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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E. P. Thompson

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Fifty years since first publication, E. P. Thompson's revolutionary account of working-class culture and ideals is published in Penguin Modern Classics, with a new introduction by historian Michael Kenny 
 
This classic and imaginative account of working-class society in its formative years, 1780 to 1832, revolutionized our understanding of English social history. E. P. Thompson shows how the working class took part in its own making and re-creates the whole-life experience of people who suffered loss of status and freedom, who underwent degradation, and who yet created a cultured and political consciousness of great vitality. 
 
Reviews: 
 
'A dazzling vindication of the lives and aspirations of the then - and now once again - neglected culture of working-class England' Martin Kettle, Observer 
 
'Superbly readable . . . a moving account of the culture of the self-taught in an age of social and intellectual deprivation' Asa Briggs, Financial Times 
 
'Thompson's work combines passion and intellect, the gifts of the poet, the narrator and the analyst' E. J. Hobsbawm, Independent 
 
'An event not merely in the writing of English history but in the politics of our century' Michael Foot, Times Literary Supplement 
 
'The greatest of our socialist historians' Terry Eagleton, New Statesman 
 
About the author: 
 
E. P. Thompson was born in 1924 and read history at Corpus Christi, Cambridge, graduating in 1946. An academic, writer and acclaimed historian, his first major work was a biography of William Morris. The Making of the English Working Class was instantly recognized as a classic on its publication in 1963 and secured his position as one of the leading social historians of his time. Thompson was also an active campaigner and key figure in the ending of the Cold War. He died in 1993, survived by his wife and two sons.

The Making of the English Working Class

John Healy

John Healy, the son of poor Irish immigrants in London, grows up hardened by violence and soon finds himself overwhelmed by alcoholism. He ends up in the grass arena: the parks and streets of the inner city, where beggars, thieves, prostitutes and killers fight for survival and each day brings the question of where to find the next drink. In his searing autobiography Healy describes with unflinching honesty his experiences of addiction, his escape through learning to play chess in prison, and his ongoing search for peace of mind.

The Grass Arena

An Autobiography

Virginia M. Axline

In 1964, renowned psychotherapist Virginia M. Axline visited a New York school. There she encountered a little boy apart from teachers and children. Dibs sat alone, or gently traced the edge of the room, defying approach and every attempt at interaction. Every day was like this, and every day his teachers feared further that their support was not enough. As a last resort, Axline was asked to meet with Dibs for a series of weekly play therapy sessions. There, through the guise of time spent will toys and paint, Dibs' extraordinary character -- and the circumstance of his pain -- is slowly revealed... 
 
Based on the transcripts of their sessions together, Dibs in Search of Self is a seminal testament to the power of psychotherapy, and a classic of twentieth century nonfiction -- an incredible true story of personal transformation.

Dibs in Search of Self

Personality Development in Play Therapy

Sam Selvon

Set in London in 1965, The Housing Lark follows a group of West Indian friends as they attempt to buy a house together in the city they now call home, while also navigating racist attitudes, sexual politics, exploitative landlords and brushes with the law. Written with Selvon's characteristic exuberance and humour, this is a vivid and moving depiction of the migrant experience, peopled by a compelling cast of schemers, dreamers and hustlers.

The Housing Lark

Penguin Modern Classics

Gregor Rezzori

The Snows of Yesteryear (1989) is Gregor von Rezzori's haunting evocation of his childhood in Czernowitz, in present-day Ukraine. Growing up after the First World War, Rezzori portrays a twilit world suspended between the dying ways of an imperial past and the terrors of the twentieth century. He recalls his volatile, boar-hunting father, his earthy nursemaid, his fragile, aristocratic mother, his adored governess and the tragic death of his beloved sister, in a luminous story of war, unrest, eccentricity, folk tales, dark forests, night flights, and what it is like to lose your home.

The Snows of Yesteryear

Portraits for an Autobiography

Milovan Djilas

A mesmerising, chilling close-up portrayal of Stalin from Milovan Djilas, a Communist insider - with an introduction from Anne Applebaum, author of Gulag and Iron Curtain 
 
This extraordinarily vivid and unnerving book three meetings held with Stalin during and after the Second World War. Djilas brilliantly describes the dictator in his lair - cunning, cruel, enormously talented. Few books give as clear a sense of what made Stalin such a compelling figure and how he was able to hypnotise and terrify those around him. Djilas also describes the key members of Stalin's court: Beria, Malenkov, Zhukov, Molotov and Khruschchev. The result is a gripping account of the ruler at the height of his fame and power.

