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I’m a British author who has always had a fascination with magical realism and novels that blend the serious with the strange. For that reason, though I write literary fiction for adults, I take so much of my inspiration from children’s literature. There’s something so simple about how kids’ books stitch the extraordinary into the every day without having to overexplain things. I now live not far from the forest that inspired A. A. Milne’s Hundred Acre Wood, and my latest novel is set in and inspired by this part of rural England–with all the mystery and magic that a trip into the woods entails.
In this claustrophobic modern classic, a grieving father and Ted Hughes scholar finds himself haunted by an oily, unnerving, anthropomorphic crow.
I’m a fan of anything Porter writes, but his debut is deserving of the indelible mark it’s made upon the modern literary landscape. The crow is a character like no other, and Porter’s poetry brings this strange and beautiful bird to life.
A SUNDAY TIMES TOP 100 NOVEL OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
Winner of the 2016 International Dylan Thomas Prize and the Sunday Times/Peter, Fraser + Dunlop Young Writer of the Year award and shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Goldsmiths Prize.
In a London flat, two young boys face the unbearable sadness of their mother's sudden death. Their father, a Ted Hughes scholar and scruffy romantic, imagines a future of well-meaning visitors and emptiness.
In this moment of despair they are visited by Crow - antagonist, trickster, healer, babysitter. This sentimental bird is drawn to the grieving family…
I’ve always had a healthy dose of skepticism, having been a scientist before I was an author. I look for the con when something’s too good to be true, even in fiction…so don’t insult me by saying, “a magic amulet that makes everyone nice all the time.” If you want me to believe in pixie dust, tell me what’s in place to keep pixie dust smugglers from rigging the system. I raised smart, critical-minded kids, so I always pointed them to my own favorite young-audience books: those that felt real, even if they were fantastical, instead of ones with the more common “just trust me” attitude.
I love how Lyra’s world is so different from ours, yet doesn’t require a huge leap of faith to believe. The science-like attention to detail somehow makes it sensible. Are there talking polar bears who shape metal with their paws and claws? Yes. Are my objections to that bizarre idea addressed so well that I accept it as normal? Also yes.
The amount of thought put into the world makes the unreal feel very real, in other words. Yes, there are subtle magical forces, witches, and humans tethered to literal spirit animals…but scientists have studied and invented machines to work with all of it the same way we work with forces in our own world that we don’t understand. This series respects its readers' intelligence, regardless of age.
The first volume in Philip Pullman's groundbreaking HIS DARK MATERIALS trilogy, now a thrilling, critically acclaimed BBC/HBO television series. First published in 1995, and acclaimed as a modern masterpiece, this first book in the series won the UK's top awards for children's literature.
"Without this child, we shall all die."
Lyra Belacqua and her animal daemon live half-wild and carefree among scholars of Jordan College, Oxford.
The destiny that awaits her will take her to the frozen lands of the Arctic, where witch-clans reign and ice-bears fight.
Her extraordinary journey will have immeasurable consequences far beyond her own world...
I’ve been either studying, researching, or teaching psychology since I was 16 – but before that, I was a reader. I have always been drawn to books that pose fundamental questions about the mind,and to this day I still go back to fiction and non-fiction that can generate ideas and hypotheses for new experiments. I’ve even used fictional stories in brain-scanning experiments to explore how the mind represents voices and characters: our findings show that we are experts at automatically simulating both the sound and the intention of other people when they talk in a story (even when the stories are very simple ones).
My book starts with a series of conversations with people who have psychosis and hear voices. Some people described to me a particularly unusual experience: the feeling of a voice being there, even when it wasn’t speaking.
As an undergraduate student one of the books that first got me thinking about these topics was Richard Bentall’s Madness Explained. It really opened my eyes to the possibilities of the mind and how we can think about experiences like hallucinations without necessarily pathologizing them.
This book was my gateway to then learning about things like the International Hearing Voices moment, which argues against an overly medicalized understanding of unusual experiences like voice-hearing. My book is quite wide-ranging, but I’ve tried to retain some of the ethos ofMadness Explained in how I’ve approached the world of uncanny presences.
