual engagement with a memory that is impersonal and effectively boundless. Renouard has written a book that is rigorously impressionistic, deeply informed historically and culturally, but also playful, ironic, personal, and formally adventurous, a book that stands with comparison with the best of Roland Barthes and Jean Baudrillard. (280 pages / $31) Maël Renouard has taught philosophy at the Sorbonne and the École Normale Supérieure and translated Nietzsche, Joseph Conrad, Arthur Schnitzler among others. In 2014 Renouard was made a chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et Lettres.
Part travelogue, part spiritual self-help book; A modern-day pilgrimage to ten monasteries around the world.
Suffering from information overload, unable to sleep, Sarah Sands, former editor of the BBC's Today programme, has tried many different strategies to de-stress... only to reject them because, as she says, all too often they threaten to become an exercise in self-absorption. Inspired by the ruins of an ancient Cistercian abbey at the bottom of her Norfolk garden, she begins to research the lives of the monks who once resided there, and realises how much we may have to learn from monasticism. Renouncing the world, monks and nuns have acquired a hidden knowledge of how to live: they labour, they learn and they acquire 'the interior silence'. This book is a quest for that hidden knowledge - a pilgrimage to ten monasteries round the world. From a Coptic desert community in Egypt to a retreat in the Japanese mountains, we follow Sands as she identifies the common characteristics of monastic life and the wisdoms to be learned from them; and as she discovers, behind the cloistered walls, a clarity of mind and an unexpected capacity for solitude which enable her, after years of insomnia, to experience that elusive, dreamless sleep. (Hardcover / 256 pages / $26) A raw, intensely personal memoir of spiritual exploration from one of the world’s great commentators on religion. After seven years in a convent, which she left, dismayed by its restrictions, Karen Armstrong struggled to establish herself in a new way of life, and became entrapped in a downward spiral, haunted by despair, anorexia and suicidal feelings.
Despite her departure from the convent she remained within the Catholic Church until the God she believed in 'died on me', and she entered a ‘wild and Godless period of crazy parties and numerous lovers’. Her attempts to reach happiness and carve out a career failed repeatedly, in spectacular fashion. She began writing her bestseller ‘A History of God’ in a spirit of scepticism, but through studying other religious traditions she found a very different kind of faith which drew from Christianity, Judaism and Islam and, eventually, spiritual and personal calm. In her own words, her ‘story is a graphic illustration – almost an allegory – of a widespread dilemma. It is emblematic of a more general flight from institutional religion and a groping towards a form of faith that has not yet been fully articulated but which is nevertheless in the process of declaring itself’. Her lifelong inability to pray and to conform to traditional structures of worship is shared by the many who are leaving the established churches but who desire intensely a spiritual aspect to their lives. ‘The Spiral Staircase’ grapples with the issue of how we can be religious in the contemporary world, and the place and possibility of belief in the 21st-century. (356 pages / $23) Handed a terminal cancer diagnosis, ninety-year-old Norma Bauerschmidt says 'No' to chemotherpay and 'Yes' to living, spending the last year of her life on an adventurous road trip with her son, daughter-in-law and outsize poodle Ringo. This is her uplifting story of a year lived like no other.
Two days after her husband of sixty-seven years dies, nonagenarian Miss Norma is diagnosed with cancer. When given her treatment options - surgery, chemo and radiotherapy - she rises to her full five feet and says in the strongest voice she can muster: 'I’m ninety years old. I’m hitting the road!' Driving Miss Norma is the story of her inspirational road trip across the US in a thirty-six-foot motorhome with her son, Tim, his wife, Ramie and their Poodle, Ringo - showing us that it's never too late to begin an adventure, inspire hope or become a trailblazer. As the journey unfolds, Miss Norma finally spreads her wings and lives life on her own terms for the very first time. With each adventure a once timid Miss Norma says YES to living in the face of death - whether it's experiencing her very first pedicure or taking the hot air balloon ride her late husband never found time for. With each passing mile - and one hilarious visit to a cannabis dispensary - Miss Norma’s health improves and conversations that had once been taboo begin to unfold. Norma, Tim and Ramie bond in ways they could never have anticipated and their definitions of home, family and friendship are rewritten as strangers become friends and shower them with kindness. Bursting with Miss Norma’s generous spirit, Driving Miss Norma ignites a renewed sense of life, family, fun and self-discovery - at any age. (304 pages / $19) Supper for one? Cooking Alone (1954) is a delicious miniature compendium of tales inspired by a cast of eccentric solitary characters.
