Search results for ""Notting Hill Editions""

A seasonal anthology of Christmas-themed writings to savour during the highs and lows of Christmas Day. This delightful book offers a diverse array of classic and contemporary writers who have expressed their thoughts about Christmas over the centuries - with joy, nostalgia and dazzling wit. Includes selections from Dostoevsky, Truman Capote, A.A. Milne, Jerome K Jerome, and modern day diarists, this beautiful volume is as full of delight and nostalgia as Christmas itself.

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Things I Don't Want to Know is a unique response to George Orwell from one of our most vital contemporary writers. Taking Orwell's famous list of motives for writing as the jumping-off point for a sequence of thrilling reflections on the writing life, this is a perfect companion not just to Orwell's essay, but also to Levy's own, essential oeuvre.

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Joe Brainard's I Remember is a cult classic, envied and admired by writers from Frank O'Hara to John Ashbery and Edmund White. As autobiography, Brainard's method was brilliantly simple: to set down specific memories as they rose to the surface of his consciousness, each prefaced by the refrain 'I remember'. Fifty-two years after its original US publication in 1970, this is the first UK edition. 'In simple, forthright, declarative sentences, he charts the map of the human soul and permanently alters the way we look at the world. I Remember is both uproariously funny and deeply moving. It is also one of the few totally original books I have ever read.' Paul Auster 'I would make a case for I Remember as one of the twenty or so most important American autobiographies, important for its air of unimportance and for its mingling of cultural bric-a-brac with sexual frankness and self-revelation.' New Yorker

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On the one hand clothes can supposedly help you out with embodied life by concealing the bits you feel ashamed of and accentuating the bits you're proud of. However, fashion isn't really about clothes in any practical sense, but rather the endless replacement of clothes by other clothes, and especially the vilification of certain styles and the extreme elevation of others. Like gambling, fashion is a system that keeps us captivated by treating us badly, trapping us in a cycle of promises and dashed hopes by suggesting that new clothes will help us to like ourselves more. And while it's easy to dismiss fashion as elitist and wasteful, isn't it also fascinating, exciting and perhaps sometimes even radical - not to mention surprisingly egalitarian? Rather than insisting we give up on the pleasures that clothes have to offer, this brilliant new book by psychoanalyst and writer Anouchka Grose puts forward a post-fashion logic that rejects the parade of manufactured novelties in favour of more idiosyncratic forms of sartorial imitation. Taking us on a journey from the court of Louis XIV to TikTok's avant apocalypse, Fashion: A Manifesto scrutinises fashion from a number of angles: historically, psychologically, politically, environmentally, even linguistically, to open up questions about the ways in which it works both for and against us and looks forward to a future where our clothes treat us - not to mention the planet - a great deal more kindly.

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Only two species of mammal have a post-reproductive life that lasts longer than their reproductive life: the killer whale, whose elders are able to sniff out food supplies over vast oceanic distances to keep their pods fed, and the Homo sapien. While the evolutionary purpose of the killer whale’s extensive life seems clear, what is the point of ours? This was a question that intrigued psychoanalyst Carl Jung, who observed that if a culture is to maintain its deepest, profoundest roots while moving forward to embrace the challenges of historical and technological change, it needs to find an equilibrium between the energy, vigour and creativity of those in the ego-driven first half of life and the experience, dignity and wisdom of those in the second. But to make it to that second half of life, we need to traverse the dreaded ‘middle years’, when so many of us find ourselves discontent with our jobs, unhappy in our relationships and lamenting our fetishized youths. Drawing on history, psychology, science and literature, Jamieson shows just how ubiquitous, and crucial, the ‘midlife crisis’ is, and the devastating consequences for society at large if we continue to regard it as something we can, and should, avoid.

