'To be different is to be the best f*cking thing here and you'll be celebrated for that!'

Written and illustrated by global phenomenon YUNGBLUD, this interactive journal is packed with never-before-seen art, exclusive lyrics, poems, creative prompts, and incisive questions that will push you to dig deep and celebrate what makes you different.

Who are you?

For most of us that is the hardest question in the world.

This book is designed to help guide you on a journey to find out. To confess what you love about yourself, destroy your deepest insecurities and face your darkest fears.

This is a book to rip, draw, burn, bury and create. A book that will end up in tatters if you do it right. This is a book of you.

So, I’ll ask you again… Who are you?

It’s time to find out.

Dom xoxo

One of the twentieth century's most extraordinary Americans, Pearl Buck was the first person to make China accessible to the West.

She recreated the lives of ordinary Chinese people in "The Good Earth," an overnight worldwide bestseller in 1932, later a blockbuster movie. Buck went on to become the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Long before anyone else, she foresaw China's future as a superpower, and she recognized the crucial importance for both countries of China's building a relationship with the United States. As a teenager she had witnessed the first stirrings of Chinese revolution, and as a young woman she narrowly escaped being killed in the deadly struggle between Chinese Nationalists and the newly formed Communist Party.
Pearl grew up in an imperial China unchanged for thousands of years. She was the child of American missionaries, but she spoke Chinese before she learned English, and her friends were the children of Chinese farmers. She took it for granted that she was Chinese herself until she was eight years old, when the terrorist uprising known as the Boxer Rebellion forced her family to flee for their lives. It was the first of many desperate flights. Flood, famine, drought, bandits, and war formed the background of Pearl's life in China. "Asia was the real, the actual world," she said, "and my own country became the dreamworld."
Pearl wrote about the realities of the only world she knew in "The Good Earth. "It was one of the last things she did before being finally forced out of China to settle for the first time in the United States. She was unknown and penniless with a failed marriage behind her, a disabled child to support, no prospects, and no way of telling that "The Good Earth "would sell tens of millions of copies. It transfixed a whole generation of readers just as Jung Chang's "Wild Swans "would do more than half a century later. No Westerner had ever written anything like this before, and no Chinese had either.
Buck was the forerunner of a wave of Chinese Americans from Maxine Hong Kingston to Amy Tan. Until their books began coming out in the last few decades, her novels were unique in that they spoke for ordinary Asian people-- "translating my parents to me," said Hong Kingston, "and giving me our ancestry and our habitation." As a phenomenally successful writer and civil-rights campaigner, Buck did more than anyone else in her lifetime to change Western perceptions of China. In a world with its eyes trained on China today, she has much to tell us about what lies behind its astonishing reawakening.

'I thought that no man liveth and dieth to himself, so I put behind what I thought and what I did the panorama of the world I lived in - the things that made me.' Sean O'Casey, 1948

Sean O'Casey's six-part Autobiography, originally published between 1939 and 1955, is an eloquently comprehensive self-portrait of an artist's life and times, unsurpassed in literature.

"Drums Under the Windows" (1945) sees O'Casey's young (pre-writing) life taking shape amid the extraordinary tumult of Ireland in the early twentieth century, thus leading him into the fray of the Easter Rising of 1916. "Inishfallen, Fare Thee Well" (1949) charts the steps towards his emigration from Ireland in 1926: a move pressed upon O'Casey by his hard struggle against the restrictions and prohibitions wrought by Irish society, church and state.

Faber Finds is devoted to restoring to readers a wealth of lost or neglected classics and authors of distinction. The range embraces fiction, non-fiction, the arts and children's books. For a full list of available titles visit www.faberfinds.co.uk. To join the dialogue with fellow book-lovers please see our blog, www.faberfindsblog.co.uk.

'I thought that no man liveth and dieth to himself, so I put behind what I thought and what I did the panorama of the world I lived in - the things that made me.'

