LITERARY CRITICISM & ESSAYS
A Bookseller Recommends...
Dead and Alive
Zadie Smith
In this keenly awaited new collection, Zadie Smith brings her unique skills as an essayist to bear on a range of subjects which have captured her attention in recent years.
She takes an exhilaratingly close look at artists Toyin Ojih Odutola, Kara Walker and Celia Paul. She invites us along to the movies, to see and to think about Tár, and to Glastonbury to witness the ascendance of Stormzy.
She takes us on a walk down Kilburn High Road in her beloved North West London and invites us to mourn with her the passing of writers Joan Didion, Martin Amis, Hilary Mantel, Philip Roth and Toni Morrison. She considers changes of government on both sides of the Atlantic – and the meaning of ‘the commons’ in all our lives.
A Bookseller Recommends...
One Aladdin Two Lamps
Jeanette Winterson
I can change the story because I am the story.
With her execution looming, a woman is fighting for her life. Every night she tells a story. Every morning, she lives one more day. One Aladdin Two Lamps cracks open the legendary story of One Thousand and One Nights to show how its questions are still relevant to our lives today. Is love the most important thing in the world? What makes us happy?
In her guise as Aladdin, Jeanette Winterson asks us to reread what we think we know and look again at how fiction works in our lives, giving us the courage to change our own narratives and alter endings we wish to subvert. As a young working-class woman, with no obvious future beyond factory work or marriage, Winterson realised through the power of books that she could read herself as fiction as well as fact.
Weaving together fiction, magic and memoir, this remarkable book is a tribute to the age-old tradition of storytelling and a radical step into the future – an invitation to look more closely at our own stories, and to imagine the world anew.
Fires Which Burned Brightly
Sebastian Faulks
On Friendship
Andrew O'Hagan
Dead and Alive
Zadie Smith
One Aladdin Two Lamps
Jeanette Winterson
A Complicated Woman
Rebecca Lucy Taylor
Transcendence for Beginners
Clare Carlisle
Greyhound
Joanna Pocock
Backstage
Donna Leon
Good and Evil
Andrew Irwin and Rory Stewart
Words Are My Matter
Ursula K. Le Guin
Question 7
Richard Flanagan
Reacher: The Stories Behind The Stories
Lee Child
Books - A Manifesto
Ian Patterson
Changing My Mind
Julian Barnes
The Future of Truth
Werner Herzog
Dispersals
Jessica J. Lee
Things That Disappear
Jenny Erpenbeck
89 Words followed by Prague, A Disappearing Poem
Milan Kundera
Granta 173
Thomas Meaney
The Position of Spoons
Deborah Levy
The Slicks
Maggie Nelson
Wild Fictions
Amitav Ghosh
The Hour of the Predator
Giuliano da Empoli
The Message
Ta-Nehisi Coates
My Good Bright Wolf
Sarah Moss
Night Vision
Jean Sprackland
The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World
David Graeber
Into Being
Lily Dunn
On Reflection
Richard Holloway
Alone
Daniel Schreiber
Lifeform
Jenny Slate
Saints
Amy Jeffs
The Writer's Cats
Muriel Barbery
Attention
Anne Enright
The Disenlightenment
David Mamet
The Tower
Thea Lenarduzzi
Dysphoria Mundi
Paul B. Preciado
Epic of the Earth
Edith Hall
The Graces
Breeze Barrington
History in Flames
Robert Bartlett
It's Terrible the Things I Have to Do to Be Me
Philippa Snow
Memories of a Catholic Girlhood
Mary McCarthy
The Odd Woman and the City
Vivian Gornick
A Poet Can Survive Everything But a Misprint
Oscar Wilde
Things in Nature Merely Grow
Yiyun Li
Toni at Random
Dana A. Williams
Alexandrian Sphinx
Peter Jeffreys and Gregory Jusdanis
And Then? And Then? What Else?
