Search results for ""Author Jeanette Winterson""

'Joins the dots in a neglected narrative of female scientists, visionaries and code-breakers' ObserverHow is artificial intelligence changing the way we live and love? Now with a new chapter, this is the eye-opening new book from Sunday Times bestselling author Jeanette Winterson.Drawing on her years of thinking and reading about AI, Jeanette Winterson looks to history, religion, myth, literature, politics and, of course, computer science to help us understand the radical changes to the way we live and love that are happening now.With wit, compassion and curiosity, Winterson tackles AI's most interesting talking points - from the weirdness of backing up your brain and the connections between humans and non-human helpers to whether it's time to leave planet Earth.'Very funny... A kind of comparative mythology, where the hype and ideology of cutting-edge tech is read through the lens of far older stories' Spectator'Refreshingly optimistic' GuardianA 'Books of 2021' Pick in the Guardian, Financial Times, Daily Telegraph and Evening Standard

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A ghost has no substance, but it has power - and presence - and it can appear in alternative forms. In the metaverse, we are all alternative forms. The Dead will join us.The genre-bending and dazzling new collection of ghost stories from the Sunday Times bestselling Jeanette Winterson'Winterson the artist at her most potent' GUARDIAN'Thought-provoking' DAILY MIRROR'Spine-chillingly good' IOur lives are digital, exposed and always-on. We track our friends and family wherever they go. We have millennia of knowledge at our fingertips.We know everything about our world. But we know nothing about theirs.We have changed, but our ghosts have not. They've simply adapted and innovated, found new channels to reach us. They inhabit our apps and wander the metaverse just as they haunt our homes and our memories, always seeking new ways to connect.To live amongst us.To remind us.To tempt us.To take their revenge.These stories are not ours to tell. They are the stories of the dead - of those we've lost, loved, forgotten... and feared. Some are fiction. But some may not be.

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A ghost has no substance, but it has power - and presence - and it can appear in alternative forms. In the metaverse, we are all alternative forms. The Dead will join us.The genre-bending and dazzling new collection of ghost stories from the Sunday Times bestselling Jeanette Winterson'Winterson the artist at her most potent' GUARDIAN'Thought-provoking' DAILY MIRROR'Spine-chillingly good' IOur lives are digital, exposed and always-on. We track our friends and family wherever they go. We have millennia of knowledge at our fingertips.We know everything about our world. But we know nothing about theirs.We have changed, but our ghosts have not. They've simply adapted and innovated, found new channels to reach us. They inhabit our apps and wander the metaverse just as they haunt our homes and our memories, always seeking new ways to connect.To live amongst us.To remind us.To tempt us.To take their revenge.These stories are not ours to tell. They are the stories of the dead - of those we've lost, loved, forgotten... and feared. Some are fiction. But some may not be.

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The Stone Gods is one of Jeanette Winterson's most imaginative novels -- an interplanetary love story; a traveller's tale; a hymn to the beauty of the worldOn the airwaves, all the talk is of the new blue planet - pristine and habitable, like our own 65 million years ago, before we took it to the edge of destruction. And off the air, Billie and Spike are falling in love. What will happen when their story combines with the world's story, as they whirl towards Planet Blue, into the future? Will they - and we - ever find a safe landing place?

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'A fantasy, a vivid dream...inventive and brilliant' GuardianHenri has a passion for Napoleon - but Napoleon has a passion for chicken. As soldier and emperor butcher their way across Europe, glory falls to ruin and love turns to hate. But, when Henri encounters the red-haired, web-footed Villanelle, he discovers in her an equal. Together they abandon their pasts, and flee to the Venetian canals to meet their singular destiny in the city of chance and disguises.'A deeply imagined and beautiful book, often arrestingly so.' New York Times

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'This book is a deep, sensual plunge, a worship of the body, inside and out' The TimesIn a quiet English suburb, a love affair ignites. For our nameless narrator, Louise is the last in a long line of explosive passions, but the first to have broken their heart. With Louise's husband, Elgin, blocking love's course, their affair is doomed to unravel - until, that is, a terrible choice must be made. With its witty and masterful prose, Written on the Body takes the reader on a beguiling and defying exploration of love and its physical forms.'An ambitious work, at once a love story and a philosophical meditation on the body' Sunday Telegraph