Conversations With Stalin

George Orwell

'An unrivalled picture of the rumours, suspicions and treachery of civil war' Antony Beevor 
 
Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism as I understand it'. Thus wrote Orwell following his experiences as a militiaman in the Spanish Civil War, chronicled in Homage to Catalonia. Here he brings to bear all the force of his humanity, passion and clarity, describing with bitter intensity the bright hopes and cynical betrayals of that chaotic episode: the revolutionary euphoria of Barcelona, the courage of ordinary Spanish men and women he fought alongside, the terror and confusion of the front, his near-fatal bullet wound and the vicious treachery of his supposed allies. 
 
A firsthand account of the brutal conditions of the Spanish Civil War, George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia includes an introduction by Julian Symons.

Homage to Catalonia

James Baldwin

Raoul Peck

The New York Times bestseller based on the Oscar nominated documentary film 
 
In June 1979, the writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin embarked on a project to tell the story of America through the lives of three of his murdered friends: Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. He died before it could be completed. In his documentary film, I Am Not Your Negro, Raoul Peck imagines the book Baldwin never wrote, using his original words to create a radical, powerful and poetic work on race in the United States - then, and today. 
 
'Thrilling . . . A portrait of one man's confrontation with a country that, murder by murder, as he once put it, "devastated my universe"' The New York Times 
 
'Baldwin's voice speaks even more powerfully today . . . the prose-poet of our injustice and inhumanity . . . The times have caught up with his scalding eloquence' Variety 
 
 'A cinematic séance . . . One of the best movies about the civil rights era ever made' Guardian 
 
 'I Am Not Your Negro turns James Baldwin into a prophet' Rolling Stone

I Am Not Your Negro

Claude Lévi-Strauss

Tristes Tropiques begins with the line 'I hate travelling and explorers', yet during his life Claude Lévi-Strauss travelled from wartime France to the Amazon basin and the dense upland jungles of Brazil, where he found 'human society reduced to its most basic expression'. His account of the people he encountered changed the field of anthropology, transforming Western notions of 'primitive' man. Tristes Tropiques is a major work of art as well as of scholarship. It is a memoir of exquisite beauty and a masterpiece of travel writing: funny, discursive, movingly detailing personal and cultural loss, and brilliantly connecting disparate fields of thought. Few books have had as powerful and broad an impact.

Tristes Tropiques

John Steinbeck

Just after the iron curtain fell on Eastern Europe John Steinbeck and acclaimed war photographer, Robert Capa ventured into the Soviet Union to report for the New York Herald Tribune. This rare opportunity took the famous travellers not only to Moscow and Stalingrad - now  Volgograd - but through the countryside of the Ukraine and the Caucasus. A RUSSIAN JOURNAL is the distillation of their journey and remains a remarkable memoir and unique historical document.  Steinbeck and Capa recorded the grim realities of factory workers, government clerks, and peasants, as they emerged from the rubble of World War II.  This is an intimate glimpse of two artists at the height of their powers, answering their need to document human struggle

A Russian Journal

The Lion and the Unicorn was written in London during the worst period of the Blitz. It is vintage Orwell, a dynamic outline of his belief in socialism, patriotism and an English revolution. His fullest political statement, it has been described as 'one of the most moving and incisive portraits of the English character' and is as relevant now as it ever has been.

The Lion and the Unicorn

Socialism and the English Genius

Sylvia Townsend Warner

Lolly Willowes, always so gentle and accommodating, suddenly announces that she is moving, alone, to the countryside. To her overbearing family in London, it is a disturbing and inexplicable act of defiance. But Lolly will not be swayed, and in the depths of the English countryside she gradually discovers not only freedom and independence, but also, unexpectedly, her true vocation: witchcraft.

Lolly Willowes

Wang Xiaobo

Wang Xiaobo made his name as a novelist but his essays, too, have become ongoing bestsellers in China since their publication in the 1990s. Bringing together his thoughts on reading and talking and silence in the Cultural Revolution, about the irrepressible spirit of one beloved pig he met while an 'educated youth', and about being operated on via a textbook, these essays give a rare glimpse into a world rarely seen and discussed with such honesty. 
 
Written with a light touch and with a wry sense of humour, these are also the essays of a great literary talent, grappling with sociology, sexuality and feminism, with the cultural clash of living in the USA, and with Chinese sci-fi, the internet, and beloved European writers like Bertrand Russell and Italo Calvino. Electrifying, containing a razor-sharp wit and intellect, this collection reveals the voice of a generation to English-speaking readers for the very first time.

Pleasure of Thinking

Erving Goffman

Acclaimed on first publication and today considered one of the defining works of the sociology, The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life is Erving Goffman's extraordinary analysis of the structure of our social interactions. 
 
