Steve Roud was Local Studies Librarian for the London Borough of Croydon and served as Honorary Librarian of the Folklore Society for over fifteen years. He has been researching British folklore for over thirty years and is the joint author of the Oxford Dictionary of English Folklore, plus other books on traditional drama and folk song, and the Penguin Guide to the Superstitions of Britain and Ireland, which won the Katharine Briggs Folklore Award in 2004. His publications include London Lore (2008) and The Lore of the Playground (2010). He also compiles the Folk Song Index and the Broadside Index, two internationally acclaimed computer databases of traditional folk and popular song. He lives in Sussex.

Steve Roud

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Václav Havel

Václav Havel’s remarkable and rousing essay on the tyranny of apathy, with a new introduction by Timothy Snyder 
 
Cowed by life under Communist Party rule, a greengrocer hangs a placard in their shop window: Workers of the world, unite! Is it a sign of the grocer’s unerring ideology? Or a symbol of the lies we perform to protect ourselves? 
 
 Written in 1978, Václav Havel’s meditation on political dissent – the rituals of its suppression, and the sparks that re-ignite it – would prove the guiding manifesto for uniting Solidarity movements across the Soviet Union. A portrait of activism in the face of falsehood and intimidation, The Power of the Powerless remains a rousing call against the allure of apathy. 
 
'Havel’s diagnosis of political pathologies has a special resonance in the age of Trump' Pankaj Mishra

The Power of the Powerless

Anthony Burgess

These are Anthony Burgess's candid confessions: he was seduced at the age of nine by an older woman; whilst serving in Gibraltar in World War II he was thrown into jail on VE Day for calling Franco names; he once taught a group of Nazi socialites that the English equivalent of 'heil' was 'sod' and had them crying 'Sod Hitler'. Little Wilson and Big God moves from Moss Side to Malaya recalling Burgess's time as an education officer in the tropics, his tempestuous first marriage, his struggles with Catholicism and the beginning of his prolific writing life. Wise, self-deprecating and bristling with incident, this is a first-class memoir.

Little Wilson and Big God

George Orwell

'You can live on a shilling a day in Paris if you know how. But it is a complicated business' 
 
As a struggling writer in his twenties, Orwell lived as a down-and-out among the poorest members of society. In this, his early memoir, Orwell recalls with vivid clarity his time working as a penniless dishwasher in Paris, pawning clothes to buy a day's worth of bread and wine, sleeping in bug-infested bunks, trading survival skills and cigarette butts with fellow tramps, and trudging between London's workhouse spikes for a few hours' sleep and tea. With all of the sensitivity and compassion that Orwell is known and loved for, he exposed the hardships of poverty and gave readers an unprecedented look at life lived on the fringes of society. 
 
This vivid account is an enduring call to support the world's most vulnerable people and exemplifies his belief that 'The greatest of evils and the worst of crimes is poverty.' 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY KERRY HUDSON

Down and Out in Paris and London

Laurie Lee

Andalusia is a passion - and fifteen years after his last visit Laurie Lee returned. He found a country broken by the Civil War, but the totems of indestructible Spain survive: the Christ in agony, the thrilling flamenco cry-the pride in poverty, the gypsy intensity in vivid whitewashed slums, the cult of the bullfight, the exultation in death, the humour of hopelessness-the paradoxes deep in the fiery bones of Spain. Rich with kaleidoscopic images, A Rose for Winter is as sensual and evocative as the sun-scorched landscape of Andalusia itself.

A Rose For Winter

Various

This is dub poetry: bold and musical, funny and furious. 
 
This collection brings together the work of nine inventive and brilliant poets who defined and drove the dub poetry genre. From the Caribbean, Canada and the UK, the poetry in this collection spans forty years, as dub became a powerful cultural and creative force. 
 
With roots in the reggae culture of 1970s Kingston, dub poetry uses the vivid expressions of everyday spoken language to describe and challenge the experience of life on the margins. Early dub poetry took on police violence, slums and poverty. Later, as Caribbean migrants arrived in countries like Britain and Canada, dub poets faced new issues: racism, discrimination and hostility. Over four difficult decades, dub gave marginalised people a voice for their anger, defiance and creativity. It was the soundtrack to post-Windrush culture. 
 
Serious and humorous, alive and urgent, here is the very best of dub poetry. 
 
The poets included in this collection are: Oku Onuora, Mikey Smith, Mutabaruka, Jean 'Binta' Breeze, James Berry, Benjamin Zephaniah, Ahdri Zhina Mandiela, Lillian Allen and Afua Cooper.

