Politics and the English Language by George Orwell

$1.99 AUD

Category: Books, Writing and Language | Series: Penguin Modern Classics Ser.

'The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's reals and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics'. All issues are p olitical issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.' ...Show more

Typographic Specimans: A Natural History of Letterforms by A. W. Bainbridge

$19.99 AUD

Category: Books, Writing and Language

In 1831, Reverend Jackson Whitehead served as chaplain aboard the HMS Pica, which accompanied the Beagle on its second survey expedition. Whitehead was a keen collector of fauna as well as a typography enthusiast. Upon realising that the majority of both ships' crews were either committed atheists or bu dding evolutionists, Whitehead embarked on creating a whole series of natural history specimens made up out of typographical characters. ...Show more

What are We Doing Here? by Marilynne Robinson

$27.99 AUD

Category: Books, Writing and Language

New essays by the Orange and Pulitzer Prize winning author of Gilead, Home and Lila. In this collection, Marilynne Robinson, one of today's most important thinkers - admired by President Obama, and so many others - impels us to action and offers us hope.Marilynne Robinson has plumbed the human spirit in her renowned novels, including Lila, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award; Home, winner of the Orange Prize; and Gilead, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In this new essay collection she trains her incisive mind on our modern political climate and the mysteries of faith. Whether she is investigating how the work of great thinkers about America like Emerson and Tocqueville inform our political consciousness or discussing the way that beauty informs and disciplines daily life, Robinson's peerless prose and boundless humanity are on full display. What Are We Doing Here? is a call to continue the tradition of the great thinkers and to remake political and cultural life as "deeply impressed by obligation [and as] a great theatre of heroic generosity, which, despite all, is sometimes palpable still." In our era of rampant political and cultural pessimism, we run the risk of becoming bogged down in disillusionment and of losing sight of ways out of the mire. In What Are We Doing Here?, the incomparable Marilynne Robinson offers us balm: impelling us to action, but offering us hope. ...Show more

The Clothing of Books by Jhumpa Lahiri

$16.99 AUD

Category: Books, Writing and Language

How do you clothe a book? In this deeply personal reflection, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri explores the art of the book jacket from the perspectives of both reader and writer. Probing the complex relationships between text and image, author and designer, and art and commerce, Lahiri delve s into the role of the uniform; explains what book jackets and design have come to mean to her; and how, sometimes, "the covers become a part of me." ...Show more

Nganga: A Dictionary of Aboriginal Terms and Phrases by Aunty Fay Muir Aunty Fay; Sue Lawson Sue

$16.99 AUD

Category: Books, Writing and Language

Axiomatic by Maria Tumarkin

$34.99 AUD

Category: Books, Writing and Language

The past shapes the present – they teach us that in schools and universities. (Shapes? Infiltrates, more like; imbues, infuses.) This past cannot be visited like an ageing aunt. It doesn’t live in little zoo enclosures. Half the time, this past is nothing less than the beating heart of the p resent. So, how to speak of the searing, unpindownable power that the past – ours, our family’s, our culture’s – wields in the present? Stories are not enough, even though they are essential. And books about history, books of psychology – the best of them take us closer, but still not close enough. ...Show more

On Writing by Stephen King

$19.99 AUD

Category: Books, Writing and Language

Part memoir, part master class by one of the bestselling authors of all time, this superb volume is a revealing and practical view of the writer's craft, comprising the basic tools of the trade every writer must have. King's advice is grounded in the vivid memories from childhood through his emergence a s a writer, from his struggling early career to his widely reported, near-fatal accident in 1999 - and how the inextricable link between writing and living spurred his recovery. There is a reason why Stephen King is one of the bestselling writers in the world, ever. Described in the Guardian as 'the most remarkable storyteller in modern American literature', Stephen King writes books that draw you in and are impossible to put down. ...Show more

