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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Peter Everett

In 1912, in Storyville, the notorious red-light district of New Orleans, a photographer named E. J. Bellocq took a series of photographs of the women who worked in the brothels. Rediscovered in the 1950s, Bellocq's photographs have become famous, but the man himself remains a mystery.In Bellocq's Women, Peter Everett performs as remarkable a feat of fictional reconstruction as he did in Matisse's War and The Voyages of Alfred Wallis. All we have of Bellocq are his photographs and a few fragmentary memories; in this extraordinary novel Everett not only brings the photographer to life - and with him his strange, tortured relationship with his mother and two young girls, one his landlady's daughter, the other a child whore - but also his world - the opium dens and bar rooms of New Orleans and the whore houses with their surreal combination of violence and homeliness.

Bellocq's Women

Patricia Bosworth

Diane Arbus's startling photographic images of dwarfs, twins, transvestites, and freaks seemed from the first to redefine both the normal and the abnormal in our lives; they were already becoming part of the iconography of the age when Arbus committed suicide in 1971. Arbus herself remained an enigma until the publication of this first full biography. Patricia Bosworth examines the life behind the eerie, mesmerizing photographs: Diane's pampered childhood; her passionate marriage to Allan Arbus and their work together as fashion photographers during the fifties; the emotional upheaval surrounding the end of that marriage; and the radically dark, liberating, and ultimately tragic turn Diane's art took during the sixties. Bosworth's engrossing book is a compassionate portrait of the woman behind some of the most powerful photographs of our time.

Diane Arbus

Bill Cunningham

An enchanting memoir by the legendary New York Times fashion photographer Bill Cunningham 
 
 *A Financial Times Book of the Year 2018* 
*The New York Times Bestseller* 
 
‘I took to New York life like a star shooting through the heavens…’ 
 
Bill Cunningham’s first love was fashion but the big city came a close second. He left for New York aged nineteen, losing his family’s support but enjoying the infinite luxury of freedom. Living on a scoop of Ovaltine a day, he would run down to Fifth Avenue to feed on the spectacular sights of the window displays – then run back to his tiny studio to work all night. 
 
Working as ‘William J’ (to spare his parents’ blushes), Bill became one of the most celebrated hat designers of the 1950s, creating elegant town hats for movie stars and playful beach hats for the summer set. Bill’s mission was to bring happiness by making beautiful things – even if it meant pawning his bike to fund fancy-dress outfits for all his friends. 
 
When women stopped wearing hats and his business was forced to close, Bill worked as a fashion journalist, touring the couture houses of Europe. But New York remained his home, and it was as a street photographer of the fashions of the city that he became well known, in a job that would last almost forty years. 
 
Fashion Climbing is the enchanting memoir he left behind, capturing the madcap times of his early career and the fashion scene of the mid-century. 
 
 Written with the spark and wit of Holly Golightly, and brimming over with Bill’s infectious joy for life, it is a gift to all who seek beauty, whatever our style or status.

Fashion Climbing

A New York Life

Don McCullin

'He has known all forms of fear, he's an expert in it. He has come back from God knows how many brinks, all different. His experience in a Ugandan prison alone would be enough to unhinge another man - like myself, as a matter of fact - for good. He has been forfeit more times than he can remember, he says. But he is not bragging. Talking this way about death and risk, he seems to be implying quite consciously that by testing his luck each time, he is testing his Maker's indulgence' - John le Carre 
 
'McCullin is required reading if you want to know what real journalism is all about' - The Times 
 
'From the opening...there is hardly a dull sentence: his prose is so lively and uninhibited... An excellent book' - Sunday Telegraph 
 
'Unsparing reminiscences that effectively combine the bittersweet life of a world-class photojournalist with a generous selection of his haunting lifework... A genuinely affecting memoir that reckons the cost and loss involved in making one's way on the cutting edge of conflict' - Kirkus Reviews 
 
'If this was just a book of McCullin's war photographs it would be valuable enough. But it is much more' - Sunday Correspondent

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