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Here is a powerful and provocative collection of essays that offers poignant reflections on living between society’s most charged, politicised, and intractably polar spaces – between black and white, rich and poor, thin and fat.
To celebrate the centenary of Ulysses‘s publication, eighteen artists, writers and thinkers each respond to an episode of James Joyce’s classic modernist novel.
A dazzling insight into what gives meaning to our life and to us as a species. What makes us human? This illuminating book shares 130 mind-expanding answers to that question. We all want to understand our place in the universe and find a sense of purpose in the life. This book will help the reader navigate that journey with the help of leading names from the worlds of literature, history, philosophy, politics, sport, comedy and popular culture. Originally broadcast as a popular feature on the Jeremy Vine Show on BBC Radio 2 from 2013-2021, ‘What Makes Us Human?’ includes short essays from: Andrew Marr, Carlo Rovelli, Marian Keyes, Alain de Botton, Robert Webb, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Fry, and many more.
Each essay here captures a piece of Polley’s life as she remembers it, while at the same time examining the fallibility of memory and the embodied reactions of children and women adapting and surviving. The guiding light is the possibility of experiencing the past anew, as the person she is now. In this book, Polley explores what it is to live in one’s body, in a constant state of becoming, learning, and changing. As she was advised after a catastrophic injury to her head – if we relinquish our protective crouch and run towards the danger, then life can be reset, reshaped and lived afresh.
‘Managing Expectations’ is a collection of delicately crafted, hilarious and heartfelt essays, described as a ‘tell-most’, in which Minnie Driver uses her formidable storytelling skills to examine and understand her less-than-ordinary life. Suffused with warmth and humour, Minnie shares poignant, candid and honest stories of her unconventional childhood, the shock of fame, motherhood, love, success, failure, the power of sisterly love, and the loss of her beloved mother. In her own words, it’s about how things not working out actually worked out in the end, and how reaching for the dream is easily more interesting, expansive, sad and funny than the dream itself coming true.
Why read non-fiction? Is it just to find things out? Or is it for pleasure, challenge, adventure, meaning? Here, in seventy new pieces, some of the most original writers and thinkers of our time give their answers. From Hilton Als on reading as writing’s dearest companion to Nicci Gerrard on reading for her life; from Malcolm Gladwell on entering the minds of others to Michael Lewis on books as secret discoveries; and from Lea Ypi on the search for freedom to Slavoj Zizek on violent readings, each offers their own surprising perspective on the simple act of turning a page. The result is a celebration of seeing the world in new ways – and of having our minds changed.
For readers of Rachel Cusk, Lisa Taddeo and the essays of Zadie Smith, ‘Bear Woman’ is a beautifully wrought memoir from one of Sweden’s bestselling authors, in which she examines motherhood and the female experience. In 1541, a young woman named Marguerite de La Roque accompanied her guardian on one of the first French colonial expeditions to the new world. After a sexual scandal on board ship, she was punished with abandonment on a barren, uninhabited island in the North Atlantic. Centuries later, Swedish writer Karolina Ramqvist came across the legend of the Bear Woman and became obsessed with this woman’s story of survival against the odds.
Clive James the essayist and cultural critic at his brilliant best – a dizzyingly erudite tour of twentieth-century culture.
From ‘A Long Long Way’, his Booker shortlisted novel about the Irish soldiers who fought for Britain during the First World War to his Donal McCann starring hit-play, ‘The Steward of Christendom’; from his first Costa Book of the Year novel ‘The Secret Scripture’ to his second, ‘Days Without End’, a decade later, Sebastian Barry’s writing career has been as long and varied as it has extraordinary. Intimate, revealing and generous of heart, these three lectures – written and delivered as part of his three year tenure as the Laureate for Irish fiction – reflect on his life and career so far, some of the formative moments and people he’s met along the way, and the ongoing importance of creativity.
Published to challenge the historic narrative of music and music writing being written by men, for men, ‘This Woman’s Work’ seeks to confront the male dominance and sexism that have been hard-coded in the canons of music, literature, and film and has forced women to fight pigeon-holing or being side-lined by carving out their own space. Women have to speak up, to shout louder to tell their story – like the auteurs and ground-breakers featured in this collection, including: Anne Enright on Laurie Anderson; Megan Jasper on her ground-breaking work with Sub Pop; Margo Jefferson on Bud Powell and Ella Fitzgerald; and Fatima Bhutto on music and dictatorship.
Winner of the 2020 Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger, France’s best foreign book of the year.
‘Astounding’ Sebastian Barry
‘A masterpiece’ Ayad Akhtar
‘This little book is ruminative, humane, and gorgeously precise’
Jonathan Lethem
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