**A Book of the Year in The Times and The Sunday Times ** Trees are essential, for nature and for us. Yet we are cutting and burning them at such a rate that we are fast approaching a tipping point. But there is still hope. If we had a trillion more trees, the damage could be undone. Combining cutting-edge scientific research with vivid travel writing, Fred Pearce shows how we achieve this. Challenging received wisdom about the need for planting, he explains why the best strategy is to stand back, stop the destruction and let nature - and those who dwell in the forests - do the rest. Lucid, revelatory and often surprising, A Trillion Trees is an environmental call to arms, and a celebration of our planet's vast arboreal riches.

Since Britain's 2016 referendum on EU membership, the nation has been profoundly split: one side fantasizing that the referendum will never be acted upon, the other entrenched in questionable assumptions about reclaimed sovereignty and independence. Underlying the cleavage are primal myths, deeper histories, and political folk-legends. James Meek,'the George Orwell of our times', goes in search of the stories and consequences arising out of a nation's alienation from itself. In Dreams of Leaving and Remaining, Meek meets farmers and fishermen intent on exiting the EU despite the loss of protections they will incur. He reports on a Cadbury's factory shut down and moved to Poland in the name of free market economics, exploring the impact on the local community left behind. He charts how the NHS is coping with the twin burdens of austerity and an aging population. Dreams of Leaving and Remaining is urgent reporting from one of Britain's finest journalists. James Meek asks what we can recover from the debris of an old nation as we head towards new horizons, and what we must leave behind.There are no easy answers, and what he creates instead is a masterly portrait of an anxious, troubled nation.

In 1925, Harold Ross hired Katharine Sergeant Angell as a manuscript reader for The New Yorker. Within months she became the magazine's first fiction editor, discovering and championing the work of Vladimir Nabokov, John Updike, James Thurber, Marianne Moore, and her husband-to-be, E. B. White, among others. After years of cultivating fiction, she set her sights on a new genre: garden writing. On March 1, 1958, The New Yorker ran a column entitled "Onward and Upward in the Garden," a critical review of garden catalogs, in which White extolled the writings of "seedmen and nurserymen," those unsung authors who produced her "favorite reading matter." Thirteen more columns followed, exploring the history and literature of gardens, flower arranging, herbalists, and developments in gardening. Two years after her death in 1977, E. B. White collected and published the series, with a fond introduction. The result is this sharp-eyed appreciation of the green world of growing things, of the aesthetic pleasures of gardens and garden writing, and of the dreams that gardens inspire.

A.A. Gill was an exceptional writer. Savage and compassionate in equal measure, he was always opinionated, always original, often surprising, and his writing illuminated every page. This second collection of his journalism brings together pieces from near and far. He was ferociously well-travelled and wrote 'abroad is as foreign and funny and strange and shocking as it ever was, and our need to know our neighbours every bit as great'. Far and Away is a book about meeting those neighbours. Wherever he was - with the glitterati in St Tropez or in the ruins of earthquake-stricken Haiti - he had the ability to pin down the heart of a story and render it unforgettable. He was a peerless writer about food, and we also join him at tables all around the globe. A.A. Gill had the gift of making his readers see the world in a different way. And, always, of making them laugh. This collection is an opportunity to marvel at a master at work.

Daily Maverick, the country’s leading online news service, has been making sense of the madness that is South African reality for the past five years. Brain Porn offers the best of their irreverent writing. These superbly written essays offer insight into not only the wheeling and dealing that goes on in politics, but also into our societal dynamics and why we get up to the crazy things we sometimes do as a nation. Whether you’re a news junkie or just want to hold your own over lunchtime conversation, you can’t afford not to read this book.

