Store

Home
/
Store
/

The Stairwell

The Stairwell

£5.00

ByMichael Longley

Winner of the 2015 Griffin Poetry Prize
Shortlisted for the 2014 T.S. Eliot Prize

In The Stairwell, his tenth collection, Michael Longley’s themes and forms reach a new intensity. The second part of the book is a powerful sequence of elegies for his twin brother, Peter, and the dominant mood elsewhere is elegiac. The title poem begins: ‘I have been thinking about the music for my funeral …’ The two parts are also linked by Homer. Longley is well-known for his Homeric versions, and the Iliad is a presiding presence – both in poems about the Great War and in the range of imagery that gives his twin’s death a mythic dimension. Yet funeral music can be life-affirming.

Longley has built this collection on intricate doublings, not only when he explores the tensions of twinship. The psychologically suggestive word ‘stairwell’ is itself an ambiguous compound. These poems encompass birth as well as death, childhood and age, nature and art, the animal and human worlds, tenderness and violence, battlefield and ‘homeland’. The Stairwell is a richly textured, immensely moving work. Michael Longley has the rare ability to fuse emotional depth with complicated artistry: to make them, somehow, the same thing.

Add to wishlist

Compare

The Story of Art

The Story of Art without Men: The instant Sunday Times bestseller

£30.00

‘Katy Hessel is a brilliant chronicler of the overlooked. I am so thrilled this book exists as an empowering, enlightening guide to the unforgettable vision of these brilliant artists. Essential reading.’ ELIZABETH DAY

‘ Will change the history of art… thank God.’ TRACEY EMIN

‘I was not aware how hungry I was for this book until I dropped everything and ate it from cover to cover. I was not aware how angry I was that this book did not exist until it existed. It’s an urgently needed, un-put-downable, joyful, insightful, glorious, perspective-shifting revision of the Story of Art.’ ES DEVLIN
__________________________________

How many women artists do you know? Who makes art history? Did women even work as artists before the twentieth century? And what is the Baroque anyway?

Discover the glittering Sofonisba Anguissola of the Renaissance, the radical work of Harriet Powers in the nineteenth-century USA and the artist who really invented the Readymade. Explore the Dutch Golden Age, the astonishing work of post-War artists in Latin America and the women artists defining art in the 2020s. Have your sense of art history overturned, and your eyes opened to many art forms often overlooked or dismissed. From the Cornish coast to Manhattan, Nigeria to Japan, this is the story of art for our times – one with women at its heart, brought together for the first time by the creator of @thegreatwomenartists.

__________________________________

‘A long overdue, revisionist history of art by the brilliant Katy Hessel … Never stuffy or supercilious, Hessel’s book is a revelation and an important first step towards redressing the balance of an art world in which women have been sidelined, stepped over and trampled upon for far too long’ REFINERY29

‘ An extraordinary achievement that will have a disruptive cultural legacy and help deter mine the landscape for years to come. ‘ HARPER’S BAZAAR

‘ A spirited, inspiring, brilliantly illustrated history of female artistic endeavour … The Story of Art Without Men should be on the reading list of every A-level and university art history course and on the front table of every museum and gallery shop. ‘ LAURA FREEMAN, THE TIMES

‘ Passionate, enthusiastic and witty… I wish I had had this book as a teenager ‘ THE I

Buy via Wrecking Ball at Bookshop.org

Add to wishlist

Compare

scottish art

The Story of Scottish Art

£25.00

ByLachlan Goudie

The compelling story of over 5,000 years of Scottish art, told by Lachlan Goudie, renowned contemporary Scottish artist, broadcaster and presenter of BBC Four ‘s ‘The Story of Scottish Art’.

This is the story of how Scotland has defined itself through its art over the past 5000 years, from the earliest enigmatic Neolithic symbols etched onto the landscape of Kilmartin Glen to Glasgow’s fame as a centre of artistic innovation today. Lachlan Goudie brings his perspective and passion as a practising artist and broadcaster to narrate the joys and struggles of artists across the millennia striving to fulfil their vision and the dramatic transformations of Scottish society reflected in their art.