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'A book of innocence and bawdiness, fury and joy...needs to be read and re-read' The TimesOn the banks of the Thames a baby is found floating. Rescued by the Dog-Woman, a giant strong enough to fling an elephant into the air, their lives together will take them on a dizzying journey through space and time.As past and present collapse and centuries overlap, love, sex, truth, lies and twelve dancing princesses take centre stage. 'Entrancing...fabulous... Its language retains the clear music of poetry' Sunday Telegraph 'Simple prose shows the subtlest of minds behind it, swift, confident and dazzling' Financial Times 'Her stories and characters levitate off the page into dancing life... A bold, bizarre and timely book' Independent

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These interlocking essays uncover art as an active force in the world - neither elitist or remote, present to those who want it, affecting even those who don't. Winterson's own passionate vision of art is presented here, provocatively and personally, in pieces on Modernism, autobiography, style, painting, the future of fiction, in two essays on Virginia Woolf, and more intimately in pieces where she describes her relationship to her work and the books that she loves.

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The perfect festive treat: a beautifully illustrated book of Christmas stories and recipes from the Booker prize long-listed author.'Packed with charm and beautifully illustrated, it's a book that will solve your gift dilemmas and let you escape the less salubrious aspects of Christmas for a literary wonderland' StylistEverybody loves a Christmas story. The tradition of the Twelve Days of Christmas is a tradition of celebration, sharing and giving. And what better way to do that than with a story?Read these stories by the fire, in the snow, travelling home for the holidays. Give them to friends, wrap them up for someone you love, read them aloud, read them alone, read them together. Enjoy the season of peace and goodwill, mystery, and a little bit of magic.There are ghosts here and jovial spirits. Chances at love and tricks with time.There is frost and icicles, mistletoe and sledges. There's a cat and a dog and a solid silver frog. There's a Christmas cracker with a surprising gift inside.There's a haunted house and a SnowMama. There are Yuletides and holly wreaths. Three Kings. And a merry little Christmas time.And for the icing on the Christmas cake, there are twelve festive recipes from Yuletides past and present. Red cabbage, gravlax, turkey biryani, sherry trifle, Mrs Winterson's mince pies and more.

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In celebration of the Glyndebourne Festival, Jeanette Winterson has brought together some of the best loved and most critically acclaimed authors writing today to pen stories inspired by opera. Includes an introduction by Jeanette Winterson, Alexander McCall Smith on Cosi Fan Tutte, Ali Smith on Fidelio, Andrew Motion on Peter Grimes, Andrew O'Hagan on Eugene Onegin, Anne Enright on La Boheme, Antonia Fraser on The Marriage of Figaro, Colm Toibin on Pearl Fishers, Jackie Kay on The Makropulos Affair, Joanna Trollope on L'Elisir d'Amore, Julie Myerson on Ariadne auf Naxos, Jeanette Winterson on La Fanciulla del West, Kate Atkinson on La Traviata, Kate Mosse on Pelleas et Melisande, Lynne Truss on The Turn of the Screw, Marina Warner on Dido and Aeneas, Paul Bailey on The Makropulos Affair, Posy Simmonds, 'Midsummer Night at Glyndebourne', Ruth Rendell on Theodora, Sebastian Barry on Natoma, Toby Litt on Don Giovanni.

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How do we love? With romance. With work. Through heartbreak. Throughout a lifetime. As a means, but not an end. Love in all its forms has been an abiding theme of Jeanette Winterson’s writing. Here are selections from her books about that impossible, essential force, stories and truths that search for the mythical creature we call Love.Selected from the books of Jeanette Winterson VINTAGE MINIS: GREAT MINDS. BIG IDEAS. LITTLE BOOKS.A series of short books by the world’s greatest writers on the experiences that make us human Also in the Vintage Minis series:Eating by Nigella LawsonJealousy by Marcel ProustBabies by Anne EnrightDesire by Haruki Murakami

