A. Igoni Barrett was born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, in 1979 and lives in Lagos. He is a winner of the 2005 BBC World Service short story competition, the recipient of a Chinua Achebe Center Fellowship, a Norman Mailer Center Fellowship, and a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Residency. His short story collection, Love is Power, or Something Like That, was published in 2013. In 2014 he was named on the Africa39 list of sub-Saharan African writers under 40. Blackass is his first novel.

A. Igoni Barrett

The short life of A.J.A. Symons (1900-41) was described by his biographer as an intricate and largely harmless confidence trick. His many interests included the collection of musical boxes and rare books as well as the study and practice of forgery; they left him time to edit an anthology of Edwardian verse and compose studies of H.M. Stanley and other notable figures. He is remembered for The Quest for Corvo, one of the most remarkable biographies ever written, and for co-founding the Wine and Food Society.

A. J. A. Symons

A. J. Liebling, born in Manhattan in 1904, joined the staff of the New Yorker in 1935 and contributed innumerable articles to the magazine throughout his lifetime, on subjects ranging from food to boxing and France to horse racing. As a war correspondent during the Second World War, he reported from France, England and Algeria, and participated in the Normandy landings. In later life he married the writer Jean Stafford, his third wife. He died in 1963.

A. J. Liebling

A. J. Rosen is an author of YA fantasy novels and is an ambassador for Wattpad, known as @agatharoza. Entwined is her first novel.

A. J. Rosen

A. K. Davidson

A. O. Scott has been a film critic at the New York Times since 2000. His writing has appeared in many other publications, including the New York Review of Books, Slate, the New Yorker and the Nation. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism in 2010, Scott is currently Distinguished Professor of Film Criticism at Wesleyan University. He lives with his family in Brooklyn, New York. 
 
@aoscott

A. O. Scott

A.S. Byatt (1936-2023) was a novelist, short-story writer and critic of international renown. Her novels include Possession (winner of the Booker Prize 1990), the Frederica Quartet and The Children’s Book, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. She was appointed CBE in 1990 and DBE in 1999, and was awarded the Erasmus Prize 2016 for her ‘inspiring contribution to life writing’ and the Pak Kyongni Prize 2017. In 2018 she received the Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award.

A. S. Byatt

A. T. Williams won the George Orwell Prize for Political Writing in 2013 for his book A Very British Killing: The Death of Baha Mousa. He lives in Warwickshire.

A. T. Williams

A. W. Chase

Dubbed ‘The new queen of spy fiction’ by the Guardian newspaper, and ‘the real thing’ by the Washington Post, A.C. 'Ava' Glass is the CWA Dagger-shortlisted author of Alias Emma (The Chase), The Traitor and The Trap. The Traitor was a 2023 Richard and Judy Bookclub pick. Alias Emma was a Barnes and Noble book of the month. A former crime reporter and communications consultant, for five years Ava worked closely with spies. Her time in that world fascinated her, and the people she met back then inspire every book she writes.

A.C. Glass

A.E. Housman

Arthur Edward Waite was the designer and co-creator of the now famous Rider Waite Tarot deck. 
 
An American-born British poet and scholarly mystic, his strong interest in all esoteric matters - divination, magic, Kabbalism, alchemy and Freemasony - led to him penning a number of books. These include the Key to the Tarot, The Book of Ceremonial Magic and A New Encyclopedia of Freemasony.

A.E. Waite

A.E. Warren is the author of the Tomorrow's Ancestors series, which consists of Subject Twenty-One, The Hidden Base, The Fourth Species and The Final Rising. 
 
After spending eight years working as a lawyer, she began to write in the evenings and early mornings as a form of escapism from life in a very small cubicle with lots of files. She self-published her first novels in her spare time, which were picked up by Del Rey UK which is the science fiction/fantasy imprint of Penguin Random House. 
 
 She is an avid reader, occasional gamer and fair-weather runner. She lives in the UK with her husband, daughter and hopefully, one day, a wise border terrier named Austen.

A.E. Warren

A.G.D. Maran

A.J. Ayer

A.J. Cronin

A K Benedict writes crime and speculative fiction in a room filled with clowns, mannequins and Doctor Who figures. Her first novel, The Beauty of Murder, was nominated for an eDunnit award and is in development for a major 8-part TV series by Company Pictures. Her second, Jonathan Dark or The Evidence of Ghosts, came out in February 2016. She's written Torchwood audio dramas for Big Finish and her short stories have featured in anthologies including Great British Horror and Best British Short Stories. She lives in St Leonards-on-Sea with her dog, Dame Margaret Rutherford.

