By the age of twenty-one, Billy the Kid had killed a man for each year he'd been alive. Then he was shot dead in the night by a man he once called a friend.Drawing on contemporary accounts, period photographs, dime novels, and his own prodigious fund of empathy and imagination, Michael Ondaatje's visionary novel traces the legendary outlaw's passage across the blasted landscape of 1880 New Mexico and the collective unconscious of his country. The Collected Works of Billy the Kid is a virtuoso synthesis of storytelling, history, and myth by a writer who brings us back to our familiar legends with a renewed sense of wonder.
Following the success of Birds as Individuals, Len Howard spent the 1950s continuing to deepen her understanding of the birds in her garden.This book tells the story of one exceptional great tit that Len called Star. With patience, consistency and sensitivity, Len succeeds in teaching this little bird to count using taps. Star's character and intelligence is revealed in this intimate bird biography, unlike any told before. In opening her home to wild birds, Len gains their trust enough to make astonishing discoveries about their capabilities.Full of joy and wonder, as well as deep knowledge and fascinating detail, Living with Birds also takes in the story of a lame fledgling, tales of great tit parents and their babies, observations of migrant birds, and how exactly Len succeeded in developing such unusual relationships with wild birds.'Howard seems to have stood on the brink of communication with a wild bird, something till now hardly conceivable...awe-inspiring' Observer
An astonishing, intimate and powerful memoir by the author of Richard and Judy Book Club pick SugarThis is necessary work. This is love work. This is legacy literature about me and mine born into a world run by them and theirs.On her second birthday in 1967, Bernice McFadden died. She was in a car crash on the motorway turnoff to Detroit. For a few minutes, she was clinically dead. From the moment of her resuscitation, we follow a remarkable life, all the way up to the publication of her first novel, Sugar.In 80s Brooklyn, growing up in terror of her alcoholic father, young Bernice loses herself in books, finding solace in summer trips to her aunt's home in Barbados and escaping to boarding school. But it's not until she reads Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, stories about 'messy, beautiful, joyful Black people' so reminiscent of her loved ones, that she sees herself within their pages.Bernice's family story begins in Sandersville, Georgia, with freedwoman Louisa Vicey Wilson in 1870. Her descendants survived Reconstruction, Jim Crow, joined the 'great migration', cried when Dr King was assassinated during The Civil Rights Movement. Wisdom, secrets, and fierce love are passed down through generations of women like Lou's handmade quilt.Tracing her roots gives Bernice the strength to write her own story, liberating herself from generational trauma while honouring her ancestors. A memoir of many threads, First Born Girls is an extraordinarily moving account of a life shaped both by family history and a drive to be something more.
*FROM THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION-SHORTLISTED AUTHOR OF ENTER GHOST*'Recognising the Stranger combines intellectual brilliance with moral clarity and profound resoluteness of purpose.' SALLY ROONEY'A pitch-perfect example of how the novelist can get to the heart of the matter better than a million argumentative articles. Hammad shows us how the Palestinian struggle is the story of humanity itself, and asks us not to look away but to see ourselves.' MAX PORTER'Hammad's writing burns with fierce intelligence, humane insight and righteous anger. For those at risk of despair, doubtful of the role literature has to play in times of crisis, it is a reminder of the radical potential of reading and the possibility of change.' OLIVIA SUDJICAward-winning author of The Parisian and Enter Ghost Isabella Hammad delivered the Edward W. Said Lecture at Columbia University nine days before 7 October 2023. The text of Hammad's seminal speech and her afterword written in the early weeks of 2024 together make up a searing appraisal of the war on Palestine during what feels like a turning point in the narrative of human history.Moving and erudite, Hammad writes from within the moment, shedding light on the Palestinian struggle for freedom. Recognising the Stranger is a brilliant melding of literary and cultural analysis by one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists and a foremost writer of fiction in the world today.