Sean O'Casey, 1948

Sean O'Casey's six-part Autobiography, originally published between 1939 and 1955, is an eloquently comprehensive self-portrait of an artist's life and times, unsurpassed in literature.

As its title suggests, "Rose and Crown" (1952) reflects O'Casey's experience of making a new home in England where, socialist passion intact, he makes a sharp study of the General Strike of 1926. "Sunset and Evening Star" (1954) offers both valediction and celebration: for though O'Casey views Ireland as 'a decaying ark... afraid of the falling rain of the world's thought', he can still envisage the nation's young 'throwing out some of the musty stuff, bringing the fresh and the new...'

Faber Finds is devoted to restoring to readers a wealth of lost or neglected classics and authors of distinction. The range embraces fiction, non-fiction, the arts and children's books. For a full list of available titles visit www.faberfinds.co.uk. To join the dialogue with fellow book-lovers please see

our blog, www.faberfindsblog.co.uk.

This timely and expansive biography of Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian writer, Nobel laureate, and social activist, shows how the author's early years influence his life's work and how his writing, in turn, informs his political engagement. Three sections spanning his life, major texts, and place in history, connect Soyinka's legacy with global issues beyond the borders of his own country, and indeed beyond the African continent. Covering his encounters with the widespread rise of kleptocratic rule and international corporate corruption, his reflection on the human condition of the North-South divide, and the consequences of postcolonialism, this comprehensive biography locates Wole Soyinka as a global figure whose life and works have made him a subject of conversation in the public sphere, as well as one of Africa's most successful and popular authors. Looking at the different forms of Soyinka's work--plays, novels, and memoirs, among others--this volume argues that Soyinka used writing to inform, mobilize, and sometimes incite civil action, in a decades-long attempt at literary social engineering.

Winner of the Anne M. Sperber Prize

A spirited and revealing memoir by the most celebrated editor of his time

After editing The Columbia Review, staging plays at Cambridge, and a stint in the greeting-card department of Macy's, Robert Gottlieb stumbled into a job at Simon and Schuster. By the time he left to run Alfred A. Knopf a dozen years later, he was the editor in chief, having discovered and edited Catch-22 and The American Way of Death, among other bestsellers. At Knopf, Gottlieb edited an astonishing list of authors, including Toni Morrison, John Cheever, Doris Lessing, John le Carre, Michael Crichton, Lauren Bacall, Katharine Graham, Robert Caro, Nora Ephron, and Bill Clinton--not to mention Bruno Bettelheim and Miss Piggy. In Avid Reader, Gottlieb writes with wit and candor about succeeding William Shawn as the editor of The New Yorker, and the challenges and satisfactions of running America's preeminent magazine. Sixty years after joining Simon and Schuster, Gottlieb is still at it--editing, anthologizing, and, to his surprise, writing.

But this account of a life founded upon reading is about more than the arc of a singular career--one that also includes a lifelong involvement with the world of dance. It's about transcendent friendships and collaborations, "elective affinities" and family, psychoanalysis and Bakelite purses, the alchemical relationship between writer and editor, the glory days of publishing, and--always--the sheer exhilaration of work.

