Daisy Jones and the Six meets Patricia Highsmith in this addictive, intense novel about the brutal and ferocious road to glory, from the award-winning author of My Husband.  Ever since she was a child, Cléo, the French-American daughter of two academics, has had only one becoming a famous singer. Over the years, to everyone’s surprise but her own, she overcomes every obstacle and becomes a global superstar with millions of dollars, countless awards, and several Los Angeles villas to her name. But as any celebrity will tell you, getting to the top is one thing; staying there is another. Now thirty-three years old, Cléo is taking her first real vacation in years, on a remote island with no one else in sight. With the never-ending spin cycle of her life finally on pause and no paparazzi peeking out from behind the coconut palms, she can work on her fourth album in peace. Except that with so much time to think, she can’t help but ruminate on her past—including how, just six months earlier, things started to go very, very wrong . . . Taking place between New York, Paris, Los Angeles, and the South Pacific, How to Become a Celebrity is a brilliant sophomore novel from Maud Ventura that dives intoxicatingly deep into the machinations of one woman’s complicated mind, and her relentless pursuit of fame.

A wildly inventive story collection from legendary film director Pedro AlmodóvarThe Last Dream brings together for the first time twelve unpublished stories from Almodóvar’s personal archive, written between the late sixties and the present day. Both a tantalising glimpse into Almodóvar’s creative mind and a masterclass in how to tell a story, this intimate and mischievous collection reflects Almodóvar’s obsessions and many of the themes of his cinematic work, spanning genres from autofiction to comedy, parody, pastiche and gothic. The title story, ‘The Last Dream’, is a beautiful chronicle of the death of Almodóvar’s mother, and other stories a love story between Jesus and Barabbas; a cult film director out in search of painkillers on a bank holiday weekend; the primary version of the film Bad Education; and a gothic tale of a repentant vampire among monks.In his introduction, Almodóvar ‘I’ve been asked to write my autobiography more than once, and I’ve always refused; it’s also been suggested that I let someone else write my biography, but I have always felt somewhat resistant to the idea of a book entirely about me as an individual. I’ve never kept a diary, and whenever I’ve tried, I’ve never made it to page two; in a sense, then, this book represents something of a paradox. It might be best described as a fragmentary autobiography, incomplete and a little cryptic.’A celebration of the relationship between life and art, fiction and reality from an artist unafraid to write about our most intimate moments, these stories explore desire, mortality, loneliness and the pain and glory of artistic creation, laced with playful humour and a deep love of literature and culture.Translated by Frank Wynne

"Poignant, sometimes harrowing." – Wall Street Journal The defense lawyer for Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, the Selma marchers, and other civil rights heroes reveals the true story of the historic trial that made Dr. King a national hero. Fred D. Gray was just twenty-four years old when he became the defense lawyer for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a young minister who had become the face of the bus boycott that had rocked the city of in Montgomery, Alabama. In this incredible history, Gray takes us behind the scenes of that landmark case, including such unforgettable moments *Martin Luther King's courageous response to a bomb threat on his own home *Poignant, searing testimony that exposed the South's racist systems to an worldwide audience *The conspiracy to destroy Gray's career and draft him into the Vietnam War *The unforgettable moment when a Supreme Court ruling brought the courtroom to a halt Alabama v. King captures a pivotal moment in the fight for equality, from the eyes of the lawyer who Dr. King called "the brilliant young leader who later became the chief counsel for the protest movement."

Stories mould who we are, from our character to our cultural identity. They drive us to act out our dreams and ambitions, and shape our politics and beliefs. We use them to construct our relationships, to keep order in our law courts, to interpret events in our newspapers and social media. Storytelling is an essential part of what makes us human. There have been many attempts to understand what makes a good story – from Joseph Campbell’s well-worn theories about myth and archetype to recent attempts to crack the ‘Bestseller Code’. But few have used a scientific approach. This is curious, for if we are to truly understand storytelling in its grandest sense, we must first come to understand the ultimate storyteller – the human brain. In this scalpel-sharp, thought-provoking book, Will Storr demonstrates how master storytellers manipulate and compel us, leading us on a journey from the Hebrew scriptures to Mr Men, from Booker Prize-winning literature to box set TV. Applying dazzling psychological research and cutting-edge neuroscience to the foundations of our myths and archetypes, he shows how we can use these tools to tell better stories – and make sense of our chaotic modern world.