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'Brave and ambitious' Independent In a near-future London, Sappho, Picasso and Handel each set upon the same plan - to flee the city by train. Finding themselves fellow passengers, the poet, the painter and the musician discover their fates drawn together by the curious agency of a book. As stories within stories unfold and journeys intersect, another world comes to the fore - one of painful beauty, where language has the power to heal.'Winterson's belief in love, beauty, and most of all, language, is evangelical and redemptive...it is timely and exciting to read' Rachel Cusk, The Times

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Jeanette Winterson''s explosive first novel, a gripping coming-of-age story, a queer romance, a modern classic.I love her.'Then you do not love the Lord.'Yes, I love both of them.'You cannot.'''I do.''''This is the story of Jeanette, born to be one of God''s elect: adopted by a fanatical Pentecostal family and ablaze with her own zeal for the scriptures, she seems perfectly suited for the life of a missionary. But then she converts Melanie, and realises she loves this woman almost as much as she loves the Lord. How on Earth could her Church called that passion Unnatural?Both a groundbreaking coming-of-age novel and a pioneering work of autofiction, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit goes beyond facts into the deepest truths. Searing and tender, playful and provocative, it is a portrait of the artist as a young evangelist, re-writing her own Bible.''Witty... extraordinary and exhilarating'' The Times

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'Like most people I lived for a long time with my mother and father. My father liked to watch the wrestling, my mother liked to wrestle; it didn't matter what'This is the story of Jeanette, adopted and brought up by her mother as one of God's elect. Zealous and passionate, she seems destined for life as a missionary, but then she falls for one of her converts. At sixteen, Jeanette decides to leave the church, her home and her family, for the young woman she loves. Innovative, punchy and tender, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is a few days ride into the bizarre outposts of religious excess and human obsession.'Witty… extraordinary and exhilarating' The Times'She is a master of her material, a writer in whom great talent abides' Vanity Fair'Many consider her to be the best living writer in this language... In her hands, words are fluid, radiant, humming' Evening Standard'A novel that deserves revisiting' Observer'A wonderful rites-of-passage novel' Mariella Frostrup

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Interweaving elements of fantasy and history, this novel chronicles the adventures of Jordan, who lives with his mother by the Thames during the reign of Charles II, as he follows his dreams to the end of the world, and beyond.

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Condemned to shoulder the world forever by the gods he dared defy, freedom seems unattainable to Atlas. But then he receives an unexpected visit from Heracles, the one man strong enough to share the burden . . .Jeanette Winterson's retelling of the myth of Atlas and Heracles asks difficult and eternal questions about the nature of choice and coercion. Visionary and inventive, Weight turns the familiar on its head to show us ourselves in a new light.The Myths series brings together some of the world's finest writers, each of whom has retold a myth in a contemporary and memorable way. Authors in the series include Karen Armstrong, Margaret Atwood, A.S. Byatt, David Grossman, Natsuo Kirino, Alexander McCall Smith, Philip Pullman, Ali Smith and Jeanette Winterson.

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'Utterly compulsive' Daily Telegraph'A gripping gothic read' Sarah Hall, Guardian'So seductive ... I was hooked' IndependentThe Forest of Pendle used to be a hunting ground, but some say that the hill is the hunter - alive in its black-and-green coat cropped like an animal pelt.Good Friday, 1612. Two notorious witches await trial and certain death in Lancaster Castle, whilst a small group gathers in secret protest. Into this group the self-made Alice Nutter stakes her claim and swears to fight against the rule of fear. But what is Alice's connection to these witches? What is magic if not power, and what will happen to the women who possess it?

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'At that time I could not imagine what would become of me, and I didn't care. It was not judgement day, but another morning'This is the story of Jeanette, adopted and brought up by working-class evangelists in the North of England to be one of God's elect. Passionate, headstrong and shielded by her mother's grand disapproval of a sinful world, she seems destined for life as a missionary. And then she meets Melanie.At sixteen, Jeanette faces a world of uncertainty as she breaks from the church and her community for the young woman she loves. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is a warm, witty and daring novel that gives voice to irrepressible desire.Meet ten of literature's most iconic heroines, jacketed in bold portraits by female photographers from around the world.

