When Matt leaves his kindergarten class for a quick trip to the bathroom, he never imagines what will happen next. He suddenly finds himself in a stranger’s car, being driven to an unfamiliar place. Who is this man, and is he really a stranger? When the school bell rings and Matt is nowhere to be found, his frantic sister, Bonnie, realises that her little brother is not lost but missing. She must do everything in her power to save him, even if it puts her own life in danger…
Publication date: 7th June 2021
“This is the first time we are seeing… a conversation about defunding, and some people having a conversation about abolishing the police and prison state. This must be what it felt like when people were talking about abolishing slavery.” – Patrisse Cullors, Black Lives Matter.
Abolishing the Police (An Illustrated Introduction) is both a contribution to this conversation and an invitation to join it. It provides rigorous and accessible analyses of why we might want to abolish the police, what abolishing them would involve, and how it might be achieved, introducing readers to the rich existing traditions of anti-police theory and practice.
Its authors draw on their diverse on-the-ground experiences of political organising, protest, and resistance to policing in the UK, France, Germany, and the United States, as well as their original research in academic fields ranging from law to security studies, political theory to sociology to public health.
Without assuming any prior specialist knowledge, they present the critical tools and insights these disciplines have to offer to ongoing struggles against the injustices of policing (and consider, in turn, what these disciplines must learn from these struggles.)
The complete guide to playing the Acoustic Guitar from the first time you pick it up all the way to playing your first songs along with backing tracks.
With Jacques-Louis Daguerre, William Talbot Fox, Etienne Jules-Marey and William Blake as his predecessors, Adam Fuss creates photograms and daguerreotypes that evoke a general poetic and spiritual vision akin to urbanites of the 1800s, people who have lost contact with nature and God. While technically seeking to refine the beginnings of photography, Fuss attempts, in the 100 new works presented here, to record life and death. Colorful spirals created by pendulums lead into great depths; snakes create geometric waves in water; loving pairs of rabbits appear in silhouette; a hunched woman cries; sunflowers sprout withered leaves and broken stems; otherwise placid water bears the concentric marks of water drops; the shadows of silvery children’s clothing hover in mid-air; light reflects on birds in flight–and all, for Fuss, mark the simultaneous presence and absence of the corporeal under the title My Ghost.
In a momentous publication, Seamus Heaney’s translation of Book VI of the Aeneid, Virgil’s epic poem composed sometime between 29 and 19 BC, follows the hero, Aeneas, on his descent into the underworld.
In Stepping Stones, a book of interviews conducted by Dennis O’Driscoll, Heaney acknowledged the importance of the poem to his writing, noting that ‘there’s one Virgilian journey that has indeed been a constant presence, and that is Aeneas’s venture into the underworld.
‘The motifs in Book VI have been in my head for years – the golden bough, Charon’s barge, the quest to meet the shade of the father.’ In this new translation, Heaney employs the same deft handling of the original combined with the immediacy of language and flawless poetic voice as was on show in his translation of Beowulf, a reimagining which, in the words of Bernard O’Donoghue, brought the ancient poem back to life in ‘a miraculous mix of the poem’s original spirit and Heaney’s voice’.
A mesmerizing, continent-spanning survey of the most dynamic scenes in contemporary African photography, and an introduction to the creative figures who are making it happen.
Africa State of Mind gathers together the work of an emergent generation of photographers from across Africa, including both the Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa. It is both a summation of new photographic practice from the last decade and an exploration of how contemporary photographers from the continent are exploring ideas of ‘Africanness’ to reveal Africa to be a psychological space as much as a physical territory – a state of mind as much as a geographical place.
Dispensing with the western colonial view of Africa in purely geographic or topographic terms, Ekow Eshun presents Africa State of Mind in four thematic parts: Hybrid Cities; Inner Landscapes; Zones of Freedom; and Myth and Memory. Each theme, introduced by a text by Eshun, presents selections of work by a new wave of African photographers who are looking both outward and inward: capturing life among the sprawling cities and multitudinous conurbations of the continent, turning the legacy of the continent’s history into the source of resonant new myths and dreamscapes and exploring questions of gender, sexuality and identity. Each of the photographers seeks to capture the experience of what it means, and how it feels, to live in Africa today.
