Search results for ""faber faber""

Originally published in 1979, Moortown Diary is the updated version of Ted Hughes's acclaimed Devon farming sequence, written over a period of several years during which he was spending almost every day outside, either gardening or farming. The introduction and notes (added in 1989) sketch in the background from which these remarkable poems emerged as an improvised verse journal, sparely edited, coalescing spontaneously on the page. 'Moortown Diary keeps its eye firmly on the creatures behind the language. It's written in the style of Hughes's play translations: very swift and bright and urgent and speakable . . . Hughes strips away the protective layers - the soundproofed ears, the double-glazed eyes - that prevent us making contact with anything outside ourselves. Right now, I can't think of anything more important than that kind of poem. Because we're not just here to think about literature. We're here to try to wake up.' Alice Oswald, The Guardian'It grips your heart, and your intestines, like a vice from the first page. He makes language as physical as a bruise, and in these poems beauty and tenderness blend with violence.' John Carey, Sunday Times'The Moortown sequence includes some of Hughes's finest poems . . . They are like no other poems I have read, with a degree of intensity, sanity and grace that he has never equalled.' Anthony Thwaite, Times Literary Supplement

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Finished just two months before the author's murder on 18 August 1936 by a gang of Franco's supporters, The House of Bernarda Alba is now accepted as Lorca's great masterpiece of love and loathing.Five daughters live together in a single household with a tyrannical mother. When the father of all but the eldest girl dies, a cynical marriage is advanced which will have tragic consequences for the whole family. Lorca's fascinatingly modern play, rendered here in an English version by David Hare, speaks as powerfully as a political metaphor of oppression as it does as domestic drama. The House of Bernarda Alba premiered at the National Theatre, London, in March 2005.

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'It was a wrong number that started it . . .'Chosen as one of the '100 Most Important Comics of the Century', Faber is proud to publish the graphic novel City of Glass for the first time in the UK. As Art Spiegelman explains in his new introduction, David Mazzucchelli and Paul Karasik 'created a strange doppelganger of the original book' and 'a breakthrough work.' Paul Auster's Edgar Award-nominated masterwork has been astonishingly transformed into a new visual language.

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The eagerly awaited follow-up to the best-selling Why Beethoven Threw the Stew.What did Haydn's wife use for curling-paper for her hair?What did Schubert do with his old spectacles case?Why was Dvorák given a butcher's apron when he was a little boy?Why did Tchaikovsky spit on a map of Europe?Why did Fauré find a plate of spinach on his face?And why did Handel waggle his wig?In Why Beethoven Threw the Stew, renowned cellist Steven Isserlis set out to pass on to children a wonderful gift given to him by his own cello teacher - the chance to people his own world with the great composers by getting to know them as friends. In his new book he draws us irresistibly into the world of six more favourite composers, bringing them alive in a manner that cannot fail to catch the imagination of children encountering classical music for the first time. Once again the text is packed with facts, dates and anecdotes, interspersed with lively black-and-white line illustrations, making this an attractive and accessible read for children to enjoy on their own or share with an adult.'If Why Beethoven Threw the Stew does not turn your child into a music lover, the chances are nothing will.' Daily Mail

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Preserved on a single surviving manuscript dating from around 1400, composed by an anonymous master, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was rediscovered only 200 years ago, and published for the first time in 1839. One of the earliest great stories of English literature, after Beowulf, the poem narrates the strange tale of a green knight on a green horse, who rudely interrupts the Round Table festivities one Yuletide, casting a pall of unease over the company and challenging one of their number to a wager. The virtuous Gawain accepts, and decapitates the intruder with his own axe. Gushing blood, the knight reclaims his head, orders Gawain to seek him out a year hence, and departs. Next Yuletide Gawain dutifully sets forth... His quest for the Green Knight involves a winter journey, a seduction scene in a dream-like castle, a dire challenge answered - and a drama of enigmatic reward disguised as psychic undoing.

