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 Ondaatje

Discover Michael Ondaatje's debut novel, 'a beautifully detailed story, perhaps the finest jazz novel ever written' Sunday Times 
 
Based on the life of cornet player Buddy Bolden, one of the legendary jazz pioneers of turn-of-the-twentieth-century New Orleans, Coming Through Slaughter is an extraordinary recreation of a remarkable musical life and a tragic conclusion. Through a collage of memoirs, interviews, imaginary conversations and monologues, Ondaatje builds a picture of a man who would work by day at a barber shop and by night unleash his talent to wild audiences who had never experienced such playing. But Buddy was also playing the field with two women, and inside his head was a ticking time-bomb which he was unable to stop.

Coming Through Slaughter

Angela Carter

Is Sophie Fevvers, toast of Europe's capitals, part swan...or all fake? 
 
Courted by the Prince of Wales and painted by Toulouse-Lautrec, she is an aerialiste extraordinaire and star of Colonel Kearney's circus. She is also part woman, part swan. Jack Walser, an American journalist, is on a quest to discover the truth behind her identity. Dazzled by his love for her, and desperate for the scoop of a lifetime, Walser has no choice but to join the circus on its magical tour through turn-of-the-nineteenth-century London, St Petersburg and Siberia. 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY SARAH WATERS 
 
**One of the BBC's 100 Novels That Shaped Our World** 
 
'A spellbinding achievement' Literary Review 
 
'Raunchy, raucous...a rich, turn of the 19th century world, which reeks of human and animal variety' The Times

Nights at the Circus

Werner Herzog

A poetic meditation on life and death, by one of the most renowned and respected film-makers and intellectuals of our time. 
 
In November 1974, when Werner Herzog was told that his mentor Lotte Eisner, the film historian and critic, was dying in Paris, he set off to walk there from Munich, ‘in full faith, believing that she would stay alive if I came on foot’. Along the way he recorded what he saw, how he felt, and what he experienced, from the physical discomfort of the journey to moments of rapture. It is a remarkable narrative – part pilgrimage, part meditation, and a confrontation between a great German Romantic imagination and the contemporary world. 
 
‘Surely the strangest, strongest walking book I know’ Robert Macfarlane 
 
?????'It hits you with the force of dreams and leaves you with the taste of snow-filled air’ Helen Macdonald

Of Walking In Ice

Munich - Paris: 23 November - 14 December, 1974

Derek Jarman

'What started as a book on the frustration of funding led to the writing of an autobiography at forty... I had so little to do in the daylight hours, I stayed up late unbuttoning Levis in back rooms.' 
 
In 1984 at the age of 40, the polymath film-maker Derek Jarman began to write his journals. In the first of these diaries, Dancing Ledge, we see his origins as a young artist, written with Jarman's distinctive immediacy, curiosity, and candour. Behind-the-scenes of his first controversial films and stage designs, at glamorous launch parties with friends like David Hockney, Ossie Clarke and Patrick Proktor, to the trials of securing funding, Dancing Ledge is a coming-of-age memoir for all fledgling artists. 
 
Dancing Ledge also chronicles a unique time in British history, capturing gay nightlife from the end of the war to the beginning of the AIDS epidemic.

Dancing Ledge

Journals vol. 1

A fever-dream journal documenting the making of cinema’s most infamous production, from the world's most infamously visionary director: Werner Herzog. 
 
In 1982, the visionary film director, Werner Herzog, released Fitzcarraldo, a lavish film about a would-be rubber baron who pulls a 320-ton steamship over a mountain. Hailed instantly by critics around the globe as a masterpiece, Fitzcarraldo won Herzog the 1982 Outstanding Director Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, affirming Herzog's reputation as one of the most revered and enigmatic filmmakers of his time. 
 
Conquest of the Useless is the diary Herzog kept during the making of Fitzcarraldo, compiled from June 1979 to November 1981. Emerging as if out of an Amazonian fever dream during filming, Herzog's writings are an extraordinary documentary unto themselves. Strange and otherworldly events are recounted by the filmmaker. The crew's camp in the heart of the jungle is attacked and burned to the ground; the production of the film clashes with a border war; and, of course, Herzog unravels the impossible logistics of moving a 320-ton steamship over a hill without the use of special effects. 
 
In his preface, Herzog warns that the diary entries collected in Conquest of the Useless do not represent "reports on the actual filming" but rather "inner landscapes, born of the delirium of the jungle." Thus begins an extraordinary glimpse into the mind of a genius during the making of one of his greatest achievements.

Conquest of the Useless

Fever Dreams in the Jungle

Read this meditative and inspiring diary of Derek Jarman's famous garden at Dungeness, which is also a powerful account of his life as an HIV positive man in the 1980s. 
 
 In 1986 Derek Jarman discovered he was HIV positive and decided to make a garden at his cottage on the barren coast of Dungeness. 
 
 Facing an uncertain future, he nevertheless found solace in nature, growing all manner of plants. While some perished beneath wind and sea-spray others flourished, creating brilliant, unexpected beauty in the wilderness. 
 
 Modern Nature is both a diary of the garden and a meditation by Jarman on his own life: his childhood, his time as a young gay man in the 1960s, his renowned career as an artist, writer and film-maker. It is at once a lament for a lost generation, an unabashed celebration of gay sexuality, and a devotion to all that is living. 
 
