Three years ago, the Italian Environment Fund (FAI), were facing a crisis of funding for the restoration of the unique and beautiful Villa Necchi Campiglio in Milan, designed in 1932 by Piero Portaluppi. They decided to appeal to architects themselves for help, as this is a building much admired by professionals the world over. They wrote to over 300 architects, asking them to contribute a drawing which could be exhibited and catalogued to raise funds. The response was overwhelming – of the 300 asked, 110 sent in over 400 drawings. They came from all over the world – from Tokyo, Melbourne, New York, Amsterdam, Porto, London, and Madrid, as well as from cities right across Italy. They sent architectural drawings, sketches, cartoons, paintings – rough ideas and grand schemes of abundant variety, and the project and exhibition were a huge success. In May 2008 the doors of the beautifully restored Villa opened to the public for the first time.

The drawings that made this possible are gathered together here for the first time in a beautiful Moleskine presentation book, complementing the new A4 Moleskine Folio format. The collection also contains interesting and previously unpublished essays that explore drawing and sketching as the most important tools at the architect’s disposal, as well as being the root of the design process and a metaphor for any creative endeavour. A free 120-page Moleskine sketchbook is included, and we are offering a special launch offer of 10% off until 1 October 2009.

This beautifully written book tells an extraordinary and utterly heartbreaking story, rarely told in the recounting of Soviet history. In the depths of the Depression of the 1930s in the US, thousands of people, brought to an all-time low by the complete failure of capitalism and the greed of Wall Street bankers, decided to make a fresh start – where capitalism had failed them, Communism would provide dignity for the working man, racial equality, and honest labour. What in fact awaited them in Stalin’s Russia, however, was the most monstrous betrayal.

In a remarkable piece of historical investigation that spans seven decades of political change, Tim Tzouliadis follows these thousands from Pittsburgh and Detroit and Los Angeles, as their numbers dwindle on their epic and terrible journey. Through official records, memoirs, newspaper reports and interviews he searches the most closely guarded archive in modern history to reconstruct their story – one of honesty, vitality and idealism brought up against the brutal machinery of repression. His account exposes the self-serving American diplomats who refused their countrymen sanctuary, it analyses international relations and economic causes but also finds space to retrieve individual acts of kindness and self-sacrifice. Highly recommended. Winner of the Longman/History Today Book of the Year.

 

“A powerful, important and highly readable book…Tzouliadis brilliantly links high politics to the torrent of innocents, adding devastating detail.”      George Walden, Observer

 

“Spellbinding…Tzouliadis brings to life and aspect of Stalin’s Terror that has been almost completely forgotten.”        Scotsman

Chris Hani’s assassination in 1993 gave rise to one of South Africa’s great imponderables: if he had survived, what impact would he have had on politics and government in South Africa? More pointedly, could this charismatic leader have risen to become president of the country?

Hani was a hero of South Africa’s liberation, a communist party leader and Umkhonto we Sizwe chief of staff who was both intellectual and fighter, a man who could inspire an army but carried a book of poetry in his backpack. Hani led MK into its earliest battles, and carved a formidable reputation as a thinker, debater and peacemaker.

Hani: A Life Too Short tells the story of Hani’s life, from his childhood in rural Transkei and education at Fort Hare University to the controversial Memorandum of 1969, the crisis in the ANC camps in Angola in the 1980s and the heady dawn of freedom. Drawing on interviews and the recollections of those who knew him, this vividly written book provides a detailed account of the life of a great South African.

Janet Smith is an executive editor of The Star and a special writer at Independent Newspapers, concentrating on socio-political stories, essays and profiles. She is the author of two award-winning novels for young South Africans and the co-author of a third prize-winning book for teenagers. Beauregard Tromp is a senior reporter at The Star newspaper in Johannesburg. He was awarded the Mondi Shanduka Newspaper Journalist of the Year in 2009 for his coverage of the xenophobic violence in Johannesburg in 2008.

