Paris Review Interviews, Volume 4, by Philip Gourevitch

Since The Paris Review was founded in 1953, it has given us invaluable conversations with the greatest writers of our age. Here is the fourth collection of brilliant interviews to be gathered together, ‘a bible both for readers and writers, the insider gossip for those who are truly passionate about their prose.’ Observer

This new edition is introduced by Salman Rushdie and includes interviews with: William Styron, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, E.B. White, P.G. Wodehouse, John Ashbery, Philip Roth, Maya Angelou, Orhan Pamuk, V.S. Naipaul, Stephen Sondheim, Haruki Murakami, David Grossman and Marilynne Robinson.

Read Salman Rushdie’s introduction.

The Optimist, by Laurence Shorter

Collapsing stock markets, melting ice caps, floods, tornadoes, terrorism . . . When it comes to bad news, we’ve never had it so good. Perhaps it is time to be a little more optimistic? That’s what Laurence Shorter decided. And that’s why he set himself the challenge of meeting the world’s most cheerful people. Surely with the help of Desmond Tutu, Richard Branson and Bill Clinton, Laurence can find the secret to inner happiness. But first things first – how on Earth is he going to get to meet them?

Deliciously quirky and enormously funny, it brims over with the sort of joie de vivre that would brighten the darkest day.
Good Book Guide

[An] anti-misery memoir.
Evening Standard

The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi, by Andrew McConnell Stott

The son of a deranged Italian immigrant, Joseph Grimaldi (1778–1837) was the most celebrated of English clowns. The first to use white-face make-up and wear outrageous coloured clothes, he completely transformed the role of the Clown in the pantomime with a look as iconic as Chaplin’s tramp or Tommy Cooper’s magician. One of the first celebrity comedians, his friends included Lord Byron and the actor Edmund Kean, and his memoirs were edited by the young Charles Dickens. But underneath the stage paint, Grimaldi struggled with depression and his life was blighted with tragedy. His first wife died in childbirth and his son would go on to drink himself to death. In later life, the extreme physicality of his performances left him disabled and in constant pain. The outward joy and tomfoolery of his performances masked a dark and depressing personal life, and instituted the modern figure of the glum, brooding comedian.

Drawing on a wealth of source material, Stott has written the definitive biography of Grimaldi and a highly nuanced portrait of Georgian theatre in London, from the frequent riots at Drury Lane to the spectacular excess of its arch rival Sadler’s Wells; from stage elephants running amok to recreations of Admiral Nelson’s sea battles on flooded stages at the height of the Napoleonic Wars. Joseph Grimaldi left an indelible mark on the English theatre and the performing arts, but his legacy is one of human struggle, battling demons and giving it his all in the face of adversity.

Seeing Things: A Memoir, by Oliver Postgate

‘Oliver Postgate was, for my money, the greatest children’s storyteller of the last 100 years. Together, the team of Postgate and Peter Firmin were apparently incapable of creating anything less than timelessly wonderful whenever they sat down to work.’ Charlie Brooker

For over forty years Oliver Postgate’s name was synonymous with the best in children’s television – Bagpuss, The Clangers, Ivor the Engine, The Pogles, Noggin the Nog, Pingwings. His work is still loved by viewers of all ages.

In this delicious autobiography Oliver Postgate describes how he came to create his stories and characters, developing innovative techniques of animation and puppetry alongside his friend and co-producer Peter Firmin. The story of Oliver Postgate’s extraordinary and adventurous life, and the wonderful characters who populated it, both real and imagined, is witty, charming, beautifully remembered and beautifully told.

Read an extract of Seeing Things

The Officer’s Prey, by Armand Cabasson

The first in a series of bestselling thrillers set in the Napoleonic Wars.

