Non-fiction

Twelve bytes. Twelve eye-opening, mind-expanding, funny and provocative essays on the implications of artificial intelligence for the way we live and the way we love - from Sunday Times-bestselling author Jeanette Winterson. An original, and entertaining new book from Jeanette Winterson, drawing on her years of thinking about and reading about Artificial Intelligence in its bewildering manifestations. She looks to history, religion, myth, literature, the politics of race and gender, and of co...

‘It seemed a simple and interesting idea: what plants would you choose if starting a garden from scratch, given that you were only allowed to propagate them from seed? ... The emphasis is on childish simplicity of approach, and economy of outlay.’ – James Fenton In this light-hearted gardening book, James Fenton describes a hundred plants he would choose to grow from seed. Flowers for colour, size, or exotic interest; herbs and meadow flowers; climbing vines and tropical species… Here is a ha...

In this collection of essays on the work of, and conversations with, John Berger, thirty-seven of his friends, artistic collaborators and followers come together to form the first truly international and cross-cultural celebration of his interventions. Berger has for decades, through his poetic humanism, brought together geographically, historically and socially disparate subjects. His work continues to throw out lifelines across genres, times and types of experience, opening up radical quest...

The language we use when we are in love is not a language we speak. It is a language addressed to ourselves and to our imaginary beloved. It is a language of solitude, of mythology, of what Barthes calls an 'image repertoire'. Reviving the notion of the amorous subject beyond psychological or clinical enterprises, Barthes' A Lover's Discourse is a book for everyone who has ever been in love, or indeed, thought themselves to be immune to its power. Paperback: 256 PagesProduct Dimensions: 129 x...

Many of us find ourselves in the odd situation of not believing in religion - but nevertheless being interested in it, moved by it and sympathetic to some of its aims. We may enjoy religious art and architecture, music and community, and even some of the rituals - while being unable to believe in angels, divine commandments or stories about the afterlife. This book is about those feelings and what we might do about them. The School of Life is a secular organisation fascinated by the gaps left...

Ranging from the silent fate of Shakespeare's gifted imaginary sister to Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë and the effects of poverty and sexual constraint on female creativity, A Room of One's Own, based on a lecture given by Woolf at Girton College, Cambridge, is one of the great feminist polemics. Published almost a decade later, Three Guineas breaks new ground in its discussion of men, militarism and women's attitudes towards war. These two pieces reveal Virginia Woolf's indomitable spirit, s...

translated by Richard Howard* A Short History of Decay (1949) is E.M. Cioran's nihilistic and witty collection of aphoristic essays concerning the nature of civilization in mid-twentieth-century Europe. Touching upon Man's need to worship, the feebleness of God, the downfall of the Ancient Greeks and the melancholy baseness of all existence, Cioran's pieces are pessimistic in the extreme, but also display a beautiful certainty that renders them delicate, vivid, and memorable. Illuminating and...

From Macaulay in the 19th century to Fukuyama in the late 20th, historians have often been lulled into thinking that things can only get better. Such belief in progress, argues Simon Heffer, may be typical of times of plenty, but it ignores a less palatable truth: that, since the beginnings of recorded history, the major events in international relations can be attributed to a single cause, the desire by rulers to assert or protect their power. Taking a panoramic view from the days of Thucydi...

Ranging from the personal to the analytical, covering subjects such as art, politics, storytelling and creativity, A Way of Being Free confirms Okri's place as one of the most inspiring of contemporary writers.Paperback: 272 pagesProduct Dimensions: 129 x 198 mmISBN: 9781784082567Published by Head of Zeus

Against Everything is a thought-provoking study and essential guide to the vicissitudes of everyday life under twenty-first-century capitalism. Mark Greif is one of the most exciting writers of his generation. In this invigorating collection, he challenges us to rethink the ordinary world and take life seriously - in short, to stay honest in dishonest times. In a series of coruscating set pieces he asks why we put ourselves through the pains of exercise, what our concerns about diet or sex do...

Against Interpretation was Susan Sontag's first collection of essays and made her name as one of the most incisive thinkers of our time. Sontag was among the first critics to write about the intersection between 'high' and 'low' art forms, and to give them equal value as valid topics, shown here in her epoch-making pieces 'Notes on Camp' and 'Against Interpretation'. Here too are impassioned discussions of Sartre, Camus, Simone Weil, Godard, Beckett, Levi-Strauss, science-fiction movies, psyc...

Reality versus fiction is at the heart of the current literary debate. We live in a world of docu-drama, the ‘real life’ story. Works of art, novels, films, are frequently bolstered by reference to the autobiography of the creator, or to underlying ‘fact.’ Where does that leave the imagination? And who gets to define the parameters of ‘reality’ and ‘fiction’ anyway? Five writers debate the limits of materialism and realism, in art and literature – and offer a passionate defence of the alchemi...

