Forget everything you think you know about strippersIn this powerful book, Stacey Clare, a stripper with over a decade of experience, takes a detailed look at the sex industry - the reality of the work as well as the history of licensing and regulation, feminist themes surrounding sex work, and stigma. Bringing her personal knowledge of the industry to bear, she offers an unapologetic critique and searing indictment of exploitation, and raises the rights of sex workers to the top of the agenda.The Ethical Stripper rejects notions of victimhood, challenges stigma and shame, and unpacks decades of confusion and contradictions. It's about the sex-work community's fight for safety and self-determination, and it challenges you to think twice about every newspaper article, documentary and film you have seen about stripping and sex work.
Whether negotiating the mind-games of the Israeli intelligence services or performing ablutions in a London bathroom, Mohammad Chowdhury's life as a British Muslim travelling the world brings daily challenges. Border Crossings is the story of Chowdhury's journey, gripping in some parts and shame-inducing in others, as he describes a lifelong struggle to reconcile the British, Asian and Muslim sides of his identity, constantly dealing with the mistrust of Westerners alongside the hypocrisies of his own community and their misunderstanding of Islam.Chowdhury's story echoes the experience of thousands of Western Muslims who since 9/11 have been subjected to a constant barrage of questions that cast doubt over the very goodness of their faith. It is the story of a man who cries when England win the Ashes, yet still finds himself screaming in the face of racism and religious bigotry. This timely book powerfully rejects the poisonous narrative that Muslims can no longer be trusted as honest citizens of the West.
'Exquisite . . . Angela Carter goes feral with Ursula K. Le Guin' (Jay Griffiths): a beautifully illustrated novel rooted in fantasy and folklore, set in a post-apocalyptic California
They've all got a book in them, unfortunately.In December 2016, Julia Greengage, aspiring writer and resting actor, puts up a poster in her local library inviting people to join a new writers' group. The group will exchange constructive feedback and 'generally share in the pains and pleasures of this excruciating yet exhilarating endeavour we call Literature'.Seven people, each in their own way a bit of a work in progress, heed the call.There's Keith, a mercenary sci-fi geek who can write 5,000 words before breakfast and would sell his mother for a book deal. Tom, a suburban lothario with an embarrassing secret. Peter, a conceptual artist whose main goal in life is to make everyone else feel uncomfortable. Alice, who's been working on her opening sentence for over nine months. Jon, a faded muso with a UFO complex. Blue, whose doom-laden poems include 'Electrocuted Angel in the Headlights of My Dead Lover's Eye Sockets' and the notorious 'Kitten on a Fatberg'. And Mavinder, who sadly couldn't make the first meeting. Or the second. But promises to come to the next one...Soon, under Julia's watchful eye, the budding writers are meeting every month to read out their work and indulge each other's dreams of getting published. But it's not long before the group's idiosyncrasies and insecurities begin to appear. Feuds, rivalries and even romance are on the cards - not to mention an exploding sheep's head, a cosplay stalker, and an alien mothership invasion. They're all on a journey, and God help the rest of us.A novel-in-emails about seven eccentric writers, written by three quite odd ones, Work in Progress is a very British farce about loneliness, friendship and the ache of literary obscurity.
Jet fuel for your imagination: a collection of 500 time-travelling, mind-bending microfictions from the creator of @QuietPineTrees
A practical, jargon-busting, step-by-step guide to sustainable investing for women
An illustrated compendium and critique of the most beautiful, bulbous and downright dangerous video game butts
Douglas and his father haven't been able to communicate since his mother's death from cancer. Their house is a place of sadness. One day Douglas finds an injured goose and begins their mission to nurse the bird, and themselves, back to health.
According to the latest figures, the number of vegans in the UK has more than quadrupled since 2014, now representing over 1 per cent of the total population. With the rise in plant-based foods and cruelty-free products showing no sign of stopping, Think Like a Vegan explores how vegan ethics can be applied to every area of our daily lives.We all want to live more healthily and ethically, and this book is certainly not just for vegans. It's for anyone interested in veganism, its ideals and what even non-vegans can learn from its practice. Through a personal and often irreverent lens, the authors explore a variety of contemporary topics related to animal use: from the basics of vegan logic to politics, economics, love and other aspects of being human, each chapter draws you into a thought-provoking conversation about your daily ethical decisions.Why should we adopt animals?What's the problem with organic meat?What are the economics of plant-based foods?What about honey?What is the relationship between veganism and feminism?What is vegansexualism?
