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Titles indicated with an "A" indicated next to their ISBN means the stock are available at point of creating this catalogue.
Journalist Patricia Evangelista came of age in the aftermath of a street revolution that forged a new future for the Philippines. Three decades later, in the face of mounting inequality, the nation discovered the fragility of its democratic institutions under the regime of strongman Rodrigo Duterte.
Some People Need Killing is Evangelista’s meticulously reported and deeply human chronicle of the Philippines’ drug war. For six years, Evangelista chronicled the killings carried out by police and vigilantes in the name of Duterte’s war on drugs—a war that has led to the slaughter of thousands—immersing herself in the world of killers and survivors and capturing the atmosphere of fear created when an elected president decides that some lives are worth less than others. The book takes its title from a vigilante whose words seemed to reflect the psychological accommodation that most of the country had made: “I’m really not a bad guy,” he said. “I’m not all bad. Some people need killing.” A profound act of witness and a tour de force of literary journalism, Some People Need Killing is also a brilliant dissection of the grammar of violence and an important investigation of the human impulses to dominate and resist. (Hardcover / 448 pages / $37) A collection of compassionate reporting from America’s death row, named a 2023 Pulitzer Prize finalist for feature writing.
Elizabeth Bruenig’s sensitive reporting pulls back the curtain on an increasingly routine crisis in America’s death chambers: state executioner’s inability to kill the condemned humanely. She takes readers to the torturous final moments of death row inmates, while considering the often heinous crimes that earned them their sentences, and the complex legal system and prison bureaucracy that uphold them. Thoughtful and profound, Bruenig negotiates the culture of violence in America and examines what’s at stake when we refuse to see the humanity in those who have done the inhumane. (136 pages / $23) About the author: Elizabeth Bruenig is a writer at The Atlantic. In 2019, she was named a Pulitzer finalist in feature writing for her investigation of a gang rape that took place at her high school in Arlington, Texas. Liz now reports on capital punishment, criminal justice, and American violence. Derek Parfit (1942–2017) is the most famous philosopher most people have never heard of. In Parfit, David Edmonds presents the first biography of an intriguing, obsessive, and eccentric genius.
Widely regarded as one of the greatest moral thinkers of the past hundred years, Parfit was anything but a public intellectual. Yet his ideas have shaped the way philosophers think about things that affect us all: equality, altruism, what we owe to future generations, and even what it means to be a person. Believing that we should be less concerned with ourselves and more with the common good, Parfit dedicated himself to the pursuit of philosophical progress to an extraordinary degree. He always wore gray trousers and a white shirt so as not to lose precious time picking out clothes, he varied his diet as little as possible, and he had only one serious non-philosophical interest: taking photos of Oxford, Venice, and St. Petersburg. In the latter half of his life, he single-mindedly devoted himself to a desperate attempt to rescue secular morality—morality without God—by arguing that it has an objective, rational basis. For Parfit, the stakes could scarcely have been higher. If he couldn’t demonstrate that there are objective facts about right and wrong, he believed, his life was futile and all our lives were meaningless. Connecting Parfit’s work and life and offering a clear introduction to his profound and challenging ideas, Parfit is a powerful portrait of an extraordinary thinker who continues to have a remarkable influence on the world of ideas. (Hardcover / 408 pages / $60) Divine your way through writer's block while adding a little magic into your writing practice with this illustrated oracle deck and guidebook set!
($35 per box / 50 cards (3 x 5 inches); an 80-page, full-color illustrated paperback book, and a keepsake magnetic closure box; cards and travel case are embedded in an interior tray) This book announces her as a brilliant contemporary philosopher and master of the graphic essay form, guiding us to ask better questions about what it means to see, and ultimately, to be.' Eloise Grills A delicious mix of daily life, science, philosophy, pop culture, daydreams and irreverent humour, Eventually Everything Connects is a work of graphic non-fiction that is comforting, confronting and mind-expanding in equal measure.
Eventually Everything Connects is Sarah Firth's debut graphic novel, a collection of interconnected visual essays created over eight years. Sarah invites you into her wild mind as she explores ways to see with fresh eyes, to face the inevitability of change, and to find freedom in sensuality. With raw honesty and vulnerability, Firth reminds us that the profane and the sacred, the tender and the cruel, the rigorous and the silly, all coexist in dynamic tension. (Hardcover / 288 pages / $30) From one of the world's most imaginative designers comes a story about humanity told through the lens of our buildings.
Our world is losing its humanity.
Too many developers care more about their shareholders than society. Too many politicians care more about power than the people who vote for them. And too many cities feel soulless and depressing, with buildings designed for business, not for us. So where do we find hope? Thomas Heatherwick has an alternative. The time has come to put human emotion back at the heart of the design process. Drawing on thirty years of making bold, beautiful buildings, neuroscience and cognitive psychology, Heatherwick brings together vivid stories and hundreds of beautiful images into a visual masterpiece. Humanise will inspire us to do nothing less than remake our world. (496 pages / $33) 'Thomas Heatherwick brings a velvet sledgehammer to the way we think about buildings and how they change our lives . . . I want to live in the kind of city Heatherwick imagines!' SIMON SINEK
'Humanise is a masterwork. It's quietly furious, impassioned, rigorous and forensic in all the right doses. It leaves me very hopeful indeed about how things could go from here' ALAIN DE BOTTON A documentary filmmaker who spent years uncovering a Mao-era death camp; an independent journalist who gave voice to the millions who suffered through Covid; a magazine publisher who dodges the secret police: these are some of the people who make up Sparks: China's Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future, a vital account of how some of China's most important writers, filmmakers, and artists have overcome crackdowns and censorship to challenge the Chinese Communist Party on its most sacred ground - its monopoly on history.
In traditional China, dynasties rewrote history to justify their rule by proving that their predecessors were unworthy of holding power. Marxism gave this a modern gloss, describing history as an unstoppable force heading toward Communism's triumph. The Chinese Communist Party builds on these ideas to whitewash its misdeeds and justify its rule. But in recent years, critical thinkers from across the land have begun to challenge this state-led disremembering. Using digital technologies to bypass China's legendary surveillance state, their samizdat journals, guerilla media posts, and underground films document a pattern of disasters: from past famines and purges to the ethnic clashes and virus outbreaks of the present. Based on years of research in Xi Jinping's China, Sparks challenges stereotypes of a China where the state has quashed all free thought, revealing instead a country engaged in one of humanity's great struggles of memory against forgetting - a battle that will shape the China that emerges in the mid-21st century. Ian Johnson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer who has spent most of his adult life in China, working as a correspondent for The New York Times, New York Review of Books, and The Wall Street Journal. (Hardcover / 400 pages / $57) Vietnam has a strong literary culture that dates back to Confucian influence and has remained important today. Using Vietnamese books, documents, and manuscripts from the collection of the British Library, Vietnam Documented gives a window into that heritage and represents key incidents in Vietnamese social, cultural, and political history. It also highlights the visual sophistication of Vietnamese design, drawing on Chinese and French models and socialist styles in art and design. An informative text by the long-time Keeper of the Vietnamese collection, Sud Chonchirdsin, introduces the book.
Among the earliest documents in the Library’s collection is a 17th-century royal letter to the English East India Company. Other highlights include a travel diary of a member of one of the last of Vietnam’s tribute missions to the Imperial court in China (1880) and a beautifully illustrated manuscript of the classic Tale of Kiê`u. The strength of the collection lies in materials collected during Vietnam’s twentieth-century struggle for independence—including rare periodicals from North Vietnam—that show how artists were mobilized in wartime. This accessible, full-color introduction to an under-appreciated design heritage is a welcome view into a beautiful culture. (136 pages / 80 colour images / $39) Collected together for the very first time, witty and wide-ranging essays from the celebrated author of Little Women.
Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888) is, of course, best known as the author of Little Women (1868). But she was also a noted essayist who wrote on a wide range of subjects, including her father’s failed utopian commune, the benefits of an unmarried life, and her experience as a young woman sent to work in service to alleviate her family’s poverty. Her first literary success was a contemporary close-up account of the American Civil War, brilliantly depicted in Hospital Sketches, which was drawn from her own experience of serving as an army nurse near the nation’s capital. As with her famous novel, Alcott writes these essays with clear observation, unforgettable scenes, and one of the sharpest wits in American literature. Blending gentle satire with reportage and emotive autobiography, Alcott’s exquisite essays are as exceptional as the novels she is known for. (Hardcover / 168 pages / $38) "In the surviving small fraction of the 3000 letters she wrote in her life, Austen is forever chatting about what she’s wearing or thinking about wearing, and what material it’s made from, and how much that material cost per yard." Open Letters Review What did Jane Austen wear?
Acclaimed dress historian and Austen expert Hilary Davidson reveals, for the first time, the wardrobe of one of the world’s most celebrated authors. Despite her acknowledged brilliance on the page, Jane Austen has all too often been accused of dowdiness in her appearance. Drawing on Austen’s 161 known letters, as well as her own surviving garments and accessories, this book assembles examples of the variety of clothes she would have possessed—from gowns and coats to shoes and undergarments—to tell a very different story. The Jane Austen Hilary Davidson discovers is alert to fashion trends but thrifty and eager to reuse and repurpose clothing. Her renowned irony and wit peppers her letters, describing clothes, shopping, and taste. Jane Austen’s Wardrobe offers the rare pleasure of a glimpse inside the closet of a stylish dresser and perpetually fascinating writer. (Hardcover / 240 pages / 200 colour + b-w illustrations / Published by Yale University Press London / $54) "As Davidson notes at the outset of her book, Jane Austen herself considered her wardrobe very important, no matter how smilingly sardonic she could be about it. She spent a whopping chunk of her annual income on clothing, cared about the latest styles and fashions, and wrote about the subject privately and publicly for the whole of her life. If all that doesn’t qualify it as a legitimate brand of Austen study, it’s tough to imagine what would." Open Letters Review Everything I feel from reading and listening to music
I commit to paper in black pen And gradually, blot by blot, stroke by stroke, A new mode of expression emerges. At this point, it's just scribbles in a diary Not yet reborn as "Henn Kim" of the future. _________________________________ Depression and creativity, love and family, books and music: this personal and vulnerable memoir by the iconic South Korean illustrator explores her life from the ages of seventeen to thirty-three through image, text and poetry. From what nearly broke her to what saved her, everyone will find something to comfort them in Henn Kim's world. (Hardcover / 448 pages / $33) Henn Kim moved to Seoul at 19, where she worked as a graphic designer focused on music and art, designing cover art for indie bands. She then decided to follow her own path as an illustrator, and her work has been commissioned by the BBC, UNICEF, Nike, Bottega Veneta, Snapchat, TED, and featured in GQ, The Big Issue and Vogue. 'Good writers offer advice.
Great writers offer condolences' If you want to be a writer, then you'd better be ready to hurl yourself at the door. That's the message from Stephen Marche in this irresistibly droll broadside. Perseverance, in the teeth of rejection, forms the essence of a writer's life. It's what it takes, so no whining. Even the greatest of writers grapple with failure. Marche's provocative, often very funny vignettes range through literary history from Samuel Johnson ('broke as f*ck') to Jane Austen's lacklustre publishing deals, to Dostoevsky facing mock-execution. The trick is to endure. As James Baldwin famously exhorts us: 'Write. Find a way to keep alive and write.' For new and seasoned writers, Marche's words are salutary and, in a paradoxical way, consoling. All writers are up against it. Success is just an attire. (112 pages / $22) Stephen Marche is a novelist and essayist. He is the author of half a dozen books, most recently Death of an Author – an AI collaboration under the pseudonym Aidan Marchine. He has written opinion pieces and essays for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Esquire, Vanity Fair and many others. A must-have for all loyal fans of the Shakespeare and Company.
An illuminating collection of interviews between the prestigious Shakespeare and Company bookshop and the best writers of our time Shakespeare and Company, Paris, is one of the world’s most iconic and beautiful bookshops. Located on the banks of the Seine, opposite Notre-Dame, it’s long been a meeting place for anglophone writers and readers. In that tradition, determined for the bookshop to remain a place of meaningful and transformative conversation, owner Sylvia Whitman and novelist and literary director Adam Biles have hosted several hundred interviews with writers, ranging from prize-winning novelists to visionary non-fiction writers.
The Shakespeare and Company Book of Interviews is a selection of the best of these interviews from the last decade. Packed with warmth, sensitivity and humour, it’s a celebration of the greatest writers of our age and an insight into the lives and thoughts behind some of today’s most talked-about books. (Hardcover / 256 pages / $45) Where do the best ideas come from? How do you stay motivated? What does it take to become a published author? And how do you actually make money from your writing? For over five years the hosts of Always Take Notes podcast have posed their nosiest questions to some of the world's greatest writers. The result is a compendium of frank and frequently entertaining guidance for living a creative life. From the early failures that shaped them to the daily challenges of writing and the habits that keep them on track, literary luminaries offer guidance to inspire.
Featuring: Alexander McCall Smith, Anne Enright, Candice Carty-Williams, Christina Lamb, Colin Thubron, Colum McCann, David Mitchell, Elif Shafak, George Packer, Hadley Freeman, Hollie McNish, Ian McEwan, Ian Rankin, Irvine Welsh, Jeffrey Archer, Joanne Harris, Kate Mosse, Kiran Millwood Hargrave, Kit de Waal, Louise Doughty, Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Maggie Fergusson, Mark Haddon, Marlon James, Max Hastings, May Jeong, Merve Emre, Monica Ali, Niall Ferguson, Nikesh Shukla, Oliver Bullough, Orlando Figes, Patrick Kingsley, Rory Stewart, Rosie Nixon, Ruth Ozeki, Ruth Padel, Sam Knight, Samanth Subramanian, Samira Shackle, Sara Baume, Sebastian Junger, Simon Lancaster, Simon Scarrow, Stig Abell, Terri White, Tessa Hadley, Tim Rice, Toby Young, Tracy Chevalier, William Boyd, William Dalrymple, and many more... (Hardcover / 288 pages / $43) Virtually anyone who has ever watched a profound movie, a powerful TV show, or read a moving novel understands that entertainment can and does affect us in surprising and significant ways. But did you know that our most popular forms of entertainment can have a direct physical effect on us, a measurable impact on society, geopolitics, the economy, and even the future itself?
In You Are What You Watch, Walter Hickey, Pulitzer Prize winner and data expert proves how exactly how what we watch (and read and listen to) has a far greater effect on us and the world at large than we imagine. Employing a mix of research, deep reporting, and 100 data visualizations, Hickey presents the true power of entertainment and culture. You Are What You Watch proves its points not just with research and argument, but hard data. In You Are What You Watch, readers will be given a nerdy, and sobering, celebration of popular entertainment and its surprising power to change the world. (Hardcover / 240 pages / $52) WINNER OF THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE 2021
Winner of the UNESCO Press Freedom Award 2021 What will you sacrifice for the truth? Maria Ressa has spent decades speaking truth to power. But her work tracking disinformation networks seeded by her own government, spreading lies to its own citizens laced with anger and hate, has landed her in trouble with the most powerful man in the country: President Duterte. Now, hounded by the state, she has multiple arrest warrants against her name, and a potential 100+ years behind bars to prepare for - while she stands trial for speaking the truth. How to Stand Up to a Dictator is the story of how democracy dies by a thousand cuts, and how an invisible atom bomb has exploded online that is killing our freedoms. It maps a network of disinformation - a heinous web of cause and effect - that has netted the globe: from Duterte's drug wars, to America's Capitol Hill, to Britain's Brexit, to Russian and Chinese cyber-warfare, to Facebook and Silicon Valley, to our own clicks and our own votes. Told from the frontline of the digital war, this is Maria Ressa's urgent cry for us to wake up and hold the line, before it is too late. (288 pages / $23) bout the author:
Maria Ressa is CEO, co-founder and President of Rappler, the Philippines's top digital news site. She is the current Nobel Laureate and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize 2021, the first Filipino in history to do so. She grew up in America and studied at Princeton University before working as a journalist in Asia for over 36 years. Maria has endured multiple arrests by the Duterte government. Ressa won the UNESCO World Press Freedom Prize 2021 and was TIME Person of the Year in 2018, and was named by TIME as one of the most inspiring and influential women of the century. She has also featured in Prospect's Top 50 Thinkers, Bloomberg 50, and the BBC's Top 100 Women. She has received countless awards for her work, including the Golden Pen of Freedom Award from the World Association of News Publishers. Before founding Rappler, Maria investigated terrorism in Southeast Asia, opening and running CNN's Manila Bureau and Jakarta Bureaus, before heading the largest news group in the Philippines. Can we love the work of artists such as Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, Miles Davis, Polanski, or Picasso? Should we? Dederer explores the audience’s relationship with artists from Michael Jackson to Virginia Woolf, asking: How do we balance our undeniable sense of moral outrage with our equally undeniable love of the work? Is male monstrosity the same as female monstrosity? And if an artist is also a mother, does one identity inexorably, and fatally, interrupt the other? In a more troubling vein, she wonders if an artist needs to be a monster in order to create something great. Does genius deserve special dispensation? Does art have a mandate to depict the darker elements of the psyche? And what happens if the artist stares too long into the abyss?
