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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Andre Dubus III

It is the summer of 1967 and, with one more year of high school to go, Leo Suther still has a lot to learn. He's in love with Allie Donovan, the beautiful girl who has turned his head ever since she moved to his small Massachusetts town. And he feels a real draw to the blues his father has taught him. Leo soon finds himself in the middle of a consuming love affair - and an intense testing of his political values by Allie's father, who challenges him on the escalating Vietnam conflict and forces him to examine just where he stands in relation to the people in his life. Throughout his - and the nation's - unforgettable 'summer of love', Leo is learning the language of the blues, which seem to echo the mourning he feels for his dead mother, his occasionally distant father, and the youth that is fast giving way to manhood.

Bluesman

Bruce Robinson

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY JOHNNY DEPP 
 
A screenplay based on the novel by Hunter S. Thompson 
 
It's 1960. In a highrise hotel not far from the beaches of San Juan, a man is recovering from an animal of a hangover. 
 
Paul Kemp is an alcoholic journalist who's barely seen better days, arriving at the only job he can get: writing horoscopes for failing rag The Daily Star. His fellow hacks are mostly crazy drunks on the verge of quitting, so Kemp fits in perfectly. 
 
But when he meets the impossibly gorgeous Chenault and her flashy boyfriend Sanderson, Kemp finds himself in way over his head - party to shady business deals, in hair-raising car chases with enraged Puerto Ricans, experimenting with a hitherto unknown hallucinogen - and finally discovers a mad, desperate devotion to the truth. 
 
Bruce Robinson brings Hunter S. Thompson's novel to the big screen with all the brilliance, wild humour and fierce energy associated with the acclaimed writer and director of Withnail &amp; I and The Killing Fields.

The Rum Diary: A Screenplay

Derek Jarman

Derek Jarman was one of our most celebrated artists- painter, poet, film-maker - and the author of many books, including the bestsellers Modern Nature and At Your Own Risk. 
 
The film scripts collected here for the first time- including Akenaten, Jubilee, Bob-Up-A-Down, B Movie: Little England/ A Time of Hope, Neutron and Sod 'Em - confirm Derek Jarman's reputation as a leading independent film-maker.

Up in the Air

Collected Film Scripts

Matthew Baylis

Alastair Strange is having trouble.  His girlfriend Martha, tired of late night telly and takeaway pizzas, has reinvented herself as the real estate princess of Putney. His dream job has turned into a nightmare and his Dad's been arrested for burglary.  Just when things couldn't get worse, along comes Alastair's old friend, society It-girl Tara, with a tantalising job offer. Alastair finds himself teaching media studies in an Ealing school.  A cushy number, he thinks, but that's before Tara calls the favour in- The derelict Ealing Studios are next to the school - their presence haunts Alastair and acts as a continual motif for his story, combining the quirky wit and eccentricity of the Ealing films with an eye for the absurdities of modern urban life.  Flat-sharing with the impossible Davenport, dealing with mysterious girls on the bus and disastrous blind dates, it would seem that there is, perhaps, one last comedy left in Ealing.

The Last Ealing Comedy

David Bellos

Jacques Tati's Monsieur Hulot, unmistakeable with his pipe, brolly and striped socks, was a creation of sheer slapstick genius that made audiences around the world laugh at the sheer absurdity of life. This biography charts Tati's rise and fall, from his earliest beginnings as a music hall mime during the Depression, to the success of Jour de Fete and Mon Oncle, to Playtime, the grandiose masterpiece that left the once delebrated director bankrupt and begging for equipment to complete his final films. Analysing Tati's singular vision, Bellos reveals the intricate staging of his most famous gags and draws upon hitherto inaccessible archives to produce a unique assessment of his work and its context for film lovers and film students alike.

Jacques Tati His Life & Art

Dan Kennedy

How would you like a six-figure marketing job at the hallowed record label that signed everyone who counts in the last fifty years of pop music? Before you answer, we'll throw in a plush office, a hip assistant and a bottomless expense account? 
 
Dan Kennedy thinks all of his dreams have come true at once. In reality, he's just walked into a nightmarish episode of The Office. From his first assigment - creating a campaign celebrating 25 years of Phil Collins' love songs - he knows he's in way over his head, and from the looks of others around the boardroom, he's not alone. 
 