A young English biographer is working on a book about the late writer, John Coetzee. He plans to focus on the years from 1972-1977 when Coetzee, in his thirties, is sharing a run-down cottage in the suburbs of Cape Town with his widowed father. This, the biographer senses, is the period when he was ‘finding his feet as a writer’. Never having met Coetzee, he embarks on a series of interviews with people who were important to him – a married woman with whom he had an affair, his favourite cousin Margot, a Brazilian dancer whose daughter had English lessons with him, former friends and colleagues. From their testimony emerges a portrait of the young Coetzee as an awkward, bookish individual with little talent for opening himself to others. Within the family he is regarded as an outsider, someone who tried to flee the tribe and has now returned, chastened. His insistence on doing manual work, his long hair and beard, rumours that he writes poetry evoke nothing but suspicion in the South Africa of the time. Sometimes heartbreaking, often very funny, Summertime shows us a great writer as he limbers up for his task. It completes the trilogy of fictionalised memoir begun with Boyhood and Youth.

Thirty years ago and full of hope, on their Cape Cod honeymoon, Jack and Joy Griffin drafted the Great Truro Accord, a plan for their future that’s now thirty years old and has largely come true. At the time they were living in Los Angeles, where Griffin wrote scripts that were already losing his interest. He left all that behind for a family life and to teach at the sort of New England college his parents had aspired to. Now the two of them are back on the Cape – where Jack also spent childhood vacations which still cast a long shadow – to celebrate the marriage of their daughter Laura’s best friend. Things look good, even if cracks are beginning to show…Jack’s been driving around with his father’s ashes in an urn in the boot of his car, though his mother is very much alive and often on his mobile. Laura’s boyfriend seems promising – but be careful what you wish for, especially if there’s a chance it could come true. A year later, at her wedding, Jack has a second urn in the car, and his life is starting to unravel. Full of every family feeling imaginable, painfully comic and profoundly involving, That Old Cape Magic is surprising, uplifting and unlike anything this Pulitzer Prize winner has ever written.

Adam One, the kindly leader of the God’s Gardeners – a belief devoted to the melding of science and religion, the preservation of all species, the tending of the Earth, and the cultivation of bees and organic crops on flat rooftops – has long predicted the Waterless Flood. Now it has occurred, obliterating most human life. Two women have avoided it: the young trapeze-dancer, Ren, locked into the high-end sex club, Scales and Tails; and former SecretBurgers meat-slinger turned Gardener, Toby, barricaded into the luxurious AnooYoo Spa, where many of the treatments are edible. Have others survived? Ren’s bioartist friend Amanda, or the MaddAddam eco-fighters? Ren’s one-time teenage lover, Jimmy? Or the murderous Painballers, survivors of the mutual-elimination Painball prison? Not to mention the CorpSeCorps, the shadowy and corrupt policing force of the ruling powers. Meanwhile, in the natural world, gene-spliced life forms are proliferating: the lion/lamb blends, the Mo’hair sheep with human hair, the pigs with human brain tissue. As Adam One and his intrepid hemp-clad band make their way through a ruined world, singing their devotional hymns and faithful to their creed and to their Saints – Saint Francis Assisi, Saint Rachel Carson, and Saint Al Gore among them – what odds for Ren and Toby, and for the human race? By turns dark, tender, violent, thoughtful and uneasily hilarious, The Year of the Flood is Atwood at her most effective.

“We all know what this could be: we know it could be dysentery, we know it could be typhoid. In the ‘Occupied City’, we all know what this could mean…”

 

Tokyo, January 26th, 1948. As the third year of the US Occupation of Japan begins, a man enters a downtown bank. He speaks of an outbreak of dysentery and says he is a doctor, sent by the Occupation authorities, to treat anyone who might have been exposed. Clear liquid is poured into sixteen teacups. Sixteen employees of the bank drink this liquid according to strict instructions. Within minutes twelve of them are dead, the other four unconscious. The man disappears along with some, but not all, of the bank’s money. And so begins the biggest manhunt in Japanese history. In Occupied City, David Peace dramatises and explores the rumours of complicity, conspiracy and cover-up that surround the chilling case of the Teikoku Bank Massacre: of the man who was convicted of the crime, of the legacy of biological warfare programmes, and of the victims and survivors themselves. The second part of his acclaimed Tokyo Trilogy – and an extraordinary picture of a city in mourning – Occupied City is further evidence of a singular and formidable novelist.

Struggling UC Santa Cruz grad student Willie Shakespeare Greenberg is trying to write his thesis about the Bard…kind of. Cut off by his father for laziness, and desperate for dough, Willie agrees to deliver a giant, psychedelic mushroom to a mysterious collector, making himself an unwitting target in Ronald Reagan’s War on Drugs.

