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A stunning collection of essays and memoir from twice Booker Prize winner and international bestseller Hilary Mantel, author of The Mirror and the LightIn 1987, when Hilary Mantel was first published in the London Review of Books, she wrote to the editor, Karl Miller, 'I have no critical training whatsoever, so I am forced to be more brisk and breezy than scholarly.' This collection of twenty reviews, essays and pieces of memoir from the next three decades, tells the story of what happened next.Her subjects range far and wide: Robespierre and Danton, the Hite report, Saudi Arabia where she lived for four years in the 1980s, the Bulger case, John Osborne, the Virgin Mary as well as the pop icon Madonna, a brilliant examination of Helen Duncan, Britain's last witch. There are essays about Jane Boleyn, Charles Brandon, Christopher Marlowe and Margaret Pole, which display the astonishing insight into the Tudor mind we are familiar with from the bestselling Wolf Hall Trilogy. Her famous lecture, 'Royal Bodies', which caused a media frenzy, explores the place of royal women in society and our imagination. Here too are some of her LRB diaries, including her first meeting with her stepfather and a confrontation with a circus strongman.Constantly illuminating, always penetrating and often very funny, interleaved with letters and other ephemera gathered from the archive, Mantel Pieces is an irresistible selection from one of our greatest living writers.

'Tawada's <b>strange, exquisite</b> book toys with ideas of language, identity and what it means to own someone else's story or one's own' <i><b>The New Yorker</b> </i>on Tawada's <i>Memoirs of a Polar Bear</i><br/><br/>How perfect that Tawada's first essay collection in English dives deep into her lifelong fascination with the possibilities opened up by cross-hybridizing languages. Tawada famously writes in both Japanese and German, but her interest in language reaches beyond any mere dichotomy. The term 'exophonic', which she first heard in Senegal, has a special allure for the author: 'I was already familiar with similar terms, 'immigrant literature,' or 'creole literature,' but 'exophonic' had a much broader meaning, referring to the general experience of existing outside of one's mother tongue.'<br/><br/>Tawada revels in explorations of cross-cultural and intra-language possibilities (and along the way deals several nice sharp raps to the global primacy of English). The accent here, as in her fiction, is the art of drawing closer to the world through defamiliarization. Never entertaining a received thought, Tawada seeks the still-to-be-discovered truths, as well as what might possibly be invented entirely whole cloth.<br/><br/><i>Exophony </i>opens a new vista into Yoko Tawada's world, and delivers more of her signature erudite wit - at once cross-grained and generous, laser-focused and multidimensional, slyly ironic and warmly companionable.

In 2006, in the wake of several miscarriages, Joanna Pocock travelled by Greyhound bus across the US from Detroit to Los Angeles. Seventeen years later, now in her 50s, she undertakes the same journey, revisiting the same cities, edgelands, highways and motels in the footsteps of the few women writers - Simone de Beauvoir, Ethel Mannin and Irma Kurtz - who chronicled their own road trips across the US. In <em>Greyhound</em>, Pocock explores the overlap of place and memory, the individual with the communal, and the privatization of public space as she navigates two very different landscapes - an earlier, less atomized America, and a current one mired in inequality, as it teeters on the brink of environmental catastrophe. Her focus is on the built-upon environment: the rivers of tarmac, the illuminated gas stations, the sprawling suburbs and the sites of extraction created specifically to fuel contemporary life. Combining memoir, reportage, environmental writing and literary criticism, <em>Greyhound</em> is a moving and immersive book that captures an America in the throes of late capitalism with all its beauty, horror and complexity.

A wonderful writer, who will surely inspire a generation the way that Caitlin Moran did before her&apos; Julie Burchill &apos;I loved it so much, I wanted it to go on forever, Dolly Alderton is so gifted at making people care. A rare talent&apos; Marian Keyes When it comes to the trials and triumphs of becoming a grown up, journalist and former Sunday Times dating columnist Dolly Alderton has seen and tried it all. In her memoir, she vividly recounts falling in love, wrestling with self-sabotage, finding a job, throwing a socially disastrous Rod-Stewart themed house party, getting drunk, getting dumped, realising that Ivan from the corner shop is the only man you&apos;ve ever been able to rely on, and finding that that your mates are always there at the end of every messy night out. It&apos;s a book about bad dates, good friends and - above all else - about recognising that you and you alone are enough. Glittering with wit and insight, heart and humour, Dolly Alderton&apos;s powerful debut weaves together personal stories, satirical observations, a series of lists, recipes, and other vignettes that will strike a chord of recognition with women of every age - while making you laugh until you fall over. Everything I know About Love is about the struggles of early adulthood in all its grubby, hopeful uncertainty. A spot-on, wildly funny and sometimes heart-breaking book about growing up, growing older and navigating all kinds of love along the way.

'Do-Over', one of the stories in this dazzling, smart and razor-sharp first collection by Curtis Sittenfeld, Sunday Times bestselling author of Eligible and American Wife. In `The World Has Many Butterflies', a married woman flirts with a man she meets at parties by playing You think it, I'll say it, putting into words the bitchy things she guesses he's thinking about their fellow guests. But she is in for a shock when, in time, she finds out what was really in his mind. `The Nominee' sees Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail, confessing her surprising true feelings about a woman journalist she has sparred with over the years. In `Gender Studies', a visiting academic sleeps with her taxi driver, for what turns out to be all the wrong reasons. The theme that unites these stories is how even the cleverest people tend to misread others, and how much we all deceive ourselves. Sharp and tender, funny and wise, they show Sittenfeld's knack for creating real, believable characters that spring off the page, while also skewering contemporary mores with brilliant dry wit.

The one and only Zadie Smith, prize-winning, bestselling author of Swing Time and White Teeth, is back with a second unmissable collection of essays 'Should you read this brilliant book? Absolutely' Independent 'Generous, curious, insistent on the possibility of imaginative connection' Evening Standard No subject is too fringe or too mainstream for Zadie Smith's insatiable curiosity. From social media to the environment, from Jay-Z to Karl Ove Knausgaard, she has endless enthusiasmand the boundless wit, insight and wisdom 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 collection showcases its author as a true literary powerhouse, demonstrating once again her credentials as an essential voice of her generation. 'Lively, intelligent and frequently hilarious, [it] proves that she's one of the brightest minds in English literature today' NPR 'Smart, spirited and distinctive' Wall Street Journal 'She is the book nerd, the culture geek, reading, hearing and seeing, and dying to talk to somebody about it' Guardian

The extraordinary #1 bestseller - a word-of-mouth literary phenomenon &apos;Do not read this book in public: it will make you cry&apos; Anne Enright &apos;Every line pulses with the pain and joy and complexity of an extraordinary life&apos; Mark O&apos;Connell &apos;I am afraid of being the disruptive woman. And of not being disruptive enough. I am afraid. But I am doing it anyway.&apos; In this dazzling debut, Emilie Pine speaks to the business of living as a woman in the 21st century - its extraordinary pain and its extraordinary joy. Courageous, humane and uncompromising, she writes with radical honesty on birth and death, on the grief of infertility, on caring for her alcoholic father, on taboos around female bodies and female pain, on sexual violence and violence against the self. Devastatingly poignant and profoundly wise - and joyful against the odds - Notes to Self offers a portrait not just of its author but of a whole generation.