Food For Thought
By Stu Hennigan
Food For Thought
By Stu Hennigan
Give your brain some nourishment with these amazing, thought-provoking non-fiction titles. From memoirs and music books to social history, nature writing, psychogeography and cultural criticism, this collection covers an incredibly diverse range of styles and subject matter, and showcases some of the freshest voices in contemporary non-fiction writing.
Black and British: A Forgotten History
David Olusoga
£12.99 £12.34A landmark study of the Black British experience dating all the way back to Roman times, this is a monumental, eminently readable work of scholarship and narrative history, destined to be the benchmark against which all others are judged for a long time to come.
The Secret DJ
The Secret DJ
£12.99 £12.34From the crusty scene of the 80s to living it large at the top end of mid-90s super-club culture, El Patron himself, the anonymous Secret DJ takes you on a wild and wonderful gonzo ride through the highest highs and lowest lows of the moneybags monstrosity that it the major label music industry. Withnail and I meets Fear and Loathing In las Vegas, and then some.
This Is Not Who I Am: Our Authenticity Obsession
Emily Bootle
£11.99 £11.39A compact and essential guide to the contemporary obsession with authenticity in all its different guises. Razor sharp in its analysis and told with a brutal wit, this is a fascinating takedown of how the capitalist nightmare machine finds ever-more inventive ways to manipulate our perceptions of what it means to ‘be’ ourselves, and whether true authenticity is even possible in an age of social media saturation.
Bullshit Jobs: The Rise of Pointless Work, and What We Can Do About It
David Graeber
£10.99 £10.44If you’ve ever doubted the truly useful value of your own job - or anyone else’s – this is a must-read. Graeber is a superb narrator, weaving a web of deeply complex, stats-based social theory and often hilarious anecdotal evidence from case study interviews together with the pace of a born storyteller and a comic’s ear for a one-liner to reveal that the majority of jobs are totally pointless. Anarchism and anthropology, together at last!
Cold Fish Soup
Adam Farrer
£9.99 £9.49A raw and tender tale that’s partly a study of male mental health and insecurity, part family tragedy and part psychogeographical love letter to a stretch of the East coast of England that’s slowly falling into the sea. Deeply sad and wildly fully, this one got rave reviews, and deservedly so.
Against Memoir: Winner of the 2019 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay
Michelle Tea
£10.00 £9.50A collection of essays and journalistic pieces from one of the greatest chroniclers of queer subcultures. Painfully, nakedly honest but warm as hell and with bags of heart, I fell in love with her effortlessly cool, fresh style and casually dazzling intelligence after reading this; it’s hard to imagine any other newcomers not doing the same.
Car Park Life: A Portrait of Britain's Unexplored Urban Wilderness
Gareth E. Rees
£9.99 £9.49The idea of a book pitched as a discussion of contemporary Britain told through the medium of some of its car parks sounds probably doesn’t sound like a great read, but the reality is very different. This is lively, engaging stuff that may come straight out of left-field but beneath the offbeat humour and knowing weirdness of the narrative, makes some very serious points about where we are right now and how we got here.
The Sound of Being Human: How Music Shapes Our Lives
Jude Rogers
£9.99 £9.49Praised to the heavens by all and sundry, this one sets out to explain why for so many people, music transcends mere sound and becomes not just a background sound to their lived experience but part of the fabric of life itself.
Hermit: A memoir of finding freedom in a wild place
Jade Angeles Fitton
£18.99 £18.04A stirring and evocative mediatation on the human desire for solitude across the centuries that blends memoir, nature writing and history with a journalists attention to detail and a poet’s clarity of vision.
Surrender
Joanna Pocock
£12.99 £12.34When the writer loses both her parents and starts to go through the menopause, she decides there must be more to life than the 9-5 and sets out on a journey through the eco-communities trying to preserve the fragile landscape of the American West. It’s a compulsively readable, spellbinding story told in beautiful prose, and kinda heartbreaking when you see the lengths some people are prepared to go to save their little corner of the earth in the face of imminent eco-catastrophe.
Porn: An Oral History
Polly Barton
£13.99 £13.29A timely, important and thought-provoking work that discusses its subject via a series of interviews with individuals of all ages, genders and sexualities. It doesn’t offer any easy answers, and to her credit she states at the start that this isn’t the aim; rather, its to attempt to show what a nuanced, personal and unbelievably complicated subject this is. Think of it as the first letter of the sentence that starts the conversation, rather than the full stop at the end.
