Essays Books
Black Lawrence Press Without Saints
Book Synopsis
£16.10
Bridge21 Publications, LLC People of Nanjing: A Cultural Perspective on a
Book SynopsisNanjing has a prominent place in Chinese culture and history as having been a capital city for ten times throughout the history. The city of Nanjing is a fine history textbook. If one pores over this city, one will evoke the history of China itself. Every historic site in Nanjing is saturated with the character of human affairs. Whichever ruins one might visit, they are all part of a deep historical dialogue. In terms of scenery, Nanjing has mountains and rivers, enough to match any city. But the city's strength is in its history, and its unique culture. This book is a collection of prose about the unique history, culture and atmosphere of the city as well as the temperament and customs of its people, by the renowned Nanjing-born writer, YE Zhaoyan.Nanjng in the eyes of Matteo Ricci (1552-1610), the Italian Jesuit priest and one of the founding figures of the Jesuit China missions:"THIS METROPLITAN CITY is called Nankin…In the judgement of the Chinese this city surpasses all other cities in the world in beauty and in grandeur… It is literally filled with palaces and temples and towers and bridges, and these are scarcely surpassed by similar structures in Europe… There is a gaiety of spirit among the people, who are well mannered and nicely spoken…in the whole kingdom of China and in all bordering countries, Nankin is rated as the first city.This city was once the capital of the entire realm and the ancient abode of kings through many centuries, and though the kind changed his residence to Pekin, in the north, … Nankin lost none of it splendor or of its reputation…" - Ricci, Matteo, Nicolas Trigault, and Louis J. Gallagher. 1953. China in the Sixteenth Century: The Journals of Matthew Ricci, 1583-1610. New York: Random House. pp. 268-270."An elegant city with the European and American planning models adopted at the macro level, and the traditional Chinese style at the micro level – the most beautiful, clean and well-planned modern city in twentieth-century China." - YE Zhaoyan: remarks on the modern Nanjing cityTable of ContentsThe Nostalgia Complex The History of Nanjing The Regal Aura of the Golden Hill The Sound of a Vanquished Nation Opportunities for the City A Strategic Town in the Southeast A Picture of Migration The Figures of the Six Dynasties and Nanjing Radishes South Nanjing North Nanjing Eating in Nanjing Drinking in Nanjing (Part 1) Drinking in Nanjing (Part 2) Leisure in Nanjing The Seasons of Nanjing Nanjingers The Outsiders of Nanjing Nanjing's Authors The Salaried Classes of Nanjing The Men of Nanjing The Women of Nanjing (Part 1) The Women of Nanjing (Part 2) Nanjing, 100 Years Ago Nanjing, History, and Culture On the Qinhuai River Tianxia Wenshu ("The Literary Center of All-Under-Heaven") Excursions on Donkeyback The Streets that Lu Xun Walked Zhu Xie Remembering Tiger Bridge Prison The Ballad of Nanjin Remembering the Dead Old Buildings Lost The Season for Love Songs Remembering the Willow Seeing the Willow Through the Mists The 480 Temples of the Southern Dynasties Autumn Cool and Summer Heat Cycling in Nanjing A Gathering at Anleyuan Nanjing in Culture A City's Character and its Authors Drinking Tea at the Vanguard Bookstore Repairing the City Walls Inscriptions on the Bricks of the City Wall The Ineffable Xuanwu Lake Nanjing, Nanjing Nanjing in the Xinhai Revolution
£23.44
WW Norton & Co Preparing the Ghost: An Essay Concerning the
Book SynopsisIn 1874, Moses Harvey—eccentric Newfoundland reverend and amateur naturalist—was the first person to photograph the near-mythic giant squid, draping it over his shower curtain rod to display its magnitude. In Preparing the Ghost, what begins as Harvey’s story becomes spectacularly “slippery and many-armed” (NewYorker.com) as Matthew Gavin Frank winds his narrative tentacles around history, creative nonfiction, science, memoir, and meditations about the interrelated nature of them all. In his full-hearted, lyrical style, Frank weaves in playful forays about his trip to Harvey’s Newfoundland home, his own childhood and family history, and a catalog of peculiar facts that recall Melville ’s story of obsession with another deep-sea dwelling leviathan. “Totally original and haunting” (Flavorwire), Preparing the Ghost is a delightfully unpredictable inquiry into the big, beautiful human impulse to obsess.Trade Review"Slyly charming. . . . stunning writing and perversely wonderful research. . . . Alluring. It’s hard to imagine a better book about not entirely understanding giant squids." -- Jon Mooallem - New York Times Book Review"In a book as coiled, strange and tentacular as its subject, Matthew Gavin Frank considers the squid. . . . An act of love and erudition." -- Annalissa Quinn, NPR"One of the handsomest, most elusive creatures on earth and its first photographer get their close-up in Matthew Gavin Frank’s marvelous Preparing the Ghost." -- Elissa Schappell - Vanity Fair"Totally original and haunting in the way you’d expect a book about a real life Presbyterian clergyman and amateur naturalist from the late-19th century—and his relationship with a giant squid—to be." -- Jason Diamond - Flavorwire"A great essay takes us into the author’s polymathic mind and out to the wondrous world, teaching us something we didn’t know we wanted to know." -- Patrick Madden, author of Quotidiana"Reads like a cross between Walt Whitman and a fever dream. Who would think squid and ice cream go together? I remained riveted to the very last word." -- Sy Montgomery, author of The Good Good Pig"Matthew Gavin Frank reinvents the art of research in extraordinarily imaginative ways. His meditation on the briefly known and the forever unknowable courts lore (both family and creaturely), invites the fantastical, heeds fact, and turns the human drive to notate and list into a gesture of lyrical beauty." -- Lia Purpura, author of On Looking and Rough Likeness"Inventive, original, and endlessly interesting, Preparing the Ghost is a gorgeous exploration of myth, history, language, and imagination. . . . A journey through passion, obsession, fear, and adventure, and the hunger to behold what lurks within the depths of the sea." -- Catherine Chung, author of Forgotten Country"The most original book I have read in years." -- Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Chronology of Water and Dora: A Headcase"A mysterious but seductive mix of history, creative non-fiction, memoir, and poetry. . . . keeps the reader riveted with the lure of the unknown and dark, sultry prose." -- Megan Mayhew Bergman, author of Birds of a Lesser