This unflinching, deeply personal book expands on Claire Dederer’s instantly viral Paris Review essay, “What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?” Highly topical, morally wise, honest to the core, Monsters is certain to incite a conversation about whether and how we can separate artists from their art. A timely, passionate, provocative, blisteringly smart interrogation of how we make and experience art in the age of cancel culture, and of the link between genius and monstrosity. Can we love the work of controversial classic and contemporary artists but dislike the artist? (Hardcover / 288 pages / $35) Welcome to Sotheran's, one of the oldest bookshops in the world, with its weird and wonderful clientele, suspicious cupboards, unlabelled keys, poisoned books and some things that aren't even books, presided over by one deeply eccentric apprentice.
Some years ago, Oliver Darkshire stepped into the hushed interior of Henry Sotheran Ltd on Sackville Street (est. 1761) to interview for a job. Allured by the smell of old books and the temptation of a management-approved afternoon nap, he was soon balancing teetering stacks of first editions, fending off nonagenarian widows and trying not to upset the store's resident ghost (the late Mr Sotheran, hit by a tram). Darkshire came to love Sotheran's, not just for its illustrious history (or for producing the most cursed book of all time), but also its joyous disorganization and the unspoken rules of its gleefully old-fashioned staff, whose mere glance may cause a computer to burst into flames. By turns unhinged and earnestly dog-eared, Once Upon a Tome is the rather colourful story of life in one of the world's oldest bookshops and a love letter to the benign, unruly world of antiquarian bookselling. (256 pages / $26) About the author: Oliver Darkshire is 28, and his life as a struggling bookseller and writer is exactly what his careers instructor warned him would happen if he didn't pay attention. He lives in Manchester with his husband and a house full of books he actively tried not to collect. A historian of gender explores the complicated relationship between womanhood and motherhood.
In an era of falling births, it's often said that millennials invented the idea of not having kids. But history is full of women without children: some who chose childless lives, others who wanted children but never had them, and still others-the vast majority, then and now-who fell somewhere in between. Modern women considering how and if children fit into their lives are products of their political, ecological, and cultural moment. But history also tells them that they are not alone. Drawing on deep research and her own experience as a woman without children, historian Peggy O'Donnell shows that many of the reasons women are not having children today are ones they share with women in the past: a lack of support, their jobs or finances, environmental concerns, infertility, and the desire to live different kinds of lives. Understanding this history-how normal it has always been to not have children, and how hard society has worked to make it seem abnormal-is key, she writes, to rebuilding kinship between mothers and non-mothers, and to building a better world for us all. (Hardcover / 256 pages / $52) "Historian Heffington's incisive debut examines how society demonizes women without children while increasingly failing to provide the supports that make it possible to raise kids sustainably...A cogent and well-supported polemic." --Publishers Weekly Winner of Pulitzer Prize in Memoir
When Hua Hsu first meets Ken in a Berkeley dorm room, he hates him. A frat boy with terrible taste in music, Ken seems exactly like everyone else. For Hua, who makes zines and haunts indie record shops, Ken represents all that he defines himself in opposition to – the mainstream. The only thing Hua, the son of Taiwanese immigrants, and Ken, whose Japanese American family has been in the US for generations, have in common is that, however they engage with it, American culture doesn’t seem to have a place for either of them. But despite his first impressions, Hua and Ken become friends, a friendship built on late-night conversations over cigarettes, long drives along the California coast, and the successes and humiliations of everyday college life. And then violently, senselessly, Ken is gone, killed in a carjacking, not even three years after the day they first meet. Capturing a coming-of-age cut short, and a portrait of a beautiful friendship, Stay True is a deeply moving and intimate memoir about growing up and moving through the world in search of meaning and belonging. (208 pages / $24) The dazzling essays of the beloved, subversive Chinese writer Wang Xiaobo, a continual bestseller in China, now in English for the first time
Wang Xiaobo (1952 - 1997) made his name as a novelist but his essays, too, have become ongoing bestsellers in China since their publication in the 1990s. Bringing together his thoughts on reading and talking and silence in the Cultural Revolution, about the irrepressible spirit of one beloved pig he met while an 'educated youth', and about being operated on via a textbook, these essays give a rare glimpse into a world rarely seen and discussed with such honesty. Written with a light touch and with a wry sense of humour, these are also the essays of a great literary talent, grappling with sociology, sexuality and feminism, with the cultural clash of living in the USA, and with Chinese sci-fi, the internet, and beloved European writers like Bertrand Russell and Italo Calvino. Electrifying, containing a razor-sharp wit and intellect, this collection reveals the voice of a generation to English-speaking readers for the very first time. (224 pages / $35) In Don't Read Poetry, poet and literary critic Stephanie Burt offers an accessible introduction to the seemingly daunting task of reading, understanding, and appreciating poetry. Burt dispels preconceptions about poetry and explains how poems speak to one another-and how they can speak to our lives.
She shows readers how to find more poems once they have some poems they like, and how to connect the poetry of the past to the poetry of the present. Burt moves seamlessly from Shakespeare and other classics to the contemporary poetry circulated on Tumblr and Twitter. She challenges the assumptions that many of us make about "poetry," whether we think we like it or think we don't, in order to help us cherish-and distinguish among-individual poems. A masterful guide to a sometimes confounding genre, Don't Read Poetry will instruct and delight ingénues and cognoscenti alike. (320 pages / $33) Stephanie Burt is a professor of English at Harvard University, and the recipient of a 2016 Guggenheim fellowship for poetry. She has authored fourteen books of poetry and literary criticism. |
Shoji Morimoto was constantly being told that he was a ‘do-nothing’ because he lacked initiative. Dispirited and unemployed, it occurred to him that if he was so good at doing nothing, perhaps he could turn it into a business. And with one tweet, he began his business of renting himself out . . . to do nothing.
Morimoto, aka Rental Person, provides a fascinating service to the lonely and socially anxious. Sitting with a client undergoing surgery, accompanying a newly-divorced client to her favourite restaurant, visiting the site of a client’s suicide attempt are just a few of his thousands of true life adventures. He is dependable, non-judgmental and committed to remaining a stranger and the curious encounters he shares are revelatory about both Japanese society and human psychology. In Rental Person Who Does Nothing, Morimoto chronicles his extraordinary experiences in his unique line of work and reflects on how we consider relationships, jobs and family in our search for meaningful connection and purpose in life. (208 pages / $33) A book for our times: a moving meditation on the tension between loneliness and freedom, individualism and love.
