Notting Hill Editions – förlag

This entertaining anthology offers an array of writers past and present expressing their thoughts about dogs. With an introduction by actor, producer and dog-lover Tracey Ullman.Dogs throughout history have enjoyed a special relationship with humankind, and our favourite four-legged creatures continue to grow in popularity. The writers and poets collected within this anthology reflect on the joys and pitfalls of dog ownership with wit, and affection.From Roald Amundsen’s account of using and eating sled dogs in his expedition to the South Pole, to J.R. Ackerley’s tender portrayal of his ill-behaved dog Tulip, On Dogs traces the canine’s journey from working animal to pampered pet. With a humorous introduction by Tracey Ullman (an inveterate adopter of strays), and 6 characterful dog portraits by animal photographer Rhian ap Gruffydd and a cover image by Picasso of his dog Lump.Contributors include Alice Walker, Charles Dickens, James Thurber, Miranda Hart, Brigitte Bardot, A.A. Gill, David Sedaris, Barbara Woodhouse, and many more.

A new book from one of our most acclaimed writers.‘We always believe that changing our mind is an improvement, bringing a greater truthfulness to our dealings with the world and other people. It puts an end to vacillation, uncertainty, weak-mindedness. It seems to make us stronger and more mature. Well, we would think that, wouldn't we?’In this engaging and erudite essay, critically acclaimed writer Julian Barnes explores what is involved when we change our minds: about words, about politics, about books; about memories, age and time.

An ardent steward of the land, fearless traveller and unrivalled observer of nature and culture, Barry Lopez died after a long illness on Christmas Day in 2020. The previous summer, a wildfire had consumed much of what was dear to him in his home and the community around it – a tragic reminder of the climate change of which he’d long warned. At once a cri de Coeur and a memoir of both pain and wonder, this remarkable collection of essays adds indelibly to Lopez’s legacy, and includes previously unpublished works, some written in the months before his death. They unspool memories, both personal and political, among them tender, sometimes painful stories of his childhood in New York and California, reports from expeditions to study animals and sea life, recollections of travels to Antarctica and other extraordinary places on earth, and mediations on finding oneself amid vast, dramatic landscapes. He reflects on those who taught him, including Indigenous elders and scientific mentors who sharpened his eye for the natural world. We witness poignant returns from his travels to the sanctuary of his Oregon backyard and in prose of searing candour, he reckons with the cycle of life, including own and – as he has done throughout his career – with the dangers the earth and its people are facing. With an introduction by Rebecca Solnit that speaks to Lopez’s keen attention to the world, including its spiritual dimensions, Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World opens our minds and souls to the importance of being wholly present to the beauty and complexity of life.

A timely exploration of Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann by Booker-shortlisted author Tom McCarthy.Since her untimely death in 1973, Ingeborg Bachmann has come to be regarded as one of the twentieth century’s most important writers. Unpacking a single Bachmann poem, novelist Tom McCarthy latches onto two of its central terms — the eponymous threshold and ledger — and takes off on a line of flight: through the work of Franz Kafka, David Lynch, Anne Carson, Sappho and Shakespeare. Can writing be understood as an experience of the threshold, a limit- or boundary- state? A condition of ecstasy or ec-stasis, standing outside of oneself? With identity ruptured and surpassed, how – and by whom – might such experience be recorded? Appearing on the eve of Bachmann’s centenary year, McCarthy’s book argues for the centrality of her vision to the very act of literature itself. Ingeborg Bachmann (25 June 1926 – 17 October 1973) was an Austrian poet and author. She is regarded as one of the major voices of German-language literature in the 20th century. In 1963, she was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

After decades living in England, writer and filmmaker Xiaolu Guo travelled to her native China with her daughter. Her objective was twofold: to show her eleven-year-old where she came from, and to discover what remained of an enigmatic period that had long fascinated her: the magnificent and cosmopolitan Tang Dynasty (618–907).As they wander through the great cities of Xi’an and Luoyang, and cross the Wei and the Yangzi Rivers, Guo ponders the unique artistic, intellectual and social achievements of the Tang Dynasty and its influence on Western culture. Part travelogue, part historical reflection, Everyday Tang is a profound – and often startling – meditation on China’s Golden Age.

