Books for The Budding Writer

A Strange Life – Selected Essays of Louisa May Alcott
A Strange Life – Selected Essays of Louisa May Alcott

Louisa May Alcott

Louisa May Alcott is best known as the author of Little Women. But she was also a noted essayist who wrote on a wide range of subjects, including her father’s failed utopian commune, life as a Civil War nurse and her experience as a young woman sent to work in service to alleviate her family’s poverty. Blending gentle satire with reportage and emotive biography, these essays show Alcott to be one of the sharpest wits in American literature.

The Wrong Turning: Encounters with Ghosts
The Wrong Turning: Encounters with Ghosts

A curated selection of chilling ghost stories from world literature, introduced and edited by broadcaster Stephen Johnson. What these tales of the supernatural have in common is the theme of taking a ‘wrong turning’ in which the protagonists are made to face their darkest fears. In the spirit of a fireside storyteller, each tale has an afterword by Stephen Johnson, to suggest what the story might really be telling us.

Happy Half-Hours: Selected Writings of A. A. Milne
Happy Half-Hours: Selected Writings of A. A. Milne

A. A. Milne

A delightful selection of writing from non-fiction books and articles by the ever-popular A.A. Milne, many of which haven’t been in print for decades. Introduced by the prize-winning children’s author Frank Cottrell Boyce, this volume is an ideal gift book, bringing A.A. Milne’s brilliant non-fiction back to the spotlight.

Happy Half-Hours – Signed Copy
Happy Half-Hours – Signed Copy

A. A. Milne Frank Cottrell-Boyce

Signed and introduced by Frank Cottrell-Boyce. A delightful selection of writing from non-fiction books and articles by the ever-popular A.A. Milne, many of which haven’t been in print for decades. Introduced by the prize-winning children’s author Frank Cottrell Boyce, this volume is an ideal gift book, bringing A.A. Milne’s brilliant non-fiction back to the spotlight.

Found and Lost: Mittens, Miep, and Shovelfuls of Dirt
Found and Lost: Mittens, Miep, and Shovelfuls of Dirt

Alison Leslie Gold

Starting with supervision of her primary school’s ‘Lost and Found’ depot, Gold charts her need to save objects, stories, and people – including herself – that she sensed to be on a road to perdition. In this compelling memoir, Gold relates her descent into addiction, and the fateful meeting that ultimately led to her salvation.

Alchemy: Writers on Truth, Lies and Fiction
Alchemy: Writers on Truth, Lies and Fiction

Joanna Kavenna Gabriel Josipovici

We live in a world of docu-drama, in which the ‘real life’ story is held in higher regard than fiction. Where does that leave the imagination? Five writers grapple with reality and fiction, and the alchemical process of turning life into art.

Grumbling at Large: Selected Essays of J. B. Priestley
Grumbling at Large: Selected Essays of J. B. Priestley

J. B. Priestley

A delightful selection of Priestley’s essays, drawing on five decades of his writing. Priestley defined the essay as a ‘prose masterpiece in miniature’ and understood that to perfect the form, the essayist had to stand ‘naked and shivering’ in the very first sentence.

My Katherine Mansfield Project
My Katherine Mansfield Project

Kirsty Gunn

In this lyrical essay, Gunn explores the ideas of home and belonging – and of her own deep connection to a place where every flower and gatepost seems embroidered with the memory of some story or another.

Portrait Inside My Head
Portrait Inside My Head

Phillip Lopate

In this revealing collection of personal essays, renowned essayist, Phillip Lopate, shares his unique view on the big subjects of parenthood, marriage, sex, friendship, and ‘the nail parings of daily life’. At turns funny, tender, and searingly honest, he searches with a cool eye for that elusive truth about himself and the world.

Essays on the Self
Essays on the Self

Virginia Woolf

The essays in this collection are, of course, not merely concerned with the self. Woolf does also discuss the rights of women, the revolutions of modernity, the past, present and future of the novel. She is eloquent on social inequality and the agony of war.

Things I Don’t Want To Know
Things I Don’t Want To Know

Deborah Levy

Things I Don’t Want to Know is a unique response to George Orwell from one of our most vital contemporary writers. Taking Orwell’s famous list of motives for writing as the jumping-off point for a sequence of thrilling reflections on the writing life, this is a perfect companion not just to Orwell’s essay, but also to Levy’s own, essential oeuvre.

I Remember
I Remember

Joe Brainard

Joe Brainard’s I Remember is a cult classic, envied and admired by writers from Frank O’Hara to John Ashbery and Edmund White. Introduced by Paul Auster.

No products have been found