With an Introduction by Professor Stuart Sim. John Bunyan was variously a tinker, soldier, Baptist minister, prisoner and writer of outstanding narrative genius which reached its apotheosis in this, his greatest work. It is an allegory of the Christian life of true brilliance and is presented as a dream which describes the pilgrimage of the hero - Christian - from the City of Destruction via the Slough of Despond, the Hill of Difficulty, the Valley of the Shadow of Death and Vanity Fair over the River of the Water of Life and into the Celestial City. The Pilgrim's Progress has been translated into 108 languages, was a favourite of Dr Johnson and was praised by Coleridge as one of the few books which might be read repeatedly and each time with a new and different pleasure.

The first in Deborah Levy's essential three-part 'Living Autobiography' on writing and womanhood. 'Unmissable. Like chancing upon an oasis, you want to drink it slowly . . . Subtle, unpredictable, surprising' Guardian _________________________________ Taking George Orwell's famous essay, 'Why I Write', as a jumping-off point, Deborah Levy offers her own indispensable reflections of the writing life. With wit, clarity and calm brilliance, she considers how the writer must stake claim to that contested territory as a young woman and shape it to her need. Things I Don't Want to Know is a work of dazzling insight and deep psychological succour, from one of our most vital contemporary writers. The final two instalments in Deborah Levy's 'Living Autobiography', The Cost of Living and Real Estate, are available now. _________________________________ 'Superb sharpness and originality of imagination. An inspiring work of writing' Marina Warner 'An exciting writer, sharp and shocking as the knives her characters wield' Sunday Times 'A writer whose anger and confusion in the face of the world transform into poetic flights of fancy . . . which always feel marvellously right' Independent

A niece of Jane Austen and a novelist herself, Catherine Hubback was fifty-two years old when she left England for America. She travelled to California on the Transcontinental Railroad and settled in Oakland, on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay. Her son Edward shared her household and commuted by ferryboat to a wheat brokerage in the City. In letters to her eldest son John and his wife Mary in Liverpool, Catherine conveys her delight - and her exasperation - at her new environment. She portrays her neighbours with a novelist's wry wit and brings her English sensibility to bear on gardening with unfamiliar plants and maintaining a proper wardrobe in a dry climate. She writes vividly of her adventures as she moves about a landscape recognizable to present-day residents, at a time when boats rather than bridges spanned the bay, and hot springs were the main attraction in the Napa Valley. In an atmosphere of financial unrest, she writes freely of her anxieties, while supplementing Edward's declining income by making lace and teaching the craft to other women. She recalls her 'prosperous days' in England, but finds pleasure in small things and assuredly takes her place in a society marked by great disparities in wealth. In addition to transcriptions of the letters, this highly readable edition offers pertinent information on many of the people and places mentioned, explanatory notes, and striking illustrations. The introduction places the letters in context and tells the story of Catherine Hubback, whose life evolved in ways unprecedented in the Austen family.

'Unlike anything I've read . . . Remarkable.' Roxane Gay 'An audacious sojourn through the terror and beauty of refusing to explain yourself. ' New York Times In letters addressed to their friends, to members of their family - both biological and chosen - and to fellow storytellers, Akwaeke describes the shape of a life lived in overlapping realities. Through heartbreak, chronic pain, intimacy with death, becoming a beast, this is embodiment as a nonhuman: outside the boundaries imposed by expectations and legibility. This book is an account of the grueling work of realignment and remaking necessary to carve out a future for oneself. The result is a Black spirit memoir: a powerful, raw unfolding of identity.

Headstones are sliding earthwards. An urban fox forages for slugs. A jogger disappears into a forest of sycamores as high-rise blocks glister with the last of the sun. Follow Chris McCabe into the nocturnal world of Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park in search of the lost and forgotten poets of the East End. In The East Edge, McCabe leaves the safety of streetlights behind and walks in the footsteps of William Morris and W.G. Sebald through one of London's most enigmatic Victorian cemeteries. Stealing through the shadows, McCabe discovers stories of maritime disasters and the war dead, veers off the path with contemporary poet Stephen Watts, and trawls the archives to uncover one of London's overlooked mavericks, the career criminal-turned-poet William 'Spring' Onions. McCabe's lyrical prose and trademark dark wit are interrupted by a 'disembodied essay', spoken by a poltergeist who has returned to haunt his master's house. In this, the third instalment of McCabe's journey through London's Magnificent Seven, the stakes are raised as he places himself into the foreground of the cemetery as a performer. Can the burial grounds become a space for live theatre? Will the voices of the dead rise to meet the living? What ghosts emerge when darkness falls?

