Written in the form of a diary that runs from 1926 to 1928, English Hours is a delightful account of a Catalan in the UK during the inter-war period. In it, Soldevila writes endearingly of the country and people that he meets while providing us with an invaluable "foreign" look at this critical period in 20th century Great Britain. English Hours is not only an insight into British society during this period, but also provides a detailed look at the way two cultures can clash and yet how, ultimately, it is the people and individuals who make up our countries.

A TLS Book of the Year This exhilarating collection of non-fiction sees one of the greatest twentieth-century writers meditating on the moments that make up a life 'How did I so unwittingly transform the joy of living into the great luxury of being alive?' Between 1967 and 1977, the internationally renowned author Clarice Lispector wrote weekly dispatches from her desk in Rio for the Jornal do Brasil. Already famous for her revolutionary, interior, metaphysical novels and short stories, in her Chronicles she turned her attention to the everyday, reshaping the material of her life into profound, touching and funny, tiny revelations. Observing the world around her, small encounters like hearing tales of the lost loves of a taxi driver, or the bitterness lurking beneath the prettiness of an old friend, become an exposition of the currents and foibles that define our lives. Everything from the meaning of cosmonauts to the new ideas, writers and artists that populate the sparkling international world of the sixties and seventies are considered and transformed into jewels of insight, delight and devastation. Sincere and playful, exhilarating and contemplative, Too Much of Life: Complete Chronicles opens up a new way of seeing the world.

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 Punjab region of India sent more than 600,000 combatants to assist the British war effort during World War I. Their families back home, thousands of miles from the major scenes of battle, were desperate for war news, and newspapers provided daily reports to keep the local population up-to-date with developments on the Western Front. This book presents the first English-language translations of hundreds of articles published during World War I in the newsapers of the Punjab region. They offer a lens into the anxieties and aspirations of Punjabis, a population that committed resources, food, labour as well as combatants to the British war effort. Amidst a steadily growing field of studies on World War I that examine the effects of the war on colonial populations, War News in India makes a unique and timely contribution.

Veteran journalist Pete Hamill has never covered just politics. Or just sports. Or just the entertainment business, the mob, foreign affairs, social issues, the art world, or New York City. He has in fact written about all these subjects, and many more, in his years as a contributor to such national magazines as Esquire, Vanity Fair, and New York, and as a columnist at the New York Post, the New York Daily News, the Village Voice, and other newspapers. Seasoned by more than thirty years as a New York newspaperman, Hamill writes on an extraordinarily wide variety of topics in powerful language that is personal, tough-minded, clearheaded, always provocative. Piecework is a rich and varied collection of Hamill's best writing since 1970, on such diverse subjects as what television and crack have in common, why winning isn't everything, stickball, Nicaragua, Donald Trump, why American immigration policy toward Mexico is all wrong, Brooklyn's Seventh Avenue, and Frank Sinatra, not to mention Octavio Paz, what it's like to realize you're middle-aged, Northern Ireland, New York City then and now, how Mike Tyson spent his time in prison, and much more. This collection proves him once again to be among the last of a dying breed: the old-school generalist, who writes about anything and everything, guided only by passionate and boundless curiosity. Piecework is Hamill at his very best.

Every day, a powerful and sophisticated underground business delivers thousands of refugees along the Mediterranean coasts of Europe. A new breed of criminals, risen from the post-9/11 political chaos and the fi asco of the Arab Spring, coupled with the destabilization of Syria and Iraq and the rise of ISIS, controls it. The ever-increasing political volatility has offered them new business opportunities, from trafficking millions of refugees to selling Western hostages to jihadist groups. The kidnapping industry in the Middle East is now worth hundreds of billions of dollars annually. Loretta Napoleoni's exclusive and meticulous research into the business of kidnap and ransom, and its link to terrorist activity, is based on first-hand accounts - from interviews with hostage negotiators to the experiences of former hostages themselves. Merchants of Men is a fascinating and eye-opening exploration of this most shocking of financial interdependencies.

Many of us are consumed by news cycles reporting on Trump's latest astonishing policy or declaration, and the overwhelming sense we have is one of confusion and incredulity - how could this be happening?

