Michael Symmons Roberts’s fourth book of poetry, Corpus, was the winner of the 2004 Whitbread Poetry Award, and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Forward Prize, and the Griffin International Prize. His sixth collection, Drysalter, was the winner of both the Forward Prize and the Costa Poetry Prize in 2013. He collaborated with Paul Farley on Edgelands (Cape/Vintage) and will do so again in The Deaths of the Poets (Cape, 2017). He has also worked many times with the composer James MacMillan. He has published two novels, and is Professor of Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Michael Symmons Roberts

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Susan Orlean

Susan Orlean's collection of profiles ranges from the well-known (Marky Mark) to the unknown (Colin Duffy, a typical American man, aged ten) to the formerly known (the cult sixties girl group the Shaggs). Orlean meets with Cristina Sanchez, Spain's first fully-qualified female matador, Silly Billy, New York's most successful children's clown, an African king who is a New York taxi-driver, and a champion show dog called Biff, who from a certain angle looks like President Clinton. As in her remarkable bestseller The Orchid Thief, soon to be the basis of Spike Being John Malkovich Jonze's new film, starring Meryl Streep and Nicholas Cage, Orlean's eye for the fascinatingly bizarre and her wonderfully witty way with language make her take on the world utterly original and unique.

The Bullfighter Checks Her Make-Up

Charles Handy

Who are the new philanthropists? And how is their philanthropy 'new'? 
 
In this remarkable and inspiring book, the eminent management writer Charles Handy and his wife Elizabeth, a portrait photographer, have collaborated to portray a new generation of practical philanthropists, men and women who have made their own fortunes and decided to move on from financial success to try to help those in need. They are doing so not simply by giving their money away to charities and agencies but by helping actively, working on the spot with the very people who need their aid, ensuring that the initiatives are sustainable in the longer term. 
 
As in their acclaimed The New Alchemists, the Handys have both interviewed and photographed their subjects in order to tell their inspiring stories; from the Sydney restaurateur Jeff Gambin, who personally helps to cook hot and cold menus for homeless people; to Niall Mellon, a young Irish property developer who is replacing the shacks with breeze-block homes in a South African township; and Sara Davenport, who sold her art gallery and set up the breast-cancer care centre the Haven Trust to offer integrated and holistic treatment and support. 
 
This striking book of words and photographs reveals the energy and inspiration of these new ways of using wealth, revealing the motivations and satisfactions of such direct action.

The New Philanthropists

Harper Lee

'Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird.' 
 
Atticus Finch gives this advice to his children as he defends the real mockingbird of this classic novel - a black man charged with attacking a white girl. Through the eyes of Scout and Jem Finch, Lee explores the issues of race and class in the Deep South of the 1930s with compassion and humour. She also creates one of the great heroes of literature in their father, whose lone struggle for justice pricks the conscience of a town steeped in prejudice and hypocrisy.

To Kill A Mockingbird

60th Anniversary Edition

Enhanced Edition

50th Anniversary Edition

Anthony Burgess

The fully restored fiftieth anniversary edition 
 
Foreword by Martin Amis 
 
First published by William Heinemann in 1962, A Clockwork Orange is widely acknowledged as one of the most influential books of the twentieth century. This special edition, compiled and edited by Andrew Biswell, Burgess's biographer, restores the text of the novel as Burgess originally wrote it, and includes a selection of interviews, articles, reviews and other previously unpublished material.

A Clockwork Orange

Chris Heath

No other pop group in recent history has faced fame with such intelligence, humour and shrewdness as the Pet Shop Boys. In 1991, the band toured North America for the first time shadowed by journalist Chris Heath and legendary rock photographer Pennie Smith. They visited fourteen cities in one month, confronting the American music industry and colliding with the likes of Liza Minnelli, Steven Spielberg and Axl Rose. This is more than a documentary of a tour; it is an unusually intimate portrait of two maverick British musicians always reluctant to compromise. 
 
‘There was a time when the Pet Shop Boys seemed to exist entirely on radio, television and in magazines. This is the other world of the Pet Shop Boys in concert, travel and backstage, as they bring their art and glamour to America. It’s funny too.’ 
Johnny Marr 
 
‘A brilliant book, to be read over and over again. How could anyone not love these men?’ 
NME

Pet Shop Boys versus America

Sophie Pinkham

Each time Ukraine has rebuilt itself over the last century, it has been plagued by the same conflicts: corruption, poverty, and most of all Russian aggression. Sophie Pinkham saw all this and more over ten years in Ukraine and Russia, a period that included the Maidan revolution of 2013-14, Russia's annexation of Crimea, and the ensuing war in Donbass. 
 
