Of all the great novelists writing today, none shows the same gift as Martin Amis for writing non-fiction - his essays, literary criticism and journalism are justly acclaimed. As Rachel Cusk wrote in the The Times, reviewing a previous collection, 'Amis is as talented a journalist as he is a novelist, but these essays all manifest an unusual extra quality, one that is not unlike friendship. He makes an effort; he makes readers feel that they are the only person there.' The essays in The Rub of Time range from superb critical pieces on Amis's heroes Nabokov, Bellow and Larkin to brilliantly funny ruminations on sport, Las Vegas, John Travolta and the pornography industry. The collection includes his essay on Princess Diana and a tribute to his great friend Christopher Hitchens, but at the centre of the book, perhaps inevitably, are essays on politics, and in particular the American election campaigns of 2012 and 2016. One of the very few consolations of Donald Trump's rise to power is that Martin Amis is there to write about him.

'There will be an avalanche of books about the pandemic. None will be as eye-opening or humane or moving as Lamb's' DAILY TELEGRAPH A story of poverty, generosity and worlds colliding in modern Britain When Covid-19 hit the UK and lockdown was declared, Mike Matthews wondered how his four-star hotel would survive. Then the council called. The British government had launched a programme called ' Everyone In ' and 33 rough sleepers - many of whom had spent decades on the street - needed beds.The Prince Rupert Hotel would go on to welcome well over 100 people from this community, offering them shelter, good food and a comfy bed during the pandemic. This is the story of how that luxury hotel spent months locked down with their new guests, many of them traumatised, addicts or suffering from mental illness. As a world-leading foreign correspondent turning her attention to her own country for the first time, Christina Lamb chronicles how extreme situations were handled and how shocking losses were suffered, how romances emerged between guests and how people grappled with their pasts together. Unexpected and profound, heart-warming and heartbreaking, this is a tale that gives a panoramic insight into modern Britain in all its failures, and people in all their capacities for kindness - even in the most difficult of times.

A self-proclaimed 'myth buster by trade', over her long-ranging career as a journalist and political activist Barbara Ehrenreich has delved with devastating wit and insight into the social and political fabric of America. Had I Known gathers together Ehrenreich's most significant articles and excerpts from the last four decades - some of which became the starting point for her bestselling books - from her award-winning article 'Welcome to Cancerland', published shortly after she was diagnosed with breast cancer, to her groundbreaking investigative journalism in 'Nickel and Dimed', which explored living in America on the minimum wage. Issues she identified as far back as the 80s and 90s such as work poverty, rising inequality, the gender divide and medicalised health care, are top of the social and political agenda today. Written with remarkable tenderness, humour and incisiveness, Ehrenreich's describes an America of struggle, inequality, racial bias and injustice. Her extraordinarily prescient and relevant perspective announces her as one of most significant thinkers of our day.

At risk of life and reputation, the reform journalist W. T. Stead (1849-1912) exposed child vice and white slavery in London and established age 16 for statutory rape. Concluding the 1914 Portrait, Joyce saluted the "Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead" and set the path of future works. The exemplary life and devotions of Stead provided James Joyce with a model, a theme, and a purpose. Joyce integrated Steadfacts with his own personal emerging autobiography and interpretation of the ongoing Irish national, international, and even cosmic events. In this book Eckley uses new sources to unravel forgotten languages, motifs, and metaphors and recognizes "obscurity" as a "chrysalis factor" in Joyce's Finnegans Wake to illuminate Stead's influence on Joyce. This book of Finnegans Wake criticism will open paths for exciting new efforts in studying Joyce.

A TLS and a Prospect Book of the Year A revelatory, explosive new analysis of the military today. Over the first two decades of the twenty-first century the British Army fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, at considerable financial and human cost. Yet neither war achieved its objectives. Award-winning journalist Simon Akam questions why, and provides challenging but necessary answers. Composed from assiduous documentary research, field reportage, and hundreds of interviews, this book is a strikingly rich, nuanced portrait of one of our pivotal national institutions in a time of great stress. This is as much a book about Britain, and about the politics of failure, as it is about the military.