Brimming with entertaining anecdotes, recipes (rabbit with aubergine and prunes, anyone?) and top tips (ever wondered how to store ice cream in a bedsit?), Kathleen Le Riche is a witty, charming guide to the single life. Reissued with a new foreword by Bee Wilson, this vintage delight is a hymn to the pleasures of dining solo. (Hardback / 144 pages / $23) In this exuberant book, the incomparable Ray Bradbury shares the wisdom, experience, and excitement of a lifetime of writing.
The first thing a writer should be is - excited Part memoir, part masterclass, ZEN IN THE ART OF WRITING offers a vivid and exuberant insight into the craft of writing. Bradbury reveals how writers can each find their own unique path to developing their voice and style. ZEN IN THE ART OF WRITING offers a celebration of the act of writing that will delight, impassion, and inspire. (148 pages / $25) Kurt Vonnegut used to like to say, Practicing an art form is a way to grow your soul. He would screw up his lips into a prune face after he said this because of how important he believed this idea to be.
Pity the Reader is the very embodiment of that idea, a book about writing and life and why the two go together. It includes rare photos and reproductions, Vonnegut's own account in his own words of how he became a writer and why it matters, and previously untold stories by and about Vonnegut as teacher and friend. It turns out he was generous to a fault about students' writing, idiosyncratic, a bit tortured and always creative as a teacher, and here in this book that portrait becomes our gateway into getting to know Kurt Vonnegut better than we ever have before as a human being. Vonnegut recounts that his favorite work of art among all those his children produced so far is a letter his daughter Nanette wrote to a disgruntled customer, after he had tormented a new waitress at the restaurant where she had just started working, and then he shares the letter with us. Thus he illustrates his first writing rule: Find a subject you care about. This book is full of such rare, intimately teachable moments, and they add up to something special. Pity the Reader indeed. (432 pages / $33) Forming new habits can improve your mood and invigorate your daily routine, but you’ve gotta figure out which ones to adopt or drop. How can you successfully create habits—and what new habits will actually increase your happiness and fulfillment?
Wellness expert Karen Salmansohn to the rescue! Happy Habits presents 50 habits that span body, mind, relationships, work, home, and play. Karen shares the tools you need to master fundamental habits (daily meditation; practicing gratitude), surprising happiness-boosting techniques (crying regularly; strategic complaining), and tips for easily incorporating new habits into your daily life. Filled with fascinating studies and simple rituals, this illustrated guide offers fun, accessible ways to uplift your life. (Hardcover / 128 pages / $26) Food can embody our personal histories as well as wider cultural histories. But what are the stories we tell ourselves about the kitchen, and how do we first come to it? How do the cookbooks we read shape us? Can cooking be a tool for connection in the kitchen and outside of it?
In these thirteen original essays, writers consider the subjects of cooking and eating and how they shape our lives, and the possibilities and limitations the kitchen poses. Rachel Roddy traces her life through the cookers she has known; Rebecca May Johnson considers the radical potential of finger food; Ruby Tandoh discovers other definitions of sweetness; Yemisí Aríbisálà remembers a love affair in which food failed as a language; and Julia Turshen considers food's ties to community. A collection to savour and inspire, In the Kitchen brings together thirteen contemporary writers who brilliantly capture their experiences in the kitchen and beyond. (224 pages / $23) Over the course of a year, Robert Penn learns how to plant, harvest, thresh and mill his own wheat, in order to bake bread for his family. In returning to this pre-industrial practice, he tells the fascinating story of our relationship with bread: from the domestication of wheat in the Fertile Crescent at the dawn of civilization, to the rise of mass-produced loaves and the resurgence in homebaking today.