Daniel Handler and Lemony Snicket
Blackout
Yann Chateigne Tytelman
Erik Satie Three Piece Suite
Ian Penman
Feeding the Monster
Anna Bogutskaya
The Future of Travel
Granta 172: Badlands
Thomas Meaney
In Praise of Good Bookstores
Jeff Deutsch
In Writing
Hattie Crisell
I Write to Find Out What I am Thinking
Joan Didion
Like Love
Maggie Nelson
Look Closer
Robert Douglas-Fairhurst
Pigeonholed
Gary Younge
Snapshots
Dinah Lenney
Sunday Best
Daniel Gray
The Threshold and the Ledger
Tom McCarthy
Dear Writer
Maggie Smith
The Future of the Novel
Simon Okotie
The Gender of Sound
Anne Carson
In a Yellow Wood
Cynthia Ozick
Men Explain Things to Me
Rebecca Solnit
No Straight Road Takes You There
Rebecca Solnit
Putting Myself Together
Jamaica Kincaid
Silent Catastrophes
W. G. Sebald
The Site of Memory
Toni Morrison
Stalin's Library
Geoffrey Roberts
Strange Relations
Ralf Webb
Thirst
Robert Macfarlane, Lucy Jones and Rebecca Solnit
Tree and Leaf
J. R. R. Tolkien
Turning to Birds
Lili Taylor
What Everyone Knows About Britain* (*Except The British)
Michael Peel
Women in Dark Times
Jacqueline Rose
Writing the Magic
Richard V. Hirst
All Things Are Too Small
Becca Rothfeld
An Anthropologist on Mars
Oliver Sacks
Appendix Project
Kate Zambreno
The Daily Artist's Way
Julia Cameron
Everything in Its Place
Oliver Sacks
Facing Down the Furies
Edith Hall
Genre and Trope
Amy Jones
Golden Age Christmas Mysteries
Otto Penzler
I Want to Talk to You
Diana Evans
Jim
Shelley Fisher Fishkin
A Little History of Literature
John Sutherland
The Magic Books
Anne Lawrence-Mathers
Musicophilia
Oliver Sacks
The Nine Lives of Annie Besant
Clare Paterson
Noah and the Flood in Western Thought
Philip C Almond
No Judgement
Lauren Oyler
Other Traditions
John Ashbery
The Paris Trilogy
Colombe Schneck
Precarious Lease
Jacqueline Feldman
Which as You Know Means Violence
Philippa Snow
An Apartment on Uranus
Paul B. Preciado
Sleepless
Marie Darrieussecq
Regarding the Pain of Others
Susan Sontag
Orientalism
Edward W. Said
Bluets
Maggie Nelson
Shooting an Elephant
George Orwell
What Is Mine
José Henrique Bortoluci
The Gender of Sound
Anne Carson
Bookworm
Lucy Mangan
On Writing
Stephen King
Against Interpretation and Other Essays
Susan Sontag
Letters to a Young Poet
Rainer Maria Rilke
Sister Outsider
Audre Lorde
A Swim in a Pond in the Rain
George Saunders
A Guest at the Feast
Colm Tóibín
Space Crone
Ursula K. Le Guin
Bird by Bird
Anne Lamott
Steering the Craft
Ursula K. Le Guin
The Medium is the Massage
Marshall McLuhan
Portable Magic
Emma Smith
No Straight Road Takes You There
Rebecca Solnit
We're Falling Through Space
J. David Reed
A Room of One's Own
Virginia Woolf
Too Much of Life
Clarice Lispector
Blueberries
Ellena Savage
Artful
Ali Smith
Solutions for Writers
Sol Stein
The Perpetual Race of Achilles and the Tortoise
Jorge Luis Borges
Coventry
Rachel Cusk
Writing Down the Bones
Natalie Goldberg
Essayism
Brian Dillon
How NOT to Write a Novel
Howard Mittelmark and Sandra Newman
Little Weirds
Jenny Slate
Decline of the English Murder
George Orwell
Notes of a Native Son
James Baldwin
Devotion
Patti Smith
Affinities
Brian Dillon
The Long-Winded Lady
Maeve Brennan
A Horse at Night
Amina Cain
The Science of Storytelling
Will Storr
Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors
Susan Sontag
Novelist as a Vocation
Haruki Murakami
Dysphoria Mundi
Paul B. Preciado
Trick Mirror
Jia Tolentino
Into The Woods
John Yorke
Intimations
Zadie Smith
On Writers and Writing
Margaret Atwood
Consider The Lobster
David Foster Wallace
Men Explain Things to Me
Rebecca Solnit
The Weird and the Eerie
Mark Fisher
Ordinary Notes
Christina Sharpe
Reading Lessons
Carol Atherton
Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction
Patricia Highsmith
In Other Words
Jhumpa Lahiri
The Little Virtues
Natalia Ginzburg
Minor Monuments
Ian Maleney