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As a boy growing up near Liverpool in the 1950s, Andrew Lees would visit the docks with his father to watch the ships from Brazil unload their exotic cargo of coffee, cotton bales, molasses, cocoa - the ships’ names and goods noted down in loving detail in his exercise book. One day, his father gave him a dog-eared book called Exploration Fawcett. The book told the true story of Lieutenant-Colonel Percy Fawcett, a British explorer who in 1925 had gone in search of a lost city in the Amazon, and never returned. The riveting story of Fawcett’s encounters with deadly animals and hostile tribes, his mission to discover an Atlantean civilization, and the many who lost their own lives when they went in search of him, inspired the young Lees to believe that there were still earthly places where one could ‘fall off the edge’.Lees travelled to Manaus in Fawcett’s footsteps. After a time-bending psychedelic experience in the forest, he understood that his yearning for the imaginary Brazil of his boyhood, like Fawcett’s search for an earthly paradise, was a nostalgia for what never was. Part travelogue, part memoir, Lees paints a portrait of an elusive Brazil, and a flawed explorer whose doomed mission ruined lives.

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The best fishing writing is never really about fishing, or never only about fishing, and the writers collected in A Twitch Upon the Thread use angling as a way to write about love, loss, faith, and obsession. This is an anthology of fishing writing ranging from medieval times to the present, taking the reader from riverbank to open ocean, from England to New Zealand, from the shore to the depths. Read it and be hooked. Included are contributions from Virginia Woolf, Charles Dickens, Ota Pavel, Arthur Ransome, George Orwell, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and dozens more.

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Linenbound with a satin marker, these notebooks are slim enough to be carried in a pocket. Contains ninety-six pages, left-side blank; right-side lined, with occasional literary quotations on the theme of epiphany. There are three versions – Voyage, Epiphany and Nostalgia.

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From Aristophanes to Zeffirelli, from Gerard Depardieu to Mae West, in Break a Leg! Michèle Brown has assembled a world-beating cast, including actors, dramatists, directors and even critics (`A man who knows the way but cannot drive the car.’ Kenneth Tynan). She draws on plays, books, newspapers and table-talk and her collection of wise and witty lines includes the familiar and the completely unexpected. This is a work where Sarah Bernhardt is playing opposite Kenneth Branagh. Orson Welles is sharing the limelight with Samuel Beckett, Aphra Behn and Noel Coward, and the themes range from stage fright to star quality.

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Morris's intimate journals, written for a friend, unconsciously explore questions of travel, noting his reaction to the idea of leaving or arriving, to hurry and delay, what it means to dread a place you've never been to or to encounter the actuality of a long-held vision. Poet Lavinia Greenlaw draws out these questions as she follows in the footprints of Morris's prose, responding to its surfaces and undercurrents, extending its horizons. The result is a new and composite work, which brilliantly explores our conflicted reasons for not staying at home.

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In this haunting memoir, Alison Gold gives a luminous account of key moments in her life that brought her to be the writer she is. They tell of her early activism; they tell of her descent into alcoholism; they tell of her recovery; they tell of her discovery of the power of writing to give a shape and meaning to a life. Found and Lost is both a tender memorial to the extraordinary people in her life, and a compelling tale of redemption. Starting with her childhood experience of running her primary school 'Lost and Found' depot, Gold develops, though a series of letters, a meditation on ageing, friendship, loss and the forces that link us to the dead. In the very act of writing, she begins to find a route out of depression and grief. Alison Leslie Gold is best known for her works that have kept alive stories from the time of the Holocaust, stories of courage and survival - most famously her Anne Frank Remembered, co-authored with Miep Gies (who risked her life to protect the Frank family). She has never chosen to write about her own life or what made her into a gatherer of other people's stories, until now, in Found and Lost. For she has chosen to go back to her childhood in order to chart the origin of her need to save objects, stories, people - including herself - who she has sensed to be on a road to perdition.