The Naked Don't Fear the Water: A Journey Through the Refugee Underground
Matthieu Aikins
£12.99 £12.34A staggering work of radical empathy, in which the writer uses his linguistic skills and mixed heritage to travel with one of his best friends and his family as they attempt to escape as refugess from war-torn Afghanistan. This book deserved to be huge and should have got way more attention that it did – anyone who reads this and still speaks of refugees in the dehumanising terms spouted by the vile British media is definitely part of the problem.
A Working-Class Family Ages Badly: 'Remarkable' The Observer
Juno Roche
£10.99 £10.44Published last year under the title A Working Class Family Ages Badly, this new paperback edition of luminary queer writer Juno Roche’s memoir is a love letter to working class mothers and women everywhere, which also contains deep analysis of inter-generational trauma, poverty, gender, original sin and much, much more. A vital read from an incredible voice.
Chernobyl Prayer: Voices from Chernobyl
Svetlana Alexievich
£9.99 £9.49Her body of work is unsurpassed, and no student of Soviet history should be without it. She has an astonishing gift for extracting the core from the stories told to her by her interviewees and seamlessly blending them into a narrative that no more historian could hope to match. This one reads like a late period Burroughs nightmare (think Cities of the Red Night) but it’s 100% real, and terrifyingly, not even forty years in the past.
Chamber Music: About the Wu-Tang (in 36 Pieces)
Will Ashon
£9.99 £9.49Everything will Ashon touches is gold. Here he uses the skills of a Shaolin master to dissect the idiosynchratic beast that is the first Wu Tang Clan record. Split into 36 chapters, mirroring the 36 chambers the album title alludes to, this is endlessly inventive and cut from a completely different cloth to the vast majority of music books on the block.
Bluets: AS SEEN ON BBC2’S BETWEEN THE COVERS
Maggie Nelson
£12.99 £12.34A series of meditations on the colour blue from the luminary poet, academic and theorist. This is dreamy brainfood to be savoured languidly, repeatedly, every single word revealing fresh layers of wonderful with each successive read.
Coming Undone: A Memoir
Terri White
£9.99 £9.49This one was so close to the bone for me in places I was reading with gritted teeth and eyes half-shut. Journalist, activist, former Empire editor and all-round force of nature Terri White lays it all out here in this heartbreaking memoir of abuse, trauma, addiction and recovery, which is made all the more impressive by her staunch refusal to offer resolution or closure at the end. Harrowing, devastating, impossibly affecting writing of the highest quality.
Flaneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London
Lauren Elkin
£10.99 £10.44In this marvellously entertaining and insightful book, the author takes us in the footsteps of famous flaneuses such as George Sand and Virginia Woolfe, taking in Tokyo, Paris, London, New York with a cultured insouciance and a cool intellectual eye.
k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004-2016)
Mark Fisher and Darren Ambrose
£30.00 £28.50There was no better companion to help navigate the chaos of the modern world than the late Mark Fisher. This massive tome compiles many posts from his hugely influential K-Punk blog with pieces of cultural criticism on music, film and literature, plus some of his wildly original essays on hauntology, depression and lost futures. When you look around at the binfire of the UK after 13 years of Tories, it’s hard not to wonder what MF would have thought……
Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures
Merlin Sheldrake
£12.99 £12.34Who’d’ve thought a book about fungi could become such a big hit? This is already a classic, in which polymathic genius Sheldrake shows in microscopic detail that there is much more to the world around (and inside) us than meets the eye.
Now That's What I Call a History of the 1980s: Pop Culture and Politics in the Decade That Shaped Modern Britain
Lucy Robinson
£14.99You know you’re getting old when your childhood decade starts becoming worthy of history books. This playfully titled cultural history of the 80s is bang on the money, with each chapter taking an iconic cultural moment, object or image – Diana’s legs, Roland Rat, the Battle of Orgreave, Spycatcher – and extrapolating a discussion of it to show how it related to the wider societal issues of the time.
When the Dust Settles: The gripping behind-the-scenes story from the UK's top disaster planner -A SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
Lucy Easthope
£10.99 £10.44Remarkable work from a remarkable woman who specialises in the prevention of mass disaster, and deals with the aftermath when the unthinkable happens. Deeply humane, darkly funny, heartbreaking, and brilliant.