- 97,196 Words: EssaysISBN: 9781911214465
Title: 97,196 Words: Essays
Author: CARRERE EMMANUEL
From the bestselling author of The Adversary and 'France's greatest writer of nonfiction' (New York Times), the first collection of Carr re's essays in English.
Over the course of his career, Emmanuel Carr re has reinvented non-fiction writing. In a search for truth in all its guises, he dispenses with the rules of genre. For him, no form is out of reach- theology, historiography, reportage and memoir - among many others - are fused under the pressure of an inimitable combination of passion, curiosity and intellect that has made Carr re one of our most distinctive and important literary voices today.
97,196 Wordsintroduces Carr re's shorter work to an English-language audience. Featuring more than thirty extraordinary texts written over an illustrious twenty-five-year period of Carr re's creative life, the book shows a remarkable mind at work. Spanning continents, histories, and personal relationships, 97,196 Wordsconsiders the divides between truth, reality and our shared humanity, exploring remarkable events and eccentric lives, including Carr re's own.
Format: Hardback
Price: $38.00$38.00 - Alibis: Essays on ElsewhereISBN: 9781250013989
Title: Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere
Author: ACIMAN ANDRE
A Boston Globe Best Nonfiction Book of 2011
Celebrated as one of the most poignant stylists of his generation, Andr#65533; Aciman has written a luminous series of linked essays about time, place, identity, and art that show him at his very finest. From beautiful and moving pieces about the memory evoked by the scent of lavender; to meditations on cities like Barcelona, Rome, Paris, and New York; to his sheer ability to unearth life secrets from an ordinary street corner, Alibis reminds the reader that Aciman is a master of the personal essay.
Format: Paperback
Price: $41.00$41.00 - Approaching Eye LevelISBN: 9781911547648
Title: Approaching Eye Level
Author: GORNICK VIVIAN
Seven seminal essays addressing loneliness, friendship and feminism, written in Gornick's inimitable voice, this collection has never been published in Australia.
Format: Paperback
Price: $25.00$25.00 - Bad Boy of Athens: Classics from the Greeks to Game of ThronesISBN: 9780008245122
Title: Bad Boy of Athens: Classics from the Greeks to Game of Thrones
Author: MENDELSOHN DANIEL
'Mendelsohn takes the classical costumes off figures like Virgil and Sappho, Homer and Horace ... He writes about things so clearly they come to feel like some of the most important things you have ever been told.' Sebastian Barry
Over the past three decades, Daniel Mendelsohn's essays and reviews have earned him a reputation as 'our most irresistible literary critic' (New York Times). This striking new collection exemplifies the way in which Mendelsohn - a classicist by training - uses the classics as a lens to think about urgent contemporary debates.
There is much to surprise here. Mendelsohn invokes the automatons featured in Homer's epics to help explain the AI films Ex Machina and Her, and perceives how Ted Hughes sought redemption by translating a play of Euripides (the 'bad boy of Athens') about a wayward husband whose wife returns from the dead. There are essays on Sappho's sexuality and the feminism of Game of Thrones; on how Virgil's Aeneid prefigures post-World War II history and why we are still obsessed with the Titanic; on Patrick Leigh Fermor's final journey, Karl Ove Knausgaard's autofiction and the plays of Tom Stoppard, Tennessee Williams, and Noël Coward. The collection ends with a poignant account of the author's boyhood correspondence with the historical novelist Mary Renault, which inspired his ambition to become a writer.
In The Bad Boy of Athens, Mendelsohn provokes and dazzles with erudition, emotion and tart wit while his essays dance across eras, cultures and genres. This is a provocative collection which sees today's master of popular criticism using the ancient past to reach into the very heart of modern culture.
Format: Paperback
Price: $28.00$28.00 - Bad News: Why We Fall for Fake NewsISBN: 9781472962881
Title: Bad News: Why We Fall for Fake News
Author: BROTHERTON ROB
From the bestselling author of Suspicious Minds
There was a time when the news came once a day, in the morning newspaper. A time when the only way to see what was happening around the world was to catch the latest newsreel at the movies.
Times have changed. Now we're inundated. The news is no longer confined to a radio in the living room, or to a nightly half-hour timeslot on the television. Pundits pontificate on news networks 24 hours a day. We carry
the news with us, getting instant alerts about events around the globe. Yet despite this unprecedented abundance of information, it seems increasingly difficult to know what's true and what's not.
In Bad News, Rob Brotherton delves into the psychology of news, reviewing how the latest research can help navigate this supposedly post-truth world. Which buzzwords describe psychological reality, and which are empty sound bites? How much of this news is unprecedented, and how much is business as usual? Are we doomed to fall for fake news, or is fake news ... fake news?
There has been considerable psychological research into the fundamental questions underlying this phenomenon. How do we form our beliefs, and why do we end up believing things that are wrong? How much information can we possibly process, and what is the internet doing to our attention spans? Ultimately this book answers one of the greatest questions of the age- how can we all be smarter consumers of news?
Format: Paperback
Price: $33.00$33.00 - Barrel Fever: Stories & EssaysISBN: 9780349119762
Title: Barrel Fever: Stories & Essays
Author: SEDARIS DAVID
In David Sedaris's world, no one is safe and no cow is sacred. A manic cross between Mark Leyner, Fran Lebowitz and the National Enquirer, Sedaris's collection of stories and essays is a rollicking tour through the American Zeitgeist: a man who is loved toomuch flees the heavyweight champion of the world; a teenage suicidetried to incite a lynch mob at her funeral; and in his essays, David Sedaris considers the hazards of rewards of smoking, writing for Giantess magazine, and living with his scrappy brother Paul, aka 'The Rooster'.With a perfect eye and a voice infused with as much empathy as wit, Sedaris writes and reads stories and essays that target the soulful ridiculousness of our behaviour. Barrel Fever is like a blind date with modern life - and anything can happen.
