It’s Halloween tomorrow, and tonight the 4th Estate team will be busy designing costumes, whittling pumpkins and stockpiling sweets. And most importantly, reading. Here are the books we recommend you scare yourself silly with this evening – from chilling children’s books to fearsome fiction to terrifying true crime (but including no ghost writers, suprisingly). As the Goosebumps books used to say on the cover: reader beware… you’re in for a scare…
The remarkable true story behind Elizabeth Smart’s wonderful work of poetic prose By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept finds a different – raw, powerful, heart-breaking – meaning in the concept ‘for the love of language’… Read more…
When Barbara the Slut came into the office on submission, it was all we could do at 4th Estate not to print out multiple copies and throw them at passers by. The book, a collection of short stories so stark, so honest, so true and so unashamed, was published just two months ago and in its time, has garnered quite the online presence. We couldn’t help but reach out to Electric Literature to pilfer some of their amazing interview with Barbara‘s author Lauren Holmes… Read more…
As you may have noticed, 4thEstate.co.uk is looking a bit different this week. That’s because on Monday, we launched a new redesign of the site, hoping to make it more visual, interactive, and easy to navigate.
Reading a book in translation will never be the same as reading it in its original language, but in lieu of universal fluency they are the best way of sharing ideas and stories across different cultures. Here are 4 translated works to let in the wider world.
Introducing RE4DINGS: a new regular video series from 4th Estate, in which our authors read 1 to 4 pages of their choice from their latest book. You heard it here first.
‘I hope that it adds up to a new way of thinking about who we have been, and who we are now’
Andrew Marr’s new book, We British: The Poetry of a People is out now, published by 4th Estate Books. The British have never had a musical tradition to rival that of Russia or Germany; or the gloriously exuberant architecture of Paris or Rome; or the coherent worldview of classical China. What they have had is the richest and most remarkable tradition of poetry of any major culture. This book is an attempt to use British poetry as the framework for a kind of alternative epic, the story of what it was like to be British, told through poetry, and sometimes through the stories of the poets.
In an exciting publishing first, the German edition of A Modern Way to Eat by Anna Jones, published by Mosaik Verlag on 12th October, will be the only book in the world ever to be printed on apple paper: an eco-friendly, sustainable paper made from apple scraps. The paper was produced in the South Tyrol, one of Europe’s largest apple growing areas, using forty tonnes of scraps left over from apple juice production. A paper manufacturer succeeded in producing a completely biodegradable paper from this organic by-product.
