NEW RELEASES
Madrid. Unfinished. Man Dying. A great painter lies on his deathbed. Max Porter (author of Lanny and Grief is the Thing With Feathers) translates into seven extraordinary written pictures the explosive final workings of the artist's mind.
"Reads like a private communion with the painter." —Guardian
Watson's remarkable project evokes, to often hilarious effect, the thought processes of its character through the course of a day. Beneath the world of demarcated fridge shelves, office politics, clock-watching and WhatsApp notifications emerges a instance of sexual violence that has shaken and disordered the character's existence.
"little scratch reads like the cinders settling in the air after an explosion. The silent and enraged inner testimony of a character trying to maintain 'normalcy', little scratch is daring and completely readable." —Colin Barrett
"Playful precise and insightful, Rebecca Watson's writing bursts with enormous energy." —Nicole Flattery
Shaun Bythell, proprietor of The Bookshop, Wigtown, follows his (cuttingly accurate) Diary of a Bookseller and Confessions of a Bookseller, with a hilarious 'useful' handbook to the types of customers booksellers are faced with every day. Which type are you?
A literary history of walking From Dickens to Zizek. Every time we walk we are going somewhere. Moving around the modern city becomes more than from getting from A to B, but a way of understanding who and where you are. In a series of riveting intellectual rambles, Matthew Beaumont, retraces a history of the walker. From Charles Dicken's insomniac night rambles to wandering through the faceless, windswept monuments of the neoliberal city, the act of walking is one of escape, self-discovery, disappearances and potential revolution. Pacing stride for stride alongside such literary amblers and thinkers as Edgar Allen Poe, Andrew Breton, H G Wells, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys and Ray Bradbury, Matthew Beaumont explores the relationship between the metropolis and its pedestrian life. He asks can you get lost in a crowd? It is polite to stare at people walking past on the street? What differentiates the city of daylight and the nocturnal metropolis? What connects walking, philosophy and the big toe? Can we save the city—or ourselves—by taking the pavement?
A story from the world of 'His Dark Materials' and 'The Book of Dust'.
Lyra Silvertongue, you're very welcome. Yes, I know your new name. Serafina Pekkala told me everything about your exploits.
Lyra and her daemon Pantalaimon have left the events of 'His Dark Materials' far behind. In this snapshot of their forever-changed lives they return to the North to visit an old friend, where we will learn that things are not exactly as they seem.
A lovely small hardback, beautifully illustrated throughout by Tom Duxbury.
The possession and dispossession of land continues to cast a long shadow between the partners of the Treaty of Waitangi, and until these issues are adequately addressed a wound will remain in New Zealand race relations.
24 Māori academics share their personal journeys, revealing what being Māori has meant for them in their work.
An A-Z guide on how we stay informed in the era of fake news, from former Guardian Editor-in-Chief Alan Rusbridger. Nothing in life works without facts. A society that isn't sure what's true can't function. Without facts there can be no government or law. Science is ignored. Trust evaporates. People everywhere feel ever more alienated from—and mistrustful of—news and those who make it. We no longer seem to know who or what to believe. We are living through a crisis of 'information chaos'.
The posthumously published concluding volume of Gray's inventive vernacular version of Dante's poem.
>>Is Lanark also some sort of version of The Divine Comedy?
Noah Yuval Harari's remarkable set of thinking tools for looking at human history are now presented as a graphic novel.
In 1757, a down-and-out Irish poet, the head waiter at the Shakespear's Head Tavern in Covent Garden, and a celebrated London courtesan became bound together by the publication of a little book: Harris's List of Covent Garden Ladies. This salacious work—detailing the names and 'specialities' of the capital's prostitutes—became one of the eighteenth century's most scandalous bestsellers. Rubenhold, author of the revisionist history The Five, reveals the lives of women on the list and gives us remarkable insight into women's lives in the 18th century precariat.
Charts the rise of the New Romantics, a scene that grew out of the remnants of post-punk and developed quickly alongside club culture, ska, electronica, and goth. Not only did the movement visually define the decade, it was the catalyst for the Second British Invasion, when the US charts would be colonised by British pop music—Depeche Mode, Culture Club, Wham!, Soft Cell, Ultravox, Duran Duran, Sade, Spandau Ballet, the Eurythmics.
When 12 year-old Malky and his younger brother Seb become the owners of a "Dreaminator", they are thrust into worlds beyond their wildest imagination. From tree-top flights and Spanish galleons, to thrilling battles and sporting greatness - it seems like nothing is out of reach when you can share a dream with someone else. But impossible dreams come with incredible risks, and when Seb won't wake up and is taken to hospital in a coma, Malky is forced to leave reality behind and undertake a final, terrifying journey to the stone-age to wake his brother.
Beethoven is for many the archetype of the classical composer, yet his life remains shrouded in myths, and the image persists of him as an eccentric genius shaking his fist at heaven. Tunbridge cuts through the noise in a refreshing way. Each chapter focuses on a period of his life, a piece of music and a revealing theme, from family to friends, from heroism to liberty. It's a combination of biographical detail, insight into the music and surprising new angles, all of which can transform how you listen to his works.
With the same white-knuckle thrills as Hall's first novel, The Raw Shark Texts, this new book is also a freewheeling investigation into the magic power locked inside the alphabet, love through the looking glass, the bond between parents and children, and, at its heart, the quest for meaning in a world that, with each passing season, seems to become more chaotic and untidy.
For some, Derrida is the originator of a relativist philosophy responsible for the contemporary crisis of truth. For the far right, he is one of the architects of Cultural Marxism. To his academic critics, he reduced French philosophy to "little more than an object of ridicule." For his fans, he is an intellectual rock star who ranged across literature, politics, and linguistics. An Event, Perhaps presents this misunderstood and misappropriated figure as a deeply humane and urgent thinker for our times.
An enjoyable introduction to Japanese history, from the earliest records to the present, as distilled in the lives of twenty very various individuals.
"Harding's book is a marvellous read, full of startling information." —The Times
Erosion: Essays of undoing by Terry Tempest Williams $38
Open Water by Caleb Azuman Nelson $33
The International Brigades: Fascism, freedom and the Spanish Civil War by Giles Trewlett $33
Max Makes a Million by Maira Kalman $32
How do we find the strength to not look away from all that is breaking our hearts? We know the elements of erosion: wind, water, and time. They have shaped our physical landscapes. Here, Williams explores the many forms of erosion we face: of democracy, science, compassion, and trust. "These are essays about the courage to face what is most brutal and monstrous by finding what is beautiful and merciful." —Rebecca Solnit
Two young people meet at a pub in South East London. Both are Black British, both won scholarships to private schools where they struggled to belong, both are now artists—he a photographer, she a dancer—trying to make their mark in a city that by turns celebrates and rejects them. Tentatively, tenderly, they fall in love. But two people who seem destined to be together can still be torn apart by fear and violence. At once a love story and an insight into race and masculinity, Open Water asks what it means to be a person in a world that sees you only as a Black body, to be vulnerable when you are only respected for strength, to find safety in love, only to lose it.
The Spanish Civil War was the first armed battle in the fight against fascism. Over 35,000 volunteers from sixty-one countries around the world came to help defend democracy against the troops of Franco, Hitler and Mussolini. This is the first major history of the International Brigades.
"Magnificent. Narrative history at its vivid and compelling best." —Fergal Keane
Max's dream is to live in Paris and be a poet—even though no one will buy his poems, and he is penniless. And he's a dog. But living in New York City isn't so bad. Where else could he have friends like Bruno, who paints invisible pictures, or Marcello, who builds upside-down houses? Fun!