Format: Paperback
Price: $28.00$28.00 - Becoming George Orwell: Life & Letters, Legend & LegacyISBN: 9780691182742
Title: Becoming George Orwell: Life & Letters, Legend & Legacy
Author: RODDEN JOHN
Is George Orwell the most influential writer who ever lived? Yes, according to Rodden's provocative book about the transformation of a man into a myth. He charts the astonishing passage of a litterateur into a legend.
Format: Hardback
Price: $60.00$60.00 - Best American Essays 2018ISBN: 9780544817340
Title: Best American Essays 2018
Author: ALS HILTON & ATWAN ROBERT (EDS)
The Pulitzer-Prize winning and Guggenheim-honored Hilton Als curates the best essays from hundreds of magazines, journals, and websites, bringing "the fierce style of street reading and the formal tradition of critical inquiry, reads culture, race, and gender" (New York Times) to the task.
Format: Paperback
Price: $33.00$33.00 - Best American Essays 2020ISBN: 9780358359913
Title: Best American Essays 2020
Author: ACIMAN ANDRE ED
A collection of the year's best essays selected by Andr Aciman, author of the worldwide bestseller Call Me by Your Name. Andr Aciman "quite simply, one of the finest essayists of the last hundred years" (Los Angeles Review of Books) and one of the most poignant stylists of his generation, selects the best essays of the year from hundreds of magazines, journals, and websites.
Format: Paperback
Price: $37.00$37.00 - Best American Magazine Writing 2018ISBN: 9780231189996
Title: Best American Magazine Writing 2018
Author: HOLT SID
In a time of reckoning with wrongdoing in high places, this year's National Magazine Awards finalists and winners focus on abuse of power in all its forms. Ronan Farrow's Pulitzer Prize-winning revelation of Harvey Weinstein's depredations (New Yorker), along with Rebecca Traister's charged commentary for New York and Laurie Penny's incisive Longreads columns, speak to the urgency of the #MeToo moment. Ginger Thompson's reporting on the botched operation that triggered a cartel massacre in Mexico (National Geographic/ProPublica) and Azmat Khan and Anand Gopal's New York Times Magazine investigation of civilian casualties of drone strikes in Iraq amplify the voices of those harmed by U.S. actions abroad. Alex Tizon's "My Family's Slave" (Atlantic) is a powerful attempt to come to terms with the destruction in plain sight in his own upbringing. Responding to the overt racism of the Trump era, Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah analyzes Dylann Roof, the South Carolina shooter, and white supremacist terrorism in a Pulitzer-winning profile (GQ), and Ta-Nehisi Coates's "My President Was Black" (Atlantic) looks back at the meaning of Obama. Don Van Natta Jr. and Seth Wickersham's ESPN reporting exposes the seamy sides of the NFL. In addition, David Wallace-Wells offers a portrait of our climate change-ravaged future (New York); Nina Martin investigates America's shameful record on maternal mortality (NPR/ProPublica); Ian Frazier asks "What Ever Happened to the Russian Revolution?" (Smithsonian); and Alex Mar considers "Love in the Time of Robots" (Wired with Epic Magazine). The collection concludes with Kristen Roupenian's viral short story "Cat Person" (New Yorker).
Format: Paperback
Price: $41.00$41.00 - Best American Nonrequired Reading 2019ISBN: 9780358093169
Title: Best American Nonrequired Reading 2019
Author: LEPUCKI EDAN & 826 NATIONAL (EDS)
An eclectic collection of fiction, essays, poetry, and graphic work selected by high school students with the help of New York Times best-selling author Edan Lepucki.
Over the past year, fifteen Bay Area high school students have gathered each week in the basement of an independent publishing house to pore over online and print literary journals, magazines, books, plays, and graphic novels. They read things they couldn't shake and engaged in deep conversations about how good writing brings people together, no matter what else is happening around the world. With the help of New York Times best-selling author Edan Lepucki they have compiled The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2019.
Format: Paperback
Price: $36.00$36.00 - Best of A. A. GillISBN: 9781474607759
Title: Best of A. A. Gill
Author: GILL A A
For over twenty years, people turned to A. A. Gill's columns every Sunday - for his fearlessness, his perception, and the laughter-and-tear-provoking one-liners - but mostly because he was the best. 'By miles the most brilliant journalist of our age', as Lynn Barber put it. This is the definitive collection of a voice that was silenced too early but that can still make us look at the world in new and surprising ways.
In the words of Andrew Marr, A.. A. Gill was 'a golden writer'. There was nothing that he couldn't illuminate with his dazzling prose. Wherever he was - at home or abroad - he found the human story, brought it to vivid life, and rendered it with fierce honesty and bracing compassion. And he was just as truthful about himself. There have been various collections of A. A. Gill's journalism - individual compilations of his restaurant and TV criticism, of his travel writing and his extraordinary feature articles. This book showcasesthe very best of his work: the peerlessly funny criticism, the extraordinarily knowledgeable food writing, assignments throughout the world, and reflections on life, love, and death. Drawn from a range of publications, including the Sunday Times, Vanity Fair, Tatler and Australian Gourmet Traveller, The Ivy Cookbook and his books on England and America, it is by turns hilarious, uplifting, controversial, unflinching, sad, funny and furious.