In Our Stories, author and journalist Ian Wishart brings out the most fascinating forgotten tales of our past, told through the eyes of the people who were there. Read about the tsunamis that washed away the homes and lives of our early European immigrants, or the earthquakes that toppled Christchurch buildings more than a century ago and lifted Wellington out of the sea. Read the real story about the search for gold, or the visiting circuses whose lions and leopards escaped, or the dinosaur found on a Taranaki riverbank (it's still there because it was too big to move ) Discover the heroes and villains of our past through long forgotten news stories from New Zealand, the USA, UK and Australia, and find out how life really was in pioneer days. These, and many more, are our stories...

Herman Bang (1857-1912) was a sharp-witted observer of the society and manners of his age; with an eye for telling details, he could at one moment mercilessly puncture hypocrisy and arrogance, at the next invoke indignant sympathy for the outcasts and failures of a ruthlessly competitive world. In his novels and especially in his short stories he often takes as his protagonist an unremarkable character who might be dismissed by a casual observer as uninteresting: a failed ballet dancer who scrapes a living as a peripatetic dance teacher in outlying villages ('Irene Holm'), or a lodging-house-keeper's daughter who toils from dawn to dusk to make ends meet ('Froken Caja'). He can also make wicked fun of pretensions and plots, as in 'The Ravens', where the family of the aging Froken Sejer are scheming to have her declared incapable, whilst she is selling off her valuables behind their backs to cheat them of their inheritance. His wide-ranging journalism has many targets, alerting readers to the wretched poverty hidden just a few steps from the thriving city shops or the ineptitude of Europe's ruling houses - as well as celebrating the innovations of the modern age, such as the automobile or the department store. Bang was well known throughout Europe in his lifetime, especially in Germany, where his works were translated early. In the English-speaking world he has had little impact, partly no doubt because of his homosexuality. Even now, only a couple of his novels have been translated. This volume is an attempt to remedy this lack by introducing a broad selection of his short stories and journalism to a new public.

For over thirty years, Mark Austin has covered the biggest stories in the world for ITN and Sky News. As a foreign correspondent and anchorman he has witnessed first-hand some of the most significant events of our times, including the Iraq War, during which his friend and colleague Terry Lloyd was killed by American 'friendly fire', the historic transition in South Africa from the brutality of apartheid to democracy, the horrors of the Rwandan genocide, and natural disasters such as the Haiti earthquake and the Mozambique floods. The stories themselves will be familiar to many people, but less well known are the often extraordinary behind the scenes tales of a newsman's life on the road; the problems encountered in some of the most dangerous places on earth; the days when things go badly wrong; the moments of high drama and raw emotion and, quite often, the hilarious happenings the viewer never imagines and only seldom sees. Based on decades of experience on the frontlines, this candid and revealing memoir gives a startling insight into one man's extraordinary career and lifts the lid on the world of television news.

'Naomi Klein's work has always moved and guided me. She is the great chronicler of our age of climate emergency, an inspirer of generations' - Greta Thunberg For more than twenty years Naomi Klein's books have defined our era, chronicling the exploitation of people and the planet and demanding justice. On Fire gathers for the first time more than a decade of her impassioned writing from the frontline of climate breakdown, and pairs it with new material on the staggeringly high stakes of what we choose to do next. Here is Klein at her most prophetic and philosophical, investigating the climate crisis not only as a profound political challenge but also as a spiritual and imaginative one. Delving into topics ranging from the clash between ecological time and our culture of 'perpetual now,' to rising white supremacy and fortressed borders as a form of 'climate barbarism,' this is a rousing call to action for a planet on the brink. With dispatches from the ghostly Great Barrier Reef, the smoke-choked skies of the Pacific Northwest, post-hurricane Puerto Rico and a Vatican attempting an unprecedented 'ecological conversion,' Klein makes the case that we will rise to the existential challenge of climate change only if we are willing to transform the systems that produced this crisis. This is the fight for our lives. On Fire captures the burning urgency of the climate crisis, as well as the energy of a rising political movement demanding change now.