A.K.Benedict

A. L. Kennedy has twice been selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists and has won a host of other awards – including the Costa Book of the Year for her novel Day. She lives in Essex.

A.L. Kennedy

A.M. Ellis is a speculative fiction author and lover of everything steeped in myth and mystery. Her stories often lean into diverse voices, not only in her identity as a Black woman, but in exploring neurodivergence and mental health. A proud introvert and nostalgic gamer, she lives in Maryland, USA, with her husband and three children.

A.M. Ellis

A.N. Wilson was born in 1950 and educated at Rugby and New College, Oxford. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he holds a prominent position in the world of literature and journalism. He is an award-winning biographer and a celebrated novelist, winning prizes for much of his work. He lives in North London.

A.N. Wilson

A. T. Emerald lives with her husband and baby daughter in Nottinghamshire. She discovered her love of writing in 2020 and has not shut up about enemies to lovers ever since. She loves iced matcha, torrid love confessions with knives pressed to throats (fictional, of course) and does not accept bills for any therapy her books might incur.

A.T. Emerald

A.W. Priest

A.B.C. Merriman-Labor was a barrister, writer and munitions worker born in Freetown, Sierra Leone in 1877. His published works include A Series of Lectures on the Negro Race and The Story of the African Slave in a Nutshell. He also edited two editions of the Handbook of Sierra Leone. He arrived in the UK in 1904 to study law. In 1907, he organised a centenary commemoration of the abolition of the slave trade in Westminster Abbey. He later embarked on an 'entertainment-lecture' tour called Life and Scenes in Britain, travelling across thousands of miles of West, South West and Central Africa, which he expanded on to create Britons Through Negro Spectacles.

ABC Merriman-Labor

AJ Cronin

AJ Molloy

Aabria Iyengar is an American actress and author.

Aabria Iyengar

Aaliya Jaleel is a freelance illustrator, designer, and visual development artist, currently majoring in Animation at the University of Texas at Dallas. She is also the illustrator of Under My Hijab and Muslim Girls Rise. You can visit her online at www.aaliyamj.com.

Aaliya Jaleel

Aaron Allston

After more than fifteen years of experience as a clinical psychotherapist, Dr Aaron Balick has taken the amazing insights from psychology and psychotherapy out of the consultation room and made them accessible to the wider world. 
 
He has been an ‘agony uncle’ for many years for both CBBC and BBC Radio 1, as well as on television, including BBC Worldwide, BBC 3 and BBC Learning.

Aaron Balick

Aaron Carroll

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Simone Weil

An icon of twentieth-century French philosophy, Simone Weil was described by André Gide as 'the patron saint of all outsiders' and by Albert Camus as 'the only great spirit of our time'. In this, one of her last and best-known works, she offers a vision of what human life could be - where the needs of our bodies are met and the needs of the soul, too, are better known and nurtured. 
 
Written in 1943, when France was occupied and Weil was working in the offices of the Free France in London, The Need for Roots responds to a plea both timely and timeless: what can satisfy the cry of our hearts for justice? In the same decade that saw the UN Declaration of Human Rights, Weil argues that rights alone are inadequate to the task - and encourages her contemporaries not to repeat the mistakes of the French Revolution and the malaise of modern life. The alternative she offers has intrigued and inspired generations of readers since.

The Need for Roots

Prelude to a Declaration of Obligations towards the Human Being

Liang Qichao

The power, anger and fluency of Liang Qichao's writings make him one of the towering figures in modern Chinese literature. He saw his great, almost unmanageable task as an attempt to write China into the new era - to provide an ancient country, devastated by civil war and foreign predators with the intellectual equipment to renew itself. China could only recover through a clear-sighted, informed understanding of its enemies - and by engaging in a thorough-going self-critique. Then China would be able to expel its invaders, reform its society and become a great power once more. 
 
Liang said that he wrote from an 'ice-drinker's studio', implying that underneath his dispassionate tone lay an ardour and passion which only ice could cool. This selection of pieces shows Liang's extraordinary range and the burning sense of mission which drove him on. Blending together Confucianism, Buddhism and the Western Enlightenment, Liang's ideas about nation, democracy and morality had a profound impact on Chinese visions of the political order, though the China that eventually emerged from the further disasters of the 1930s and 1940s would be a very different one.