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'A monumental achievement - one of the great scientific biographies.' Michael FraynThe Strangest Man is the Costa Biography Award-winning account of Paul Dirac, the famous physicist sometimes called the British Einstein. He was one of the leading pioneers of the greatest revolution in twentieth-century science: quantum mechanics. The youngest theoretician ever to win the Nobel Prize for Physics, he was also pathologically reticent, strangely literal-minded and legendarily unable to communicate or empathize. Through his greatest period of productivity, his postcards home contained only remarks about the weather.Based on a previously undiscovered archive of family papers, Graham Farmelo celebrates Dirac's massive scientific achievement while drawing a compassionate portrait of his life and work. Farmelo shows a man who, while hopelessly socially inept, could manage to love and sustain close friendship.The Strangest Man is an extraordinary and moving human story, as well as a study of one of the most exciting times in scientific history.'A wonderful book . . . Moving, sometimes comic, sometimes infinitely sad, and goes to the roots of what we mean by truth in science.' Lord Waldegrave, Daily Telegraph

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In Altman on Altman, one of American cinema's most incorrigible mavericks reflects on a brilliant career.Robert Altman served a long apprenticeship in movie-making before his great breakthrough, the Korean War comedy M*A*S*H (1969). It became a huge hit and won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, but also established Altman's inimitable use of sound and image, and his gift for handling a repertory company of actors. The 1970s then became Altman's decade, with a string of masterpieces: McCabe and Mrs Miller, The Long Goodbye, Thieves Like Us, Nashville . . . In the 1980s Altman struggled to fund his work, but he was restored to prominence in 1992 with The Player, an acerbic take on Hollywood. Short Cuts, an inspired adaptation of Raymond Carver, and the Oscar-winning Gosford Park, underscored his comeback.Now he recalls the highs and lows of his career trajectory to David Thompson in this definitive interview book, part of Faber's widely acclaimed Directors on Directors series. 'Hearing in his own words in Altman on Altman just how much of his films occur spontaneously, as a result of last-minute decisions on set, is fascinating . . . For film lovers, this is just about indispensable.' Ben Sloan, Metro London

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Now fully updated, Lynch on Lynch describes the career of a cinematic genius who has continued to astonish filmgoers with the lovely and life-affirming The Straight Story and the luxurious dread of the Academy Award-nominated Mulholland Drive.David Lynch erupted onto the cinema landscape with Eraserhead, establishing himself as one of the most original, imaginative, and truly personal directors at work in contemporary film. He is a surrealist, in the tradition of the great Spanish director Luis Bunuel. Over the course of a career that includes such films as The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, Lost Highway, and the seminal TV series Twin Peaks, Lynch has remained true to an artistic vision of innocence lost or adrift in the direst states of darkness and confusion. Nobody else sees the world quite as David Lynch does. Once seen, his films are never forgotten, nor does the world about us seem quite as it did before.In this definitive career-length interview book, Lynch speaks openly about the full breadth of his creative work, which encompasses not only movies but also a lifelong commitment to painting, a continuing exploration of photography, extensive work in television, and musical collaborations with composer Angelo Badalamenti and singer Julee Cruise.

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One of the most original, moving and beautifully written non-fiction works of recent years, The Missing marked the acclaimed debut of one of Britain's most astute and important writers.In a brilliant merging of reportage, social history and memoir, Andrew O'Hagan clears a devastating path from the bygone Glasgow of the 1970s to the grim secrets of Gloucester in the mid 1990s.'A triumph in words.' Independent on Sunday'The Missing, part autobiography, part old-fashioned pavement-pounding, marks the most auspicious debut by a British writer for some time.' Gordon Burn, Independent'A timely corrective to the idea that nothing profound can be said about now.' Will Self, Observer Books of the Year'His vision of modern Britain has the quality of a poetic myth, with himself as Bunyan's questing Christian and the missing as Dantesque souls in limbo.' Blake Morrison, Guardian

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TWICE WINNER OF THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTIONFROM THE WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTIONTHE MULTI-MILLION COPY BESTSELLING AUTHORIn this collection of essays, the author of Demon Copperhead and The Lacuna brings to us (out of one of history's darker moments) an extended love song to the world we still have. From its opening parable gleaned from recent news about a lost child saved in an astonishing way, the book moves on to consider a world of surprising and hopeful prospects ranging from an inventive conservation scheme in a remote jungle to the backyard flock of chickens tended by the author's small daughter.Whether she is contemplating the Grand Canyon, her vegetable garden, motherhood, adolescence, genetic engineering, TV-watching, the history of civil rights, or the future of a nation founded on the best of all human impulses, these essays are grounded in the author's belief that our largest problems have grown from the earth's remotest corners as well as our own backyards, and that answers may lie in those places, too. In the voice Kingsolver's readers have come to rely on - sometimes grave, occasionally hilarious, and ultimately persuasive - Small Wonder is a hopeful examination of the people we seem to be, and what we might yet make of ourselves.