With an Introduction by Rosemary O'Day. London Labour and the London Poor is a masterpiece of personal inquiry and social observation. It is the classic account of life below the margins in the greatest Metropolis in the world and a compelling portrait of the habits, tastes, amusements, appearance, speech, humour, earnings and opinions of the labouring poor at the time of the Great Exhibition. In scope, depth and detail it remains unrivalled. Mayhew takes us into the abyss, into a world without fixed employment where skills are declining and insecurity mounting, a world of criminality, pauperism and vice, of unorthodox personal relations and fluid families, a world from which regularity is absent and prosperity has departed. Making sense of this environment required curiosity, imagination and a novelist's eye for detail, and Henry Mayhew possessed all three. No previous writer had succeeded in presenting the poor through their own stories and in their own words, and in this undertaking Mayhew rivals his contemporary Dickens. 'To pass from one to the other', writes one authority,' is to cross sides of the same street'.

In Players, Teams, and Stadium Ghosts, sportswriter Bob Hunter has assembled a Hall of Fame collection of his best writing from the Columbus Dispatch. Fans will encounter some of the biggest names in sports and relive great moments from games played by amateurs and pros. They'll encounter forgotten players and teams that struggled. Hunter shows us LeBron James when he was a 15-year-old high school freshman, already capturing the world's attention; 20-year-old Derek Jeter's meteoric rise through the minors, including the Columbus Clippers; a strange encounter with Pete Rose hustling frozen pizzas; and the excitement of watching future WNBA star Katie Smith dominate a Columbus Quest championship game. The common thread is the personal touch that Hunter consistently uses to take readers beyond the final scores and the dazzle of lights. These are the people behind the athletes. They're remembered for how they played, but Hunter reminds us who they were.

These sometimes harrowing, frequently funny, and always riveting stories about food and eating under extreme conditions feature the diverse voices of journalists who have reported from dangerous conflict zones around the world. A profile of the former chef to Kim Jong Il of North Korea describes Kim's exacting standards for gourmet fare, which he gorges himself on while his country starves. A journalist becomes part of the inner circle of an IRA cell thanks to his drinking buddies. And a young, inexperienced female journalist shares mud crab in a foxhole with an equally young Hamid Karzai. Along with tales of deprivation and repression are stories of generosity and pleasure, sometimes overlapping. This memorable collection, introduced and edited by Matt McAllester, is seasoned by tragedy and violence, spiced with humor and good will, and fortified, in McAllester's words, with "a little more humanity than we can usually slip into our newspapers and magazine stories."

Chosen from the 2012 National Magazine Awards finalists and winners, this anthology is filled with compelling features and profiles, eye-opening reporting, and incisive criticism and analysis of contemporary culture and society. Written by today's leading journalists, the selections cover a range of developments in politics, international affairs, culture, and business -- from the increasingly short shelf lives of celebrity marriages to the ongoing fallout from Wall Street's financial malpractice, from the insidious effects of the lingering wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to the resurgent battle over issues pertaining to women's safety and health. Always engaging and informative, "Best American Magazine Writing 2012" is an incomparable resource for the most noteworthy journalism and literary achievements of the year.

Essays include Lawrence Wright ( "The New Yorker") on the history of Scientology and recent challenges to its mission and methods; Matthieu Aikins ( "The Atlantic") on the shady dealings and shifting sands of the war in Afghanistan; the late Christopher Hitchens ( "Vanity Fair") on the physical and emotional toll of cancer; and Joel Stein ( "Time") on the propensity for politicians and other popular figures to get into trouble on the Internet. John Jeremiah Sullivan ( "GQ") immerses himself in David Foster Wallace's curious legacy; Tim Crothers ( "ESPN") follows the inspiring story of Phiona Mutesi, a chess prodigy from the slums of Uganda; Chris Ballard ( "Sports Illustrated") recounts Dewayne Dedmon's struggle to reconcile his faith with a career in sports; Wesley Yang ( "New York") explores the pressure on Asian Americans to succeed and the psychological and cultural consequences when they don't; and Luke Dittrich ( "Esquire") shares the raw experiences of those who survived one of 2011's worst natural disasters: the tornado that hit Joplin, Missouri. The sparkling dialogue and vividly imagined, eccentric characters of Karen Russell's award-winning short story, "The Hox River Window" ( "Zoetrope: All-Story"), rounds out the collection.