THIS BOOK WILL EXPLAIN WHAT MADNESS IS, TO SHOW THAT IT CAN BE UNDERSTOOD IN PSYCHOLOGICAL TERMS, AND THAT BY STUDYING IT WE CAN LEARN IMPORTANT INSIGHTS ABOUT THE NORMAL MIND. THE BOOK WILL ARGUE THAT TRADITIONAL APPROACHES TO MADNESS MUST BE ABANDONED IN FAVOUR OF A NEW APPROACH WHICH IS MORE CONSISTENT WITH THAT WE NOW KNOW ABOUT THE HUMAN MIND. OVER THE LAST CENTURY OR SO IT HAS BECOME SO COMMONPLACE TO REGARD MADNESS SIMPLY AS A MEDICAL CONDITION THAT IT HAS BECOME DIFFICULT TO THINK OF IT IN ANY OTHER WAY. BENTALL ARGUES INSTEAD THAT DELUSIONS, HALLUCINATIONS…
Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.
I was fortunate enough to meet my husband over 17 years ago, and we have packed a lot of life in since then. Along with two kids and a dog, we’ve had our fair share of tough moments: financial challenges, bereavement, family issues, marital disagreement, and traumatic life events that taught me just as much as my two decades-long career as a relationship psychotherapist has. This, combined with working with individuals, couples, and partners in search of what love means and how to practically go about achieving it, has clarified for me just how much we all need tools and teachings when it comes to matters of the heart.
I devoured this book and its main premise: that to be a therapist is a great art and a deep discipline. Yalom is the inspiration for many psychology and psychotherapy students and trainees, and for good reason. He is the kindly, wise father many of us wish we had.
I adored this book for its insights into psychotherapy and the therapy room and for the tenderness with which Yalom treats his patients. He was also one of the first professionals to openly and publicly share his own emotions and thoughts about his patients and being a therapist. He powerfully puts forward the ‘human first, therapist second’ philosophy, one that informed my work fundamentally. He takes chances, loves his patients sincerely, and, as a result, was a hugely respected clinician who taught as well as he practiced. It is a great read for patients and therapists alike.
The collection of ten absorbing tales by master psychotherapist Irvin D. Yalom uncovers the mysteries, frustrations, pathos, and humour at the heart of the therapeutic encounter. In recounting his patients' dilemmas, Yalom not only gives us a rare and enthralling glimpse into their personal desires and motivations but also tells us his own story as he struggles to reconcile his all-too human responses with his sensibility as a psychiatrist. Not since Freud has an author done so much to clarify what goes on between a psychotherapist and a patient.
As a teenager, I started reading about people who lived in marginal places, such as the Eskimos of the far north and the Kung San of South Africa. Living a middle-class American life it was difficult for me to understand how people could not only live in those places but also love them. After I raised my children, my husband encouraged me to return to college, and I did, majoring in anthropology. I learned about the deep connections that bind all people—love of home and family. By learning about other people’s lives, much of what confused me about my own fell away.
If there’s one name that thrills anyone interested in Antarctic exploration,
Shackleton is it.
In 1914, he led a crew of 28 men to Antarctica aboard the
sailing ship Endurance, with the goal of crossing the continent by dog sled. The
weather was bad, and Endurance was frozen into the icepack. The following
summer was cold, and the ice did not melt. It was almost two years on the ice
and traversing the sea in small boats before Shackleton was able to bring his
crew home. He lost not a single man.
What I found fascinating, besides the
physical dangers they survived, was the camaraderie among the men and—hard
to believe—some of them even went back on later expeditions.