With cameos by ageing rock stars, dinosaur music-biz kingpins, hip-hop thugs and Iggy Pop, Rock On is an achingly funny tale of rock and roll, office life, and what happens when the suits take control.

Rock On

How I Tried to Stop Caring about Music and Learn to Love Corporate Rock

Brian Keenan

While held hostage by fundamentalist Shi'ite militiamen in the suburbs of Beirut, Brian Keenan was visited and sustained by the presence of Turlough O'Carolan - the legendary blind Irish harper of the seventeenth century. This novel is thus a re-creation of an extraordinary historical story and a personal debt repaid. It is also, obliquely, a parallel life - another life imprisoned, shaped by the dark.Narrated largely by O'Carolan from his death-bed, and through the recollections of those closest to him, Turlough powerfully brings to life a lost Ireland of famine and disease, eviction and oppression. Stalking through the broken and dispossessed comes Turlough O'Carolan, the musical prodigy, blinded by smallpox and now an itinerant harper, lauded by the aristocracy and a hero to his people. His Rabelaisian desire for drink and women is counterpointed by his artistic struggle towards the great music and some kind of inner peace. Driven by demons and dreams, riven by contradictions, Turlough emerges as a great man, full of frailty: a blind man afraid of the dark.A panoramic picaresque, rich with the textures and smells of rural Ireland and peopled by a host of angels and devils, Turlough is a remarkable historical journey, and a huge imaginative feat

Turlough

Eva Hoffman

Isabel Merton is a renowned concert pianist whose playing is marked by rare intensity. At the height of her career, she feels increasingly torn between the expressive musical realm she inhabits, and the fragmented life she leads as an itinerant artist, with its frequent flights, anonymous hotels and arbitrary encounters. 
Then Isabel meets Anzor Islikhanov, a political exile from war-torn Chechnya driven by a powerful desire to help and avenge his people. As their paths cross in several cities, they are drawn to each other - until a menacing incident throws Isabel into crisis.

Illuminations

Audrey Salkeld

Leni Riefenstahl will always be remembered for her brilliant film of the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin - still rated as one of the best documentaries ever made. Before that she was acclaimed for her roles in silent feature films, when German cinema was in its artistic heyday in the 1920s. She pioneered the box office success of such classic mountaineering dramas as The White Hell of Piz Palu and then began to direct her own films. The Blue Light was admired by Hitler and led to her filming the Wagnerian Nuremberg Rally of 1934. After the war she was shunned by the film industry, despite a court in 1952 proclaiming her not guilty of supporting the Nazis in a punishable way. Her undoubted charisma led to many affairs and grandiose schemes - deep sea diving in her seventies and still filming wildlife in her nineties. Audrey Salkeld has sifted the fact from the legend and gives us a moving portrait of the great movie `star' who suffered more in the `wilderness' than her enduring fame suggests.

A Portrait Of Leni Riefenstahl

Tim Thornton

Being an unsigned band isn't a situation - it's a mental illness. Few people realise they're suffering from this affliction. Russell Groom knows, and he wants to change things fast. But Russell doesn't fit the traditional rock-star mould, and his woefully unexceptional band are headed nowhere, inhabiting a world of cramped and sweaty rehearsal rooms, crap day jobs, empty gigs and interminable trips down the A303 to dodgy festival slots in Wiltshire. Enter Josh - the enigmatic and arrogant son of a successful record producer - with an offer it's impossible to refuse... 
 
Tim Thornton's new novel is a hilarious fly-on-the-wall trip round the outskirts of the music industry, with a valuable lesson: unsigned bands never become signed bands. They have to die first.

Death of an Unsigned Band

Joshua Furst

As a young woman in the 1980's, Julia became entangled with the emerging punk scene in Minneapolis - in particular with the band Nobody's fool - until a mysterious and unspeakable catastrophe delivers her to a husband and the suburbs. Battered by mental llness, haunted by memories and grief that stretching back to her childhood, she is unable to put her past behind her - or refrain from making her daughter Cheryl into a vessel for her own hopes and fears. 
 