An Odyssey: A Father, A Son and an Epic by Daniel Mendelsohn

$39.99 AUD

Category: Autobiography and Biography

From the award-winning, best-selling writer: a deeply moving tale of a father and son's transformative journey in reading-and relivin -Homer's epic masterpiece. "My favourite classicist once again combines meticulous literary investigation with warm and wrenching human emotion - books like these are why I love reading." LEE CHILD When eighty-one-year-old Jay Mendelsohn decides to enrol in the undergraduate seminar on the Odyssey that his son Daniel teaches at Bard College, the two find themselves on an adventure as profoundly emotional as it is intellectual. For Jay, a retired research scientist who sees the world through a mathematician's unforgiving eyes, this return to the classroom is his `one last chance' to learn about the great literature he'd neglected in his youth - and, even more, a final opportunity to understand his son. But through the sometimes-uncomfortable months that follow, as the two men explore Homer's great work together - first in the classroom, where Jay persistently challenges his son's interpretations, and then during a surprise-filled Mediterranean journey retracing Odysseus' legendary voyages - it becomes clear that Daniel has much to learn, too: for Jay's responses to both the text and the travels gradually uncover long-buried secrets that allow the son to understand his difficult father at last. As this intricately woven memoir builds to its wrenching climax, Mendelsohn's narrative comes to echo The Odyssey itself, with its timeless themes of deception and recognition, marriage and children, the pleasures of travel and the meaning of home. Rich with literary and emotional insight, An Odyssey is a renowned author-scholar's most revelatory entwining yet of personal narrative and literary exploration. ...Show more

A Filth of Starlings: A Compilation of Bird Collective Nouns by PatrickGeorge

$14.99 AUD

Category: Books, Writing and Language

A flock of geese,a murder of crows, a parliament of owls: thsee are some of the bird collective nouns you may already know. But have you heard of a bouquet of pheasants, a chime of wrens or a circus of puffins? Then turn the pages of this book to discover a collection of lesser-known and sometimes more fanciful ones... ...Show more

1606: Shakespeare and the Year of Lear by James Shapiro

$24.99 AUD

Category: History, Politics and Society

1606: William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear traces Shakespeare's life and times from the autumn of 1605, when he took an old and anonymous Elizabethan play, The Chronicle History of King Leir, and transformed it into his most searing tragedy, King Lear. 1606 proved to be an especially grim year for England, which witnessed the bloody aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot, divisions over the Union of England and Scotland, and an outbreak of plague. But it turned out to be an exceptional one for Shakespeare, unrivalled at identifying the fault-lines of his cultural moment, who before the year was out went on to complete two other great Jacobean tragedies that spoke directly to these fraught times: Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra. Following the biographical style of 1599, a way of thinking and writing that Shapiro has made his own, 1606: William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear promises to be one of the most significant and accessible works on Shakespeare in the decade to come. ...Show more

Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts by Christopher de Hamel

$29.99 AUD

Category: Books, Writing and Language

An extraordinary and beautifully illustrated exploration of the medieval world through twelve manuscripts, from one of the world's leading experts. Winner of The Wolfson History Prize and The Duff Cooper Prize. A San Francisco Chronicle Holiday Book Gift Guide Pick Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts is a captivating examination of twelve illuminated manuscripts from the medieval period. Noted authority Christopher de Hamel invites the reader into intimate conversations with these texts to explore what they tell us about nearly a thousand years of medieval history - and about the modern world, too. In so doing, de Hamel introduces us to kings, queens, saints, scribes, artists, librarians, thieves, dealers, and collectors. He traces the elaborate journeys that these exceptionally precious artifacts have made through time and shows us how they have been copied, how they have been embroiled in politics, how they have been regarded as objects of supreme beauty and as symbols of national identity, and who has owned them or lusted after them (and how we can tell). From the earliest book in medieval England to the incomparable Book of Kells to the oldest manuscript of the Canterbury Tales, these encounters tell a narrative of intellectual culture and art over the course of a millennium. Two of the manuscripts visited are now in libraries of North America, the Morgan Library in New York and the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Part travel book, part detective story, part conversation with the reader, Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts allows us to experience some of the greatest works of art in our culture to give us a different perspective on history and on how we come by knowledge. ...Show more

Bleaker House: Chasing My Novel to the End of the World by Nell Stevens

$32.99 AUD

Category: Books, Writing and Language

When Nell Stevens was given the opportunity to spend three months in a location of her choice in order to write her novel, she was determined to rid herself of all distractions. So Nell decided to travel to Bleaker Island (official population: two) in the Falklands where she would write 2,500 words a da y. But Bleaker House is not that novel. Instead this is a book about a young woman realising that the way to writing fiction doesn't necessarily lie in total solitude and a clear plan. Nor does it lie in a daily ration of 1085 calories, no means of contacting the outside world and a slow descent towards something that feels worryingly like madness ...Hilariously funny, painfully honest, and beautifully observed, Bleaker House is part memoir, part travelogue, part story collection. It is an exploration of the narrow spaces between real life and fiction and, in the end, a book about failing to write a novel, but finally becoming a writer. ...Show more