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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Stefania Rousselle

Award-winning journalist and documentary maker Stefania Rousselle had stopped believing in love. She had covered a series of bleak assignments, from terrorist attacks to the rise of the far right. Her relationship had fallen apart. Her faith in humanity was shaken. She decided to set out alone on a road trip across France, sleeping in strangers' homes, asking ordinary men and women the one question everyone wants to know the answer to: What is love? 
 
From a baker in Normandy to a shepherd in the Pyrénées, from a gay couple estranged from their families to a widow who found love again at 70, Amour is a treasure trove of poignant and profound stories about love, accompanied by beautiful full-colour photographs.

Amour

How the French Talk about Love

John Robins

John Robins is a critically acclaimed stand-up comedian, Taskmaster champion, and an award-winning broadcaster. He is also an alcoholic.But what does that mean? What is an alcoholic? 
In Thirst, John tells the story of his life through the lens of alcohol, the drinks that made him, and those that broke him. From his earliest drinking experiences – pretending to be drunk after a sip of champagne aged five, spraying aftershave into his mouth at the school play afterparty, and university nights spent downing red wine alone in his room – to his last drink in 2022 and the journey into sobriety that followed, John explores our relationship with alcohol through reflections on decades of his own drinking.From hazy memory to sudden clarity he sheds light on subjects from mental health to friendship, from creativity to the lies we tell ourselves, and answers questions such as: are alcoholics born or made? How can we make sense of youthful missteps? And can Buddhism provide relief when dealing with haemorrhoids? 
Filled with insights and epiphanies from the world of addiction and recovery, Thirst blends John’s trademark raw honesty and hilarious digressions with the collective wisdom of alcoholics and those around them to offer a compelling, powerful and morbidly funny narrative for anyone who has ever asked 'why do we drink?', 'why do I drink?' or 'do I drink too much?'.

Thirst

Twelve Drinks That Changed My Life

Jerry Schilling

On a lazy Sunday in 1954, twelve-year-old Jerry Schilling wandered into a Memphis touch football game, only to discover that his team was quarterbacked by a nineteen-year-old Elvis Presley, the local teenager whose first record, &quot;That&rsquo;s All Right,&quot; had just debuted on Memphis radio. The two became fast friends, even as Elvis turned into the world&rsquo;s biggest star. In 1964, Elvis invited Jerry to work for him as part of his &quot;Memphis Mafia,&quot; and Jerry soon found himself living with Elvis full-time in a Bel Air mansion and, later, in his own room at Graceland. Over the next thirteen years Jerry would work for Elvis in various capacities &mdash; from bodyguard to photo double to co-executive producer on a karate film. But more than anything else he was Elvis&rsquo;s close friend and confidant: Elvis trusted Jerry with protecting his life when he received death threats, he asked Jerry to drive him and Priscilla to the hospital the day Lisa Marie was born and to accompany him during the famous &quot;lost weekend&quot; when he traveled to meet President Nixon at the White House. 
 
Me and a Guy Named Elvis looks at Presley from a friend&rsquo;s perspective, offering readers the man rather than the icon &mdash; including insights into the creative frustrations that lead to Elvis&rsquo;s abuse of prescription medicine and his tragic death. Jerry offers never-before-told stories about life inside Elvis&rsquo;s inner circle and an emotional recounting of the great times, hard times, and unique times he and Elvis shared. These vivid memories will be priceless to Elvis&rsquo;s millions of fans, and the compelling story will fascinate an even wider audience.

Me and a Guy Named Elvis

My Lifelong Friendship with Elvis Presley

Art Spiegelman

**In a new flexibound format with an updated afterword** 
 
This book opens with Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!, creating vignettes of the people, events, and comics that shaped Art Spiegelman. It traces the artist's evolution from a MAD-comics obsessed boy in Rego Park, Queens, to a neurotic adult examining the effect of his parents' memories of Auschwitz on his own son. 
 
 
The second part presents a facsimile of Breakdowns, the long-sought after collection of the artist's comics of the 1970s, the book that triggers these memories. Breakdowns established the mode of formally sophisticated comics that transformed the medium, and includes the prototype of Maus, cubist experiments, an essay on humor, and the definitive genre-twisting pulp story "Ace Hole-Midget Detective." 
 
 
Pulling all this together is an illustrated essay that looks back at the sixties as the artist pushes sixty, and explains the obsessions that brought these works into being. Poignant, funny, complex, and innovative, Breakdowns alters the terms of what can be accomplished in a memoir.

Breakdowns

Barack Obama

Bruce Springsteen

Two long-time friends share an intimate and urgent conversation about life, music and their enduring love of America, with all its challenges and contradictions, in this stunningly-produced expansion of their ground-breaking Higher Ground podcast, featuring more than 350 photographs, exclusive bonus content, and never-before-seen archival material. 
 