The Story of Scottish Art is beautifully illustrated with the diverse artworks that form Scotland’s long tradition of bold creativity: Pictish carved stones and Celtic metalwork; Renaissance palaces and chapels; paintings of Scottish life and landscapes by Horatio McCulloch, David Wilkie and Joan Eardley; designs by master architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh; and collage and sculpture by Pop Art pioneer Eduardo Paolozzi. Lachlan tells the compelling story of how and why these and many other Scottish masterpieces were created, and the impact they have had on the world.

Buy via Wrecking Ball at Bookshop.org

Add to wishlist

Compare

The Tempest

The Tempest Prognosticator

£9.99

In The Tempest Prognosticator leeches warn of storms, whales blunder up the Thames, beetles tap out their courtship rituals, and women fall for deft cocktail makers and melancholy apes. With her keen eye and a gift for vividly capturing the natural world, Isobel Dixon entices the reader on a journey where the familiar is not always as it seems at first, where the sideways glance, the double take, yields rich rewards. From Crusoe to Psycho, Pink Floyd to Fred Astaire, the human zoo’s at play here too, in a collection filled with ‘miracle and wonder’, wit and bite.

Add to wishlist

Compare

ID_Terrorist

The Terrorist at My Table

£18.00

ByImtiaz Dharker

The Terrorist at My Table asks crucial questions about how we live now – working, travelling, eating, listening to the news, preparing for attack. What do any of us know about the person who shares this street, this house, this table, this body? When life is in the hands of a fellow-traveller, a neighbour, a lover, son or daughter, how does the world shift and reform itself around our doubt, our belief?

Imtiaz Dharker’s poems and pictures hurtle through a world that changes even as we pass. This is life seen through distorting screens – a windscreen, a TV screen, newsprint, mirror, water, breath, heat haze, smokescreen.

Her book grows, layer by layer, through three sequences: The terrorist at my table, The habit of departure and Worldwide Rickshaw Ride. Each cuts a different slice through the terrain of what we think of as normal. But through all the uncertainties and concealments, her poems unveil the delicate skin of love, trust and sudden recognition.

Add to wishlist

Compare

The Things I Learnt and

The Things I Learnt And The Things I Still Don’t Know About

£10.00

The debut poetry collection from writer and thrilling live performer of spoken word and poetry Talitha Wing, The Things I Learnt And The Things I Still Don’t Know About will propel Talitha to prominence in the world of poetry and spoken word. Talitha is an actor, writer and poet, based in London and Vienna. Talitha’s debut play Socks was commissioned by Paines Plough for the nationwide Come To Where I’m From program in 2019. Talitha’s next play will be She Calls Me Crazy, currently in development with TBA Productions.

Add to wishlist

Compare

The Threadbare Coat

The Threadbare Coat: Selected Poems

£12.99

ByThomas A. Clark

A Telegraph Book of the Year 2020

This Selected celebrates Scotland’s most distinctive contemporary writer, a vivid minimalist, ruralist, and experimentalist. His poems most often are first published by Moschatel Press, which Clark and his wife, the artist Laurie Clark, set up in 1973. Here presentation is an aspect of form. Some poems appear in sequences, some feature singly and some are as short as a single line. The poems are verbally memorable, but also visually so. The longer poems are built up out of such precisions, extended, connected. Ballad and folk song are never far away.

Add to wishlist

Compare

CREATOR: gd-jpeg v1.0 (using IJG JPEG v80), quality = 95

The Toll

£9.99

The new collection from one of Britain’s most popular poets, ‘The Toll’ is a tightly-wrought book on politics, family and a crumbling society that sees Luke Wright at the peak of his powers.