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N.P. is the title of a last collection of short stories by a celebrated Japanese writer. Written in English while he was living in Boston, the book may never see print in his native Japan: each time a new translator takes up the task, death gets in the way.N.P. is an extraordinarily powerful story of passion and friendship, the nature of love and the taboos surrounding it, confirming Banana Yoshimoto's place as one of Japan's most important writers.'The voice of young Japan.' Independent on Sunday

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'Fascinating . . . Shot through with fresh insights . . . No previous biography has attempted anything so comprehensive.' ObserverNelson is a thrilling new appraisal of Horatio Nelson, the greatest practitioner of naval command the world has ever seen. It explores the professional, personal, intellectual and practical origins of one man's genius, to understand how the greatest warrior that Britain has ever produced transformed the art of conflict, and enabled his country to survive the challenge of total war and international isolation. In Nelson, Andrew Lambert - described by David Cannadine as 'the outstanding British naval historian of his generation' - is able to offer new insights into the individual quality which led Byron rightly to celebrate Nelson's genius as 'Britannia's God of War'. He demonstrates how Admiral Nelson elevated the business of naval warfare to the level of the sublime. Nelson's unique gift was to take that which other commanders found complex, and reduce it to simplicity. Where his predecessors and opponents saw a particular battle as an end in itself, Nelson was always a step ahead - even in the midst of terrifying, close-quarters action, with officers and men struck down all around him. 'Excellent . . . Worthy of the stirring events [it celebrates].' Independent

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Faber are pleased to announce the relaunch of the poetry list - starting in Spring 2001 and continuing, with publication dates each month, for the rest of the year. This will involve a new jacket design recalling the typographic virtues of the classic Faber poetry covers, connecting the backlist and the new titles within a single embracing cover solution. A major reissue program is scheduled, to include classic individual collections from each decade, some of which have long been unavailable: Wallace Stevens's Harmonium and Ezra Pound's Personae from the 1920s; W.H. Auden's Poems (1930); Robert Lowell's Life Studies from the 1950s; John Berryman's 77 Dream Songs and Philip Larkin's The Whitsun Weddings from the 1960s; Ted Hughes's Gaudete and Seamus Heaney's Field Work from the 1970s; Michael Hofmann's Acrimony and Douglas Dunn's Elegies from the 1980s. Timed to celebrate publication of Seamus Heaney's new collection, Electric Light, the relaunch is intended to re-emphasize the predominance of Faber Poetry, and to celebrate a series which has played a shaping role in the history of modern poetry since its inception in the 1920s.

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Dirty Havana Trilogy tells the story of Pedro Juan, an ex-radio journalist who wanders from one odd job to the next, half-disgusted and half-fascinated by his predicament. Working as a garbage-man, dealing on the black market, selling marijuana, and hustling lady tourists off the streets, Pedro Juan throws himself wholeheartedly into the pleasures of the flesh in his squalid surroundings: drink, sex and more sex. A visceral and unforgettable picaresque, a damning portrait of vice and poverty, and an insane journey into the condemned soul of a sexual deviant, Dirty Havana Trilogy is a Tropic of Cancer for these times.

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Georgetown, Washington D.C., 1973. Actress and divorced mother Chris MacNeil starts to experience 'difficulties' with her usually sweet-natured eleven-year-old daughter Regan. The child becomes afflicted by spasms, convulsions and unsettling amnesiac episodes; these abruptly worsen into violent fits of appalling foul-mouthed curses, accompanied by physical mutation. Medical science is baffled by Regan's plight and, in her increasing despair, Chris turns to troubled priest and psychiatrist Damien Karras, who immediately recognises something profoundly malevolent in Regan's distorted fetures and speech. On Karras's recommendation, the Church summons Father Merrin, a specialist in the exorcism of demons . . .William Peter Blatty scripted this version of his own best-selling novel for director William Friedkin, and was rewarded with an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay of 1973. This publication also includes the texts of the film's legendary 'lost scenes' and excised dialogue which shed additional light on The Exorcist's profound darkness.