The beginning of Robert Ferguson's introduction is arresting. 'If they've heard of him at all, people tend to know two things about Knut Hamsun: that he wrote "Hunger," and that he met Hitler. Those who know a little more know that in "Hunger," "Mysteries" and "Pan," he produced novels that have had a decisive effect on European and American literature of the twentieth century. Ernest Hemingway tried to write like him; so did Henry Miller, who called him 'the Dickens of my generation'; 'never has the Nobel Prize been awarded to one worthier of it.' Thomas Mann wrote in 1929. Hermann Hesse called him 'my favourite author'. Russian writers like Andre Bely and Boris Pasternak read him keenly in their youth, and Andre Gide thought him arguable superior to Dostoevsky. They all read him - Kafka, Brecht, Gorky, Wells, Musil. Rebecca West described him as the possessor of 'qualities that belong to the very great - the completest omniscience about human nature'. And Isaac Bashevis Singer stated that Hamsun was quite simply 'the father of the modern school of literature in his every aspect - his subjectiveness, his fragmentariness, his use of flashbacks, his lyricism'. Singer, in his foreword to "Hunger," goes on to say that 'The whole modern school of fiction in the twentieth century stems from Hamsun.' Yet in discussions of the history of modern literature, Hamsun's name is rarely mentioned. His reputation, which probably reached its height around 1929 with the world celebrations of his seventieth birthday, was in ruins by the end of the Second World War. Alone among the major European writers, he had supported Hitler. Brazenly alone, he had hailed he rise and bemoaned the fall of the epitome of spiritual tyranny in recent history.'

What a subject, and in this, the first biography, Robert Ferguson brilliantly gets the measure of this awkward, paradoxical writer, or, as he calls him 'a multiple paradox, a living riddle; a human question-mark'.

'"Enigma" is scholarly, very readable, warm, intelligent, shrewd, refreshingly unpretentious, invaluable, essential. A magnificent achievement.' Martin Seymour-Smith, "Washington Post"

""

'"Enigma" is simply a pleasure to read. When Ferguson writes of the demonic muse that haunted Hamsun throughout his life, we glimpse something profound about the creative act of writing, and we come very close to the exalted emotion that every writer feels - or hopes to feel. Indeed, the highest praise that can be bestowed on Ferguson's work is to declare that "Enigma" is one of the most moving, inspiring and exciting books on the subject of writing that I have ever encountered.' Jonathan Kirsch, "Los Angeles Times"

""

'Robert Ferguson's is the first full length English biography of Knut Hamsun and no one could ahve done a more expert job.' John Carey, "Sunday Times"

T S Eliot called Louis MacNeice 'a poet of genius', a poet's poet, one 'whose virtuosity can be fully appreciated only by other poets'. As his publisher, however, Eliot knew that MacNeice's work could speak to a much larger public. His Autumn Journal, published in May 1939, went through five printings during the war years, and it was to become one of the definitive poems of the 1930s. 'I would have a poet,' wrote MacNeice, 'able-bodied, fond of talking, a reader of the newspapers, capable of pity and laughter, informed in economics, appreciative of women, involved in personal relationships, actively interested in politics, susceptible to physical impressions.' Knowing himself to be all of those things, modesty and a desire to demystify his calling led him to make no mention of the one all-important characteristic that distinguishes a poet: a mastery of the music and magic of language. MacNeice's mother died when he was seven, and Jon Stallworthy shows how his imagination transmuted her ghostly presence, and the powerful presence of his father, into an elemental opposition structuring most of what he would write - from anguished indictments of his native Ireland to poignant love poems. Drawing on the testimony of MacNeice's family, friends and lovers, and his extensive correspondence, Stallworthy has produced a remarkable portrait of a poet of rare energy and integrity who was also a brilliant scholar, critic, autobiographer, playwright and translator. 'Jon Stallworthy's Louis MacNeice is the indispensable guide to the poetry and is written with great verve, generosity and brilliance. A moving and eloquent account of the life of the poet, as well as a superb analysis of the relationship between the life and the work, this is surely one of the great literary biographies of our time.' Jonathan Allison, editor of The Selected Letters of Louis MacNeice

Malcolm Lowry was the troubled author of Under the Volcano (1947), a brilliant novel about the last day of an alcoholic former British consul on the Mexican Day of the Dead, the manuscript of which Lowry rescued from the flames when his fisherman's shack burned down in 1944. Lowry's other books were not always so lucky: his first novel, Ultramarine (1930), was stolen after four years' composition and resurrected from a carbon copy; another manuscript, In Ballast to the White Sea, was destroyed in the 1944 fire. An early draft of In Ballast was discovered this century and published in 2014. Lowry's life, like his work, was often lost to chaos; Gordon Bowker's 1994 biography is a masterful account of a life spent adrift.

