Fiction and Non Fiction

Brief Summary In the year before her death, as she struggled with an untreatable illness, Cory Taylor began to write about her experiences, the patterns of her life, and of those she had lost. Dying is about vulnerability and strength, courage and humility, and anger. It is also about the acceptance that it takes to live a good life and say goodbye to it in peace. ISBN:9781782119784 Author:Cory Taylor

Brief Summary James Boswell called him ‘the greatest man of any age’. Christian Meier’s biography is the definitive modern account of Caesar’s life and career, and places him within the wider context of the crisis of the Roman republic. It is a compelling work of historical scholarship. ISBN:9780006863496 Author:Christian Meier

Brief Summary Since she burst spectacularly into view with her debut novel almost two decades ago, Zadie Smith has established herself not just as one of the world's preeminent fiction writers, but also a brilliant and singular essayist. She contributes regularly to The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books on a range of subjects, and each piece of hers is a literary event in its own right. Arranged into five sections - In the World, In the Audience, In the Gallery, On the Bookshelf, and Feel Free - this new collection poses questions we immediately recognize. What is The Social Network, and Facebook itself, really about? "It's a cruel portrait of us: 500 million sentient people entrapped in the recent careless thoughts of a Harvard sophomore. " Why do we love libraries? "Well-run libraries are filled with people because what a good library offers cannot be easily found elsewhere: an indoor public space in which you do not have to buy anything in order to stay." What will we tell our granddaughters about our collective failure to address global warming? "So I might say to her, look: the thing you have to appreciate is that we'd just been through a century of relativism and deconstruction, in which we were informed that most of our fondest-held principles were either uncertain or simple wishful thinking, and in many areas of our lives we had already been asked to accept that nothing is essential and everything changes and this had taken the fight out of us somewhat." Gathering in one place for the first time previously unpublished work, as well as already classic essays, such as, Joy, and, Find Your Beach, Feel Free offers a survey of important recent events in culture and politics, as well as Smith's own life. Equally at home in the world of good books and bad politics, Brooklyn-born rappers and the work of Swiss novelists, she is by turns wry, heartfelt, indignant, and incisive and never any less than perfect company. This is literary journalism at its zenith. " ISBN:9781594206252 Author:Zadie Smith

Brief Summary This magisterial volume follows the death of ancient traditions, the triumph of new classes, and the emergence of new technologies, sciences, and ideologies, with vast intellectual daring and aphoristic elegance. Part of Eric Hobsbawm's epic four-volume history of the modern world, along with The Age of Capitalism, The Age of Empire, and The Age of Extremes. ISBN:9780679772538 Author:Eric Hobsbawm