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Tim Lott

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Tim Lott's parents, Jack and Jean, met at the Empire Snooker Hall, Ealing, in 1951, in a world that to him now seems 'as strange as China'. In this extraordinarily moving exploration of his parents' lives, his mother's inexplicable suicide in her late fifties and his own bouts of depression, Tim Lott conjures up the pebble-dashed home of his childhood and the rapidly changing landscape of postwar suburban England. It is a story of grief, loss and dislocation, yet also of the power of memory and the bonds of family love.

The Scent of Dried Roses

One family and the end of English Suburbia - an elegy

Susan Sontag

Where the Stress Falls is divided into three sections: the first, 'Reading', includes ardent pieces on writers from Sontag's own private canon - Machado de Assis, Barthes, W. G. Sebald, Borges, Tsvetaeva and Elizabeth Hardwick. In the second, 'Seeing', she shares her passions for film, dance, photography, painting, opera and theatre. And in the final section, 'There and Here', Sontag explores her own commitments to the work (and activism) of conscience and to the vocation of the writer.

Where the Stress Falls

Ved Mehta

The last volume of Ved Mehta's Continents of Exile series. Nearly 50 years in the making, Continents of Exile is one of the great works of twentieth-century autobiography: the epic chronicle of an Indian family in the twentieth century. From 1930s India to 1950s Oxford and literary New York in the 1960s-80s, this is the story of the post-colonial twentieth century, as uniquely experienced and vividly recounted by Ved Mehta. 
 
During the clamour of a New York dinner party, Mehta is startled to find his father crying on his mother's shoulders. This episode begins a painful and revealing voyage into his father's personal history. In stark prose, Mehta unravels a passionate, clandestine affair that bore quiet yet extraordinary consequences for himself and his family. Red Letters also serves as a brilliant exploration and a recreation of British India: its sights and sounds, its injustices and its secrecy.

The Red Letters

Continents of Exile: 12

Norman Mailer

Advertisements for Myself is a comprehensive collection of the best of Norman Mailer's essays, stories, interviews and journalism from the Forties and Fifties, linked by anarchic and riotous autobiographical commentary. Laying bare the heart of a witty, belligerent and vigorous writer, this manifesto of Mailer's key beliefs contains pieces on his war experiences in the Philippines (the basis for his famous first novel The Naked and the Dead), tributes to fellow novelists William Styron, Saul Bellow, Truman Capote and Gore Vidal and magnificent polemics against pornography, advertising, drugs and politics. Also included is his notorious exposition of the phenomenon of the 'White Negro', the Beat Generation's existentialist hero whose life, like Mailer's, is 'an unchartered journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self'

Advertisements for Myself

Louise Glück

For the past fifty years, Louise Glück has been a major force in modern poetry, distinguished as much for the restless intelligence, wit and intimacy of her poetic voice as for her development of a particular form: the book-length sequence of poems. This volume brings together the twelve collections Glück has published to date, offering readers the opportunity to become immersed in the artistry and vision of one of the world's greatest poets. 
 
From the allegories of The Wild Iris to the myth-making of Averno; the oneiric landscapes of The House on Marshland to the questing of Faithful and Virtuous Night - each of Glück's collections looks upon the events of an ordinary life and finds within them scope for the transcendent; each wields its archetypes to puncture the illusions of the self. Across her work, elements are reiterated but endlessly transfigured - Persephone, a copper beech, a mother and father and sister, a garden, a husband and son, a horse, a dog, a field on fire, a mountain. Taken together, the effect is like a shifting landscape seen from above, at once familiar and unspeakably profound.

Poems

1962–2020

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

Hunter S Thompson

A compilation of the subversive, important and entertaining writer of Hunter S. Thompson - renowned American writer of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas 
 
'It would not do to be found in the desert under these circumstances: firing wildly into the cactus from a car full of drugs...' 
 
Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone showcases the evolution of the writer of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Hell's Angels, through his work at the magazine that he helped to put on the map. Jann S. Wenner, Hunter Thompson's editor and friend for nearly thirty-five years, has chosen the pieces, including many never collected before. They show how Thompson's Rolling Stone writing, when taken as a whole, forms an extended, allusive autobiography of the writer himself as he pursues his lifelong obsession, the king-hell story of them all: The Death of the American Dream.

Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone

The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson

Evelyn Waugh

Nancy Mitford

Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh were two of the twentieth century's most amusing and gifted writers, who matched wits and traded literary advice in more than five hundred letters over twenty-two years. Dissecting their friends, criticizing each other's books and concealing their true feelings beneath a barrage of hilarious and knowing repartee, they found it far easier to conduct a friendship on paper than in person. This correspondence provides a colourful glimpse into the literary and social circles of London and Paris, during the Second World War and for twenty years after.