Meanwhile, would-be playwright (and oppressed Catholic) William Shakespeare is eighteen years old and stuck teaching Latin in Stratford-upon-Avon. The future Bard’s life is turned upside down when a stranger entrusts him with a sacred relic from Rome …This, at a time when adherents of the ‘Old Faith’ are being hanged, drawn, and quartered as traitors. Separated in time and place, the lives of Willie and William begin to intersect in curious ways, from harrowing encounters with the law (and a few ex-girlfriends) to dubious experiments with mind-altering substances.Wise or foolish, the bold choices they make will shape not only the Shakespeare each is destined to become…but the very course of history itself.

It sounded simple enough.

“Audrey,” I said. “Audrey, why don’t we go out, for a stroll?”

“In this weather?”

“Clear the cobwebs,” I said, pulling on my boots, and she shrugged her shoulders and said, “Why not?”

Cause I’m going to shove you over the bloody cliff, Audrey, that’s why not.

 

Al Greenwood has decided to kill his wife, and he’s planned the perfect murder. But things don’t turn out quite the way he hoped, and Al finds himself committing more crimes to cover his tracks.

Told through the voice of despicable yet strangely likeable Al, Cliffhanger is a blackly comic novel which takes its readers on a thrilling ride through Middle England. T. J. Middleton is a unique and exciting new voice, full of biting wit. Sharp, original and hugely entertaining, this is crime writing at its very best.

Writing under a pseudonym, Tim Binding returns with a very dark, very British, very funny seaside tale of sudden disappearances and mistaken identities.

 

“Perfectly paced, with sly wit and a blackly humorous ending.”    Sunday Telegraph

“A rollicking ride . . . There is a touch of Ealing to this clever, witty seaside comedy of manners.”         Independent

“An Ayckbournesque comedy about what happens when the unhappiness of a stale marriage develops into a sharper pain . . . Excellent.”        Daily Telegraph

After more than 30 years Anne Greves feels compelled to break her silence about her first lover, and a treacherous pursuit across Cambodia’s killing fields. Once she was a motherless girl from taciturn immigrant stock. Defying fierce opposition, she falls in love with Serey, a gentle rebel and exiled musician. She’s still only 16 when he leaves her in their Montreal flat to return to Cambodia and, after a decade without word, she abandons everything to search for him in the bars of Phnom Penh, a city traumatised by the Khmer Rouge slaughter. Against all odds the lovers are reunited, and in a political country where tranquil rice paddies harbour the bones of the massacred, Anne pieces together a new life with Serey. But there are wounds that love cannot heal, and some mysteries too dangerous to know. And when Serey disappears again, Anne discovers a story she cannot bear. Haunting, vivid, elegiac, The Disappeared is a tour de force; at once a battle cry and a piercing lamentation, for truth, for love.

 

So begins Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, an expanded edition of the beloved Jane Austen novel featuring all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie mayhem. As our story opens, a mysterious plague has fallen upon the quiet English village of Meryton – and the dead are returning to life! Feisty heroine Elizabeth Bennet is determined to wipe out the zombie menace, but she’s soon distracted by the arrival of the haughty and arrogant Mr. Darcy. What ensues is a delightful comedy of manners with plenty of civilized sparring between the two young lovers – and even more violent sparring on the blood-soaked battlefield as Elizabeth wages war against hordes of flesh-eating undead.

 

Jane Austen is the author of Sense and Sensibility, Persuasion, Mansfield Park, and other masterpieces of English literature.

Seth Grahame-Smith is the author of How to Survive a Horror Movie and The Big Book of Porn.

 

This book has been a huge bestseller in the US, and the world now keenly awaits the follow-up – Sense, Sensibility and Sea Monsters - does it…?