Paradise"What a marvelous essay. . . . Take it all in. Revel in its majesty." -- Lee Martin, author of Such a Life"A multi-tentacled and entirely captivating saga of profound mystery and relentless pursuit." -- Dinty W. Moore, author of Between Panic & Desire"A mash-up of a meditation on the nature of myth, the magnetic distance between preservation and perseverance, and the “sympathetic cravings” that undergird pain. In Frank’s heart-thumping taxonomy, monstrous behemoths square nicely with butterflies and ice cream. Don’t ask me how: read this book!" -- Mary Cappello, author of Swallow: Foreign Bodies, Their Ingestion, Inspiration, and the Curious Doctor who Extracted Them"Part history, part lyric poem, part detective novel—Matthew Gavin Frank’s Preparing the Ghost is just as intriguing and hard to classify as its subject. I never thought I’d care so much about the elusive giant squid, but thanks to this book, I can’t help but see its shadow everywhere." -- Brenda Miller, author of Season of the Body and Listening Against the Stone
£11.39
WW Norton & Co In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas
Book SynopsisBefore embarking on what would become one of the most prominent writing careers in American literature, spanning decades and indelibly shaping the nation’s perception of the West, Larry McMurtry knew what it meant to come from Texas. Originally published in 1968, In a Narrow Grave is the Pulitzer Prize–winning author’s homage to the past and present of the Lone Star State, where he grew up a precociously observant hand on his father’s ranch. From literature to rodeos, small-town folk to big city intellectuals, McMurtry explores all the singular elements that define his land and community, revealing the surprising and particular challenges in the “dying . . . rural, pastoral way of life.” “The gold standard for understanding Houston’s brash rootlessness and civic insecurities” (Douglas Brinkley, New York Times Book Review), In a Narrow Grave offers a timeless portrait of the vividly human, complex, full-blooded Texan.
£12.34
Sasquatch Books Pie & Whiskey: Writers under the Influence of
Book Synopsis"an anthology that’s ... eclectic, drunk and delicious." —The New York TimesIf you love pie, whiskey, and good writing, this collection of funny and heartbreaking stories, poems, and recipes serves up a plethora of pleasure.What happens when good writing is inspired by and served with a slice of pie and a shot of whiskey? Pie & Whiskey is a literary event series started in Spokane, Washington, where the idea was to serve good pie, good whiskey, and good writers reading prose or poetry about pie and whiskey. This collection features the best original work from the series by writers such as Anthony Doerr, Elissa Washuta, Kim Barnes, and more. Proving that good writing is best served with a slice of pie and a shot of whiskey, a smattering of pie recipes and whiskey-centric cocktails are included alongside dozens of surprising, funny, heartbreaking, fantastically written stories and poems by Jess Walter, J Robert Lennon, Kim Barnes, and ML Smoker and more.Full contributor list:Kim Addonizio • Steve Almond • Kim Barnes • Devin Becker • Judy Blunt • Anthony Doerr • Thom Caraway • Elizabeth J. Colen • Debra Magpie Earling • Christopher Howell • Sherrie Flick • Jacob H. Fries • Nina Mukerjee Furstenau • Margot Kahn • Meissa Kwasny • Kate Lebo • J. Robert Lennon • Samuel Ligon • Gary Copeland Lilley • Robert Lopez • Tod Marshall • Virginia Reeves • Laura Read • Paisley Rekdal • Nicole Sheets • M. L. Smoker • Alexandra Teague • Rachel Toor • Robert Wrigley • Ed Skoog • Jess Walter • Shawn Vestal • Elissa Washuta • Joe Wilkins • Nance Van Winckel • Kristen Millares Young • Maya Jewell ZellerTrade Review2017 WIRED favorite"This project began as a reading series organized by Lebo and Ligon, in which they sent 12 writers a pie and whiskey prompt to inspire new work. Six years later, they have created an anthology that’s just as eclectic, drunk and delicious."—The New York Times"In vino, veritas; in whiskey, wit; in pie pleasure. With that Latin-inspired preamble, we are called west to an all-American literary event held annually in Spokane and Missoula named Pie & Whiskey. And yes, pie and whiskey are served while seriously talented writers read their new works loosely based on, yes again, pie and whiskey."—Foreword Reviews"Wonderful relatable storytelling, executed brilliantly."—San Francisco Book Review"This book is small enough to fit in somebody's Christmas stocking, and it also contains a lot of swearing. Of course, those are both selling points for the right person."—Wired.com“the best of the booze- and sugar-fueled essays, poetry and fiction and nonfiction stories.”—The Inlander “[Pie & Whiskey] is a breezy, sharp slice of largely Northwest writers like Christopher Howell, Elizabeth J. Colen, and Laura Read—one that examines Americana, domestic bliss (and strife), and debauchery.”—Seattle Met Magazine “A ridiculously good time.”—Missoula Independent“This book brings writers together with food and booze and lets the words flow as freely as the drink.”—Seattle Refined"The anthology features an all-star cast of the best of the Northwest and beyond — Jess Walter, Kim Barnes, Steve Almond — and runs the range of profane to profound, and both. Just my style."—The Register-Guard "I have no memory of eating pie and drinking whiskey at the same time. But the idea of pie and then whiskey appeals, or whiskey and then pie and then whiskey again, especially if those pies are made by Lebo, the best pie-maker there is."—The Stranger"...'pie and whiskey' falls right into the Goldilocks zone of themes."—Seattle Review of Books
£16.96
Bloomsbury Publishing Real Estate: A Living Autobiography
Book Synopsis
£16.80
Bloomsbury Publishing Why Didn't You Just Do What You Were Told?:
Book Synopsis
£16.20
Semiotext (E) Bee Reaved
Book Synopsis
£16.16
Zando On Misdirection: Magic, Mayhem, American Politics
Book SynopsisAn investigation of misinformation and fracturing in contemporary American political culture. An Atlantic Edition, featuring long-form journalism by Atlantic writers, drawn from contemporary articles or classic storytelling from the magazine’s 165-year archive.A collection of essays from Atlantic staff writer Megan Garber, On Misdirection: Magic, Mayhem, American Politics is a timely treatise on our contemporary American political culture. Using the concept of “misdirection” to argue how attention, boredom, uncertainty, and cynicism have become the disquieting stalwarts of our current political arena, Garber offers readers a new and accessible theory for understanding the lasting power of Donald Trump and his right-wing legions.