Gathering knowledge and wisdom from experts around the world - farmers on the banks of the Nile, harvesters in the American Midwest and Parisian boulangers - Penn reconnects the joy of making and eating bread with a deep appreciation for the skill and patience required to cultivate its key ingredient. This book is a celebration of the millennia-old craft of breadmaking, and how it is woven into the story of humanity. (Hardback / 240 pages / $24) Confessional and often hilarious, in Normal Sucks a neuro-diverse writer, advocate, and father offers a radical message of acceptance and empowerment.
Jonathan Mooney blends anecdote, expertise, and memoir to present a new mode of thinking about how we live and learn. As a neuro-diverse kid diagnosed with dyslexia and ADHD who didn't learn to read until he was twelve, the realization that he wasn’t the problem—the system and the concept of normal were—saved Mooney's life. Here, he explores the toll that our narrow conception of normal takes on kids and adults both. But, he argues, if we can reorient the ways in which we think about diversity and disability, we can start a revolution. Mooney has been inspiring audiences with his story for nearly two decades. Now he’s ready to share what he’s learned from parents, educators, researchers, and kids in a book that is both a survival guide and a call to action. Whip-smart and inspiring—and movingly framed as a letter to his own young sons—this book will upend what we call normal and empower us all. (256 pages / $27) A spectacular, searing history that brings to light the extraordinary accomplishments of brave Jewish women who became resistance fighters.
Witnesses to the brutal murder of their families and neighbors and the violent destruction of their communities, a cadre of Jewish women in Poland—some still in their teens—helped transform the Jewish youth groups into resistance cells to fight the Nazis. With courage, guile, and nerves of steel, these “ghetto girls” paid off Gestapo guards, hid revolvers in loaves of bread and jars of marmalade, and helped build systems of underground bunkers. They flirted with German soldiers, bribed them with wine, whiskey, and home cooking, used their Aryan looks to seduce them, and shot and killed them. They bombed German train lines and blew up a town’s water supply. They also nursed the sick and taught children. Yet the exploits of these courageous resistance fighters have remained virtually unknown. Judy Batalion—the granddaughter of Polish Holocaust survivors—takes us back to 1939 and introduces us to Renia Kukielka, a weapons smuggler and messenger who risked death traveling across occupied Poland on foot and by train. Joining Renia are other women who served as couriers, armed fighters, intelligence agents, and saboteurs, all who put their lives in mortal danger to carry out their missions. Batalion follows these women through the savage destruction of the ghettos, arrest and internment in Gestapo prisons and concentration camps, and for a lucky few—like Renia, who orchestrated her own audacious escape from a brutal Nazi jail—into the late 20th century and beyond. Powerful and inspiring, featuring twenty black-and-white photographs, The Light of Days is an unforgettable true tale of war, the fight for freedom, exceptional bravery, female friendship, and survival in the face of staggering odds. (592 pages / $27) A call to action for the modern world, this book celebrates the #GenderRebels who paved the way for women everywhere to be soldiers and spies; kings and queens; firefighters, doctors, pilots; and a Swiss Army knife’s-worth more. These superbly spirited (wo)men all had one thing in common: they defied the rules to progress in a man’s world.
You’ll encounter Kit Cavanagh, the swaggering Irish dragoon who was the first woman to be buried in London with full military honours; marauding eighteenth-century pirates Mary Read and Anne Bonny, who collided on the high seas after swapping their petticoats for pantaloons; Ellen Craft, an escaped slave who masqueraded as a white master to spirit her husband-to-be to freedom; and Billy Tipton, the swinging jazz musician, who led a double life as an adult, taking five wives along the way. Then there are the women who still have to dress like men to live their best lives, like the inspirational football-lovers in Iran, who risk everything to take their place in the stands. (284 pages / $22) 'Hunty, do you want to come over, have a kiki and spill some tea?'
