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.

Dark Shadows is a compelling portrait of Kazakhstan, a country that is little known in the West. Strategically located in the heart of Central Asia, sandwiched between Vladimir Putin's Russia, its former colonial ruler, and Xi Jinping's China, this vast oil-rich state is carving out its place in the world as it contends with its own complex past and present. Journalist Joanna Lillis paints a vibrant picture of this emerging nation through vivid reportage based on 13 years of on-the-ground coverage, and travels across the length and breadth of this enigmatic country that lies along the ancient Silk Road and at the geopolitical and cultural crossroads where East meets West. Featuring tales of murder and abduction, intrigue and betrayal, extortion and corruption, this book explores how a president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, transformed himself into a potentate and the economically-struggling state he inherited at the fall of the USSR into a swaggering 21st-century monocracy. A colourful cast of characters brings the politics to life: from strutting oligarch to sleeping villagers, from principled politicians to striking oilmen, from crusading journalists to courageous campaigners. Traversing dust-blown deserts and majestic mountains, taking in glitzy cities and dystopian landscapes, Dark Shadows conjures up Kazakhstan as a living, breathing place, full of extraordinary people living extraordinary lives.

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).

What are the right questions to ask when seeking out the true spirit of a nation? In November 2017 the people of Zimbabwe took to the streets in an unprecedented alliance with the military. Their goal, to restore the legacy of Chimurenga, the liberation struggle, and wrest their country back from over thirty years of Robert Mugabe's rule. In an essay that combines bold reportage, memoir and critical analysis, Zimbabwean novelist and journalist Panashe Chigumadzi reflects on the 'coup that was not a coup', the telling of history and manipulation of time and the ancestral spirts of two women - her own grandmother and Mbuya Nehanda, the grandmother of the nation.

The Talk of Liverpool is a unique record of life in one of the world's most talked about cities across four headline-making decades. Paddy Shennan covered the biggest subjects and talked to people who dominated Merseyside life between the 1980s and the present day. A master of the big interview, he is a leading authority on high-profile news stories including Hillsborough, the murder of James Bulger and the abduction of Madeleine McCann. But this compelling book also reveals its author to be a true all-rounder, capable of writing about any subject - including comedy (interviews with Ken Dodd, Alexei Sayle and many others), politics (the "Liverpool 47" and many others) and football (read how he upset Joe Royle and Jim Beglin but delighted Wayne Rooney's family and Barry Horne). Paddy had the pleasure of interviewing many of his heroes - including Tony Benn, Alan Bleasdale, Jean Alexander, Mark E. Smith of The Fall and Nigel Blackwell of Half Man Half Biscuit. He also relished variety; whether it be telling the stories of those who knew The Beatles best, going behind the scenes at Ann Summers or hearing the confessions of a funeral director. As Alastair Machray, his former editor, says: "Paddy is a simply brilliant writer who can bring any subject to life with a turn of phrase that is gifted and not learned. He has a rare ability to communicate with his audience despite that audience being an eclectic mix of ages, cultures and demographics. He writes with flair yet with insight, with humour yet with sensitivity; with courage yet with wisdom."

In Citizens of Scandal, Vanessa Freije explores the causes and consequences of political scandals in Mexico from the 1960s through the 1980s. Tracing the process by which Mexico City reporters denounced official wrongdoing, she shows that by the 1980s political scandals were a common feature of the national media diet. News stories of state embezzlement, torture, police violence, and electoral fraud provided collective opportunities to voice dissent and offered an important, though unpredictable and inequitable, mechanism for political representation. The publicity of wrongdoing also disrupted top-down attempts by the ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional to manage public discourse, exposing divisions within the party and forcing government officials to grapple with popular discontent. While critical reporters denounced corruption, they also withheld many secrets from public discussion, sometimes out of concern for their safety. Freije highlights the tensions-between free speech and censorship, representation and exclusion, and transparency and secrecy-that defined the Mexican public sphere in the late twentieth century.