£9.49
Zando On BTS: Pop Music, Fandom, Sincerity
Book SynopsisA love letter to Korean pop sensation BTS and an ode to fandom. An Atlantic Edition, featuring long-form journalism by Atlantic writers, drawn from contemporary articles or classic storytelling from the magazine’s 165-year archive.The supersonic rise of the Korean pop group BTS may seem enigmatic to some, but for Lenika Cruz, senior culture editor at The Atlantic, their worldwide fame is obvious. As Cruz argues in On BTS: Pop Music, Fandom, Sincerity, the group’s trajectory—debuting on a relatively obscure label in Korea to becoming a global household name in just a few years—is a natural result of their authenticity, artistry, energy, social conscientiousness, and general coolness. As a non-English-language band finding record-breaking international success, BTS is helping usher in a fresh, more inclusive era in the music industry. In this love letter to the once-in-a-generation pop sensation, Cruz narrates her own unexpected journey into the fandom, and in doing so might welcome you in, too.
£9.49
Zando On Womanhood: Bodies, Literature, Choice
Book SynopsisTwelve incisive, probing essays on womanhood in popular culture. An Atlantic Edition, featuring long-form journalism by Atlantic writers, drawn from contemporary articles or classic storytelling from the magazine’s 165-year archive.On Womanhood: Bodies, Literature, Choice gathers a selection of Pulitzer Prize finalist Sophie Gilbert’s essential and attentive essays on womanhood and popular culture. Unflinchingly positioning television and literature as capacious sites of feminist critique, Gilbert’s criticism sharply surveys our contemporary media landscape. This collection joins treatises on beloved series like Game of Thrones with thoughtful meditations on Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale; ponders the lessons supermodels offer us on questions of consent; and examines the rebellious literary legacies of Jane Austen, Margaret Atwood, and their respective contemporaries. On Womanhood offers some of the most commanding popular criticism of this generation.
£9.99
Zando On Divas: Persona, Pleasure, Power
Book SynopsisA critic’s notebook on sparkle and spectacle. An Atlantic Edition, featuring long-form journalism by Atlantic writers, drawn from contemporary articles or classic storytelling from the magazine’s 165-year archive.A collection of essays on musicians, celebrities and aesthetic movements and moments that, taken together, characterises the often used, yet widely misunderstood term diva. On Divas offers readers an original understanding of an age-old phenomenon by drawing together figures as diverse as Beyoncé, Björk, and Donald Trump. With keen insight and genuine enthusiasm, Spencer Kornhaber illustrates how willfulness, pleasure, spectacular self-involvement, and the public’s blend of adoration and resentment define divadom.
£9.99
Zando On Thinking for Yourself: Instinct, Education,
Book SynopsisSeven essays that make the compelling case for coming to your own informed conclusions in an age of extremes. An Atlantic Edition, featuring long-form journalism by Atlantic writers, drawn from contemporary articles or classic storytelling from the magazine’s 165-year archive.Caitlin Flanagan’s two decades of celebrated reporting and commentary at The Atlantic span an array of subjects — from cancer to fraternities, abortion to scammers — but always return to one central question: What happens when we suppress our critical instincts and shut our ears to opposing opinions and competing facts? With poise, humour and an analytical acumen unlike any other working journalist, this collection of deep reporting and cultural commentary encourages readers to dismantle their echo chambers — whether they be social media feeds or lecture halls — and embrace disagreement.
£9.99
Zando On Human Slaughter: Evil, Justice, Mercy
Book Synopsis Incisive, compassionate, and revelatory reporting from America’s death row, named a 2023 Pulitzer Prize finalist for feature writing. An Atlantic Edition, featuring long-form journalism by Atlantic writers, drawn from contemporary articles or classic storytelling from the magazine’s 165-year archive.Elizabeth Bruenig’s sensitive reporting pulls back the curtain on a routine crisis in America’s death chambers: state executioners’ inability to kill the condemned humanely. She takes readers to the torturous final moments of death row inmates while considering the often heinous crimes that led to their sentences. Thoughtful and profound, Bruenig’s writing negotiates the culture of violence in America, asking what’s at stake when we refuse to see the humanity in those who have done the inhumane.