Add to wishlist

Compare

Transgender Issue

The Transgender Issue: An Argument for Justice

£10.99

THE INSTANT SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER

‘Few books are as urgent as Shon Faye’s debut … Faye has hope for the future – and maybe so should we’ Independent

‘Unsparing, important and weighty … a vitally needed antidote’ Observer

‘A moving and impressively comprehensive overview of trans life’ Vogue

Trans people in Britain today have become a culture war ‘issue’. Despite making up less than one per cent of the country’s population, they are the subjects of a toxic and increasingly polarized ‘debate’ which generates reliable controversy for newspapers and talk shows. This media frenzy conceals a simple fact: that we are having the wrong conversation, a conversation in which trans people themselves are reduced to a talking point and denied a meaningful voice.

In this powerful new book, Shon Faye reclaims the idea of the ‘transgender issue’ to uncover the reality of what it means to be trans in a transphobic society. In doing so, she provides a compelling, wide-ranging analysis of trans lives from youth to old age, exploring work, family, housing, healthcare, the prison system and trans participation in the LGBTQ+ and feminist communities, in contemporary Britain and beyond.

The Transgender Issue is a landmark work that signals the beginning of a new, healthier conversation about trans life. It is a manifesto for change, and a call for justice and solidarity between all marginalized people and minorities. Trans liberation, as Faye sees it, goes to the root of what our society is and what it could be; it offers the possibility of a more just, free and joyful world for all of us.

‘Fundamentally not a culture-war book. It operates outside the narrow coverage of trans people in the mainstream, and lays bare the inarguable facts’ New Statesman

‘Monumental and utterly convincing – crystal clear in its understanding of how the world should be’ Judith Butler

Buy via Wrecking Ball at Bookshop.org

Add to wishlist

Compare

The Trees

The Trees

£9.99

ByPercival Everett

The Trees is a page-turner that opens with a series of brutal murders in the rural town of Money, Mississippi. When a pair of detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation arrive, they meet expected resistance from the local sheriff, his deputy, the coroner, and a string of racist White townsfolk.

The murders present a puzzle, for at each crime scene there is a second dead body – that of a man who resembles Emmett Till, a young black boy lynched in the same town 65 years before.

The detectives suspect that these are killings of retribution, but soon discover that eerily similar murders are taking place all over the country. Something truly strange is afoot. As the bodies pile up, the MBI detectives seek answers from a local root doctor who has been documenting every lynching in the country for years, uncovering a history that refuses to be buried.

In this bold, provocative book, Everett takes direct aim at racism and police violence, and does so in a fast-paced style that ensures the reader can’t look away. The Trees is an enormously powerful novel of lasting importance.

Buy via Wrecking Ball at Bookshop.org

Add to wishlist

Compare

The Ultimate Guide to Billie Eilish

The Ultimate Guide to Billie Eilish

£5.00

ByDaizy Whitehead, Dan Whitehead

At the age of just 17, Billie Eilish’s debut album topped the Billboard 200 and UK charts. It also became the best-performing album of 2019 in the US. In the UK, she became the youngest female artist to hit No. 1. From musical methods and career highlights to fashion fireworks, read all about Billie in this ultimate guide, filled with facts, trivia, quotes, and plenty of cool photography.

Add to wishlist

Compare

The Ultimate Woody Alan Film Companion

The Ultimate Woody Allen Film Companion

£10.00

A complete look at the extensive, ageless, unparalleled filmography of Woody Allen.

Writer, actor, director, comedian, author, and musician, Woody Allen is one of the most culturally and cinematically influential filmmakers of all time. His films – he has over 45 writing and directing credits to his name – range from slapstick to tragedy, farce to fantasy. As one of history’s most prolific moviemakers, his style and comic sensibility have been imitated, but never replicated, by countless other filmmakers over the years. In The Ultimate Woody Allen Film Companion, film writer Jason Bailey profiles every one of Allen’s films: from his debut feature, What’s Up, Tiger Lily, through slapstick classics such as Take the Money and Run and Sleeper; Academy Award-winning films such as Annie Hall and Hannah and Her Sisters; and recent gems such as Midnight in Paris and Blue Jasmine.