So it comes as little surprise when 16 year-old Cheryl packs a bag and runs away. Exactly where is anyone's guess, though as Julia envisions her daughter's every move from the house through the city's outskirts and into the city - she relives her own bygone experiences in the very same place, where the radical fringe converge. Here amidst a group of would-be revolutuionaries squatting in the Sabotage Café, Cheryl re-enacts her mothers troubled coming-of-age, initiated as she is into a sullied melange of drugs, awkward sex, glib anarchy and acts of vandalism and violence that throw into question everything that she, in her mothers mind's eye, has run from and wishes to become. 
 
A chilling, mesmerizing portrait of todays innocents burdened with the fallout of their parent's rebellion in addition to their own, The Sabotage Cafe is an unforgettable tour de force of insight and compassion, a brilliant first novel by a writer in full, ambitious command of his craft.

The Sabotage Café

Nik Cohn

What lunacy would cause a 55-year-old white male to embroil himself in the world of New Orleans rap - as ideas man, talent-spotter, lyricist, and would-be producer? Nik Cohn has loved (and hated) hip-hop since its birth and loved (and hated) New Orleans for even longer - an addiction he's never wanted to kick. But nothing prepared him for the experience of being pitched, more or less by accident, into the role of Triksta, rap impresario. 
 
A white alien in a black world, with no funding or qualifications, and not a clue what he was doing, he had to rethink himself from scratch. Surrounded by a cast that included such names as Choppa and Soulja Slim, Big Ramp and Lil T, Bass Heavy, Fifth Ward Weebie, and Shorty Brown Hustle, he entered a world of tiny backstreet studios, broken-down slums and gun turfs. 
 
Triksta is the story of a three-year odyssey to the heart of rap, and New Orleans, and self-knowledge.

Triksta

Life and Death and New Orleans Rap

A. O. Scott

Few could explain, let alone seek out, a career in criticism. Yet what A. O. Scott shows in Better Living Through Criticism is that we are, in fact, all critics: because critical thinking informs almost every aspect of artistic creation, of civil action, of interpersonal life. With penetrating insight and humour, Scott shows that while individual critics – himself included – can make mistakes and find flaws where they shouldn't, criticism as a discipline is one of the noblest, most creative and urgent activities. 
 
Using his own film criticism as a starting point – everything from an infamous dismissal of the international blockbuster The Avengers to his intense affection for Pixar's animated Ratatouille – Scott expands outwards, easily guiding readers through the complexities of Rilke and Shelley, the origins of Chuck Berry and the Rolling Stones, the power of Marina Abramovic and 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' Scott shows that real criticism was and always will be the breath of fresh air that allows true creativity to thrive. As he puts it: ‘The time for criticism is always now, because the imperative to think clearly, never goes away.’

Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think about Art, Pleasure, Beauty and Truth

Angela Carter

The Vintage Collected Edition of Angela Carter's works continues with THE CURIOUS ROOM, which contains her dramatic writings, including several previously unpublished plays and screenplays. THE CURIOUS ROOM includes a radio play about the demented Victorian painter and parricide Richard Dadd; reworkings of Puss in Boots and the Dracula story; a draft for an opera of Virginia Woolf's ORLANDO, as well as the film scripts of THE MAGIC TOYSHOP and THE COMPANY OF WOLVES. Revealing many of the enthusiasms and concerns which ignited Carter's fiction. THE CURIOUS ROOM is full of magnificent and startling new material, charged with the range and power of Carter's imagination and inventiveness.

The Curious Room

Collected Dramatic Works

A remarkable collection of 'Covid Chronicles' -- stories from lockdown sent in from listeners to BBC Radio 4 -- making a deeply moving people's history of the pandemic. 
 
 
On 23 March 2020, as the deadly virus spread around the world, the UK went into lockdown. In the following weeks and months, it became clear that in many ways we were all in this together, but the illness and the long period of isolation would hit people in entirely different ways. 
 
When BBC Radio 4's PM Programme launched the 'Covid Chronicles' series, listeners from across the country - and beyond - began sending in their lockdown stories to be aired on the show. The results are astonishing: moving, profound, funny, powerful and an invaluable record of our collective experiences. Ranging from the everyday (the thrill of booking a food delivery) to the momentous (a wedding on Zoom), we hear about birth and death, loneliness and loss, community and kindness, as well as remarkable stories from those working in the NHS on the front line. 
 