Wyd en syd het digter en joernalis Danie Marais gesoek na stukke vir hierdie voortreflike versameling oor die heinde en die verre. Tussen globalisering en die sogenaamde Afrika-diaspora, wil dit somtyds voorkom of almal wat mens ken, òf oorsee is, òf al ˜n ruk daar vertoef het. Tog is daar tot dusver weinig daaroor in Suid-Afrika geskryf. Hierdie versameling – so kosmopolitaans soos die mense wat daarin verskyn; so eklekties soos die wye wêreld waarmee dit te make het – gaan ˜n lang ent om dié gebrek aan te vul. Hier is dagboeke en poskaarte, strippe en kort stories, gedigte en essays – van bekendes en onbekendes – wat almal verskillende wedervaringe in verskillende plekke weergee. Skrywers soos Achmat Dangor, Sindiwe Magona en Eben Venter se beplakkerde koffers vol herinneringe lê op die voerband langs dié van digters soos Marais, Antjie Krog en Gabeba Baderoon; strip kunstenaars soos Joe Dog, Lorcan White en Karlien de Villiers deel die doeane-tou met figure soos Hunter Kennedy, Toast Coetzer en Dana Snyman. En oral, deur die fassinasie of die ongemak met die verre, skemer daar ˜n duidelike liefde vir die tuiste wat agtergelaat is: op die oppervlak is hierdie ˜n versameling oor die buiteland, maar vlak onder die vel skuil daar eintlik ˜n love-song vir ˜n Suid-Afrika wat nooit haar kinders ophou terugroep nie.

Arabia in the 1960s – still a land of desert, nomadic tribes, falcons and gazelles. And Abu Dhabi, perched on the Gulf Coast, was a poor fishing community. Barely forty years on, it is the richest city on earth, with major stakes in Western economies. And if the extraordinarily ambitious plans for the capital of the United Arab Emirates succeed, its future impact will be global.

Jo Tatchell’s family arrived in Abu Dhabi in 1974 when there were only a few thousand inhabitants. She left as a young adult in the nineties, choosing personal freedom over a life of comfort and ease. But in recent years, as Abu Dhabi has become ever more significant on the world stage, she has returned to get behind the headlines and see how the city is changing for herself.

In this illuminating portrait, she shows Abu Dhabi past and present through the eyes of its people – from sheikhs to Indian immigrants, housewives to ex-pats – as well as her own. Tales of traditional Bedu hospitality and of expeditions into the desert mingle with accounts of hair-raising decadence and double standards, as she reveals a society and culture almost derailed by sudden, extreme wealth. And yet, as she discovers, Abu Dhabi is about to change again. Its rulers have a grand vision of a cultural bridge between Islam and the West, which might just transform our world.

“Utterly compelling . . . what emerges is a resilient family’s unconditional love for one another.”      Scotland on Sunday

“A moving personal tale of family life and love torn apart by persecution and destruction under a crude regime. The story shines through, engrossing in its horror, doubly powerful for the knowledge that a happy ending is still far away.”       Financial Times

What underlies the many problems of the modern world – from accelerating rates of extinction and desertification to the increased alienation of the individual – is a reality overload, an increasingly invasive mechanisation and homogenisation of modern life that glorifies consumption and conformity. This overload has been created from the constant force-feeding of too much information, a phenomenon that dispossesses us of our deepest connections to time, our physical world, and each other.

Annie Le Brun explains that the degradation of the environment mirrors the devastation going on in our minds, revealing a link between genetically modified foods and the transformation and decay of our language and communication. There is a direct relationship between the rupture of the great biological balances that govern the planet and the equally devastating rupture in our imaginal realm. The imaginal realm is the home of our dreams and the perceptions that feed our thoughts, individuality, and creativity. Without its influence we are forced to live a drab, alienated lifestyle based on consumption alone. If, as Shakespeare claims, we are such stuff as dreams are made on, this theft of our imagination by the reality overload threatens the very foundations of our existence.

Annie Le Brun, a member of the French surrealist group during its later years, is a poet and essayist who has written books on subjects as varied as the work of Raymond Roussell and the war in former Yugoslavia, as well as groundbreaking work on the Marquis de Sade.

This is a practical, do-it-yourself guide for leaders and facilitators wanting to help organisations to function and to develop in more healthy, human and effective ways as they strive to make their contributions to a more humane society. It has been developed by the Barefoot Collective.

The guide, with its supporting website, includes tried and tested concepts, approaches, stories and activities. Its purpose is to help stimulate and enrich the practice of anyone supporting organisations and social movements in their challenges of working, learning, growing and changing to meet the needs of our complex world. Although it is aimed at leaders and facilitators of civil society organisations, we hope it will be useful to anyone interested in fostering healthy human organisation in any sphere of life.