With a keen eye for the dark absurdities of post-Soviet society, Pinkham presents a dynamic account of contemporary Ukrainian life. She meet a charismatic doctor helping to smooth the transition to democracy even as he struggles with drug dependence; a band of Ukrainian, Russian, and Belarusian hippies in a Crimean idyll; and a Jewish clarinetist agitating for Ukrainian liberation. These fascinating personalities deliver an indelible impression of a country on the brink. 
 
Black Square is necessary reading for anyone who wishes to learn the roots of the current Russo-Ukrainian war and the personal stories of the people who live it every day.

Black Square

Adventures in Post-Soviet Ukraine

The Pet Shop Boys are one of the most successful and unusual bands of the last five decades. They are the pop duo that proves pop music can be modern, ecstatic and playful as well as serious and intelligent, winning them legions of devoted fans throughout the world. 
 
In 1989, Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe invited journalist Chris Heath and photographer Lawrence Watson to shadow them around Hong Kong, Japan and the UK as they embarked on their first-ever tour. This book is the result: an immersive portrait giving access into the duo’s inner sanctum, showing them in brilliantly observed detail as they work, relax, gossip, argue and occasionally try to make sense of what they do. 
 
‘As clear a picture as could be wished for of the seething mass of elegant contradictions that is the 
Pet Shop Boys’ on-the-road experience.’ Independent on Sunday 
 
‘This superbly reported book transcends tired rock journalism cliché. It’s about what it means to be a pop star, what it means to be a Pet Shop Boy… how to love pop, hold it to a higher standard and subvert its expectations.’ 
Laura Snapes

Pet Shop Boys, Literally

The next instalment in the acclaimed New Yorker 'decades' series featuring an all-star line-up of historical pieces from the 1960s alongside new pieces by current New Yorker staffers. 
 
The 1960s, the most tumultuous decade of the twentieth century, were a time of tectonic shifts in all aspects of society – from the March on Washington and the Second Vatican Council to the Summer of Love and Woodstock. No magazine chronicled the immense changes of the period better than The New Yorker. This capacious volume includes historic pieces from the magazine’s pages that brilliantly capture the sixties, set alongside new assessments by some of today’s finest writers. 
 
Here are real-time accounts of these years of turmoil: Calvin Trillin reports on the integration of Southern universities, E. B. White and John Updike wrestle with the enormity of the Kennedy assassination and Jonathan Schell travels with American troops into the jungles of Vietnam. The murder of Martin Luther King, Jr., the fallout of the 1968 Democratic Convention, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the Six-Day War: all are brought to immediate and profound life in these pages. 
 
The New Yorker of the 1960s was also the wellspring of some of the truly timeless works of American journalism. Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem and James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time all first appeared in The New Yorker and are featured here. The magazine also published such indelible short story masterpieces as John Cheever’s ‘The Swimmer’ and John Updike’s ‘A &amp; P’, alongside poems by Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. 
 
The arts underwent an extraordinary transformation during the decade, one mirrored by the emergence in The New Yorker of critical voices as arresting as Pauline Kael and Kenneth Tynan. Among the crucial cultural figures profiled here are Simon &amp; Garfunkel, Tom Stoppard, Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, Cassius Clay (before he was Muhammad Ali), and Mike Nichols and Elaine May. 
 
The assembled pieces are given fascinating contemporary context by current New Yorker writers, including Jill Lepore, Malcolm Gladwell and David Remnick. The result is an incomparable collective portrait of a truly galvanising era. 
 
With contributions from: Truman Capote, John Updike, E.B. White, Rachel Carson, James Baldwin, Jonathan Schell, Dwight Macdonald, Renata Adler, Hannah Arendt, Pauline Kael, AJ Liebling, Nat Hentoff, Calvin Trillin, Xavuer Rynne, John McPhee, Anthony Hiss and more.

The New Yorker Book of the 60s

Story of a Decade

Parmy Olson

In January 2012, the hacker collective Anonymous brought down the FBI website in response to planned American laws against internet piracy. In 2011, LulzSec, a sister organisation, broke into and blocked computer systems at VISA, Mastercard and PayPal. The groups have infiltrated the networks of totalitarian governments in Libya and Tunisia. They have attacked the CIA and NATO. But instead of being sanctimonious and secretive, these cyber activists are flippant and taunting, never hesitating to mock those they've outsmarted. Today, governments, big businesses and social activists are waking up to the true power of the internet, and how it can be manipulated. 
 
This is the story of a hive mind, with many hackers across the globe connected to slice through security systems and escape untraced. Through the stories of four key members, We Are Anonymous offers a gripping, adrenalin-fuelled narrative drawing upon extensive research, and hundreds of conversations with the hackers themselves. By coming to know them - their backgrounds, families, motivations - we come to know the human side of their virtual exploits, showing exactly why they're so passionate about disrupting the internet's frontiers.

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