As the 2020 US Presidential race takes shape, Surviving Autocracy provides an indispensable overview of the calamitous trajectory of the past few years. Drawing on her Soviet childhood and two decades covering the resurgence of totalitarianism in Russia, acclaimed New Yorker journalist and prize-winning author Masha Gessen links together seemingly disparate elements of Trump's regime to offer a roadmap for understanding Trump's approach, policies and ultimate aims. Highlighting an inventory of ravages to liberal democracy, including the corrosion of the media, the justice system and cultural norms, she posits that America is in the throws of an autocratic attempt.

Gessen's penetrating analysis offers a new political discourse to replace that which has been so thoroughly degraded, and with it, a clearer path to action. Manifesto-like, Surviving Autocracy is threaded with solutions to the current situation, such as developing a political language that encompasses autocratic impulses, a more agile and honest media, and a visionary moral politics to counter Trump's extraordinary on-going assault.

One of our most trenchant columnists takes the measure of America in the last four years.

Welcome to the favela, welcome to the rainforest, welcome to the real Brazil. This is the Brazil where a factory worker is loyal to his company for decades, only to find out that they knew the product he was making would eventually poison him. This is the Brazil where the mothers of the favela expect their sons to die as victims of the drug trade while still in their teens. This is the Brazil where the women initiated into the old Amazonian tradition of 'baby-pulling' deliver babies in their own time, far away from the drugs and scalpels of the modern hospital. In the company of award-winning journalist Eliane Brum, we meet the individuals struggling to stay afloat in a society riven by inequality and violence, and witness the resilience of spirit and commitment to life that makes Brazil one of the most complicated, most exhilarating places on earth.

THE MANAGEMENT OF SAVAGERY tells the story of the parallel rise of international jihadism and Western ultra-nationalism. Since Washington's secret funding of the Mujahideen following the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in the 1970s, America has supported extremists with money and hardware, including enemies such as Bin Laden. The Pentagon's willingness to make alliances abroad have seen the war coming home with inevitable consequences: by funding, training, and arming jihadist elements in Afghanistan, Syria, and Libya since the Cold War and waging wars of regime change and interventions that gave birth to the Islamic State. Meanwhile, Trump's dealings In the Middle East are likely only to exacerbate the situation further. Blumenthal excavates the real story behind America's dealing with the world and shows how the extremist forces that now threaten peace across the globe are the inevitable flowering of America's imperial designs of a national security state. And shows how this has ended with the rise of the Trump presidency.

In the promised land of the Sunbelt, people come by the thousands to escape the crush of Eastern cities and end up duplicating the very world they have fled. Can the land remain unchanged? In Blue Desert, Charles Bowden presents a view of the Southwest that seeks to measure how rapid growth has taken its toll on the land. Writing with a reporter's objectivity and a desert rat's passion, Bowden takes us into the streets as well as the desert to depict not a fragile environment but the unavoidable reality of abuse, exploitation, and human cruelty. Blue Desert shows us the Sunbelt's darker side as it has developed in recent times-where "the land always makes promises of aching beauty and the people always fail the land"-and defies us to ignore it. Blue Desert has no boundaries, no terrain, no topographical coordinates; it is a state of mind inescapable to one who sees change and knows that nothing can be done to stop it.

'One of the greatest writers of our time.' Toni Morrison 'You Don't Know Us Negroes adds immeasurably to our understanding of Hurston ... her words make it impossible for readers to consider her anything but one of the intellectual giants of the 20th century.' The New York Times Book Review With an introduction by New York Times bestselling author Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Genevieve West The first comprehensive collection of essays, criticism, and articles by the legendary author of the Harlem Renaissance, Zora Neale Hurston You Don't Know Us Negroes is the quintessential gathering of provocative essays from one of the world's most celebrated writers, Zora Neale Hurston. Spanning more than three decades and penned during the backdrop of the birth of the Harlem Renaissance, Montgomery bus boycott, desegregation of the military, and school integration, Hurston's writing articulates the beauty and authenticity of Black life as only she could. Collectively, these essays showcase the roles enslavement and Jim Crow have played in intensifying Black people's inner lives and culture rather than destroying it. She argues that in the process of surviving, Black people re-interpreted every aspect of American culture-"modif[ying] the language, mode of food preparation, practice of medicine, and most certainly religion." White supremacy prevents the world from seeing or completely recognizing Black people in their full humanity and Hurston made it her job to lift the veil and reveal the heart and soul of the race. These pages reflect Hurston as the controversial figure she was - someone who stated that feminism is a mirage and that the integration of schools did not necessarily improve the education of Black students. Also covered is the sensational trial of Ruby McCollum, a wealthy Black woman convicted in 1952 for killing her lover, a white doctor. Demonstrating the breadth of this revered and influential writer's work, You Don't Know Us Negroes and Other Essays is an invaluable chronicle of a writer's development and a window into her world and mind.