From one of the most important chroniclers of our time, come two extended excerpts from her never-before-seen notebooks - writings that offer an illuminating glimpse into the mind and process of a legendary writer. Joan Didion has always kept notebooks: of overheard dialogue, observations, interviews, drafts of essays and articles Here is one such draft that traces a road trip she took with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, in June 1970, through Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. She interviews prominent local figures, describes motels, diners, a deserted reptile farm, a visit with Walker Percy, a ladies' brunch at the Mississippi Broadcasters' Convention. She writes about the stifling heat, the almost viscous pace of life, the sulfurous light, and the preoccupation with race, class, and heritage she finds in the small towns they pass through. And from a different notebook: the "California Notes" that began as an assignment from Rolling Stone on the Patty Hearst trial of 1976. Though Didion never wrote the piece, watching the trial and being in San Francisco triggered thoughts about the city, its social hierarchy, the Hearsts, and her own upbringing in Sacramento. Here, too, is the beginning of her thinking about the West, its landscape, the western women who were heroic for her, and her own lineage.

'The ultimate Camp statement: it's good because it's awful.' These two classic essays were the first works of criticism to break down the boundaries between 'high' and 'low' culture, and made Susan Sontag a literary sensation. Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.

Gentleman Jack - Anne Lister - and Eliza Raine are 13-year-olds at boarding school. Sharing a bed in a cold attic, they pledge undying love, marry each other secretly and promise to live together when they grow up. But nothing works out as planned. Real letters and journals reveal two Georgian women whose lives changed beyond belief.

For many years the victim of smear campaigns by notable male writers, and dismissed as being merely 'the mother of Mary Shelley', Mary Wollstonecraft has claimed her rightful title as one of the founders of feminist thought, a movement anchored in her Vindications. Outraged by Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, its use of gendered language and defence of monarchy and hereditary privilege, A Vindication of the Rights of Men turned the tables on philosophy. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman swiftly followed, taking the conversation further, and arguing the case for women's education. Together, these two seminal works went on to change the course of history, and her arguments continue to hold water today. This edition contains explanatory notes and an introduction by Bee Rowlatt, Chair of the Wollstonecraft Society.

On October 13, 2016, it was announced that Bob Dylan had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, recognizing his countless contributions to music and letters over the last fifty years. Some months later, he delivered a lecture that will now be available in book form for generations to come. In it, he reflects on his life and experience with literature, giving readers a rare and intimate look at an American icon. From being inspired by Buddy Holly to the novels that helped shape his own approach to writing (The Odyssey, Moby Dick, and All Quiet on the Western Front), this is Dylan like you've never seen him before.

Born in battle, Peter White's journal is one of the most extraordinary stories to come out of the Second World War. As a 24-year-old lieutenant in the King's Own Scottish Borderers, Peter kept an unauthorised journal of his regiment's advance through the Low Countries and into Germany in the closing months of the war in Europe.

Forbidden by his commanding officer from doing so for security reasons, Peter's boyhood habit of diary-keeping had become an obsession too strong to shake off. Each day he found time to record in copious detail the war going on around him, the lives and deaths of the men with whom he served, and the inexorable Allied advance into the Third Reich.

In one of the most graphic and finely crafted evocations of a soldier at war, the images he records are not for the faint-hearted. There are heroes aplenty within its pages, but there are also disturbing insights into the darker side of humanity, frequently brushed aside in many other war accounts - the men who broke under the strain and who ran away (sometimes with tragic results); the binge drinking that occasionally rendered the whole platoon unable to fight; the looting and the callous disregard for human life that happens when death is a daily companion.

Hidden away for more than fifty years, White's diary is a remarkable account of the horrors of war experienced by a British soldier in the greatest conflict of the twentieth century.

The Maine Woods, vast and largely unsettled, are often described as unchanged since Henry David Thoreau's 1847 journey across the backcountry, in spite of the realities of Indian dispossession and the visible signs of logging, settlement, tourism, and real estate development. In the summer of 2014 scholars, indigenous peoples, activists, and other individuals retraced Thoreau's route. Inspired partly by this expedition, the accessible and engaging essays here offer valuable new perspectives on conservation, the cultural ties that connect Native communities to the land, and the profound influence the geography of the Maine Woods had on Thoreau and writers and activists who followed in his wake. Together, these essays offer a rich and multifaceted look at this special place and the ways in which Thoreau's Maine experiences continue to shape understandings of the environment a century and a half later. Contributors include the volume editor, Kathryn Dolan, James S. Finley, James Francis, Richard W. Judd, Dale Potts, Melissa Sexton, Chris Sockalexis, Stan Tag, Robert M. Thorson, and Laura Dassow Walls.