At no time before have so many people lived alone, and never has loneliness been so widely or keenly felt. Why, in a society of individualists, is living alone perceived as a shameful failure? And can we ever be happy on our own? Drawing on personal experience, as well as philosophy and sociology, Daniel Schreiber explores the tension between the desire for solitude and freedom, and the desire for companionship, intimacy, and love. Along the way he illuminates the role that friendships play in our lives—can they be a response to the loss of meaning in a world in crisis? A profoundly enlightening book on how we want to live, Alone spent almost a year on Germany’s bestseller list. (Hardcover / 152 pages / $32) How do we talk about porn? Why it is that when we do talk about porn, we tend to retreat into the abstract? How do we have meaningful conversations about it with those closest to us?
In Porn: An Oral History, Polly Barton interrogates the absence of discussion around a topic that is ubiquitous and influences our daily lives. In her search for understanding, she spent a year initiating intimate conversations with twenty acquaintances of a range of ages, genders and sexualities about everything and anything related to porn: watching habits, emotions and feelings of guilt, embarrassment, disgust and shame, fantasy and desire. Soon, unfolding before her, was exactly the book that she had been longing to encounter - not a traditional history, but the raw, honest truth about what we aren't saying. A landmark work of oral history written in the spirit of Nell Dunn, Porn is a thrilling, thought-provoking, revelatory, revealing, joyfully informative and informal exploration of a subject that has always retained an element of the taboo. (360 pages / $34 / Ban in Malaysia) As New York came to a halt with COVID, Michael Kimmelman composed an email to a group of architects, historians, writers, and friends, inviting them to take a walk. Wherever they liked, he wrote—preferably someplace meaningful to them, someplace that illuminated the city and what they loved about it. At first, the goal was distraction. At a scary moment when everything seemed uncertain, walking around New York served as a reminder of all the ways the city was still a rock, joy, and inspiration. What began with a lighthearted trip soon took on a much larger meaning and ambition. These intimate, funny, richly detailed conversations between Kimmelman and his companions became anchors for millions of Times readers during the pandemic.
Filled with stunning photographs documenting the city during the era of COVID, The Intimate City is the ultimate insider’s guide. All the walks can be walked, or just be read for pleasure, by know-it-all New Yorkers or anyone else. A kaleidoscopic portrait of an enduring metropolis, The Intimate City reveals why New York, despite COVID and a long history of other calamities, continues to inspire and to mean so much to those who call it home and to countless others. (Hardcover / 272 pages / $52) A native New Yorker and twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Michael Kimmelman is the architecture critic of The New York Times. He was the paper’s chief art critic and, from Berlin, created the Abroad column, covering politics and culture across Europe and the Middle East. He has reported from more than 40 countries and founded Headway, a nonprofit journalistic initiative focused on global challenges and paths to progress. Why play to 12,000 people when you can play to 12? In Autumn 2021, Robin Ince's stadium tour with Professor Brian Cox was postponed due to the pandemic. Rather than do nothing, he decided he would instead go on a tour of over a hundred bookshops, from Wigtown to Penzance; from Swansea to Margate.
Packed with anecdotes and tall tales, Bibliomaniac follows Robin up and down the country in his quest to discover just why he can never have enough books. It is the story of an addiction and a romance, and also of an occasional points failure just outside Oxenholme. (Hardcover / 288 pages / $40)
The last time Clancy Martin tried to kill himself was in his basement with a dog leash. He didn’t write a note.
How Not to Kill Yourself is an affirmation of life by someone who has tried to end it multiple times. It’s about standing in your bathroom every morning, gearing yourself up to die. It’s about choosing to go on living anyway. In an unflinching account of his darkest moments, Clancy Martin makes the case against suicide, drawing on the work of philosophers from Seneca to Jean Améry. Through critical inquiry and practical steps, we might yet answer our existential despair more freely – and with a little more creativity. (Hardcover / 336 pages / $39) A beautifully illustrated guide to NFTs for anyone interested in entering the NFT universe and learning about this incredible new trend that, for many people, may seem futuristic and obscure at first!
Non-fungible tokens, so called because they are uniquely coded files “tokenized,” or stored on a blockchain ledger, are a new way to create, sell, trade, and collect unique digital assets. Each NFT can be traced by anyone to its owner by an imbedded digital code within it. Why “non-fungible” Because, unlike a “fungible” form of currency like the US dollar, NFTs cannot be swapped any one for any other. Instead, each unique NFT must be purchased with cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum, and on a special online trading platform. Written by finance expert Alyssa Place, and beautifully illustrated by Rebecca Pry, this field guide will walk you through the various categories of NFTS, like collectibles, art, land, sports, and more. Inside this elegant paperback, you’ll find profiles on individual NFTs, each showcasing a full-page illustration, plus definitions of NFT terms, information on how and where to find NFTs, and how to collect them. It’s a complicated but excited world out there, and this visually stunning field guide will help you join the fun! (176 pages / $29) A complete narrative history of the weird and wonderful world of Underground Comix.
In the 1950s, comics meant POW! BAM! superheroes, family-friendly gags, and Sunday funnies, but in the 1960s, inspired by these strips and the satire of MAD magazine, a new generation of creators set out to subvert the medium, and with it, American culture. Their “comix,” spelled that way to distinguish the work from their dime-store contemporaries, presented tales of taboo sex, casual drug use, and a transgressive view of society. Embraced by hippies and legions of future creatives, this subgenre of comic books and strips often ran afoul of the law, but that would not stop them from casting cultural ripples for decades to come, eventually moving the entire comics form beyond the gutter and into fine-art galleries. Author Brian Doherty weaves together the stories of R. Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Trina Robbins, Spain Rodriguez, Harvey Pekar, and Howard Cruse, among many others, detailing the complete narrative history of this movement. Through dozens of new interviews and archival research, Doherty chronicles the scenes that sprang up around the country in the 1960s and ’70s, beginning with the artists’ origin stories and following them through success and strife, and concluding with an examination of these creators’ legacies, Dirty Pictures is the essential exploration of a truly American art form that recontextualized the way people thought about war, race, sex, gender, and expression. (448 pages / $32) Join author and Japanologist Beth Kempton on a sacred journey to uncover the secrets of fearless writing which have lain buried in Eastern philosophy for two thousand years.
In a radical departure from standard advice and widely-held assumptions about the effort and suffering required for creative success, The Way of the Fearless Writer will show you there is another way to thrive - a path of trust, ease, freedom and joy. This profound book reveals the deep connections between mind, body, spirit, breath and words. Offering a rare insight into the writing life and a host of fresh and original exercises, it will open your eyes to writing as a direct connection to life itself. (Hardcover / 272 pages / $33) "As you travel with me on a sacred journey into the heart of writing, drawing on ancient wisdom from Japan and China, you will learn how the deep connections between mind, body, spirit, breath and words can help you access your true voice and release it onto the page without judgement." Beth Kempton We spend so much time in pursuit of happiness—trying to purchase it, experience it, meditate our way toward it—but happiness is elusive and doesn’t last. According to the teachings of the Buddha, Cuong Lu writes, “Suffering is not a problem to be solved. It is a truth to be recognized.” Happiness Is Overrated invites us to look deeply at the truths in our lives—not glossing over or denying our suffering—and to focus on the meaning and value already within us.
Each chapter of Happiness Is Overrated shares a lesson drawn from Buddhist psychology, accessible for all readers. Short practices at the end of each of the 30 short chapters help readers apply the teachings on their own. Happiness Is Overrated helps us get in touch with our true selves and our true minds, through meditation and mindfulness practices that include paying attention to the breath, observing our minds, connecting with our hearts, practicing “interbeing” with others and the Earth, and more. CUONG LU, Buddhist teacher, scholar, and writer, was ordained a monk at Plum Village in France under the guidance of Thich Nhat Hanh. (128 pages / $34) This inspirational gift book filled with Bob Ross-themed challenges for art and life will bring the painter's philosophy to your world in a whole new way.