This book is a collection of some of these Chronicles, written in the midst of one of the most unexpected and intense moments in our history. Together they give us an unforgettable portrait of ordinary people caught in extraordinary times, with all the humour and tragedy and uncertainty we've been through. 
 
 'It's inspiring that so many people have shared their stories - some everyday, some life-changing, but all very human. This is a wonderful collection of experiences, to record and remember this devastating year' Christie Watson, bestselling author of The Language of Kindness

Letters from Lockdown

A Selection of Covid Chronicles from BBC Radio 4’s PM Programme

Alexander Barabanov

Alexander Barabanov, a key figure in the Russian dance world, has sifted through many thousands of photographs of dance to accumulate an extraordinary collection of pictures, ranging from historical ballet photographs to shocking avant-garde imagery. 
 
This work has been collected and edited to form an astonishing sequence. Rather than being assembled as an anthology, the sequence has in fact been 'choreographed' so the book is constructed to form a dance in ten movements. It begins with creation myths, follows erotic engagements and leads to a series of mass movements in the modern age. It includes such gems as the young Nureyev's first performance with the Kirov and Baryshinikov's debut as well as images with brutal reference to Abu Ghraib or the march of fascism.

A Dance

Paolo Parisi

'My music is the spiritual expression of what I am: my faith, my knowledge, my being...' 
 
John Coltrane rose from a hard and impoverished childhood in North Carolina to become one of the greatest jazz musicians of all time. From session musician to band member of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis, his raw talent and passion for experimentation inaugurated a new movement in music. Positioned at the beating heart of the 50s and 60s jazz world, Coltrane and his quartet created some of the most innovative and expressive music of the age, including the hit album My Favorite Things and the landmark work A Love Supreme. 
 
Juxtaposing scenes from Coltrane's personal life - his military career, addictions, political activism and love affairs - against snapshots of his major recordings, Coltrane evokes an extraordinary life and the momentous historical events that formed its backdrop. It is a graphic novel that echoes his work in its structure and style, and forms a testament to a pioneer and legend, whose music continues to inspire to this day.

Coltrane

Tim Moore

The spangled insanity, the stubborn reinforcement of crude national stereotypes, the scoreboard shamelessly corrupted by cross-border friendship and hatred... throughout those long post-ABBA decades, the Eurovision Song Contest has been drawing 450 million of us to the sofa for all the wrong reasons. And the most gloriously wrong of all: our enduring fascination with the unfortunates left to wander the desolate summit of Mount Fiasco without a point to their names. 
 
From Lisbon to Liverpool, from the Black Sea to the Baltic, Tim Moore travels the continent to track down the thirteen Eurominstrels who suffered the entertainment world's prime humiliation.

Nul Points

Robert Gutman

Mozart: A Cultural Biography is a fresh interpretation of a musical genius, meticulously researched and gracefully written.  It places Mozart's life and music in the context of the intellectual, political, and artistic currents of eighteenth-century Europe.  Even as he delves into philosophic and aesthetic questions, Robert Gutman keeps in sight, clearly and firmly, the composer and his works.  He discusses the major genres in which Mozart worked - chamber music; liturgical, theatre, and keyboard compositions; concerto; symphony; opera; and oratorio.  All of these riches unfold within the framework of the composer's brief but remarkable life.With Gutman's informed and sensitive handling, Mozart emerges in a light more luminous than in previous renderings.  The composer was an affectionate and generous man to family and friends, self-deprecating, witty, winsome, but also an austere moralist, incisive and purposeful.Mozart is both an extraordinary portrait of a man in his time and a brilliant distillation of musical thought.

Mozart

Paul Oliver

'This is not only Oliver's finest book on the blues, but is perhaps the finest overall survey of the subject that has yet been written. ' FINANCIAL TIMES The influence of the blues on popular mainstream music is immense. Its fascinating history reaches back to the end of the nineteenth century, its roots in the work songs of slavery, the ballads and country music of black Americans. Paul Oliver places singers like Blind Lemon Jefferson, Bessie Smith, Muddy Waters and Lightnin' Hopkins firmly in the context of their surroundings. He considers every facet of the Blues, its themes and subjects, the impact of recording, its-far-reaching legacy. This is not simply the history of a music but a reflection of the tumult with American society.

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