Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives - and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization, and helped make us who we are.
One of the greatest explorations of sin, epiphany and redemption ever written, the Confessions of Saint Augustine continue to shape our ideas with their passionate declaration of the life-changing power of faith.
Today The Prince is still seen as the Bible of realpolitik, read by strategists, businessmen and political animals everywhere as the ultimate guide to gaining and maintaining power in a dangerous world.
One of the most important works of cultural theory ever written, Walter Benjamin's groundbreaking essay explores how the age of mass media means audiences can listen to or see a work of art repeatedly - and what the troubling social and political implications of this are. Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives - and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.
THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLERbr>br>''The real remedy is education of the kind that Sanghera has embraced- accepting, not ignoring, the past'' Gerard deGroot, The Timesbr>_____________________________________________________br>br>EMPIRE explains why there are millions of Britons living worldwide.br>EMPIRE explains Brexit andthe feeling that we are exceptional. br>EMPIRE explains our distrust of cleverness. br>EMPIRE explains Britain''s particular brand of racism. br>br>Strangely hidden from view, the British Empire remains a subject of both shame and glorification. In his bestselling book, Sathnam Sanghera shows how our imperial past is everywhere: from how we live and think to the foundation of the NHS and even our response to the COVID-19 crisis. br>br>At a time of great division, when we are arguing about what it means to be British, Empireland is a groundbreaking revelation - a much-needed and enlightening portrait of contemporary British society, shining a light on everything that usually gets left unsaid. _______________________________________________________br>br>''Empireland takes a perfectly-judged approach to its contentious but necessary subject'' Jonathan Coebr>br>''I only wish this book has been around when I was at school'' Sadiq Khan, Mayor of Londonbr>br>''This remarkable book shines the brightest of lights into some of the darkest and most misunderstood corners of our shared history'' James O''Brien>
For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike ? either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction to powerful critiques of European society posed by Indigenous observers and intellectuals. Revisiting this encounter has startling implications for how we make sense of human history today, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery, and civilization itself.br>br>Drawing on pathbreaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we learn to throw off our conceptual shackles and perceive what''s really there. If humans did not spend 95 percent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that time? If agriculture, and cities, did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what kinds of social and economic organization did they lead to? What was really happening during the periods that we usually describe as the emergence of "the state"? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful, hopeful possibilities, than we tend to assume.br>br>The Dawn of Everything fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society. This is a monumental book of formidable intellectual range, animated by curiosity, moral vision, and a faith in the power of direct action.>
From cultural icon Margaret Atwood comes a brilliant collection of essays -- funny, erudite, endlessly curious, uncannily prescient -- which seek answers to Burning Questions such as: Why do people everywhere, in all cultures, tell stories? How much of yourself can you give away without evaporating? How can we live on our planet? Is it true? And is it fair? What do zombies have to do with authoritarianism? In over fifty pieces Atwood aims her prodigious intellect and impish humour at the world, and reports back to us on what she finds. The roller-coaster period covered in the collection brought an end to the end of history, a financial crash, the rise of Trump and a pandemic. From debt to tech, the climate crisis to freedom; from when to dispense advice to the young (answer: only when asked) to how to define granola, we have no better guide to the many and varied mysteries of our universe.