From his early years Tom Weir MBE was set on making his way as an explorer, writer and photographer, a progress interrupted by World War Two but then leading to expeditions ranging from the Himalayas to Greenland. For over forty years his feature 'My Month' appeared in the Scots Magazine, reflecting his fascination with Scotland, its remote corners, people and wildlife - interests that made his award-winning TV programme Weir's Way so popular. From sources published and unpublished this collection of Tom Weir's writing has been selected by Hamish Brown from the whole body of his life's work.

'A vaulting triumph of a book' Isabella Tree, author of Wilding 'A master storyteller, Weidensaul communicates so much joy in the sheer act of witnessing and such exhilaration in the advances of the science behind what he sees that we are slow to grasp the extent of the ecological crisis that he outlines.' Observer Bird migration remains perhaps the most singularly compelling natural phenomenon in the world. Nothing else combines its global sweep with its inherent ability to engender wonder and excitement. The past two decades have seen an explosion in our understanding of the almost unfathomable feats of endurance and complexity involved in bird migration - yet the science that informs these majestic journeys is still in its infancy. Pulitzer Prize-shortlisted writer-ornithologist Scott Weidensaul is at the forefront of this research, and A World on the Wing sees him track some of the most remarkable flights undertaken by birds. His own voyage of discovery sees him sail through the storm-wracked waters of the Bering Sea; encounter gunners and trappers in the Mediterranean; and visit a forgotten corner of north-east India, where former headhunters have turned one of the grimmest stories of migratory crisis into an unprecedented conservation success. As our world comes increasingly under threat from the effects of climate change, these ecological miracles may provide an invaluable guide to a more sustainable future for all species, including us. This is the rousing and reverent story of the billions of birds that, despite the numerous obstacles we have placed in their path, continue to head with hope to the far horizon.

From ISIS propaganda videos to popular regime-backed TV series and digital activism, the Syrian conflict has been dramatically affected by the production of media, at the same time generating in its turn an impressive visual culture. Yet what are the aesthetic, political and material implications of the collusion between the production of this sheer amount of visual media being continuously shared and re-manipulated on the Internet, and the performance of the conflict on the ground? This ethnography uses the Syrian case to reflect more broadly on how the networked age reshapes contemporary warfare and impacts on the enactment of violence through images and on images. In stark contrast to the techno-utopias celebrating digital democracy and participatory cultures, Donatella Della Ratta's analysis exposes the dark side of online practices, where visual regimes of representation and media production dramatically intertwine with modes of destruction and the performance of violence. Exploring the most socially-mediated conflict of contemporary times, the book offers a fascinating insight into the transformation of warfare and life in the age of the internet.

A spidery network of mobile online media has supposedly changed people, places, time, and their meanings. A prime case is the news. Digital webs seem to have trapped "legacy media," killing off newspapers and journalists' jobs. Did news businesses and careers fall prey to the digital "Spider"? To solve the mystery, Kevin Barnhurst spent thirty years studying news going back to the realism of the 1800s. The usual suspects--technology, business competition, and the pursuit of scoops--are only partly to blame for the fate of news. The main culprit is modernism from the "Mister Pulitzer" era, which transformed news into an ideology called "journalism." News is no longer what audiences or experts imagine. Stories have grown much longer over the past century and now include fewer events, locations, and human beings. Background and context rule instead. News producers adopted modernism to explain the world without recognizing how modernist ideas influence the knowledge they produce. When webs of networked connectivity sparked a resurgence in realist stories, legacy news stuck to big-picture analysis that can alienate audience members accustomed to digital briefs.