Verbal Riddim

Dub Poetry

Christopher Isherwood

In November 1929, Christopher Isherwood - determined to become a 'permanent foreigner' - packed a rucksack and two suitcases and left England on a one-way ticket for Berlin. With incredible candour and wit, Isherwood recalls the decadence of Berlin's night scene and his route to sexual liberation.  As the Nazis rise to power, Isherwood describes his dramatic struggle to save his partner Heinz from persecution.

Christopher and His Kind

Marjane Satrapi

The brilliant graphic memoir of growing up in Iran during and after the Islamic revolution. 
 
Marjane Satrapi lived through the Iranian Revolution as a little girl. This is her classic memoir-in-comic-strips, the story of a child entangled in the history and politics of her country. It paints an unforgettable portrait of growing up in revolutionary and war-torn Iran, in a family that was both outrageous and ordinary, beset by tragedy and yet buffered by love. Funny, wise, ultimately heartbreaking and told with unforgettable pictures. 
 
&lsquo;A revelation...you will remember it for a very long time&rsquo; Mark Haddon 
 
&lsquo;The magic of Marjane Satrapi&rsquo;s work is that it can condense a whole country&rsquo;s tragedy into one poignant, funny scene after another&rsquo; Independent on Sunday 
 
THE COMPLETE PERSEPOLIS VOLUMES I &amp; II: Includes The Story of a Childhood and The Story of a Return 
 
TRANSLATED BY ANJALI SINGH 
 
**ONE OF THE GUARDIAN'S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21st CENTURY**

Persepolis I & II

Tom Wolfe

Tom Wolfe's genre-defining magical mystery tour through the 1960s published in Vintage Classics for the first time to mark its fiftieth anniversary. 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY JARVIS COCKER 
 
In the summer of 1964, author Ken Kesey and his Merry Band of Pranksters set out on an awesome social experiment like no other. Blazing across America in their day-glo schoolbus, doped up and deep ‘in the pudding’, the Pranksters’ arrival on the scene – anarchic, exuberant and LSD-infused – would turn on an entire counter-culture, and provide Tom Wolfe with the perfect free-wheeling subject for this, his pioneering masterpiece of New Journalism. 
 
'The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is not simply the best book on the hippies, it is the essential book...the pushing, ballooning heart of the matter' New York Times

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

Kurt Vonnegut

First published on the anniversary of Kurt Vonnegut's death, Armageddon in Retrospect is a collection of twelve new writings - a fitting tribute to the author, and an essential contribution to the discussion of war, peace and humanity's tendency towards violence. Imbued with Vonnegut's trademark rueful humour, the pieces range from a visceral non-fiction recollection of the destruction of Dresden - to a painfully funny short story about three soldiers and their fantasies of the perfect meal.

Armageddon in Retrospect

Andre Schwarz-Bart

THE BOOK: In every generation, according to Jewish tradition, thirty-six just men, the Lamed-waf, are born to take the burden of the world's suffering upon themselves. At York in 1185 the just man was Rabbi Yom Tov Levey, whose sacrifice so touched God that he gave his descendants one just man each generation, all the way down to Ernie Levey, the last of the just, killed at Auschwitz in 1943. This, then, is the story of Ernie Levey.

The Last of the Just

Jack Hilton

'Witty and unusual' George Orwell 
'Magnificent' W H Auden 
 
A lyrical tour of life as a young working-class man born into the first days of the 20th century, Caliban Shrieks is a lost masterpiece of 1930s British literature. 
 
Caliban Shrieks’ narrator went from a childhood of poverty, yet joy and freedom, to the punishing grind of factory life and the idiocy of being sent blindly into war. He was turned out of the army a vagrant - seeing England from city to city, county to county - before being thrust back into an uncertain cycle of working life as it unfolded in the post-war years. 
 
A story of men and women lost, wandering – and angrily dreaming of a better, fairer England, Hilton’s autobiographical novel is a bold modernist retelling of the myth of how we find ourselves disenfranchised from the world and sold into a slavery of our making.

Caliban Shrieks

Wilfred Owen

'Orpheus, the pagan saint of poets, went through hell and came back singing. In twentieth-century mythology, the singer wears a steel helmet and makes his descent "down some profound dull tunnel" in the stinking mud of the Western Front. For most readers of English poetry, the face under that helmet is that of Wilfred Owen.' Professor Jon Stallworthy, from his Introduction. 
 
When Wilfred Owen was killed in the days before the Armistice in 1918, he left behind a shattering, truthful and indelible record of a soldier's experience of the First World War. His greatest war poetry has been collected, edited and introduced here by Professor Jon Stallworthy. This special edition is published to commemorate the end of the hellish war that Owen, though the hard-won truth and terrible beauty of his poetry, has taught us never to forget.

