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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Sebastian Peake

Maeve Gilmore

These profound and moving accounts of life with Mervyn Peake provide poignant and revealing insights into the art, personality and friendships of the author of Titus Groan, Gormenghast and Titus Alone.

A Child of Bliss/A World Away

Patrick White

In this remarkable self-portrait Patrick White explains how on the very rare occasions when he re-reads a passage from one of his books, he recognises very little of the self he knows. This 'unknown' is the man interviewers and visiting students expect to find, but 'unable to produce him', he prefers to remain private, or as private as anyone who has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature can ever be. In this book is the self Patrick White does recognise, the one he sees reflected in the glass.

Flaws in the Glass

Anthony Burgess

After returning from a trip to Brunei, Anthony Burgess, initially believing he has only a year to live, begins to write - novels, film scripts, television series, articles. It is the life of a man desperate to earn a living through the written word. He finds at first that writing brings little success, and later that success, and the obligations it brings, interfere with his writing - especially of fiction. There were vast Hollywood projects destined never to be made, novels the critics snarled at, journalism that scandalised the morally scrupulous. 
 
There is the éclat of A Clockwork Orange (and the consequent calls for Burgess to comment on violent atrocities), the huge success - after a long barren period - of Earthly Powers. There is a terrifying first marriage, his description of which is both painful and funny. His second marriage - and the discovery that he has a four-year-old son - changes his life dramatically, and he and Liana escape to the Mediterranean, for an increasingly European life. With this marriage comes the triumphant rebirth of sex, creative energy and travel - to America, to Australia and all over Europe.

You've Had Your Time

Kingsley Amis

Elegant, provocative and hugely entertaining, Kingsley Amis's memoirs are filled with anecdotes, experiences and portraits of famous friends, family, acquaintances (and a few eminent foes). From his childhood days to Oxford and army life, his travels abroad and his years as a successful novelist, Memoirs offers extraordinary insights into a unique literary life.

Memoirs

Martin Amis

WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY JAMES WOOD 
 
Once close friends, writers Gwyn Barry and Richard Tull now find themselves in fierce competition. 
 
While Tull has spiralled into a mire of literary obscurity and belletristic odd jobs, Barry’s atrocious attempts at novels have brought him untold success. Prizes, prestige and wealth abound, and from far below Tull can only watch, stewing in torment. 
 
Until, that is, resentment turns to revenge. Consumed by the question of how one writer can really hurt another, Tull’s quest for an answer will unleash increasingly violent urges on both writers’ lives. 
 
‘A funny, vicious portrait of literary London’ Evening Standard

The Information

John Milton

The great British epic, a work of rich and fascinating poetry and one of the most enduring books ever created. This edition contains both Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. 
 
&lsquo;Paradise Lost was the first literary work in English written on a planetary scale&rsquo; Guardian 
 
Satan is out for revenge. His rebellion has failed, he has been cast out from heaven and is doomed to spend eternity in hell. Somehow he must find a way to prove his power and wound his enemies. He fixes upon God's beloved new creations, Adam and Eve, as the vehicles of his vengeance. In this dramatic and influential epic, Milton tells the story of the serpent and the apple, the fall of man and the exile from paradise in stunningly vivid and powerful verse. 
 
INTRODUCED BY ORLANDO READE, AUTHOR OF WHAT IN ME IS DARK 
 
'Milton's language ravishes the ear, yet the verse also floods the inner eye with spectacular imagery' The Times

Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained

Graham Greene

With superb skill and feeling, Graham Greene retraces the experiences and encounters of his extraordinary life. His restlessness is legendary; as if seeking out danger, Greene travelled to Haiti during the nightmare rule of Papa Doc, Vietnam in the last days of the French, Kenya during the Mau Mau rebellion. With ironic delight he recalls his time in the British Secret Service in Africa, and his brief involvement in Hollywood. He writes, as only he can, about people and places, about faith, doubt, fear and, not least, the trials and craft of writing.

Ways Of Escape

Christopher Isherwood

This is the story of Christopher Isherwood’s parents – their meeting in 1895, marriage in 1903 after his father had returned from the Boer War, and his father’s death in an assault on Ypres in 1915, which left his mother a widow until her own death in 1960. As well as a family memoir, it is a social history of a period of striking change, and a portrait of the world which shaped Isherwood and which he rejected.