Also available as a Time Warner AudioBook.

Perchance, fair lady, dost thou think me unduly vexed by the sorrowful state of thine quarters? These foul specks, the evidence of life itself, have sullied not only thine shag-tempered matt but also thine character. Be ye mad, woman?

In Naked, David Sedaris's message alternately rendered in Fakespeare, Italian, Spanish, and pidgin Greek is the same: pay attention to me.

Whether he's taking to the road with a thieving quadriplegic, sorting out the fancy from the extra-fancy in a bleak fruit-packing factory, or celebrating Christmas in the company of a recently paroled prostitute, this collection of memoirs creates a wickedly incisive portrait of an all-too-familiar world. It takes Sedaris from his humiliating bout with obsessive behavior in A Plague of Tics to the title story, where he is finally forced to face his naked self in the mirrored sunglasses of a lunatic. At this soulful and moving moment, he picks potato chip crumbs from his pubic hair and wonders what it all means.

This remarkable journey into his own life follows a path of self-effacement and a lifelong search for identity, leaving him both under suspicion and overdressed.

'She has, to my knowledge, an almost unblemished record in never having failed to spot a great new play...' Philip Howard, from his Foreword Joyce McMillan has been writing about theatre in Scotland for more than three decades. As drama critic successively for The Guardian, Scotland on Sunday and The Scotsman, she has reviewed thousands of plays. During that time she has borne witness to an extraordinary cultural and political renaissance in Scotland, reflected in the newfound confidence of its playwrights, in the vibrancy of its theatre culture and in its recent outburst of new theatre companies. Compiled by McMillan and the theatre director, Philip Howard, Theatre in Scotland is a panoramic history of modern Scottish theatre, reported from the frontline. It traces the remarkable journey of Scottish theatre towards its new self-confidence: the road to 1990, when Glasgow was European Capital of Culture; followed by the explosive expansion of the 1990s; culminating in the emergence of the National Theatre of Scotland and its drive to bring theatre culture right into the heart of the nation. Gathered here are the leading Scottish playwrights, from John Byrne to Liz Lochhead, from David Greig to David Harrower, as well as the full breadth of English playwrights, from Shakespeare to Pinter. There are reflections on the great Scottish plays, classic - Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis, Men Should Weep - and modern - Black Watch, The James Plays. There are reports not only from the urban theatre centres of Edinburgh and Glasgow but from all over Scotland; and from the feast that is the Edinburgh Festival, to the nourishing A Play, A Pie and A Pint. A leading thinker and writer about Scotland, McMillan has an incomparable ability to detect the wider cultural resonances in Scottish theatre, and to reveal what it can tell us about Scotland as a whole. Her book serves as a portrait of a nation and a shared cultural life, where visions of 'what we have been, what we are, and what we might become' are played out in sharp focus on its stages. 'When Scottish theatre works [its] magic over the coming years, I will be there, to try to catch the moment in print, and to tell it as it was. And believe me, on the good nights and the bad ones, the privilege will be mine: to be paid to go looking for joy, and occasionally to find it.' Joyce McMillan 'Joyce has an unrivalled passion and hunger for theatre - to be surprised by it, challenged by it, moved by it. Her prose when describing something which has done just this is inspiring and affecting.' Vicky Featherstone

