Notting Hill Editions – serie

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.'

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

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.

Following on from the bestselling Nairn's Towns - a celebration of the city of Paris by cult figure Ian Nairn. Illustrated with original black and white images taken by Nairn himself. More than a guide book - this is a journey of discovery. Out of print since 1968, this is a unique guide book from the late, great architectural writer, Ian Nairn. Illustrated with the author's snaps of the city, Nairn gives his readers an idiosyncratic and unpretentious portrait of the 'collective masterpiece' that is Paris. 'Once you discover [Nairn]...you want to read everything he's written.' - Daily Telegraph

In this haunting memoir, Alison Gold gives a luminous account of key moments in her life that brought her to be the writer she is.Alison Leslie Gold is best known for her works that have kept alive stories from the time of the Holocaust, stories of courage and survival - most famously her Anne Frank Remembered, co-authored with Miep Gies (who risked her life to protect the Frank family).She has never chosen to write about her own life or what made her into a gatherer of other people's stories, until now, in Found and Lost, a tender memorial to the extraordinary people in the author’s life, and a compelling tale of redemption.Starting with her childhood experience of running her primary school 'Lost and Found' depot, Gold develops, through a series of letters, a meditation on ageing, friendship, loss and the forces that link us to the dead. They tell of her early activism, her descent into alcoholism and her recovery, and her discovery of the power of writing to give a shape and meaning to a life. In the very act of writing, she begins to find a route out of depression and grief.

A seasonal anthology of Christmas-themed writings to savour during the highs and lows of Christmas Day.This delightful book offers a diverse array of classic and contemporary writers who have expressed their thoughts about Christmas over the centuries - with joy, nostalgia and dazzling wit.Includes selections from Dostoevsky, Truman Capote, A.A. Milne, Jerome K. Jerome, and modern day diarists, this beautiful volume is as full of delight and nostalgia as Christmas itself.

A walking guide to this historic London neighbourhood, uncovering its countercultural roots.A delightful English/Japanese pocket-size guide to London's most popular district. Through four walks London writer Julian Mash uncovers the history, culture and fascinating characters that have made Notting Hill so iconic. Beautifully laid out including several photographic images and four hand-drawn maps, the guide will appeal to both tourists and residents alike.

“Above all, do not lose your desire to walk: every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness.” —Søren Kierkegaard Duncan Minshull has always walked and in the last twenty years has made use of it by writing and publishing books on the subject. He has described the whys, hows, and wheres of traveling on foot for various magazines and newspapers, including The Times (London), the Financial Times, Condé Nast Traveler, and Vogue. He has edited two other collections on walking: While Wandering: A Walking Companion (originally The Vintage Book of Walking) and The Burning Leg: Walking Scenes from Classic Fiction.Walking and writing have always gone together. Think of the poets who walk out a rhythm for their lines and the novelists who put their characters on a path. But the best insights, the deepest and most joyous examinations of this simple activity are to be found in nonfiction—in essays, travelogues, and memoirs.Beneath My Feet: Writers on Walking rounds up the most memorable walker-writers from the 1700s to the modern day, from country hikers to urban strollers, from the rationalists to the truly outlandish. Follow in the footsteps of William Hazlitt, George Sand, Rebecca Solnit, Will Self, and dozens of others. Keep up with them—and be astonished.

A.A. Milne, best known as the author of the classic Winnie-the-Pooh stories, was a successful writer long before his children’s stories launched him to overnight success.At the age of twenty-three, he was appointed the Assistant Editor of Punch magazine. He claimed ‘I know no work manual or mental to equal the appalling heart-breaking anguish of fetching an idea from nowhere.’ But Milne had a talent for regularly turning out a thousand whimsical words on lost hats and umbrellas, tennis, dogs, faulty geysers, dotty maids, women loading film in a camera, the English obsession with rank and titles, cheap cigars, and any amount of life’s other little difficulties. He was praised for being able to produce ‘with apparently effortless ease and the utmost gaiety’ articles notable for their ‘enchanting ingenuity’.But there was another, more serious side to Milne. After serving in World War 1, where he survived the Somme, Milne was invalided home with trench fever in 1916. His experiences made him a committed and vocal pacifist. War was nothing but ‘mental and moral degradation’. His fiercely argued pacifism was ahead of his time, and forms some of his most powerful work.This selection of Milne’s articles, spanning over four decades of his life from 1910 to 1952, are collected for the first time in this volume, including his passionately argued writings on pacifism. The writings demonstrate his trademark wit, varied genius, little-known political views, and nostalgia for a lost era.

A fascinating account by one of the world's leading neurologists of the profound influence of William Burroughs on his medical career. Lees relates how Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch and troubled drug addict, inspired him to discover a ground-breaking treatment for Parkinson's Disease. Lees journeys to the Amazonian rainforest in search of cures for Parkinson's Disease, and through self-experimentation seeks to find the answers his patients crave. He enters a powerful plea for the return of imagination to medical research.

