The noted Dutch poet and novelist Cees Nooteboom reflects upon the life of the mind through a reexamination of books, music, art, travel, and gardeningThough a tireless explorer of distant cultures, for more than forty years Cees Nooteboom has also been returning to Menorca, “the island of the wind.” It is in his house there, with a study full of books and a garden taken over by cacti and many insects, that the 533 days of writing take place. The result is not a di...

In the tradition of A History of Reading, this book is an account of Manguel’s astonishment at the variety, beauty and persistence of our efforts to shape the world and our lives, most notably through something almost as old as reading itself: libraries. The Library at Nightbegins with the design and construction of Alberto Manguel’s own library at his house in western France – a process that raises puzzling questions about his past and his reading habits,...

Campo Santo is a collection of essays by W. G. SebaldWhen W.G. Sebald died tragically in 2001 a unique voice was silenced. Campo Santo is a collection of the pieces he left behind - none of them previously published in book form - which provide a powerful insight into the themes that came to dominate his life.Four pieces pay tribute to Corsica, weaving elegiacally between past and present. Sebald also examines the works of...

A dazzling book about memory and extinction from the author of Atlas of Remote IslandsA Publishers Weekly Best Book of the YearA Financial Times Best Book of the YearWinner of the Warwick PrizeWinner of the Helen & Kurt Wolff Translator's PrizeLonglisted for the International Booker PrizeEach disparate object described in this book—a Caspar David Friedrich painting, a species of tiger, a villa in Rome, a...

"This curiously moving history . . . traces the development of collections since the Renaissance through lively portraits of famous collectors." — The New YorkerFrom amassing sacred relics to collecting celebrity memorabilia, the impulse to hoard has gripped humankind throughout the centuries. But what is it that drives people to possess objects that have no conceivable use? To Have and To Hold is a captivating tour of collectors and their treasur...

A NEW STATESMAN BOOK OF THE YEARAN OBSERVER BEST ART BOOK OF 2021SHORTLISTED FOR THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE 2022‘This is a wonderful book. A lyrical journey into the natural and unnatural world’ Patti Smith‘Everything Philip Hoare writes is bewitching’ Olivia LaingAn illuminating exploration of the intersection between life, art and the sea from the award-winning author of L...

“I am completely an elitist, in the cultural but emphatically not the social sense. I prefer the good to the bad, the articulate to the mumbling, the aesthetically developed to the merely primitive, and full to partial consciousness. I love the spectacle of skill, whether it’s an expert gardener at work, or a good carpenter chopping dovetails . . . I don’t think stupid or ill-read people are as good to be with as wise and fully literate ones. I would rather watch a great tennis player ...

Winner of the PEN Translation Prize"Pondering revolutionary Cuba, the Berlin Wall, and the caves of Cappadocia, these essays explore themes of memory, war, movement, and home."—The New Yorker"A thoughtful, roving meditation on migration, language, and home."—Publishers WeeklyIn her prize-winning debut, Mexican essayist Mariana Oliver trains her gaze on migration in its many forms, moving between re...

A poetic history of the twentieth century from one of our most beloved, popular, and highly lauded poets—a stirring, strikingly original, intensely imagined recreation of the most potent voices and searing moments that have shaped our collective experience.XX is award-winning poet Campbell McGrath's astonishing sequence of one hundred poems—one per year—written in a vast range of forms, and in the voices of figures as varied as Picasso and Mao, Frida Kahlo and Elvis Presle...

Roads to Berlin maps the changing landscape of Germany, from the period before the fall of the Wall to the present. Written and updated over the course of several decades, an eyewitness account of the pivotal events of 1989 gives way to a perceptive appreciation of its difficult passage to reunification.Nooteboom's writings on politics, people, architecture and culture are as digressive as they are eloquent; his innate curiosity takes him through the landscapes of Heine and Goethe,...

An exploration of the many reasons to remain hopeful in the face of life's disappointments and challenges.In a world that isn’t short of darkness, there could be few more urgent priorities than to spend time rehearsing for ourselves why life – despite all its challenges – still has so much to offer us; why there are still so many reasons to be hopeful.Here is a collection of some of the most persuasive arguments for staying on the side of optimism, creativi...

John Berger writes: 'The pocket in question is a small pocket of resistance. A pocket is formed when two or more people come together in agreement. The resistance is against the inhumanity of the new world economic order. The people coming together are the reader, me and those the essays are about - Rembrandt, Palaeolithic cave painters, a Romanian peasant, ancient Egyptians, an expert in the loneliness of certain hotel bedrooms, dogs at dusk, a man in a radio station. And unexpectedly, ou...