and Criticism
Conversations with RBG by Jeffrey Rosen ($43, HB)
Drawing on more than 20 years of conversations with Jeffrey Rosen, starting in the 1990s & continuing through the Trump era. Rosen, a veteran legal journalist, scholar & president of the National Constitution Center, shares the Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s observations on a variety of topics—with the affection they have for each other as friends evident in their banter & in their shared love for the Constitution—and for opera. Justice Ginsburg discusses the future of Roe v. Wade, her favourite dissents, the cases she would most like to see overruled, the #MeToo movement, how to be a good listener, and how to lead a productive, compassionate life—and of course the future of the Supreme Court itself.
Essays by Lydia Davis ($45, HB)
Lydia Davis’s writing is a masterclass in control—wry, lucid, penetrating, every word placed deliberately. Here she presents a dazzling collection of literary essays, each one as beautifully formed, thought-provoking, playful & illuminating as her critically acclaimed short fiction. Ranging across her many creative influences, including Thomas Pynchon, Michel Leiris, Maurice Blanchot, Lucia Berlin & Joan Mitchell, she returns again & again to her own writing process, interrogating the limits of literature & the ways in which we can challenge & reinvent it.
97,196 Words: Essays by Emmanuel Carrère
In a search for truth in all its guises, Emamanuel Carrère dispenses with the rules of genre. For him, no form is out of reach- theology, historiography, reportage & memoir. This book introduces Carrère’s shorter work to an English-language audience—it features more than 30 texts written over a 25 year period, spanning continents, histories & personal relationships—considering the divides between truth, reality & our shared humanity, exploring remarkable events & eccentric lives, including Carrère’s own. ($40, HB)
Make It Scream, Make It Burn by Leslie Jamison
This is a profound meditation on isolation, longing & the conflicts faced by all those who choose to tell true stories about the lives of others—and about why and how we tell stories. Leslie Jamison takes the reader deep into the lives of strangers—from a woman healed by the song of ‘the loneliest whale in the world’ to a family convinced their child is a reincarnation of a lost pilot—and asks how we can bear witness to the changing truths of others’ lives while striving to find a deeper connection to the complexities of our own. ($33, PB)
Serious Noticing: Selected Essays by James Wood
From the career-defining ‘Hysterical Realism’ to his more personal reflections on family, religion and sensibility, Serious Noticing offers a comprehensive overview of literary critic author of How Fiction Works, James Wood’s, writing over the last twenty years. These essays offer more than a viewpoint—they show how to bring the eye of critical reading to life as a whole. ($25, PB)
Now in B Format Books that Saved My Life: Reading for Wisdom, Solace & Pleasure by Michael McGirr, $23 The Sky is Falling: The Unexpected Politics of Hollywood’s Superheroes and Zombies by Peter Biskind, $20 On the Shoulders of Giants by Umberto Eco
In this final collection of his essays Umberto Eco explores his perennial areas of interest, accompanied by beautiful reproductions of the art he discusses. These wide-ranging pieces dig into the roots of our civilization, changing ideas of beauty, our obsession with conspiracies & the emblematic heroes of the great narrative, amongst other fascinating topics. ($65, HB)
Gleebooks’ special price $59.99 Outspoken: 50 Speeches by Incredible Women from Boudicca to Michelle Obama (ed) Deborah Coughlin ($33, HB)
A lot of history is made up of speeches. Speeches about big ideas, celebratory speeches, rousing speeches to inspire soldiers to fight to the death, comic speeches to help us see the funny side to life. From Jesus to Winston Churchill to Martin Luther King Jr and even Donald Trump, we’ve been raised with the words of important men ringing in our ears ... But where are all the women? History may not have listened to women, but that never stopped them from speaking out. From Joan of Arc and Virginia Wolf, to Oprah Winfrey and Greta Thunberg, this book is a celebration of outstanding and outspoken women everywhere.