On September 26, 2014, 43 male students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers' College went missing in Iguala, Guerrero, Mexico. On route to a protest, local police intercepted the students and a confrontation ensued. By the morning, they had disappeared without a trace. Hernandez reconstructs almost minute-by-minute the events of those nights in late September 2014, giving us what is surely the most complete picture available: her sources are unparalleled, since she has secured access to internal government documents that have not been made public, and to video surveillance footage the government has tried to hide and destroy. Hernandez demolishes the Mexican state's official version, which the Pena Nieto government cynically dubbed the "historic truth". As her research shows, state officials at all levels, from police and prosecutors to the upper echelons of the PRI administration, conspired to put together a fake case, concealing or manipulating evidence, and arresting and torturing dozens of "suspects" who then obliged with full "confessions" that matched the official lie. By following the role of the various Mexican state agencies through the events in such remarkable detail, Massacre in Mexico shows with exacting precision who is responsible for which component of this monumental crime.

The war against ISIS and the so-called caliphate it declared across Syria and Iraq was a battle to define not just the Middle East but the wider world. Growing from the aftermath of the U.S. war in Iraq and a brutal civil war in Syria, ISIS sought to usher in a new era of conflict as it launched terrorist attacks across Europe, while inflicting a savage extremism on the population in controlled. And the U.S. developed a new kind of war to stop it - one that that relied heavily on the sacrifices of local soldiers who fought on behalf of the American cause. This struggle came to a climax in the Iraqi city of Mosul, the crown jewel of the caliphate, in the deadliest urban combat the world had seen in a generation. Few journalists got as close to the war, and to protagonists on both sides of it, as Mike Giglio, who spent six years reporting on the rise and fall of the ISIS proto-state. He travelled along the Turkey-Syria border with the smugglers and operatives who worked in ISIS's criminal and financial networks, accompanied antiquities traders to visit stolen artefacts that helped to fund the ISIS war effort, sat with human traffickers at the heart of the migrant crisis, and met with ISIS defectors as they tried to free their minds from its grip. He also embedded often with the local soldiers on the front lines of the international effort to stop ISIS, tracking a war effort that saw these soldiers take heavy casualties as U.S. special forces worked in the shadows and U.S. pilots and drone operators dropped bombs. In Mosul, the war's central battle, he travelled in the attacking convoys of elite Kurdish and Iraqi commandos as car bombs plunged into their ranks and ISIS drones dropped grenades. Behind the drama on the battlefield, the suspense was in how much ISIS might change the world before its cities fell and how many of America's allies it could kill along the way. The story is a chilling portrait of the destructive power of extremism and of the tenacity and astonishing courage required to defeat it.

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."

Ce livre est la premiere monographie qui tente de presenter l'oeuvre de Ryszard Kapuscinski dans toute sa diversite intrinseque (journalisme d'opinion, correspondances de presse, reportages, recits, notes essayistiques, poesie, photographie) et dans toute sa duree, soit plus de cinquante ans: des premiers poemes au volume posthume Lapidarium VI. Les auteurs considerent Kapuscinski avant tout comme un ecrivain qui s'est incarne dans la figure d'un journaliste-voyageur et qui, grace a son talent, a transforme le reportage en outil permettant de formuler des significations universelles tout en preservant sa sensibilite de journaliste aux changements et aux besoins du monde. Le livre propose des interpretations theoriques litteraires des principaux ouvrages de Kapuscinski, mais les auteurs etudient egalement avec attention le destin personnel de l'ecrivain qui etait souvent le heros de ses propres textes. La biographie a ete traduite en espagnol et en italien.

'China', Napoleon once remarked, 'is a sleeping lion. Let her sleep, for when she wakes she will shake the world.' In 2014, President Xi Jinping triumphantly declared that the lion had awoken. From holding its ground in trade wars with the US, to presenting itself as a world leader in the fight against climate change, a newly confident China is flexing its economic muscles for strategic ends. With the Belt and Road initiative, billed as a new Silk Road for the 21st Century, China is set to extend its influence throughout Eurasia and across the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean. But with the Chinese and US militaries also vying over the Pacific, does this newfound confidence put China on a collision course with the US? Combining a geopolitical overview with on-the-ground reportage from a dozen countries, this new edition of China's Asian Dream engages with the most recent developments in the ongoing story of China's ascendency, and offers new insights into what the rise of China means not only for Asia, but for the world.