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER Relive the delusional fever-dream of the modern era. 'Thank f*ck for Marina Hyde: the most lethal, vital, screamingly funny truth-teller of our time.' PHOEBE WALLER-BRIDGE 'The most brilliantly funny columnist of our time.' GARY LINEKER 'It's a scientific FACT: Marina Hyde is Britain's funniest writer.' CAITLIN MORAN No other writer is more suited to chronicling the absurd times in which we live. In What Just Happened?! Marina Hyde slashes her way through the hellscape of post-referendum politics, where the chaos never stops. Clamber aboard as we relive every inspirational moment of magic, from David Cameron to Theresa May to Boris Johnson. Marvel at the sights, from Trumpian WTF-ery to celebrity twattery. And boggle at the cast of characters: Hollywood sex offenders, populists, sporting heroes (and villains), dastardly dukes, media barons, movie stars, reality TV monsters, billionaires, police officers, various princes and princesses, wicked advisers, philanthropists, fauxlanthropists, telly chefs, and (naturally) Gwyneth Paltrow. It's the full state banquet of crazy - and you're most cordially invited. Drawn from her spectacularly funny Guardian columns, What Just Happened?! is a welcome blast of humour and sanity in a world where reality has become stranger than fiction. 'A joyous rallying voice in British journalism.' GRAYSON PERRY 'An infinite number of gag-writers, working all day in a gag factory, couldn't come up with any of the perfectly-formed one-liners that populate Marina Hyde's hilarious writing . . . But behind the wit lurks real anger, argument, exasperation and intelligence. Her writing is more than a gentle poke in the ribs: it's a well-wrought and deftly aimed smash in the teeth.' ARMANDO IANNUCCI

This compelling book explores how Egyptian bloggers used citizen journalism and cyberactivism to chip away at the state's monopoly on information and recalibrate the power dynamics between an authoritarian regime and its citizens. When the Arab uprisings broke out in early 2011 and ousted entrenched leaders across the region, social media and the Internet were widely credited with playing a role, particularly when the Egyptian government shut down the Internet and mobile phone networks in an attempt to stave off the unrest there. But what these reports missed were the years of grassroots organizing, digital activism, and political awareness-raising that laid the groundwork for this revolutionary change. Radsch argues that Egyptian bloggers created new social movements using blogging and social media, often at significant personal risk, so that less than a decade after the information revolution came to Egypt they successfully mobilized the overthrow of the state and its president.

The Believer, a ten-time National Magazine Award finalist, is a bimonthly literature, arts, and culture magazine based at the Beverly Rogers, Carol C. Harter Black Mountain Institute, a department of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. In each issue, readers will find journalism, essays, intimate interviews, an expansive comics section, poetry, and on occasion, delightful and unexpected bonus items. Our poetry section is curated by Jericho Brown, Kristen Radtke selects our comics, and Joshua Wolf Shenk is our editor-in-chief. Issues feature a column by Nick Hornby, in which he discusses the things he's been reading, as well as a comedy advice column.

Allan Jones launched Uncut magazine in 1997 and for 15 years wrote a popular monthly column called Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before, based on his experiences as a music journalist in the 70s and 80s, a gilded time for the music press.

By turns hilarious, cautionary, poignant and powerful, the Stop Me...stories collected here include encounters with some of rock's most iconic stars, including David Bowie, Lou Reed, Leonard Cohen, Van Morrison, Neil Young, Elvis Costello, The Sex Pistols, The Clash, The Smiths, R.E.M. and Pearl Jam. From backstage brawls and drug blow-outs, to riots, superstar punch-ups, hotel room confessionals and tour bus lunacy, these are stories from the madness of a music scene now long gone.

Pakistan's largest city is a sprawling metropolis of 20 million people. A place of political turbulence, where lavish wealth and absolute poverty sit side by side, and where the lines between idealism and corruption can quickly blur. Through the stories of those who know the city best - including a journalist, an activist, and an ambulance driver - Samira Shackle paints a vivid, vibrant and often violent portrait of Karachi over the past decade: a period during which the Taliban arrived in Pakistan, adding to the daily perils of its residents and pushing their city into the international spotlight. Nuanced and fast-paced, Karachi Vice is an immersive, electrifying journey around one of the most compelling cities in the world.