Do you love drag but struggle to keep up with the lingo? Are you dying to throw shade but don t know how to? Well, never fear: The Drag Dictionary is here to save you! Featuring bright, fun illustrations inspired by your best-loved queens, as well as over 40 classic phrases explained - from 'body-ody-ody' to 'squirrel friends', 'tuck' and more - this is a tribute to the amazing artists who add sparkle and glitz to our lives. (Hardcover / 112 pages / $22) Is it possible to believe in God and be gay? How does it feel to be excluded from a religious community because of your sexuality? Why do some people still believe being LGBT is a sin?
The Book of Queer Prophets contains modern-day epistles from some of our most important thinkers, writers and activists: Jeanette Winterson tackles religious dogma, Amrou Al-Kadhi writes about trying to make it as a Muslim drag queen in London, John Bell writes about his decision to come out later in life, Tamsin Omond remembers getting married in the middle of a protest and Kate Bottley explains her journey to becoming an LGBT ally. Essays from: Jeanette Winterson, Phyll Opoku-Gyimah, Amrou Al-Kadhi, Pádraig Ó Tuama, Garrard Conley, Juno Dawson, Rev. Winnie Varghese, Keith Jarrett, Jay Hulme, Lucy Knight, Tamsin Omond, Erin Clark, Michael Segalov, Jarel Robinson-Brown, John L. Bell, Mpho Tutu van Furth, Karl Rutlidge, Garry Rutter, Rev Rachel Mann, Jack Guiness, Dustin Lance Black, Ric Stott. Afterword: Kate Bottley (240 pages / $24) When Penguin released a new, unexpurgated edition of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1960, they were charged with the crime of publishing obscene material and made to defend the book’s literary merit in court. Thus began one of the most famous trials of the 20th century.
There to take it all in was Sybille Bedford. With her trademark wit and flair, she presents us with a play-by-play of the trial: from the prosecution’s questioning of the novel’s thirteen ‘unvarying’ sex scenes and 66 swear words, to the dozens of witnesses who testified – including the Bishop of Woolwich and E. M. Forster. Bedford gives us a timeless and dramatic account that captures one of the most fascinating and absurd moments in both legal and publishing history, when attitudes and morals shifted forever. (Paperback / 80 pages / $15) In 1895, William James, the father of American philosophy, delivered a lecture entitled "Is Life Worth Living?" It was no theoretical question for James, who had contemplated suicide during an existential crisis as a young man a quarter century earlier. Indeed, as John Kaag writes, "James's entire philosophy, from beginning to end, was geared to save a life, his life"―and that's why it just might be able to save yours, too.
Sick Souls, Healthy Minds is a compelling introduction to James's life and thought that shows why the founder of pragmatism and empirical psychology can still speak so directly and profoundly to anyone struggling to make a life worth living. Kaag tells how James's experiences as one of what he called the "sick-souled," those who think that life might be meaningless, drove him to articulate an ideal of "healthy-mindedness"―an attitude toward life that is open, active, and hopeful, but also realistic about its risks. In fact, all of James's pragmatism, resting on the idea that truth should be judged by its practical consequences for our lives, is a response to, and possible antidote for, crises of meaning that threaten to undo many of us at one time or another. Along the way, Kaag also movingly describes how his own life has been endlessly enriched by James. Eloquent, inspiring, and filled with insight, Sick Souls, Healthy Minds may be the smartest and most important self-help book you'll ever read. (Hardcover / 224 pages / $38) Each year, the flowering of cherry blossoms marks the beginning of spring. But if it weren’t for the pioneering work of an English eccentric, Collingwood “Cherry” Ingram, Japan’s beloved cherry blossoms could have gone extinct.