Three plays, ‘all written for live theatre – with the emphasis on live’, and all first performed at the Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough: The Revengers’ Comedies (1989); Things We Do for Love (1997); and House & Garden (1999).
The Revengers’ Comedies
A hugely entertaining pitch that recalls the old movies to which it frequently pays homage – Strangers on a Train, Rebecca, Kind Hearts and Coronets – and expands after intermission to reveal an immensely disturbing vision of contemporary middle-class England poisoned by the rise of economic ruthlessness and the collapse of ethics. New York Times
Things We Do for Love
Lloyds Private Banking Playwright of the Year Award
One of his best, his most shockingly and uproariously funny: a cruel and hilarious masterpiece of tragic comedy and comic tragedy. Sunday Times
House & Garden
The triumph of his ingenuity lies in the fact that you have to see both plays . . . A second time round, in whichever order you take them, characters will deepen, while those you know become the background. It is a superb Ayckbourn joke that a comedy about non-communication should depend on the sharpest communication skills. Sunday Times
Snake in the Grass
“A terrific piece – brilliant, bizarre and yet totally believable… In fact, it’s more than classic; it’s close to the top of its class.” Yorkshire Post
If I Were You
“A blissfully funny comedy that’s also filled with sadness, a devilishly simple theatrical idea that spins out all kinds of complex truths about human nature.” Daily Telegraph
Life and Beth
“A wise, humane, funny play about the inevitability of death and the continuity of life.” Guardian
My Wonderful Day
“A transformation happens as magical as the most magnificent pantomime transformation anyone could ever imagine… the playwright dissolves the paraphernalia of our adult selves and uncovers that space inside each of us that is still the child we once were.” Observer
Life of Riley
“As perceptive as ever… Ayckbourn has once again achieved a satisfyingly rich, tragi-comic complexity.” Daily Telegraph
The definitive monograph on Alex Prager, one of the truly original image makers of our time.
Alex Prager is a photographer and filmmaker whose elaborate sets and complex staging draw on a rich cultural heritage of cinematic style, informed by street photography, to produce work that is unerringly memorable. At once temporal and timeless, bright but shadowed, Prager’s images exist within a hyperreal world, deeply rooted in the eerie undertones of Los Angeles, where the line between reality and fiction is blurred.
Prager’s critically acclaimed work is introduced here, spanning a decade of photographic work and five films. This collection of carefully curated photographs is complemented by an in-depth interview by Nathalie Herschdorfer, director of the Musee des Beaux-Arts Le Locle, Switzerland, and discursive essays by Michael Govan, director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Michael Mansfield, executive director of the Ogunquit Museum of American Art, Maine, and Clare Grafik, senior curator at The Photographers’ Gallery, London.
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. Alexander Pope (1688-1744) was an essayist, critic, satirist, poet and translator. He published “An Essay on Criticism” in 1711 and a republished version of “The Rape of the Lock” in 1714. His “Collected Works” were published in 1717 and he translated the “Iliad and the Odyssey” into English. “The Dunciad” (1728), one of his most famous works, was a vicious satire on Dullness featuring many of his contemporaries.
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.
‘I had sent my heroine straight down a rabbit-hole without the least idea what was to happen afterwards,’ wrote Dodgson, describing how Alice was conjured up one ‘golden afternoon’ in 1862 to entertain his child-friend Alice Liddell. In the magical world of Wonderland and the back-to-front Looking-Glass kingdom, order is turned upside-down: a baby turns into a pig; time is abandoned at a tea-party; and a chaotic game of chess makes a 7-year-old a Queen.
‘And if Ferdinand decides to make a chocolate fudge banana cake. What do we do? For goodness sake!….. We ALL JOIN IN!’
This book is a rumbustious, rollicking and above all noisy collection of seven exuberant poems, perfect for chanting aloud, that are brilliantly illustrated by the incomparable Quentin Blake.
