Virginia Woolf (Author)
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Merve Emre (Introducer)
A Contemporary Classics hardcover edition of Virginia Woolf’s classic plea for a
world in which women are free to use their gifts. In this influential extended essay and using powerful images and memorable thought experiments -such as a fictional sister of William Shakespeare, who is as talented as her brother but limited in ways he was not -Woolf analyses the many ways in which women have been held back throughout history and still are in her own time.
Edward St Aubyn (Author)
The Patrick Melrose Novels hilariously dissect the English upper class, conjuring a world of decadence, amorality, greed, snobbery, and cruelty, but never without the possibility of grace. Taken together, they are one of the most thrilling reading experiences in contemporary fiction.
Edward St. Aubyn chronicled the life of Patrick Melrose across five short novels, painting an acrid portrait of a beleaguered and self-loathing world of privilege. Never Mind unfolds over a day and an evening at the family’s chateau in the south of France, where the sadistic and terrifying figure of David Melrose dominates the lives of his rich and unhappy American wife, Eleanor, and their five-year-old son, Patrick.
Bad News opens as Patrick, now twenty-two years old, sets off to collect his father’s ashes from New York, where he will spend a drug-crazed twenty-four hours.
Back in England, Some Hope offers Patrick the possibility of recovery (and the most debauched and riotous dinner party in contemporary fiction).
The Booker-shortlisted Mother’s Milk returns to the family chateau, where Patrick, now married and a father himself, struggles with child rearing, adultery, his mother’s desire for assisted suicide, and the loss of the family home.
At Last, set over the single day of a funeral, is the stunning final volume.
Hanshan (Author)
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Peter Harris (Edited by)
The best of Hanshan's treasured poems—among the earliest of Zen Buddhist poetry, beloved by the Beat Generation—here newly translated by Peter Harris and organised thematically in a beautiful Pocket Poet hardcover. Long ranking among the most inspiring works of world literature, the poems of Hanshan (whose name means Cold Mountain), were written at least twelve centuries ago on trees, rocks, and walls by a semi-mythical Buddhist monk living in the mountains of south-eastern China.
Felix Salten (Author)
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Kurt Wiese (Illustrator)
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Whittaker Chambers (Translator)
Bambi, a Life in the Woods is a 1923 Austrian coming-of-age novel written by Felix Salten - now published as a beautiful hardback edition in the Everyman's Library Children's Classics series.
The novel traces the life of Bambi, a male roe deer, from his birth through childhood, the loss of his mother, the finding of a mate, the lessons he learns from his father, and the experience he gains about the dangers posed by human hunters in the forest. It is also, in its most complete translation, seen as a parable of the dangers and persecution faced by Jews in Europe.
Ha Jin (Author)
The demands of human longing contend with the weight of centuries of custom in
acclaimed author Ha Jin’s Waiting, a novel of unexpected richness and universal resonance. Every summer Lin Kong, a doctor in the Chinese Army, returns to his village to end his loveless arranged marriage with the humble and touchingly loyal Shuyu. Each time, Lin must return to the city to tell Manna Wu, the educated, modern nurse he loves, that they will have to postpone their engagement once again. Caught between the conflicting claims of these two very different women and trapped by a culture in which adultery can ruin lives and careers, Lin has been waiting for eighteen years. This year, he promises will be different
Jonathan Lethem (Author)
Motherless Brooklyn is a compulsively readable riff on the classic noir detective novel. Brooklyn's self-appointed Human Freakshow, Lionel Essrog is an orphan whose Tourettic impulses drive him to rip apart our language in startling and original ways. Together with three other veterans of the St. Vincent's Home for Boys, he works for small-time mobster Frank Minna's limo service cum detective agency. But when Frank is fatally stabbed, Lionel's world is suddenly topsy-turvy, and he must untangle the threads of the case while trying to keep the words straight in his head.
The Fortress of Solitude is the vividly told story of Dylan Ebdus growing up white and motherless in Brooklyn in the 1970s. In a neighbourhood where the entertainments include muggings and games of stoopball, Dylan has one friend, a black teenager, also motherless, named Mingus Rude. Through the knitting and unravelling of the boys' friendship, Lethem creates an overwhelmingly rich and emotionally gripping canvas of race and class, superheroes, gentrification, funk, hip-hop, graffiti tagging, loyalty, and memory.
From the prize-winning author of Motherless Brooklyn, The Fortress of Solitude is a daring, riotous, sweeping novel that spins the tale of two friends and their adventures in late 20th-century America.
Wesley Stace (Edited by)
Variations on a musical theme by a striking range of authors, among them Flaubert, Turgenev, Proust, Nabokov, Katherine Mansfield, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, Amit Chaudhuri, Bernard MacLaverty and Maya Angelou. Wesley Stace's attractive medley embraces musical genres from Virginia Woolf's 'A String Quartet' to Langston Hughes's 'The Blues I'm Playing'. Short stories are interspersed with interludes from longer works - E. M. Forster's Howards End, Ann Patchett's Bel Canto and Vikram Seth's An Equal Music. Here are music lessons, solos and duets, rehearsals and performances - and a whole suite of stories demonstrating that music is indeed the food of love. The perfect marriage of the musical and the literary.
D H Lawrence (Author)
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John Sutherland (Introducer)
In the bleak aftermath of World War I, Constance, Lady Chatterley, is a young woman trapped in an unfulfilling marriage to an aristocrat whose war wounds have left him paralysed. With her husband's encouragement, she enters into a liaison with Oliver Mellors, the gamekeeper on their country estate in Nottinghamshire. As this illicit relationship grows into tenderness, mutual respect and sensual passion, Constance discovers that true fulfilment requires a real connection of both mind and body. Lady Chatterley's Lover shocked its original audience with its vindication of adulterous love across the class divide as well as its explicit descriptions of sex. It retains its power today as a hymn to erotic love and as an impassioned treatise on 'tender-hearted fucking' as a means to salvation from the horrors of war and the sterility of modern life. It is all the more poignant that Lawrence wrote this book - three times over - while he was dying from tuberculosis.
The modern world was not interested in its salvation. Lawrence had Lady Chatterley privately printed in Italy in 1928, but strict obscenity laws in the UK rendered it unpublishable there for more than thirty years.
