Essays
£9.99
Reporting
David Remnick, who has worked for the New Yorker since 1992 and is currently its editor, is one of the most insightful journalists working today, particularly adept at perceiving the human individual behind the public figure. This selection of his best pieces from the last fifteen years ra... See details
£14.50
Sails of the Herring Fleet: Essays on Beckett
Blau directed Beckett’s plays when they were still virtually unknown, and for more than four decades has remained one of the leading interpreters of his work. In addition to now-classic essays, the collection includes early programme notes and two remarkable interviews - one about Blau’s experien... See details
£22.95
Samuel Johnson: Selected Writings
2009 marks the tercentenary of the birth of Samuel Johnson, a writer now better known from the monumental book his friend James Boswell wrote about him than from any of his own writings. This representative selection from his work contains the many political, literary and moral essays that Johnso... See details
£10.99
Selected Essays
This generous selection of essays from a career spanning more than 50 years covers politics, sexuality, literature and a lot else besides. John Banville has said of Vidal that he is ‘always the writer, detached, beady-eyed, coolly passionate, determinedly accurate’. See details
£20.00
Sex and Violence, Death and Silence
This posthumous collection covers 35 years of Gordon Burns’s writing about the visual arts, from Francis Bacon to the YBAs. ‘Gordon Burn was a one-off’, wrote Sean O’Brien in the Independent. ‘The range of his interests and competence made him impossible to define . . . It’s as hard to fin... See details
£18.95
The Singer on the Shore
This collection of literary essays addresses, among other things, the Bible, Kafka, Borges, Sterne, Aharon Appelfeld and Kierkegaard. The collection has two overarching themes: Jewishness and the Jewish sense of exile and rootlessness, and the concept of the work of art as toy. See details
£10.99 £8.99 save 18%
The Sixties
Jenny Diski was there, but she remembers it. Her memoir cum critique cum paean to a decade of fashion, hedonism and political activism is characteristically wry, witty and intelligent. ‘Jenny Diski's eloquent and probing The Sixties is full of doubts and queries’, wrote Robert Irwin in the... See details
£8.99
So Many Books
Gabriel Zaid exposes the Malthusian paradox at the heart of the publishing industry – the writing of books is growing exponentially, the reading of them only arithmetically. But, if over-publishing is the Scylla that threatens the privileged status of reading in culture, then an exclusive focus o... See details
£9.99
Some of my Best Friends Are…
This thought-provoking collection of Yasmin Alibhai-Brown’s weekly columns for the Independent covers the Taliban, immigration, Palestine, the nature of Britishness and her infamous decision to return her MBE. See details
£11.99
Speaking to the Rose
The Swiss modernist writer Robert Walser spent the last years of his life in a mental asylum. He continued to write, mainly in a script that was considered to be a secret code for many years. In fact, he was writing in standard German, albeit in almost illegibly small letters. Several transcripti... See details
£22.50
Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney
Stephen Burt writes:
It must feel odd – and more than a bit unsettling – to realise that sooner or later, perhaps in your lifetime, somebody will write your biography. Biographers can get lives badly wrong; and even when they get things right, giving attentive accounts with the salien...
See details
£9.99
Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney
Stephen Burt writes:
It must feel odd – and more than a bit unsettling – to realise that sooner or later, perhaps in your lifetime, somebody will write your biography. Biographers can get lives badly wrong; and even when they get things right, giving attentive accounts with the salien...
See details