Renegades: Born in the USA is a candid, revealing, and entertaining dialogue between President Barack Obama and legendary musician Bruce Springsteen that explores everything from their origin stories and career-defining moments to the growing distance between the American Dream and the American reality. Filled with full-colour photographs and rare archival material, it is a compelling and beautifully illustrated portrait of two outsiders-one Black and one white-looking for a way to connect their unconventional searches for meaning, identity, and community with the American story itself. 
 
It includes: 
· Original introductions by President Obama and Bruce Springsteen 
· Exclusive new material from the Renegades podcast recording sessions 
· Obama's never-before-seen annotated speeches 
· Springsteen's handwritten lyrics for songs spanning his 50-year-long career 
· Rare and exclusive photographs from the authors' personal archives

Renegades

Born in the USA

Yeganeh Torbati

Bozorgmehr Sharafedin

Stolen Revolution follows the lives of six Iranians who, together, lived the entire arc of modern Iranian history: the promise of the 1979 revolution, its betrayal by forces of autocracy and a people’s undying spirit of resistance. 
 
Fuelled by Iranians’ dreams of social justice and political freedom, the 1979 revolution swept aside the shah’s ailing, repressive monarchy. But the revolution’s leader Ayatollah Khomeini and his acolytes built a system in its place that served his narrow Islamic fundamentalist faction, and worsened every failing and brutality that had existed under the shah. Award-winning journalists Bozorgmehr Sharafedin and Yeganeh Torbati tell the entwined stories of six Iranians, providing a powerful new lens on Iran’s recent history in all its bitter twists and stubborn hope: 
 
• Mehdi Karroubi: a devotee of Khomeini, he rose to the heights of power on the wave of the revolution, before being cast out of its inner circle. 
 
• Hila Sedighi: a young activist, who gave voice through her poetry to her peers’ hopes during the reform years and ultimately immortalised their shattered dreams. 
 
• Said Rahmani: a successful global tech entrepreneur who returned to Iran to spark a start-up boom in his native country, and encountered a ruthless security state that wanted his company for itself. 
 
• Amir Moghadam: an ambitious government bureaucrat, who witnessed corruption and graft on a scale that impelled him to take enormous risks to expose the truth. 
 
• Rozhin Yousefzadeh and Kosar Eftekhari: both born in the 1990s, they escaped their gendered destinies by leaving their hometowns for Tehran, where they joined a mass movement that confronted a ferocious state apparatus: the Woman Life Freedom protests. Each paid an enormous price. 
 
Through vivid and original reporting, Stolen Revolution offers a compulsively readable new story of Iran, centring ordinary Iranians’ lives, whilst providing a visceral understanding of how life is actually lived under a modern authoritarian state. This is a harrowing story of power, corruption and greed – and those brave individuals who fought back.

Stolen Revolution

Betrayal and Hope in Modern Iran

Elna Baker

Growing up in a family shaped by conventional ideas of femininity, Elna Baker turned to food for self-expression. But at the age of 22, unemployed and with few romantic prospects, she faced the reality of her situation and it hit her hard. 
 
In one year, Elna Baker lost over 8 stone. 
 
Suddenly, strangers on the street who had once shouted insults were smiling spontaneously. Men who would never have given her a second glance were falling at her feet. Elna's new life was a fairytale, but adoration came at a price. She was reliant on appetite suppressants and weight loss shakes to keep her dream body alive. If old Elna became unlovable, new Elna would do everything she could to denounce her former self. 
 
Ten years later, on the eve of her dream wedding, a spell lifts. In choosing the version of herself that the world around her idolised, Elna had left her true self behind. Now, she would have to burn her dream life to the ground and rebuild it. 
 
Pretty for a Day is a vulnerable, witty and eye-opening story of the frivolity of beauty and the heartbreaking reality of extreme weight loss. This is the story of millions of women and, indeed, many men who are overwhelmed by impossible standards imposed through advertising, movies, celebrity culture, social media, and even our own friends and family. 
 
With the widespread availability of weight loss medication, like Ozempic and Mounjaro, we can choose to be thin for the first time in history. No one knows for sure what the medical or social consequences will be. 
 
Now, Elna Baker's searing memoir offers a roadmap to understand the devastating impact of weight loss. This is the story of how, after decades of undoing, Elna Baker finally got her body back.

Pretty for a Day

Jon Ronson

** AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER NOW ** 
 
The million-copy bestselling author of The Psychopath Test, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed and the award-winning BBC podcast Things Fell Apart moves to Penguin for his first book in eleven years, a darkly comic true crime mystery set within the masculinity crisis, The Castle. 
 
I honestly have no clue what is going on. 
This is very weird. 
We left. Was completely fucked. All good now. 
 
When Jon Ronson received a series of disquieting texts after his son Joel had been lured to a mysterious castle in the forests of New England under false pretences late one evening, it set Ronson Sr. off on an extraordinary adventure into a world of unmoored men on a desperate search for purpose, whatever the cost. 
 
Why did the wealthy scion of a gilded age tycoon entice Jon’s son to his castle on the pretext of a party, when the reality was something else entirely? Could Jon uncover what was really going on inside that strange castle? Why was a popular online lawncare influencer wrongly implicated in a bizarre plot to traumatize millions of unsuspecting children? And, more pressingly, why are two recently paroled murderers on their way to pay Jon an ominous visit? 
 