The Barefoot Guide is offered free to the world and can be downloaded on this website: www.barefootguide.org. The website also contains a growing library of additional downloadable exercises, readings, case studies and diagrams to accompany the Barefoot Guide.

This book offers a perspective on why organisations exist, the real roles they play, and on the importance of supporting the sovereignty of local organisations and social movements for meaningful social change. You will find here a range of approaches to understanding ourselves and our roles as leaders and facilitators, as we try to understand and facilitate change in organisations. In addition, the significance of relationships and power dynamics in organisations and organisational change processes are explored. We provide some tools for reading organisations, including how organisations tend to move through various phases of development, how we might facilitate change and the challenges we all face in implementing or sustaining change. Finally, the guide gives support to processes of building learning organisations, how we can continually learn both from our own experiences and the experiences of others.

David Weidman’s name may not be familiar, but his work certainly is. Weidman began his career as an animator in 1950s Los Angeles, painting backgrounds for Hannah Barbera and setting the standard for the look of cartoons of that era. However, like a true entrepreneur he soon began to work for himself, and went on to establish a style that is today instantly recognizable and iconic. A printmaker, ceramicist, font designer, painter, cartoonist, and silk screener, Weidman never stopped experimenting as an artist. Today at age 87 Weidman’s staggering body of work is just as modern and visually stunning as it was forty years ago. His graphic sensibility and expert use of saturated colour palletes evoke the vintage modern look while remaining completely relevant to contemporary designers. The Whimsical Work of David Weidman is a long overdue career retrospective of a true originator, who created the look of an era. Gorgeous.

This new series celebrates the V&A Museum’s status as a source of inspiration for designers, reflecting the unique breadth and depth of a collection that represents over 3,000 years of objects from all over the world. The first four titles in this limited edition box-set feature some of the museum’s most popular patterns – William Morris, The Fifties, Indian Florals and Digital Pioneers – and a short introduction to each puts the patterns in context. Complete with a free CD of the images inside, to be redrawn or reworked, commercial designers looking to license patterns and individual motifs from the collection can use the books as a starting point for research. The second box set, due next year, will contain four new titles -Kimonos, Novelty Patterns, Owen Jones and Secret Gardens.

It seemed inconceivable that after decades of exhibitions, auctions, books, and movies, unpublished Frida Kahlo artwork could still be found anywhere, much less a shop in a converted textile factory. “Well, if you don’t believe me just come along,” replied her traveling companion. Levine could not resist and was soon en route to La Buhardilla Antiquarios (The Attic Antiques), in San Miduel de Allende, Mexico.

Down an arched stone corridor in a small back room sat two wooden chests, a metal trunk, a wooden box, and a battered old suitcase. On the lid of the suitcase was the name ‘Sra. KAHLO DE RIVERA’. The shop owners opened the five cases to reveal a jumble of objects, including paintings, drawings, keepsake boxes, annotated books, clothing, a diary, and other assorted items and ephemera. Levine picked up one of ten airmail letters, inscribed with the words “personal archive of Frida K. and personal archive of my private life.”

Finding Frida Kahlo presents, for the first time in print, an astonishing lost archive of one of the twentieth century’s most revered artists. Hidden from view for over half a century, this richly illustrated, intimate portrait overflows with fascinating details about Kahlo’s romances, friendships, and business affairs during a three-decade period, beginning in the 1920s when she was a teenager and ending just before she died in 1954. Full of ardent desires, seething fury, and outrageous humor, Finding Frida Kahlo is a rare glimpse into an exuberant and troubled existence: a vivid diary entry records her sexual encounter with a woman named Doroti; a painted box contains eleven stuffed hummingbirds, concealed beneath a letter in which she laments her discovery that her husband, Diego Rivera, had been monstrously dissecting “these beautiful creatures” to extract an aphrodisiac; an altered French medical book describes the pain she was suffering from the amputation of her right leg, written by Kahlo upon pages that illustrate an amputation technique; a letter to a friend expresses her loneliness, and a simple request for coconut candies. Frida Kahlo never wrote an autobiography. Instead, she left behind a much more complex material universe. Finding Frida Kahlo offers scholars and fans alike an opportunity to examine firsthand Kahlo’s secret world and draw their own conclusions about how she imagined her place in it.