Bailey also includes essays on the fascinating themes that color Allen’s works, from death and Freud to music and New York City. Getting up close and personal with the actors and actresses that have brought the iconic films to life, this book’s behind-the-scenes stories span the entire career of a man whose catalog has grown into a timeless cornerstone of American pop culture. Complete with full cast lists, production details, and full-color images and artwork, The Ultimate Woody Allen Film Companion is the ultimate, indispensable reference to one of cinema’s most beloved and important figures.

Add to wishlist

Compare

The Universal Home Doctor

The Universal Home Doctor

£6.99

BySimon Armitage

As the title implies, Simon Armitage’s flesh-and-blood account of numerous personal journeys reads like a private encyclopaedia of emotion and health. Vivid and engaged, the poems range from the rainforests of South America to the deserts of Western Australia, but are set against the ultimate and most intimate of all landscapes, the human body. Equally, the body politic comes into question, through subtle enquiries into Englishness and the idea of home.

Add to wishlist

Compare

the-univese-and-me

The Universe and Me

£10.00

ByToria Garbutt

“Toria’s words are silk javelins. Frank explorations of self, outpourings of a joyfully pained mind. She means it. Cos she’s lived it. I love that girl” Mike Garry

“rendered unemployed by Arkwright’s spinning Jenny at twelve years old. No wonder she’s a luddite. Happily, she turned to the pen, with astonishing results. Ladies and gentlemen I give you, our mellifluous girl from the mills, Toria Garbutt” John Cooper Clarke

“Toria Garbutt is an utterly extraordinary poet, with a rich soul, hard kick and the biggest heart. In live performance she has an exquisite effect on the listener, she made me blush once and I am still blushing thinking about it now” Salena Godden

“the most exciting poet I’ve seen in years” Mark Grist

“I love her stuff” Hollie McNish

Add to wishlist

Compare

Saul Leiter

The Unseen Saul Leiter

£35.00

ByMargit Erb, Michael Parillo

The first sightings of newly discovered work from Saul Leiter’s abundant archive of colour slides.

Now widely acclaimed as one of the world’s greatest photographers, Saul Leiter (1923-2013) remained relatively unsung until he was rediscovered by curators and critics in his early 80s, and his work has been drastically re-evaluated over the last two decades. Leiter’s images evoked the flow and rhythm of life on the mid-century streets of New York in luminous colour at a time when his contemporaries were shooting in black and white. His complex and impressionistic photographs are as much about evoking an atmosphere as nailing the decisive moment.

Saul Leiter was born in Pittsburgh and moved to New York City in 1946. He pioneered a painterly approach to colour photography starting in the late 1940s and produced covers for fashion magazines such as Esquire and Harper’s Bazaar before largely withdrawing from public attention in the 1980s. The publication in 2006 of his first monograph, Early Color , inspired an avid ‘rediscovery’ of Leiter’s work by contemporary audiences.

His studio in New York’s East Village, where he lived from 1952 until his death in 2013, is now the home of the Saul Leiter Foundation. The Foundation has begun a full-scale survey and organization of his more than 80,000 works, with the aim of compiling the ‘complete’ archive. This volume contains works discovered through this process, specifically colour slides, never before published or seen by the public. Meticulously curated by Margit Erb and Michael Parillo of the Saul Leiter Foundation and supported by texts that explain how Leiter built the slide archive and how it is now being explored, catalogued and restored, this new monograph will be a must-have for photography fans worldwide.

Buy via Wrecking Ball at Bookshop.org

Add to wishlist

Compare

The Wager

The Wager

£6.50

ByMachado De Assis

One of the classics of South American literature. ‘It is not enough to say that he is an important American novelist; he is one of the masters in either hemisphere.’ – New York Times

Aires returns home to his native Rio after many years abroad and is captivated by a young widow whom he sees praying at her husband’s graveside. Her charm and the tragic story of her brief marriage increase his fascination, and soon he is indulging in impossible dreams. But the Brazil that Aires remembers from his youth is changing fast. A new era is dawning with events such as the coming of the railway and the abolition of slavery. The future belongs to a younger generation, to men like Tristao, the doctor and political candidate, who is also an admirer of the beautiful widow. This is a story of broken dreams, love, and obsession-universal themes that give the author’s work the timeless quality for which it is renowned.