This landmark, first-of-its-kind anthology presents a groundbreaking perspective on women's writing about the natural world and our place within it
Angola, 2002. In the last days of a vicious civil war, it is a dangerous landscape rife with rebel soldiers, land mines, corruption and deception. A suspicious explosion kills a beloved nurse, while another humanitarian worker goes missing. Lena Rodrigues, a young photographer, flies out to Angola's highlands to piece together the reasons behind her sister's disappearance. But will she have the strength to bear witness to the truth, before she gets entangled in the country's conflict for minerals and power?
Kate and her Granny Jean have nothing in common. Jean's great claim to fame is raising her weans without two pennies to rub together, and Kate's an aspiring scriptwriter whose anxiety has her stuck in bad thought after bad thought. But what Jean's Glaswegian family don't know is that she dreamed of being a film star and came a hairsbreadth away from making it a reality. Now in her nineties, Jean is a force to be reckoned with. But when the family starts to fall apart Jean must face her failings as a mammy head-on - and Kate too must fight her demons. Either that or let go of her dream of the silver screen forever...
Cullrothes, in the Scottish Highlands, where Innes hides a terrible secret from his girlfriend Alice, a gorgeous, cheating, lying schoolteacher. In the same village, Donald is the aggressive distillery owner, who floods the country with narcotics alongside his single malt; when his son goes missing, he becomes haunted by an anonymous American investor intent on purchasing the Cullrothes Distillery by any means necessary. Schoolgirl Jessie is trying to get the grades to escape to the mainland, while Grandpa counts the days left in his life.This is a place where mountains are immense and the loch freezes in winter. A place with only one road in and out. With long storms and furious midges and a terrible phone signal. The police are compromised the journalists are scum, and the innocent folk of Cullrothes tangle themselves in a fermenting barrel of suspicion, malice and lies...
Brilliant science-fiction set in the ancient City of Skala between a harsh, hot, barren desert called Hellinar and the dark, icy tundra of Ayon...
In the spring of 2004, David Lascelles invited a group of monks from Bhutan to build a stupa in the gardens of Harewood House in Yorkshire. It was a step into the unknown for the Bhutanese. They didn't speak any English, had never travelled outside their own culture, had never flown in an airplane or seen the ocean.Theirs was one kind of journey, but the project was also another kind of voyage for David. It was an attempt to reconcile a deep interest in Buddhism with the 250 years that his family has lived at Harewood, the country house and estate - with its links to one of the darkest chapters in Britain's colonial past - that he has loved, rejected, tried to make sense of and been haunted by all his life.In Buddhist thought, one of the functions of a stupa is to harmonise the environment in which it is built and subdue the chaotic forces at work there. Would this stupa have a similar effect, quelling the forces of Harewood's past and harmonising the contradictions of its present?A Hare-Marked Moon tells the story behind the extraordinary meeting of cultures that resulted in the Harewood Stupa, interspersed with accounts of David's travels in the Himalayas which delve into the rich and turbulent history of the region, and the beliefs that have shaped it.
From the publisher of The Good Immigrant: a groundbreaking collection of essays written by British hijabis
In 2016, Mary Jane Baxter did what many people dream of: she quit her job at the BBC, rented out her flat and headed for the hills. Her home for the next few months was an upcycled 1986 Bedford Bambi campervan with a top speed of 60mph. She raided skips for vintage wallpaper and scoured second-hand emporiums to source stylish vintage accessories, creating her own travelling craft studio, packed with everything necessary for crafting on the road.She then set off around Europe searching for inspiration, travelling from Belgium right down to the Cinque Terre in Italy then around France and up to Scotland. Armed with her trusty hand-cranked Singer, she spent a summer sewing on the go, foraging in flea markets, meeting artists and hosting pop-up events to help fund her trip. Like creatives the world over she decided to see where her travels would lead her and returned with a head full of new projects.Fortunately, there's no need for you to give up your job, wave goodbye to your family and rent out your house in order to re-ignite your own creativity; Mary Jane has done all the hard work for you. Sew on the Go is her guide to carving out more creative space in your life. From decorating your own budget-conscious bolthole to achievable projects including clothes and fashion accessories, beautiful gift ideas and child-friendly makes, this book is the ideal companion for those who dream of devoting more time to their craft.