The War Poems Of Wilfred Owen

This is Orwell's memoir of his experiences during the Spanish Civil War - a groundbreaking work of dissident literature drawn from vivid personal experience. 
 
There are occasions where it pays better to fight and be beaten than not to fight at all... 
 
This is dissident literature drawn from vivid personal experience. Orwell volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War, was near-fatally wounded and survived to write this book about the experience. Written with all the deep human understanding that defines Orwell’s writing, he vividly recounts the battles that were faced by ordinary working people as they fought for both their lives and their ideologies. Using first-hand experience, his capacity for observation and the clarity and conviction of his writing, Orwell reveals the real-world effects of totalitarianism. 
 
'The finest model of how to write about a foreign conflict, a war or a revolution... Brilliant reportage' Timothy Garten-Ash 
 
'[Orwell] describes what is happening in Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War in such a way that we are able to see why he’s so upset about Soviet power. His argument is not one of category and concept but of irresistible observation' Timothy Snyder 
 
'When he went to Spain, [Orwell] was an unknown. He wasn’t Hemingway. He wasn’t a well-connected intellectual. He just had this amazing eye for detail. He was an amazing observer, and he could write so powerfully. This book, to me, is just one of the classics of foreign reporting' Guy Raz

Homage to Catalonia

Raymond Williams

Taking inspiration from classic authors from Jane Austen to Thomas Hardy, Williams shines a light on our society’s changing views of the rural and industrial landscapes in which we work and live. 
 
Our collective notion of the city and country is irresistibly powerful. The city as the seat of enlightenment, sophistication, power and greed is in profound contrast with an innocent, peaceful, backward countryside. Examining literature since the sixteenth century, Williams traces the development of our conceptions of these two traditional poles of life. His groundbreaking study casts the country and city as central symbols for the social and economic changes associated with capitalist development. 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY TRISTRAM HUNT

The Country and the City

Apsley Cherry-Garrard

One of the world's greatest works of travel and adventure writing, reissued on its 100th birthday. 
 
This is a gripping account of an expedition gone disastrously wrong. Apsley Cherry-Garrard, one of the youngest members of Scott's team, recorded the experience of his adventure and in doing so created a masterpiece of travel writing. Despite the horrors that Scott and his men faced, Cherry's account is filled with details of scientific discovery, unforgettable descriptions of landscape and a belief in the spirit of human beings. A celebrated and compelling book on Antarctic exploration. 
 
INTRODUCED BY SARA WHEELER 
 
'The Worst Journey in the World is to travel what War and Peace is to the novel... a masterpiece' New York Review of Books 
 
* Voted Number 1 in National Geographic's 100 Best Adventure Books of All Time *

The Worst Journey in the World

Ranked number 1 in National Geographic’s 100 Best Adventure Books of All Time

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

Tom Wolfe's debut collection of essays - a brilliant, form-bending dive into the future of America as it careened through the 1960s 
 
In 1965, Tom Wolfe dropped like a bomb onto the American literary scene with his first book, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, an incandescent panorama of American counter-culture, its dances, bouffant hairdos, customised cars and rock concerts. Capturing the energy of the age in its portraits of Phil Spector, Cassius Clay, Las Vegas and the Nanny Mafia – as well as asking, why do doormen hate Volkswagens? – Wolfe’s flamboyant essay collection remains one of the great, revolutionary landmarks of modern non-fiction. 
 
'Journalism, it is said, is the first draft of history. Nobody exemplifies the dictum better than Wolfe, the cultural observer and social critic par excellence' Daily Telegraph

The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby

Nik Cohn

Nik Cohn had planned a trip around the world, but when a friend told him that Broadway is 'the world within itself', he started walking up the Great White Way, from Battery Park to Times Square. Escorted by a drum-playing Russian taxi driver, fuelled by duck soup and whiskey and sleeping in crackhouse hotels, Cohn encountered pickpockets, dancers, old  magicians, disgraced politicians, epic storytellers, part-time messiahs, and an unforgettable transvestite called Lush Life. Hallucinogenic history, rogues' gallery, personal odyssey, this extraordinary saga is also an extended love letter to a dream of New York now lost.

The Heart of the World

Richard Flanagan

This is a story about the many forms of love and death, of war and truth, as one man comes of age, prospers, only to discover all that he has lost. 
 
In the despair of a Japanese POW camp on the Burma Death Railway, surgeon Dorrigo Evans is haunted by his love affair with his uncle’s young wife two years earlier. Struggling to save the men under his command from starvation, from cholera, from beatings, he receives a letter that will change his life forever. 
 
*WINNER OF THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2014* 
 
'An unforgettable story of men at war' The Times 
 
This series of war novels from Vintage Classics presents eight powerful stories about the horror and waste of war - each a passionate plea to prevent its repetition.

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