£9.99
Zando On the Housing Crisis
Book Synopsis
£9.99
Zando On Heroism
Book Synopsis
£9.49
Bloomsbury Publishing USA Dirtbag, Massachusetts: A Confessional
Book Synopsis
£15.29
Counterpoint Voices: How a Great Singer Can Change Your Life
Book SynopsisVoices isn't just illuminating and thought-provoking and clever; it is exciting. —Roddy Doyle, author of The CommitmentsA personal exploration of what singing means and how it works, Voices is a book about our deepest, most telling relationships with music. Nick Coleman examines the act of singing not as a performance, but as a close, difficult moment of hopeful connection. What does it do to us, emotionally and psychologically, to listen hard and habitually to somebody else’s singing? Why is human song so essential to our lives? The book asks many other questions, too: Why did Jagger and Lennon sing like that (and not like this)? Billie, Janis, Amy: must the voices of anguish always dissolve into spectacle? What makes us turn again and again to a singing human voice?The history of postwar popular music is often told sociologically or in terms of musicological influence and innovation in style. Voices offers a different, intimate perspective. In ten discrete but cohering essays, Coleman tackles the arc of that history as an emotional experience with real psychological consequences. He writes about the voices that have affected the ways he feels about and understands the world—from Aretha Franklin to Amy Winehouse, Marvin Gaye to David Bowie. Ultimately, Voices is the story of what it is to listen and be moved—what it is to feel emotion.
£18.04
Counterpoint The Baltimore Book Of The Dead
Book Synopsis
£15.29
Counterpoint Lost In Summerland: Essays
Book SynopsisBarrett Swanson embarks on a personal quest across the United States to uncover what it means to be an American amid the swirl of our post-truth climate in this collection of critically acclaimed essays and reportage.A trip with his brother to a New York psychic community becomes a rollicking tour through the world of American spiritualism. At a wilderness retreat in Ohio, men seek a cure for toxic masculinity, while in the hinterlands of Wisconsin, antiwar veterans turn to farming when they cannot sustain the heroic myth of service. And when his best friend’s body washes up on the shores of the Mississippi River, he falls into the gullet of true crime discussion boards, exploring the stamina of conspiracy theories along the cankered byways of the Midwest. In this exhilarating debut, Barrett Swanson introduces us to a new reality. At a moment when grand unifying narratives have splintered into competing storylines, these critically acclaimed essays document the many routes by which people are struggling to find stability in the aftermath of our country’s political and economic collapse, sometimes at dire and disillusioning costs.
£20.80
Counterpoint Lost in Summerland: Essays
Book SynopsisBarrett Swanson embarks on a personal quest across the United States to uncover what it means to be an American amid the swirl of our post-truth climate in this collection of critically acclaimed essays and reportage.A trip with his brother to a New York psychic community becomes a rollicking tour through the world of American spiritualism. At a wilderness retreat in Ohio, men seek a cure for toxic masculinity, while in the hinterlands of Wisconsin, antiwar veterans turn to farming when they cannot sustain the heroic myth of service. And when his best friend’s body washes up on the shores of the Mississippi River, he falls into the gullet of true crime discussion boards, exploring the stamina of conspiracy theories along the cankered byways of the Midwest.In this exhilarating debut, Barrett Swanson introduces us to a new reality. At a moment when grand unifying narratives have splintered into competing storylines, these critically acclaimed essays document the many routes by which people are struggling to find stability in the aftermath of our country’s political and economic collapse, sometimes at dire and disillusioning costs.
£16.15
Made for Success Invisible Threads
£23.55
Graywolf Press The Collector of Leftover Souls: Field Notes on
Book SynopsisLonglisted for the National Book Award for Translated Literature Urgent investigative essays covering a wide range of humanity in Brazil, from the Amazon to the favelasEliane Brum is a star journalist in Brazil, known for her polyphonic writing that gives voice to people often underrepresented in popular literature. Brum's reporting takes her into Brazil's most marginalized communities: she visits the Amazon to understand the practice of indigenous midwives, stays in São Paulo's favelas to witness the joy of a marriage and the tragedy of young men dying due to drugs and guns, and wades through the mud to capture the boom and bust of modern-day gold rushes. Brum is an enormously sensitive and perceptive interlocutor, and as she visits these places she provides intimate glimpses into both everyday and extraordinary lives: a poor father on the way to bury his son, a street performer who eats glass, a woman living out her final 115 days, and a hoarder rescuing the leftover souls of the city.The Collector of Leftover Souls showcases the best of Brum's work from two books, combining short profiles with longer reported pieces. These vibrant missives range across current issues such as the human cost of exploiting natural resources, the Belo Monté Dam's eradication of a way of life for those on the banks of the Xingu River, and the contrast between urban centers and remote villages. Told in the vibrant and idiomatic language of the people Brum writes about, The Collector of Leftover Souls is a vital work of investigative journalism from an internationally acclaimed author.
£11.99
Graywolf Press I Will Take the Answer: Essays
Book SynopsisA moving and wide-ranging collection of essays by the author of Letter to a Future LoverThe idea of connection permeates I Will Take the Answer, Ander Monson's fourth book of utterly original and intelligent essays. How is our present connected to our past and future? How do neural connections form memories, and why do we recall them when we do? And how do we connect with one another in meaningful ways across time and space?In the opening essay, which extends across the book in brief subsequent pieces, a trip through a storm sewer in Tucson inspires Monson to trace the city's relationship to Jared Lee Loughner, the gunman who shot Gabrielle Giffords and killed six bystanders, along with how violence is produced and how we grieve and honor the dead. With the formally inventive "I in River," he ruminates on water in a waterless city and the structures we use to attempt to contain and control it. Monson also visits the exuberantly nerdy kingdom of a Renaissance Faire, and elaborates on the enduring appeal of sad songs through the lens of March Sadness, an online competition that he cofounded, an engaging riff on the NCAA basketball tournament brackets in which sad songs replace teams.As personal and idiosyncratic as the best mixtape, I Will Take the Answer showcases Monson's deep thinking and broad-ranging interests, his sly wit, his soft spot for heavy metal, and his ability to tunnel deeply into the odd and revealing, sometimes subterranean, worlds of American life.