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***LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2019*****SHORTLISTED FOR THE COMEDY WOMEN IN PRINT PRIZE 2020****LONGLISTED FOR THE POLARI PRIZE 2020**'Beware, for I am fearless and therefore powerful.'Inspired by Mary Shelley's gothic classic Frankenstein, discover this audacious new novel about the bodies we live in and the bodies we desire.As Brexit grips Britain, Ry, a young transgender doctor, is falling in love. The object of their misguided affection: the celebrated AI-specialist, Professor Victor Stein. Meanwhile, Ron Lord, just divorced and living with his Mum again, is set to make his fortune with a new generation of sex dolls for lonely men everywhere.Ranging from 1816, when nineteen-year-old Mary Shelley pens her radical first novel, to a cryonics facility in present-day Arizona where the dead wait to return to life, Frankissstein shows us how much closer we are to the future than we realise.'Intelligent and inventive...very funny' The Times 'One of the most gifted writers working today' New York Times

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'Winterson is a rangy pirate, a world-swashbuckler, a plunderer of stories, literatures and hearts' Ali Smith, Scotsman 'It's night. I'm sitting at my screen. There's an e-mail for me. I unwrap it. It says - Freedom, just for one night.' Ali, or Alix, is an e-writer. They will write anything you like, but on one condition: that you are prepared to enter your story. Finally, you can be the hero of your own life. But, there is a price to pay - the risk that you might leave the story as somebody else.'Brilliant, evocative writing... Winterson never seems to put a foot wrong... It is funny, clever, entertaining and wholly delightful' Spectator

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‘A shining delight of a novel’New York Times 'Clever and beautiful...it soars'Financial Times A baby girl is abandoned, banished from London to the storm-ravaged American city of New Bohemia. Her father has been driven mad by jealousy, her mother to exile by grief. Seventeen years later, Perdita doesn't know a lot about who she is or where she's come from - but she's about to find out. Jeanette Winterson’s cover version of The Winter’s Tale vibrates with echoes of Shakespeare's original and tells a story of hearts broken and hearts healed, a story of revenge and forgiveness, a story that shows that whatever is lost shall be found.‘Emotionally wrought and profoundly intelligent... A supremely clever, compelling and emotionally affecting novel that deserves multiple readings to appreciate its many layers’Mail on Sunday 'There are passages here so concisely beautiful they give you goosebumps'Observer'Pulsates with such authenticity and imaginative generosity that I defy you not to engage with it'Independent

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Travelling across the Atlantic on board the QE2, Alice - a bright, young physicist - meets Jove, short for Giovanni, one of the world's most respected experts on time travel and a confirmed lothario. By the time the pair land in New York, Alice has become Jove's mistress, an affair of the heart which is only complicated further when Alice meets Jove's, wife, Stella; a tempestuous beauty born with a diamond at the base of her spine. As this love triangle turns into a menage-a-trois, Alice, Stella and Jove struggle against the currents immersing them, while their romance pulls into its wake the stories of other generations, philosophies, quantum physics and time travel. A celebration of the human heart in all its frailty, confusion and excess, Gut Symmetries is a lyrical evocation of parallel lives, loves and universes, from one of Britain's best loved authors.

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From one of Britain’s best-loved literary novelists comes a magical, lyrical tale of the young orphan Silver, taken in by the ancient lighthousekeeper Mr. Pew, who reveals to her a world of myth and mystery through the art of storytelling. Motherless and anchorless, Silver is taken in by the timeless Mr. Pew, keeper of the Cape Wrath lighthouse. Pew tells Silver ancient tales of longing and rootlessness, of the slippages that occur throughout every life. One life, Babel Dark’s, a nineteenth-century clergyman, opens like a map that Silver must follow, and the intertwining of myth and reality, of storytelling and experience, lead her through her own particular darkness. A story of mutability, talking birds and stolen books, of Darwin and Stevenson and of the Jekyll and Hyde in all of us, Lighthousekeeping is a way into the most secret recesses of our own hearts and minds. Jeanette Winterson is one of the most extraordinary and original writers of her generation, and this shows her at her lyrical best.

