To celebrate this month’s release of Essential Bukowski: Poetry by Charles Bukowski, we’ve rounded up the gang to share their favourite lyrics from this compact yet comprehensive collection. Some of us are first time Bukowski readers, some are longtime devotees. Wherever you are in your Bukowski journey, these four poems will ease you in (or shock you to the core) to the brilliance of a Los Angelino legend.
After one of the most divisive and contentious campaigns in the country’s history, today America goes to the polls to elect the next leader of the free world. The rest of us watch and wait with bated breath. After a year of political turmoil around the world, nobody can predict the result of today’s vote. So on the day of the most nail-biting political event of the year, distract yourself with our 4 by 4th list of essential reading (in no particular order) for exploring the real issues facing the most powerful nation on earth, and understanding the enigma that is the United States
‘…all against the grave and tragic rhythm of the earth in its most timeless phase: the sea.’ William Faulkner
Authors tend to get serious when they portray the world’s oceans. They address the sea in reverent tones. It’s a mood inspired, at least in part, by the sea’s inhuman ancientness. The ocean reveals the brevity of humanity’s time on earth; that we’re just one of many short-lived species that primordially flopped out from its depths onto land. Yet perversely, while looking out to sea thinking of death, people have also marked it as a fine place to holiday. In light of this month’s vacation-orientated ‘Out of the Office’ theme, here are 4 great works on the sea:
ALEXANDER MASTERS; A LIFE DISCARDED
How do you write a biography of someone you’ve never met?
Condensed from a preoccupation that lasted half a decade, Alexander Masters’s latest book A Life Discarded locates fantasy in ‘a daily record of an [ordinary person’s] thoughts about their existence, written […] so to speak, from the inside’. Again, Cambridge – by now surely to be understood as the author’s topographical muse – is the tableau; the city’s seemingly uncanny ability to both produce and submerse its more ‘sensitive’ inhabitants providing reader and author — armed with paper, pen and a private investigator named Vince — a series of wildly compelling, darkly comic revelations. Read more…
With King Power and The Sport of Kings coming off the presses this month, we’re in a right royal mood at 4th Estate. Here are some of our favourite regal reads…
Happy St. Patrick’s Day to all who celebrate it. Here at 4th Estate, we aren’t partaking in any festivities just yet (it’s only 11am) but we’re watching the clock. Here for you are three and a half of our favourite quotes from our Irish authors. Ian Sansom only counts as half because he lives in Ireland, you see. Read more…
A somewhat subversive take on Mother’s Day, brought to you by us at 4th Estate.
Four brilliant books that open our eyes to the wonders of the natural world.