£14.40
Graywolf Press Just Us: An American Conversation
Book SynopsisFINALIST FOR THE 2021 ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE IN NONFICTIONClaudia Rankine?s Citizen changed the conversation?Just Us urges all of us into itAs everyday white supremacy becomes increasingly vocalized with no clear answers at hand, how best might we approach one another? Claudia Rankine, without telling us what to do, urges us to begin the discussions that might open pathways through this divisive and stuck moment in American history.Just Us is an invitation to discover what it takes to stay in the room together, even and especially in breaching the silence, guilt, and violence that follow direct addresses of whiteness. Rankine?s questions disrupt the false comfort of our culture?s liminal and private spaces?the airport, the theater, the dinner party, the voting booth?where neutrality and politeness live on the surface of differing commitments, beliefs, and prejudices as our public and private lives intersect.This brilliant arrangement of essays, poems, and images includes the voices and rebuttals of others: white men in first class responding to, and with, their white male privilege; a friend?s explanation of her infuriating behavior at a play; and women confronting the political currency of dying their hair blond, all running alongside fact-checked notes and commentary that complements Rankine?s own text, complicating notions of authority and who gets the last word.Sometimes wry, often vulnerable, and always prescient, Just Us is Rankine?s most intimate work, less interested in being right than in being true, being together.
£25.50
Graywolf Press See/Saw: Looking at Photographs
Book SynopsisA lavishly illustrated history of photography in essays by the author of Otherwise Known as the Human ConditionSee/Saw shows how photographs frame and change our perspective on the world. Taking in photographers from early in the last century to the present day-including artists such as Eugene Atget, Vivian Maier, Roy DeCarava, and Alex Webb-the celebrated writer Geoff Dyer offers a series of moving, witty, prescient, surprising, and intimate encounters with images.Dyer has been writing about photography for thirty years, and this tour de force of visual scrutiny and stylistic flair gathers his lively, engaged criticism over the course of a decade. A rich addition to Dyer's The Ongoing Moment, and heir to Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida, Susan Sontag's On Photography, and John Berger's Understanding a Photograph, See/Saw shows how a photograph can simultaneously record and invent the world, revealing a brilliant seer at work. It is a paean to art and art writing by one of the liveliest critics of our day.
£20.40
Graywolf Press On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint
Book SynopsisNamed a Most Anticipated/Best Book of the Month by: NPR * USA Today * Time * Washington Post * Vulture * Women's Wear Daily * Bustle * LitHub * The Millions * Vogue * Nylon * Shondaland * Chicago Review of Books * The Guardian * Los Angeles Times * Kirkus * Publishers WeeklySo often deployed as a jingoistic, even menacing rallying cry, or limited by a focus on passing moments of liberation, the rhetoric of freedom both rouses and repels. Does it remain key to our autonomy, justice, and well-being, or is freedom's long star turn coming to a close? Does a continued obsession with the term enliven and emancipate, or reflect a deepening nihilism (or both)? On Freedom examines such questions by tracing the concept's complexities in four distinct realms: art, sex, drugs, and climate.Drawing on a vast range of material, from critical theory to pop culture to the intimacies and plain exchanges of daily life, Maggie Nelson explores how we might think, experience, or talk about freedom in ways responsive to the conditions of our day. Her abiding interest lies in ongoing practices of freedom by which we negotiate our interrelation withindeed, our inseparability fromothers, with all the care and constraint that entails, while accepting difference and conflict as integral to our communion.For Nelson, thinking publicly through the knots in our culturefrom recent art-world debates to the turbulent legacies of sexual liberation, from the painful paradoxes of addiction to the lure of despair in the face of the climate crisisis itself a practice of freedom, a means of forging fortitude, courage, and company. On Freedom is an invigorating, essential book for challenging times.
£21.60
Graywolf Press,U.S. Just Us: An American Conversation
Book SynopsisNow in paperback, Claudia Rankine's "skyscraper in the literature on racism" (Christian Science Monitor) In Just Us, Claudia Rankine invites us into a necessary conversation about Whiteness in America. What would it take for us to breach the silence, guilt, and violence that arise from addressing Whiteness for what it is? What are the consequences if we keep avoiding this conversation? What might it look like if we step into it? "I learned early that being right pales next to staying in the room," she writes. This brilliant assembly of essays, poems, documents, and images disrupts the false comfort of our culture's liminal and private spaces-the airport, the theater, the dinner party, the voting booth-where neutrality and politeness deflect true engagement in our shared problems. Rankine makes unprecedented art out of the actual voices and rebuttals of others: White men responding to, and with, their White male privilege; a friend clarifying her unexpected behavior at a play; and women on the street expressing the political currency of dyeing their hair blond, all running alongside fact-checked notes and commentary that complement Rankine's own text, complicating notions of authority and who gets the last word. Funny, vulnerable, and prescient, Just Us is Rankine's most intimate and urgent book, a crucial call to challenge our vexed reality.
£18.00
Graywolf Press,U.S. Yellow Rain: Poems
Book SynopsisA reinvestigation of chemical biological weapons dropped on the Hmong people in the fallout of the Vietnam War In this staggering work of documentary, poetry, and collage, Mai Der Vang reopens a wrongdoing that deserves a new reckoning. As the United States abandoned them at the end of the Vietnam War, many Hmong refugees recounted stories of a mysterious substance that fell from planes during their escape from Laos starting in the mid-1970s. This substance, known as "yellow rain," caused severe illnesses and thousands of deaths. These reports prompted an investigation into allegations that a chemical biological weapon had been used against the Hmong in breach of international treaties. A Cold War scandal erupted, wrapped in partisan debate around chemical arms development versus control. And then, to the world's astonishment, American scientists argued that yellow rain was the feces of honeybees defecating en masse-still held as the widely accepted explanation. The truth of what happened to the Hmong, to those who experienced and suffered yellow rain, has been ignored and discredited. Integrating archival research and declassified documents, Yellow Rain calls out the erasure of a history, the silencing of a people who at the time lacked the capacity and resources to defend and represent themselves. In poems that sing and lament, that contend and question, Vang restores a vital narrative in danger of being lost, and brilliantly explores what it means to have access to the truth and how marginalized groups are often forbidden that access.