George Bernard Shaw's public career began in arts journalism-as an art critic, a music critic, and, most famously, a drama critic-and he continued writing on cultural and artistic matters throughout his life. His total output of essays and reviews numbers in the hundreds, dwarfing even his prolific playwriting career. This volume of Shaw's Major Cultural Essays introduces readers to the wealth and diversity of Shaw's cultural writings from across the breadth of his professional life, beginning around 1890 and ending in 1950. Topics covered include the theatre, of course, but also music, opera, poetry, the novel, the visual arts, philosophy, censorship, and education. Major figures discussed at length in these works include Ibsen, Wagner, Nietzsche, Shakespeare, Wilde, Mozart, Beethoven, Keats, Rodin, Zola, Ruskin, Dickens, Tolstoy, and Poe, among many others. Coursing with Shavian flair and vigor, these essays showcase the author's broad aesthetic sensibilities, trace the intersection of culture and politics in Shaw's worldview, and provide a fascinating window into the vibrant cultural moment of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

'I knew this from the beginning, when I was inside the lorry, thinking about truth. If you are a good storyteller you will be trusted, get a life, and escape from hell. But what do you need to do to be trusted, if telling the truth is not enough?' - Aso, a refugee working with Freedom from Torture Aso is one of many powerful voices in Dina Nayeri's wide-ranging, groundbreaking new book, which combines deep reportage with her own life experience to examine what constitutes believability. Intent on exploring ideas of persuasion and performance, Nayeri takes us behind the scenes in emergency rooms, corporate boardrooms, asylum interviews and into her own family, to ask - where lies the difference between being believed and being dismissed? What does this mean for our culture? As personal as it is profound in its reflections on language, history, morality and compassion, Who Gets Believed? investigates the unspoken social codes that determine how we relate to one another. 'I was hugely moved by this book. Who Gets Believed? is essential reading, an extraordinary labour of love and hope that is destined to become indispensable in the continuing struggle for justice' - John Burnside

The last major interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, conducted by New York Times bestselling author David Sheff, featuring a new introduction that reflects on the fortieth anniversary of Lennon's death.

Originally published in Playboy in 1981 just after John Lennon's assassination, All We Are Saying is a rich, vivid, complete interview with Lennon and Yoko Ono, covering art, creativity, the music business, childhood beginnings, privacy, how the Beatles broke up, how Lennon and McCartney collaborated (or didn't) on songs, parenthood, money, feminism, religion, and insecurity. Of course, at the heart of the conversation is the deep romantic and spiritual bond between Lennon and Ono.

Sheff's insightful questions set the tone for Lennon's responses and his presence sets the scene, as he goes through the kitchen door of Lennon and Yoko's apartment in the Dakota and observes moments at Lennon's famous white piano and the rock star's work at the stove, making them grilled cheese sandwiches. Sheff's new introduction looks at his forty-year-old interview afresh, and examines how what he learned from Lennon has resonated with him as a man and a parent. This is a knockout interview: unguarded, wide-ranging, alternately frisky and intense.

G K Chesterton (1874-1936) was an important figure in the Edwardian literary world. He engaged closely with the vibrant new influences in literature and reviewed a stream of new editions, biographies, and memoirs for the Daily News. This critical edition includes all of his contributions to the Daily News from 1901 to 1913.

Lynching in American Literature and Journalism consists of twelve essays investigating the history and development of writing about lynching as an American tragedy and the ugliest element of national character. According to the Tuskegee Institute, 4,743 people were lynched between 1882 and 1968 in the United States, including 3,446 African Americans and 1,297 European Americans. More than 73 percent of the lynchings in the Civil War period occurred in the Southern states. The Lynchings increased dramatically in the aftermath of the Reconstruction, after slavery had been abolished and free men gained the right to vote. The peak of lynching occurred in 1882, after Southern white Democrats had regained control of the state legislators. This book is a collection of historical and critical discussions of lynching in America that reflects the shameful, unmoral policies, and explores the topic of lynching within American history, literature, and journalism.