In this follow-up to their landmark first book, Deric Henderson and Ivan Little have gathered new stories from seventy journalists who have worked in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. These contributors write powerfully about the victims they have never forgotten, the events that have never left them, and the lasting impact of working through those terrible years. Reporting the Troubles 2, which includes contributions from a new generation of journalists, who came up in the years leading to the Good Friday Agreement, provides a compelling narrative of the last fifty years, and covers many of the key events in Northern Ireland's troubled history, from Bloody Sunday in 1972 to the inquest into the Ballymurphy Massacre in 2021. Grounded in the passionate belief that good journalism and good journalists make a difference, Reporting the Troubles 2 is a profoundly moving act of remembrance and testimony. 'I am sometimes asked to identify the most important story that I dealt with while I was editor of the Irish Times ... I answer that the most important story was not published in a single day but over years. And it was not put together by any one journalist but by a whole cohort of reporters, photographers, feature writers and editors ... For the most part they just got by-lines and the satisfaction of knowing that what they were doing was important, that the story had to be told, day by day, hour by hour. And that telling it could make a difference. It is difficult to imagine that there could ever have been a peace process without that.' CONOR BRADY, former editor, Irish Times Contributions from - Gordon Adair, Don Anderson, Ciaran Barnes, Colin Bateman, Jilly Beattie, Charlie Bird, David Blevins, Declan Bogue, Conor Brady, Stephen Breen, Eugene Campbell, Peter Cardwell, Mark Carruthers, Niall Carson, Paddy Clancy, Simon Cole, Liam Collins, Mark Davey, Donna Deeney, Michael Denieffe, Patricia Devlin, Michael Donnelly, Roisin Duffy, Gavin Esler, Michael Fisher, Jim Flanagan, Mike Gaston, Gareth Gordon, Jim Gracey, Paul Harris, Deric Henderson, Mark Hennessy, Gary Honeyford, Paul Johnson, Fergal Keane, Vincent Kearney, Gerry Kelly, Will Leitch, Ivan Little, Robin Livingstone, David Lynas, Darragh MacIntyre, Michael Macmillan, Kevin Magee, Stanley Matchett, Don McAleer, Roisin McAuley, Barry McCaffrey, Jonny McCambridge, Freya McClements, Sir Trevor McDonald, Lindy McDowell, Mark McFadden, Hugh McGrattan, Seamus McKee, Fearghal McKinney, Allison Morris, Rod Nawn, Malachi O'Doherty, Maggie O'Kane, Mike Parry, Lance Price, Colin Randall, Paul Reynolds, Maggie Taggart, Eric Villiers, John Ware, Nicholas Watt, Johnny Watterson, David Young.

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.

From the author of The Empathy Exams comes a profound meditation on isolation, longing and the conflicts faced by all those who choose to tell true stories about the lives of others.

'Intelligent, compassionate, and so fiercely, prodigiously brave. This is the essay at its creative, philosophical best' - Eleanor Catton, author of The Luminaries on The Empathy Exams

A profound exploration of the oceanic depths of longing and obsession, Make It Scream, Make It Burn is a book about why and how we tell stories. It takes the reader deep into the lives of strangers - from a woman healed by the song of 'the loneliest whale in the world' to a family convinced their child is a reincarnation of a lost pilot - and asks how we can bear witness to the changing truths of other's lives while striving to find a deeper connection to the complexities of our own.