Joe Brainard's I Remember is a cult classic, envied and admired by writers from Frank O'Hara to John Ashbery and Edmund White. As autobiography, Brainard's method was brilliantly simple: to set down specific memories as they rose to the surface of his consciousness, each prefaced by the refrain 'I remember'.Fifty-two years after its original US publication in 1970, this is the first UK edition.'In simple, forthright, declarative sentences, he charts the map of the human soul and permanently alters the way we look at the world. I Remember is both uproariously funny and deeply moving. It is also one of the few totally original books I have ever read.' Paul Auster

From the bestselling author of the award-winning How Shostakovich Changed My Mind comes a new book about the cathartic power of music.For critic and composer Stephen Johnson, there have been moments when music has confronted him with life-changing insights. Some of these have been hard to accept, but once accepted they have opened up new possibilities of thinking, feeling and living. Through an exploration of seven pieces – by Anton Bruckner, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Johann Sebastian Bach, Lili Boulanger, Richard Wagner, Jean Sibelius and Ludwig van Beethoven – Johnson considers the lives and the intentions of the composers who created them, and how they have affected him personally.

Woolf's fine character studies of several authors, among them Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who 'seems not a man, but a swarm, a cloud, a buzz of words, darting this way and that, clustering, quivering and hanging suspended'. He is, Woolf adds,so complex, so eccentric, that we 'become dazed in the labyrinth of what we call Coleridge'. He was incapable of adopting requisite social modes, of suppressing his obsessive urge to talk, of pandering to the expectations of others. Woolf tries to capture a 'clear picture' of Coleridge but this metaphor is skewed and what she really reveals is a voice - mad and beautiful - never to be heard again:

Confessions of a Heretic is a collection of provocative essays by the late social commentator and polemicist Roger Scruton (1944-2020). Each “confession” reveals aspects of the author’s thinking that his critics would probably have advised him to keep to himself. In this selection, covering subjects from art and architecture to politics and nature conservation, Scruton challenges popular opinion on key aspects of our culture: What can we do to protect Western values against Islamist extremism? How can we nurture real friendship through social media? Why is the nation-state worth preserving? How should we achieve a timely death against the advances of modern medicine? This provocative collection seeks to answer the most pressing problems of our age.In his introduction, the bestselling author and commentator Douglas Murray writes of what it cost Scruton to express views considered unpalatable, and of the importance of these ideas after Scruton’s death.

Following on from the huge success of Beneath My Feet: Writers on Walking and Sauntering: Writers Walk Europe, Duncan Minshull brings together over fifty walker-writers who have travelled the world’s seven continents.With contributions from Edith Wharton, Thomas Jefferson, Charles Darwin, Rabindranath Tagore, D. H. Lawrence, Isabella Bird, Katherine Mansfield, Rachel Carson, Jean-Paul Clébert, Colin Thubron, William Boyd and many more, Globetrotting takes us across the streets of London, Rome, Melbourne, Cairo, Kyiv and Kabul; through the frozen wastes of Antarctica; along the pilgrim paths of Japan; into the jungles of Ghana; around the Great Wall of China.

In the late 1800s, Sigmund Freud began to develop radical theories about sexuality, dreams and childhood experiences. Not only were his ideas revolutionary, but they also initiated a new discipline with various – often competing – schools of thought.In this groundbreaking book, Andrew Jamieson unpacks ten of psychotherapy’s most profound principles and illuminates them through the biographies of twenty remarkable people. From Pablo Picasso’s chaotic life, which illustrates Freud’s concept of the unconscious, to the origins of Nelson Mandela’s compassion, which exemplify Carl Jung’s notion of individuation; from John Bowlby’s attachment theory, as seen through the lives of Virginia Woolf and Franz Kafka, to Melanie Klein’s views on the relationship between love and hate, as revealed through the experiences of Cary Grant, On the Couch throws new light on the motivations and desires of some of our most memorable personalities.Other lives examined include Josephine Baker, Nicolaus Copernicus, Charles Darwin, Viktor Frankl, Ernest Hemingway, Burt Hellinger, Emma Jung, Angela Merkel, Marilyn Monroe, Vladimir Putin, Ludwig Wittgenstein and W. B. Yeats.