Format: Paperback
Price: $28.00$28.00 - Best of MeISBN: 9781408713884
Title: Best of Me
Author: SEDARIS DAVID
David Sedaris's best stories and essays, spanning his remarkable career--as selected by the author himself
For more than twenty-five years, David Sedaris has been carving out a unique literary space, virtually creating his own genre. A Sedaris story may seem confessional, but is also highly attuned to the world outside. It opens our eyes to what is at absurd and moving about our daily existence. And it is almost impossible to read without laughing.
&
Now, for the first time collected in one volume, the author brings us his funniest and most memorable work. In these stories, Sedaris shops for rare taxidermy, hitchhikes with a lady quadriplegic, and spits a lozenge into a fellow traveler's lap. He drowns a mouse in a bucket, struggles to say "give it to me" in five languages, and hand-feeds a carnivorous bird.
&
But if all you expect to find in Sedaris's work is the deft and sharply observed comedy for which he became renowned, you may be surprised to discover that his words bring more warmth than mockery, more fellow-feeling than derision. Nowhere is this clearer than in his writing about his loved ones. In these pages, Sedaris explores falling in love and staying together, recognizing his own aging not in the mirror but in the faces of his siblings, losing one parent and coming to terms--at long last--with the other.
&
Taken together, the stories in TheBest of Me reveal the wonder and delight Sedaris takes in the surprises life brings him. No experience, he sees, is quite as he expected--it's often harder, more fraught, and certainly weirder--but sometimes it is also much richer and more wonderful.
&
Full of joy, generosity, and the incisive humor that has led David Sedaris to be called "the funniest man alive" (Time Out New York), The Best of Me spans a career spent watching and learning and laughing--quite often at himself--and invites readers deep into the world of one of the most brilliant and original writers of our time.
Format: Trade paperback
Price: $38.00$38.00 - Between the World & MeISBN: 9781925240702
Title: Between the World & Me
Author: COATES TA-NEHISI
A bold and personal literary exploration of America's racial history by the single best writer on the subject of race in the United States ("The New York Observer") "This is your country, this is your world, this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it". In the one hundred fifty years since the end of the Civil War and the ratificiation of the Thirteenth Amendment, the story of race and America has remained a brutally simple one, written on flesh: It is the story of the black body, exploited to create the country s foundational wealth, violently segregated to unite a nation after a civil war, and, today, still disproportionately threatened, locked up, and killed in our streets. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all regardless of race honestly reckon with our country's fraught racial history and free ourselves from its burden? "Between the World and Me" is Ta-Nehisi Coates s attempt to answer those questions, presented in the form of a letter to his adolescent son. Coates shares with his son and readers the story of his own awakening to the truth about history and race through a series of revelatory experiences: immersion in nationalist mythology as a child; engagement with history, poetry, and love at Howard University; travels to Civil War battlefields and the South Side of Chicago; a journey to France that reorients his sense of the world; and pilgrimages to the homes of mothers whose children's lives have been taken as American plunder. Taken together, these stories map a winding path toward a kind of liberation a journey from fear and confusion to a full and honest understanding of the world as it is. Masterfully woven from lyrical personal narrative, reimagined history, and fresh, emotionally charged reportage, "Between the World and Me" offers a powerful new framework for understanding America s history and current crisis, and a transcendent vision for a way forward."
Format: Trade paperback
Price: $35.00$35.00 - BlakworkISBN: 9781925360851
Title: Blakwork
Author: WHITTAKER ALISON
A stunning mix of memoir, reportage, fiction, satire, and critique composed by a powerful new voice in poetry. Alison Whittaker's BLAKWORK is an original and unapologetic collection from which two things emerge; an incomprehensible loss, and the poet's fearless examination of the present.
Whittaker is unsparing in the interrogation of familiar ideas - identifying and dissolving them with idiosyncratic imagery, layering them to form new connections, and reinterpreting what we know.
'Alison Whittaker's second book,& Blakwork& is a bold mix of poetry, micro-fiction, memoir and critique, and a follow-up to her award-wining debut poetry collection,& Lemons in the Chicken Wire...Whittaker has drawn on the strength of past generations to become a strong& blak& woman in contemporary Australia, and readers are gifted her insights into growing up& blak.& With a unique style of writing, she bravely unpacks themes such as colonisation and Aboriginal rights in Australia.'& --& Karen& Wyld, Books+Publishing
Format: Paperback
Price: $30.00$30.00 - BluetsISBN: 9781933517407
Title: Bluets
Author: NELSON MAGGIE
Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color . . . A lyrical, philosophical, and often explicit exploration of personal suffering and the limitations of vision and love, as refracted through the color blue. WithBluets, Maggie Nelson has entered the pantheon of brilliant lyric essayists. Maggie Nelson is the author of numerous books of poetry and nonfiction, includingSomething Bright, Then Holes (Soft Skull Press, 2007) andWomen, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (University of Iowa Press, 2007). She lives in Los Angeles and teaches at the California Institute of the Arts.
Format: Paperback
Price: $36.00$36.00 - Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant Brilliant Brilliant: Modern Life As Interpreted by Someone Who Is Reasonably Bad at Living ItISBN: 9780008265427
Title: Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant Brilliant Brilliant: Modern Life As Interpreted by Someone Who Is Reasonably Bad at Living It
Author: GOLBY JOEL
'This is a funny and beautiful book. What a little bastard.' RUSSELL BRAND
'A millennial's answer to David Sedaris. No writer is funnier than Joel Golby.' DOLLY ALDERTON
A collection of full-throated appreciations, withering assessments, and hard-won lessons by the popular journalist.
There are a few things you need to know about Joel Golby. Both his parents are dead. His dad was an alcoholic. He himself has a complicated relationship with alcohol. He once went to karaoke three times in five days. He will always beat you at Monopoly, and he will always cheat.