Part travelogue, part memoir, Lees paints a portrait of an elusive Brazil, and a flawed explorer whose doomed mission ruined lives.As a boy growing up near Liverpool in the 1950s, Andrew Lees would visit the docks with his father to watch the ships from Brazil unload their exotic cargo of coffee, cotton bales, molasses, cocoa - the ships’ names and goods noted down in loving detail in his exercise book.One day, his father gave him a dog-eared book called Exploration Fawcett. The book told the true story of Lieutenant-Colonel Percy Fawcett, a British explorer who in 1925 had gone in search of a lost city in the Amazon, and never returned. The riveting story of Fawcett’s encounters with deadly animals and hostile tribes, his mission to discover an Atlantean civilization, and the many who lost their own lives when they went in search of him, inspired the young Lees to believe that there were still earthly places where one could ‘fall off the edge’.Lees travelled to Manaus in Fawcett’s footsteps. After a time-bending psychedelic experience in the forest, he understood that his yearning for the imaginary Brazil of his boyhood, like Fawcett’s search for an earthly paradise, was a nostalgia for what never was.

On foot the world comes our way. We get close to the Continent’s alpine ranges, arterial rivers, expansive coastlines. Close to its ancient cities and mysterious thoroughfares; and close to the walkers themselves—the Grand Tourers and explorers, strollers and saunterers, on their hikes and quests, parades and urban drifts.Sauntering features sixty walker-writers—classic and current—who roam Europe by foot. Twenty-two countries are traversed. We join Henriette d’Angeville, the second woman to climb Mont Blanc; Nellie Bly roaming the trenches of the First World War; Werner Herzog on a personal pilgrimage through Germany; Hans Christian Andersen in quarantine; Joseph Conrad in Cracow; Rebecca Solnit reimagining change on the streets of Prague; and Robert Macfarlane dropping deep into underground Paris.Contributors include: Patrick Leigh Fermor; John Hillaby; Robert Walser; Henriette d’Angeville; Joseph Roth; Joanna Kavenna; Richard Wright; Werner Herzog; Robert Antelme; George Sand; Rainer Maria Rilke; Robert Macfarlane; Rebecca Solnit; Kate Humble; Nicholas Luard; Edith Wharton; Elizabeth von Armin; Joseph Conrad; D. H. Lawrence; Vernon Lee; Guy Debord, Mark Twain, Thomas Coryat, and more.

Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg by New York Times bestselling author Emily Rapp Black is an amputee’s personal examination of how the experiences, art, and disabilities of Frida Kahlo shaped her life.At first sight of Kahlo’s painting The Two Fridas, Emily Rapp Black felt an instant connection with the artist. An amputee from childhood, Rapp Black grew up with a succession of prosthetic limbs, and learned that she had to hide her disability from the world. Kahlo sustained lifelong injuries after a horrific bus crash and her right leg was eventually amputated.In Kahlo’s art, Rapp Black recognised her own life, from the numerous operations to the compulsion to create to silence pain. Here she tells her story of losing her infant son to Tay-Sachs, giving birth to a daughter, and learning to accept her body. She writes of how Frida Kahlo inspired her to find a way forward when all seemed lost.Contains 5 images of Frida Kahlo’s art and clothing.

Why do people love ghost stories, even if they don’t believe (or say they don’t believe) in ghosts? Is it simply the adrenaline rush that comes from being mesmerized and terrified by a great storyteller, or do these tales yield deeper meanings—telling us things about our own inner shadows? Stephen Johnson brings together some of the most memorable encounters with ghosts in world literature, from Europe, Russia, the United States, and China. Recurring themes and imagery are noted, interpretations suggested—but only suggested, since ambiguity and resistance to rational interpretation are key elements in the best ghost stories. As the writer Robert Aickman observed, often the decisive moment comes when someone, somehow, makes a “wrong turning”—literally, perhaps, but at the same time psychologically, even morally—and some mysterious nemesis takes over.Old favorites by M. R. James, Ambrose Bierce, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman are interlaced with extracts from longer works by Emily Brontë, Henry James, and Alexander Pushkin,, along with slightly left-field apparitions from Tove Jansson and Flann O’Brien. With such expert guides, who knows what we will be led to encounter in the haunted chambers of our minds?

‘I have put myself on a list for two Siberian kittens. I will have cat hammocks. I will have scratching posts. I will not allow myself to be distressed by shredded upholstery,’ writes Margaret Atwood in her introduction to this beautifully illustrated anthology on cats.For thousands of years, cats have been venerated and mistrusted in equal measure. Through memoir, fiction, letters and poems, the writers in these pages celebrate cats and their curious ways. As Hemingway wrote, ‘one cat leads to another.’Includes contributions from Alice Walker, Edward Gorey, Mary Gaitskill, Caitlin Moran, Ernest Hemingway, Nikola Tesla, John Keates, Muriel Spark, Lynne Truss, Hilaire Belloc, Guy du Maupassant, Rebecca West and more.Plus: photography by Elliot Ross.This anthology, a companion volume to the hugely popular On Dogs: An Anthology, introduced by Tracey Ullman, is introduced by Margaret Atwood, author of more than fifty books of fiction, poetry, and critical essays.