The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh

Len Deighton

This unflinching history of the darkest days of the Second World War covers the entire world stage, from the Battle of the Atlantic to Pearl Harbor. Rooted in the personal accounts of the soldiers themselves, Blood, Tears and Folly is a sweeping, moving account of the political machinations, the strategy and tactics, the weapons and the men on both sides who created a world of devastation.

Blood, Tears and Folly

An Objective Look at World War Two

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

G. I. Gurdjieff

The exhilarating, life-affirming call to spiritual arms from world-renowned spiritual teacher G. I. Gurdjieff 
 
'Gurdjieff's voice is heard as a call. 
He calls because he suffers from the inner chaos in which we live. 
He calls to us to open our eyes. 
He asks us why we are here, what we wish for, what forces we obey. He asks us, above all, if we understand what we are . . .' 
 
Part adventure narrative, part travelogue, part spiritual guide, Meetings with Remarkable Men is suffused with Gurdjieff's unique perspective on life. With vivacity and charm, he organizes his account around portraits of the remarkable men and women who accompanied him through remote parts of the Near East and Central Asia, and who aided his search for hidden knowledge. Among them are Gurdjieff's own father (a traditional bard), a Russian prince dedicated to the search for Truth, a Christian missionary who entered a World Brotherhood deep in Asia, and a woman who escaped slavery to become a trusted member of Gurdjieff's group of fellow seekers. 
 
Meetings with Remarkable Men conveys a haunting sense of what it means to live fully - with conscience, with purpose and with heart.

Meetings with Remarkable Men

Morrissey

Steven Patrick Morrissey was born in Manchester on May 22nd 1959. Singer-songwriter and co-founder of the Smiths (1982-1987), Morrissey has been a solo artist for twenty-six years, during which time he has had three number 1 albums in England in three different decades. 
 
Achieving twelve Top 10 albums (plus nine with the Smiths), his songs have been recorded by David Bowie, Nancy Sinatra, Marianne Faithfull, Chrissie Hynde, Thelma Houston, My Chemical Romance and Christy Moore, amongst others. 
 
An animal protectionist, in 2006 Morrissey was voted the second greatest living British icon by viewers of the BBC, losing out to Sir David Attenborough. In 2007 Morrissey was voted the greatest northern male, past or present, in a nationwide newspaper poll. In 2012, Morrissey was awarded the Keys to the City of Tel-Aviv. 
 
It has been said 'Most pop stars have to be dead before they reach the iconic status that Morrissey has reached in his lifetime.' 
 
Autobiography covers Morrissey's life from his birth until the present day.

Autobiography

Tennessee Williams

When Memoirs was first published in 1975, it created quite a bit of turbulence in the media--though long self-identified as a gay man, Williams' candour about his love life, sexual encounters, and drug use was found shocking in and of itself, and such revelations by America's greatest living playwright were called &quot;a raw display of private life&quot; by The New York Times Book Review. As it turns out, more than thirty years later, Williams' look back at his life is not quite so scandalous as it once seemed; he recalls his childhood in Mississippi and St. Louis, his prolonged struggle as a &quot;starving artist,&quot; the &quot;overnight&quot; success of The Glass Menagerie in 1945, the death of his long-time companion Frank Merlo in 1962, and his confinement to a psychiatric ward in 1969 and subsequent recovery from alcohol and drug addiction, all with the same directness, compassion, and insight that epitomize his plays.

Memoirs

Henry Miller

'New York is an aquarium ... where there are nothing but hellbenders and lungfish and slimy, snag-toothed groupers and sharks' 
 
In 1935 Henry Miller set off from his adopted home, Paris, to revisit his native land, America. Aller Retour New York, his exuberant, humorous missive to his friend Alfred Perlès describing the trip and his return journey on a Dutch steamer, is filled with vivid reflections on his hellraising antics, showing Miller at the height of his powers. This edition also includes Via Dieppe-Newhaven, his entertaining account of a failed attempt to visit England. 
 
'The greatest American writer' Bob Dylan

Aller Retour New York

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

Joseph Brodsky

'Reading Brodsky's essays is like a conversation with an immensely erudite, hugely entertaining and witty (and often very funny) interlocutor' Wall Street Journal 
 
Watermark is Joseph Brodsky's witty, intelligent, moving and elegant portrait of Venice. Looking at every aspect of the city, from its waterways, streets and architecture to its food, politics and people, Brodsky captures its magnificence and beauty, and recalls his own memories of the place he called home for many winters, as he remembers friends, lovers and enemies he has encountered. Above all, he reflects with great poetic force on how the rising tide of time affects city and inhabitants alike. 
 
Watermark is an unforgettable piece of writing, and a wonderful evocation of a remarkable, unique city. 
 
Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature

Watermark: An Essay on Venice

Laurie Lee

'The stooping figure of my mother, waist-deep in the grass and caught there like a piece of sheep's wool, was the last I saw of my country home as I left it to discover the world' 
 
Abandoning the Cotswolds village that raised him, the young Laurie Lee walks to London. There he makes a living labouring and playing the violin. But, deciding to travel further a field and knowing only the Spanish phrase for 'Will you please give me a glass of water?', he heads for Spain. With just a blanket to sleep under and his trusty violin, he spends a year crossing Spain, from Vigo in the north to the southern coast. Only the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War puts an end to his extraordinary peregrinations . . .

As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning

Dorothy Parker

Dorothy Parker, more than any of her contemporaries, captured the spirit of her age in her writing. The decadent 1920S and 1930s in New York were a time of great experiment and daring for women. For the rich, life seemed a continual party, but the excesses took their emotional toll. With a biting wit and perceptive insight, Dorothy Parker examines the social mores of her day and exposes the darkness beneath the dazzle. Her own life exemplified this duality, for a while she was one of the most talked-about women of her day, she was also known as a &quot;masochist whose passion for unhappiness knew no bounds&quot;. As philosopher Irwin Edman said, she was &quot;a Sappho who could combine a heartbreak with a wisecrack&quot;. Her dissection of the jazz age in poetry and prose is collected in this volume along with articles and reviews.

The Collected Dorothy Parker

Kingsley Amis

In this hilarious, inspiring and provocative series of essays, Kingsley Amis introduces every reader to the wonders and value of science fiction writing. From the extraordinary ideas but sexless science of Jules Verne to the power of H. G. Wells's terrifying storytelling; from the brilliance of bad science fiction writing to the potency of their important ideas; from a portrait of the average SF reader to Amis's sad prediction that this genre will never make it in film or television, New Maps of Hell is a warm and witty exploration of a world many readers may be yet to discover.

New Maps of Hell

George Orwell

'Politics and the English Language' is widely considered Orwell's most important essay on style. Style, for Orwell, was never simply a question of aesthetics; it was always inextricably linked to politics and to truth.'All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.'Language is a political issue, and slovenly use of language and cliches make it easier for those in power to deliberately use misleading language to hide unpleasant political facts. Bad English, he believed, was a vehicle for oppressive ideology, and it is no accident that 'Politics and the English Language' was written after the close of World War II.

Politics and the English Language

Tove Ditlevsen

Growing up in a working-class neighbourhood in Copenhagen, Tove feels that her childhood is made for a completely different girl. As 'long, mysterious words begin to crawl across my soul', she comes to understand that she has a vocation that will define her life. Her path seems assured, but she has no idea of the struggles ahead - love affairs, wanted and unwanted pregnancies, artistic failure and destructive addiction. As the years go by, the central tension of Tove's life comes into painful focus: the terrible lure of dependency, in all its forms, and the possibility of living freely and fearlessly - as an artist on her own terms.

Childhood, Youth, Dependency

The Copenhagen Trilogy

William S. Burroughs

Both heartwarming and meditative, The Cat Inside explores not only the personal relationship between Burroughs and cats, but the deeper relationship of cats with mankind, which Burroughs traces back to the Egyptians. This book of moving and witty discourse is for both Burroughs fans and cat lovers alike.

The Cat Inside

Italo Calvino

'Words connect the visible track to the invisible thing ... like a fragile makeshift bridge cast across the void' 
 
With imagination and wit, Italo Calvino sought to define the virtues of the great literature of the past in order to shape the values of the future. His effervescent last works, left unfinished at his death, were the Charles Eliot Norton lectures, which he was due to deliver at Harvard in 1985-86. These surviving drafts explore the literary concepts closest to his heart: Lightness, Quickness, Multiplicity, Exactitude and Visibility (Constancy was to be the sixth), in serious yet playful essays that reveal his debt to the comic strip and the folktale. This collection, now in a fluent and supple new translation, is a brilliant précis of a great writer whose legacy will endure through the millennium he addressed. 
 
Translated by Geoffrey Brock 
 
'The book I give most to people is Six Memos for the Next Millennium' Ali Smith 
 
'Wonderful . . . full of wit and erudition' Daily Telegraph

Six Memos for the Next Millennium

Ryszard Kapuscinski

After the deposition of Haile Selassie in 1974, which ended the ancient rule of the Abyssinian monarchy, Ryszard Kapuscinski travelled to Ethiopia and sought out surviving courtiers to tell their stories. Here, their eloquent and ironic voices depict the lavish, corrupt world they had known - from the rituals, hierarchies and intrigues at court to the vagaries of a ruler who maintained absolute power over his impoverished people. They describe his inexorable downfall as the Ethiopian military approach, strange omens appear in the sky and courtiers vanish, until only the Emperor and his valet remain in the deserted palace, awaiting their fate. Dramatic and mesmerising, The Emperor is one of the great works of reportage and a haunting epitaph on the last moments of a dying regime.