Joel makes a name for himself as a journalist who brings us distinguished articles such as 'A Man Shits On A Plane So Hard It Has To Turn Around And Come Back Again', but that says more about us than him. In his first book, Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant Brilliant Brilliant Joel writes about important stuff (death, alcohol, loss, friendship) and unimportant stuff (Saudi Arabian Camel Pageants, a watertight ranking of the Rocky films, Monopoly), always with the soft punch of a lesson tucked within.
Golby's sharp, evocative prose thrives on reality and honesty that is gut-wrenchingly close to the bone, and laced with a copious dose of dark humour. Who is this book for? It is for everyone, but mainly people who are as lost and confused as Joel and just want to have a good laugh about it. stuff (death, alcohol, loss, friendship) and unimportant stuff (Saudi Arabian Camel Pageants, a watertight ranking of the Rocky films, Monopoly), always with the soft punch of a lesson tucked within.
Golby's sharp, evocative prose thrives on reality and honesty that is gut-wrenchingly close to the bone, and laced with a copious dose of dark humour. Who is this book for? It is for everyone, but mainly people who are as lost and confused as Joel and just want to have a good laugh about it.
Format: Paperback
Price: $25.00$25.00 - Busted in New York & Other Essays With an Introduction by Zadie SmithISBN: 9781529413748
Title: Busted in New York & Other Essays With an Introduction by Zadie Smith
Author: PINCKNEY DARRYL
'[Pinckney] reveals himself to be a skilful chronicler of black experience in literary criticism, reportage and biography' The New York Times
In these twenty-five essays, Darryl Pinckney has given us a view of our recent racial history that blends the social and the personal and wonders how we arrived at our current moment. Pinckney reminds us that "white supremacy isn't back; it never went away." It is this impulse to see historically that is at the core of Busted in New York and Other Essays, which traces the lineage of black intellectual history from Booker T. Washington through the Harlem Renaissance, to the Black Panther Party and the turbulent sixties, to today's Afro-pessimists, and celebrated and neglected thinkers in between.
These are capacious essays whose topics range from the grassroots of protest in Ferguson, Missouri, to the eighteenth-century Guadeloupian composer Joseph Bologne, from an unsparing portrait of Louis Farrakhan to the enduring legacy of James Baldwin, the unexpected story of Black people experiencing Russia, Barry Jenkins's Moonlight, and the painter Kara Walker. The essays themselves are a kind of record, many of them written in real-time, as Pinckney witnesses the Million Man March, feels and experiences the highs and lows of Obama's first presidential campaign, explores the literary Black diaspora, and reflects on the surprising and severe lesson he learned firsthand about the changing urban fabric of New York.
As Zadie Smith writes in her introduction to the book: "How lucky we are to have Darryl Pinckney who, without rancor, without insult, has, all these years, been taking down our various songs, examining them with love and care, and bringing them back from the past, like a Sankofa bird, for our present examination. These days Sankofas like Darryl are rare. Treasure him!
Format: Paperback
Price: $28.00$28.00 - Call Them by Their True Names: American Crises (& Essays)ISBN: 9781783784974
Title: Call Them by Their True Names: American Crises (& Essays)
Author: SOLNIT REBECCA
Beginning with the election of Donald Trump ('The Loneliest Man in the World') and expanding back and forth into American history, surveillance, violence against the individual, the denormalizing of misogyny and the rehumanizing of public space. The ultimate focus of the book is climate and feminist activism, bringing Solnit's trademark deep analysis to bear on a range of contemporary crises. And again, and spectacularly, she shows us how to hope.
Format: Hardback
Price: $28.00$28.00 - CalypsoISBN: 9780349141893
Title: Calypso
Author: SEDARIS DAVID
David Sedaris returns with his most deeply personal and darkly hilarious book.
If you've ever laughed your way through David Sedaris' cheerfully misanthropic stories, you might think you know what you're getting with Calypso. You'd be wrong.
When he buys a beach house on the Carolina coast, Sedaris envisions long, relaxing vacations spent playing board games and lounging in the sun with those he loves most. And life at the Sea Section, as he names the vacation home, is exactly as idyllic as he imagined, except for one tiny, vexing realization: it's impossible to take a vacation from yourself.
With Calypso, Sedaris sets his formidable powers of observation toward middle age and mortality. Make no mistake: these stories are very, very funny-it's a book that can make you laugh 'til you snort, the way only family can. Sedaris' powers of observation have never been sharper, and his ability to shock readers into laughter unparalleled. But much of the comedy here is born out of that vertiginous moment when your own body betrays you and you realize that the story of your life is made up of more past than future.
This is beach reading for people who detest beaches, required reading for those who loathe small talk and love a good tumor joke. Calypso is simultaneously Sedaris' darkest and warmest book yet-and it just might be his very best.
Format: Paperback
Price: $28.00$28.00 - China in Ten WordsISBN: 9780715645512
Title: China in Ten Words
Author: HUA YU
From one of China's most acclaimed writers, his first work of non-fiction to appear in English: a unique, intimate look at the Chinese experience over the past several decades, told through personal stories and astute analysis that sharply illuminate the country's meteoric economic rise and social transformation. Framed by ten words or phrases common in the Chinese vernacular, China in Ten Words reveals as never before the world's most populous yet most often misunderstood nation. With Yu Hua's wit, insight and courage, this is a refreshingly candid vision of the 'Chinese miracle' and all its consequences, from the singularly invaluable perspective of a leading writer living in China today. Two of the author's novels were named in the Top Ten most influential books of the decade by Wen Hui Bao, Shanghai's biggest newspaper.