This is the one-volume edition of a famous biography of Henry James, which includes new material. Born in America, Henry James was educated both there and in Europe before settling in London, where he was to spend most of his life, in 1876. His novels represent the culmination of the 19th-century realist tradition of Austen, George Eliot, Flauberty and Balzac, and a decisive step towards the experimental modernism of Woolf and T.S. Eliot. His works often focus upon an innocent American in Europe, and assess the qualities and dangers of both American and European culture at the time, as well as showing their vast differences.

The first biography of the renowned writer, broadcaster, conservationist and chronicler of colonial Kenya, whose lyrical and evocative memoir The Flame Trees of Thika (1959) achieved worldwide fame when made into a television drama series in 1981. Colonial Kenya inspired three great writers - Karen Blixen (Out of Africa), Beryl Markham (West with the Night) and Elspeth Huxley. Huxley's writings (30 books in all: novels, biographies, political accounts) have great political and social range, encompassing (in her Kenyan books) the exploits of the Happy Valley farmers - made famous by James Fox's book White Mischief, poor white farmers and the lives of Africans alike. After a childhood spent in East Africa and wartime Britain, Elspeth married Gervas, a grandson of Thomas Huxley and cousin to Julian and Aldous Huxley, whom she knew well. She also later got to know Joy Adamson and the Leakeys. She travelled widely with her husband (an executive with the Empire Marketing Board) and wrote while constantly on the move. She worked for the BBC in World War II and became a Kenyan government adviser. In 1938 she bought a farm in Wiltshire, where she died in 1997. The author, Christine Nicholls, has access to all her letters and papers, and is familiar with many of the people and places in the book. Elspeth Huxley was a compelling personality and a brilliant letter-writer, extraordinarily energetic and effective in everything she did.

Bill Bryson's biography of William Shakespeare unravels the superstitions, academic discoveries and myths surrounding the life of our greatest poet and playwright. Ever since he took the theatre of Elizabethan London by storm over 400 years ago, Shakespeare has remained centre stage. His fame stems not only from his plays - performed everywhere from school halls to the world's most illustrious theatres - but also from his enigmatic persona. His face is familiar to all, yet in reality very little is known about the man behind the masterpieces. Shakespeare's life, despite the scrutiny of generations of biographers and scholars, is still a thicket of myths and traditions, some preposterous, some conflicting, arranged around the few scant facts known about the Bard - from his birth in Stratford to the bequest of his second best bed to his wife when he died. Taking us on a journey through the streets of Elizabethan and Jacobean England, Bryson examines centuries of stories, half-truths and downright lies surrounding our greatest dramatist. With a steady hand and his trademark wit, he introduces a host of engaging characters, as he celebrates the magic of Shakespeare's language and delights in details of the bard's life, folios, poetry and plays.

Everyone knows Frank Herbert's Dune. This science fiction epic combines politics human evolution and ecology and has captured the imagination of generations of readers. It is one of the most popular science fiction novels ever written, has won awards, sold millions of copies around the world and spawned multiple motion-picture adaptations.

Brian Herbert, Frank Herbert's eldest son, tells the provocative story of his father's extraordinary life in this honest and loving chronicle. He has also brought to light all the events in Herbert's life that would find their way into speculative fiction's greatest epic. From his early years in Tacoma, Washington, through his time at university and in the Navy, to the difficult years of poverty while struggling to become a published writer, Herbert worked long and hard before finding success after the publication of Dune in 1965.

Brian Herbert writes about these years with a truthful intensity that brings every facet of his father's brilliant, and sometimes troubled, genius to full light. Insightful and provocative, containing family photos never published anywhere, this absorbing biography offers Brian Herbert's unique personal perspective on one of the most enigmatic and creative talents of our time.