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John Cassavetes is the godfather of American independent cinema, saluted by virtually every US maverick who's followed in his stead, from Martin Scorsese to Sean Penn. Since his death in 1989, Cassavetes has become increasingly renowned as a cinematic hero - a loner who fought against the iniquities of the Hollywood system, steering his own creative course in a career spanning thirty years. Having first established himself as an actor, he bravely struck out on his own as a director in 1959 with Shadows, and proceeded to build up a formidable body of work. His major films include Faces, Woman Under the Influence, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, Opening Night and Gloria. These unforgettable works are driven and distinguished by Cassavetes's collaboration with actors of the calibre of Gena Rowlands, Ben Gazzara and Peter Falk. Professor Ray Carney, a friend and admirer of Cassavetes, presents a book that offers us Cassavetes in his own words - frank, uncompromising, humane, and passionate about both life and art.

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'Compulsively readable' (History), this is the first volume in a series that details the long and violent endeavour of the English to dismember Europe's strongest state, a succession of wars that is one of the seminal chapters in European history. Beginning with the funeral of Charles IV of France in 1328, it follows the Hundred Years War up to the surrender of Calais in 1347. It traces the early humiliations and triumphs of Edward III: the campaigns of Sluys, Crecy and Calais, which first made his name as a war leader and the reputation of his subjects as the most brutally effective warriors of their time. Trial by Battle is an account of the events of a pivotal period in both French and British history, from Wolfson History Prize-winning author and historian Jonathan Sumption. 'A new and immensely impressive history of the war.' Daily Telegraph

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This volume contains two plays by one of Britain's finest playwrights. In Quartet Cecily, Reggie and Wilfred are in a home for retired opera singers. Each year, on 10 October, there is a concert to celebrate Verdi's birthday. Jean, who used to be married to Reggie, arrives at the home and disrupts their equilibrium. She still acts like a diva and refuses to sing. But the show must go on . . .Equally Divided begins shortly after the funeral of Edith and Renata's mother. Edith, severe, embattled, unmarried, has sacrificed her life to nurse the bedridden old woman. Renata, glamorous and married several times, has spent her life doing what she pleases. When the contents of the will are made known, childhood rivalries re-emerge and the result is a moral tale both powerful and comic.

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Wildly charismatic, impossibly brilliant, totally rebellious - Will Hunting is a mathematical genius who lives on the fringes of society, refusing to accept the talent that he has for maths and taking, instead, a job as a cleaner in a university. A psychologist takes him under his wing and tries to help Hunting resolve the traumas that beset him.Matt Damon and Ben Affleck - lifelong friends and two of the best actors of their generation - have written a film that is funny, ironic and profoundly moving; one that is filled with empathy for society's outsiders and their struggle to fight their way through life.

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'The Faber Book of Beasts is a generous and intelligent round- up of old favourites, new juxtapositions, and poems we mightn't know about ... Will set heads shaking, as well as nodding with pleasure.' Independent William Wordsworth's 'To a Skylark'W.B. Yeats' 'Leda and the Swan'Elizabeth Bishop's 'The Moose'D.H. Lawrence's 'Bat'Marianne Moore's 'Elephants'William Blake's 'The Tyger' Gerard Manley Hopkins' 'The Windhover'Thom Gunn's 'The Snail'Seamus Heaney's 'Otter'John Donne's 'The Flea'Christopher Smart's 'My Cat Jeoffry''Baa Baa Black Sheep' From childhood rhymes to canonical classics, Homer to Ted Hughes, this eclectic poetry anthology celebrating the earth's creatures brims with beastly delights. Celebrated poet Paul Muldoon's bestiary shows that we are 'most human in the presence of animals', whether tame or wild, common or exotic, mammals or reptiles, real or imaginary - and the result is a must-read for animal-lovers of all ages everywhere.'Animals bring the best out in us [and make] the best art ... Elephants, skunks, otters, hedgehogs and hippos feature in Muldoon's menagerie; how charming it is to observe how they nuzzle along together in his engaging anthology.' Irish Times

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The Pulitzer Prize winning playwright, director and teacher has written a blunt, unsparingly honest guide to acting. In True and False David Mamet overturns conventional opinion and tells aspiring actors what they really need to know. He leaves no aspect of acting untouched: how to judge the role, approach the part, work with the playwright; the right way to undertake auditions and the proper approach to agents and the business in general. True and False slaughters a wide range of sacred cows and yet offers an invaluable guide to the acting profession.