George F. Will has been one of this country's leading columnists since 1974. He won the Pulitzer Prize for it in 1977. The Wall Street Journal once called him "perhaps the most powerful journalist in America." In new collection, he examines a remarkably unsettling thirteen years in our nation's experience, from 2008 to 2020. Included are a number of columns about court cases, mostly from the Supreme Court, that illuminate why the composition of the federal judiciary has become such a contentious subject. Other topics addressed include the American Revolutionary War, historical figures from Frederick Douglass to JFK, as well as a scathing assessment of how State of the Union Addresses are delivered in the modern day. Mr. Will also offers his perspective on American socialists, anti-capitalist conservatives, drug policy, the criminal justice system, climatology, the Coronavirus, the First Amendment, parenting, meritocracy and education, China, fascism, authoritarianism, Frank Sinatra, Bob Dylan, The Beach Boys, and the morality of enjoying football. American Happiness and Discontents: The Unruly Torrent, 2008-2020 is a collection packed with wisdom and leavened by humor from one the preeminent columnists and intellectuals of our time.

The son of one of the greatest writers of our time-Nobel Prize winner and internationally best-selling icon Gabriel Garcia Marquez-remembers his beloved father and mother in this tender memoir about love and loss. 'It enthralled and moved me.' Salman Rushdie In March 2014, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, one of the most acclaimed writers of the twentieth century, came down with a cold. The woman who had been beside him for more than fifty years, his wife Mercedes Barcha, was not hopeful; her husband, affectionately known as "Gabo," was then nearly 87 and battling dementia. I don't think we'll get out of this one, she told their son Rodrigo. Hearing his mother's words, Rodrigo wondered, "Is this how the end begins?" To make sense of events as they unfolded, he began to write the story of Garcia Marquez's final days. The result is this intimate and honest account that not only contemplates his father's mortality but reveals his remarkable humanity. Both an illuminating memoir and a heartbreaking work of reportage, A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes transforms this towering genius from literary creator to protagonist, and paints a rich and revelatory portrait of a family coping with loss. At its centre is a man at his most vulnerable, whose wry humour shines even as his lucidity wanes. Gabo savours affection and attention from those in his orbit, but wrestles with what he will lose-and what is already lost. Throughout his final journey is the charismatic Mercedes, his constant companion and the creative muse who was one of the foremost influences on Gabo's life and his art. Bittersweet and insightful, surprising and powerful, A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes celebrates the formidable legacy of Rodrigo's parents, offering an unprecedented look at the private family life of a literary giant. It is at once a gift to Gabriel Garcia Marquez's readers worldwide, and a grand tribute from a writer who knew him well.

Elizabeth Hardwick's iconic essay collection Seduction and Betrayal is a radical portrait of women and literature, reissued with a new introduction by Deborah Levy.

'Hardwick's sentences are burned in my brain.' - Susan Sontag

Sidelined. Betrayed. Killed off. Elizabeth Hardwick dissects the history of women and literature.

In her most virtuoso work of criticism, she explores the lives of the Brontës, Woolf, Eliot and Plath; the fate of literary wives such as Zelda Fitzgerald and Jane Carlyle; and the destinies of fictional heroines from Richardson's Clarissa to Ibsen's Nora. With fierce empathy and biting wit, Hardwick mines their childhoods, families, and personalities to probe the costs of sex, love, and marriage. Shattering the barrier between writing and life, she asks who is the seducer and who the seduced; who the victim and who the victor.

First published in 1974, yet both urgently timely and timeless, Seduction and Betrayal explodes the conventions of the essay: and the result is nothing less than a reckoning.

G K Chesterton (1874-1936) was an important figure in the Edwardian literary world. He engaged closely with the vibrant new influences in literature and reviewed a stream of new editions, biographies, and memoirs for the Daily News. This critical edition includes all of his contributions to the Daily News from 1901 to 1913.

This is the third volume of the First of the Year annual series. Contributors such as Armond White, Philip Levine, Charles O'Brien, Uri Avnery, Donna Gaines, Tom Smucker, Scott Spencer, and Amiri Baraka are back (and fractious as ever). And First's family of writers keeps growing. This volume includes vital new voices such as A. B. Spellman, Bernard Avishai, Rudolph Wurlitzer, and Diane di Prima.

