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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.

Perspectives On Aesthetics, Art And Culture - Essays In Honour Of Lars-olof Åhlberg [Bok / Häftad]

'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.

'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 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.

Where there is family, there is hope . . . Vienna, 1930s. The Kleinmann family live a simple, ordinary life. Gustav works as a furniture upholsterer while Tini keeps their modest apartment. Their greatest joy is their children: Fritz, Edith, Herta and Kurt. But after the Nazis annex Austria, the Kleinmanns' world rapidly shifts before their eyes. Neighbours turn on them, the business is seized, as the threat to the family becomes ever greater. Gustav and Fritz are among the first to be taken. Nazi police send the pair to Buchenwald in Germany, the beginning of an unimaginable ordeal. Over the months of suffering that follow, there is one constant that keeps them alive: the love between father and son. Then, they discover that Gustav will be transferred to Auschwitz, a certain death sentence, and Fritz is faced with a choice: let his father to die alone, or join him... Based on Gustav's secret diary and meticulous archival research, this book tells the Kleinemanns' story for the first time - a story of love and courage in the face of unparalleled horrors. The Boy Who Followed His Father Into Auschwitz is a reminder of the worst and the best of humanity, of the strength of family ties and the human spirit.

Microdoses of the straight dope, stories so true they had to be wrapped in fiction for our own protection, from the best-selling author of But What if We&apos;re Wrong? A man flying first class discovers a puma in the lavatory. A new coach of a small-town Oklahoma high school football team installs an offense comprised of only one, very special, play. A man explains to the police why he told the employee of his local bodega that his colleague looked like the lead singer of Depeche Mode, a statement that may or may not have led in some way to a violent crime. A college professor discusses with his friend his difficulties with the new generation of students. An obscure power pop band wrestles with its new-found fame when its song &quot;Blizzard of Summer&quot; becomes an anthem for white supremacists. A couple considers getting a medical procedure that will transfer the pain of childbirth from the woman to her husband. A woman interviews a hit man about killing her husband but is shocked by the method he proposes. A man is recruited to join a secret government research team investigating why coin flips are no longer exactly 50/50. A man sees a whale struck by lightning, and knows that everything about his life has to change. A lawyer grapples with the unintended side effects of a veterinarian&apos;s rabies vaccination. Fair warning: Raised in Captivity does not slot into a smooth preexisting groove. If Saul Steinberg and Italo Calvino had adopted a child from a Romanian orphanage and raised him on Gary Larsen and Thomas Bernhard, he would still be nothing like Chuck Klosterman. They might be good company, though. Funny, wise and weird in equal measure, Raised in Captivity bids fair to be one of the most original and exciting story collections in recent memory, a fever graph of our deepest unvoiced hopes, fears and preoccupations. Ceaselessly inventive, hostile to corniness in all its forms, and mean only to the things that really deserve it, it marks a cosmic leap forward for one of our most consistently interesting writers.