£15.30
Graywolf Press,U.S. Shelter: A Black Tale of Homeland, Baltimore
Book SynopsisIn 2016, Lawrence Jackson accepted a new job in Baltimore, searched for schools for his sons, and bought a house. It would all be unremarkable but for the fact that he had grown up in West Baltimore and now found himself teaching at Johns Hopkins, whose vexed relationship to its neighborhood, to the city and its history, provides fodder for this captivating memoir in essays. With sardonic wit, Jackson describes his struggle to make a home in the city that had just been convulsed by the uprising that followed the murder of Freddie Gray. His new neighborhood, Homeland-largely White, built on racial covenants-is not where he is "supposed" to live. But his purchase, and his desire to pass some inheritance on to his children, provides a foundation for him to explore his personal and spiritual history, as well as Baltimore's untold stories. Each chapter is a new exploration: a trip to the Maryland shore is an occasion to dilate on Frederick Douglass's complicated legacy; an encounter at a Hopkins shuttle-bus stop becomes a meditation on public transportation and policing; and Jackson's beleaguered commitment to his church opens a pathway to reimagine an urban community through jazz. Shelter is an extraordinary biography of a city and a celebration of our capacity for domestic thriving. Jackson's story leans on the essay to contain the raging absurdity of Black American life, establishing him as a maverick, essential writer.
£15.30
Graywolf Press Voice of the Fish: A Lyric Essay
Book SynopsisLars Horn's Voice of the Fish, the latest Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize winner, is an interwoven essay collection that explores the trans experience through themes of water, fish, and mythology, set against the backdrop of travels in Russia and a debilitating back injury that left Horn temporarily unable to speak. In Horn's adept hands, the collection takes shape as a unified book: short vignettes about fish, reliquaries, and antiquities serve as interludes between longer essays, knitting together a sinuous, wave-like form that flows across the book.Horn swims through a range of subjects, roving across marine history, theology, questions of the body and gender, sexuality, transmasculinity, and illness. From Horn's upbringing with a mother who used them as a model in photos and art installationsmemorably in a photography session in an ice bath with dead squidto Horn's travels before they were out as trans, these essays are linked by a desire to interrogate liminal physicalities. Horn reexamines the oft-presumed uniformity of bodily experience, breaking down the implied singularity of the body as cultural and scientific object. The essays instead privilege ways of seeing and being that resist binaries, ways that falter, fracture, mutate. A sui generis work of nonfiction, Voice of the Fish blends the aquatic, mystical, and physical to reach a place beyond them all.
£14.40
Graywolf Press The Tribe: Portraits of Cuba
Book SynopsisTeeming with life and compulsively readable, the pieces gathered in The Tribe aggregate into an extraordinary mosaic of Cuba today. Carlos Manuel Álvarez, one of the most exciting young writers in Latin America, employs the crónica form?a genre unique to Latin American writing that blends reportage, narrative nonfiction, and novelistic techniques?to illuminate a particularly turbulent period in Cuban history, from the reestablishment of diplomatic relations with the United States, to the death of Fidel Castro, to the convulsions of the San Isidro Movement.Unique, edgy, and stylishly written, The Tribe shows a society in flux, featuring athletes in exile, artists, nurses, underground musicians and household names, dissident poets, the hidden underclass at a landfill, migrants attempting to make their way across Central America, fugitives escaping the FBI, and dealers in the black market, as well as revelers and policemen in the noisy Havana night. It is a major work of reportage by one of Granta?s Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists.
£15.30
Graywolf Press,U.S. Wonderlands: Essays on the Life of Literature
Book SynopsisCharles Baxter's new collection of essays, Wonderlands, joins his other works of nonfiction, Burning Down the House and The Art of Subtext. In the mold of those books, Baxter shares years of wisdom and reflection on what makes fiction work, including essays that were first given as craft talks at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. The essays here range from brilliant thinking on the nature of wonderlands in the fiction of Haruki Murakami and other fabulist writers, to how request moments function in a story. Baxter is equally at home tackling a thorny matter such as charisma (which intersects with political figures like the disastrous forty-fifth US president) as he is bringing new interest to subjects such as list-making in fiction. Amid these craft essays, an interlude of two personal essays-the story of a horrifying car crash and an introspective "letter to a young poet"-add to the intimate nature of the book. The final essay reflects on a lifetime of writing, and closes with a memorable image of Baxter as a boy, waiting at the window for a parent who never arrives and filling that absence with stories. Wonderlands will stand alongside his prior work as an insightful and lasting work of criticism.
£15.30
Graywolf Press Animal Joy: A Book of Laughter and Resuscitation
Book SynopsisA Time Must-Read Book of 2022 A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2022Aster(ix) Journal''s 12 Best Nonfiction Books of 2022An invigorating, continuously surprising book about the serious nature of laughter.Laughter shakes us out of our deadness. An outburst of spontaneous laughter is an eruption from the unconscious that, like political resistance, poetry, or self-revelation, expresses a provocative, impish drive to burst free from external constraints. Taking laughter's revelatory capacity as a starting point, and rooted in Nuar Alsadir's experience as a poet and psychoanalyst, Animal Joy seeks to recover the sensation of being present and embodied. Writing in a poetic, associative style, blending the personal with the theoretical, Alsadir ranges from her experience in clown school, Anna Karenina's morphine addiction, Freud's un-Freudian behaviors, marriage brokers and war brokers, to Not Jokes, Abu Ghraib, Frantz's negrophobia, smut, the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, laugh tracks, the problem with adjectives, and how poetry can wake us up. At the center of the book, however, is the author's relationship with her daughters, who erupt into the text like sudden, unexpected laughter. These interventionsfrank, tender, and always a challenge to the writer and her thinkingare like tiny revolutions, pointedly showing the dangers of being severed from one's true self and hinting at ways one might be called back to it.A bold and insatiably curious prose debut, Animal Joy is an ode to spontaneity and feeling alive.
