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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.

<i>Zombies want brains. Vampires want blood. Cannibals want human flesh. </i>All<i> monsters need feeding.</i><br/><br/>Horror has been embraced by mainstream pop culture more than ever before, with horror characters and aesthetics infecting TV, music videos and even TikTok trends. Yet even with the commercial and critical success of <i>The Babadook, Hereditary, Get Out, The Haunting of Hill House, Yellowjackets</i> and countless other horror films and TV series over the last few years, loving the genre still prompts the question: <i>what's wrong with you?</i> Implying, of course, that there is something <i>not quite right</i> about the people who make and consume it. In <i>Feeding the Monster</i>, Anna Bogutskaya dispels this notion once and for all by examining how horror responds to and fuels our feelings of fear, anxiety, pain, hunger and power.

<b>From the bestselling author of <i>Mayflies</i> and <i>Caledonian Road</i>, a heart-enriching celebration of what makes us great: our friends.</b><br/><br/>If we are lucky, in our lives, our friendships will be rich and varied. They will be shared with those with two legs, with four legs, with whiskers or clean faces; they will come dressed in the simplicity of childhood or the professional attire of adult life; some will span decades, and some will be only fleeting. But the thing they will all have in common is that life is not only unimaginable - but unimagined - without them.<br/><br/>In these gorgeous personal reflections, Andrew O'Hagan explores friendship through music and poetry, memory and history, illuminating the many ways and reasons that people come together, and how our lives are all the better because we do.

In this fascinating collection, Jenny Erpenbeck meditates on the disappearance and impermanence of things. Whether recalling the demolition of familiar places, the loss of a friendship, or a change in social attitudes, Erpenbeck's sharp intelligence, eye for telling detail, and her nuanced perspective on her country's history and her own writing lifeimbue these short pieces with lasting power.

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.

In 1920, Virginia and Leonard Woolf's Hogarth Press published Maxim Gorky's <em>Reminiscences of Tolstoy</em> and it was recognized almost immediately as one of the few masterpieces of modern biography. 'It is one of the most remarkable biographical pieces ever written,' writes Leonard Woolf in his autobiography. 'It makes one hear, see, feel Tolstoy and his character as if one were sitting in the same room - his greatness and his littleness, his entrancing and infuriating complexity, his titanic and poetic personality, his superb humour.' In 1934, the book was expanded to include Gorky's memoirs of two other great Russian literary figures, Anton Chekhov and Leonid Andreev. Almost a hundred years later, <em>Reminiscences of Tolstoy, Chekhov and Andreev</em> is reissued in a superb new translation by Bryan Karetnyk.

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.