**A WASHINGTON POST, TIME and SLATE Book of the Year'A stunning debut'** GUARDIAN'Stylish and unsettling' OBSERVER'A true original' PAUL MURRAY'Brilliant . . . Mind-bending, psychologically intricate, really thrilling' LAUREN GROFF‘There is no other writer like him’ MAGGIE NELSONA strange and brilliant teenager’s first pani...

**Brought to you by Penguin.A thrilling and darkly funny debut novel about the joy and anxiety of adolescence by the acclaimed memoirist and cult writer**Nicholas has plenty of reasons to feel unstable: he’s fifteen, the child of divorced parents, living with his absent dad in the bleak Chicago suburbs, and an outsider at school. Then, one day in geometry class, he forgets how to breathe. The doctor says it’s just panic, but Nicholas suspects that his real problem might not...

The tenth-anniversary edition of Michael Clune’s classic memoir of addiction and recovery: “Dreamily exact . . . sensual and hilarious . . . One of the year's best books” (The New Yorker).How do you describe an addiction in which your drug of choice creates a hole in your memory, a “white out,” so that every time you use it is the first time—new, fascinating, vivid? Michael W. Clune’s story takes us straight inside such an addiction—what he calls “the memory disease.”With d...

Teachers of literature make judgments about value. They tell their students which works are powerful, beautiful, surprising, strange, or insightful—and thus, which are more worthy of time and attention than others. Yet the field of literary studies has largely disavowed judgments of artistic value on the grounds that they are inevitably rooted in prejudice or entangled in problems of social status. For several decades now, professors have called their work value-neutral, simply a means for...

For centuries, a central goal of art has been to make us see the world with new eyes. Thinkers from Edmund Burke to Elaine Scarry have understood this effort as the attempt to create new forms. But as anyone who has ever worn out a song by repeated listening knows, artistic form is hardly immune to sensation-killing habit. Some of our most ambitious writers—Keats, Proust, Nabokov, Ashbery—have been obsessed by this problem. Attempting to create an image that never gets old, they experiment...

For centuries, a central goal of art has been to make us see the world with new eyes. Thinkers from Edmund Burke to Elaine Scarry have understood this effort as the attempt to create new forms. But as anyone who has ever worn out a song by repeated listening knows, artistic form is hardly immune to sensation-killing habit. Some of our most ambitious writers—Keats, Proust, Nabokov, Ashbery—have been obsessed by this problem. Attempting to create an image that never gets old, they experiment...

The years after World War Two have seen a widespread fascination with the free market. In this book, Michael W. Clune considers this fascination in postwar literature. In the fictional worlds created by works ranging from Frank O'Hara's poetry to nineties gangster rap, the market is transformed, offering an alternative form of life, distinct from both the social visions of the left and the individualist ethos of the right. These ideas also provide an unsettling example of how art takes on ...

This is the second series of one-off comedies written by the genius behind the smash-hit radio sitcom “Cabin Pressure” – John Finnemore. The first series won the coveted Writers Guild of Great Britain award for Best Comedy.Each show is a comedy perfumed by just two actors - including (across the series) famous household names such as Martin Clunes (“Doc Martin”), Julia McKenzie (“Fresh Fields”) and the inimitable voice of Carolyn in “Cabin Pressure”, Stephanie Cole.The show...

Brought to you by Penguin.I want to write a book about Vilhelm’s room and the events which took place in it, or arose from it; those that led to Lise’s death, which I have survived only so that I might write down the story of her and Vilhelm...The ripples from a breakup radiate outwards from the room where a married couple once loved each other, and a bizarre Lonely Hearts advert sets off a train of tragicomic events that lead to an inevitable conc...

**Brought to you by Penguin.The culture war is over. If you want it to be. It wasn’t even a culture war; it was a war on culture. A sustained attack, Dan Hicks argues, in the form of the weaponisation of civic museums, public art, and even universities — and one that has a deeper history than you might think.**Tracing the origins of contemporary conflicts over art, heritage, memory, and colonialism, Every Monument Will Fall joins the dots between the building of st...

Brought to you by Penguin.On sleepless nights, I open the matchbox and reread the story of the girl who gathered shooting stars.After the death of her father, twelve-year-old Tomoko is sent to live for a year with her uncle in the coastal town of Ashiya. It is a year which will change her life.The 1970s are bringing changes to Japan and her uncle's magnificent colonial mansion opens up a new and unfamiliar world for Tomoko;...

**Brilliantly read by a multi-cast of narrators.The International Bestseller'Just stellar - extreme, uncanny and beautifully controlled' - Anne Enright, Booker Prize winning author of The Wren, The Wren'These stories are perfect for the times we dwell inside' - Colum McCann, author of ApeirogonThe strange and explosive new collection from the incomparable imagination of Samanta Schweblin, a master of the short story.**A gripping blen...