Kathleen and Frank

The Living Room. The Potting Shed. The Complaisant Lover. Carving a Statue. The Return of A. J. Raffles. The Great Jowett. Yes and No. For Whom the Bell ChimesIn these eight plays Graham Greene, one of the great writers of the twentieth century, demonstrates his considerable skills as a dramatist. Each of them explores themes that were of fundamental importance to Greene, and together they exhibit a daring wit and an exhilarating sense of experiment.

The Collected Plays

Graham Greene's 'long journey through time' began in 1904, when he was born into a tribe of Greenes based in Berkhamstead at the public school where his father was headmaster. In A Sort of Life Greene recalls schooldays and Oxford, adolescent encounters with psychoanalysis and Russian roulette, his marriage and conversion to Catholicism, and how he rashly resigned from The Times when his first novel, The Man Within was published in 1929. A Sort of Life reveals, brilliantly and compellingly, a life lived and an art obsessed by 'the dangerous edge of things'.

A Sort of Life

Laurens Van Der Post

Yet Being Someone Other is the most revealing book that Laurens van der Post wrote about his extraordinary and eventful life, and the most far-reaching; it is a distillation of the experiences that have moved him at the deepest level of the imagination and made him the exceptional person and writer he was.

Yet Being Someone Other

Karen Russell

VINTAGE CLASSICS' AMERICAN GOTHIC SERIES 
Spine-tingling, mind-altering and deliciously atmospheric, journey into the dark side of America with nine of its most uncanny classics. 
 
'Sleep Donation has a dreamlike beauty while remaining ominous and off-kilter. Parts of it gave me nightmares' Stephen King 
 
An epidemic of insomnia has left America crippled with exhaustion. 
 
Thankfully the Slumber Corps agency provides a lifeline, transfusing sleep to sufferers from healthy volunteers. Recruitment manager Trish Edgewater, whose sister Dori was one of the first victims of the disaster, has spent the last seven years enlisting new donors. But when she meets the mysterious Donor Y and Baby A - whose sleep can be universally accepted - her faith in the organisation and in her own motives begins to unravel. 
 
Fully illustrated and featuring a brand-new 'Nightmare Appendix', this uncanny and prescient novella from the bestselling author of Swamplandia! will haunt your sleepless nights.

Sleep Donation

John Fowles

In 1963 John Fowles won international recognition with his first published novel The Collector. But his roots as a serious writer can be traced back long before to the journal he began as a student at Oxford in the late 1940s and continued to keep faithfully over the next half century. Written with an unsparing honesty and forthrightness, it reveals the inner thoughts and creative development of one of the twentieth century's most innovative and important novelists. 
 
This first-hand account of the road to fame and fortune holds the reader's attention with all the narrative power of the novels, but also offers an invaluable insight into the intimate relationship between Fowles's own life and his fiction.

The Journals Volume 1

Roland Barthes

In these interviews, given between 1962 and 1980, Barthes speaks about the development of his thought, explaining why and how he wrote his many books, paying tributes to philosophers, linguists, novelists, poets, painters and film-makers who have inspired him, as well as discussing how his life became dedicated to an exploration of semiotics. What comes across is the sheer gusto of a man who never stopped developing and changing, and the warm personal side of his rich and probing intelligence.

The Grain Of The Voice

Henry Green

Henry Green wrote his autobiography in 1940, aged only thirty-five, because he was convinced he wouldn't survive the war. The result is a delightfully wayward and incisive portrait of English society and of the man himself. From reminiscences of a childhood spent among the gentry, to searing descriptions of Eton and Oxford, to reflections on the author's first experiments with prose and with sex, all Green's unique talents as a writer are on offer here, at their most dazzling and accessible.

Pack My Bag

Kurt Vonnegut

This is the second volume of Vonnegut’s autobiographical writings – a collage of his own life story, snipped up and stuck down alongside his views on everything from suicidal depression to the future of the planet and Andrew Lloyd Webber. Honest, dark, rambling, funny; this rare glimpse of Vonnegut's soul is a dagger to the heart of Western complacency.

