Recent Vintage Classics
Jacqueline Harpman (Author)
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Ros Schwartz (Translator)
'THE ’90S GENDER SWAP NOVEL YOU NEED TO READ NOW' (NEW YORK TIMES), FROM THE AUTHOR OF I WHO HAVE NEVER KNOWN MEN
There’s a voice in Aline’s head: a voice that wants out.
Brash, boisterous and sexually adventurous, this voice seems to be the antithesis of Aline, a prim literature professor for whom each day promises to be as quiet and conventional as the last.
That is until, after thirty-five years of imprisonment, her alter ego breaks free.
Taking on a life of his own, Orlanda – Aline’s second self – slips into the taut, rugged body of a young man. As Aline continues unaware, Orlanda follows, dragging gleeful chaos in his wake, vowing to leave both their existences forever altered.
A bewitching fable, an androgynous dream, Orlanda is one woman’s reckoning with all the hidden sides of her soul.
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READER REVIEWS - JOIN THE ORLANDA OBSESSION:
'Hilarious, life affirming, haunting…truly perfect in prose, plot, and concept. Just wow'
'A powerful novel, witty, wicked and teasing'
'It’s the perfect book'
'This is the second book I've read by her and it's another masterpiece'
'Reading this has confirmed Jacqueline Harpman as one of my favourite writers I’ve ever encountered'
Marlen Haushofer (Author)
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Amanda Prantera (Translator)
An Austrian housewife sits in her loft intent on her drawings of birds and insects.
The loft is a retreat where she can work undisturbed. It is also a retreat from her dull and dissatisfied husband, a man who sighs unhappily even when she sneezes. Their grown-up children are living independent lives and the house is very quiet. Her dreams are filled with domestic drudgery.
Then one day, a package arrives containing extracts from the narrator's diary, written twenty years before. Back then she had been sent away to a remote cottage in a bid to 'cure' her from unexplained sudden deafness. More mysterious packages containing old diary entries arrive. Who is sending them? And what did happened all those years ago in the forest?
'A thrilling novel... What gives this book its tremendous power? First the voice is charming, with a skittish beauty throughout... But there is also disarming honesty, and a lack of vanity, which appeals as only truth can’ John Self, Guardian
TRANSLATED BY AMANDA PRANTERA
Virginia Woolf (Author)
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Carol Ann Duffy (Introducer)
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valentine cunningham (Introducer)
Celebrate the 100th birthday of a groundbreaking novel with this very special hardback based on the first edition published by the Hogarth Press.
Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.
Clarissa Dalloway is preparing to give a party. Over the course of one day, as she readies her house, Clarissa is flooded with memories and re-examines the choices she has made over the course of her life.
Virginia Woolf started writing Mrs Dalloway in 1922 as a short story. Its publication in 1925 was met with modest commercial success but the novel went on to become one of the most vital works of literature of the last century.
The text of this centenary edition of Mrs Dalloway is based on the original Hogarth Press edition, published by Virginia and Leonard Woolf on 14 May 1925. The dust jacket features the original cover created by Virginia Woolf ’s sister, Vanessa Bell, for the Hogarth Press. Beneath the cover ‘deep rust’ boards printed in gilt take inspiration from the finish of the first trade edition.
'Sheer magic' Daily Mail
'One of the most moving, revolutionary artworks of the twentieth century' Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours
Simone de Beauvoir (Author)
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Lauren Elkin (Translator)
Laurence is a woman who appears to live an ideal life.
Weekends in the country, weekdays in Paris – her life features all the trappings of 1960s French bourgeoisie. She has money, a handsome husband, two daughters and a lover. She also has a successful career as an advertising copywriter, though her mind unbidden writes copy while she’s at home, and dreams of domesticity in the office.
But Laurence is a woman whose experience of life has always been overwritten by the expectation of perfection. It is only when her 10-year-old daughter, Catherine, starts to vocalise her despair about the unfairness of the world that Laurence begins to act, finally grappling with a life that prizes image over truth.
TRANSLATED BY LAUREN ELKIN
Jeanette Winterson (Author)
A beautiful hardback edition of Jeanette Winterson's explosive first novel: a gripping coming-of-age story, a queer romance, a modern classic.
‘I love her.’
‘Then you do not love the Lord.’
‘Yes, I love both of them.’
‘You cannot.’
'I do.''
This is the story of Jeanette, born to be one of God's elect: adopted by a fanatical Pentecostal family and ablaze with her own zeal for the scriptures, she seems perfectly suited for the life of a missionary. But then she converts Melanie, and realises she loves this woman almost as much as she loves the Lord. How on Earth could her Church called that passion Unnatural?