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The Philokalia is a collection of texts on prayer and the spiritual life, written between the fourth and fifteenth centuries by masters of the Orthodox Christian tradition. First published in Greek in 1782, translated into Slavonic and later into Russian, this is the first complete translation into English. It is made from the original Greek, and will be completed in five volumes.Volume IV contains some of the most important writings in the entire collection. St Symeon the New Theologian speaks about the conscious experience of the Holy Spirit and about the vision of the divine and uncreated Light. St Gregory of Sinai provides practical guidance concerning the life of the Hesychast and the use of the Jesus Prayer. St Gregory Palamas discusses the distinction between the essence and the energies of God.

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'Believe me, my young friend, there is absolutely nothing half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats. In them or out of them, it doesn't matter. Whether you get away or you don't, whether you arrive at your destination or whether you never get anywhere at all, you're always busy.'Ever since the publication of Kenneth Grahame's novel in 1908, the characters of Ratty, Mole, Toad and Badger have delighted generations of readers. Now Alan Bennett has written an adaptation for the stage, a version which is both true to the original and yet carries that distinctive Bennett hallmark.Alan Bennett introduces this edition, writing about the history of the project and the staging of the production.'Bennett is even able to inject the odd sly joke for the adult without bewildering the tots... the result is a delightful evening, a treat for anyone.' The Times

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Lorca's Blood Wedding is a classic of twentieth-century theatre. The story is based on a newspaper fragment which told of a family vendetta and a bride who ran away with the son of the enemy family. Lorca uses it to investigate the subjects which fascinated him: desire, repression, ritual, and the constraints and commitments of the rural Spanish community in which the play is rooted. Ted Hughes's version stays close in spirit and letter to the original Spanish. With marvellous directness, he fused Lorca's vision to his own, and the result is a powerful poetic text which captures all the violence and pathos of the play for an English-speaking audience.

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These lectures were delivered by Seamus Heaney while he was Professor of Poetry at Oxford University. In the first of them, Heaney discusses and celebrates poetry's special ability to redress spiritual balance and to function as a counterweight to hostile and oppressive forces in the world. He proceeds to explore how this 'redress' manifests itself in a diverse range of poems and poets, including Christopher Marlowe's 'Hero and Leander', 'The Midnight Court' by the eighteenth-century Irish poet Brian Merriman, John Clare's vernacular writing and Oscar Wilde's 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol'. Several twentieth-century poets are also discussed - W. B. Yeats, Dylan Thomas, Elizabeth Bishop and others - and the whole book constitutes a vivid proof of the claim that 'poetry is strong enough to help'.

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'These legends are the action-packed stories - of ancient heroes, huge battles, attempted invasions, prophecies and spells, clashes between the underworld and the real world, abductions, love affairs and feasts - which have fascinated the Irish mind for more than 2,000 years . . . Most of them have an extraordinary, stark narrative sweep, with a marvellous sense of detail . . . Heaney writes directly and fluently . . . with great tact and skill.' Sunday Times

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'A firework display of technique, versatility and passion.' Independent on Sunday'The crafted sincerity of this potent, lyrical collection, in which an absolutely contemporary voice concisely expresses common concerns, is everything that poetry should be.' Times Literary Supplement'The first poet of serious artistic intent since Philip Larkin to have achieved popularity . . . it is possible that he will attain the sort of proverbial status Larkin now occupies.' Sean O'Brien, The Deregulated Muse

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100 Poems by 100 Poets will serve both to introduce the diffident to the finest poetry in the English language, and to reward the devoted with its challenging choices and delightful surprises.

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In the period covered by this richly detailed collection, which brings the poet to the age of forty, T.S. Eliot was to set a new course for his life and work. Forsaking the Unitarianism of his American forebears, he was received into the Church of England and naturalised as a British citizen - a radical and public alteration of the intellectual and spiritual direction of his career.The demands of Eliot's professional life as writer and editor became more complex and exacting during these years. The celebrated but financially-pressed periodical he had been editing since 1922 - The Criterion - switched between being a quarterly and a monthly, before being rescued by the fledgling house of Faber & Gwyer. In addition to writing numerous essays and editorials, lectures, reviews, introductions and prefaces, his letters show Eliot involving himself wholeheartedly in the business of his new career as a publisher. His Ariel poems, Journey of the Magi (1927) and A Song for Simeon (1928) established a new manner and vision for the poet of The Waste Land and 'The Hollow Men'. These are also the years in which Eliot published two sections of an exhilaratingly funny, savage, jazz-influenced play-in-verse - 'Fragment of a Prologue' and 'Fragment of an Agon' - which were subsequently brought together as Sweeney Agonistes. In addition, he struggled to translate the remarkable work Anabase, by St.-John Perse, which was to be a signal influence upon his own later poetry.This correspondence with friends and mentors vividly documents all the stages of Eliot's personal and artistic transformation during these crucial years, the continuing anxieties of his private life, and the forging of his public reputation.