Ingram first fell in love with the sakura, or cherry tree, when he visited Japan on his honeymoon in 1907 and was so taken with the plant that he brought back hundreds of cuttings with him to England. Years later, upon learning that the Great White Cherry had virtually disappeared from Japan, he buried a living cutting from his own collection in a potato and repatriated it via the Trans-Siberian Express. In the years that followed, Ingram sent more than 100 varieties of cherry tree to new homes around the globe. As much a history of the cherry blossom in Japan as it is the story of one remarkable man, The Sakura Obsession follows the flower from its significance as a symbol of the imperial court, through the dark days of the Second World War, and up to the present-day worldwide fascination with this iconic blossom. (416 pages / $23) Camas Davis was at an unhappy crossroads. A longtime magazine editor, she had left New York City to pursue a simpler life in her home state of Oregon, with the man she wanted to marry, and taken an appealing job at a Portland magazine. But neither job nor man delivered on her dreams, and in the span of a year, Camas was unemployed, on her own, with nothing to fall back on. Disillusioned by the decade she had spent as a lifestyle journalist, advising other people how to live their best lives, she had little idea how best to live her own life. She did know one thing: She no longer wanted to write about the genuine article, she wanted to be it.
So when a friend told her about Kate Hill, an American woman living in Gascony, France who ran a cooking school and took in strays in exchange for painting fences and making beds, it sounded like just what she needed. She discovered a forgotten credit card that had just enough credit on it to buy a plane ticket and took it as kismet. Upon her arrival, Kate introduced her to the Chapolard brothers, a family of Gascon pig farmers and butchers, who were willing to take Camas under their wing, inviting her to work alongside them in their slaughterhouse and cutting room. In the process, the Chapolards inducted her into their way of life, which prizes pleasure, compassion, community, and authenticity above all else, forcing Camas to question everything she'd believed about life, death, and dinner. So begins Camas Davis's funny, heartfelt, searching memoir of her unexpected journey from knowing magazine editor to humble butcher. It's a story that takes her from an eye-opening stint in rural France where deep artisanal craft and whole-animal gastronomy thrive despite the rise of mass-scale agribusiness, back to a Portland in the throes of a food revolution, where Camas attempts--sometimes successfully, sometimes not--to translate much of this old-world craft and way of life into a new world setting. Along the way, Camas learns what it really means to pursue the real thing and dedicate your life to it. (352 pages / $23) They say you can't judge a book by its cover—but its title can tell you more than you ever needed to know!
Amazing, illuminating, and gut-bustingly funny, Bizarre Books is the wonderfully twisted product of more than two decades of determined searching in forgotten corners of out-of-the-way libraries and through the literary detritus of eclectic private collections. It is certain to delight every true fan of trivia and the patently absurd. (224 pages / $28) Iceland is an island of multiple identities in constant flux, just like its unruly, volcanic ground. Shaped as much by storytelling as it is by tectonic activity, Iceland's literary heritage is one of Europe's richest – and most ancient.
Iceland: A Literary Guide for Travellers takes the literary-minded traveller (either in person or in an armchair) on a vivid and illuminating journey. It follows Iceland's many stories that have been passed down through the generations: told and retold by sheep farmers, psalm-writers, travelling reverends, independence fighters, scholars and hedonists. From the captivating Norse myths, which continue to inspire contemporary authors such as A.S. Byatt, to gripping Scandinavian crime fiction and Game of Thrones, via Jules Verne and J.R.R Tolkien, W.H. Auden and Seamus Heaney, Iceland's influence has spread far beyond its frozen shores. Peopled by Norse maidens and witches, elves and outlaws and taking the reader and traveller from Reykjavik and the Bay of Smokes to the remote Westfjords and desolate highlands, this is an enthralling portrait of the Land of Ice and Fire. (224 pages / $30) What do we really need in order to live a happy life? Over two thousand years ago the Greek philosopher Epicurus offered a seemingly simple answer: all we really want is pleasure.
