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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Michael Pollan

Over the past 75 years, a new canon has emerged. As humans have driven the living planet to the brink of collapse, visionary thinkers around the world have raised their voices to defend it. Their words have endured, becoming the classics that define the environmental movement today. 
 
Food Rules, Michael Pollan's wise and witty critique of the western industrialised diet, distils the wisdom of history and traditional cultures to three simple rules: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

Food Rules

'Here, see my belongings: a bag of dry crusts on my back and the Holy Bible in my breast pocket; that's it.' 
 
 In 1884 a slim volume containing four short tales appeared in Russia. They told of a pilgrim, a lone wanderer, led by his quiet curiosity and a deep spiritual longing to undertake a lifelong journey across the land. The story of this gentle figure and his travels - through forests, fields and steppes, encountering priests and professors, nuns and convicts on the way - became a beloved spiritual guide around the world, immortalized in the pages of J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey as the 'small pea-green cloth-bound book' that Franny keeps close in her handbag. At its heart, it is a paean to peace, prayer, consolation and silent contemplation. 
 
Translated with an introduction and notes by Andrew Louth

The Way of a Pilgrim

Candid Tales of a Wanderer to His Spiritual Father

Erving Goffman

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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

W. N. P. Barbellion

The young naturalist W. N. P. Barbellion described this remarkably candid record of living with multiple sclerosis as 'a study in the nude'. It begins as an ambitious teenager's notes on the natural world, and then, following his diagnosis at the age of twenty-six, transforms into a deeply moving account of battling the disease. His prose is full of humour and fierce intelligence, and combines a passion for life with clear-sighted reflections on the nature of death. 
 
Barbellion selected and edited this manuscript himself in 1917, adding a fictional editor's note announcing his own demise. This Penguin Classics edition includes 'The Last Diary', which covers the period between submission of the manuscript and Barbellion's actual death in 1919.

The Journal of a Disappointed Man

Gillian Rose

Gillian Rose was a star academic, acclaimed as one of the most dazzling and original thinkers of her time. Told that she had incurable cancer, she found a new way to explore the world and herself. Tender, heartbreakingly honest and written with moments of surprising humour, Love's Work is the exhilarating result. 
 
In this short, unforgettable memoir, Rose looks back on her childhood, from the young dyslexic girl, torn between father and stepfather, to the adolescent confronting her Jewish inheritance. As an adult, Gillian Rose proves herself a passionate friend, a searcher for truth, a woman in love and, finally, an exacting but generous patient. 
 
Intertwining the personal and the philosophical, Rose meditates on faith, conflict and injustice; the fallibility and endurance of love; our yearning for independence and for connection to others. With droll self-knowledge ('I am highly qualified in unhappy love affairs,' Rose writes) and with unsettling wisdom ('To live, to love, is to be failed'), Love's Work asks the unanswerable question: how is a life best lived?

Love's Work

D. W. Winnicott

D. W. Winnicott was one of the most influential figures in child psychiatry. In this landmark work, re-issued on the fiftieth anniversary of his death, he lays out his ground-breaking theories of child development, and how children become independent from their parents. 
 
Along the way Winnicott touches on a wide range of questions, from why babies cry and why toddlers are aggressive to how to teach children about sex. Above all, Winnicott encourages parents to ignore external pressures and guilt, and to trust their own instincts. His accessible and non-judgemental approach remains as radical today as it was in the 1960s.

The Child, the Family, and the Outside World

Thomas De Quincey

"Thou has the keys of Paradise, oh just, subtle, and mighty opium!" Determined to counter the lies about opium that had been told by travellers to the Orient and the medical profession, De Quincey describes his addiction, the consciousness altering properties of the drug, its pleasures and its pains.

Confessions of an English Opium Eater

Robin Wall Kimmerer

Over the past 75 years, a new canon has emerged. As humans have driven the living planet to the brink of collapse, visionary thinkers around the world have raised their voices to defend it. Their words have endured, becoming the classics that define the environmental movement today. 
 
In The Democracy of Species Robin Wall Kimmerer guides us towards a more reciprocal, grateful and joyful relationship with our animate earth, from the wild leeks in the field to the deer in the woods.

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