A strange and brilliant teenager's first panic attacks send him down a rabbit hole in this wild, critically acclaimed debut.'A stunning debut' GUARDIAN'Stylish and unsettling' OBSERVER'A true original' PAUL MURRAY'Brilliant . . . Mind-bending, psychologically intricate, really thrilling' LAUREN GROFFNicholas has plenty of reasons to feel unstable. He's...

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 writerNicholas 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 t...

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...

A coming-of-age memoir in seven computer games, from the author of Whiteout ."Unconventionally plotted and oddly moving. . . . Gamelife argues that our hidden inner world, 'the part of our lives that wasn't involved with people,' can save us in an outside world that doesn't always make us feel whole." ―Ethan Gilsdorf, The New York Times Book Review...

In telling the story of his youth through seven computer games, critically acclaimed author Michael W. Clune (White Out) captures the part of childhood we live alone.You have been awakened.Floppy disk inserted, computer turned on, a whirring, and then this sentence, followed by a blinking cursor. So begins Suspended, the first computer game to obsess seven-year-old Michael, to worm into his head and change his sense of reality. Th...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

The collected BBC radio productions of the major works of Oscar Wilde, plus bonus play by Neil BartlettLoved for his flamboyant personality, sparkling wit and brilliant epigrams, Oscar Wilde was a comic genius and a literary icon.This collection reflects the many facets of his dazzling talent. Here are dramatisations of his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, a Gothic tale of a gilded aristocrat who makes a dangerous pact, as well as four scint...

There she stood. A goddess. I was in love with the marble goddess.When Rika Horauchi accepts an unusual new part-time job, she never expects to fall in love.Rika has been tasked with talking to Venus, to keep her company when the museum is closed on Mondays. As Venus comes to life in the quiet of their surroundings, she opens up new worlds for Rika, and they speak about everything. But when the museum’s curator, Hashibami, makes it...