Five decades after her debut poetry collection, Firstborn, Louise Glück is a towering figure in American letters. Written with the same probing, analytic control that has long distinguished her poetry, American Originality is Glück's second book of essays--her first, Proofs and Theories, won the 1993 PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction. Glück's moving and disabusing lyricism is on full display in this decisive new collection. From its opening pages, American Originality forces reade...

Christopher Hitchens was an unparalleled, prolific writer, who raised the polemical essay to a new art form, over a lifetime of thinking and debating the defining issues of our times. As an essayist he contributed to the New Statesman, Atlantic Monthly, London Review of Books, TLS and Vanity Fair. Any publication of a volume of Hitchens' essays was a major event on both sides of the Atlantic. Now comes a volume of Hitchens' previously uncollected essays, covering the themes that define Hitche...

Vivian Gornick’s writing has always explored the hard truths of existence: the nature of human loneliness, and the struggle to love, work, and connect. In these seven seminal essays Gornick chronicles the New York streets that energise her, and looks back on the dangerously charged atmosphere of the Catskills where she waitressed as a student in the late fifties. She describes her introduction to feminism and the lessons it taught her, reflects on a friendship with an older female writer that...

The question Are We Human? is both urgent and ancient. Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley offer a multilayered exploration of the intimate relationship between human and design and rethink the philosophy of design in a multi-dimensional exploration from the very first tools and ornaments to the constant buzz of social media. The average day involves the experience of thousands of layers of design that reach to outside space but also reach deep into our bodies and brains. Even the planet itself ...

Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011) was a matchless writer, debater and humanist. Throughout his life he shone the light of reason and truth into the eyes of charlatans and hucksters, exposing falsehood and decrying hypocrisy wherever he found it. With his passing, the world lost a great soul, the written word one of its finest advocates and those who stand for freedom everywhere have lost one of their clearest voices. Arguably collects Hitchens' writing on politics, literature and religion when...

A dazzling meditation on the philosophical, scientific, and historical roots of attention, an attempt to pin down this elusive state of being. You've paid money for this book, or you have family or friends who don't mind your borrowing or who gift books like this. You are being attentive because you're interested in what type of person this gifter thinks you are - too attentive, to them, to yourself, or too inattentive. Hardback: 240 PagesProduct Dimensions: 120 x 190 mmISBN: 9781907903618 Pu...

The chant of 'Azadi!' - Urdu for 'Freedom!' - is the slogan of the freedom struggle in Kashmir against what Kashmiris see as the Indian Occupation. Ironically, it also became the chant of millions on the streets of India against the project of Hindu Nationalism. Even as Arundhati Roy began to ask what lay between these two calls for Freedom - a chasm or a bridge? - the streets fell silent. Not only in India, but all over the world. The Coronavirus brought with it another, more terrible unders...

This new selection of essays by Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) demonstrate the varied aspects of his genius. The selection shows the surprise and contradiction of Wilde s extraordinary character: wit, romancer, talker, lecturer and scholar. The ideas expressed remain remarkably relevant to modern readers, and his popularity remains undiminished. Hardback: 192 PagesProduct Dimensions: 120 x 190 mmISBN: 9781910749067 Published by Notting Hill Editions

The body frequently escapes her but is always very much present in these compellingly vivid, clear-eyed essays on an embodied self in flight through the world, from the brilliant young writer Ellena Savage. These essays traverse cities and spaces, bodies and histories, moving through forms and modes to find a closer kind of truth. Paperback: 256 PagesProduct Dimensions: 129 x 198 mmISBN: 9781912854677 Published by Scribe Publications

Bluets winds its way through depression, divinity, alcohol, and desire, visiting along the way with famous blue figures, including Joni Mitchell, Billie Holiday, Yves Klein, Leonard Cohen and Andy Warhol. While its narrator sets out to construct a sort of ‘pillow book’ about her lifelong obsession with the colour blue, she ends up facing down both the painful end of an affair and the grievous injury of a dear friend. The combination produces a raw, cerebral work devoted to the inextricability...

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. One day, his father gave him a dog-eared book called Exploration Fawcett. The book told the true story of 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 hostile tribes, his mi...

'A problem of space first of all, then a problem of order' One of the most singular and extravagant imaginations of the twentieth century, the novelist and essayist Georges Perec was a true original who delighted in wordplay, puzzles, taxonomies and seeing the extraordinary in the everyday. In these virtuoso writings about books and language, he discusses different ways of reading, a list of the things he really must do before he dies and the power of words to overcome the chaos of the world....

Why is it important to imbibe a thinking culture? What can contemporary Malays contribute by way of an active intellectual and social life towards reform and progress? Where are the loci of critical thought in Malay public life? In a revealing book of essays edited by Mohamed Imran Mohamed Taib and Nurul Fadiah Johari, writers from various backgrounds—academics, researchers, community organisers, and social activists—offer insights and critical reflections into contemporary Malay society. The...