This book is considered one of the great books of exploration, about what Shackleton himself called "the last great journey on earth". The book tells of the author's Antarctic expedition in which the Endurance was crushed by the ice, and he and his men made a 600-mile trek across ice and ocean to solid land, and then a 700-mile journey in an open boat to South Georgia, followed by an epic crossing of the uncharted mountains of that island. In this edition the text is illustrated with reproductions of the photographs of Frank Hurley - who accompanied the expedition -…
I'm a science fiction writer. If you write about time travel, one of the things you have to worry about is changing the past, the ‘gun for a dinosaur’ effect. If you go to the past and kill that dinosaur, will it affect the present? Maybe that dinosaur was the ancestor of all mammals. So, if you want to steal something from the past and bring it to now, you have to choose carefully. Something that has left no biological footprint. When I got that far, I remembered that Titus Oates walked off into the storm in Antarctica, never to be seen again, to save his companions. His body is still out there, frozen in a glacier … or is it?
Ernest Shackleton was Scott’s rival and companion, the one who was smart enough not to die. A later Antarctic explorer, Sir Raymond Priestly, famously said, “For scientific discovery give me Scott. For speed and efficiency of travel, give me Amundsen. But when disaster strikes and all hope is gone, get down on your knees and pray for Shackleton.” Shackleton’s last expedition was the stuff of legend. His ship the Endurance was trapped in the ice for ten months, and finally crushed by the ice and sunk. Shackleton marshalled his men to march across the floes dragging their boat, and then they sailed across the polar seas to Elephant Island where they finally were rescued more than two years after they set out. It’s an almost unbelievable feat.
After the conquest of the South Pole by Amundsen, who, by a narrow margin of days only, was in advance of the British Expedition under Scott, there remained but one great main object of Antarctic journeyings—the crossing of the South Polar continent from sea to sea. When I returned from the Nimrod Expedition on which we had to turn back from our attempt to plant the British flag on the South Pole, being beaten by stress of circumstances within ninety-seven miles of our goal, my mind turned to the crossing of the continent, for I was morally certain that either…
I grew up in Los Angeles, California, which is frequently imagined as well as experienced. As a child, we lived by the beach and in the foothills of Angeles National Forest. The leaps of faith you make in this landscape were always clear: earthquakes, wildfires, and mudslides occur regularly. The question asked often about the Arctic: “why on earth do people live there?” applies also to California: life in beautiful landscapes and seascapes is risky. Then, I made my first trip to Iceland alone in 1995, and have now been to Iceland ten times, Greenland twice, and Nayan Mar, above the Russian Arctic Circle, each time with fascination.
If you can’t decide which of the many long stories of polar expeditions to read, this one is for you!
This book is a selection from the stories of the famous Arctic explorers: John Franklin, Roald Asmussen, Fridtjof Nansen. If you flip the book around and turn it upside down, you get a selection of Antarctic explorers of the same caliber, which is a brilliant design.
A beautiful literary anthology published to commemorate the International Polar Year―and remind us what we're in danger of losing.
The Arctic and Antarctic ice shelves have been an object of obsession for as long as we've known they existed. Countless explorers, including such legends as Richard Byrd, Ernest Shackleton, and Robert Falcon Scott, have risked their lives to chart their frozen landscapes. Now, for the first time in human history, we are in legitimate danger of seeing polar ice dramatically shrink, break apart, or even disappear. The Ends of the Earth, a collection of the very best writing on the…
I am a retired 4-star Admiral who spent over forty years at sea, rising from Midshipman at the Naval Academy to Supreme Allied Commander at NATO. Along the way, I served in and commanded destroyers, cruisers, and aircraft carriers in combat, and I have faced many very difficult decisions under extreme pressure. In addition, I’ve been in the Pentagon for many assignments, including as Senior Military Assistant to the Secretary of Defense – which also created countless high-pressure decisions. What I learned in the Navy has helped me again and again in calculating risk and making the right decisions.
In an amazing feat of leadership and critical decision-making under the most stressful circumstances imaginable, Ernest Shackleton managed to save his entire crew – despite their ship being crushed in the ice pack of Antarctica. His decisions from start to finish risked everything – hiking to the edge of the sea, sailing one of the ship’s small boats on a voyage to a distant outpost, bringing help back, and saving the crew. His decisions inspired me in the many expeditions I led as a naval officer, none of which were as challenging as what he faced.