Blurring the line between workaday life and theatrical performance, Goffman argues that our behaviour with others is defined by how we wish to be perceived - resulting in displays bearing a startling similarity to those of an actor on the stage. From the houses and clothes that we use as 'fixed props' to the 'backstage' of the solitude in which our personas are rehearsed and relaxed, Goffman's insight reveals human character to be not fixed or stable, but liquid and consciously maintained.

The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

Azar Nafisi

Every Thursday morning in a living room in Iran, over tea and pastries, eight women meet in secret to discuss forbidden works of Western literature. As they lose themselves in the worlds of Lolita, The Great Gatsby and Pride and Prejudice, gradually they come to share their own stories, dreams and hopes with each other, and, for a few hours, taste freedom. Azar Nafisi's bestselling memoir is a moving, passionate testament to the transformative power of books, the magic of words and the search for beauty in life's darkest moments.

Reading Lolita in Tehran

Elaine Kraf

Ellen is a single artist living alone on New York’s Upper West Side in the 1970s. She is beset by old boyfriends, paint pigment choices, and, occasionally, by 'radiances' - episodes of joyous, reckless unreality. Under the influence of 'radiances' she becomes Princess Esmeralda, and West 72nd Street becomes the kingdom over which she rules. Life as Esmeralda is a liberating experience for Ellen, who, despite the chaos and stigma these episodes can bring, relishes the respite from the confines of the everyday. And yet those around her, particularly the men in her life, are threatened by her incarnation as Esmeralda, and by the freedom that it gives her. 
 
The Princess of 72nd Street is Elaine Kraf's witty, dizzyingly inventive take on female liberation and mental health, a work of immense literary power and unbridled energy. Provocative at the time of its publication in 1979 and thoroughly iconoclastic, it is a remarkable portrait of an unforgettable woman.

The Princess of 72nd Street

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

Shiva Naipaul

In the 1970s Shiva Naipaul travelled to Africa, visiting Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia for several months. Through his experiences, the places he visited and his various encounters, he aimed to discover what 'liberation', 'revolution' and 'socialism' meant to the ordinary people. His journey of discovery is brilliantly documented in this intimate, comic and controversial portrayal of a continent on the brink of change.

North of South

An African Journey

Marshall McLuhan

Well known for coining the term 'Global Village', Marshall McLuhan's thinking was, and still is, revolutionary. His theories, many of which are illustrated in this astonishing 'inventory of effects', force us to question how modes of communication have shaped society. This is an astonishing work by a truly astonishing man. 
 
The Penguin on Design series includes the works of creative thinkers whose writings on art, design and the media have changed our vision forever. This is one of four books in that series.

The Medium is the Massage

An Inventory of Effects

Ronald Blythe

This colourful, perceptive portrayal of English country life reverberates with the voices of the village inhabitants, from the reminiscences of survivors of the Great War evoking days gone by, to the concerns of a younger generation of farm-workers and the fascinating and personal recollections of, among others, the local schoolteacher, doctor, blacksmith, saddler, district nurse and magistrate. Providing insights into farming, education, welfare, class, religion and death, Akenfield forms a unique document of a way of life that has, in many ways, disappeared.

Akenfield

Czeslaw Milosz

Written in Paris in the early 1950s, this book created instant controversy in its analysis of modern society that had allowed itself to be hypnotized by socio-political doctrines, and to accept totalitarian terror on the strength of a hypothetical future.

The Captive Mind

Tété-Michel Kpomassie

'The play of moonlight on the icebergs was indescribably strange, and its magnificent refracted shimmers were brighter than day. One night, fooled by its brilliance, I got up at three in the morning.' 
 
Scorching heat, rich, fertile soil and treacherous snakes marked the landscape in which Kpomassie grew up in 1950s Togo, West Africa. When, as a teenager, he discovered a book on Greenland, this distant land of snow and ice became an instant obsession and he embarked on the adventure of a lifetime. 
 
In this work of rich, immersive travel writing Kpomassie invites the reader to join him on his audacious journey as he makes his way from the Equator to the bitter cold of the Arctic and settles into life with the Inuit peoples, adapting to their foods and customs. Part memoir, part anthropological observation, this warm, captivating narrative teems with nuanced observations on community, belonging and colonization. 
 
Originally published in 1981, this critically acclaimed work has been translated into nine languages and is a rare example of travel writing from a West African perspective that highlights unexpected connection between cultures despite their contrasting landscapes. 
 