When the iconic artist calls us to take out our two-inch brush, we know it means one thing: This is your bravery test. This book is a collection of 55 ideas inspired by Bob Ross's philosophy of stretching just past your limits and it will motivate you just as he does when painting. Creative and thought-provoking challenges range from ideas for making new friends to breaking routines to trying new art techniques. Just remember that, in both life and art, there are no mistakes, just happy accidents. Ross was well known for phrases he tended to repeat while painting, such as "let's add some happy little trees". (Hardcover / 128 pages / $33) Rebecca Solnit’s essay ‘Men Explain Things to Me’ has become a touchstone of the feminist movement, inspired the term ‘mansplaining’, and established Solnit as one of the leading feminist thinkers of our time – one who has inspired everyone from radical activists to Beyoncé Knowles. Collected here in print for the first time is the essay itself, along with the best of Solnit’s feminist writings.
From rape culture to mansplaining, from French sex scandals to marriage and the nuclear family, from Virginia Woolf to colonialism, these essays are a fierce and incisive exploration of the issues that a patriarchal culture will not necessarily acknowledge as ‘issues’ at all. With grace and energy, and in the most exquisite and inviting of prose, Rebecca Solnit proves herself a vital leading figure of the feminist movement and a radical, humane thinker. (144 pages / $22) Why thinking in pictures? Short answer: because the words seem to need help. If you sample the many smart-thinking books to hit the shelves recently, they all promise a smarter, more rational you, and it all seems just pages away. But if the books are that good, why are there so many? And have they succeeded in moving the dial of people's reasoning?
Using illustrations and photographs, Michael Blastland shows how pictures can help put ideas to the test, making them vivid, showing them in action. Part guide, part gallery, Thinking in Pictures is a brilliantly original and witty introduction to smart-thinking - how to use it and when to question it - for anyone trying to make sense of a puzzling world. (Hardcover / 336 pages / $37) Figuring explores the complexities of love and the human search for truth and meaning through the interconnected lives of several historical figures across four centuries.
Stretching between these figures is a cast of artists, writers, and scientists - mostly women, mostly queer - whose public contribution has risen out of their unclassifiable and often heartbreaking private relationships to change the way we understand, experience and appreciate the universe. Emanating from these lives are larger questions about the measure of a good life and what it means to leave a lasting mark of betterment on an imperfect world. Weaving through the narrative is a set of peripheral figures and a tapestry of themes spanning music, feminism, the history of science, the rise and decline of religion, and how the intersection of astronomy, poetry and Transcendentalist philosophy fomented the environmental movement. (592 pages / $32) Kerri Andrews’s Way Makers is the first anthology of women’s writing about walking. Moving from Elizabeth Carter’s correspondence with Catherine Talbot in the eighteenth century through to Merryn Glover in the present day, and across poetry, letters, diaries, novels, and more, this anthology traces a long tradition of women’s walking literature.
Walking is, for the women included in this anthology, a source of creativity and comfort; it is a means of expressing grief, longing, and desire. It is also a complicated activity: it represents freedom but is also sometimes tinged with danger and fear. What cannot be denied any longer is that walking was, and continues to be, an activity full of physical and emotional significance for women: this anthology is a testament to the rich literary heritage created by generations of women walker-writers over the centuries. (Hardcover / 336 pages / $36)
Recent years have seen rapid advances in 'artificial' intelligence, which increasingly appears to be something stranger than we ever imagined. At the same time, we are becoming more aware of the other intelligences which have been with us all along, unrecognized. These other beings are the animals, plants, and natural systems that surround us, and are slowly revealing their complexity and knowledge - just as the new technologies we've built are threatening to cause their extinction, and ours.
In Ways of Being, writer and artist James Bridle considers the fascinating, uncanny and multiple ways of existing on earth. What can we learn from these other forms of intelligence and personhood, and how can we change our societies to live more equitably with one another and the non-human world? From Greek oracles to octopuses, forests to satellites, Bridle tells a radical new story about ecology, technology and intelligence. We must, they argue, expand our definition of these terms to build a meaningful and free relationship with the non-human, one based on solidarity and cognitive diversity. We have so much to learn, and many worlds to gain. (384 pages / $30) A definitive and surprising exploration of the history of Black horror films, after the rising success of Get Out, Candyman, and Lovecraft Country from creators behind the acclaimed documentary, Horror Noire.
The Black Guy Dies First explores the Black journey in modern horror cinema, from the fodder epitomized by Spider Baby to the Oscar-winning cinematic heights of Get Out and beyond. This eye-opening book delves into the themes, tropes, and traits that have come to characterize Black roles in horror since 1968, a year in which race made national headlines in iconic moments from the enactment of the 1968 Civil Rights Act and Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in April. This timely book is a must-read for cinema and horror fans alike. (336 pages / $48) About the authors: Dr. Robin R. Means Coleman is Northwestern’s vice president and associate provost for diversity and inclusion. An internationally prominent and award-winning scholar, Dr. Coleman’s work focuses on media studies and the cultural politics of Blackness. Mark H. Harris is an entertainment journalist who has written about cinema and pop culture for over twenty years for New York magazine, Vulture, Rotten Tomatoes, and more. A lifelong horror fan, he created the website BlackHorrorMovies.com in 2005 as the premier online source chronicling the history of Black representation and achievement in horror cinema. From the acclaimed and bestselling biographer Jonathan Bate, a luminous new exploration of Shakespeare and how his themes can untangle comedy and tragedy, learning and loving in our modern lives.
‘The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together.’ How does one survive the death of a loved one, the mess of war, the experience of being schooled, of falling in love, of growing old, of losing your mind? Shakespeare’s world is never too far different from our own ‘permeated with the same tragedies, the same existential questions and domestic worries. In this extraordinary book, Jonathan Bate brings then and now together. He investigates moments of his own life – losses and challenges – and asks whether, if you persevere with Shakespeare, he can offer a word of wisdom or a human insight for any time or any crisis. Along the way we meet actors such as Judi Dench and Simon Callow, and writers such as Dr Johnson, John Keats, Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath, who turned to Shakespeare in their own dark times. This is a personal story about loss, the black dog of depression, unexpected journeys and the very human things that echo through time, resonating with us all at one point or another. (320 pages / $24) A provocative history of men who were worshipped as gods that illuminates the connection between power and religion and the role of divinity in a secular age
Ever since 1492, when Christopher Columbus made landfall in the New World and was hailed as a heavenly being, the accidental god has haunted the modern age. From Haile Selassie, acclaimed as the Living God in Jamaica, to Britain’s Prince Philip, who became the unlikely center of a new religion on a South Pacific island, men made divine—always men—have appeared on every continent. And because these deifications always emerge at moments of turbulence—civil wars, imperial conquest, revolutions—they have much to teach us. In a revelatory history spanning five centuries, a cast of surprising deities helps to shed light on the thorny questions of how our modern concept of “religion” was invented; why religion and politics are perpetually entangled in our supposedly secular age; and how the power to call someone divine has been used and abused by both oppressors and the oppressed. From nationalist uprisings in India to Nigerien spirit possession cults, Anna Della Subin explores how deification has been a means of defiance for colonized peoples. Conversely, we see how Columbus, Cortés, and other white explorers amplified stories of their godhood to justify their dominion over native peoples, setting into motion the currents of racism and exclusion that have plagued the New World ever since they touched its shores. At once deeply learned and delightfully antic, Accidental Gods offers an unusual keyhole through which to observe the creation of our modern world. It is that rare thing: a lyrical, entertaining work of ideas, one that marks the debut of a remarkable literary career. (480 pages / $42) Between 1967 and 1977, the internationally renowned author Clarice Lispector wrote weekly dispatches from her desk in Rio for the Jornal do Brasil. Already famous for her revolutionary, interior, metaphysical novels and short stories, in her Chronicles she turned her attention to the everyday, reshaping the material of her life into profound, touching and funny, tiny revelations.