In August 1914, renowned explorer Ernest Shackleton and a crew of 27 set sail for the South Atlantic in pursuit of the last unclaimed prize in the history of exploration: the first crossing on foot of the Antarctic continent. They came with in 85 miles of their destination when their ship, Endurance, was trapped fast in the ice pack, and the crew was stranded on the floes. Their ordeal lasted for 20 grueling months, and the group made two near-fatal attempts to escape by open boat before they were finally rescued.
Drawing upon previously unavailable sources, Caroline Alexander gives us…
When I was five years old, my father sat down with me in front of the television and we watched together as the Space Shuttle Columbia launched for the first time. Four decades later, I’ve authored a history of those early shuttle missions, been a part of developing future space missions, and, most importantly of all, watched several space firsts with my own son. Space exploration is humanity at its greatest – working together using the best of our abilities to overcome incredible challenges and improve life here on Earth – and I’m always grateful for the opportunity to share that inspiration with others.
Including this book is a bit of a cheat, since it’s not actually about space. But the spirit of Ernest Shackleton and the Endurance crew’s journey to the Antarctic has permeated space exploration – the Shackleton crater at the lunar south pole is an intriguing potential landing site for future astronauts. While no one in “Shackleton” leaves the planet, the story this book tells about humanity’s passion for exploration, the risks of the unknown, and about endurance in the face of adversity is well worth reading for those passionate about our outward odyssey.
Ernest Shackleton was one of the last great Antarctic explorers, and he led one of the most ambitious Antarctic expeditions ever undertaken. In this graphic biography, Nick Bertozzi tells his story and the story of the dozens of men who threw in their lot with him - many of whom nearly died in the unimaginably harsh conditions of the journey. It's an astonishing feat - and was unprecedented at the time-that all the men in the expedition survived. In Shackleton, Bertozzi has documented this remarkable journey with such wit and fiendish attention to detail that it's impossible not to get…
Geri o Shimasu: Adventures of a Baka Gaijin invites readers on a witty, unfiltered romp through 2008 Japan as experienced by Alia Luria, a self-proclaimed "clueless foreigner." Luria dives headfirst into the quirks and challenges of Japanese culture, from decoding onsen etiquette and enduring public embarrassment to exploring the oddities…
Although I’m fascinated by the history of exploration, I’m most attracted to the stories that have been lost, neglected, or forgotten. Why, for instance, is Sir Vivian Fuchs – arguably the most successful British Antarctic explorer of the twentieth century – not as well-known as Scott or Shackleton? Why do we know so little of Operation Tabarin – the only wartime Antarctic expedition to be launched by a combatant nation? These are the kind of questions that I want to answer, and these are the expeditions that I have wanted to examine. I’ve been fortunate to meet and interview some truly extraordinary men – and telling their stories has been a joy and a privilege.
Ernest Shackleton is now best known for the heroic failure that was his EnduranceExpedition of 1914-17. But the skills that he displayed to such effect on that expedition were honed during his leadership of the British Antarctic (or Nimrod) Expedition of 1907-09 – an expedition with the conquest of the South Pole as its primary objective. Of course, in the final assessment, this expedition failed as well – because Shackleton turned for home when just 97.5 nautical miles from his objective, knowing that his team would die if he didn’t. Beau Riffenburgh’s account of this much less well-known expedition is masterly: meticulously researched and beautifully written; a joy to read.
On New Year's Day 1908, the ship Nimrod set off for the mysterious regions of the Antarctic. The leader of the small expedition was Ernest Shackleton who, in the next year and a quarter would record some of the greatest achievements of his career and would then, together with his companions, return home as a hero. Shackleton and his party battled against extreme cold, hunger, danger and psychological trauma in their attempt to reach the South Pole and to return alive. They climbed the active volcano of Mount Erebus, planted the Union Jack at the previously unattained South Magnetic Pole,…
