NEW RELEASES
"A beguiling series of vignettes, by turns wry, amusing and disturbing, inspired by self-portraits by women artists and reflecting on the images they provoke. An illuminating survey of the author's various identities, in a fractured world, as mother, lover and writer." —Michèle Roberts
"A new genre is born: the short selfie collection! Lively, inventive, compassionate, aching, morally complex and troubling, I loved these self-portraits more than anything I’ve read lately." — Lauren Elkin
“What knocks me out about The Wind That Lays Waste—a novel that starts in the great pause before a storm—is how it delivers exactly that compressed pressurised electricity of a gathering thunderstorm: it sparks and sputters with live-wire tension. The story centres around a reverend who is evangelising across the Argentinian countryside with his teenage daughter, when their car breaks down. This act of God, or fate, leads them to an ageing, atheist mechanic and his young helper. As a long, strangely intimate day passes, curious tensions ebb and flow, until finally the storm breaks over the plains. Perfectly translated by Chris Andrews, this is a book for readers who like that metallic taste and the feeling of the hairs on the back of their necks rising.”—Barbara Epler
Ten stories set in Belfast, laying bare the heartbreak and quiet tragedies that run under the surface of everyday lives. A reclusive cult-rock icon ends his days in the street where he was born; a lonely woman is fascinated by her niqab-wearing neighbours; a husband and wife become enmeshed in the lives of the young couple they pay to do their cleaning and gardening.
"With skill and style, Erskine unpicks the underlying complexity of ordinary lives, the unexpected intricacy of ordinary situations. These are stories about ramification as opposed to redemption; dark, bittersweet and perfectly formed." —Sara Baume
>>Erskine reads from the book.
An exquisite graphic novel about the architect and designer's life and work in the 1920s on her exemplary Modernist Villa E-1027.
>>Visit Villa E-1027
It is 1939. Jan Karski, a Polish student, enjoys a life of parties and pleasure. Then war breaks out and his familiar world is destroyed. Now he must live under a new identity, in the resistance. And, in a secret mission that could change the course of the war, he must risk his own life to try and save those of millions.
"Astonishing, thrilling, morally grave, electrifying." —Independent
In 2014 I moved back to the United States after living abroad for fourteen years, my whole adult life, because my father was dying from cancer. Six weeks after I arrived in New York City, my father died. Six months after that I learned that I had inherited the gene that would cause me cancer too. When Jean Hannah Edelstein's world overturned she was forced to confront some of the big questions in life: How do we cope with grief? How does living change when we realise we're not invincible? Does knowing our likely fate make it harder or easier to face the future?
"A most magnificent, beautifully written memoir." —NIna Stibbe
A collection that gathers together Pulitzer Prize-winning short fiction, including 'Pale Horse, Pale Rider', where a young woman lies in a fever during the influenza epidemic, her childhood memories mingling with fears for her fiance on his way to war, and 'Noon Wine', a haunting story of tragedy and scandal on a small dairy farm in Texas.
"Katherine Anne Porter's short stories are unsurpassed in modern fiction." —Robert Penn
"Porter writes English of a purity and precision almost unique in contemporary fiction." —Edmund Wilson
Surreal short stories set in the swamps of Florida, often with ecological issues underpinning their plots.
"Russell’s writing inhabits its own universe, with metaphor and simile taking us to strange new places; we are led by the hand and find ourselves completely submerged, only later to come to, groggily, in our own world." —Guardian
An ambitious noble and his three serving men travel through the Irish countryside in the stifling summer of 1348, using the advantage of the plague which has collapsed society to buy up large swathes of property and land. They come upon Nobber, a tiny town, whose only living habitants seem to be an egotistical bureaucrat, his volatile wife, a naked blacksmith, and a beautiful Gaelic hostage. Meanwhile, a band of marauding Gaels are roaming around, using the confusion of the sickness to pillage and reclaim lands that once belonged to them. As these groups converge upon the town, the inhabitants, who up until this point have been under strict curfew, begin to stir from their dwellings, demanding answers from the intruders. A deadly stand-off emerges from which no one will escape unscathed.
"Nobber is hallucinatory and sly, conjuring a densely strange and savagely captivating world. There are lots of novels, and there are lots of novels that are all much alike, but there is nothing like Nobber." —Colin Barrett
Are we spending more time at work than we would have 50 years ago? Are we sleeping less? How has the Internet affected the way we use our spare time? Everything we do takes time, and it feels like our lives are busier than ever before. Yet a detailed look at our daily activities reveals some surprising truths about the social and economic structure of the world we live in.
>>Research!
A wonderful illustrated book of evolution, the concertina pages of which fold out to a frieze as long as a triceratops.
>>Other work by Dupont.
"Accessible, irreverent and entertaining, Bhaskar Sunkara has delivered a razor-sharp guide to socialism's history, transformative promise, and path to power. This book also serves as an irresistible invitation to join in building that power, and in shaping the radically democratic future that is our best hope in these make-or-break times." —Naomi Klein
"From one of the brightest stars of the American left, essential reading for anyone who wants to build a new society based on people's needs, not profit for the elite." —Owen Jones
A remarkably hopeful look at the coming of beneficent AI and their partnership with humans as part of an organic planetary consciousness, 'Gaia'.
"To the critic the work of art is simply a suggestion for a new work of his own." Arguably the most complete exploration of his aesthetic thinking, and certainly the most entertaining, in this book Wilde seeks to demolish the supposed boundary between art and criticism. Wilde champions idleness and contemplation as prerequisites to artistic cultivation. For Wilde, criticism is not subject to the work of art, but can in fact precede it: the artist cannot create without first engaging his or her critical faculties.
A housewife takes up bodybuilding and sees radical changes to her physique - which her workaholic husband fails to notice. A boy waits at a bus stop, mocking businessmen struggling to keep their umbrellas open in a typhoon - until an old man shows him that they hold the secret to flying. A woman working in a clothing boutique waits endlessly on a customer who won't come out of the fitting room—and who may or may not be human. A newlywed notices that her husband's features are beginning to slide around his face—to match her own.
Winner of the Kenzaburo Oe Prize and the Akutagawa Prize.
Stories of the uncanny, death, sex, longing, murder, &c, exploring the tense dynamic between lust and revulsion.
Max is asked to mail a letter for his mother. As he walks through his neighborhood in search of a mailbox, he encounters all sorts of interesting things like falling leaves dancing in the wind, skyscrapers towering in the distance, and junk being piled into a rubbish truck. All around him adults hurry on their various errands, too busy to appreciate these wondrous details. His walk through the city leads Max to discover that the mailbox is actually right next door to his own house.
A woman fights to retain her sense of self amidst the chaos of work, motherhood and alternative universes.
Beautifully written evocations of the rural Kentucky of Berry's childhood.
'The Lark Ascending', Ralph Vaughan Williams's 'pastoral romance for orchestra' was premiered in 1921. Over the course of the twentieth century this piece of music, perhaps more than any other, worked its way into the collective consciousness to seemingly define a mythical concept of the English countryside: babbling brooks, skylarks, hayricks. But the birth and legacy of the composition are much more complex than this simplified pastoral vision suggests. The landscape celebrated as unsullied and ripe with mystique is a living, working, and occasionally rancorous environment—not an unaffected idyll. On a chronological journey that takes him from postwar poets and artists to the late twentieth century and the free party scene which emerged from acid house and travelling communities, Richard King explores how Britain's history and identity has been shaped by the mysterious relationship between music and nature.
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