Today we tend to associate the word 'Epicurean' with the enjoyment of fine food and wine and decadent self-indulgence. But, as philosopher John Sellars shows, these things are a world away from the vision of a pleasant life developed by Epicurus and his followers who were more concerned with mental pleasures and avoiding pain. Their goal, in short, was a life of tranquillity. In this uplifting and elegant book, Sellars walks us through the history of Epicureanism from a private garden on the edge of ancient Athens to the streets of Rome, showing us how it can help us think anew about joy, friendship, nature and being alive in the world. (Hardback / 96 pages / $21) You've Got This is packed with straightforward and inspiring advice that encourages us to enjoy life more by being kinder to ourselves.
All too often, we find ourselves asking 'why don't I have what others have?' In You've Got This, Domonique Bertolucci refocuses our attention to the things we might already have: a home filled with laughter, a child's love, compassionate friends, good health that lets us live life to the full - there is much to be thankful for. You've Got This shows us how to be generous to ourselves and gain more time and energy to enjoy the things that really do matter. It invites us to make simple changes to the way we think: changes that will leave us feeling more relaxed, calm and confident, instead of stressed and overwhelmed, and over time, make our lives happier. Turning our minds to what we have rather than what we don't have will bring back the joy of living. (Hardcover / 224 pages / $19) Vacations are made of freedom. Pure freedom. Our busy lives, full of obligations, mean that vacations may be the only times we can do whatever we want, wherever we want. So just how weird is it that we all spend that precious time doing the same things? That we descend en masse on the same cities, cluster around the same attractions and all visit the same picturesque neighbourhoods that can't actually handle the influx?
How to Be a Better Tourist offers a fresh perspective on making your vacation truly worthwhile. After all, what if all your vacations seem to be getting more and more the same? What if being a tourist is suddenly no longer quite as innocent as it first seemed? Or what if your long list of must-sees in fact stresses you out? As the writer Elbert Hubbard poignantly put it, "No man needs a vacation so much as the man who has just had one." Find out why you should perhaps stay at home. Understand why you also need to work while on vacation. Read why tourists should visit supermarkets and residential districts too. Our typical vacation behaviour - visiting the maximum number of highlights in the minimum amount of time - is rarely the most rewarding. How to Be a Better Tourist helps you get the most out of your stay without damaging the soul of your destination. Because, ultimately, an imaginatively considered vacation is a genuinely rewarding experience. (Hardback / 144 pages / $28) A pathbreaking book of literary criticism is now reissued with a new introduction by Lisa Appignanesi that speaks to how The Madwoman in the Attic set the groundwork for subsequent generations of scholars writing about women writers, and why the book still feels fresh some four decades later.
(744 pages / $34) What does art have to do with faith? For many Christians, paintings, films, music, and other forms of art are simply used for wall decoration, entertaining distraction, or worshipful devotion. But what if the arts played a more prominent role in the Christian life? In Discovering God through the Arts, discover how the arts can be tools for faith-building, life-changing spiritual formation for all Christians. Terry Glaspey, author of 75 Masterpieces Every Christian Should Know, examines: How the arts assist us in prayer and contemplation. How the arts help us rediscover a sense of wonder. How the arts help us deal with emotions. How the arts aid theological reflection and so much more. Let your faith be enriched, and discover how beauty and creativity can draw you nearer to the ultimate Creator. (272 pages / $27) The extraordinary true story of Wilhelm Brasse, the Auschwitz prisoner whose photographs exposed the atrocities of the Holocaust and then helped to convict the Nazis at the Nuremberg Trials.