Format: Paperback
Price: $31.00$31.00 - Counterfutures #6: Left Thought & Practice AotearoaISBN: 9781811261400
Title: Counterfutures #6: Left Thought & Practice Aotearoa
Author: TAYLOR DYLAN ED
Format: Paperback
Price: $25.00$25.00 - CoventryISBN: 9780571350452
Title: Coventry
Author: CUSK RACHEL
A series of essays from Rachel Cusk - about choices, womanhood and art.
Format: Paperback
Price: $25.00$25.00 - Crying BookISBN: 9781472154705
Title: Crying Book
Author: CHRISTLE HEATHER
"A poignant and piercing examination of the phenomenon of tears--exhaustive, yes, but also open-ended. . . A deeply felt, and genuinely touching, book." --Esm Weijun Wang, author of The Collected Schizophrenias
"Spellbinding and propulsive--the map of a luminous mind in conversation with books, songs, friends, scientific theories, literary histories, her own jagged joy, and despair. Heather Christle is a visionary writer." --Leni Zumas, author of Red Clocks
Heather Christle has just lost a dear friend to suicide and now must reckon with her own depression and the birth of her first child. As she faces her grief and impending parenthood, she decides to research the act of crying: what it is and why people do it, even if they rarely talk about it. Along the way, she discovers an artist who designed a frozen-tear-shooting gun and a moth that feeds on the tears of other animals. She researches tear-collecting devices (lachrymatories) and explores the role white women's tears play in racist violence.
Honest, intelligent, rapturous, and surprising, Christle's investigations look through a mosaic of science, history, and her own lived experience to find new ways of understanding life, loss, and mental illness. The Crying Book is a deeply personal tribute to the fascinating strangeness of tears and the unexpected resilience of joy.
Format: Hardback
Price: $35.00$35.00 - Dear Mr MurrayISBN: 9781473662698
Title: Dear Mr Murray
Author: MCCLAY DAVID
The publishing house of John Murray was founded in Fleet Street in 1768 and remained a family firm over seven generations. Published to coincide with this 'remarkable achievement' and in the anniversary year, Dear Mr Murray is a collection of some of the best letters from the hundreds of thousands held in the John Murray Archive. They reveal not only the story of some of the most interesting and influential books in history but also the remarkable friendships - as well as occasional animosities - between author and publisher, as well as readers, editors, printers and illustrators.
Despite the incredible number of letters that were retained by the Murray family, some failed to arrive, others were delayed and some barely survived, but longevity added to the reputation and fame of John Murray and a correspondent in Canada who addressed his letter merely to 'John Murray, The World-wide famous Book & Publishing House, London, England' as early as 1932 could be confident that his letter would arrive.
Intended to entertain and inspire, and spanning more than two hundred years, Dear Mr Murray is full of literary history and curiosities: from Charles Darwin's response to the negative reviews of On the Origin of Species to Adrian Conan Doyle challenging Harold Nicolson to a duel for insulting his father in the press; from David Livingstone's displeasure at the proposed drawing of a lion to represent his near-death encounter in Missionary Travels to William Makepeace Thackeray apologising for his drunken behaviour; from Byron berating John Murray for being fooled by his girlfriend's forgery of his signature to the poet James Hogg so desperate for money that he claims he won't be able to afford a Christmas goose; and from Jane Austen expressing concern about printing delays to Patrick Leigh Fermor beseeching Jock Murray not to visit him until he'd completed A Time of Gifts. Complemented by illustrations and reproductions of letters and envelopes, this is the perfect gift for book lovers everywhere.
Format: Hardback
Price: $48.00$48.00 - Details On Love, Death and ReadingISBN: 9781760855253
Title: Details On Love, Death and Reading
Author: DAYLIGHT TEGAN BENNETT
A book about the connections we form with literature and each other
&
Tegan Bennett Daylight has led a life in books - as a writer, a teacher and a critic, but first and foremost as a reader.
&
In this deeply insightful and intimate work, Daylight describes how her reading has nourished her life, and how life has informed her reading. In both, she shows us that it's the small points of connection - the details - that really matter: what we notice when someone close to us dies, when we give birth, when we make friends. In life's disasters and delights, the details are what we can share and compare and carry with us.
&
Daylight writes with invigorating candour and compassion about her mother's last days; her own experiences of childbearing and its aftermath (in her celebrated essay 'Vagina'); her long admiration of Helen Garner and George Saunders; and her great loves and friendships. Each chapter is a revelation, and a celebration of how books offer not an escape from 'real life' but a richer engagement with the business of living.
&
The result is a work that will truly deepen your relationship with books, and with other readers. The delight is in the details.
'A superb writer... If you love reading, you'll cherish this book for showing you why.' Charlotte Wood, author of The Weekend and The Natural Way of Things
&
'An intimate and wise celebration of the joy and solace we find in books.'& Books & Publishing
'If you care about reading and writing, past, present and future, read this book.' Stephen Romei, The Weekend Australian
'The Details is a joyful and vital adventure alongside a sophisticated reader, and a timely reminder of the critical role of art in turbulent times.' Justine Hyde, The Saturday Paper
'A testament to the enriching power of reading.' Thuy On, Sydney Morning Herald
'An immersive and thought-provoking read, ideal for any bibliophile.' The Monthly
Format: Paperback
Price: $31.00$31.00 - Do You Mind If I Cancel? (Things That Still Annoy Me)ISBN: 9781250266415
Title: Do You Mind If I Cancel? (Things That Still Annoy Me)
Author: JANETTI GARY
With over 800,000 followers on social media, Gary Janetti has quickly become a viral sensation, but here in Do You Mind If I Cancel?, the man behind the most wickedly funny memes on the Internet turns his attention away from the royal family, and squarely to the realm of everyday life. He takes on the humiliations of applying for a job, the excitement of moving to New York, and reflects on growing up, and coming out. "These are essays from my childhood and young adulthood about things that still annoy me," says Gary.But the book is not just a laugh out loud riot. In the vein of David Sedaris, and Jenny Lawson, the collection is also a deeply felt work of literary nonfiction, exploring the complexities of family, frustrations of careers, and the paradox of life where sometimes everything is irritating, and also wonderful. Original, brazen, and laugh out loud funny, Do You Mind If I Cancel? marks the arrival of a remarkably exciting new voice in American humor.