Add to wishlist

Compare

Wall of Sky, Wall of Eye

The Wall of Sky, the Wall of Eye

£5.00

ByJonathan Lethem

Jonathan Lethem again displays his brilliance in this collection of seven short stories, blurring the boundaries of sci-fi, mystery, and thriller. Tales include ‘Light and the Sufferer’, in which a crack addict is dogged by an invulnerable alien; ‘The Hardened Criminals’, wherein convicts are used as building blocks for new prisons; and ‘The Happy Man’, whose hapless protagonist is raised from the dead to support his family, only to suffer periodic out-of-body sojourns in Hell. Each tale features Lethem’s characteristic deadpan wit and unflinchingly macabre vision of life.

Add to wishlist

Compare

War of the Worlds

The War of the Worlds

£14.99

Part of Penguin’s beautiful hardback Clothbound Classics series, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith, these delectable and collectible editions are bound in high-quality, colourful, tactile cloth with foil stamped into the design.

From the planet of war they came to conquer the Earth …

The night after a shooting star is seen streaking across the sky, a cylinder is discovered on Horsell Common. Fascinated and exhilarated, the local people approach the mysterious object armed with nothing more than a white flag. But when gruesome alien creatures emerge armed with all-destroying heat-rays, their rashness turns rapidly to fear. As the rays blaze towards them, it soon becomes clear they have no choice but to flee – or die.

The forces of the Earth, however, may prove harder to beat than they at first appear …

Buy via Wrecking Ball at Bookshop.org

Add to wishlist

Compare

The Weather In Normal

The Weather in Normal

£9.99

Carrie Etter’s fourth poetry collection focuses on her hometown of Normal, Illinois, in the American Midwest. The Weather in Normal is not a set of straightforward memories but a slowly shifting entity, like a moving storm. The book opens with ‘Night Ode’, a poem set on a single street at night, the protagonist walking and feeling the oppressive summer heat, the humming of cicadas and the various ages she has walked the same road: “sixteen, nineteen, twenty-four, thirty-seven…”. This introduces us to the main themes of memory and recollection, of mature reflections on youthful experiences, of multiple, shifting perspectives.

Add to wishlist

Compare

Sjon_WHispering

The Whispering Muse

£8.99

A master storyteller, Sjón weaves together Greek and Nordic myths with the legacies of the Second World War in this mesmerising novel, which reminds us that everything is capable of change.

Add to wishlist

Compare

The Who

The Who: Their Generation

£9.50

ByMichael O'Neill

The Who defined a generation and rocked the world. My Generation, Pinball Wizard, and Baba O’Riley are some of the most well known tracks in rock history. The rock opera Tommy, the genre-defining Live at Leeds, and the classic Quadrophenia are just some of The Who’s albums. The band’s original lineup had an amazing 15-year span, as they toured their way around the globe, performing live and recording until the death of drummer Keith Moon in 1978. Then John Entwhistle died in 2002, but the remaining founding members Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend continue to tour. Their Generation takes you on the journey with the band as they conquered the world: from small London clubs to Madison Square Garden, from seven-inch vinyl releases to multi-million-selling albums, all the way to recognition as global rock gods.

The stories behind the music with an album by album analysis and accompanied by images from many of the most well known contemporary rock photographers gives a unique insight into one of the most influential groups in the history of rock music.

Add to wishlist

Compare

The Windsor Knot

The Windsor Knot

£8.99

On a perfect Spring morning at Windsor Castle, Queen Elizabeth II will enjoy a cup of tea, carry out all her royal duties . . . and solve a murder.

The perfect book for fans of The Crown and The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman.

The morning after a dinner party at Windsor Castle, eighty-nine-year-old Queen Elizabeth is shocked to discover that one of her guests has been found murdered in his room, with a rope around his neck.

When the police begin to suspect her loyal servants, Her Majesty knows they are looking in the wrong place.