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Devastated by the series of terrorist attacks that killed 130 people - the deadliest attacks on France since World War II - Lustiger, a German journalist living in Paris, set out to find answers to the questions that obsessed her: why has our generation bred Jihadists, what motivates such attacks, and what changes can we make to society to prevent the rise of hate crimes. During the three-month state of emergency declared in France, during which public demonstrations were banned and police were granted permission to carry out searches without a warrant, Lustiger reflects on the deep divide between government and governed, between the privileged few and the 'children of the banlieues' who grew into terrorists. She explores the elite Grandes Ecoles, in which of the 3000 applicants, a mere 120 get in - producing a long line of Prime Ministers, MPs, senators, Euro-ministers, and bosses of major private companies. She asks 'How can things possibly work when virtually a whole nation feels like it's standing on the outside?' This essay, in French translation and entitled Terror, has been awarded the Horst Bingel Prize for 2016. The biennial award celebrates literature which combines literary quality with social and political commitment.

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Lees draws on Burroughs' search for an addiction cure to discover a ground-breaking treatment for shaking palsy, and learns how to use the deductive reasoning of Sherlock Holmes to diagnose patients. Lees follows Burroughs into the rainforest and under the influence of yage (ayahuasca) gains insights that encourage him to pursue new lines of pharmacological research and explore new forms of science.

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Reader, you have in your hands a motley collection of essays, personal and critical. The advantage of the heterogeneous essay collection by a single author is that it shows you how a particular mind moves through the world. If you are attracted to an essayist's mentality and way of speaking, ideally you can surrender happily to his or her take on various subject matters, the more diverse the better. Let us see how our author will tackle this particular memory, neurotic tic, political or social problem, book, movie, play, comic strip, rock band, without requiring an over-arching theme. If there is a consistent theme in this particular collection, it is the discovery of limitations, and learning to live with them. The recognition of one's limits, painful as it may be, can have salutary side-effects.In my case, it absolves me of the need to be both a hero and a coward, an explorer and a stay-at-home, a saint and a villain, a loyal husband and a Don Juan, a political activist and a skeptic, a spiritual mystic and a rationalist atheist, a performing athlete and a sports fan, a great if excruciatingly self-demanding literary stylist and a prolific if merely good-enough writer.

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The lives of people both famous and obscure are filled with moments when their dirty laundry sees daylight. At such times we witness the reversibility of success, of prominence, but also come to terms viscerally with our own most vulnerable selves. We cannot stop watching the scene of shame, identifying with it, absorbing its nearness, relishing our immunity, even as we acknowledge the universality of the human stain, the uneasy predicament of living in our own bodies -

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N+1 was founded in Brooklyn in 2004 out of a dissatisfaction with the contemporary intellectual scene in the United States. A print and online magazine published three times a year n+1 showcases new thinkers in politics, literature and culture. Many of the magazine's early contributors are now considered to be the new vanguard of American writing including Chad Harbach and Marco Roth.

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Morris's intimate journals, written for a friend, unconsciously explore questions of travel, noting his reaction to the idea of leaving or arriving, to hurry and delay, what it means to dread a place you've never been to or to encounter the actuality of a long-held vision. Poet Lavinia Greenlaw draws out these questions as she follows in the footprints of Morris's prose, responding to its surfaces and undercurrents, extending its horizons. The result is a new and composite work, which brilliantly explores our conflicted reasons for not staying at home.

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A pictoral essay by the great art critic, novelist and long-time smoker, John Berger, and Turkish writer and illustrator Selçuk Demirel. "Once upon a time, men, women and (secretly) children smoked." This charming illustrated work reflects on the cultural implications of smoking, and suggests, through a series of brilliantly inventive illustrations, that society's attitude to smoke is both paradoxical and intolerant. It portrays a world in which smokers, banished from public places, must encounter one another as outlaws. Meanwhile, car exhausts and factory chimneys continue to pollute the atmosphere. Smoke is a beautifully illustrated prose poem that lingers in the mind. "A cigarette is a breathing space. It makes a parenthesis. The time of a cigarette is a parenthesis, and if it is shared you are both in that parenthesis. It's like a proscenium arch for a dialogue." - John Berger (in interview)

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A new edition of Britain's Changing Towns (1967), introduced, edited and updated by Owen Hatherley: "These essays show him writing about cities and towns as wholes rather than as collections of individual buildings. In each of them, there are several things happening at once - assessments of historic townscape, capsule reviews of new buildings, attempts to find the specific character of each place - "

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