''Got under my skin in the way the best writing can'' SHEILA HETI A fearless and savagely funny examination of masculinity under late capitalism, from an electrifying new voice Set in Philly one year into Trump''s presidency, Sean Thor Conroe''s audacious, freewheeling debut follows our eponymous fuccboi, Sean, as he attempts to live meaningfully in a world that doesn''t seem to need him. Reconciling past, failed selves -- cross-country walker, SoundCloud rapper, weed farmer -- he now finds himself back in his college city, trying to write, doing stimulant-fueled bike deliveries to eat. Unable to accept that his ex has dropped him, yet still engaged in all the same fuckery -- being coy and spineless, dodging decisions, maintaining a rotation of baes -- that led to her leaving in the first place. But now Sean has begun to wonder, how sustainable is this mode? How much fuckery is too much fuckery? Written in a riotous, utterly original idiom, and slyly undercutting both the hypocrisy of our era and that of Sean himself, Fuccboi is an unvarnished, playful, and searching examination of what it means to be a man. ''Sean Conroe isn''t one of the writers there''s a hundred of. He writes what''s his own, his own way'' NICO WALKER
A collection of interviews with the world''s leading public intellectual from the time of the rise of Donald Trump to power to the end of his presidency. In it, Noam Chomsky sheds light into the phenomenon of Trumpism, exposes the catastrophic nature and impact of Trump''s policies, the environment and the planet on the whole. He also captures the dynamics and contradictions operating today - from the brutal class warfare launched by the masters of capital to maintain and even enhance the features of a dog-eat dog society to the unprecedented mobilization of millions of people against neoliberal capitalism, racism, and police violence.>
Maggie Nelson is the author of several books of poetry and prose, including the New York Times bestseller and National Book Critics Circle Award winner The Argonauts , and most recently in the UK, Bluets . She teaches at University of Southern California and lives in Los Angeles.>
News is to the mind what sugar is to the body. In 2013 Rolf Dobelli stood in front of a roomful of journalists and proclaimed that he did not read the news. It caused a riot. Now he finally sets down his philosophy in detail. And he practises what he preaches: he hasn't read the news for a decade. Stop Reading the News is Dobelli's manifesto about the dangers of the most toxic form of information - news. He shows the damage it does to our concentration and well-being, and how a misplaced sense of duty can misdirect our behaviour. From the author of the bestselling The Art of Thinking Clearly , Rolf Dobelli's book offers the reader guidance about how to live without news, and the many potential gains to be had: less disruption, more time, less anxiety, more insights. In a world of increasing disruption and division, Stop Reading the News is a welcome voice of calm and wisdom.
Jeanette Winterson CBE was born in Manchester. Adopted by Pentecostal parents she was raised to be a missionary. This did and didn''t work out. Discovering early the power of books she left home at 16 to live in a Mini and get on with her education. After graduating from Oxford University she worked for a while in the theatre and published her first novel at 25. Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit is based on her own upbringing but using herself as a fictional character. She scripted the novel into a BAFTA-winning BBC drama. 27 years later she re-visited that material in the bestselling memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? She has written 10 novels for adults, as well as children''s books, non-fiction and screenplays. She is Professor of New Writing at the University of Manchester. She lives in the Cotswolds in a wood and in Spitalfields, London. She believes that art is for everyone and it is her mission to prove it.
From the bestselling author of Digital Minimalism comes a radical vision of a world without email - a world with increased creativity, productivity and collaboration You start the day checking your inbox, spend hours fruitlessly triaging the onslaught of requests and information, then when 5:30pm rolls around you realise with crushing stress that you haven''t even got to the most important items on your to-do list yet. Sound familiar? Constant communication has become part of the way we work and we check our bursting inboxes on average every 5.4 minutes. But at what expense?br>In A World Without Email, bestselling author Cal Newport argues that this steady flow of distractions disrupts us from achieving any meaningful work, causes us undue stress and is costing businesses millions in the form of untapped potential. Newport shows us how to completely reimagine and redesign our work without the constant pings of emails distracting us. Drawing on a fascinating array of case studies and offering practical solutions, this radical book shows us how dramatically reducing email will liberate people to do their most profound, fulfilling and creative work - and much more of it too.>
The bestselling author of Find Me and Call Me by Your Name returns to the essay form with this collection of thoughts on time, the creative mind, and great lives and works. The irrealis mood knows no boundaries between what is and what isn''t, between what happened and what won''t. In more ways than one, the essay about the artists, writers, and great minds gathered in this volume have nothing to do with who I am, or who they were, and my reading of them may be entirely erroneous. But I misread them the better to read myself. From meditations on subway poetry and the temporal resonances of an empty Italian street, to considerations of the lives and work of Sigmund Freud, Constantine Cavafy, W. G. Sebald, John Sloan, eric Rohmer, Marcel Proust, and Fernando Pessoa, and portraits of cities such as Alexandria and St. Petersburg, Homo Irrealis is a deep reflection of the imagination''s power to shape our memories under time''s seemingly intractable hold.