'I looked death in the eyes. I did it fifty thousand times...' Wilhelm Brasse When Germany invaded Wilhelm Brasse's native Poland in 1939, he was asked to swear allegiance to Hitler and join the Wehrmacht. He refused. He was deported to Auschwitz concentration camp as political prisoner number 3444. A trained portrait photographer, he was ordered by the SS to record the inner workings of the camp. He began by taking identification photographs of the prisoners as they entered the camp, went on to capture the criminal medical experiments of Josef Mengele, and also recorded executions. Between 1940 and 1945, Brasse took around 50,000 photographs of the horror around him. He took them because he had no choice. Eventually, Brasse's conscience wouldn't allow him to hide behind his camera. First he risked his life by joining the camp's Resistance movement, faking documents for prisoners, trying to smuggle images to the outside world to reveal what was happening. Then, when Soviet troops finally advanced on the camp to liberate it, Brasse refused SS orders to destroy his photographs. 'Because the world must know,' he said. (304 pages / $28) My Life in Transition is a story that's not often told about trans lives: what happens beyond the early days of transition. Both deeply personal and widely relatable, this collection illustrates six months of Julia's life as an out trans woman-about the beauty and pain of love and heartbreak, struggling to find support from bio family and the importance of chosen family, moments of dysphoria and misgendering, learning to lean on friends in times of need, and finding peace in the fact that life keeps moving forward.
After the nerve-wracking, anxiety-ridden early transition period has ended and the hormones have done their thing, this book shows how you can be trans and simply exist in society. You can be trans and have a successful future. You can be trans and have a normal life full of ups and downs. In our current political and social climate, this hopeful, accessible narrative about trans lives is both entertaining and vital. (176 pages / $26) One woman’s journey to overcome grief by delving into an overlooked wonder of nature.
‘As the world of mushrooms opened up to me I began to see that the path back to life was easier than I had thought. It was simply a matter of gathering delights that flash and sparkle. All I had to do was follow the mushroom trail, even though I still didn’t know where it would lead. What would I find in the great unknown that lay ahead of me? What lay beyond those hilltops and mists and turns in the road?’ When Long Litt Woon loses her husband of 32 years to an unexpected death, she is utterly bereft. An immigrant in his country, in losing the love of her life she has also lost her compass and her passport to society. For a time, she is stuck, aimless, disoriented. It is only when she wanders off deep into the woods with mushroom hunters and is taught there how to see clearly what is all around her, and learn how to make distinctions, take educated risks, and hear all the different melodies in Nature’s chorus, that she returns to life and to living. And it is mushrooms which guide her back. In this book, she describes how they saved her, and how they might save you. (320 pages / $23) Unfailingly elegant and endlessly relevant, the four essays in this collection treat literature as a vital record of our political hypocrisies, our social failings, and the ennobling limits of our ideological aspirations.
Delving into the literary canon, George Orwell encounters dusty classics and lesser-known works of literature on his own exhilarating terms. The novels of Henry Miller lead him inside the belly of Jonah’s whale, an imagined refuge in a time of total war. A trenchant investigation of Charles Dickens unfolds into a poignant portrait of nineteenth-century liberalism. A minor pamphlet on Shakespeare by Tolstoy provokes a stirring evocation of humanism and the excessive vitality of life. A series of singularly thrilling reading experiences, they celebrate Orwell’s engagement with the world of writers and literature. (256 pages / $25) Anti-Social is the diary of a council worker whose job is to keep his community happy, or at least away from each other's throats. That's hard enough at the best of times but when government cuts mean that hospitals, social services and police are all at breaking point, the possibility of complete chaos is never far away.
This is an urgent, timely but, most of all, hysterically funny true story of a life spent working with the people society wants to forget and the problems that nobody else can resolve. This book will make you laugh, cry and boil with rage within a single sentence. (416 pages / $20) Fred Rogers’s gentle spirit and passion for children’s television takes center stage in this collection of interviews spanning his nearly forty-year career.
Nearly twenty years after his death, Fred Rogers remains a source of comfort and fond memories for generations who grew up watching Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. Over the course of his career, Rogers revolutionized children’s television and changed the way experts thought about the educational power of media. But perhaps his most lasting legacy was demonstrating the power of simply being nice to other people. In this collection of interviews including his firey (for him) 1969 senate testimony that saved PBS and his final interview with Diane Rehm, Rogers’s gentle spirit and compassionate approach to life continues to be an inspiration. (112 pages / $27) From the truths and lies we tell about ourselves to the resonant creations of fiction, stories give shape and meaning to all our lives. Both a practicing psychoanalyst and a professor of literature, Josh Cohen has long been taken with the mutual echoes between the life struggles of the consulting room and the dramas of the novel. So what might the most memorable characters in literature tell us about how to live meaningfully?