A new collection of journalism from one of the great titans of 20th century literature "I don't want to be remembered for One Hundred Years of Solitude or for the Nobel Prize but rather for my journalism," Gabriel Garcia Marquez said in the final years of his life. And while some of his journalistic writings have been made available over the years, this is the first volume to gather a representative selection from across the first four decades of his career--years during which he worked as a full-time, often muckraking, and controversial journalist, even as he penned the fiction that would bring him the Nobel Prize in 1982. Here are the first pieces he wrote while working for newspapers in the coastal Colombian cities of Cartagena and Barranquilla . . . his longer, more fictionlike reportage from Paris and Rome . . . his monthly columns for Spain's El Pais. And while all the work points in style, wit, depth, and passion to his fiction, these fifty pieces are, more than anything, a revelation of the writer working at the profession he believed to be "the best in the world." 'Garcia Marquez always thought of himself as a journalist first and foremost and this brilliant collection goes a long way towards justifying that belief.' Salman Rushdie

'Will Self may not be the last modernist at work but at the moment he's the most fascinating of the tradition's torch bearers.' New York From one of the most unusual and distinctive writers working today, dubbed 'the most daring and delightful novelist of his generation' by the Guardian, Will Self's Why Read is a cornucopia of thoughtful and brilliantly witty essays on writing and literature. Self takes us with him: from the foibles of his typewriter repairman to the irradiated exclusion zone of Chernobyl, to the Australian outback and to literary forms past and future. With his characteristic intellectual brio, Self aims his inimitable eye at titans of literature like Woolf, Kafka, Orwell and Conrad. He writes movingly on W.G. Sebald's childhood in Germany and provocatively describes the elevation of William S. Burroughs's Junky from shocking pulp novel to beloved cult classic. Self also expands on his regular column in Literary Hub to ask readers how, what and ultimately why we should read in an ever-changing world. Whether he is writing on the rise of the bookshelf as an item of furniture in the nineteenth century or on the impossibility of Googling his own name in a world lived online, Self's trademark intoxicating prose and mordant, energetic humour infuse every piece.

The New York Times Bestseller From the prize-winning, bestselling author of Say Nothing and Empire of Pain, twelve enthralling stories of skulduggery and intrigue by one of the most decorated journalists of our time. 'Eminently bingeable, religiously fact-checked and seductively globetrotting' - The Observer Patrick Radden Keefe's work has been recognized by prizes ranging from the National Magazine Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award in the US to the Orwell Prize and the Baillie Gifford in the UK, for his meticulously reported, hypnotically engaging work on the many ways people behave badly. Rogues brings together a dozen of his most celebrated articles from the New Yorker. As Keefe observes in his preface: 'They reflect on some of my abiding preoccupations: crime and corruption, secrets and lies, the permeable membrane separating licit and illicit worlds, the bonds of family, the power of denial.' Keefe explores the intricacies of forging $150,000 vintage wines; examines whether a whistleblower who dared to expose money laundering at a Swiss bank is a hero or a fabulist; spends time in Vietnam with Anthony Bourdain; chronicles the quest to bring down a cheerful international black-market arms merchant; and profiles a passionate death-penalty attorney who represents the 'worst of the worst', among other bravura works of literary journalism. The appearance of his byline in the New Yorker is always an event; collected here for the first time readers can see how his work forms an always enthralling yet also deeply human portrait of criminals and rascals, as well as those who stand up to them.

"International journalism at its best."--Stephen Kinzer

"Every conflict spawns a handful of journalists who are willing to not only brave the war zone but to seek out the stories ignored by the press pack. The Iraq War has brought us Dahr Jamail. . . . I suspect Jamail's account will prove an enduring document of what really happened during the chaotic years of occupation, and how it transformed ordinary Iraqis. . . . It tells everything."--"Mother Jones"

"From the earliest days of the war, Dahr Jamail has been a human conduit for the voices of Iraqis living under U.S. occupation. In the face of tremendous personal risk, his commitment to the crucial, principled task of bearing witness has never wavered, and this extraordinary book is the result."--Naomi Klein

Named by AlterNet as one of the top three progressive books of 2007 alongside Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine "and Jeremy Scahill's "Blackwater," Dahr Jamail's "Beyond the Green Zone" goes past the polished desks of the corporate media and Washington politicians to tell first hand of the reality of life in Iraq.