"Somewhere in the tangle of the subject's burden and the subject's desire is your story."-Alex Tizon Every human being has an epic story. The late Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Alex Tizon told the epic stories of marginalized people-from lonely immigrants struggling to forge a new American identity to a high school custodian who penned a New Yorker short story. Edited by Tizon's friend and former colleague Sam Howe Verhovek, Invisible People collects the best of Tizon's rich, empathetic accounts-including "My Family's Slave," the Atlantic magazine cover story about the woman who raised him and his siblings under conditions that amounted to indentured servitude. Mining his Filipino American background, Tizon tells the stories of immigrants from Cambodia and Laos. He gives a fascinating account of the Beltway sniper and insightful profiles of Surfers for Jesus and a man who tracks UFOs. His articles-many originally published in the Seattle Times and the Los Angeles Times-are brimming with enlightening details about people who existed outside the mainstream's field of vision. In their introductions to Tizon's pieces, New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet, Atlantic magazine editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg, Pulitzer Prize winners Kim Murphy and Jacqui Banaszynski, and others salute Tizon's respect for his subjects and the beauty and brilliance of his writing. Invisible People is a loving tribute to a journalist whose search for his own identity prompted him to chronicle the lives of others.

What takes place when we examine texts close-up? The art of close reading, once the closely guarded province of professional literary critics, now underpins the everyday processes of forensic scrutiny conducted by those brigades of citizen commentators who patrol the realms of social media. This study examines at close quarters a series of key English texts from the last hundred years: the novels of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, the plays of Samuel Beckett, the poetry of Sylvia Plath and Philip Larkin, the films of Alfred Hitchcock and the tweets of Donald Trump. It digs beneath their surface meanings to discover microcosmic ambiguities, allusions, ironies and contradictions which reveal tensions and conflicts at the heart of the paradox of patriarchal history. It suggests that acts of close reading may offer radical perspectives upon the bigger picture, as well as the means by which to deconstruct it. In doing so, it suggests an alternative to a classical vision of cultural progress characterised by irreconcilable conflicts between genders, genres and generations.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER 'Hilarious, nimble, and thoroughly illuminating' Colson Whitehead, author of The Underground Railroad 'Recalls the work of John Jeremiah Sullivan and the late David Foster Wallace, with a dash of Janet Malcolm' Vogue From its opening journey into remote Alaska for the Iditarod Sled Dog Race, IMPOSSIBLE OWLS leads us on a kaleidoscopic exploration of contemporary reality. Brian Phillips takes us to a sumo tournament in Japan, the jungle in India, the studio of a great Russian animator, a royal tour of the Yukon Territory with the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and into the weird heart of America. This exhilarating debut visits borders both real and imagined, and asks what it means, in our age, to travel to the end of the map.

A joyful collection of the most popular, provocative, and unforgettable essays from the New York Times 'Modern Love' column, featuring stories from the upcoming anthology series starring Tina Fey, Andy Garcia, Anne Hathaway, Catherine Keener, Dev Patel, and John Slattery. A young woman goes through the five stages of ghosting grief. A man's promising fourth date ends in the emergency room. A female lawyer with bipolar disorder experiences the highs and lows of dating. A widower hesitates about introducing his children to his new girlfriend. A divorcee in her seventies looks back at the beauty and rubble of past relationships. These are just a few of the people who tell their stories in Modern Love featuring dozens of the most memorable essays to run in the New York Times "Modern Love" column since its debut in 2004. Some of the stories are unconventional, while others hit close to home. Some reveal the way technology has changed dating forever; others explore the timeless struggles experienced by anyone who has ever searched for love. But all of the stories are, above everything else, honest. Together, they tell the larger story of how relationships begin, often fail, and-when we're lucky-endure. This is the perfect book for anyone who's loved, lost, stalked an ex on social media, or pined for true romance: in other words, anyone interested in the endlessly complicated workings of the human heart.

