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The subtle complexities of Virginia Woolf’s essay ‘On Being Ill’ continues to resonate for a new generation of readers today. ‘On Being Ill’ is a valuable book for everybody who wants to connect with illness through art and literature and look at it from a different perspective. Woolf’s original essay was first published exactly 100 years ago. In this collection contemporary authors reflect on this poignant work.
In ‘Fires Which Burned Brightly’, Faulks, a reluctant memoirist, offers readers a series of detailed snapshots from a life in progress. They include a post-war rural childhood – ‘cold mutton and wet washing on a rack over the range’ – the booze-sodden heyday of Fleet Street and a career as one of the country’s most acclaimed novelists. There are not one, but two daring escapes from boarding school; the delirium of a jetlagged American book tour; the writing of ‘Birdsong’ in his brother’s house in 1992; and memorable trips across the channel to France. Politics, psychiatry and frustrated ventures into the world of entertainment are analysed with patience and rueful humour.
Cherry blossom, hinoki, ezo spruce. Persimmon, maple, cypress. The trees of Japan are wondrous emblems of beauty that cast a spell on those who venture to its unique landscape. As a child, Aya Koda realized they were more than mere objects of beauty. Gifted a sapling by her father, she discovered that we depend on trees as much as they do on us. Markers of time passing, they clear the air and regenerate our earth – while we are responsible to care for their future. Following her travels around Japan, as she witnesses landslides, lumber and forests of falling ash, Tree is a beautiful series of essays that contemplate the most distinctive and eternal features of our natural world. A modern classic translated for the first time, Koda’s voice echoes down the generations, to remind us that trees hold a mirror to what we cherish on Earth, and what we choose to leave behind.
There’s something about islands: the way they shift and change with the weather, the promise of escape, the pull of the sea. Often remote, almost always idyllic, they lend themselves to metaphor and marvel as well as to escape and indulgence. In these essays, 13 writers capture the magic and mirage of islands. Taking us from the glimmering coast of Cornwall’s St Ives to the populated archipelagos off the coast of Ireland, from the warm water and glowing sun of Phuket to feasts of halloumi and chilled watermelon along the shores of Cyprus, ‘Over the Water’ urges us to consider: what is an island?
This rare self-portrait from pioneering publisher, writer and cultural activist Margaret Busby underscores her powerful legacy and celebrates some of the people and places that have shaped her exceptional life.
One of the most inspiring and counter-intuitive thinkers of our age, the author of ‘Seven Brief Lessons on Physics’, transforms the way we think about the world with his reflections on science, history, and humanity. In this collection of writings, the logbook of an intelligence always on the move, Carlo Rovelli follows his curiosity and invites us on a voyage through science, history, philosophy, and politics.
In this keenly awaited new collection, Zadie Smith brings her unique skills as an essayist to bear on a range of subjects which have captured her attention in recent years. She takes an exhilaratingly close look at artists Toyin Ojih Odutola and Celia Paul. She invites us along to the movies, to see and to think about Tar, and to Glastonbury to witness the ascendance of Stormzy. She asks us to look again at the young Michael Jackson and to mourn with her the passing of writers Joan Didion, Martin Amis, Hilary Mantel, Philip Roth and Toni Morrison. And she shows us once again her unrivalled ability to think through critically and humanely some of the most urgent preoccupations and tendencies of our troubled times.
In ‘Fires Which Burned Brightly’, Faulks, a reluctant memoirist, offers readers a series of detailed snapshots from a life in progress. They include a post-war rural childhood – ‘cold mutton and wet washing on a rack over the range’ – the booze-sodden heyday of Fleet Street and a career as one of the country’s most acclaimed novelists. There are not one, but two daring escapes from boarding school; the delirium of a jetlagged American book tour; the writing of ‘Birdsong’ in his brother’s house in 1992; and memorable trips across the channel to France. Politics, psychiatry and frustrated ventures into the world of entertainment are analysed with patience and rueful humour.
In these essays twelve writers consider the joys of cycling, whether in a city late at night, or along country lanes on a summer’s day. Yara Rodrigues Fowler and Xani Byrne write a moving essay on coming to terms with loss through tandem biking, Jon McGregor reminisces on the significance of cycling to Dunwich Beach throughout his life, Annie Lord sings the praises on cycling home on Lime Bikes from parties and the late Dervla Murphy regales us with stories of her cycle to India on her bike, named Roz.
In her spare, stark style, Annie Ernaux’s Simple Passion documents the desires and indignities of a human heart ensnared in an all-consuming passion.
Every day we think about love, and every day love eludes us. Maybe you’re hoping to begin a new relationship, or in a secret place in your heart, gathering the courage to leave one. Maybe you’re in a long-term partnership, wondering how to sustain love through life’s many storms. Maybe you’re a parent and you want to be a better one; or you’ve lost a parent, and that loss suddenly dwarves everything else. After years of interviewing people about their relationships, Natasha Lunn learnt that these daily questions about love are often rooted in three bigger ones: How do we find love? How do we sustain it? And how do we survive when we lose it? Interviewing authors and experts as well as drawing on her own experience, Natasha Lunn guides us through the complexities of these three questions. The result is a book to learn from, to lose and find yourself in.
Following the international critical acclaim of ‘The Cost of Living’, this final volume of Deborah Levy’s ‘Living Autobiography’ is an exhilarating, thought-provoking and boldly intimate meditation on home and the spectres that haunt it.
Acclaimed Hollywood filmwriter and director Nora Ephron turns her sharp powers of observation back onto herself in these autobiographical essays as she examines the indignities of ageing for the Baby Boom generation.
‘Sapiens’ showed us where we came from. ‘Homo Deus’ looked to the future. ’21 Lessons for the 21st Century’ explores the present. How can we protect ourselves from nuclear war, ecological cataclysms and technological disruptions? What can we do about the epidemic of fake news or the threat of terrorism? What should we teach our children? Yuval Noah Harari takes us on a thrilling journey through today’s most urgent issues.
Following the acclaimed ‘Things I Don’t Want to Know’, Deborah Levy returns to the subject of her life in letters. ‘The Cost of Living’ reveals a writer in radical flux, considering what it means to live with value and meaning and pleasure.
‘Things I Don’t Want to Know’ is a response to George Orwell from one of our most vital contemporary writers. Taking Orwell’s famous list of motives for writing as the jumping-off point for a sequence of thrilling reflections on the writing life, this is a perfect companion both to Orwell’s essay and to Levy’s own oeuvre.
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