The first-ever volume of the photographs of German writer W.G. Sebald, exquisitely designed to shed new light on his creative process, as it chronicles the images and encounters that shaped his writing life. Shadows of Reality presents a unique, fully illustrated catalogue of W.G. Sebald's photographs- an extraordinary combination of film negatives, prints, and slides from the University of East Anglia's photographic collection, the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach, and the Sebald Estate. Complementing the exhibition Lines of Sight- W.G. Sebald's East Anglia and edited by literary scholar Clive Scott and photography curator Nick Warr, this wonderfully comprehensive book covers the multiple photographic facets of Sebald's published work and includes a substantial amount of material that has not been made public before. Introduced by Nick Warr, who offers an intriguing overview of the author's critical relationship to photography, Shadows of Reality also includes an illuminating interview with Michael Brandon-Jones, the photographer who collaborated with Sebald on all of his publications. The book features a collection of extracts-principally on photography-from interviews with Sebald himself, bequeathed to the archive of recordings held at the University of East Anglia by his close friend Gordon Turner, who also provides a memoir. Accompanying these are inspired essays by Clive Scott and Angela Breidbach on Sebald's writing-with-photographs and the complex and mercurial interactions of those photographs with narrative design. A deeply important collection for anyone interested in Sebald's creative processes or the ways in which photography might serve fiction, Shadows of Reality is an inexhaustible treasure trove of new discoveries and revelations about the cherished international author.

Shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing 2019, an electrifying memoir from a Mexican-American US Border Patrol guard 'Stunningly good... The best thing I've read for ages' James Rebanks, author of The Shepherd's Life Francisco Cantu was a US Border Patrol agent from 2008 to 2012. In this extraordinary account, he describes his work in the desert along the Mexican border. He tracks humans through blistering days and frigid nights. He detains the exhausted and hauls in the dead. The line he is sworn to defend, however, begins to dissolve. Haunted by nightmares, Cantu abandons the Patrol for civilian life - but he soon faces a final confrontation with the world he believed he had escaped. 'A raw, compelling memoir... An eloquent rebuke to all those who look to build walls rather than bridges between people' Sunday Times 'A must-read... A page-turning personal story that holds until the final page and wrenches long after' GQ 'Remarkable... Lyrical and moving' Guardian

Published in 1986, Blue Desert was Charles Bowden's third book-length work and takes place almost entirely in Arizona, revealing Bowden's growing and intense preoccupation with the state and what it represented as a symbol of America's ""New West."" Bowden presents a view of the Southwest that measures how rapid growth takes its toll on the land. Writing with a reporter's objectivity and a desert rat's passion, Bowden offers us his trademarked craft and wit to take 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 darker side of development-where ""the land always makes promises of aching beauty and the people always fail the land""-and defies us to ignore it. In a thoughtful new foreword, Francisco Cantu writes, ""In Blue Desert, we follow Bowden in the processes of becoming. We see the version of Bowden that he would likely most want us to remember-someone who did their best to be an honest witness, someone who was haunted by modernity and his place in it, someone who grappled with his demons by gazing deeply into the desert."" Blue Desert is a critical piece in the oeuvre of Charles Bowden, and it continues to remind readers of the cruelty and beauty of the world around us.