Thoughts From the Ice-Drinker's Studio

Essays on China and the World

Nicolaus Copernicus

Galileo Galilei

Johannes Kepler

René Descartes

Isaac Newton

'How great, then, must be the incomprehensible space all the way to the furthest fixed stars? How wide and immense must be the depth of that fantastical sphere?' 
 
In the late fifteenth century, it was believed that the earth stood motionless at the centre of a small, ordered cosmos. Just over two centuries later, everything had changed. Not only was the sun the centre of creation, but the entire practice of science had been revolutionised. This is the story of that astonishing transformation, told through the words of the astronomers and mathematicians at its heart. Bringing together excerpts from the works and letters of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, Newton and others for the first time, The Dawn of Modern Cosmology is the definitive record of one of the great turning points in human history. 
 
Edited with Translations, Notes and an Introduction by Aviva Rothman

The Dawn of Modern Cosmology

From Copernicus to Newton

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While on a year of study in Paris in 1927, Liebling acquired the friendship and tutelage of Yves Mirande, 'one of the last great gastronomes of France', beginning a joyous apprenticeship in the fine art of eating. Told with gluttonous joie de vivre, Between Meals expounds on the delights and pitfalls of a life dedicated to food, from bad rosé ('a pinkish cross between No-Cal and vinegar') to lobster a l'Américaine ('I have never personally inquired into the mysteries of its fabrication; I am content to love a masterpiece of painting without asking how the artist mixed his colours'), to a memorable stay at a Swiss slimming clinic with a masseur named Sprudli. Witty, grouchy and full of gusto, Between Meals has the exquisite sensuality of a Michelin-starred meal and the delicious, catty wit of the perfect dinner guest. It is a love song to food, wine and Paris. 
 
With an introduction by James Salter.

Between Meals

An Appetite for Paris

Ibn Hajar al-'Asqalani

Six hundred years ago, Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani - an esteemed Islamic scholar and poet - survived the bubonic plague, which took the lives of three of his children, as well as millions of others throughout the medieval world. Holding up an eerie mirror to our own time, al-Asqalani reflects on the origins of plagues, from those of the Prophet Muhammad's era to the Black Death of his own. 
 
Weaving together accounts of evil jinn, religious stories, medical manuals, poetry, and the author's personal experiences, Merits of the Plague is a profound reminder that with tragedy comes one of the noblest expressions of our humanity: the practice of compassion, patience and care for those around us.

Merits of the Plague

Carter G. Woodson

New to Penguin Classics, one of the most influential works of Black social criticism ever written 
 
The Mis-education of the Negro is today considered one of the most influential works by 'the father of Black history', Carter G. Woodson, setting the table for generations of antiracist teaching pioneered by Black educators. 
 
As both student and teacher, Woodson witnessed the distortions of Black life in the history and literature taught in schools and universities. He believed that there was a relationship between these distortions and the violence that circumscribed Black life in the material world, declaring, "There would be no lynching it if did not start in the schoolroom." Mixing social criticism, history, theory and memoir, The Mis-education of the Negro argues cogently that students, teachers, and leaders needed to be educated in a manner that was accountable to Black experiences and lived realities, both past and present.

The Mis-Education of the Negro

Michel Foucault

The final major work by one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century 
 
In the fourth and final volume of his far-reaching and influential study of human sexuality, Foucault turns his attention to early Christianity, exploring how ancient ideas of pleasure were modified into the notion of the 'flesh'. Ranging over marriage, procreation and the concept of virginity as a divine state, Foucault brilliantly shows how a fledgling religion altered and defined the Western history of desire. Confessions of the Flesh brings to a conclusion one of the twentieth century's seminal works. 
 
'A thinker of immense power ... posing questions that still perplex us' The Times Literary Supplement 
 
'Required reading ... The appearance of the fourth volume is the most significant event in the world of Foucault scholarship in 20 years ... Essential' Los Angeles Review of Books

The History of Sexuality: 4

Confessions of the Flesh

Dionne Brand

A man with his head in the clouds, an artist who has visions, is shot dead after a domestic disturbance. His partner struggles with her feelings of responsibility, and whole relationships, whole lives, the entire multicultural city of Toronto, swirl around the fatal moment. Outsiders settle in the unfamiliar landscape of a new country, uncomfortable with the place and its people, uncomfortable sometimes with themselves. Still earlier, the poet discovers herself as speaker and subject, in a joyful, imagistic, rigorous and ruthless reclamation of the poetic. 
 