Both a groundbreaking coming-of-age novel and a pioneering work of autofiction, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit goes beyond facts into the deepest truths. Searing and tender, playful and provocative, it is a portrait of the artist as a young evangelist, re-writing her own Bible.
'Witty... extraordinary and exhilarating' The Times
'She is a master of her material, a writer in whom great talent abides' Vanity Fair
'Many consider her to be the best living writer in this language... In her hands, words are fluid, radiant, humming' Evening Standard
Vintage Quarterbound Classics: Bound to be beautiful
Josephine Baker (Author)
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Anam Zafar (Translator)
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Sophie Lewis (Translator)
Immerse yourself in joy and glamour: this is the dazzling Josephine Baker in her own words.
‘She was a beacon of joy and fellowship and her smile…reaches out to us across the years’ Financial Times
‘A delightful, nourishing read’ Guardian
‘Josephine Baker certainly shook things up. This memoir demonstrates - vividly - the pleasure she took in doing it’ Washington Post
Funny, candid and unconventional: the wildly famous but elusive Josephine Baker tells her own story in this enchanting memoir. Baker took Paris by storm in the 1920s, dazzling audiences with her humour, beauty and effervescence on stage. She became an icon. Hemingway, Cocteau and Picasso admired her; Shirley Bassey adored her. It was said she strolled the streets of Paris with her pet cheetah who wore a diamond collar.
Later, as one of the most recognisable women in the world, she became a spy for the French resistance, her celebrity working as her cover. She was awarded the Légion d’honneur for military service. After the war she became increasingly interested in civil rights, and in 1963 she spoke at the March on Washington alongside Martin Luther King. All this from a girl of mixed heritage, born in Missouri to a poor mother and a father she did not know.
Formed from a series of conversations with the French journalist Marcel Sauvage over a period of more than twenty years, and now translated into English for the first time, this gorgeous book offers an insight into one of the most beguiling figures of the twentieth century.
‘The most sensational woman anyone ever saw’ Ernest Hemingway
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY IJEOMA OLUO
TRANSLATED BY ANAM ZAFAR AND SOPHIE LEWIS
Jacqueline Harpman (Author)
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Ros Schwartz (Translator)
SISTERHOOD. SECRETS. SURVIVAL.
Discover the haunting, heart-breaking post-apocalyptic TikTok sensation, now available in a beautiful hardback gift edition.
Deep underground, thirty-nine women are kept in isolation in a cage. Above ground, a world awaits. Has it been abandoned? Devastated by a virus?
Watched over by guards, the women have no memory of how they got there, no notion of time, and only vague recollection of their lives before. But, as the burn of electric light merges day into night and numberless years pass, a young girl - the fortieth prisoner - sits alone an outcast in the corner.
Soon she will show herself to be the key to the others' escape and survival in the strange world that awaits them above ground. The woman who will never know men.
WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY SOPHIE MACKINTOSH, BOOKER PRIZE-LONGLISTED AUTHOR OF THE WATER CURE
Discover the reader obsession.
**Orlanda, the next sensation from Jacquline Harpman, is available now**
Roberto Bolaño (Author)
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY CHRIS POWER
‘A master of the short form’ Independent
Wide-ranging, suggestive, and ever-daring, Roberto Bolaño's short stories map out the dark terrain that he would go on to explore in his novellas and epic novels.
From melancholic portraits of exile and its folklore to a rogue’s gallery of desperate characters futilely attempting to unearth the animating secrets of the world, each of Bolaño’s short fictions adds yet another door, a window, a secret passage onto the sinister, eerie universe that Bolaño brought to life across his body of work.
Bringing together Last Evenings on Earth, The Return and The Insufferable Gaucho, as well as Bolaño’s posthumously published stories, this new book marks the first time these fictions have been collected in one edition, allowing for a major reappraisal of the vital place that the short story commands for Bolaño’s literary legacy.
‘Bolaño was a flat-out genius, one of the greatest writers of our time’ Paul Auster
‘Bolaño was a game changer: his field was politics, poetry and melancholia . . . and his writing was always unparalleled’ Mariana Enríquez
Emmanuel Carrère (Author)
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Lanie Goodman (Translator)
FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF THE ADVERSARY
One morning, a man shaves off his long-worn moustache, hoping to amuse his wife and friends. But when nobody notices, or pretends not to have noticed, what started out as a simple trick turns to terror. As doubt and denial bristle, and every aspect of his life threatens to topple into madness – a disturbing solution comes into view, taking us on a dramatic flight across the world.
Translated by Lanie Goodman
Elegant novellas-in-translation, VINTAGE EDITIONS celebrate the audacity and ambition of the written word, transporting readers to wherever in the world literary innovation may be found.