Against the backdrop of the sometimes moving, often disturbing masculinity crisis, Jon follows the trail of those men who are acting out, checked out or just plain out of time. Drawing on his trademark brand of humour, psychological insight and unrivalled prescience, and told in the riveting style of a true crime thriller, The Castle marks Jon Ronson’s triumphant return to the written page in his darkest and most wildly enjoyable journey yet – deep into the recesses of the Castle and the secret lives of men. 
 
PRAISE FOR JON RONSON: 
 
‘Simultaneously frightening and hilarious’ The Times 
 
‘Funny and compulsively readable’ Louis Theroux 
 
‘His scalpel-sharp journalistic mind comes wrapped in disarming, diffident warmth’ Miranda Sawyer, Guardian 
 
‘Ronson is one of our most important modern-day thinkers’ US News & World Report 
 
‘Funny and thought-provoking . . . original, inspired journalism’ Financial Times 
 
‘Gutsy and smart’ New York Times 
 
‘Simmering with humour, weirdness and pathos’ Sunday Times 
 
‘A diligent investigator and a wry, funny writer, Ronson manages to be at once academic and entertaining’ Boston Globe 
 
‘The belly laughs come thick and fast – my God, he is funny’ Observer

The Castle

For Art Spiegelman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Maus, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 were both highly personal and intensely political. In the Shadow of No Towers, his first new book of comics since the groundbreaking Maus, is a masterful and moving account of the events and aftermath of that tragic day. 
 
Spiegelman and his family bore witness to the attacks in their lower Manhattan neighborhood: his teenage daughter had started school directly below the towers days earlier, and they had lived in the area for years. But the horrors they survived that morning were only the beginning for Spiegelman, as his anguish was quickly displaced by fury at the U.S. government, which shamelessly co-opted the events for its own preconceived agenda. 
 
He responded in the way he knows best. In an oversized, two-page-spread format that echoes the scale of the earliest newspaper comics (which Spiegelman says brought him solace after the attacks), he relates his experience of the national tragedy in drawings and text that convey-with his singular artistry and his characteristic provocation, outrage, and wit-the unfathomable enormity of the event itself, the obvious and insidious effects it had on his life, and the extraordinary, often hidden changes that have been enacted in the name of post-9/11 national security and that have begun to undermine the very foundation of American democracy.

In the Shadow of No Towers

The paperback boxed set of the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel in its original two-volume format re-released to include a sixteen-page booklet designed by the artist. Acclaimed as "the most affecting and successful narrative ever done about the Holocaust" (Wall Street Journal), Maus is considered "the first masterpiece in comic book history" (The New Yorker). 
 
 A brutally moving work of art-widely hailed as the greatest graphic novel ever written-Maus recounts the chilling experiences of the author's father during the Holocaust, with Jews drawn as wide-eyed mice and Nazis as menacing cats. 
 
 Maus is a haunting tale within a tale, weaving the author's account of his tortured relationship with his aging father into an astonishing retelling of one of history's most unspeakable tragedies. It is an unforgettable story of survival and a disarming look at the legacy of trauma

Maus I & II Paperback Box Set

Hillary Chute

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Art Spiegelman is one of our most influential contemporary artists, and it is hard to overstate his effect on postwar American culture and the world of comics. Maus has shaped the fields of literature, history, and art, and enlivened our collective sense of what these practices can accomplish. Collecting responses to the work that confirm its unique and terrain-shifting status, Maus Now sees writers such as Philip Pullman, Adam Gopnik, Ruth Franklin, and others approaching the complexity of Maus from a wide range of viewpoints and traditions. Organized into three loosely chronological sections ("Contexts", "Problems of Representation" and "Legacy"), the book offers translations of important French, Hebrew, and German essays on Maus for the first time. 
 
Maus is revelatory, and generative, in profound and long-lasting ways. With this collection, American literary scholar Hillary Chute, an expert on comics and graphic narratives, assembles the world's best writing on this classic work of graphic testimony.

Maus Now

Selected Writing

Qian Julie Wang

In China she was the daughter of professors. In Brooklyn her family is 'illegal.' 
 
Qian is seven when she moves to America, the 'Beautiful Country', where she and her parents find that the roads of New York City are not paved with gold, but crushing fear and scarcity. Unable to speak English at first, Qian and her parents must work wherever they can to survive, all while she battles hunger and loneliness at school. Thus begins an extraordinary story that describes days labouring in sweatshops and sushi factories, nights scavenging the streets for furniture, and the terrifying moment when the family emerges from the shadows to seek emergency medical treatment for Qian's mother. 
 
Qian Julie Wang's memoir is an unforgettable account of what it means to live under the perpetual threat of deportation and the small joys and sheer determination that kept her family afloat in a new land. Told from a child's perspective, in a voice that is intimate, poignant and startlingly lyrical, Beautiful Country is the story of a girl who learns first to live - and then escape - an invisible life.

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