A new selection of Paul Durcan's finest poems, published in celebration of his 80th birthday'He has written immortal poems. I revere him' Michael LongleyFor fifty years the poet Paul Durcan has explored and questioned a world both real and imagined.Steeped in the goings-on of Ireland and preoccupied with its concerns, he has delighted, enriched and unsettled his readers. His prodigious output of more than twenty collections bursts with poems that are courageously personal and passionately spiritual - a body of work that contains multitudes.'The great enemy of art is the ego' says Durcan. 'It keeps getting in the way. One needs the ego to disappear so that I become you; I become the people walking up and down the street.'First published in 1967, Durcan remains the most of companionable of poets. His vivacity and ability to surprise has never been clearer than in this new selection of eighty of his finest poems, published in celebration of his 80th birthday.EDITED BY NIALL MACMONAGLEWITH AN INTRODUCTION BY COLM TOIBIN
this charms the buried light of stars -this deflects bullets - this unblooms a war -In some Filipino clans, parents pass down to each child an agimat, an amulet or charm, in the hope its magic will protect and empower them. In a world of daily pain and loss, Romalyn Ante's second collection asks how do we keep safe what we hold most dear? At the dawn of the pandemic, the poet - a practising nurse in the NHS - is thrown onto the frontlines of the war against COVID-19, and finds herself questioning what it means to fight, and what it takes to heal. Past conflicts swim into the now: when the poet falls in love with a man of Japanese heritage, it forces a reckoning with her family's suffering under Japan's brutal wartime occupation of the Philippines. Elsewhere, we meet the irrepressible, many-breasted goddess Mebuyan, the poet's alter ego. In Philippine myth, Mebuyan nurses the spirits of departed children in the underworld, but here she watches over young people in crisis - a girl who can't stop cutting herself, a teenager who has leapt from a railway viaduct. These are poems of strength and solace - they quiver with heart, feeling a way toward hope.
A woman goes into a bakery to buy a strawberry cream tart. In the tradition of classical Japanese poetic collections, the stories in Revenge are linked through recurring images and motifs, as each story follows on from the one before while simultaneously introducing new characters and themes.
From the revered graphic artist and writer Anders Nilsen, Tongues collects together in one volume for the first time Nilsen's cult comics and their retelling of the myth of Prometheus'One of the best comics I have ever read'MARK HADDON, author of THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME'One utterly gorgeous comic'VULTUREIn the remotest reaches of Central Asia where rival groups war over oil, a minor god is chained to a mountainside. Unfolding in a series of conversations with his unlikely friend the eagle, who visits every day to carry out a gruesome sentence of torture, Tongues follows the titan's pursuit of revenge on the god that imprisoned him. Entwined with their story are those of Astrid, a teenage East African orphan on an errand of murder, and a man with a teddy bear strapped to his back wandering aimlessly in the wilderness. Tongues is a postmodern, apocalyptic retelling of the Greek myth of Prometheus, here a fallible god failing in his duty as the creator and protector of humanity. A visual meditation on our deep evolutionary past and our complicated prospects for the future, Tongues is both a propulsive story of adventure and an examination of human nature in our present moment.
Rach, Kel and Shaz bonded on the first day of big school, after Shaz lost a fight with older girls round the back of the skating rink. Since then, they shared everything from blagging their way into nightclubs, how to masturbate with an electric toothbrush and trips to the FP (Family Planning) when they're late. Everything, except what happened to Shaz in the cornfield that one summer night. So why, when Shaz and Rach bump into each other in town centre - late twenties, after the Brexit vote - are they strangers to each other? If they are ever to understand what happened to them as girls, Shaz must decide whether she has the courage to tell her secret, and risk destroying everything. Written in South Yorkshire vernacular, We Pretty Pieces of Flesh takes you by the hand and drags you through Doncaster's schoolyards, alleyways and nightclubs, bringing back the intimate treachery of teenage friendship and how we betray ourselves when we don't trust our friends.