Race is not a biological reality. Racism thrives on our not knowing this. Racist pseudoscience has become so commonplace that it can be hard to spot. But its toxic effects on society are plain to see—feeding white nationalism, fueling hatred, endangering lives, and corroding our discourse on everything from sports to intelligence. Even well-intentioned people repeat stereotypes based on “science,” because cutting-edge genetics are hard to grasp—and all too easy to distort. Paradoxically, these misconceptions are multiplying even as scientists make unprecedented discoveries in human genetics—findings that, when accurately understood, are powerful evidence against racism. We’ve never had clearer answers about who we are and where we come from, but this knowledge is sorely needed in our casual conversations about race. How to Argue With a Racist emphatically dismantles outdated notions of race by illuminating what modern genetics actually can and can’t tell us about human difference. We now know that the racial categories still dividing us do not align with observable genetic differences. In fact, our differences are so minute that, most of all, they serve as evidence of our shared humanity.

New York Times film critic Alissa Wilkinson examines Joan Didion’s cultural influence through the lens of American mythmaking in Hollywood. With bylines spanning six decades, Joan Didion’s legacy towers over the landscape of American letters. Although she launched her career in New York City, she soon struck out for Los Angeles, where the nation’s dreams were manufactured—and every aspect of her work reflected what she saw there, whether she was writing on politics, society, or herself. In this riveting cultural biography, Wilkinson takes a fresh perspective on Didion’s career as a novelist, critic, and screenwriter deeply embroiled in the grit and glamour of Hollywood. In eloquent prose, she charts how Didion became intimately acquainted with power players of the Los Angeles elite, arriving in the twilight of the old studio system in time to see lines between the industry and public life blur. Peering through a scrim of celluloid, Wilkinson incisively dissects the motifs and machinations that informed Didion’s writing—and how her writing, ultimately, demonstrated Hollywood’s addictive grasp on American identity.

New York Times film critic Alissa Wilkinson examines Joan Didion’s cultural influence through the lens of American mythmaking in Hollywood. With bylines spanning six decades, Joan Didion’s legacy towers over the landscape of American letters. Although she launched her career in New York City, she soon struck out for Los Angeles, where the nation’s dreams were manufactured—and every aspect of her work reflected what she saw there, whether she was writing on politics, society, or herself. In this riveting cultural biography, Wilkinson takes a fresh perspective on Didion’s career as a novelist, critic, and screenwriter deeply embroiled in the grit and glamour of Hollywood. In eloquent prose, she charts how Didion became intimately acquainted with power players of the Los Angeles elite, arriving in the twilight of the old studio system in time to see lines between the industry and public life blur. Peering through a scrim of celluloid, Wilkinson incisively dissects the motifs and machinations that informed Didion’s writing—and how her writing, ultimately, demonstrated Hollywood’s addictive grasp on American identity.

A young family moves into a small home on Ash Tree Lane where they discover something is terribly wrong: their house is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. Of course, neither Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Will Navidson nor his companion Karen Green was prepared to face the consequences of that impossibility, until the day their two little children wandered off and their voices eerily began to return another story—of creature darkness, of an ever-growing abyss behind a closet door, and of that unholy growl which soon enough would tear through their walls and consume all their dreams.

"People are almost always better than their neighbours think they are" George Eliot’s most ambitious novel is a masterly evocation of diverse lives and changing fortunes in a provincial community. Peopling its landscape are Dorothea Brooke, a young idealist whose search for intellectual fulfillment leads her into a disastrous marriage to the pedantic scholar Casaubon; the charming but tactless Dr Lydgate, whose pioneering medical methods, combined with an imprudent marriage to the spendthrift beauty Rosamond, threaten to undermine his career; and the religious hypocrite Bulstrode, hiding scandalous crimes from his past. As their stories interweave, George Eliot creates a richly nuanced and moving drama, hailed by Virginia Woolf as "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people".