An immigrant with a parrot in Stockholm, a photo of a girl in Lviv, a sculpture of Alexander the Great in Skopje, a memorial ceremony for the 50th anniversary of the Soviet led army invasion of Prague: these are a few glimpses of life in Eastern Europe today. Three decades after the Velvet Revolution, Slavenka Drakulic, the author of Cafe Europa and A Guided Tour of the Museum Of Communism, takes a look at what has changed and what has remained the same in the region in her daring new essay c...

Beginning with the election of Donald Trump ("The Loneliest Man in the World") and expanding back and forth into American history, surveillance, violence against the individual, the denormalizing of misogyny and the rehumanizing of public space. The ultimate focus of the book is climate and feminist activism, bringing Solnit's trademark deep analysis to bear on a range of contemporary crises. And again, and spectacularly, she shows us how to hope.Hardback: 192 PagesProduct Dimensions: 129 x 1...

Illustrated by Selçuk Demirel What happens when cataracts rob an art critic of his sight? John Berger, whose classic book Ways of Seeing has been in print for nearly forty years, joins forces with Turkish illustrator Selçuk Demirel to reflect on his own experience of loss of vision. Hardback: 96 PagesProduct Dimensions: 120 x 190 mmISBN: 9781907903328 Published by Notting Hill Editions

Split into five sections--Reading, Being, Seeing, Feeling, and Remembering--Changing My Mind finds Zadie Smith casting an acute eye over material both personal and cultural. This engaging collection of essays, some published here for the first time, reveals Smith as a passionate and precise essayist, equally at home in the world of great books and bad movies, family and philosophy, British comedians and Italian divas. Whether writing on Katherine Hepburn, Kafka, Anna Magnani, or Zora Neale Hu...

Arthur Miller was not only one of America's most important twentieth-century playwrights, but he was also one of its most influential literary, cultural, and intellectual voices. Throughout his career, he consistently remained one of the country's leading public intellectuals, advocating tirelessly for social justice, global democracy, and the arts. Theater scholar Susan C. W. Abbotson introduces this volume as a selection of Miller's finest essays, organized in three thematic parts: essays o...

Italo Calvino in Collection of Sand claimed that 'the brain begins in the eye'. The essays collected here display his fascination with the visual universe, in which the things we see tell a truth about the world. With encyclopedic knowledge and engaging curiosity, Calvino writes about such diverse subjects as the imaginative pleasures of maps, bizarre exhibitions and the earliest forms of written language. Books and paintings provoke discussions of artistic motivation, while descriptions of a...

'Language is a body, a living creature ... and this creature's home is the inarticulate as well as the articulate'. John Berger's work has revolutionized the way we understand visual language. In this new book he writes about language itself, and how it relates to thought, art, song, storytelling and political discourse today. Also containing Berger's own drawings, notes, memories and reflections on everything from Albert Camus to global capitalism, Confabulations takes us to what is 'true, e...

In this spellbinding blend of memoir and insight, bestselling author Chuck Palahniuk shares stories and generous advice on what makes writing powerful and what makes for powerful writing. With advice grounded in years of careful study and a keenly observed life, Palahniuk combines practical advice and concrete examples from beloved classics, his own books, and a "kitchen-table MFA" culled from an evolving circle of beloved authors and artists, with anecdotes, postcards from the road, and much...

After years of feeling that love was always out of reach, journalist Natasha Lunn set out to understand how relationships work and evolve over a lifetime. She turned to authors and experts to learn about their experiences, as well as drawing on her own, asking: How do we find love? How do we sustain it? And how do we survive when we lose it? In Conversations on Love she began to find the answers: Philippa Perry on falling in love slowly Dolly Alderton on vulnerability Stephen Grosz on accepti...

After the publication of Outline, Transit and Kudos - in which Rachel Cusk redrew the boundaries of fiction - this writer of uncommon brilliance returns with a series of essays that offers new insights on the themes at the heart of her life's work. Encompassing memoir and cultural and literary criticism, with pieces on gender, politics and writers such as D. H. Lawrence, Olivia Manning and Natalia Ginzburg, this collection is essential reading for our age: fearless, unrepentantly erudite, bot...

A few years ago, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie received a letter from a dear friend from childhood, asking her how to raise her baby girl as a feminist. Dear Ijeawele is Adichie's letter of response. Here are fifteen invaluable suggestions-compelling, direct, wryly funny, and perceptive-for how to empower a daughter to become a strong, independent woman. From encouraging her to choose a helicopter, and not only a doll, as a toy if she so desires; having open conversations with her about clothes, m...