We all love sweet treats, but how can we get the best and most satisfying flavours every time?Discover 80 deceptively simple recipes bursting with the flavours you love. MasterChef finalist Alexina Anatole specialises in perfectly balanced recipes that offer new exciting twists on internationally beloved classics to upgrade all of your favourite dishes With recipes exploring 10 different shades of sweetness - from the warm and comforting sweetness created with brown sugar, to the richness of bananas & plantain and the zingy fresh sweetness of strawberries and peaches - you'll find something to suit every palate for every occasion. From bold breakfast options to tasty everyday snacks, easy and refreshing frozen desserts and show-stopping cakes, discover new favourites such as:Banana & Sesame Souffle Pancakes Breakfast Croissant Pudding with Anise Pears Strawberries and cream cake Pear Sorbets with Frozen Roquefort No-Churn Dulce De Leche Ice Cream Mango, Coconut and Lime Celebration Cake
A fever-dream journal documenting the making of cinema's most infamous production, from the world's most infamously visionary director: Werner Herzog. In 1982, the visionary film director, Werner Herzog, released Fitzcarraldo, a lavish film about a would-be rubber baron who pulls a 320-ton steamship over a mountain. Hailed instantly by critics around the globe as a masterpiece, Fitzcarraldo won Herzog the 1982 Outstanding Director Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, affirming Herzog's reputation as one of the most revered and enigmatic filmmakers of his time.Conquest of the Useless is the diary Herzog kept during the making of Fitzcarraldo, compiled from June 1979 to November 1981. Emerging as if out of an Amazonian fever dream during filming, Herzog's writings are an extraordinary documentary unto themselves. Strange and otherworldly events are recounted by the filmmaker. The crew's camp in the heart of the jungle is attacked and burned to the ground; the production of the film clashes with a border war; and, of course, Herzog unravels the impossible logistics of moving a 320-ton steamship over a hill without the use of special effects.In his preface, Herzog warns that the diary entries collected in Conquest of the Useless do not represent "reports on the actual filming" but rather "inner landscapes, born of the delirium of the jungle." Thus begins an extraordinary glimpse into the mind of a genius during the making of one of his greatest achievements.
'O felt her presence behind him like a fire at his back.'Arriving at his fourth school in six years, diplomat's son Osei Kokote knows he needs an ally if he is to survive his first day - so he's lucky to hit it off with Dee, the most popular girl in school.
Set in a dark, rainy northern town, Nesbo's Macbeth pits the ambitions of a corrupt policeman against loyal colleagues, a drug-depraved underworld and the pull of childhood friendships. Get ready to helter-skelter through the darkest tunnels of human experience.
`I saw the strangest sight tonight.'New Bohemia. Leo Kaiser knows how to make money but he doesn't know how to manage the jealousy he feels towards his best friend and his wife. A boy and a girl are falling in love but there's a lot they don't know about who they are and where they come from.
How do the disillusioned, the forgotten, and the persecuted not merely hold on to life but expand its possibilities and preserve its beauty? What, in other words, does utopia look like in black?These questions animate Aaron Robertson's exploration of Black Americans' efforts to remake the conditions of their lives. Writing in the tradition of Saidiya Hartman and Ta-Nehisi Coates, Robertson makes his way from his ancestral hometown of Promise Land, Tennessee, to Detroit - the city where he was born, and where one of the country's most remarkable Black utopian experiments got its start. Founded by the brilliant preacher Albert Cleage Jr., the Shrine of the Black Madonna combined Afrocentric Christian practice with radical social projects to transform the self-conception of its members. Central to this endeavour was the Shrine's chancel mural of a Black Virgin and child, the icon of a nationwide liberation movement that would come to be known as Black Christian Nationalism. The Shrine's members opened bookstores and co-ops, created a self-defence force, and raised their children communally, eventually working to establish the country's largest Black-owned farm, where attempts to create an earthly paradise for Black people continues today. Alongside the Shrine's story, Robertson reflects on a diverse array of Black utopian visions, from the Reconstruction era through the countercultural fervour of the 1960s and 1970s and into the present day. By doing so, Robertson showcases the enduring quest of collectives and individuals for a world beyond the constraints of systemic racism. The Black Utopians offers a nuanced portrait of the struggle for spaces - both ideological and physical - where Black dignity, protection, and nourishment are paramount. This book is the story of a movement and of a world still in the making - one that points the way toward radical alternatives for the future.
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