In Junkspace (2001), architect Rem Koolhaas itemises in delirious detail how our cities are being overwhelmed. His celebrated jeremiad is here updated and twinned with Running Room, a fresh response from architectural critic Hal Foster.'The manifesto is a modernist mode, one that looks to the future… Junkspace makes no such claim: “Architecture disappeared in the twentieth century,” states Koolhaas matter-of-factly. Junkspace does a harder thing: it “foretells” the present, which is to say that it calls on us to recognize what is already everywhere around us.’ Hal Foster

The debut collection of essays from one of Britain's most celebrated photographers.For many years, photographer Michael Collins had wondered what exactly it was that he found so mysterious and compelling about photography. In this series of linked pieces, Collins offers a reappraisal of photographic genres – including the humble and ubiquitous – that he believes are worthy of greater understanding. From restoring abandoned photos, whose subjects are lost to time, to a quotidian history of the studio portrait; from tracing the origins of the photographic survey within the wider field of the history of art to an experiment in portraiture using gorillas, Collins reveals what it is about photography that is so enduringly fascinating.

Richard Sennett has spent an intellectual lifetime exploring how humans live in cities. In this pair of essays he visits two of the world's greatest cities at crucial moments in their history to meditate on the condition of exile in both geographical and psychic space: the Jewish Ghetto of Renaissance Venice, where state-imposed outsiderdom was translated into a rich community identity; and nineteenth-century Paris, a magnet for political exiles, where the experience of displacement seeped into the city's culture at large.

Morris's intimate journals, written for a friend, unconsciously explore questions of travel, noting his reaction to the idea of leaving or arriving, to hurry and delay, what it means to dread a place you've never been to or to encounter the actuality of a long-held vision. Poet Lavinia Greenlaw draws out these questions as she follows in the footprints of Morris's prose, responding to its surfaces and undercurrents, extending its horizons. The result is a new and composite work, which brilliantly explores our conflicted reasons for not staying at home.

From Macaulay in the 19th century to Fukuyama in the late 20th, historians have often been lulled into thinking that things can only get better. Such belief in progress, argues leading political commentator Simon Heffer, may be typical of times of plenty, but it ignores a less palatable truth: that, since the beginnings of recorded history, the major events in international relations can be attributed to a single cause, the desire by rulers to assert or protect their power.

What happens when an art critic loses some of his sight to cataracts? What wonders are glimpsed once vision is restored? In this impressionistic essay written in the spirit of Montaigne, John Berger, whose treatises on seeing have shaped cultural and media studies for four decades, records the effects of cataract removal operations on each of his eyes. With words by John Berger and beautiful illustrations by Turkish artist Selçuk Demirel that complement the text, Cataract is a collaborative collectors’ piece that is perfect for every reader’s bedside table.

Completed in 1980 but published here for the first time, My Prizes is an accounting - prize by prize, blow by blow - of the background and circumstances of reception of nine literary prizes that Thomas Bernhard was awarded between 1963 and 1980, followed by some of the speeches he delivered on those occasions - each of which was also the occasion for scandal or worse. The result is a portrait of the artist as prizewinner and prize farceur: sardonic, laconic, biting-the-hand, relishing both the world and himself with bitter amusement. 'Thank goodness for Thomas Bernhard, the most truthful, the funniest and the most musical of writers since Marcel Proust.' Gabriel Josipovici

‘Late Spring, directed and co-written by Yasujirō Ozu, was released in 1949, which makes it an old film, or a film that has been new for a long time…’ So begins this remarkable essay in narrative reconstruction. Film-critic, novelist and essayist Mars-Jones gives a virtuoso performance as the lost figure of film explainer, drawing out a host of meaning from the reticence of Ozu’s classic Japanese movie.‘So long after its first release Late Spring is still limber and elusive,’ enthuses Mars-Jones. Noriko Smiling breathes new life into both Ozu’s film, and film studies as a whole. There has never been a film book like this.