The Holocaust never happened. The planet isn’t warming. Vaccines cause autism. There is no such thing as AIDS. The Earth is flat. Denialism comes in many forms, dressed in the garb of research proudly claiming to represent the best traditions of scholarship. Its influence is insidious, its techniques are pernicious. Climate change denialists have built well-funded institutions and lobbying groups to counter action against global warming. Holocaust deniers have harried historians and abused su...

Written with bracing wit and intelligence, Rachel Maddow's Drift argues that we've drifted away from America's original ideals and become a nation weirdly at peace with perpetual war. To understand how we've arrived at such a dangerous place, Maddow takes us from the Vietnam War to today's war in Afghanistan, along the way exploring Reagan's radical presidency, the disturbing rise of executive authority, the gradual outsourcing of our war-making capabilities to private companies, the plummeti...

Translasted by Jeremy Tiang In this mix of memoir, essay and nature writing, Wong Yoon Wah evokes the beauty and seduction of the tropical rainforest and rubber plantations of his childhood in Malaya. He examines what surrounds us: the fruits we grow, the food we eat, the trees and animals that thrive in our midst. Along the way, we gain fascinating insights: how thunder tea rice acquired its name; how early settlers used the rain tree to tell time; how the behaviour of ants can tell us when ...

This collection of intimate, illustrated essays by some of America's most well-regarded literary writers explores how comfort food can help us cope with dark times--be it the loss of a parent, the loneliness of a move, or the pain of heartache. Lev Grossman explains how he survived on "sweet, sour, spicy, salty, unabashedly gluey" General Tso's tofu after his divorce. Carmen Maria Machado describes her growing pains as she learned to feed and care for herself during her twenties. Claire Messu...

“The role of the critic,” Daniel Mendelsohn writes, “is to mediate intelligently and stylishly between a work and its audience; to educate and edify in an engaging and, preferably, entertaining way.” His latest collection exemplifies the range, depth, and erudition that have made him “required reading for anyone interested in dissecting culture” (The Daily Beast). In Ecstasy and Terror, Mendelsohn once again casts an eye at literature, film, television, and the personal essay, filtering his i...

From My Little Pony to the Sex Pistols: An engaging exploration of why we love what we love Katy Perry. Wes Anderson. Coldplay. Star Wars. Hamilton. Gilmore Girls. We all have our most and least favorite things. But why? In this smart, funny, and well-researched book, Benjamin Errett brings together the latest findings from the worlds of psychology, criticism, neuroscience, market research, and more to examine what taste really means--and what it can teach us about ourselves. Covering kitsch,...

With the same dazzling mix of emotion and idea that characterizes his novels he illuminates the art and artists who remain important to him and whose work helps us better understand the world. An astute and brilliant reader of fiction, Kundera applies these same gifts to the reading of Francis Bacon's paintings, Leos Janácek's music, the films of Federico Fellini, as well as to the novels of Philip Roth, Dostoyevsky, and García Márquez, among others. He also takes up the challenge of restorin...

These essays, reviews and articles illuminate the life and work of one of the most individual writers of this century - a man who created a unique literary manner from the process of thinking aloud and who elevated political writing to an art.Paperback: 480 PagesProduct Dimensions: 112 x 180 mm ISBN: 9780141395463 Published by Penguin Books

The essays in this collection are, of course, not merely concerned with the self. Woolf does also discuss the rights of women, the revolutions of modernity, the past, present and future of the novel. She is eloquent on social inequality and the agony of war. She is a robust literary antiquarian, she rakes through the past in search of treasure. She is transfixed, as well, by the aesthetic contests of the present, the dynamic incompleteness of her era. She fights with local demons, she mocks t...

An unusual book of quirky essays, some deeply personal. Xu Xi writes from within, of Hong Kong’s vanishing culture and sensibility as it transforms itself into a space that is 21st Century China. She zooms in on her own life in the city on family, friends and a professional history as both business executive and author, on moments that offer wry observations of the shifting world around her. She casts her eye on films, pop stars, public transportation, and muses on the political, without losi...

No subject is too fringe or too mainstream for the unstoppable Zadie Smith. From social media to the environment, from Jay-Z to Karl Ove Knausgaard, she has boundless curiosity and the boundless wit to match. In Feel Free, pop culture, high culture, social change and political debate all get the Zadie Smith treatment, dissected with razor-sharp intellect, set brilliantly against the context of the utterly contemporary, and considered with a deep humanity and compassion. This electrifying new ...

Covering an array of subjects, from the meaning of art to supermarket shopping, these pieces were chosen for their originality, literary style, and above all, their ability to persuade. The judges awarded the first prize to “Five Ways of Being a Painting” by William Max Nelson for “its curious mix of the philosophical and the personal, the argumentative and the ruminative, that makes it a real essay.” The biennial Notting Hill Editions Essay Prize is open to all essays written in English of b...