An illustrated journal celebrating twenty-five years of the Women's Prize for Fiction, full of quotes and tips to inspire your own writing
A stunning anthology of stories, poetry and memoir by new and established writers in recovery
Musa Okwonga - a young Black man who grew up in a predominantly working-class town - was not your typical Eton College student.The experience moulded him, challenged him... but also made him wonder why a place that was so good for him also seems to contribute to the harm being done to the UK. The more he searched, the more evident the connection became between one of Britain's most prestigious institutions and the genesis of Brexit, and between his home town in the suburbs of Greater London and the rise of the far right.Woven throughout this deeply personal and unflinching memoir of Musa's five years at Eton in the 1990s is a present-day narrative which engages with much wider questions about pressing social and political issues: privilege, the distribution of wealth, the rise of the far right in the UK, systemic racism, the 'boys' club' of government and the power of the few to control the fate of the many. One of Them is both an intimate account and a timely exploration of race and class in modern Britain.
Chasing tales of sugarcane, rubber and gold, Song embarks upon a perilous voyage across the globe to the British colony of Guiana, but once there he discovers riches are not so easy to come by and he is forced into labouring as an indentured plantation worker.
At first glance, Jonathan Meades's 1993 masterpiece Pompey is a post-war family saga set in and around the city of Portsmouth. This doesn't come close to communicating the scabrous magnificence of Meades's vision.He writes like Martin Amis on acid, creating an obscene, suppurating vision of an England in terminal decline. The story begins with Guy Vallender, a fireworks manufacturer from Portsmouth (Pompey), who has four children by different four different women. There's Poor Eddie, a feeble geek with a gift for healing; 'Mad Bantu', the son of a black prostitute, who was hopelessly damaged in the womb by an attempted abortion; Bonnie, who is born beautiful but becomes a junkie and a porn star; and finally Jean-Marie, a leather-wearing gay gerontophiliac conceived on a one-night stand in Belgium. The narrator is 'Jonathan Meades', cousin to Poor Eddie and Bonnie, who tells the story of how their strange and poisonous destinies intersect. And although there is no richer stew of perversity, voyeurism, corruption, religious extremism and curdled celebrity in all of English literature, there is also an underlying compassion and a jet-black humour which makes Pompey an important and strangely satisfying work of art. Prepare to enter the English novel's darkest ride....
A gorgeously illustrated and extended version of Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale, by the Kate Greenaway Medal-winning co-author of The Lost Words
'I adore Meades's book . . . I want more of his rule-breaking irreverence in my kitchen' New York Times'The Plagiarist in the Kitchen is hilariously grumpy, muttering at us "e;Don't you bastards know anything?"e; You can read it purely for literary pleasure, but Jonathan Meades makes everything sound so delicious that the non-cook will be moved to cook and the bad cook will cook better' David Hare, GuardianThe Plagiarist in the Kitchen is an anti-cookbook. Best known as a provocative novelist, journalist and film-maker, Jonathan Meades has also been called 'the best amateur chef in the world' by Marco Pierre White. His contention here is that anyone who claims to have invented a dish is delusional, dishonestly contributing to the myth of culinary originality.Meades delivers a polemical but highly usable collection of 125 of his favourite recipes, each one an example of the fine art of culinary plagiarism. These are dishes and methods he has hijacked, adapted, improved upon and made his own. Without assuming any special knowledge or skill, the book is full of excellent advice. He tells us why the British never got the hang of garlic. That a purist would never dream of putting cheese in a Gratin Dauphinois. That cooking brains in brown butter cannot be improved upon. And why - despite the advice of Martin Scorsese's mother - he insists on frying his meatballs.Adorned with his own abstract monochrome images (none of which 'illustrate' the stolen recipes they accompany), The Plagiarist in the Kitchen is a stylish object, both useful and instructive. In a world dominated by health fads, food vloggers and over-priced kitchen gadgets, it is timely reminder that, when it comes to food, it's almost always better to borrow than to invent.
Jonathan Meades has an obsessive preoccupation with places. He has spent thirty years constructing sixty films, two novels and hundreds of pieces of journalism that explore an extraordinary range of them, from natural landscapes to man-made buildings and 'the gaps between them', drawing attention to what he calls 'the rich oddness of what we take for granted'. This book collects fifty-four pieces and six film scripts that dissolve the barriers between high and low culture, good and bad taste, deep seriousness and black comedy. Meades delivers what he calls 'heavy entertainment' - strong opinions backed up by an astonishing depth of knowledge. To read Meades on places, buildings, politics or cultural history is an exhilarating workout for the mind. He leaves you better informed, more alert, less gullible.
Prenumerera på vårt nyhetsbrev för att få fantastiska erbjudanden och inspiration för din nästa läsning.
Genom att registrera dig accepterar du vår personuppgiftspolicy.