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The shocking, heart-breaking - and often very funny - true story behind Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit.In 1985 Jeanette Winterson's first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, was published. It was Jeanette's version of the story of a terraced house in Accrington, an adopted child, and the thwarted giantess Mrs Winterson. It was a cover story, a painful past written over and repainted. It was a story of survival.This book is that story's the silent twin. It is full of hurt and humour and a fierce love of life. It is about the pursuit of happiness, about lessons in love, the search for a mother and a journey into madness and out again. It is generous, honest and true.‘Unforgettable… It’s the best book I have ever read about the cost of growing up’ Daisy Goodwin, Sunday Times**ONE OF THE GUARDIAN'S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21st CENTURY**

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In this, her first collection of short stories, Winterson reveals all the facets of her extraordinary imagination. In prose that is full of imagery and word-play, she creates physical and psychological worlds that are at once familiar and yet shockingly strange.

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Jeanette Winterson retells 'Hansel and Gretel'. A Fairy Tale Revolution is here to remix and revive our favourite stories. 'Deep in the wood'Greta lives with her brother Hansel on the edge of a great forest - a forest in danger of destruction.GreedyGuts, their aunt, doesn't appreciate Hansel and Greta's plans to replant trees and save the forest. In fact, she thinks they're horrible little vegetarians.GreedyGuts doesn't give two hoots about nature. She favours luxury and living it up: eating, shopping and partying hard. And so she hatches a plan to get rid of the meddling, do-gooder kids...deep in the wood.

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A beautiful new edition of Mary Shelley's Gothic horror classic, FrankensteinINCLUDES A CULTURAL HISTORY OF FRANKENSTEIN’S MONSTER BY JEANETTE WINTERSONNavigating the Arctic, the captain of a ship rescues a man wandering near death across the ice caps. How the man got there reveals itself a story of ambition, murder and revenge. As a young scientist, Victor Frankenstein pushed moral boundaries in order to cross the final frontier and create life. But his creation is a monster stitched together from grave-plundered body parts who has no place in the world, and his existence can only lead to tragedy.**One of the BBC’s 100 Novels That Shaped Our World**

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WITH INTRODUCTIONS BY JEANETTE WINTERSON AND GILLIAN BEERThe Waves is an astonishingly beautiful and poetic novel. It begins with six children playing in a garden by the sea and follows their lives as they grow up and experience friendship, love and grief at the death of their beloved friend Percival. Regarded by many as her greatest work, The Waves is also seen as Virginia Woolf's response to the loss of her brother Thoby, who died when he was twenty-six.The Vintage Classics Virginia Woolf series has been curated by Jeanette Winterson, and the texts used are based on the original Hogarth Press editions published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf.

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'The finest book ever written on nature and landscape in Britain' GuardianIntroduction by Robert Macfarlane. Afterword by Jeanette WintersonIn this masterpiece of nature writing, Nan Shepherd describes her journeys into the Cairngorm mountains of Scotland. There she encounters a world that can be breathtakingly beautiful at times and shockingly harsh at others. Her intense, poetic prose explores and records the rocks, rivers, creatures and hidden aspects of this remarkable landscape. Shepherd spent a lifetime in search of the 'essential nature' of the Cairngorms; her quest led her to write this classic meditation on the magnificence of mountains, and on our imaginative relationship with the wild world around us. Composed during the Second World War, the manuscript of The Living Mountain lay untouched for more than thirty years before it was finally published.

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THE TIMES AUDIOBOOK OF THE YEAR'The finest book ever written on nature and landscape in Britain' GuardianIn this masterpiece of nature writing, beautifully narrated by Oscar-winning actor Tilda Swinton, Nan Shepherd describes her journeys into the Cairngorm mountains of Scotland. There she encounters a world that can be breathtakingly beautiful at times and shockingly harsh at others. Her intense, poetic prose explores and records the rocks, rivers, creatures and hidden aspects of this remarkable landscape. Shepherd spent a lifetime in search of the 'essential nature' of the Cairngorms; her quest led her to write this classic meditation on the magnificence of mountains, and on our imaginative relationship with the wild world around us. Composed during the Second World War, the manuscript of The Living Mountain lay untouched for more than thirty years before it was finally published.

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