With a critical introduction by scholar and theorist Christina Sharpe, Nomenclature is the searing new volume spanning a decades-long career, from 1982-2022, and gathering the new and collected poems of one of Canada's most honoured, significant and bestselling poets. Here, Dionne Brand bears powerful witness to the seemingly unending wars, the ascendance of fundamentalisms and the nameless casualties of the current era, but also to the rich textures of human life and human feeling that, in the face of this world's violences, endure and flourish - and that might reach beyond the known to some other, possibly future, time and place. 
 
It is a master work, classic and living, and a record of one of the great writers of our age.

Nomenclature

New and Collected Poems

Robert Burton

The Anatomy of Melancholy is the vast and only work by Robert Burton, the seventeenth-century English priest and scholar. It 'opens and cuts up' the condition of melancholy, or depression, as we know it today, and in doing so explores a dizzying range of additional topics, including goblins, beauty, the geography of America, digestion, the passions, alcohol and kissing. Burton believed that reading was a cure for melancholy, and so the book itself - one of the most unique and uncategorizable works of all time - can be seen as a tonic for the very condition it describes.

The Anatomy of Melancholy

René Girard

René Girard eludes easy categories, bridging the fields of literary criticism, anthropology, sociology, history, religion and theology. Influencing such writers as J. M. Coetzee and Milan Kundera, his insight into contagious violence looks ever more prophetic and relevant seven years after his death. In many ways he is the thinker for our modern world of social media and herd behaviour. 
 
In this newly selected collection of writings, Cynthia L. Haven has created an approachable anthology of his work, addressing Girard's thoughts on the nature of desire, human imitation and rivalry, the causes of conflict and violence, the deep structure of religion and cultural subjects like opera and theatre. 
 
Girard spoke to his times in language that was engaging, accessible and often controversial. A long-time friend and colleague, Haven shines a spotlight on his role as a public intellectual and profound theorist, inviting a new generation to his corpus.

All Desire is a Desire for Being

Lucille Clifton

Blessing the Boats draws together poems from across Lucille Clifton's career, showcasing the stunning simplicity and grace with which she addressed the whole of human experience: birth, death, children, family, illness, sexuality and injustice in antebellum and contemporary America. Hers is a poetry that is passionate and wise, not afraid to rage or whisper; a poetry that speaks unparalleled candour and empathy to the personal, the political and the spiritual.

Blessing The Boats

Hannah Dawson

The Penguin Book of Feminist Writing selects writing from across time and throughout the world, creating a treasure-trove of the most important feminist thought alongside surprising and delightful fiction, poetry and diaries, celebrating the multiplicity of feminist voices that have emerged over the centuries. 
 
Beginning in the fifteenth century with Christine de Pizan, who imagined a City of Ladies that would serve as a refuge from the harassment of men, this book goes beyond the usual white, western story. The writers in this anthology ask questions about class, capitalism and colonialism, and other axes of oppression that intersect with sexism. Inside, we find writers like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who declared in 1848 the self-evident truth 'that all men and women are created equal', alongside Sojourner Truth, born into slavery in New York, who asked in 1851 'and ain't I a woman?' 
 
Put together by a world-leading historian of ideas and a feminist, The Penguin Book of Feminist Writing is both a history of thought - readers will find incisive and provocative selections from Mary Wollstonecraft, Virginia Woolf, Susan Sontag, Audre Lorde and over one hundred other pioneering thinkers - and a voyage of discovery, highlighting lesser-anthologised thinkers, like Juana Inés de la Cruz's seventeenth-century philosophical satire of 'misguided men', or the "poet of Palestine" Fadwa Tuqan's mountainous journeys towards self-knowledge and revolution. 
 
The product of many years of research and reading, The Penguin Book of Feminist Writing is both a deeply considered introduction to feminist thought and an abundance of riches to read and keep throughout a lifetime.

The Penguin Book of Feminist Writing

George Orwell

Today, George Orwell is perhaps most famous for his iconic novels - Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm - but in his own time it was his remarkable nonfiction writing which drew most attention. Kind-hearted, intelligent, often funny, occasionally indignant, always insightful: his essays are some of the best ever written. Among others, this selection includes 'Shooting an Elephant', 'Such, Such Were the Joys' and 'Some Thoughts on the Common Toad'.