Format: Paperback
Price: $28.00$28.00 - Dramatic Exchanges The Lives & Letters of the National TheatreISBN: 9781781259368
Title: Dramatic Exchanges The Lives & Letters of the National Theatre
Author: ROSENTHAL DANIEL (EDITOR)
The perfect gift for any theatre loverThere has been always as much drama offstage as on at the National Theatre, and much of it is to be found in the letters, telegrams, scribbled notes and colourful postcards of its main players. - What drove Laurence Olivier to confess: 'The foolishness of my position starts to obsess me'?- Why did Maggie Smith write: 'I am absolutely heartbroken by your decision'?- What prompted Judi Dench to ask: 'Can't you write me a musical so that I can sit on a chair in a fur hat & nothing else and sing RUDE songs?' This book brings together for the first time some of the most inspiring, dramatic and amusing letters from the life of Britain's most beloved theatre: Laurence Olivier's gracious rejection letters, Peter Hall's combative memos, Helen Mirren's impassioned defence of theatrical innovation, fantastical good luck missives and long conspiratorial letters. Together, they reveal the stories behind some of the most lavish, triumphant, daring and disastrous productions in the theatre's history, including Amadeus, Romans in Britain, Laurence Olivier's Othello, Closer, The History Boys and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. A rich collection of correspondence like no other, this book offers a fascinating and celebratory look at the world of theatre and beyond.
Format: Trade paperback
Price: $37.00$37.00 - Dress Your Family in Corduroy & DenimISBN: 9780349116709
Title: Dress Your Family in Corduroy & Denim
Author: SEDARIS DAVID
Essays to feature: bull; bull;David Sedaris's brief and painful encounter with the most popular guy in junior high school. bull;'The Rooster' in a tux and other unsavoury animal tales from David's brother's wedding. bull;David Sedaris on the differences between love in movies and love in real life. bull;David Sedaris on his brutally frank neighbour, a 75-year-old woman named Rocky who is given to outbursts like, 'I'll kick you up the ass so hard I'll lose my shoe!'No one renders the pathos, chaos, and impossible variety of daily encounters like David Sedaris. On every subject, he is bruisingly painful and tenderly affectionate. Sedaris is a unique voice in American writing, and this new collection will be eagerly anticipated by his ever-growing crowd of devoted readers.
Format: Paperback
Price: $28.00$28.00 - Encounters & Destinies A Farewell to EuropeISBN: 9781782273462
Title: Encounters & Destinies A Farewell to Europe
Author: ZWEIG STEFAN
A new collection of essays by Stefan Zweig: tributes to the great artists and thinkers of the Europe of his day Stefan Zweig was one of the twentieth century's greatest authors and a tireless champion of freedom, tolerance and friendship across borders. Encounters and Destinies collects his most impassioned and moving tributes to his many illustrious friends and peers: literary, philosophical and artistic luminaries from across the Old Europe that Zweig loved so much, and which he grieved to see so cruelly destroyed by two world wars. Including pieces on Rainer Maria Rilke, Marcel Proust, Sigmund Freud, Maxim Gorky and Arturo Toscanini, this essential collection is also Zweig's tribute to the ideal of friendship: an ideal he clung to as the world he knew was torn apart.
Format: Paperback
Price: $33.00$33.00 - Encyclopedia of Trouble & SpaciousnessISBN: 9781595347534
Title: Encyclopedia of Trouble & Spaciousness
Author: SOLNIT REBECCAThe incomparable Rebecca Solnit, author of more than a dozen acclaimed, prizewinning books of nonfiction including Men Explain Things To Me, brings the same dazzling writing to the essays in The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness; hailed by the Los Angeles Times as "globally wide-ranging and topically urgent and the Boston Globe as "luminous and precise.". As the title suggests, the territory of Solnit's concerns is vast, and in her signature alchemical style she combines commentary on history, justice, war and peace, and explorations of place, art, and community, all while writing with the lyricism of a poet to achieve incandescence and wisdom.
Gathered here are celebrated iconic essays along with little-known pieces that create a powerful survey of the world we live in, from the jungles of the Zapatistas in Mexico to the splendors of the Arctic. This rich collection tours places as diverse as Haiti and Icel∧ movements like Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring; an original take on the question of who did Henry David Thoreau's laundry; and a searching look at what the hatred of country music really means.
Solnit moves nimbly from Orwell to Elvis, to contemporary urban gardening to 1970s California macram#65533; and punk rock, and on to searing questions about the environment, freedom, family, class, work, and friendship. It's no wonder she's been compared in Bookforum to Susan Sontag and Annie Dillard and in the San Francisco Chronicle to Joan Didion.
The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness proves Rebecca Solnit worthy of the accolades and honors she's received. Rarely can a reader find such penetrating critiques of our time and its failures leavened with such generous heapings of hope. Solnit looks back to history and the progress of political movements to find an antidote to despair in what many feel as lost causes. In its encyclopedic reach and its generous compassion, Solnit's collection charts a way through the thickets of our complex social and political worlds. Her essays are a beacon for readers looking for alternative ideas in these imperiled times.