On Chapel Sands Laura Cumming is an art historian of the accessible kind—not dense, academic theory—her way of looking at, and her way of explaining a picture, resonate through her latest book, On Chapel Sands. This is a mystery, a memoir and a most loving tribute to her mother—the central figure in this poetic, haunting book. When her mother was aged three (and known as Betty at that time), she disappeared while playing on the Lincolnshire beach (Chapel Sands in Lincolnshire), and was missing for five days. She is eventually returned to her parents, and this mystery lies dormant for decades, until her daughter, Laura, decides to find out what happened. Her mother, now known as Elizabeth, had written the memoir of her life and given it to Cumming as a twenty first birthday; and this forms the background of On Chapel Sands When Cumming investigates her mother’s strange disappearance, and in fact her true provenance, she uncovers a most extraordinary conspiracy of silence amongst everyone who knew of the five day kidnapping—a whole village in fact, some of whom are very old, but still determined to keep the secret. There are also small black and white photos peppered through the book, at which Cumming looks closely—revealing small clues that come light on this close inspection. This is very illuminating, and I couldn’t help but think of the ‘sentimental regard’ that Susan Sontag writes about in her 1977 book, On Photography. Also fascinating are Cumming’s discussions of certain artworks, particularly Breughel’s Landscape With the Fall of Icarus. This painting, of Icarus falling and drowning in plain sight, is the first picture that Betty, as an art student, ever bought for herself, a worthy leitmotif running through the narrative. While Cumming’s tale is certainly an odd one, it’s perhaps not so unusual for the time in which it’s set. And it is so thoughtfully written that it has an impact far and beyond the facts of the disappearance. It is sad, and it’s affecting, but it is not sentimental, and it stands as a testament to both the author and her subject, her mother. A wonderful book. Seasons greetings to everybody, hope you all have a large stack of books to read over the festive season Louise
Language & Writing
Adaptation for Screenwriters Robert Edgar & John Marland ($35, PB)
Develop the critical & creative skills to ‘translate’ a story from page to screen with this step-by-step guide to the process of screen adaptation you’ll learn to: interrogate a novel or short story to release its ‘inner film’; convert fictional prose into visual drama; overcome the obstacles presented by different media ‘languages’; approach key strategic decisions—both technical & interpretive; draft & re-draft your plot, characters & dialogue; professionally format & submit your finished script. In addition to examples taken from ‘literary classics’, contemporary novels, genre fiction, short stories & biographical material, Marland & Edgar embrace the wider phenomenon of re-telling & updating existing stories, such as the ‘appropriation’ of popular figures, inter-film adaptation (sequels & ‘reboots’), and development into other visual forms including graphic fiction & video games.
Writer’s Guide to Speculative Fiction: Science Fiction & Fantasy by Kilian & Moreno-Garcia Science fiction & fantasy authors, Crawford Kilian & Silvia Moreno-Garcia, come together in this book to show writers how to craft believable worlds, good characters & engaging stories. Their hands-on, practical, put-the-book-down-andstart-writing advice explains genres & how to bend & blend them, and gives concrete suggestions on how to overcome the inevitable problems writers face, such as self editing, writing plausible characters, and building a plot without writing formula fiction. ($30, PB)
Writing to Persuade: How to Bring People Over to Your Side by Trish Hall ($41.95, HB)
As the person in charge of the Op-Ed page for the NYTimes, Trish Hall spent years immersed in argument, passion & trendsetting ideas—but also in tangled sentences, migraine-inducing jargon & dull-as-dishwater writing. Drawing on her experience editing everyone from Nobel Prize winners to first-time pundits, Hall presents the ultimate guide to writing persuasively for students, job applicants & rookie authors looking to get published. She sets out the core principles for connecting with readers—laid out in chapters such as Cultivate Empathy, Abandon Jargon, and Prune Ruthlessly. Combining boisterous anecdotes with practical advice (relayed in ‘tracked changes’ bubbles), she offers an infinitely accessible primer on the art of effectively communicating above the digital noise of the 21st century.
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