This book introduces four journals that Henry Foxall (1758-1823) kept during a trip to the British Isles in 1816-1817. It provides unique primary source material, extensively annotated for clarity and context. Foxall's journals offer an eyewitness account of Methodist embourgeoisement and institutionalization as they were occurring. They also provide some insight into the developing differences between American and British Methodism. The journals contain information on recent technological innovations of the British Industrial Revolution and recount Foxall's interactions with a number of prominent persons, both in British Methodism and outside it. Because of Foxall's close relationship with Francis Asbury, his status as an insider at the highest levels of American Methodism, and his clear understanding of the British Methodism in which he was raised, converted, and first licensed as a local preacher, his perspective is well-informed and unique.

Before embarking on what would become one of the most prominent writing careers in American literature, spanning decades and indelibly shaping the nation's perception of the West, Larry McMurtry knew what it meant to come from Texas. Originally published in 1968, In a Narrow Grave is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author's homage to the past and present of the Lone Star State, where he grew up a precociously observant hand on his father's ranch. From literature to rodeos, small-town folk to big city intellectuals, McMurtry explores all the singular elements that define his land and community, revealing the surprising and particular challenges in the "dying . . . rural, pastoral way of life." "The gold standard for understanding Houston's brash rootlessness and civic insecurities" (Douglas Brinkley, New York Times Book Review), In a Narrow Grave offers a timeless portrait of the vividly human, complex, full-blooded Texan.

This book introduces an innovative critical analysis of borders in contemporary political discourse, using examples from the Trump presidency and early stages of the Biden presidency to explore how borders are used as mechanisms of power to invoke different notions of national identity. // The volume considers border as discursive construct, reflecting on their importance in the construction and expression of national identity across different forms of modern political discourse. Employing a framework informed by Ruth Wodak's Discourse-Historical Approach, Demata examines how analyzing discourse from the Trump and Biden presidencies can reveal unique insights into how politicaians and other stakeholders use borders to recontextualize historical discourses of national identity and employ discursive strategies of inclusion and exclusion in promoting the idea of "the nation." In adopting an approach which situates these discourses within their historical and socio-cultural contexts, the volume helps to further bridge the gap between different disciplines toward offering a multi-faceted understanding of notions of borders and national identity in contemporary political language. // This book will be of interest to students and scholars in discourse analysis, language and power, language and politics, political science, and border studies.

Although Brian Aldiss cannot be pigeon-holed as a science fiction writer there is no doubt that he is a master of the art of conceiving other worlds. His fertile imagination has created intriguing and often shocking narratives which have become classics of the genre and have also translated into cinema. This collection of his essays, most of which are revised for this volume, is a testimony to the influences behind his writing, showing how the circumstances and events of his childhood are translated into strange metaphors in his novels and stories (the lonely boy playing on the beach in Walcot), how his identification with the 'exile' is a recurring theme throughout his work (it is surely no accident that he was asked to write an introduction to Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago), and how a world without children (Greybeard) expressed his grief at the temporary loss of his own children after his first marriage broke up. In these writings we witness the main events of Aldiss's life, and through his honesty and vulnerablity we are able to trace the alliance between incidents in his life and his creative imagination. For the lovers of his many books and poems this volume reveals new insights into the man and his world, giving us a better understanding of his place in the history and literary criticism of science fiction and of his interest in the cultural importance of SF as a genre.

Norman Mailer at 100 celebrates the author's centenary in 2023 and the seventy-fifth anniversary of the publication of his bestselling debut novel, The Naked and the Dead, by illustrating how Mailer remains a provocative presence in American letters. Novelist and Mailer scholar Robert J. Begiebing lays out how this polymath author's work makes vital contributions to the larger American literary landscape, encompassing the debates of the nation's founders, the traditions of Western Romanticism, and the juggernaut of twentieth-century modernism. The book includes six critical essays, two creative dialogues featuring Walt Whitman and Ernest Hemingway, and Begiebing's own interview with Mailer from 1983. Each piece pairs Mailer with a critical interlocutor whose work offers telling revelations about his ideas and art, among them Ralph Waldo Emerson, Carl Jung, Kate Millett, and Joan Didion. By encouraging a reconsideration of his career from its beginnings to his final books in the early twenty-first century, Norman Mailer at 100 forges a new path toward appreciating the author's achievements that underscores the extent to which his work can help us confront the challenges of today.