The lives of people both famous and obscure are filled with moments when their dirty laundry sees daylight. At such times we witness the reversibility of success, of prominence, but also come to terms viscerally with our own most vulnerable selves. We cannot stop watching the scene of shame, identifying with it, absorbing its nearness, relishing our immunity, even as we acknowledge the universality of the human stain, the uneasy predicament of living in our own bodies -

Things I Don't Want to Know is a unique response to George Orwell from one of our most vital contemporary writers. Taking Orwell's famous list of motives for writing as the jumping-off point for a sequence of thrilling reflections on the writing life, this is a perfect companion not just to Orwell's essay, but also to Levy's own, essential oeuvre.Deborah Levy writes: 'Perhaps when Orwell described sheer egoism as a necessary quality for a writer, he was not thinking about the sheer egoism of a female writer. Even the most arrogant female writer has to work over time to build an ego that is robust enough to get her through January, never mind all the way to December.'

A new edition of Britain's Changing Towns (1967), introduced, edited and updated by Owen Hatherley.These essays show Nairn writing about cities and towns as wholes rather than as collections of individual buildings. In each of them, there are several things happening at once - assessments of historic townscape, capsule reviews of new buildings, attempts to find the specific character of each place.Includes sixteen essays on places as varied as Glasgow and Norwich, Llanidloes and Sheffield, by the finest English architectural writer of the 20th Century.

Cyclogeography is an essay about the bicycle in the cultural imagination and a portrait of London seen from the saddle. The bicycle enables us to feel a landscape, rather than just see it, and in the great tradition of the psychogeographers, Day attempts to depart from the map and reclaim the streets of the city whilst exploring the relationship between bodies, bikes and geography.

When novelist Kirsty Gunn received a Randell Fellowship from the British Academy and Carnegie Foundation in 2009 she returned to New Zealand to spend the winter in Wellington, near the childhood home of Katherine Mansfield, the writer to whom she'd always felt most connected. In this lyrical essay, Gunn explores the ideas of home and belonging - and of her own deep connection to a place where every flower and gatepost seems embroidered with the memory of some story or another.

This new selection of essays by Oscar Wilde show-cases the varied aspects of his genius. For Pearson, the biographer, the essays and dialogues illustrate the many faces of Wilde's extraordinary character: wit, romancer, talker, lecturer, humanist and scholar. The ideas expressed remain remarkably relevant to modern readers, whilst his popularity remains undiminished.

In this extraordinary memoir, neuroscientist Andrew Lees explains how William Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch and troubled drug addict, played an unlikely part in his medical career.Lees draws on Burroughs' search for an addiction cure to discover a ground-breaking treatment for shaking palsy, and learns how to use the deductive reasoning of Sherlock Holmes to diagnose patients. Lees follows Burroughs into the rainforest and under the influence of yage (ayahuasca) gains insights that encourage him to pursue new lines of pharmacological research and explore new forms of science.

In Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche conducts his protagonist through his great journey of life - the quest for meaning, and fulfilment, and for a way to live with the knowledge of death. In this faithful new translation by Michael Hulse, Zarathustra is revealed in all his bold and ironic splendour, as a man who strives to find a way to live - joyfully - in a secular world. Luminous and ecstatic, Thus Spake Zarathustra is a grand celebration of perilous, beautiful, human life by one of the most important philosophers in history.

BBC broadcaster Stephen Johnson explores how Shostakovich's music took shape under Stalin's reign of terror. Johnson writes of the healing effect of music on sufferers of mental illness and tells of how Shostakovich's music lent him unexpected strength in his struggle against bipolar disorder.Through interviews conducted with surviving members of Soviet orchestras, through his reading of philosophers, psychoanalysts, and neurologists, Johnson paints a compelling picture of one man's music and its power to validate and sustain another man's life.

‘About one third of this book is discovery, in the sense that I came upon the sites by accident or by following a topographical hunch. There must be many more, and all you need for the search is the ability to turn off the main road, switch on your antennae and respond. Good luck.’ Ian NairnOut of print for 50 years until it was republished by Notting Hill Editions in 2017, this is a unique guidebook from the late, great architectural writer, Ian Nairn. Illustrated with the author's own black and white photographs of the city, Nairn gives his readers an idiosyncratic and unpretentious portrait of the 'collective masterpiece' that is Paris. Nairn encourages the reader to find their own Paris beneath the glossy surface and demonstrates his eye for detail – whether it is architectural stonework on an archway, shadows cast by a railing, or an empty chair in a Paris park. More than a guidebook, this is an inimitable journey of discovery in finding the hidden delights of the city, in the first hardback edition ever published.