For the Queen has been living an extraordinary double life ever since her coronation. Away from the public eye, she has a brilliant knack for solving crimes.

With her household’s happiness on the line, her secret must not get out. Can the Queen and her trusted secretary Rozie catch the killer, without getting caught themselves?

Add to wishlist

Compare

CAD_WorldsWife

The World’s Wife

£10.99

ByCarol Ann Duffy

Behind every famous man is a great woman – and from the quick-tongued Mrs Darwin to the lascivious Frau Freud, from the adoring Queen Kong to the long-suffering wife of the Devil himself, each one steps from her counterpart’s shadow to tell her side of the story in this irresistible collection. Original, subversive, full of imagination and quicksilver wit, The World’s Wife is Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy at her beguiling best.

Add to wishlist

Compare

pls

The Writer’s War

£7.00

ByFelicity Trotman, Various

‘When I come home and leave behind Dark things I would not call to mind …’ wrote Leslie Coulson, one of the many soldiers who tried to express his wartime experiences in writing: dreaming of an idyllic England in the face of the horror of the Western Front. Coulson was one of the hundreds of thousands who did not come home – but because of his poetry we glimpse something of his thoughts and experiences.

Today we can be grateful that so many of those who endured the First World War did write about it: giving us an unmatched view of an event which would otherwise be completely beyond our ability to imagine. The Writers’ War is a collection of excerpts from outstanding accounts of the First World War. It provides an essential insight to anyone interested in modern history or early twentieth-century literature. Extraordinary extracts bring the human experience of war brilliantly to life – from the terror of bombardment, or the camaraderie of military service, to the home front.

The writing reflects an enormous range of nationalities and personalities. It includes memorable poetry, fiction, and journalism. Some great names of modern English literature appear, such as Arthur Conan Doyle, D. H. Lawrence and Rudyard Kipling. In addition, there are superb accounts by foreign authors such as novelists Edith Wharton and Henri Barbusse, and flying ace Manfred von Richthofen. The Writers’ War gives an unparalleled insight into a world-changing event, and what it meant in human terms both to the writers and millions of others caught up in it.

Add to wishlist

Compare

There Will Be No

There Will Be No Miracles Here

£7.99

ByStephen Sawyer

Stephen Sawyer’s remarkable first collection is a book about politics – public dreams, private desires and common fears. From a Merseyside housing estate in the 1960s via Pinochet and Thatcher to the floods in Sheffield in 2007, these poems trace the sutures of power and resistance on the body and under the skin through the mediations of love, death, class, art and oppression. They raise questions about identity and belonging in a time of rapid structural and technological change, and celebrate the creativity and courage of individual and collective responses. There Will Be No Miracles Here is a book of passion and humour about people who live at the sharp edge.

Add to wishlist

Compare

pls

Things I’ve Been Silent About

£17.99

Azar Nafisi, author of the international bestseller “Reading Lolita in Tehran”, now gives us a stunning personal story of growing up in Iran, memories of her life lived in thrall to a powerful and complex mother, against the background of a country’s political revolution. A girl’s pain over family secrets; a young woman’s discovery of the power of sensuality in literature; the price a family pays for freedom in a country beset by political upheaval – these and other threads are woven together in this beautiful memoir.

Nafisi’s intelligent and complicated mother, disappointed in her dreams of leading an important and romantic life, created mesmerising fictions about herself, her family, and her past. But her daughter soon learned that these narratives of triumph hid as much as they revealed. Nafisi’s father escaped into narratives of another kind, enchanting his children with classic tales like the “Shahnameh”, the “Persian Book of Kings”. When her father began to see other women, young Azar began to keep his secrets from her mother. Nafisi’s complicity in these childhood dramas ultimately led her to resist remaining silent about other personal – as well as political, cultural, and social – injustices.