First never shies away from hot button issues--Fredric Smoler, for example, offers a definitive consideration of America's recent history with torture. But First's approach to current political firestorms is often marked by a cool sense of the past. History is always in the mix when First writers examine the roots of Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin and contemporary right-wing pundits who falsely claim the mantle of Whittaker Chambers. First's refusal to toe "correct" lines is apparent in Benj DeMott's reconsideration of Chambers' work.

The new volume is also marked by its cultivation of radical imaginations. The ideas of the Situationists and Cornelius Castoriadis are revived. A young historian, David Waldstreicher, recovers the radical, useable past in the 60s work of Staughton Lynd. Amiri Baraka evokes the felt quality of Jesse Jackson's 1988 campaign and another poet remembers (in verse) long-forgotten, extreme political acts of American Renaissance poets.

A recent review of First of the Year: 2009 used a phrase of Kenneth Burke's--"perspective by incongruity"--to make sense of the method that shaped it. First is committed to thought-provoking incongruities. Faith that wonder is our best teacher informs this volume. First's music writing provides a high-low soundtrack of surprise. Beyond the section on Michael Jackson, there are serious responses to John Coltrane and Bach, World Saxophone Quartet and Mariah Carey, Sonny Rollins and Willie Mitchell. First's message is in the music.

Familiar narratives and simplistic stereotypes frame the representation of women in U.S. politics. Pervasive containment rhetorics, such as the distinction between women as mothers and caregivers and men as rational thinkers, create unique hurdles for any woman seeking public office. While these 'governing codes' generally act to constrain female political power, they can also be harnessed as a resource depending on the particular circumstances (e.g., party affiliation, geographic location and personal style). One of these governing codes, the metaphor, is an especially powerful tool in politics today, particularly for women. By examining the political careers of four of the most prominent and influential women in contemporary U.S. politics_Democrats Ann Richards and Hillary Rodham Clinton and Republicans Christine Todd Whitman and Elizabeth Dole_Karrin Vasby Anderson and Kristina Horn Sheeler illustrate how metaphors in public discourse may be both familiar narratives to embrace and boundaries to overturn.

Photojournalism and Today's News provides a practical guide for aspiring photojournalists as well as an intelligent look into newsroom culture and its influences on photographic assignments, production, and editing. Written by an award-winning photo editor and director of photography, and based on interviews with more than seventy high-profile journalists, this book appeals to students and young professionals alike. Addresses a wide range of practical issues supported by in-depth examples from the field and critical thinking about photography, journalism, and newsroom culture Examines social and cultural issues and how they are communicated through photojournalism Prepares young journalists to respect their visual journalism colleagues by teaching them how to effectively work together Highlights the expectations of the newsroom and editors

'The late Jim Harrison was one of the true greats when it came to writing about food. He combined an attention to detail with a glorious prose style and a massive appetite... A must read.' - Observer New York Times bestselling author Jim Harrison was one of America's most beloved writers, a muscular, brilliantly economic stylist with a salty wisdom. He also wrote some of the best essays on food around, earning praise as 'the poet laureate of appetite' (Dallas Morning News). A Really Big Lunch collects many of his food pieces for the first time - and taps into his larger-than-life appetite with wit and verve. Jim Harrison's legendary gourmandise is on full display in A Really Big Lunch. From the titular New Yorker piece about a French lunch that went to thirty-seven courses, to pieces from Brick, Playboy, the Kermit Lynch Newsletter and more on the relationship between hunter and prey, or the obscure language of wine reviews, A Really Big Lunch is shot through with Harrison's pointed apercus and keen delight in the pleasures of the senses. And between the lines the pieces give glimpses of Harrison's life over the last fifteen years. A Really Big Lunch is a literary delight that will satisfy every appetite.