£15.30
Graywolf Press On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint
Book SynopsisNamed a Most Anticipated/Best Book of the Month by: NPR * USA Today * Time * Washington Post * Vulture * Women?s Wear Daily * Bustle * LitHub * The Millions * Vogue * Nylon * Shondaland * Chicago Review of Books * The Guardian * Los Angeles Times * Kirkus * Publishers WeeklySo often deployed as a jingoistic, even menacing rallying cry, or limited by a focus on passing moments of liberation, the rhetoric of freedom both rouses and repels. Does it remain key to our autonomy, justice, and well-being, or is freedom?s long star turn coming to a close? Does a continued obsession with the term enliven and emancipate, or reflect a deepening nihilism (or both)? On Freedom examines such questions by tracing the concept?s complexities in four distinct realms: art, sex, drugs, and climate.Drawing on a vast range of material, from critical theory to pop culture to the intimacies and plain exchanges of daily life, Maggie Nelson explores how we might think, experience, or talk about freedom in ways responsive to the conditions of our day. Her abiding interest lies in ongoing ?practices of freedom? by which we negotiate our interrelation with?indeed, our inseparability from?others, with all the care and constraint that entails, while accepting difference and conflict as integral to our communion.For Nelson, thinking publicly through the knots in our culture?from recent art-world debates to the turbulent legacies of sexual liberation, from the painful paradoxes of addiction to the lure of despair in the face of the climate crisis?is itself a practice of freedom, a means of forging fortitude, courage, and company. On Freedom is an invigorating, essential book for challenging times.
£15.30
Graywolf Press A Line in the World: A Year on the North Sea
Book SynopsisA celebrated Danish writer explores the unsung histories and geographies of her beloved slice of the world. Me, my notebook and my love of the wild and desolate. I wanted to do the opposite of what was expected of me. It?s a recurring pattern in my life. An instinct. Dorthe Nors?s first nonfiction book chronicles a year she spent traveling along the North Sea coast?from Skagen at the northern tip of Denmark to the Frisian Islands in the Wadden Sea. In fourteen expansive essays, Nors traces the history, geography, and culture of the places she visits while reflecting on her childhood and her family and ancestors? ties to the region as well as her decision to move there from Copenhagen. She writes about the ritual burning of witch effigies on Midsummer?s Eve; the environmental activist who opposed a chemical factory in the 1950s; the quiet fishing villages that surfers transformed into an area known as Cold Hawaii starting in the 1970s. She connects wind turbines to Viking ships, thirteenth-century church frescoes to her mother?s unrealized dreams. She describes strong waves, sand drifts, storm surges, shipwrecks, and other instances of nature asserting its power over human attempts to ignore or control it. Through a deep, personal engagement with this singular landscape, A Line in the World accesses the universal. Its ultimate subjects are civilization, belonging, and change: changes within one person?s life, changes occurring in various communities today, and change as the only constant of life on Earth.
£15.30
Graywolf Press Black and Female: Essays
Book SynopsisThe first wound for all of us who are classified as black is empire.In Black and Female, Tsitsi Dangarembga examines the legacy of imperialism on her own life and on every aspect of black embodied African life. This paradigm-shifting essay collection weaves the personal and political in an illuminating exploration of race and gender. Dangarembga recounts a painful separation from her parents as a toddler, connecting this experience to the ruptures caused in Africa by human trafficking and enslavement. She argues that, after independence, the ruling party in Zimbabwe only performed inclusion for women while silencing the work of self-actualized feminists. She describes her struggles to realize her ambitions in theater, film, and literature, laying out the long path to the publication of her novels.At once philosophical, intimate, and urgent, Black and Female is a powerful testimony of the pervasive and long-lasting effects of racism and patriarchy that provides an ultimately hopeful vision for change. Black feminists are the status quo's worst nightmare. Dangarembga writes, our conviction is deep, bolstered by a vivid imagination that reminds us that other realities are possible beyond the one that obtains.
£18.40
Graywolf Press Dark Days: Fugitive Essays
Book Synopsis
£20.80
Graywolf Press Critical Hits: Writers Playing Video Games
Book SynopsisA wide-ranging anthology of essays exploring one of the most vital art forms on the planet todayFrom the earliest computers to the smartphones in our pockets, video games have been on our screens and part of our lives for over fifty years. Critical Hits celebrates this sophisticated medium and considers its lasting impact on our culture and ourselves.This collection of stylish, passionate, and searching essays opens with an introduction by Carmen Maria Machado, who edited the anthology alongside J. Robert Lennon. In these pages, writer-gamers find solace from illness and grief, test ideas about language, bodies, power, race, and technology, and see their experiences and identities reflected inor complicated bythe interactive virtual worlds they inhabit. Elissa Washuta immerses herself in The Last of Us during the first summer of the pandemic. Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah describes his last goodbye to his father with the help of Disco Elysium. Jamil Jan Kochai remembers being an Afghan American teenager killing Afghan insurgents in Call of Duty. Also included are a comic by MariNaomi about her time as a video game producer; a deep dive into portal fantasy movies about video games by Charlie Jane Anders; and new work by Alexander Chee, Hanif Abdurraqib, Larissa Pham, and many more.