Shooting an Elephant

Anna Julia Cooper

The Portable Anna Julia Cooper will introduce a new generation of readers to an educator, public intellectual and community activist whose prescient insights and eloquent prose underlie some of the most important developments in modern American intellectual thought and African-American social and political activism. 
 
This volume brings together, for the first time, Anna Julia Cooper's major collection of essays, A Voice from the South, along with several previously unpublished poems, plays, journalism and selected correspondences, including over thirty previously unpublished letters between Anna Julia Cooper and W. E. B. Du Bois.

The Portable Anna Julia Cooper

Saul Bellow

In the mid-1970s, Saul Bellow visited Israel and To Jerusalem and Back is his account of his time there. Immersing himself in its landscape and culture, he records the opinions, passions and dreams of Israelis of varying viewpoints &ndash; from Prime Minister Rabin, novelist Amos Oz and the editor of an Arab-language newspaper to a kibbutznik escaped from the Warsaw ghetto and the barber at Bellow&rsquo;s hotel. Through meditations steeped in history and literature he adds his own reflections on being Jewish in the twentieth century. Bellow&rsquo;s exploration of a beautiful and troubled city is a powerful testament to the unique spirit and challenges of Israel, its history and its future.

To Jerusalem and Back

Harry Crews

1935, Bacon County, Georgia. The bite of the Great Depression was beginning to be felt in the rest of America, but its teeth had been in Bacon County for years. Here one of America's most original storytellers, Harry Crews, was born in a sharecropper's cabin at the end of a dirt road. A Childhood is his memoir of that time - his first years of life - and that place: the poor soil and the sickness, the blood feuds and the faith healers, the ghosts and the shopping catalogues. 
 
A profound vision of the rural South that resounds with the violence of poverty and the tenderness of kinship, A Childhood is a true American classic.

A Childhood

The Biography of a Place

Peter Kropotkin

'Don't compete! - competition is always injurious to the species, and you have plenty of resources to avoid it!' 
 
Welcome to the anarchist history of the world. In this lively, provocative work, Peter Kropotkin argues that 'mutual aid' is a natural instinct in all of us, animal and human. Cooperation, reciprocity, support: these, for Kropotkin, are the overlooked foundations of our history. 
 
From the earliest days of evolution through to artisanal guilds, indigenous nomads and even the Royal National Lifeboat Association, it is a pragmatic, mutually beneficial bond to our fellow humans that has allowed us to survive. In this, Kropotkin challenges all the major orthodoxies of his age, from individualism and social Darwinism to Marxist theories of the saviour state. Instead, these essays insist that a better life for all of us - and our planet - begins when we reject competition, and embrace the local, the mutual and the collective.

Mutual Aid

A Factor of Evolution

James Baldwin

'These essays ... live and grow in the mind' James Campbell, Independent 
 
Being a writer, says James Baldwin in this searing collection of essays, requires 'every ounce of stamina he can summon to attempt to look on himself and the world as they are'. His seminal 1961 follow-up to Notes on a Native Son shows him responding to his times and exploring his role as an artist with biting precision and emotional power: from polemical pieces on racial segregation and a journey to 'the Old Country' of the Southern states, to reflections on figures such as Ingmar Bergman and André Gide, and on the first great conference of African writers and artists in Paris. 
 
'Brilliant...accomplished...strong...vivid...honest...masterly' The New York Times 
 
'A bright and alive book, full of grief, love and anger' Chicago Tribune

Nobody Knows My Name

More Notes Of A Native Son

C L R James

In 1791, inspired by the ideals of the French Revolution, the slaves of San Domingo rose in revolt. Despite invasion by a series of British, Spanish and Napoleonic armies, their twelve-year struggle led to the creation of Haiti, the first independent black republic outside Africa. Only three years later, the British and Americans ended the Atlantic slave trade. 
 
In this outstanding example of vivid, committed and empathetic historical analysis, C. L. R. James illuminates these epoch-making events. He explores the appalling economic realities of the Caribbean economy, the roots of the world's only successful slave revolt and the utterly extraordinary former slave - Toussaint L'Ouverture - who led them. Explicitly written as part of the fight to end colonialism in Africa, The Black Jacobins put the slaves themselves centre stage, boldly forging their own destiny against nearly impossible odds. It remains one of the essential texts for understanding the Caribbean - and the region's inextricable links with Europe, Africa and the Americas.