 'An essential - urgent - book for the 21st Century' Hans Ulrich Obrist 
 
 This new edition features an introduction from Olivia Laing, the author of Crudo

Modern Nature

Journals, 1989 – 1990

Luis Bunuel

A master filmmaker, inimitable, and unrelenting in his assault on bourgeois values.  Bunuel's method is free from all artifice, and his honesty and humour are to extreme to accept any compromise in exposing our deceit and our decadence.  Like Pasolini, his work offers a remarkably sophisticated political analysis, but remains based in the essentially peasant values of storytelling, and the purposefully unsystematic supervisions of laughter.

My Last Breath

Dylan Thomas

'It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black...' 
 
Under Milk Wood tells the story of a Welsh village during one spring day. It is populated by some of the best-loved characters in British literature. Lyrical, funny, moving, it is rooted in place but with a universality that has spoken to generations of readers. A Welsh epic, a work of poetic genius, a modern classic. 
 
'A tour de force of oral poetry which oozes word pictures and onomatopoeic musicality' Guardian

Under Milk Wood

A Play for Voices

Josephine Baker

This is the iconic Josephine Baker in her own words. 
 
Funny, candid and unconventional: the wildly famous but elusive Josephine Baker tells her own story in this enchanting memoir. 
 
Baker took Paris by storm in the 1920s, dazzling audiences with her humour, beauty and effervescence on stage. She became an icon. Later, as one of the most recognisable women in the world, she became a spy for the French resistance and was awarded the Légion d’honneur for military service. After the war she became a civil rights activist, and in 1963 she spoke at the March on Washington alongside Martin Luther King. All this from a girl of mixed heritage, born in Missouri to a poor mother and a father she did not know. 
 
Formed from a series of conversations with the French journalist Marcel Sauvage over a period of more than twenty years, and now translated into English for the first time, this gorgeous book offers an insight into one of the most beguiling figures of the twentieth century. 
 
‘Translated gorgeously into English… A delightful, nourishing read’ Guardian 
 
‘She was a beacon of joy and fellowship and her smile…reaches out to us across the years’ Financial Times 
 
‘Josephine Baker certainly shook things up. This memoir demonstrates - vividly - the pleasure she took in doing it’ Washington Post 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY IJEOMA OLUO 
 
TRANSLATED BY ANAM ZAFAR AND SOPHIE LEWIS

Fearless and Free

A Memoir

Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway's classic portrait of the pageantry of bullfighting. 
 
'I was trying to learn to write, commencing with the simplest things, and one of the simplest things of all and the most fundamental is violent death' 
 
This is Hemingway's classic portrait of the pageantry of bullfighting. Here are the sights, the sounds, the excitement, and above all, the knowledge, that fuelled Hemingway's passion for Spain and the bullfight. This remarkable book contains some of his finest writing, inspired by the intense life, as well as the inevitable death, of those hot, violent afternoons. 
 
'Hemingway's style, at its best, is a superb vehicle for revealing tenderness of feeling beneath descriptions of brutality' Guardian

Death in the Afternoon

Nik Cohn

Nik Cohn began to write this book in the late 1960s with a simple purpose: to catch the feel, the pulse of Rock. Nobody had written a serious book on the subject before, and there were no reference books or research to refer to. The result is an unruly, thrilling and definitive history of an era, from Bill Haley to Jimi Hendrix, full of guts, flash, energy and speed. In vividly describing the music and cutting through the hype, Nik Cohn engendered and perfected a new form: rock criticism.

Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom

Pop from the Beginning

'The life-affirming expression of an artist engaged in living to the full' The Times 
 
 Smiling in Slow Motion is Derek Jarman's last journal, stretching from May 1991 until a fortnight before his death in February 1994. Jarman writes with his trademark humour and candour about friends and enemies, as he races through his final years of film-making, gardening and radical political protest. 
 
 Written from Jarman's Charing Cross Road flat, his famed garden at Dungeness, and finally from his bed in St Bartholomew's Hospital, Jarman meditates on his own deteriorating health and the loss of his contemporaries. Yet Smiling in Slow Motion is not simply a chronicle of illness and regret: it is, at its heart, one of endeavour, determination and pride. 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY NEIL BARTLETT

Smiling in Slow Motion

Journals, 1991–1994

Impassioned, witty and polemical, At Your Own Risk is Derek Jarman's defiant celebration of gay sexuality. 
 
In At Your Own Risk, Derek Jarman weaves poetry, prose, photographs and newspaper extracts into a rich tapestry of gay experience in the UK. The buttoned-up repression of the fifties and sixties makes way for liberation and free love in the seventies, only to be chased by the terror and pain of HIV/AIDS. This is Jarman at his passionate best, written when he was already ill with HIV and in the midst of the moral panic surrounding the AIDS crisis. Defiant and furious, he not only celebrates his own sexuality but skewers wider society for its brazen homophobia. 
 
Reissued here 25 years after Jarman's death, with an introduction by Straight Jacket author Matthew Todd, At Your Own Risk remains a singular work. It is a powerful reminder of how far we have come and how much further we have left to go. 
 
'It blew my mind quite honestly !', It's A Sin star Olly Alexander via Twitter

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