Popol Vuh, the Quiché Mayan book of creation, is not only the most important text in the native languages of the Americas, it is also an extraordinary document of the human imagination. It begins with the deeds of Mayan gods in the darkness of a primeval sea and ends with the radiant splendor of the Mayan lords who founded the Quiché kingdom in the Guatemalan highlands. Originally written in Mayan hieroglyphs, it was transcribed into the Roman alphabet in the sixteenth century.

This new edition of Dennis Tedlock's unabridged, widely praised translation includes new notes and commentary, newly translated passages, newly deciphered hieroglyphs, and over forty new illustrations.

Co-published with the European Ethnological Research Centre in the Flashbacks series. Andrew Ramage was the son of a farm servant and he himself worked on the land in the Lothians and Berwickshire, in Scotland. Subsequently he became a dock worker, lorry driver and railwayman. Of the diary he kept over many years only three notebooks remain. The first covers Andrew's early life from 1884 until the mid 1870s and the period from November 1888 until April 1889. The last two cover July 1914 to June 1917. In his account the uncertain realities of rural employment and dwelling are revealed and they dispel the bucolic image often attached to descriptions of 19th-century country life. We learn of the travails of a young man making his way in the world at a time of great social and economic change and, later, of the concerns of parenthood and aging at a time of war-time strife.

Here are some of the best of Churchill's letters of a more personal and intimate nature, presented in chronological order, with a preface to each letter explaining the context. The recipients include a vast range of people, including his schoolmaster, his American grandmother and former President Eisenhower. They are taken from within the Churchill Archive in Cambridge, where there is a mass of Churchill's correspondence, much of which is unpublished. Many of the letters included have never appeared in book form before. Winston Churchill has become an iconic figure greatly loved the world over, but maybe especially these days in the USA. Churchill understood the power of words and he used his writing to sustain and complement his political career, publishing over 40 books and receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953. This volume concentrates on his more intimate words. It seeks to show the private man behind the public figure and introduce fresh light on Churchill's character and personality by capturing the drama, immediacy, storms, depressions, passions and challenges of Churchill's extraordinary career. Churchill was neither a god nor a demon. Through these letters we see him as a human being with human emotions, frailties and a large ego. He was not always right. He held strong opinions and was often provocative. These letters take us into his world and allow us to follow the changes in his motivations and beliefs as he navigates his 90 years. There are intimate letters to his parents, his teacher at Harrow, Louis de Souza (Boer Secretary of State for War), his wife Clementine, Prime Minister Asquith, Lord Northcliffe, Anthony Eden, President Roosevelt, Eamon De Valera, the French Socialist Prime Minister Leon Blum and Charles De Gaulle. These are all letters of a personal nature and are most illuminating. They are enhanced by facsimiles of the letters and images which appear throughout the book, helping the reader to envisage a sense of Churchill in his most private moments.

Alan Rickman remains one of the most beloved actors of all time across almost every genre, from his breakout role as Die Hard's villainous Hans Gruber to his heart-wrenching run as Professor Severus Snape, and beyond. His air of dignity, his sonorous voice and the knowing wit he brought to each role continue to captivate new audiences today.

But Rickman's artistry wasn't confined to just his performances. Rickman's writing details the extraordinary and the ordinary in a way that is anecdotal, indiscreet, witty, gossipy and utterly candid. He takes us behind the scenes on films and plays ranging from Sense & Sensibility, the Harry Potter series, Private Lives, My Name is Rachel Corrie and many more.

The diaries run from 1993 to his death in 2016 and offer insight into both a public and private life. Here is Rickman the consummate professional actor, but also the friend, the traveller, the fan, the director, the enthusiast: in short, the real Alan Rickman. Here is a life fully lived, all detailed in intimate and characteristically plain-spoken prose. Reading the diaries is like listening to Rickman chatting to a close friend.

Madly, Deeply also includes a foreword by Emma Thompson and a selection of Rickman's early diaries, dating from 1974 to 1982, when his acting life first began.

Martha Gellhorn was one of the twentieth century's greatest war correspondents. The Face of War is a selection of her reports, on the conflicts in Spain, Finland, China and World War II, with later reports on Vietnam, Israel and Central America.