This translation by James Kirkup has previously been published with the title An African in Greenland

Michel the Giant

An African in Greenland

Kathy Acker

'Acker gives her work the power to mirror the reader's soul' William S. Burroughs 
 
'Kathy Acker's writing is virtuoso, maddening, crazy, so sexy, so painful, and beaten out of a wild heart that nothing can tame. Acker is a landmark writer' Jeanette Winterson 
 
This is the story of Janey, who lived in a locked room, where she found a scrap of paper and began to write down her life. It's a story of lust, sex, pain, youth, punk, anarchy, gangs, the city, feminism, America, Jean Genet and the prisons we create for ourselves. A heady, surreal mash-up of coming-of-age tale, prose, poetry, plagiarism and illustration, Kathy Acker's breakthrough 1984 novel caused huge controversy and made her an avant-garde literary icon. 
 
Published to coincide with the 20th anniversary of Kathy Acker's untimely death, Blood and Guts in High School is published for the first time in Penguin Classics, acknowledging the profound impact she has had on our culture, and alongside the authors her work pulsates with the influence of: William S. Burroughs, Cervantes and Charles Dickens, among others.

Blood and Guts in High School

Sigmund Freud

An extraordinary collection of thematically linked essays, including THE UNCANNY, SCREEN MEMORIES and FAMILY ROMANCES. 
 
Leonardo da Vinci fascinated Freud primarily because he was keen to know why his personality was so incomprehensible to his contemporaries. In this probing biographical essay he deconstructs both da Vinci's character and the nature of his genius. As ever, many of his exploratory avenues lead to the subject's sexuality - why did da Vinci depict the naked human body the way hedid? What of his tendency to surround himself with handsome young boys that he took on as his pupils? Intriguing, thought-provoking and often contentious, this volume contains some of Freud's best writing.

The Uncanny

A collection of some of Freud's most famous essays, including ON THE INTRODUCTION OF NARCISSISM; REMEMBERING, REPEATING AND WORKING THROUGH; BEYOND THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE; THE EGO AND THE ID and INHIBITION, SYMPTOM AND FEAR.

Beyond the Pleasure Principle

James Frazer

Sir James George Frazer (1854-1941) caught the popular imagination with his vast and enterprising comparative study of the beliefs and institutions of mankind, which in its third edition numbered 12 volumes. Reissued here is Frazer's own single-volume abridgement of 1922.

The Golden Bough

Silvia Federici

A cult classic since its publication in the early years of this century, Caliban and the Witch is Silvia Federici's history of the body in the transition to capitalism. Moving from the peasant revolts of the late Middle Ages through the European witch-hunts, the rise of scientific rationalism and the colonisation of the Americas, it gives a panoramic account of the often horrific violence with which the unruly human material of pre-capitalist societies was transformed into a set of predictable and controllable mechanisms. It is a study of indigenous traditions crushed, of the enclosure of women's reproductive powers within the nuclear family, and of how our modern world was forged in blood.

Caliban and the Witch

Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation

A searing account of George Orwell's observations of working-class life in the bleak industrial heartlands of Yorkshire and Lancashire in the 1930s, The Road to Wigan Pier is a brilliant and bitter polemic that has lost none of its political impact over time. His graphically unforgettable descriptions of social injustice, cramped slum housing, dangerous mining conditions, squalor, hunger and growing unemployment are written with unblinking honesty, fury and great humanity. It crystallized the ideas that would be found in Orwell's later works and novels, and remains a powerful portrait of poverty, injustice and class divisions in Britain.

The Road to Wigan Pier

Georges Bataille

A philosopher, essayist, novelist, pornographer and fervent Catholic who came to regard the brothels of Paris as his true 'churches', Georges Bataille ranks among the boldest and most disturbing of twentieth-century thinkers. In this influential study he links the underlying sexual basis of religion to death, offering a dazzling array of insights into incest, prostitution, marriage, murder, sadism, sacrifice and violence, as well as including comments on Freud, Sade and Saint Theresa. Everywhere, Eroticism argues, sex is surrounded by taboos, which we must continually transgress in order to overcome the sense of isolation that faces us all.

Eroticism

Elie Wiesel

Marion Wiesel

Born into a Jewish ghetto in Hungary, as a child,  Elie Wiesel was sent to the Nazi concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald. This is his account of that atrocity: the ever-increasing horrors he endured, the loss of his family and his struggle to survive in a world that stripped him of humanity, dignity and faith. Describing in simple terms the tragic murder of a people from a survivor's perspective, Night is among the most personal, intimate and poignant of all accounts of the Holocaust. A compelling consideration of the darkest side of human nature and the enduring power of hope, it remains one of the most important works of the twentieth century.

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