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The appearance of Philip Larkin's second prose collection - reviews and critical assessments of writers and writing; pieces on jazz, mostly uncollected; some long, revealing and often highly entertaining interviews given on various occasions - was a considerable literary event. Stamped by wit, originality and intelligence, it was vintage Larkin throughout:'Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.''I see life more as an affair of solitude diversified by company than as an affair of company diversified by solitude.'Q. 'How did you arrive upon the image of a toad for work or labour?'A. 'Sheer genius.'

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The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston includes Sherston's Progress and both Memoirs,

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Published in 1957, Hawk in the Rain was Ted Hughes's first collection of poems. It won the New York Poetry Centre First Publication Award, for which the judges were W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender and Marianne Moore, and the Somerset Maugham Award, and it was acclaimed by every reviewer from A. Alvarez to Edwin Muir. When Robin Skelton wrote, 'All looking for the emergence of a major poet must buy it', he was right to see in it the promise of what many now regard as the most important body of work by any poet of the twentieth century.

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'It is my own story I am trying to tell, and as such it must be received; those who expect a universalization of the Great War must look for it elsewhere.'Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, first published in 1930, is Siegfried Sassoon's fictionalized autobiography of the period between the early spring of 1916 and the summer of 1917. The narrative moves from the trenches to the Fourth Army School, to Morlancourt and a raid, then to and through the Somme. The mind of the narrator turns from unquestioning acceptance of the war and of the standards which it set up, to doubting the necessity of the seemingly endless slaughter.

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DAILY MAIL BOOKS OF THE YEARWINNER OF THE CRIMEFEST eDUNNIT AWARD 'Deeply atmospheric. . . Combines intrigue, magic and antiquarian bookselling.' Observer'A marvellous, magical novel' Irish Times'Irresistible. . . A lavish, lush quest novel.' LAUREN BEUKESRare book dealer Lily Albrecht has been given a tip-off about The Book of the Most Precious Substance, rumoured to be the most powerful occult book ever written. With some of the world's wealthiest people willing to pay a fortune for it, she embarks on a journey from New York to New Orleans to Munich to Paris, knowing that it could also help erase the greatest tragedy of her life.But does the book really exist at all, or will Lily lose everything in search of a ghost?What readers are saying:***** 'Erotic, thrilling, and tense all the way through. There is nothing like this on the shelves.'***** 'Devilishly delightful. . . THE BEST TWIST ENDING of the year!!'***** 'I'm a bit obsessed with this book. . . it's sexy and mysterious and cool, like nothing I've read before.'***** 'My only complaint is that I wanted more!'

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LRB BOOKSHOP'S AUTHOR OF THE MONTH ONE OF THE GUARDIAN'S BEST BOOKS OF 2019WITH A NEW AFTERWORD BY MICHAEL HOFMANN'If you haven't read Bernhard, you will not know of the most radical advance in fiction since Joyce ... My advice: dive in.' Lucy Ellmann'I absolutely love Bernhard: he is one of the darkest and funniest writers ... A must read for everybody.' Karl Ove KnausgaardInstead of the book he is meant to write, Rudolph, a Viennese musicologist, produces this dark and grotesquely funny account of small woes writ large, of profound horrors detailed and rehearsed to the point of distraction. We learn of Rudolph's sister, whose help he invites then reviles; his 'really marvellous' house which he hates; the suspicious illness he carefully nurses; his ten-year-long attempt to write the perfect opening sentence; and his escape to the island of Majorca, which turns out to be the site of someone else's very real horror story, and ultimately brings him no release from himself.Concrete is Thomas Bernhard at his very finest: a bleakly hilarious insight into procrastination and failure that scratches the murky depths of our souls.