Observing the world around her, small encounters like hearing tales of the lost loves of a taxi driver, or the bitterness lurking beneath the prettiness of an old friend, become an exposition of the currents and foibles that define our lives. Everything from the meaning of cosmonauts to the new ideas, writers and artists that populate the sparkling international world of the sixties and seventies are considered and transformed into jewels of insight, delight and devastation. This exhilarating collection of non-fiction sees one of the greatest twentieth-century writers meditating on the moments that make up a life (752 pages / $35) Introduction by Ali Smith and translated by Patrick O'Brian
Long considered one of Simone de Beauvoir’s masterpieces, A Very Easy Death is a profoundly affecting, day-by-day recounting of her mother’s final days after she is hospitalized following a fall. Though a devout Catholic, her faith is subsumed by her terror of death, and as her body fails, she clings to life with fierce, primal desperation. In depicting her mother’s refusal to ‘go gentle’ while her autonomy and dignity are taken from her, Simone de Beauvoir ‘shows the power of compassion when it is allied with acute intelligence’ (Sunday Telegraph). Powerful, touching and sometimes shocking, this is an end-of-life account that no reader is likely to forget. (114 pages / $24) Spanning geographies, cultures, and the ages, a moving journey into the physical facts and metaphysical mysteries of how the living care for the dead.
Death is universal. It will meet us all. But it’s also a practical problem—what do we do with dead bodies? Vibeke Maria and Andreas Viestad live by a cemetery and are daily spectators of its routines, and their fascination with burials has led them to dig deep to examine our relationship with the dead. Taking us on a journey around the world and into the past, the Viestads explore how the deceased are honored and cared for, cremated, and buried. From archaeological sites in Spain, Israel, and Russia to environmentally friendly burials in the United States and Ghana’s fantasy coffins, and from cremations without fire to the new industry turning our dearly departed’s ashes into diamonds, this empathetic and enthralling book is for anyone who knows their turn is coming, but who’d like a good book for the journey. (Hardcover / 240 pages / $35) |
They have waited 75 years for an acknowledgment that what was done to them was a war crime. They are still waiting.
Grandmothers, Our Grandmothers is a beautifully and sensitively rendered narrative of the ongoing crusade of WW II's most courageous survivors: the "Comfort Women"--sex slaves--of the Japanese Imperial Army. This offering in graphic novel format is both a moving tribute and a call to awareness that, though addressing young adults, speaks to all of us.
Focusing on the "Comfort Women" of his native Korea as well as from other countries, author and artist Han Seong-won tells the stories of women who were coerced, sometimes through abduction, into sexual slavery wherever the Japanese army put down stakes. Through his personal encounters with these valiant women, Han portrays strong individuals who refused to allow their identities to be defined by what was forced upon them. Rather, they are defined by their continuing triumph over pain, loss and memory even though their ordeals remain with them in some form to this day. Now in their nineties, these women are artists, musicians and activists. They share their personal stories with us, and give us their testimony. This book honors so many women, like Grandmother Kang Il-chul, abducted from her home at gunpoint when she was a girl, threatened with murder when she contracted typhoid. And Grandmother Kim Hak-soon, who began giving public testimony in 1991, testified before the UN in 1993, and remained an activist for the rest of her life. Grandmothers, Our Grandmothers underscores these women's enduring hope that the Japanese government will finally recognize the deep scars that their enslavement has left on the lives of the women, their families, and on humanity as a whole. Because without such recognition, there can be no change. And because crimes against any part of humanity are a crime against all humanity, these women must never be forgotten. (176 pages / $32) About the Author: Han Seong-won has been writing and drawing books and articles about modern Korean history for over twenty years. A documentary project on women and war led him on the path to exploring the "comfort women" problem. This book is his gift and tribute to the Grandmothers and all victims of human rights violations. A graphic novel that teaches you how to turn your stories into comics!
Acclaimed illustrator and graphic novelist Mark Crilley returns with a new approach to learning the essential elements of making comics. His easy-to-follow instruction about comic book art, design, and storytelling provides aspiring creators a one-of-a-kind how-to experience. In The Comic Book Lesson, you’ll meet Emily—an enthusiastic young comics fan who has a story she needs to tell. On her quest to turn that story into a comic book, Emily meets three helpful mentors who share their knowledge. Trudy, a high school student who works at the local comics shop, teaches Emily how to create expressive characters and how art can convey action and suspense. Madeline, a self-published manga artist, teaches Emily how to use panel composition and layout to tell a story visually and how to develop a comic from script to sketch to finished pages. Sophie, a professional graphic novelist, guides Emily through fine-tuning the details of dialogue, sequence, and pacing to lead readers through the story. Page by page, you’ll discover more about the events that drive Emily to create her comic book as her mentors teach her (and you!) about the fundamentals of visual narrative and comic book art. (160 pages / $35) What does Shakespeare have to teach us about mindfulness? What Eastern spiritual views about death, love, and presence are reflected in the writings of The Bard? The Buddha and the Bard reveals the surprising connections between the 2,500-year-old spiritual leader and the most compelling writer of all time.
Shakespeare understood and represented the human condition better than any writer of his time. As for the Buddha, he saw how to liberate us from that condition. Author Lauren Shufran explores the fascinating interplay of Western drama and Eastern philosophy by pairing quotes from Shakespeare with the tenets of an Eastern spiritual practice, sparking a compelling dialogue between the two. There’s a remarkable interchange of echoes between Shakespeare’s conception of “the inward man” and Buddhist approaches to recognizing, honoring, and working with our humanness as we play out our roles on the “stage” of our lives. The Buddha and the Bard synthesizes literature and scripture, embodied drama and transcendent practice, to shape a multifaceted lyric that we can apply as mindful practice in our own lives. Shufran’s compelling juxtapositions will encourage the reader to ask the deepest questions of themselves while delighting in the play of resonances across a cultural and historical divide. About the author: Lauren Shufran holds an MA (English) and an MFA (Creative Writing: Poetry) from San Francisco State University, and a PhD (Early Modern British Literature) from UC Santa Cruz. In her eight years of PhD candidacy at UCSC she taught a wide range of courses, from creative writing to Biblical Poetics in Renaissance England to The English Sonnet Sequence; but Shakespeare was the course she taught most consistently. She discovered yoga, meditation, and mindfulness practices while writing her dissertation. (Hardcover / 200 pages / $32) A deep dive into the science of love. In this entertaining and accessible exploration of love, Oxford anthropologist Dr Anna Machin dives into the science behind the myriad types of love that exist in the world, including romantic love, parental love, friendships, love for pets, football teams, religious love and even love for our smartphones.
Through original research brought to life by interviews and case studies, and encompassing such fascinating areas as polyamorous relationships, parasocial (love for a celebrity) and sacred loves, this book argues that it is time to stop putting romantic love on a pedestal. By exploring the science that illuminates the benefits of all our different close relationships, Dr Anna Machin encourages us to reconsider the importance of love in our own lives, to interrogate our own experiences, and to reconnect with the heart of what it really means to be human. (320 pages / $22) Christopher Kerr is a hospice doctor. All of his patients die. Yet he has tended thousands of patients who, in the face of death, speak of love, meaning and grace. They reveal that there is hope beyond cure as they transition to focus on personal meaning.
Drawing on interviews with over 1,200 patients and more than a decade of quantified data , Dr. Kerr reveals why pre-death dreams and visions are remarkable events that bring comfort and exemplify human resilience. These are not regular dreams. Described as "more real than real," they frequently include loved ones long gone and mark the transition from distress to acceptance. These end-of-life experiences help patients restore meaning, make sense of the dying process and assist in reclaiming it as an experience in which they have a say. They also benefit the bereaved who get relief from seeing their loved ones pass with a sense of calm closure. Beautifully written with astonishing stories, this book, at its heart, celebrates the power to reclaim how we die, while soothing the bereaved who witness their loved ones go with unqualified grace. (384 pages / $30) Hi. I hope you’re ok.