For the first time famous muralists from Europe to Africa, Asia to Oceania present their best murals and give a personal insight into their story with the help of artist’s portraits. The murals presented in this beautiful book are created with a very wide range of techniques – from fresco to stencil to trompe l’oeil; and appear in a wide range of places – from small walls to vast public buildings. Vigorously aesthetic, overtly political and played out in the urban social space. This overdue consideration of the role and significance of mural art within the art-history canon presents an impressive roster of artists, including WK Interact, Shepard Fairey, Viagrafic, Mike Giant, and Os Gemeos, to name but a few – and not to mention Cape Town’s Faith47 and Mak1one! Working on a monumental scale and creating images that are readily accessible to the masses, this is the rejuvenation of muralism, updated for the age of graffiti.

This beautifully illustrated book is a celebration of all those journeys that opened up new vistas to us, and the people that made them, by an author who has had a passion for travel and exploration since the tender age of 12.

 

Before the turn of the 19th century, ventures into uncharted lands required material or spiritual reward to justify the perils of shipwreck and hostile natives, and dangers yet unknown. Until recent times exploration for the sake of knowledge alone was rare, and mostly undertaken by intrepid traders, gold seekers and valiant Christian missionaries. In this book the author selects more than 150 of those he considers to be the most influential and unusual journeys of discovery, setting each firmly in its historical context. This book chronicles the personalities and motivations, the conditions that had to be endured, and the contribution that exploration has made to our knowledge of the world. It is replete with extraordinary personalities: the heroic adventurers who set out into the unknown, battling against the elements in order to commit their findings to journals and maps; the pioneers who risked everything in search of fabled riches; and the explorers who set out to conquer the deserts, poles and oceans of the globe. The book is organised simply and chronologically – from 1470BCE to 1869 – beautifully illustrated with contemporary maps, paintings, journal entries and other artefacts, and with entertaining asides and sometimes unorthodox interpretations based on the author’s lifetime study of the subject.

Yes, this is another addition to the ‘Dangerous Book…‘ series – but this one is a real treat for all fans of adventure and extraordinary human achievement. The men and women in this book were, in some cases, possessed of superb self-confidence and personal belief. Others doubted their every action to the point where they could hardly act at all. For some, heroism is contained in a single moment, while others seem to have lived a whole life that stands out.

Some names have been passed from generation to generation – the Duke of Wellington, Walter Raleigh, Edmund Hillary, Florence Nightingale – while others are less well known, whose heroism has been quieter – the Few, the Abolitionists and the Women of the SOE. Yet each of their lives illustrates how far wild courage, single-minded obsession and self-belief can take you.

From the burning of Byron’s memoirs, Jane Austen’s clipped businesslike manner, and the lucrative controversy caused by the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species, through to the discovery of the new young poet John Betjeman, the name John Murray has for more than two hundred years been synonymous with challenging, intelligent and progressive publishing.

 

From its birth in 1768, when the first John Murray of Edinburgh came down to London, each of its seven leaders has made his own contribution to the dissemination of literature and the understanding of the world. One became Byron’s publisher and confidante; another began the revolutionary series of Murray handbooks which transformed world travel in the early years of the railways; a third broke controversial new ground with the publication of Queen Victoria’s letters. So the tradition progressed to the end of the twentieth century, and a list of literary giants including Patrick Leigh Fermor, Osbert Lancaster, Françoise Sagan and Poet Laureate, John Betjeman. Written in Carpenter’s rollicking and iconoclastic style, it is an affectionate and vibrant account of the longest-surviving publishing house in the world.

Alexandre and Sonia Poussin undertook to walk the length of Africa entirely on foot, from the Cape of Good Hope to the Sea of Galilee. In a three-year trek along the great Rift Valley of East Africa, their goal was to symbolically retrace the passage of early man, from Australopithecus to Modern Man. Travelling without sponsors or a support team, Alexandre and Sonia’s slow pace and humble approach triggers generosity, enthusiasm and new perspectives of the African continent.

 

Africa Trek has been a bestseller in the US and France and has won many awards, as has the film made by Sonia on their travels. This is the first edition published on the African continent. Sonia and Alexandre will be in Cape Town in November – watch for details of an event at the Book Lounge.