Fates Worse Than Death

An Autobiographical Collage of the 1980s

Andrew Turnbull

Scott Fitzgerald follows the life of one of America's most enduring authors, from his early years in St Paul and at Princeton to New York in the twenties, the French Riviera, Baltimore, and finally Hollywood. Andrew Turnbull tells the story behind F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise, revised and finally published when he was twenty-four, making him instantly famous, and his tender love affair with Zelda Sayre, from their glittering early life to the years Zelda spent in and out of sanatoriums. A literary generation, too, comes alive, including Ernest Hemingway, Edmund Wilson and Edith Wharton. Fitzgerald lived on Turnbull's family estate in Baltimore in the early 1930s and there befriended young Andrew, then aged eleven. Turnbull's personal relationship with Fitzgerald and the hundreds of interviews with those who knew him elegantly capture the dramatic, tragic story of F. Scott and the glow and pathos of his flamboyant life.

Scott Fitzgerald

John Keats

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY DIRECTOR JANE CAMPION 
 
John Keats died in penury and relative obscurity in 1821, aged only 25. He is now seen as one of the greatest English poets and a genius of the Romantic age. This collection, which contains all his most memorable works and a selection of his letters, is a feast for the senses, displaying Keats' gift for gorgeous imagery and sensuous language, his passionate devotion to beauty, as well as some of the most moving love poetry ever written.

Bright Star

The Complete Poems and Selected Letters

'Barthes' purpose is to tear away masks and demystify the signs, signals and symbols of the language of mass culture' The Times 
 
In this magnificent and often surprising collection of essays Barthes explores the myths of mass culture. Taking subjects as diverse as wrestling, films, plastic and cars, Barthes elegantly deciphers the symbols and signs embedded deep in familiar aspects of modern life, unmasking the hidden ideologies and meanings which implicitly affect our thought and behaviour. This early classic of semiotics from one of France's greatest thinkers may irrevocably change the way you view the world around you.

Mythologies

Nevil Shute

Nevil Shute was a power and a pioneer in the world of flying long before he began to write the stories that made him a bestselling novelist. This autobiography charts Shute's path from childhood to his career as a gifted aeronautical engineer working at the forefront of the technological experimentation of the 1920s and 30s. The inspiration for many of the themes and concerns of Shute's novels can be identified in this enjoyable and enlightening memoir.

Slide Rule

The only autobiography by the great Roland Barthes, philosopher, literary theorist and semiotician. 
 
This is the autobiography of one of the greatest minds of the twentieth century. As idiosyncratic as its author, Barthes plays both commentator and subject to reveal his tastes, habits, passions and regrets. No event, relationship or thought is given priority over any other; no attempt to construct a narrative is made. And yet, via a series of vignettes, Barthes's life and views on a multitude of subjects emerge - from money and love to language and truth. 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ADAM PHILLIPS

Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes

Rebecca Fraser

'If men could see us as we really are, they would be amazed', wrote Charlotte Brontë, the outwardly conventional parson's daughter who had rarely met any men beyond those of the church or classroom by the time Jane Eyre was published in 1847. 
 
From the landscape of the Yorkshire moors, an appalling childhood and a family decimated by consumption, Jane Eyre came as an instant literary sensation. It also brought Charlotte Brontë the notoriety that was to remain with her for the rest of her short and tragic life. 
 
Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte's first biographer, attempted to clear Charlotte of the charges of passionate immorality that were levelled at a woman author - and an unmarried one at that. Rebecca Fraser, 130 years later, placed Charlotte's life within the perceptual framework of contemporary attitudes to women. Her biography is an invaluable contribution to Brontë scholarship, which shares her admiration for a woman prepared to stand out against some of the cruelest Victorian ideas about her sex.

Charlotte Bronte

Raymond Williams

Acknowledged as a masterpiece of materialist criticism, this book delves into the complex ways economic reality shapes the imagination. Surveying two hundred years of history and English literature – from George Eliot to George Orwell – Williams provides insights into the social and economic forces that have shaped British culture and society. Provocative and revolutionary in its day, this work overturned conventional thinking about the development of a common British mentality.