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The Room, The Dumb Waiter, A Slight Ache, A Night Out, Night School, The Collection, The Dwarfs, The Lover, Tea Party, The Basement, Landscape, Silence, Monologue, Family Voices, A Kind of Alaska, Victoria Station, One for the Road, Mountain Language, The New World Order, Party Time, Moonlight, Ashes to Ashes, CelebrationThis volume contains the complete short plays of Harold Pinter from The Room, first performed in 1960, to Celebration, which premiered in 2000. The book commemorates the tenth anniversary of the playwright's death and coincides with Pinter at the Pinter, a celebratory season staging twenty of his one-act plays at the Harold Pinter Theatre, London, 2018.With a foreword by Antonia Fraser. 'The foremost representative of British drama in the second half of the twentieth century.' Swedish Academy citation on awarding Harold Pinter the Nobel Prize in Literature, 2005.

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Leila does for the barbarity of contemporary Indian nationalism what The Handmaid's Tale did for the yoke of patriarchy. It is urgent, gripping, topical, disturbing, and announces a talent we'll be talking about for years to come. - Neel Mukherjee Soon to be adapted for the screen as a Netflix Original Every year on Leila's birthday Shalini kneels by the wall with a little yellow spade and scoops dry earth to make a pit for two candles. One each for herself and for Riz, the husband at her side. But as Shalini walks from the patch of grass where she held her vigil the man beside her melts away. It is sixteen years since they took her, her daughter's third birthday party, the last time she saw the three people she loves most dearly: her mother, her husband, her child.

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No one wanted to say it to me, that the girls were dead. But I knew. Late 1946 and Charlie Yates and his wife Lizzie have returned to Los Angeles, trying to stay anonymous in the city of angels. But when Yates, back in his old job at the Pacific Journal, becomes obsessed by the disappearance of two aspiring Hollywood starlets, Nancy Hill and Julie Desjardins, he finds it leads him right back to his worst fear: legendary Mob boss Benjamin 'Bugsy' Siegel, a man he once crossed, and whose shadow he can't shake. As events move from LA to the burgeoning Palace of Sin in the desert, Las Vegas - where Siegel is preparing to open his new Hotel Casino, The Flamingo - Rod Reynolds once again shows his skill at evoking time and place. With Charlie caught between the FBI and the mob, can he possibly see who is playing who, and find out what really happened to the two girls?

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November, 1957. Six teenage girls walk in the Derbyshire mists, the first chills of winter in the air. They follow the old train tracks into the dark tunnel of the Cutting. Only five reappear on the other side. October, 2017. Feverishly fixated on a childhood friend, Mina's dying mother makes a plea: 'Find Valerie'.Following up on what seems like a routine death by natural causes, DC Connie Childs' old instincts kick in, pointing her back to one cold evening in 1957. But as Connie broadens her enquiries, the investigation begins to move increasingly close to home.

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Paul Kingsnorth was once an activist, an ardent environmentalist. He fought against rampant development and the depredations of a corporate world that seemed hell-bent on ignoring a looming climate crisis in its relentless pursuit of profit. But as the environmental movement began to focus on 'sustainability' rather than the defence of wild places for their own sake and as global conditions worsened, he grew disenchanted with the movement that he once embraced. He gave up what he saw as the false hope that residents of the First World would ever make the kind of sacrifices that might avert the severe consequences of climate change.Full of grief and fury as well as passionate, lyrical evocations of nature and the wild, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist gathers the wave-making essays that have charted the change in Kingsnorth's thinking. In them he articulates a new vision that he calls 'dark ecology,' which stands firmly in opposition to the belief that technology can save us, and he argues for a renewed balance between the human and nonhuman worlds. Provocative and urgent, iconoclastic and fearless, this ultimately hopeful book poses hard questions about how we have lived and should live.

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A dazzling collection of stories - originally banned in 1968 Prague - by the author of modern classic The Unbearable Lightness of Being.Milan Kundera is a master of graceful illusion and illuminating surprise. In one of these stories a young man and his girlfriend pretend that she is a stranger he picked up on the road-only to become strangers to each other in reality as their game proceeds. In another a teacher fakes piety in order to seduce a devout girl, then jilts her and yearns for God. In yet another girls wait in bars, on beaches, and on station platforms for the same lover, a middle-aged Don Juan who has gone home to his wife. Games, fantasies, and schemes abound in all the stories while different characters react in varying ways to the sudden release of erotic impulses.