Since the early nineteenth century women have been using their fabric collections to make quilts, often using thousands of pieces in a single quilt. These feats of perseverance and art were newsworth and in towns across the United States they caught the attention of the local press, which recognized the women and their work. This book gathers these newspaper accounts of industrious needlework into a chronicle of the work. Arranged chronologically, the reports are accompanied by detailed photographs of quilts made during the same time period. This visual record of the antique quilts make it clear how painstaking and beautiful was the quiltmaker's work, and why it attracted attention. Aficionados of women's history, textile history and quilt history will gain valuable insights into the quiltmakers' dedication to their minute work, and the esteem in which their communities held them. Quilt historians and all who cherish the art of the quilt will gain a new understanding of the quilts and the people who made them.

A new authoritative edition of Katherine Mansfield's complete correspondence Provides accurate transcriptions that shed new light on the everyday, intimate world of Mansfield as a letter-writer Organised A-Z, which foregrounds the lives and personalities of her correspondents, along with the various self-fictionalising games that the letter-writer played Showcases letters and sections of letters that have never previously been published Provides meticulous explanatory notes and rich contextual information Offers extensive attention to the cultural and socio-political context of the correspondence From Conrad Aiken to Hugh Jones, this first volume covers correspondents from every period of Mansfield's life. A detailed introduction, together with biographical portraits for each correspondent, enhance the cultural and socio-historical context, while the letters themselves offer a detailed expose of Mansfield's life: from exile and emigration, intimacy and betrayal, and the traumas of war and disease, to nature and the environment and fashions and food. The volume also reveals the intimacies of some of Mansfield's most prized friendships.

China's 'Great Firewall' has evolved into the most sophisticated system of online censorship in the world. As the Chinese internet grows and online businesses thrive, speech is controlled, dissent quashed, and attempts to organise outside the official Communist Party are quickly stamped out. Updated throughout and available in paperback for the first time, The Great Firewall of China draws on James Griffiths' unprecedented access to the Great Firewall and the politicians, tech leaders, dissidents and hackers whose lives revolve around it. New chapters cover the suppression of information about the first outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, disinformation campaigns in response to the exposure of the persecution of Uyghur communities in Xinjiang and the crackdown against the Umbrella movement in Hong Kong.

Lunch with the Financial Times has been a permanent fixture in the Financial Times for almost 25 years, featuring presidents, film stars, musical icons and business leaders from around the world. The column is now as well-established institution which has reinvigorated the art of conversation in the convivial, intimate environment of a long boozy lunch. On its 25th anniversary, Lunch with the Financial Times 2 will showcase the most entertaining, incisive and fascinating interviews from the past five years including those with Edward Snowden, Bernie Ecclestone, Hilary Mantel, Sheryl Sandberg, Richard Branson, Rebecca Solnit, Emmerson Mnangagwa, Jordan Peterson, Nigel Farage, Woody Harrelson, Sepp Blatter, (pre-election) Donald Trump and Zoella, illustrated in full colour with James Ferguson's famous portraits.

In the last decades, America has gone to war as supposed defenders of democracy. The War on Terror was waged to protect the west from the dangers of Islamists. US Solders are stationed in over 800 locations across the world to act as the righteous arbiters of the rule of law. In What America Really Wants? Andrew Cockburn brilliantly dissects the intentions behind Washington's martial appetites. The American war machine can only be understood in terms of the "private passions" and "interests" of those who control it - principally a passionate interest in money. Thus, as he witheringly reports, Washington expanded NATO to satisfy an arms manufacturer's urgent financial requirements; the U.S. Navy's Pacific fleet deployments were for years dictated by a corrupt contractor who bribed high-ranking officers with cash and prostitutes; senior marine commanders agreed to a troop surge in Afghanistan in 2017 "because it will do us good at budget time." Based on years of wide-ranging research, Cockburn lays bare the ugly reality of the largest military machine in history: squalid, and at the same time terrifyingly dangerous.