Culture and Society

1780–1950

Coleridge to Orwell

Iris Murdoch

Sartre's powerful political passions were united with a memorable literary gift, placing him foremost among the novelists, as well as the philosophers, of our time. Iris Murdoch's pioneering study analyses and evaluates the different strands of Sartre's rich and complex oeurve. Combining the objectivity of the scholar with a profound interest in contemporary problems, Iris Murdoch discusses the tradition of philosophical, political and aesthetic thought that gives historical authenticity to Satre's achievement, while showing the ambiguities and dangers inherent in his position.

Sartre

Isaac Bashevis Singer

In this autobiographical work, specifically mentioned in Issac Bashevis Singer's Nobel Prize citation, Singer remembers his childhood in Warsaw, and especially the bet din, or Jewish Court, in his father's home on working-class Krochmalna Street. Advice seekers and petitioners making wills or seeking marriage settlements daily visit the rabbi in his study. In a world on the brink of modernity, Singer's gentle, learned father and his mother, equally pious but eminently practical, maintain a stubbornly traditional existence. In My Father's Court is a tribute to their efforts, and a fine evocation of life in early-twentieth century Warsaw.

In My Father's Court

Edmund White

FROM THE AUTHOR OF A BOY'S OWN STORY AND THE FAREWELL SYMPHONY 
 
'A superb introduction to the great novelist and playwright, vagabond, thief and convict, and to the brutal childhood from which he mined his remarkable vision' J G Ballard, Books of the Year, Sunday Times 
 
Interviewing lovers, friends, publishers and acquaintances, Edmund White draws from material, letters (a number published here for the first time) and other original sources to explore the perverse extremes of Jean Genet's life and writing. Separating the fact from the mythology which was fostered by Genet himself, White's portrait is a deftly painted celebration of French Literature's most modern rogue.

Genet

Virginia Woolf

Why should one half be free to live, while the other is doomed to watch silently from the sidelines? In this visionary collection, Virginia Woolf leads us on a transformative journey through the liberating powers of the mind. From an exploration of why women were barred from writing and under what conditions they might break free, to the solace derived from haunting London's streets, these essays and stories present Woolf at her most impassioned, rendering the pursuit of liberty one of life's most poetic adventures. 
 
Selected from the books A Room of One's Own, The Waves and Street Haunting and Other Essays by Virginia Woolf 
 
VINTAGE MINIS: GREAT MINDS. BIG IDEAS. LITTLE BOOKS. 
 
A series of short books by the world’s greatest writers on the experiences that make us human 
 
Also in the Vintage Minis series: 
Love by Jeanette Winterson 
Home by Salman Rushdie 
Language by Xiaolu Guo 
Race by Toni Morrison

Liberty

Vintage Minis

WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY JAMES FENTON 
 
Subtitled 'An education in the twenties', this work blends autobiography and fiction to describe the inner life of a writer evolving from precocious public school boy to Cambridge drop-out at large in London’s Bohemia. It contains thinly veiled portraits of Isherwood’s contemporaries Auden, Upward, and Spender, whose intimate friendships and cult of rebellion shaped the literary identity of England in the 1930s. Witty and outrageous, Isherwood pokes fun at the stars of his generation, above all himself, even as he testifies to their unique early gifts.

Lions and Shadows

Virginia Woolf turned to her diary as to an intimate friend, to whom she could freely and spontaneously confide her thoughts on public events or the joys and trials of domestic life. Between 1st January 1915 and her death in 1941 she regularly recorded her thoughts with unfailing grace, courage, honesty and wit. The result is one of the greatest diaries in the English language.

Selected Diaries

Arthur Koestler

The second volume of the remarkable autobiography of Arthur Koestler, author of Darkness at Noon. 
 
Taken together, Arthur Koestler's volumes of autobiography constitute an unrivalled study of a twentieth-century life. The Invisible Writing picks up where the first volume, Arrow in the Blue, ended, with Koestler joining the Communist Party. This second volume goes on to detail some of the most important, gruelling and electrifying experiences in his life. 
 
This book tells of Koestler's travels through Russia and remote parts of Soviet Central Asia and of his life as an exile. It tells of how he survived in Franco's prisons under sentence of death and in concentration camps in Occupied France and ends with his escape in 1940 to England, where he found stability and a new home.

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