" Game and gleefully provocative . . . My treasured companion of late." —New York Times" Threshold, or, how I learned to stop worrying (about what sort of novel this is) and love the narrator, whose brilliance and humor on drugs and literature, sex and boredom and death, leave me in awe. " —Rachel Kushner"Fearless and challenging, inventive and com...

Four teen boys, fresh out of school in Celtic Tiger Ireland, face an uncertain future in this dark literary debut—"For sheer bravery and for style, for its integrity of vision and for its uncompromising tone, I . . . admired Rob Doyle's Here Are the Young Men " (Colm Tóibín, The Irish Times ).Named one of the Books of the Year by The Sunday Times

'Charmingly provocative' Observer'A smorgasbord of delights' Irish Times'Addictive … a writer living and thinking his way to the frontiers of human society' The SpectatorIn Autobibliography, Rob Doyle recounts a year spent rereading fifty-two books – from the Dhammapada and Marcus Aurelius to Robert Bolaño and Svetlana Alexievich – as well as the memories they trigger and the reverberations they create. It is a reco...

"A tremendous talent. Every page fizzes with vitality." --Kevin Barry, author of BeatleboneA young man in a dark depression roams the vast, formless landscape of a Dublin industrial park where he meets a vagrant in the grip of a dangerous ideology. A woman fleeing a breakup finds herself taking part in an unusual sleep experiment. A man obsessed with Nietzsche clings desperately to his girlfriend's red shoes. And whatever happened to Killian Turner, Irelan...

"Threshold, or, how I learned to stop worrying (about what sort of novel this is) and love the narrator, whose brilliance and humor on drugs and literature, sex and boredom and death, leave me in awe." -Rachel Kushner"Fearless and challenging, inventive and compulsive, unique and utterly heartfelt." -John Boyne"Daring and deranged, endlessly entertaining, furiously funny." -Geoff Dyer"Playful, poten...

A plague of rats, the end of philosophy, the cosmic chicken, and bars that don’t serve Plymouth Gin—is this the Apocalypse or is it just America?“The apocalypse is imminent,” thinks W. He has devoted his life to philosophy, but he is about to be cast out from his beloved university. His friend Lars is no help at all—he’s too busy fighting an infestation of rats in his flat. A drunken lecture tour through the American South proves to be another colossal mistake. In ...

A timely, powerful collection of essays from one of our sharpest minds and most sparkling stylists.How much joy can a person tolerate? How many kinds of boredom make up a life? Who owns the story of black America? Should Justin Bieber be more like Socrates? And why is there a dead art collector floating in the swimming pool?Dazzlingly insightful, explosively funny and ever-timely, Zadie Smith is back with a second unmissable collection of essays. From German...

A searing portrait of a marriage built on ownership, not love. Seduced by politics and poetry, the unnamed narrator in Meena Kandasamy's When I Hit You falls in love with a university professor and agrees to be his wife. But what for her is a contract of love is for him a contract of ownership. As he sets about reducing her to his idealized version of a kept woman, bullying her out of her life as an academic and writer in the process, she attempts to push back—a r...

A working father whose life no longer feels like his own discovers the transforming powers of great (and downright terrible) literature in this laugh-out-loud memoir.Andy Miller had a job he quite liked, a family he loved and no time at all for reading. Or so he kept telling himself. But, no matter how busy or tired he was, something kept niggling at him. Books. Books he’d always wanted to read. Books he’d said he’d read, when he hadn’t. Books that whispered the promise of escape f...

One of the most important works of cultural theory ever written, Walter Benjamin's groundbreaking essay explores how the age of mass media means audiences can listen to or see a work of art repeatedly – and what the troubling social and political implications of this are.Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves – and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provo...

A guide to the art of personal writing, by the author of Fierce Attachments and The End of the Novel of LoveAll narrative writing must pull from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform event, deliver a bit of wisdom. In a story or a novel the "I" who tells this tale can be, and often is, an unreliable narrator but in nonfiction the reader must always be persuaded that the narrator is speaking truth.How does on...

“One of the finest writers of the new nonfiction” (Harper’s Bazaar) explores the role of art in our tumultuous modern era.In this remarkable, inspiring collection of essays, acclaimed writer and critic Olivia Laing makes a brilliant case for why art matters, especially in the turbulent political weather of the twenty-first century.Funny Weather brings together a career’s worth of Laing’s writing about art and culture, examining their role ...