June 1812. Napoleon begins his invasion of Russia leading the largest army Europe has ever seen. But amongst the troops of the Grande Armee is a savage murderer whose bloodlust is not satisfied by battle. When an innocent woman is brutally stabbed Captain Quentin Margont of the 84th regiment is put in charge of a secret investigation to unmask the perpetrator. Armed with only the sole fact that the killer is an officer, Margont knows that he faces a near impossible task and the greatest challenge of his military career.

The Officer’s Prey won the 2003 Gendarmerie National thriller prize.

Snow, by Orhan Pamuk

The year is 1992. Ka, a poet and political exile, returns to Turkey as a journalist, assigned to write an investigative piece about troubling events in the small and mysterious city of Kars near the Armenian border.

The snow is falling fast as Ka arrives, and soon all roads are closed. He discovers a city plagued by a ‘suicide epidemic’ amongst young women, and where the Islamists are poised to win the municipal elections. If he wants to understand what’s happened to this part of the world during his absence, this is the place to begin.

But the rogue coup that unfolds before his eyes over the next three days tells him far more than he wants to know. He sees a city wasting away under the shadow of Europe, consumed by religious and political conspiracies, and haunted by the silences of its own history.

Snow angered Islamists and westernised Turks alike when it came out in early 2002 – and promptly sold more than 100,000 copies. A spectacular tour de force, it evokes the spiritual fragility of the non-western world, its ambivalence about the godless West, and its fury.

The Other Side of Eden, by Hugh Brody

Hugh Brody has an international reputation as an anthropologist and documentary film-maker of the Inuit peoples. This book is a marvellous account of hunter-gatherer culture, gleaned from years of living and hunting with the Inuits of the Arctic and the salmon-fishing tribes in the Canadian Northwest.

Brody explores the frontiers between hunters and farmers, and shows us how the encounter between radically different ways of being in the world is at the core of human history. He travels through exquisite landscapes of ice and snow, with people who know the land as part of their selves. Posing the question, ‘Why did the farmer triumph over the hunter-gatherer?’, Brody finds answers in a variety of places, among them the Book of Genesis, the great creation myth at the centre of the agriculturalist view of the world.

This is a book that invites the reader to embark on a series of expeditions, into the territories of hunter-gatherers, and into radical ideas about what it means to be human in the present, and what it could mean in the future.

Into the Abyss, by Benedict Allen

Why do explorers put themselves in dangerous situations? And, once the worst possible situation occurs, how do they find the resources to survive?

In answering these questions, Benedict Allen weaves a series of tales from his own experience as well as that of other explorers including Columbus, Cortez, Scott, Shackelton, Stanley, Livingstone and their modern counterparts: Joe Simpson and Ranulf Fiennes.

Julius Winsome, by Gerard Donovan

Many men live in these woods who cannot live anywhere else… such men live at the end of all the long lanes in the world, and in reaching a place like this they have run out of country they can’t live in. They have no choice but to build, and so they go as far out of the way as they can even here, in the deep shade of the trees.

Julius Winsome lives in a cabin in the hunting heartland of the Maine woods, with only his books and Hobbes, his dog, for company. That is until the morning he finds Hobbes has been shot dead, and not by accident.

From this starting point, Gerard Donovan weaves an extraordinary tale that explores ideas of revenge and the threat of the wild, but one that is also a tender and heartbreaking paean to lost love. Narrated by the unforgettable voice of Julius himself – at once compassionate, vulnerable and threatening – it reads like a timeless, lost classic.

The Ice Soldier, by Paul Watkins

The Ice Soldier is an action-packed adventure story set in Britain and the Alps in the aftermath of the Second World War. While the eyes of the world are focused upon attempts to scale Mount Everest, two young men – once members of the world’s climbing elite, subsequently forced into premature retirement after the failure of a secret military operation in the Alps during World War II – have become outcasts of mountaineering society. Until, that is, a peculiar and dangerous request is made of them, drawing them back to the mountains on an exploit that will prove treacherous in more ways than one, as they confront not only the pitiless cruelty of nature but also the ghosts of their former selves.

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