Format: Paperback
Price: $40.00$40.00 - EssaysISBN: 9780141395463
Title: Essays
Author: ORWELL GEORGE
'Political writing in our time consists almost entirely of prefabricated phrases bolted together like the pieces of a child's Meccano set. It is the unavoidable result of self-censorship. To write in plain, vigorous language one has to think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox.'
Format: Paperback
Price: $21.00$21.00 - EssaysISBN: 9780241371473
Title: Essays
Author: DAVIS LYDIA
Lydia Davis's writing is a masterclass in control- wry, lucid, penetrating, every word placed deliberately. Here she presents a dazzling collection of literary essays, each one as beautifully formed, thought-provoking, playful and illuminating as her critically acclaimed short fiction. Ranging across her many creative influences, including Thomas Pynchon, Michel Leiris, Maurice Blanchot, Lucia Berlin and Joan Mitchell, she returns again and again to her own writing process, joyfully interrogating the limits of literature and the ways in which we can challenge and reinvent it.
Format: Hardback
Price: $50.00$50.00 - Essays in IdlenessISBN: 9784805306314
Title: Essays in Idleness
Author: YOSHIDA KENKO
Between 1330 and 1332, the Buddhist priest Kenko, having as he put it “nothing better to do” turned to his inkstone and brushes. He jotted down his thoughts, observations, and opinions; anecdotes that he found interesting, amusing, or instructive; accounts of customs and ceremonies-everything that seemed to him worthy of preservation. Donald Keene’s complete translation admirably presents this extraordinarily influential Japanese classic.
The little essays-none of them more than a few pages in length, and some consisting of but two or three sentences-give us the self-portrait of a most engaging gentleman. He loves the past: every scrap of tradition is precious to him. He is haunted by transience, by the vanity of human desires and ambitious, by the inevitable approach of death. He values modesty and simplicity, even as he appreciates subtlety and formality. Sometimes he contradicts himself, as a journal keeper may so easily do, but these lapses are in themselves endearing.
However Kenko is consistent in his statement of the peculiarly Japanese aesthetic principle: beauty is intrinsically bound to its perishability. The imperfect, the irregular, the understated, beginnings and endings-these have a charm of their own which surpasses that of completion.
Format: Paperback
Price: $22.00$22.00 - Everything's Trash, but It's OkayISBN: 9780525534167
Title: Everything's Trash, but It's Okay
Author: ROBINSON PHOEBE & GLAZER ILANA (FOREWARD BY)
Wouldn't it be great if life came with instructions? Of course, but like access to Michael B. Jordan's house, none of us are getting any. Thankfully, Phoebe Robinson is ready to share everything she has experienced to prove that if you can laugh at her topsy-turvy life, you can laugh at your own.
Written in her trademark unfiltered and witty style, Robinson's latest collection is a call to arms. Outfitted with on-point pop culture references, these essays tackle a wide range of topics- giving feminism a tough-love talk on intersectionality, telling society's beauty standards to kick rocks, and calling foul on our culture's obsession with work. Robinson also gets personal, exploring money problems she's hidden from her parents, how dating is mainly a warmed-over bowl of hot mess, and definitely most important, meeting Bono not once, but twice. She's struggled with being a woman with a political mind and a woman with an ever-changing jeans size. She knows about trash because she sees it every day--and because she's seen roughly one hundred thousand hours of reality TV and zero hours of Schindler's List.
With the intimate voice of a new best friend, Everything's Trash, But It's Okay is a candid perspective for a generation that has had the rug pulled out from under it too many times to count.
Format: Paperback
Price: $30.00$30.00 - Everywhere I LookISBN: 9781925498080
Title: Everywhere I Look
Author: GARNER HELEN
Garner is a 2016 Windham-Campbell Prize recipient for her non-fiction writings. The judges praised Garner's work as intelligent, lucid and often disturbing.
PRAISE FOR EVERYWHERE I LOOK
A captivating collection No matter the topic, Garner is a charming and courageous writer whose distinctive voice exemplifies the range of what is possible in personal writing. Publishers Weekly
Garner brings to the collection not only her tremendous powers of observation but a continued employment of those skills to force readers to confront unpleasant truths. The graceful prose with which she delivers her insights will challenge readers to look at what is happening around them. Library Journal (STARRED REVIEW)
Like strolling around in an idiosyncratic, surprising, and informative museum. Kirkus
'Garner is a natural storyteller: her unillusioned eye makes her clarity compulsive. New Yorker
Compulsively readable essays. Observer
Writes with the humor and precision of Joy Williams, the warmth and ferocity of Elena Ferrante, and the investigative rigor of Janet Malcolm.' John Freeman, LitHub
A thoughtful dissection of the emotional anatomy of the everyday . Financial Times UK]
This is Garner in expansive mood writing gracefully about everything from her family to ballet to the dawn service. The Spectator Garner is a wonderful appreciator: she invites us into the work under review by leading us along the path of discovery she has followed. Open Letters Monthly
Garner s prose is so very pleasant to read dry, relaxed sentences that calmly reach out towards loveliness Her] willingness to look at and truly see the failures of human behavior, in herself no less than in others, that lends her work its power. Guardian
A rich, beautiful book by a poet of the everyday, a sheer master of prose. Australian
A book with a big scope, both in terms of the subjects covered and of the stylistic approaches used to discuss them a great reminder of the range of the essay as form.' Signature
There s not a word wasted or out of place. Garner observes, intuits, shares and cares about the lives she writes about like no-one else. Readers will laugh, cry, squirm and gasp and wonder. It s Garner s unique gift as a writer, and it s beautifully realized in Everywhere I Look. Books + Publishing
Spanning fifteen years of work, Everywhere I Look is a book full of intuition, insight and humor. It takes us from backstage at the ballet to the trial of a woman for the murder of her newborn baby. It moves effortlessly from the significance of moving house to the pleasure of re-reading Pride and Prejudice.