In How to Live. What to Do, Cohen plots a course through the various stages of our lives, discovering in each the surprising and profound insights literature has to offer. Beginning with the playful mindset of Wonderland's Alice, we discover the resilience of Jane Eyre, the rebellious rage of Baldwin's Johnny Grimes and the catastrophic ambitions of Jay Gatsby, the turbulence of first love for Sally Rooney's Frances, the sorrows of marriage for Middlemarch's Dorothea Brooke, and the regrets and comforts of middle age for Rabbit Angstrom. (384 pages / $23) This book is a testament to the courage - and suffering - of those who live with serious mental illness, showing how their experiences unlock everything we know and feel.
A leading psychiatrist shows how the mysteries of the brain are illuminated at the extremes of human experience A twinge of sadness, a rush of love, a knot of loss, a whiff of regret. Memories have the power to move us, often when we least expect it, a sign of the complex neural process that continues in the background of our everyday lives. A process that shapes us: filtering the world around us, informing our behaviour and feeding our imagination. As a practising psychiatrist, Veronica O'Keane has spent many years observing how memory and experience are interwoven. In this rich, fascinating exploration, she asks, among other things, why can memories feel so real? How are our sensations and perceptions connected with them? Why is place so important in memory? Are there such things as 'true' and 'false' memories? And, above all, what happens when the process of memory is disrupted by mental illness? Here O' Keane uses the broken memories of psychosis to illuminate the integrated human brain, offering a new way of thinking about our own personal experiences. Drawing on the poignant stories of her patients and much more, from literature and fairy tales, O'Keane uses the latest neuroscientific research to reframe our understanding of the extraordinary puzzle that is the human brain; from birth through to adolescence and old age. (Hardback / 288 pages / $43) “Interaction of Color with its illuminating visual exercises and mind-bending optical illusions, remains an indispensable blueprint to the art of seeing. . . . An essential piece of visual literacy.“—Maria Popova, Brain Pickings Josef Albers’s classic Interaction of Color is a masterwork in art education. Conceived as a handbook and teaching aid for artists, instructors, and students, this influential book presents Albers’s singular explanation of complex color theory principles.
Originally published by Yale University Press in 1963 as a limited silkscreen edition with 150 color plates, Interaction of Color first appeared in paperback in 1971, featuring ten color studies chosen by Albers, and has remained in print ever since. With over a quarter of a million copies sold in its various editions since 1963, Interaction of Color remains an essential resource on color, as pioneering today as when Albers first created it. Fifty years after Interaction’s initial publication, this anniversary edition presents a significantly expanded selection of close to sixty color studies alongside Albers’s original text, demonstrating such principles as color relativity, intensity, and temperature; vibrating and vanishing boundaries; and the illusion of transparency and reversed grounds. A celebration of the longevity and unique authority of Albers’s contribution, this landmark edition will find new audiences in studios and classrooms around the world. (208 pages / 64 color illus. + 16 line drawings / $26) Every day, from the moment our alarm clock wakes us in the morning until our head hits our pillow at night, we all take part in rituals that are millennia old. In this gloriously entertaining romp through human history, BBC Horrible Histories consultant Greg Jenner explores the hidden stories behind these daily routines.
This is not a story of politics, wars or great events, instead Greg Jenner has scoured Roman rubbish bins, Egyptian tombs and Victorian sewers to bring us the most intriguing, surprising and sometimes downright silly nuggets from our past. It is a history of all those things you always wondered - and many you have never considered. It is the story of our lives, one million years in the making. (368 pages / $22) |