The Black Jacobins

Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution

Ernesto Che Guevara

Che Guevara was an inveterate letter writer and diarist throughout his short but extraordinary life. His letters and diaries are those of a master narrator, characterized by a brutal honesty, a remarkable lack of ego, a razor-sharp wit, an iron will and a great capacity to express his love and affection for his closest friends and family. 
 
This selection of Che Guevara's correspondence, beginning with letters penned in his early travels around Latin America as a medical student, shows how he polished his unique style over the years. This selection maps the emergence of a dedicated revolutionary and original political thinker from the wide-eyed young Argentine who set out to discover Latin America. Covering the entirety of Che's life, from his famous motorcycle journey around South America to the Cuban Revolutionary War, from the setting-up of the pioneering communist state of Cuba to his revolutionary travels to the Congo and Bolivia. But it also reveals a more intimate, personal side to Che, including his letters to his mother, wife and children. 
 
In one of his last letters to his young children, Che advised them to 'always be capable of feeling deeply any injustice committed against anyone, anywhere in the world. This is the most beautiful quality in a revolutionary.'

I Embrace You With All My Revolutionary Fervor

Letters 1947-1967

Louise Glück

For the past fifty years, Louise Glück has been a major force in modern poetry, distinguished as much for the restless intelligence, wit and intimacy of her poetic voice as for her development of a particular form: the book-length sequence of poems. This volume brings together the twelve collections Glück has published to date, offering readers the opportunity to become immersed in the artistry and vision of one of the world's greatest poets. 
 
From the allegories of The Wild Iris to the myth-making of Averno; the oneiric landscapes of The House on Marshland to the questing of Faithful and Virtuous Night - each of Glück's collections looks upon the events of an ordinary life and finds within them scope for the transcendent; each wields its archetypes to puncture the illusions of the self. Across her work, elements are reiterated but endlessly transfigured - Persephone, a copper beech, a mother and father and sister, a garden, a husband and son, a horse, a dog, a field on fire, a mountain. Taken together, the effect is like a shifting landscape seen from above, at once familiar and unspeakably profound.

Poems

1962–2020

Saghïmbay Orozbaq uulu

'I am a steel-fanged lion, a dragon ready to pounce, a mighty poplar with golden branches rising up to the sky' 
 
The bard Saghïmbay Orozbaq uulu composed his oral telling of the great Central Asian Manas epic in the early twentieth century, although it draws on far older sources. This vivid episode from his narrative tells the bravura story of an uncertain new khan, Boqmurun, who holds a great feast to commemorate his predecessor, Kökötöy. From east and west, warriors and their turbulent retinues come to compete in horse races, jousting and wrestling, and soon insults are hurled and scores settled violently. Yet none can beat the supreme hero, the mighty, truculent Manas. By turns earthy, stirring, bombastic and funny, Saghïmbay's work stands as a monument to the oral culture of a nomadic people. 
 
Daniel Prior's landmark translation includes a 'How to Read the Epic' section, commentary, maps and illustrations.

The Memorial Feast for Kökötöy Khan

A Kirghiz Epic Poem in the Manas Tradition

Erving Goffman

Asylums presents four interlinked essays that explore life in the 'total institutions': the closed systems of prisons, boarding schools, nursing homes and, most importantly, mental institutions. Focusing on the relationship between an inmate and the institution that contains them, Goffman unpicks how lives are managed 'on the inside', and how the setting more often than not works against the inmate's best interests. 
 
A radical exploration of the institutions that rule over the lives of men, women and children, Asylums is one of Erving Goffman's most insightful and long-lived works.

Asylums

Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates

In this groundbreaking work, acclaimed sociologist Erving Goffman examines how society treats those who it considers abnormal. Forced to adjust their social identities from situation to situation, Goffman analyses the variety of strategies that stigmatised individuals deploy to deal with the rejection of others, as well as the complex image of themselves they subsequently project. 
 
Relying extensively on biography and the lived experience of those who have found themselves on the edges of society, Goffman lays out the ways in which stigma dramatically alters the way the person affected feels about themselves, and the ways in which it can often violently shatter their relationships with 'normal' people.