Add to wishlist

Compare

Things You FInd

Things You Find in a Poets Beard

£9.99

Things You Find in a Poet’s Beard is a collection of poems that have been shouted at children from schools to church halls, silly tales that have been illustrated joyously by Children’s Laureate, Chris Riddell and bound into a book. Perhaps you’ll want to annoy your family by reading them out; perhaps you’ll want to chuckle at them under the covers with a torch; perhaps you’ll want to stare at the pictures drawn by Mr Chris Riddell or maybe you’ll want to shout them aloud to capture the spirit of your poet, A.F. Harrold himself.

Add to wishlist

Compare

This is How it Ends

This is How it Ends

£7.99

LONGLISTED FOR THE THEAKSTON OLD PECULIER CRIME NOVEL OF THE YEAR

Sunday Times Crime Book of the Month

The Times Crime Book of the Month

Mail on Sunday Thriller of the Week

‘Elegantly crafted, humane and thought-provoking. She’s top drawer’ Ian Rankin

This is how it begins. With a near-empty building, the inhabitants forced out of their homes by property developers. With two women: idealistic, impassioned blogger Ella and seasoned campaigner, Molly. With a body hidden in a lift shaft. But how will it end?

Add to wishlist

Compare

This is tomorrow

This is Tomorrow: Twentieth-century Britain and its Artists

£30.00

A compelling and lively history that examines the lives of British artists from the late-19th century to today.

In This is Tomorrow Michael Bird takes a fresh look at the ‘long twentieth century’, from the closing years of Queen Victoria’s reign to the turn of the millennium, through the lens of the artists who lived and worked in this ever-changing Britain. Bird examines how the rhythms of change and adaptation in art became embedded in the collective consciousness of the nation and vividly evokes the personalities who populate and drive this story, looking beyond individual careers and historical moments to weave together interconnecting currents of change that flowed through London, Glasgow, Leeds, Cornwall, the Caribbean, New York, Moscow and Berlin. From the American James McNeill Whistler’s defence of his new kind of modern art against the British art establishment in the latter half of the 19th century to the Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson’s melting icebergs in London, he traverses the lives of the artists that have recorded, questioned and defined our times.

At the heart of this original book are the successive waves of displacement caused by global wars and persecution that conversely brought fresh ideas and new points of view to the British Isles; educational reforms opened new routes for young people from working-class backgrounds; movements of social change enabled the emergence of female artists and artists of colour; and the emergence of the mass media shaped modern modes of communication and culture. These are the ebbs and flows that Michael Bird teases out in this panoramic account of Britain and its artists in across the twentieth century.

Buy via Wrecking Ball at Bookshop.org

Add to wishlist

Compare

Thom Gunn

Thom Gunn (Poet to Poet)

£3.00

Thom Gunn (1929-2004) was educated at Cambridge University, and had his first collection of poems, Fighting Terms, published while still an undergraduate. He moved to northern California in 1954 and taught in American universities until his death. His last collection was Boss Cupid (2000).

In this series, a contemporary poet selects and introduces a poet of the past. By their choice of poems and by the personal and critical reactions they express in their prefaces, the editors offer insights into their own work as well as providing an accessible and passionate introduction to some of the greatest poets of our literature.

Add to wishlist

Compare

Three Blue Beans

Three Blue Beans in a Blue Bladder

£6.00

ByHamish Ironside

The latest in IRON Press’s long running series of small haiku books, to accompany the reprint of the author’s previous IRON Press haiku collection, Our Sweet Little Time, which also covered a year of the poet’s life. This new collection ranges from the traditional to the experimental, combining striking imagery with philosophical reflection.

Add to wishlist

Compare

Three Dreams in the Key of G

Three Dreams in the Key of G

£9.99

In peace-agreement Ulster a mother rears her two daughters, as her husband is decommissioned from his violent paramilitary past. In Florida a septuagenarian runs a community refuge for women and the authorities have surrounded it as a threat to national security. In laboratories all over the world the human genome is being dissected and decoded.

In Three Dreams in the Key of G three female voices, Mother, Crone and Creatrix, unknowingly influence each other’s fates as each battles to assert themselves and discover their voices in hostile environments.

Add to wishlist

Compare

PREV 1 … 18 19 20 21 NEXT