£15.30
Graywolf Press Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit: Essays
Book SynopsisAn electric essay collection about Blackness, art, and dreaming of new possibilities in a time of constrictionThis collection of innovative, penetrating, and lively essays features swimming pools and poets, road trips and museums, family dinners and celebrity sightings. In a voice that is at once piercing, mournful, and slyly comic, Aisha Sabatini Sloan inhabits several roles: she is an art enthusiast in Los Angeles during a city-wide manhunt; a daughter on a road trip with her father; a professor playing with puppets in the wilds of Vermont; an interloper on a police ride-along in Detroit; a collector of the dreams of scientists at a biostation. As she watches cell phone video recordings of murder and is haunted in her sleep by the news, she reflects on her formative experiences with aesthetic and spiritual discovery, troubling those places where Blackness has been conflated with death.Sabatini Sloan?s lively style is perfectly suited to the way she circles a subject or an idea before cinching it tight. The curiosity that guides each essay, focusing on the period between the 2016 election and the onset of the pandemic, is rooted in the supposition that there is an intrinsic relationship between the way we conceptualize darkness and our collective opportunity for awakening.
£15.30
Graywolf Press Like Love
Book SynopsisA career-spanning collection of inspiring, revelrous essays about art and artistsLike Love is a momentous, raucous collection of essays drawn from twenty years of Maggie Nelson's brilliant work. These profiles, reviews, remembrances, tributes, and critical essays, as well as several conversations with friends and idols, bring to life Nelson's passion for dialogue and dissent. The range of subjects is widefrom Prince to Carolee Schneemann to Matthew Barney to Lhasa de Sela to Kara Walkerbut certain themes recur: intergenerational exchange; love and friendship; feminist and queer issues, especially as they shift over time; subversion, transgression, and perversity; the roles of the critic and of language in relation to visual and performance arts; forces that feed or impede certain bodies and creators; and the fruits and follies of a life spent devoted to making.Arranged chronologically, Like Love shows the writing, thinking, feeling, reading, look
£25.60
Graywolf Press Were Alone
Book SynopsisA collection of exceptional new essays by one of the most significant contemporary writers on the world stage Tracing a loose arc from Edwidge Danticat's childhood to the COVID-19 pandemic and recent events in Haiti, the essays gathered in We're Alone include personal narrative, reportage, and tributes to mentors and heroes such as Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, Gabriel García Márquez, and James Baldwin that explore several abiding themes: environmental catastrophe, the traumas of colonialism, motherhood, and the complexities of resilience.From hurricanes to political violence, from her days as a new student at a Brooklyn elementary school knowing little English to her account of a shooting hoax at a Miami mall, Danticat has an extraordinary ability to move from the personal to the global and back again. Throughout, literature and art prove to be her reliable companions and guides in both tragedies and triumphs.Danticat is an irresistible presen
£20.80
Graywolf Press Dark Days
Book Synopsis
£12.41
Graywolf Press,U.S. An Image of My Name Enters America
Book SynopsisFrom a brilliant, one-of-a-kind maestro (Booklist), a vibrant tapestry of memoir, research, and criticismAgain, today, if I must choose between love and memory, I choose memory.What would you risk to know yourself? Which stories are you willing to follow to the bitter end, revise, or, possibly, begin all over? In this collection of five interrelated essays, Lucy Ives explores identity, national fantasy, and history. She examines events and records from her own lifea childhood obsession with My Little Pony, papers and notebooks from college, an unwitting inculcation into the myth of romantic love, and the birth of her sonto excavate larger aspects of the past that have been suppressed or ignored. With bracing insight and extraordinary range, she weaves new stories about herself, her family, our country, and our culture. She connects postmodern irony to eighteenth-century cults, Cold War musicals to a great uncle's suicide to the settlement of the
£15.29
Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial Medio siglo con Borges / Half a Century with
Book Synopsis
£15.96
Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial Tu mundo y el mío. Postales del Antropoceno / The
Book Synopsis
£16.11
Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial La mirada quieta (de Pérez Galdós) / The Quiet
Book Synopsis
£19.16
Catapult Indigo: Arm Wrestling, Snake Saving, and Some
Book SynopsisThe first collection of nonfiction by one of the few truly important American writers of our time (Sam Lipsyte).Gathering pieces written during the past three decades, Indigo ranges widely in subject matter and tone, opening with “Cleve Dean,” which takes Padgett Powell to Sweden for the World Armwrestling Federation Championships, through to its closing title piece, which charts Powell’s lifelong fascination with the endangered indigo snake, “a thinking snake,” and his obsession with seeing one in the wild. “Some things in between” include an autobiographical piece about growing up in the segregated and newly integrated South and tributes to writers Powell has known, among them Donald Barthelme, who “changed the aesthetic of short fiction in America for the second half of the twentieth century,” and Peter Taylor, who briefly lived in Gainesville, Florida, where Powell taught for thirty-five years. There are also homages to other admired writers: Flannery O’Connor, “the goddesshead”; Denis Johnson, with his “hard honest comedy”; and William Trevor, whose Collected Stories provides “the most literary bang for the buck in the English world.” A throughline in many of the pieces is the American South—the college teacher who introduced Powell to Faulkner; the city of New Orleans, which “can render the improbable possible”; and the seductions of gumbo, sometimes cooked with squirrel meat. Also here is an elegy for Spode, Powell’s beloved pit bull: “I had a dog not afraid, it gave me great cheer and blustery vicarious happiness.” In addressing the craft of fiction, Powell ventures that “writing is controlled whimsy.” His idiosyncratic playfulness brings this collection to vivid life, while his boundless curiosity and respect for the truth keep it on course. As Pete Dexter writes in his foreword to Indigo, “He is still the best, even if not the best-known, writer of his generation.”
£14.41