The Emperor

Alex Danchev

In this remarkable collection of 100 manifestos from the last 100 years, Alex Danchev presents the cacophony of voices of such diverse movements as Futurism, Dadaism, Surrealism, Feminism, Communism, Destructivism, Vorticism, Stridentism, Cannibalism and Stuckism, taking in along the way film, architecture, fashion, and cookery. 
 
Artists' manifestos are nothing if not revolutionary. They are outlandish, outrageous, and frequently offensive. They combine wit, wisdom, and world-shaking demands. This collection gathers together an international array of artists of every stripe, including Kandinsky, Mayakovsky, Rodchenko, Le Corbusier, Picabia, Dalí, Oldenburg, Vertov, Baselitz, Kitaj, Murakami, Gilbert and George, together with their allies and collaborators - such figures as Marinetti, Apollinaire, Breton, Trotsky, Guy Debord and Rem Koolhaas. Edited with an Introduction by Alex Danchev

100 Artists' Manifestos

From the Futurists to the Stuckists

John Mortimer

Clinging to the Wreckage is the first part of John Mortimer's acclaimed autobiography. Here he recounts his solitary childhood in the English countryside, with affectionate portraits of his remote parents - an increasingly unconventional barrister father, whose blindness must never be mentioned, battling earwigs in the mutinous garden, and a vague and endlessly patient mother. As a boy dreaming of a tap-dancing career on the stage and forming a one-boy communist cell at boarding school, his father pushes him to pursue the law, where Mortimer embarks on the career that was to inspire his hilarious and immortal literary creations. 
 
Told with great humour and touching honesty, this is a magnificent achievement by one of Britain's best-loved writers.

CLINGING TO THE WRECKAGE

Woody Guthrie

Bound for Glory is the funny, cynical and earthy autobiography of Woody Guthrie, the father of American folk music. He tells of his childhood running wild in an Oklahoma oil-boom town, the tragedies that struck his family and of his life on the open road during the Great Depression - hell-raising and brawling in boxcars, all the while singing a dime for his next meal. But above all, this is a song for an America Woody saw from the lonesome highway, as he travelled from one of the country to the other with guitar in hand and the songs that made him a legend drifting out over the Dust Bowl.

Bound for Glory

Steven Runciman

''The whole tale is one of faith and folly, courage and greed, hope and delusion.' 
 
The Christian and Muslim empires of the Middle East had fought each other for centuries, two ancient, powerful civilizations, in some ways very familiar to one another. In 1095 something extraordinary happened. The Pope issued an appeal to the leaders of western Europe to recover the Christian Holy Places from Islamic rule. The response to his appeal was overwhelming as, in scenes of hysteria, many thousands of men volunteered to leave their old lives behind and march to rescue Jerusalem. Now, across western Europe, everyone from monarchs to beggars were planning to travel many hundreds of dangerous miles in search of salvation, riches or both. 
 
A triumph of prose-writing, argument and research, Steven Runciman's A History of the Crusades is an unimprovable account of events which changed the world and which still resonate today. In this first volume he tells the story of the First Crusade - from its unlikely beginnings to the horrors of the siege of Jerusalem and the carving out of aggressive new western European states on the edge of the eastern Mediterranean.

A History of the Crusades I

The First Crusade and the Foundation of the Kingdom of Jerusalem

Gillian Rose

Gillian Rose was a star academic, acclaimed as one of the most dazzling and original thinkers of her time. Told that she had incurable cancer, she found a new way to explore the world and herself. Tender, heartbreakingly honest and written with moments of surprising humour, Love's Work is the exhilarating result. 
 
In this short, unforgettable memoir, Rose looks back on her childhood, from the young dyslexic girl, torn between father and stepfather, to the adolescent confronting her Jewish inheritance. As an adult, Gillian Rose proves herself a passionate friend, a searcher for truth, a woman in love and, finally, an exacting but generous patient. 
 
Intertwining the personal and the philosophical, Rose meditates on faith, conflict and injustice; the fallibility and endurance of love; our yearning for independence and for connection to others. With droll self-knowledge ('I am highly qualified in unhappy love affairs,' Rose writes) and with unsettling wisdom ('To live, to love, is to be failed'), Love's Work asks the unanswerable question: how is a life best lived?

Love's Work

Essayist and poet Joseph Brodsky was one of the most penetrating voices of the twentieth century. This prize-winning collection of his diverse essays includes uniquely powerful appreciations of great writers: on Dostoevsky and the development of Russian prose, on Auden and Akhmatova, Cavafy, Montale and Mandelstam. These are contrasted with his reflections on larger themes of tyranny and evil, and subtle evocations of his childhood in Leningrad. Brodsky's insightful appreciation of the intricacies of language, culture and identity connect these works, revealing his remarkable gifts as a prose writer.

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