My name’s Joe, and I have one job, every day: don’t kill myself. I live with a complex mental illness called Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). 15% of people with BPD die by suicide, and 40% try. I’m already in the 40%. My job is to keep out of the 15%. In this book I want to try and explain what life is like when you have a brain that is essentially trying to murder you every day. It’s a collection of the funny, sad and shocking stuff that has happened to me along the way. Writing this book has been the hardest thing I’ve ever done. It had to be dragged into the world, with my condition telling me that every single word, sentence and chapter was terrible and would make strangers walk up to me in the street and punch me in the face. But I had run out of options. I’d done everything I ‘d been told to do and I still thought about killing myself every day. So I wrote this book to save my life. But if there is even the smallest chance that me telling you how I live with me helps you live with you; if it opens up a space for someone, somewhere to be more honest about their mental illness, it will have been worth it. Please don’t kill yourself. Love Joe xx (272 pages / $24) Arts teacher Andria Zafirakou was always a rule-breaker. At her inner-city London school where more than eighty languages are spoken, she would sense urgent needs; mending uniforms, calling social services, shielding vulnerable teens from gangs. And she would tailor each class to its pupils, fiercely believing in the power of art to unlock trauma, or give a mute child the confidence to speak. Time and again, she would be proved right.
So in 2018, when Andria won the million-dollar Global Teacher Prize, she knew exactly where the money would go: back into arts education for all. Because today, the UK government's cuts and curriculum changes are destroying the arts, while their refusal to tackle the most dangerous threats faced by children – cyber-bullying, gang violence, hunger and deprivation – puts teachers on the safeguarding frontline. Andria's story is a rallying wake-up call that shows what life is really like for schoolchildren today, and a moving insight into the extraordinary people shaping the next generation. (304 pages / $24) Andrew Motion has been close to the centres of British poetry for over fifty years.
Sleeping on Islands is his clear-sighted and open-hearted account of this remarkable career. It takes us from scenes of a teenage home-life coloured by tragedy and silence - where writing was as much a refuge as an assertion - to the excruciations of early public appearances, to the decade he spent as Poet Laureate, promoting and ensuring the central place of poetry in a nation's character. Along the way, we hear about the risks and sacrifices involved, as well as the difficulties of sustaining a commitment to writing within a helix of other obligations. We see in close-up the significance of Motion's formative relationship with W. H. Auden and his subsequent friendship with Philip Larkin. And during his time as Laureate, we witness memorable encounters with Royalty and Prime Ministers, and discover the costs and complications that accompany such a high-profile role. By turns moving and humorous, this is the intimate story of a rare poetic life. And it proves Motion's contention that the poems we most enjoy 'are not weird visitations, or ornaments stuck on the surface of life, but part of life's daily bread'. (Hardcover / 256 pages / $43) You know BrainPickings. Then you must have known Maria Popova. This is her book - 8 years in the making.
A Velocity of Being: Letters to A Young Reader is a curated anthology of letters and original illustrations crafted by 121 of the most interesting and inspiring culture-makers alive today. It is a collection of letters about why we read and what books do for the human spirit. The diverse contributions are letters from immensely accomplished and largehearted artists, writers, scientists, philosophers, entrepreneurs, musicians, and adventurers whose character has been shaped by a life of reading. These luminaries include Jane Goodall, Yo-Yo Ma, Jacqueline Woodson, Ursula K. Le Guin, Mary Oliver, Neil Gaiman, Amanda Palmer, Rebecca Solnit, Elizabeth Gilbert, Shonda Rhimes, Alain de Botton, James Gleick, Anne Lamott, Diane Ackerman, Judy Blume, Eve Ensler, David Byrne, Sylvia Earle, Richard Branson, Daniel Handler, Marina Abramović, Regina Spektor, Elizabeth Alexander, Adam Gopnik, Debbie Millman, Dani Shapiro, Tim Ferriss, Ann Patchett, a 98-year-old Holocaust survivor, Italy’s first woman in space, and many more. This project is woven entirely of goodwill, generosity of spirit, and a shared love of books. Everyone involved has donated their time, and all profits will go to the New York Public Library systems. This stunning 272-page hardcover volume features a lay-flat binding to allow for greater ease of reading. A must have for all BrainPickings fans and every reader, young and grown.
(5.9" (W) x 8.3" (H) • 272 pages • Hardcover / $60.00) In late eighteenth-century London, a group of extraordinary people gathered around a dining table once a week.
The host was Joseph Johnson, publisher and bookseller and he was joined at dinner by a shifting constellation of great minds including William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Henry Fuseli, Anna Barbauld and Mary Wollstonecraft. Johnson's years as a maker of books saw profound change in Britain and abroad. In this remarkable portrait of a revolutionary age, Daisy Hay captures a changing nation through the stories of the men and women who wrote it into being, and whose ideas still influence us today. A rich work of biography and cultural history, Dinner with Joseph Johnson is an entertaining and enlightening story of a group of people who left an indelible mark on the modern age. We often think of mathematics and literature as polar opposites. But what if, instead, they were fundamentally linked?
Did you know, for instance, that Moby-Dick is full of sophisticated geometry? That James Joyce's stream-of-consciousness novels are deliberately checkered with mathematical references? That George Eliot was obsessed with statistics? That Jurassic Park is undergirded by fractal patterns? That Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie wrote mathematician characters? From sonnets to fairytales to experimental French literature, Once Upon a Prime takes us on an unforgettable journey through the books we thought we knew, revealing new layers of beauty and wonder. Professor Hart shows how maths and literature are complementary parts of the same quest, to understand human life and our place in the universe. (Hardcover / 304 pages / $39) About the author: Sarah Hart is a respected pure mathematician and a gifted expositor of mathematics. Educated at Oxford and Manchester, Dr Hart currently holds the Gresham Professorship of Geometry, the oldest mathematics chair in the UK. The chair stretches back in an unbroken lineage to 1597. Dr Hart is the 33rd Gresham Professor of Geometry, and the first woman ever to hold the position. Welcome to this compendium of interesting, unexpected and downright bizarre geographical anomalies that are guaranteed to delight and inspire. The world is full of little-known facts that have sometimes been a source of diplomatic or military struggle. Many still exist under the radar now to be revealed by this entertaining treasure trove.
Where else can you discover: •Countries that do not really exist •the world's only town that lies almost entirely underground •a UK hotel room which became Yugoslavian for one day only •an island which is Spanish for six months of the year and French for the other six •a city which is officially constituted by one single high-rise (14 floor) skyscraper •the world's first and only railway that belonged to one country and ran across another •a hotel room whose bedroom is in France and whose bathroom is in Switzerland •Bir Tawil which is one of the very few territories on earth not claimed by any country The world is full of wonderful and strange geographical irregularities. The Atlas of geographical curiosities is a glorious celebration of an unusual world. (192 pages / 59 entries, covering all corners of the world / full illustrated with maps and colour photographs / $49) Cheating death and raising the dead. Creating life. Freeing the spirit. Colonising space. These projects, of which some have been achieved and some will soon, have a shared Russian history, belonging to a movement known as cosmism - a mixture of scientific research, metaphysics and mysticism.
More than 100 years ago, key Russian thinkers and anarchists alike wanted to resurrect the dead and send them into space. Since then, cosmists have prepared to colonise the planets, to save a world that would become overpopulated after death had been vanquished. Cosmism was the model behind the Soviet Union. Yet, it is still ever-present, and cosmism is responsible for a number of Russian policies. Decades ago, it also found itself a second home: Silicon Valley. A principal source of inspiration for Californian transhumanists, Soviet cosmism founded the core dreams of contemporary society - immortality and colonisation of space. The cosmists have written our future, and we're now living it. (208 pages / $32) In 1888, Louis Le Prince shot the world's first motion picture in Leeds, England.