Helen Garner is the author of numerous books of fiction and nonfiction. Her novel The Spare Room was published to critical acclaim in 2010. Her work of true crime This House of Grief received international praise.
PRAISE FOR This House of Grief
Garner] doesn't merely listen. She watches, imagines, second-guesses, empathizes, agonizes. Her voice intimate yet sharp, wry yet urgent inspires trust.' Atlantic
She writes with a profound understanding of human vulnerability, and of the subtle workings of love, memory and remorse. Economist
Helen Garner is an invaluable guide into harrowing territory and offers powerful and unforgettable insights.' Kate Atkinson
THIS HOUSE OF GRIEF won the Honorable Mention in the INDIEFAB 2015 Book of the Year Awards, True Crime category
"
Format: Paperback
Price: $30.00$30.00 - Eye You See With: Selected NonfictionISBN: 9780618386246
Title: Eye You See With: Selected Nonfiction
Author: STONE ROBERT & BELL MADISON SMARTT (EDITOR)
The definitive collection of nonfiction--from war reporting to literary criticism to the sharpest political writing--from the "legend of American letters" (Vanity Fair)
Robert Stone was a singular American writer, a visionary whose award-winning novels--including Dog Soldiers, Outerbridge Reach, and Damascus Gate--earned him comparisons to literary lions ranging from Samuel Beckett to Ernest Hemingway to Graham Greene. Stone had an almost prophetic grasp of the spirit of his age, which he captured with crystalline clarity in each of his novels. Of course, he was also a sharp and brilliant observer of American life, and his nonfiction writing is revelatory.
The Eye You See With--the first and only collection of Robert Stone's nonfiction--was carefully selected by award-winning novelist and Stone biographer Madison Smartt Bell. Divided into three sections, the collection includes the best of Stone's war reporting, his writing on social change, and his reflections on the art of fiction. This is an extraordinary volume that offers up a clear-eyed look at the 20th century and secures Robert Stone's place as one of the most original figures in all of American letters.
Format: Hardback
Price: $58.00$58.00 - F*ck Your Diet & Other Things My Thighs Tell MeISBN: 9781982135676
Title: F*ck Your Diet & Other Things My Thighs Tell Me
Author: HILLIARD CHLOE
Fans of Issa Rae and Phoebe Robinson will love this collection of laugh-out-loud funny and insightful essays that explore race, feminism, pop culture, and how society reinforces the message that we are nothing without the perfect body.
By the time Chloé Hilliard was 12, she wore a size 12--both shoe and dress--and stood over six feet tall. Fitting in was never an option. That didn't stop her from trying. Cursed with a "slow metabolism," "baby weight," and "big bones,"--the fat trilogy--Chloe turned to fad diets, starvation, pills, and workouts, all of which failed.
Realizing that everything--from government policies to corporate capitalism--directly impacts our relationship with food and our waistlines, Chloé changed her outlook on herself and hopes others will do the same for themselves.
The perfect mix of cultural commentary, conspiracies, and confessions, F*ck Your Diet pokes fun at the all too familiar, misguided quest for better health, permanent weight loss, and a sense of self-worth.
Format: Trade paperback
Price: $33.00$33.00 - Far & Away: Essential A A GillISBN: 9781474617376
Title: Far & Away: Essential A A Gill
Author: GILL A A
Format: Trade paperback
Price: $38.00$38.00 - Feel Free: EssaysISBN: 9780241971024
Title: Feel Free: Essays
Author: SMITH ZADIE
A New York Times Notable Book
From Zadie Smith, one of the most beloved authors of her generation, a new collection of essays
Since she burst spectacularly into view with her debut novel almost two decades ago, Zadie Smith has established herself not just as one of the world's preeminent fiction writers, but also a brilliant and singular essayist. She contributes regularly to The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books on a range of subjects, and each piece of hers is a literary event in its own right.
Arranged into five sections--In the World, In the Audience, In the Gallery, On the Bookshelf, and Feel Free--this new collection poses questions we immediately recognize. What is The Social Network--and Facebook itself--really about? "It's a cruel portrait of us: 500 million sentient people entrapped in the recent careless thoughts of a Harvard sophomore." Why do we love libraries? "Well-run libraries are filled with people because what a good library offers cannot be easily found elsewhere: an indoor public space in which you do not have to buy anything in order to stay." What will we tell our granddaughters about our collective failure to address global warming? "So I might say to her, look: the thing you have to appreciate is that we'd just been through a century of relativism and deconstruction, in which we were informed that most of our fondest-held principles were either uncertain or simple wishful thinking, and in many areas of our lives we had already been asked to accept that nothing is essential and everything changes--and this had taken the fight out of us somewhat."
Gathering in one place for the first time previously unpublished work, as well as already classic essays, such as, "Joy," and, "Find Your Beach," Feel Free offers a survey of important recent events in culture and politics, as well as Smith's own life. Equally at home in the world of good books and bad politics, Brooklyn-born rappers and the work of Swiss novelists, she is by turns wry, heartfelt, indignant, and incisive--and never any less than perfect company. This is literary journalism at its zenith.
Format: Paperback
Price: $30.00$30.00