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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Aldous Huxley

Could drugs offer a new way of seeing the world? In 1953, in the presence of an investigator, Aldous Huxley took four-tenths of a gramme of mescalin, sat down and waited to see what would happen. When he opened his eyes everything, from the flowers in a vase to the creases in his trousers, was transformed. His account of his experience, and his vision for all that psychedelics could offer to mankind, has influenced writers, artists and thinkers around the world. 
 
The unabridged text of The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley 
 
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: 
Drinking by John Cheever 
Swimming by Roger Deakin 
Eating by Nigella Lawson 
Desire by Haruki Murakami

Psychedelics

Vintage Minis

Yuval Noah Harari

Selected from the books Sapiens and Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari 
 
How did money come to be invented? Why does it now have such significance in our lives? Does it make us happier or unhappier? And what does the future hold for it? With brilliant clarity and insight, Yuval Noah Harari takes the reader on a journey from the very first coins through to 21st century economics and shows us how we are all on the brink of a revolution, whether we like it or not. 
 
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: 
Home by Salman Rushdie 
Babies by Anne Enright 
Eating by Nigella Lawson 
Drinking by John Cheever

Money

Yanis Varoufakis

VINTAGE MINIS: GREAT MINDS. BIG IDEAS. LITTLE BOOKS. 
 
How do we choose between what is fair and just, and what our debtors demand of us? Yanis Varoufakis was put in such a dilemma in 2015 when he became the finance minister of Greece. In this rousing book, he charts the absurdities that underpin calls for austerity, as well as his own battles with a bureaucracy bent on ignoring the human cost of its every action. Passionately outspoken and tuned to the voices of the oppressed, Varoufakis presents a guide to modern economics, and its threat to democracy, like no other. 
 
Selected from the books And the Weak Suffer What They Must? and Adults in the Room

Austerity

Anne Enright

Babies: our biggest mystery and our most natural consequence, our hardest test and our enduring love. Anne Enright describes the intensity, bewilderment and extravagant happiness of her experience of having babies, from the exhaustion of early pregnancy to first smiles and becoming acquainted with the long reaches of the night. Everyone, from parents to the mildly curious, can delight in Enright’s funny, eloquent and unsentimental account of having babies. 
 
Selected from the book Making Babies by Anne Enright 
 
 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: 
Fatherhood by Karl Ove Knausgaard 
Motherhood by Helen Simpson 
Drinking by John Cheever 
Sisters by Louisa May Alcott

Babies

William Styron

How does a writer compose a suicide note? This was not a question that the prize-winning novelist William Styron had ever contemplated before. In this true account of his depression, Styron describes an illness that reduced him from a successful writer to a man arranging his own destruction. He lived to give us this gripping description of his descent into mental anguish, and his eventual success in overcoming a little-understood yet very common condition. 
 
The unabridged text of Darkness Visible by William Styron 
 
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: 
Swimming by Roger Deakin 
Babies by Anne Enright 
Calm by Tim Parks 
Work by Joseph Heller

Depression

Sigmund Freud

VINTAGE MINIS: GREAT MINDS. BIG IDEAS. LITTLE BOOKS. 
 
Have you ever dreamt you were naked on stage, or woken having failed an exam? In these fascinating, pioneering essays, Sigmund Freud plunges into the recesses of our minds, and awakens the hidden meanings behind our most typical and surprising night-time fantasies. From dreams of violence and death, to the more prosaic moments in our dream-life, Freud shines a light on the darkness we are often happy left consigned to night. 
 
Selected from the books The Essentials of Psycho-Analysis and The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of the Sigmund Freud, Volume IV: The Interpretation of Dreams (First Part) by Sigmund Freud

Dreams

Laurie Lee

How do you remember the summers of your childhood? 
 
 For Laurie Lee they were flower-crested, heady, endless days. Here is an evocation of summer like no other – a remote valley filled with the scent of hay, jazzing wasps, blackberries plucked and gobbled, and games played until the last drop of dusk. Lee’s joyful and stirring writing captures the very essence of England’s golden season. 
 
Selected from the book Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee 
 
 ‘An enchanting book, an exquisite farewell, not only to childhood, and boyhood, but also to an England that has vanished’ J.B. Priestly 
 
VINTAGE MINIS: GREAT MINDS. BIG IDEAS. LITTLE BOOKS.

Summer

Stephen Grosz

‘I want to change, but not if it means changing,' a patient once said to me in complete innocence 
 
 What do we do when we find ourselves trapped by our own thoughts or behaviour? Drawing on his twenty-five years’ experience as a psychoanalyst, Stephen Grosz ushers the reader through the door of his consulting room and into the minds of his patients. In these beautifully told cases we find compulsive liars, deceived spouses, violent children and delusional adults but we also find ourselves and in doing so, understand a little more about what it is to be human. 
 
 Selected from The Examined Life. 
 
 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 
 
Discover the Vintage Minis ‘Head Space’ series: 
 
 Recovery by Helen Macdonald 
 Family by Mark Haddon

Therapy

Roger Deakin

Is there anything quite so exhilarating as swimming in wild water? This is a joyful swimming tour of Britain, a frog’s-eye view of the country’s best bathing holes – the rivers, rock pools, lakes, ponds, lochs and sea that define a watery island. Charming, funny, inspiring, an assertion of the native swimmer's right to roam, a celebration of the magic of water – this book will indeed make you want to strip off and leap in. 
 
Selected from the book Waterlog by Roger Deakin 
 
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: 
Eating by Nigella Lawson 
Liberty by Virginia Woolf 
Summer by Laurie Lee 
Desire by Haruki Murakami

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