In 1890, weeks before the planned public unveiling of his camera and projector, Le Prince boarded a train in France - and disappeared without a trace. His body was never found. In 1891, Thomas Edison - inventor of the lightbulb and the phonograph - announced that he had developed a motion-picture camera. Le Prince's family, convinced that Edison had stolen Louis's work, proceeded to sue the most famous inventor in the world. The Man Who Invented Motion Pictures excavates one of the great unsolved mysteries of the Victorian age and offers a revelatory rewriting of the birth of modern pictures. (416 pages / $28) Art & Fear is about the way art gets made, the reasons it often doesn't get made, and the nature of the difficulties that cause so many artists to give up along the way. Drawing on the authors' own experiences as two working artists, the book delves into the internal and external challenges to making art in the real world, and shows how they can be overcome every day.
First published in 1994, Art & Fear quickly became an underground classic, and word-of-mouth has placed it among the best-selling books on artmaking and creativity. Written by artists for artists, it offers generous and wise insight into what it feels like to sit down at your easel or keyboard, in your studio or performance space, trying to do the work you need to do. Every artist, whether a beginner or a prizewinner, a student or a teacher, faces the same fears - and this book illuminates the way through them. (Hardcover / 144 pages / $28) "This is a motivating book that encourages you to get out and do art. Credibility is given to the volume over quality argument, which is highly counter-intuitive. However, once accepted, one gets over some of the fear of getting started. Doing something is always better than doing nothing at all. Award-winning mental health campaigner Jonny Benjamin, MBE, and co-editor Britt Pflüger bring together people from all walks of life – actors, musicians, athletes, psychologists and activists – to share what gives them hope. This joyful collection is a supportive hand to anyone looking to find light on a dark day and shows that, no matter what you may be going through, you are not alone.
Jonny Benjamin is known for his book and documentary film, The Stranger on the Bridge, which fought to end stigma around talking about mental health, suicidal thoughts and schizoaffective disorder. When his campaign to find the man who prevented him from taking his own life went viral, Jonny was one of a wave of new figures lifting the lid on mental health struggles. In this book, he brings together a range of voices to speak to the spectrum of our experiences of mental health and the power of speaking up and seeking help. (416 pages / $24) People may be out of your life, but they’re still in your head. Learn how to control the ongoing psychological impact of all your relationships and achieve happiness, success, and fulfillment.
Who’s in Your Room? is a metaphor and a method for understanding how our relationships, past and present, impact our lives. Imagine that you live your entire life in one room. Inside are all the people with whom you have ever had a relationship. The room is infinitely large, and anyone you let in will be in your room for the rest of your life. Neurologists report that as far as your brain is concerned, the metaphor is real—memories and emotions continue to influence you, for better or worse, long after their external cause has disappeared. So who do you want in your room? Note: This book is about curating the people you let into your life, be it your professional or personal relationship. (208 pages / $34) Representing the 1970s, Angela Carter's highly acclaimed polemic enlisting the Marquis de Sade in an argument about women's sexual freedom.
'Sexuality is power' - so says the Marquis de Sade, philosopher and pornographer extraordinaire. His virtuous Justine keeps to the rules laid down by men, her reward rape and humiliation; his Juliette, Justine's triumphantly monstrous antithesis, viciously exploits her sexuality. In a world where all tenderness is false, all beds are minefields. But now Sade has met his match. With invention and genius, Angela Carter takes on these outrageous figments of his extreme imagination, and transforms them into symbols of our time - the Hollywood sex goddesses, mothers and daughters, pornography, even the sacred shrines of sex and marriage lie devastatingly exposed before our eyes. Angela Carter delves into the viscera of our distorted sexuality and reveals a dazzling vision of love which admits neither of conqueror nor of conquered. (192 pages / $24) Taking you from the earliest feature films to today, Colours of Film introduces 50 iconic movies and explains the pivotal role that colour played in their success.
The use of colour is an essential part of film. It has the power to evoke powerful emotions, provide subtle psychological symbolism and act as a narrative device. Wes Anderson’s pastels and muted tones are aesthetically pleasing, but his careful use of colour also acts as a shorthand for interpreting emotion. And let’s not forget Schindler’s List (1993, dir. Steven Spielberg), in which a bold flash of red against an otherwise black-and-white film is used as a powerful symbol of life, survival and death. In Colours of Film, film critic Charles Bramesco introduces an element of cinema that is often overlooked, yet has been used in extraordinary ways. Using infographic colour palettes, and stills from the movies, this is a lively and fresh approach to film for cinema-goers and colour lovers alike. He also explores in fascinating detail how the development of technologies have shaped the course of modern cinema, from how the feud between Kodak and Fujifilm shaped the colour palettes of the 20th Century's greatest filmakers, to how the advent of computer technology is creating a digital wonderland for modern directors in which anything is possible. Filled with sparkling insights and fascinating accounts from the history of cinema, Colours of Film is an indispensable guide to one of the most important visual elements in the medium of film. (Hardcover / 208 pages / $42) How did the first forty years of H. G. Wells' life shape the father of science fiction?
From his impoverished childhood in a working-class English family, to his determination to educate himself at any cost, to the serious ill health that dominated his twenties and thirties, his complicated marriages, and love affair with socialism, the first forty years of H. G. Wells' extraordinary life would set him on a path to become one of the world's most influential writers. The sudden success of The Time Machine and The War of The Worlds transformed his life and catapulted him to international fame; he became the writer who most inspired Orwell and countless others, and predicted men walking on the moon seventy years before it happened. In this remarkable, empathetic biography, Claire Tomalin, one of Britain's best biographers, paints a fascinating portrait of a man like no other, driven by curiosity and desiring reform, a socialist and a futurist whose new and imaginative worlds continue to inspire today. (272 pages / $25) Oliver Mol was a successful, clever, healthy twenty-five-year old. Then one day the migraine started. For ten months, the pain was constant, exacerbated by writing, reading, using computers, looking at phones or anything with a screen. Slowly he became a writer who no longer wrote, and a person who could no longer could communicate with the modern world. In literature, and life, Oliver began to disappear.
This is Oliver's story of his frightening descent into living with perpetual pain. His doctors can't figure out how to fix him. He suffers a breakdown. One evening, high on pain killers, Oliver Googles the only thing he can think of: 'full-time job, no experience, Sydney'. An ad for a train guard appears. For two years Oliver will watch others live their lives, observing the minutia and intimacy of strangers brought together briefly and connected by the steady march of time.
Exquisitely written and bravely told, Train Lord is a searingly personal yet universal book, which asks what happens when your sense of self is suddenly destroyed, and how you get it back. (272 pages / $25) Feminist autofiction from one of Sweden’s blazing talents.
Blending autofiction and essay, The Bear Woman is a journey of feminism and literary detective work spanning centuries and continents. In the 1540s, a young French noblewoman, Marguerite de la Rocque, was abandoned on an island in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence with her maidservant and her lover. In present-day Stockholm, an author and mother becomes captivated by the image of Marguerite sheltered in a dark cave after her companions have died. This image soon becomes an obsession. She must find out the real story of the woman she calls the Bear Woman. But so much in this history is written so as to gloss over male violence. And the maps and other sources she consults are at times undecipherable. Karolina Ramqvist explores what it means to write history—and to live it. Combining historical text, autofiction and essay with the uncertainty of memory, Bear Woman is the debut work of non-fiction by an award winning literary powerhouse. (352 pages / $24) It’s my theory that only the unhappy, the uncomfortable, the gauche, the badly put together, aspire to make art. Why would you seek to reshape the world unless you were ill at ease in it? Howard Jacobson Howard Jacobson's funny, revealing and tender memoir of his path to becoming a writer.
Howard Jacobson was forty when his first novel was published. In Mother's Boy, he traces the life that brought him there. Born into a working-class Jewish family in 1940s Manchester, he did not lack encouragement or subject matter. Jacobson takes us from childhood and studying at Cambridge, through landing in Sydney as a maverick young professor, and on to his first marriage and the birth of his son. Later, he begins new - and often surprising - ventures in places as disparate as London, Wolverhampton, Boscastle and Melbourne. Infused with bittersweet memories of Jacobson's parents and friends, this is the story of a writer's beginnings, and of learning to understand who you are before you can become the writer you were meant to be. (336 pages / $24) |