Dahr Jamail is an independent journalist who has covered the Middle East for more than four years. Jamail writes for the Inter Press Service and many other outlets and is a regular guest on "Democracy Now ." He lives in California.

Amy Goodman is a best-selling author and the host of "Democracy Now ."

With the work of journalists under fire around the world, this year's anthology of National Magazine Awards finalists and winners is a timely reminder of the power of journalism. These pieces from writers driven to explore America's fault lines include Shane Bauer's harrowing "My Four Months as a Private Prison Guard" (Mother Jones), a visceral portrait of the abuses of the carceral system, and Sarah Stillman's account of the havoc wreaked on young people's lives when they are put on sex-offender registries (The New Yorker). In two different considerations of parenting, Nikole Hannah-Jones looks for a school for her daughter in a rapidly changing, racially divided Brooklyn (New York Times Magazine) and Michael Chabon takes his thirteen-year-old son to Fashion Week in Paris (GQ). Pamela Colloff explores how the 1966 University of Texas Tower mass shooting changed the course of one survivor's life (Texas Monthly), and Siddhartha Mukherjee depicts the art and agony of oncology (New York Times Magazine). Other selections take up the shocks of the election, including Matt Taibbi's irreverent dispatches from the campaign trail (Rolling Stone) and George Saunders's transfixing account of Trump's rallies (The New Yorker). Jeffrey Goldberg talks through Obama's foreign-policy legacy with the president (The Atlantic), Andrew Sullivan fears for the future of democracy (New York), and Gabriel Sherman relates how the women of Fox News brought to light Roger Ailes's predations (New York). Joining them are Rebecca Solnit's wide-ranging Harper's commentary, Becca Rothfeld's pondering women waiting from The Odyssey to Tinder (Hedgehog Review), and bold expeditions into nature: David Quammen ventures to Yellowstone to consider the future of wild places (National Geographic), and Mac McClelland sets off for Cuba in search of the ivory-billed woodpecker (Audubon).

For avid readers and the uninitiated alike, this is a chance to reengage with classic literature and to stay inspired and entertained. The concept of the magazine is simple: the first half is a long-form interview with a notable book fanatic and the second half explores one classic work of literature from an array of surprising and invigorating angles. The Happy Reader 16's cover star is Moses Sumney, interviewed by Jia Tolentino. Our book of the season is Madonna in a Fur Coat by Sabahattin Ali.

Pauline Smith's many admirers will welcome this new volume which contains writings which are out of print, have never before been published, or have not appeared in book form. This collection of largely unknown material spans the full range of her creative life from the early 'Platkops' stories to her last uncompleted work. What gives this wide diversity of pieces coherence and added interest is their marked autobiographical bent.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE 2015 SHORTLISTED FOR RSL ONDAATJE PRIZE 2016 In the summer of 2009, the leader of the dreaded Tamil Tiger guerrillas was killed, bringing to a bloody end the stubborn and complicated civil war in Sri Lanka. For nearly thirty years, the war's fingers had reached everywhere: into the bustle of Colombo, the Buddhist monasteries scattered across the island, the soft hills of central Sri Lanka, the curves of the eastern coast near Batticaloa and Trincomalee, and the stark, hot north. With its genius for brutality, the war left few places, and fewer people, untouched. What happens to the texture of life in a country that endures such bitter conflict? What happens to the country's soul? Samanth Subramanian gives us an extraordinary account of the Sri Lankan war and the lives it changed. Taking us to the ghosts of summers past, and to other battles from other times, he draws out the story of Sri Lanka today - an exhausted, disturbed society, still hot from the embers of the war. Through travels and conversations, he examines how people reconcile themselves to violence, how religion and state conspire, how the powerful become cruel, and how victory can be put to the task of reshaping memory and burying histories. This Divided Island is a harrowing and humane investigation of a country still inflamed.