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'There are times in the theatre when you suddenly find yourself in the grip of silence. There is no fidgeting or coughing, no shifting about in seats: the audience's attention is so tense it is almost palpable. This is because it is both thrilling and dangerous: a fight to the death, or the dawning of salvation. David Hare's new play, Skylight, is punctuated by such moments. They are the signs that a dramatist of the first rank is writing at full stretch, in complete command of his material, undogmatic and unafraid, unforgiving and compassionate.' Sunday Times Skylight was revived in a new production at the Wyndham's Theatre, London, in June 2014, which received the Evening Standard Revival of the Year Award.

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'I could get in,' Marianne thought, 'if there was a person inside the house. There has got to be a person. I can't get in unless there is somebody there.'A powerful and haunting classic about a girl haunted by her own dreams.Ill and bored with having to stay in bed, Marianne picks up a pencil and starts doodling - a house, a garden, a boy at the window. That night she has an extraordinary dream. She is transported into her own picture, and as she explores further she soon realises she is not alone. The boy at the window is called Mark, and his every movement is guarded by the menacing stone watchers that surround the solitary house. Together, in their dreams, Marianne and Mark must save themselves . . .The perfect gift for children aged 8+, this well-loved classic will delight a new generation of readers of the Faber Children's Classics list.

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Like his acclaimed Mandeville (2008), Matthew Francis's fourth Faber collection explores a world of marvels, real and fantastic. A man takes off for the moon in an engine drawn by geese, a poltergeist moves into a remote Welsh village, and a party of seventeenth-century Englishmen encounter the wonders of Russia - sledges, vodka, skating and Easter eggs. The scientist Robert Boyle basks in the newly discovered radiance of phosphorus (the noctiluca of the title) and the theme of light in darkness is taken up by the more personal poems in the book: phoneboxes, streetlamps, moonlight. The joys of the world and of the imagination find their equivalent in Francis's joy in the possibilities of language: 'A basket of snow for the Empress / with a poem of modest triumph: / I made this out of what does not last.'

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** ORDER NIGHTS OF PLAGUE, THE NEW NOVEL FROM ORHAN PAMUK, NOW **Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature'One of the greatest and most prophetic of political novelists.' Guardian Books of the Year'Inspired and impassioned' New York Times'Powerful, assured and engaging.' Irish Times A family gathers in the shadow of a revolution, until an outsider brings the action to their doorAs the political tension from Turkey's tumultuous struggle for modernity builds, an old widow Fatma waits with her faithful servant Recep for her grandchildren to descend for their annual visit. Faruk, a failed historian; his sensitive leftist sister, Nilgun; and Metin, a high school student who lives the fast life of the nouveaux riches while dreaming of escape.The arrival of Recep's nephew Hassan, who has recently fallen in with right-wing extremists, draws the family into the growing political cataclysm. As the country wavers towards tragedy, the family are forced to confront their past and decide where they stand.

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On the crowded streets of New York City there are even more stories than there are people passing each other every day... only some of these stories survive to become history. Lamont Williams, recently released from prison and working as a hospital janitor, strikes up an unlikely friendship with a patient, an elderly Jewish Holocaust survivor who starts to tell him of his extraordinary past. Meanwhile Adam Zignelik, the son of a prominent Jewish civil rights lawyer, is facing a personal crisis: almost 40-years-old, his long-term relationship is faltering and his academic career has stalled. It's only when one of his late father's closest friends, the civil rights activist William McCray, suggests a promising research topic that the possibility of some kind of redemption arises.Dealing with memory, racism and the human capacity for guilt, resilience, heroism, and unexpected kindness, The Street Sweeper spans over fifty years, and ranges from New York to Melbourne, Chicago, Warsaw and Auschwitz, as these two very different paths - Adam's and Lamont's - lead to one greater story.

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'I am holding on to that summer, not just in my thoughts but with my whole body, from my numb fingers down to my toes. The summer when the river was ours, and so was the boathouse, the city, the meadows and the reeds at the water's edge. Happiness only exists when you can touch it and I held it, I'm still holding it, that summer of 1939, now, here tonight.'Two young oarsmen are trained as a coxless pair by a mysterious German coach in the golden summer of pre-war Amsterdam. Through the pressure and rapture of physical exertion, teamwork and victory, Anton the shy outsider and calmly self-confident David, forge an intense relationship while the grim developments on the world stage remain at a great distance. But on the wintry eve of Holland's liberation, Anton stands on the bank of his beloved river and mourns a lost world: David has disappeared and the boathouse is now derelict and deserted . . .

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