Stigma

Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity

Since the earliest moments of human history, dragons have occupied a place in our imaginations. Bringer of night in Ancient Egypt; mortal enemy of the elephant in South Asia; slain by a god in Sanskrit hymn. In the Book of Revelation, there is the Leviathan; in Loch Ness, a monster. Their crushing coils and their treasure hoards are found throughout literature and language: in the Old English of Beowulf, in the Elvish of Tolkien, in the far-flung travels of Marco Polo. 
 
The Penguin Book of Dragons is the definitive collection of all this and more: two thousand years of legend and lore about the menace and majesty of dragons.

The Penguin Book of Dragons

Acclaimed on first publication and today considered one of the defining works of the sociology, The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life is Erving Goffman's extraordinary analysis of the structure of our social interactions. 
 
Blurring the line between workaday life and theatrical performance, Goffman argues that our behaviour with others is defined by how we wish to be perceived - resulting in displays bearing a startling similarity to those of an actor on the stage. From the houses and clothes that we use as 'fixed props' to the 'backstage' of the solitude in which our personas are rehearsed and relaxed, Goffman's insight reveals human character to be not fixed or stable, but liquid and consciously maintained.

The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

Virginia M. Axline

In 1964, renowned psychotherapist Virginia M. Axline visited a New York school. There she encountered a little boy apart from teachers and children. Dibs sat alone, or gently traced the edge of the room, defying approach and every attempt at interaction. Every day was like this, and every day his teachers feared further that their support was not enough. As a last resort, Axline was asked to meet with Dibs for a series of weekly play therapy sessions. There, through the guise of time spent will toys and paint, Dibs' extraordinary character -- and the circumstance of his pain -- is slowly revealed... 
 
Based on the transcripts of their sessions together, Dibs in Search of Self is a seminal testament to the power of psychotherapy, and a classic of twentieth century nonfiction -- an incredible true story of personal transformation.

Dibs in Search of Self

Personality Development in Play Therapy

Luisa Capetillo

In 1915, Puerto Rican activist Luisa Capetillo was arrested for wearing men's trousers in public. This act of rebellion was the result of a lifelong devotion to socialist and feminist thought. And this zeal runs throughout her brilliant essays: in the challenges to big business, in her strident campaigning for the legalization of divorce, in the championing of 'free love'. At once a sharp critique and a celebration of world politics, A Nation of Women embraces humanism and envisions a world in which economic and social structures can be broken down, allowing both the worker and the woman to be free.

A Nation of Women

An Early Feminist Speaks Out

Elaine Brown

"I have all the guns and all the money. I can withstand challenge from without and from within. Am I right, Comrade?" So said Elaine Brown on becoming the first female leader of the Black Panther Party in 1974. By that time the group had grown from a small local outfit into a national revolutionary movement, described by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover as 'the greatest threat to the internal security of the country'. 
 
Brown's gripping memoir charts her rise from an impoverished neighbourhood in Philadelphia, through a political awakening during a bohemian adolescence, and on to her time as a foot soldier for the Panthers and her ascent into its upper echelons. As an unfortgettable portrayal of Black girlhood in 1950s Philadelphia and the revolutionary experience in 1960s California, A Taste of Power is a seminal exploration of power, prejudice and the struggle for justice.

A Taste of Power

Eric Williams

'If one criterion of a classic is its ability to reorient our most basic way of viewing an object or a concept, Eric Williams's study supremely passes that test' Seymour Drescher 
 
 Arguing that the slave trade was at the heart of Britain's economic progress, Eric Williams's landmark 1944 study revealed the connections between capitalism and racism, and has influenced generations of historians ever since. Williams traces the rise and fall of the Atlantic slave trade through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to show how it laid the foundations of the Industrial Revolution, and how racism arose as a means of rationalising an immoral economic programme. Most significantly, he showed how slavery was only abolished when it ceased to become financially viable, exploding the myth of emancipation as a mark of Britain's moral progress. 
 
'Its thesis is a starting point for a new generation of scholarship' New Yorker

Capitalism and Slavery

A Private Thriller

A series of children's modern classic novels by renowned 20th century children's writers. All the titles in this series have the A Puffin Book logo, contemporary-style covers, and child-friendly endnotes.

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Detective Aidan Waits is a troubled junior detective haunted by his past. Facing an uncertain future, and disconnected from his history, DC Waits and his partner, Detective Inspector Peter 'Sutty' Sutcliffe work on Manchester's streets to uncover the city's worst criminals among the grime of the underworld.

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