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 relatively in its infancy.

Pulitzer Prize-shortlisted writer and ornithologist Scott Weidensaul is at the forefront of this cutting-edge research, and A World on the Wing sees him track some of the most remarkable flights undertaken by birds around the world.

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 northeast 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 ourselves. 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.

'I was beginning to love my thief, a man I barely knew, but whom I had trusted and even liked, and who had taken my savings, amongst many other crimes.' A bravura piece of very personal reportage by Hanif Kureishi about the man who stole his life savings. Nearing sixty and needing to plan for his and his children's future, Hanif Kureishi employed an accountant from a reputable firm. When the accountant recommended investing in a property scheme, Kureishi followed his advice - only to find out that the accountant was a fraudster and his entire life savings had vanished. In this thought-provoking account of his conman, Kureishi uses this theft as a way of exploring some of the contradictions and dilemmas of our lives: the true value of money; the role of deception in art; how you can love and hate simultaneously; why the financial world seems to revolve around deceit; and what we might recover from those who have stolen from us.

One of the funniest writers of his generation, Michael Frayn has been writing humorous newspaper columns since 1959, principally for the "Guardian" and "Observer", and originally came to prominence as the thrice weekly purveyor of these short, surreal, razor-sharp explorations of human foibles, sex, politics, manners, and the events of the day. This volume brings together 110 of his finest and funniest pieces from over the years, selected and introduced by Michael Frayn himself, and is an unmissable treat for the many fans of his unique comic voice, as well as a revelation for fans of the award-winning literary novels and plays of his later career.

For more than 35 years, John 'Hoppy' Hopkins covered the biggest stories in golf, from Major Championships to Ryder Cups and Amateur competitions. During these four decades, he wrote about all the golfing greats and covered the biggest stories of the times. Collected together here for the first time are the very best of his articles, covering a diverse range of golfing stories, from the most memorable of the 120 major championships he covered to his writing on amateur tournaments including the Walker Cup and the Presidents' Putter, as well as profiles and interviews of the finest players to grace the sport. The articles are arranged month by month - giving a unique perspective on the golfing calendar, the changing seasons and stories throughout the golfing year. Perfect reading for John's many fans, and a fascinating portrait of the game's recent history, Hoppy on Golf is the ideal gift for any golf fanatic.

Rana Jawad, a British-Lebanese journalist who has reported from Tripoli for the BBC for seven years, found herself the last British journalist reporting from inside Tripoli early in 2010. Defiant and terrified in turns, she went into hiding and bravely issued the series of anonymous Tripoli Witness blogs that have become famous among anyone following the course of the insurgency. The raw blog accounts published here are accompanied by a short introductory pieces as well as a series of opening essays of what it was like to live in Gaddafi's Libya. Paul Kenyon, the acclaimed Panorama Presenter who was recently awarded for his BBC documentary on Libya, introduces Rana's work and gives an insight into this remarkable young journalists's brave reporting through harrowing times.

In 1991 Andrew Solomon faced down tanks in Moscow with a band of Russian artists protesting the August coup. We find him on the quest for a rare bird in Zambia in 1998, and in Greenland in 2001 researching widespread depression among the Inuit. In 2002 he was in Afghanistan for the fall of the Taliban. He was brought in for questioning in Qaddafi's Libya in 2006. In 2014 he travelled to Myanmar to meet ex-political prisoners as the country fitfully pushed towards freedom. Far and Away tells these and many other stories. With his signature compassion, Solomon demonstrates both how history is altered by individuals, and how personal identities shift when governments change. A journalist and essayist of remarkable perception and prescience, Solomon chronicles a life's travels to the nexus of hope, courage, and the uncertainty of lived experience and tracks seismic shifts - cultural, political and spiritual. He takes us on a magnificent journey into the heart of extraordinarily diverse experiences via intimate, deeply moving stories that reveal and revel in our common humanity.