Ranging from war journalism to crime stories to profiles on influential leaders to pieces on sports, gambling and the impending impact of supercomputers on the practice of medicine, this collection is Bowden at his best. Pieces that will appear in the collection include, "The Three Battles of Wanat", which tells the story of a bloody engagement in Afghanistan and the extraordinary years-long fallout within the US military, "The Drone Warrior," in which Bowden examines the strategic, legal and moral issues surrounding armed drones, and "The Case of the Vanishing Blonde," which first appeared in Vanity Fair and recounts the chilling story of a woman who went missing from a Florida hotel only to turn up near the Everglades, brutally beaten, raped and still alive. Also included are profiles on a diverse range of notable and influential people such as Joe Biden, Kim Jong-un, Judy Clarke who is well known for defending America's worst serial killers and David Simon, the creator of the successful HBO series The Wire.

Jon Mee explores the popular democratic movement that emerged in the London of the 1790s in response to the French Revolution. Central to the movement's achievement was the creation of an idea of 'the people' brought into being through print and publicity. Radical clubs rose and fell in the face of the hostile attentions of government. They were sustained by a faith in the press as a form of 'print magic', but confidence in the liberating potential of the printing press was interwoven with hard-headed deliberations over how best to animate and represent the people. Ideas of disinterested rational debate were thrown into the mix with coruscating satire, rousing songs, and republican toasts. Print personality became a vital interface between readers and print exploited by the cast of radicals returned to history in vivid detail by Print, Publicity, and Popular Radicalism in the 1790s. This title is also available as Open Access.

Central Asia has long stood at the crossroads of history. It was the staging ground for the armies of the Mongol Empire, for the nineteenth-century struggle between the Russian and British empires, and for the NATO campaign in Afghanistan. Today, multinationals and nations compete for the oil and gas reserves of the Caspian Sea and for control of the pipelines. Yet "Stanland" is still, to many, a terra incognita, a geographical blank. Beginning in the mid-1990s, academic and journalist David Mould's career took him to the region on Fulbright Fellowships and contracts as a media trainer and consultant for UNESCO and USAID, among others. In Postcards from Stanland, he takes readers along with him on his encounters with the people, landscapes, and customs of the diverse countries-Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan-he came to love. He talks with teachers, students, politicians, environmental activists, bloggers, cab drivers, merchants, Peace Corps volunteers, and more. Until now, few books for a nonspecialist readership have been written on the region, and while Mould brings his own considerable expertise to bear on his account-for example, he is one of the few scholars to have conducted research on post-Soviet media in the region-the book is above all a tapestry of place and a valuable contribution to our understanding of the post-Soviet world.

'A major achievement.' CLAUDIA RANKINE 'Endlessly absorbing.' SINEAD GLEESON 'A probing tour of capitalism and class.' MAGGIE NELSON 'Exhilarating.' JENNY OFFILL A personal reckoning with the intricacies of money, class and capitalism from the New York Times bestselling author. Having just purchased her first home, Eula Biss embarks on a roguish and risky self-audit of the value system she has bought into. The result is Having and Being Had: a radical interrogation of work, leisure and capitalism. Playfully ranging from IKEA to Beyonce to Pokemon, across bars and laundromats and universities, she asks, of both herself and her class, 'In what have we invested? 'As a writer Eula Biss has two great gifts. The first is her ability to reveal to the reader what has, all along, been hidden in plain sight . . . Her other talent is for laying bare our submerged fears . . . In Having and Being Had, both gifts are on display . . . if you are not deeply discomfited by the time you finish reading On Having and Being Had, you have no conscience.' AMINATTA FORNA, GUARDIAN 'Calls on the controlled rush of poetry and turns experience into art.' TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT 'Nuanced . . . Biss' sentences have retained a poet's precision.' IRISH TIMES 'Eula Biss's prescient new book gave me new language for things I didn't know I felt . . . A brilliant, lacerating re-examination of our relationship to what we own and why, and who in turn might own us.' ALEXANDER CHEE 'No contemporary writer I know explores and confronts her own societal responsibilities better than Eula Biss.' ALEKSANDER HEMON 'A meditation on race, consumerism and the American caste system. And a wry, vivd assessment of our spiritual moment. It is no accident that Having and Being Had reads like the poems money would write if money wrote poems.' JEET THAYIL

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.