Vintage books Gould's Book of Fish Флэнаган Ричард

First published in 1962, a year after Revolutionary Road, this sublime collection of stories seems even more powerful today. Out of the lives of Manhattan office workers, a cab driver seeking immortality, frustrated would-be novelists, suburban men and their yearning, neglected women, Richard Yates creates a haunting mosaic of the 1950s, the era when the American dream was finally coming true - and just beginning to ring a little hollow

'Barrow explains nothing with great clarity, a lovely lightness of touch and enormous erudition' Spectator • How do you begin to understand the concept of nothing? • Where does it begin and where does it end? • From the zeros of the mathematician to the void of the philosophers, from Shakespeare to the empty set, from the ether to the quantum vacuum, from being and nothingness to creatio ex nihilo, there is much ado about nothing at the heart of things • Recent exciting discoveries in astronomy are shown to shed new light on the nature of the vacuum and its dramatic effect upon the explanation of the Universe. This remarkable book ranges over every nook and cranny of nothingness to reveal how the human mind has had to make something of nothing in every field of human enquiry

Eleven years old and on the cusp of puberty, Aron Kleinfeld is precocious, imaginative - the leader of his gang of friends. But his bar mitzvah is looming, his friends are all hitting puberty and Aron, terrified and revolted by what he sees around him, enters a state of arrested development. He stops growing, retreats from the world, and is imprisoned in the body of a child for three long years. While Israel inches towards the Six-Day War, and his friends cross the boundary between childhood and adolescence, Aron remains in his child's body, spying on the changes that adulthood wreaks as, like his hero Houdini, he struggles to escape the trap of growing up

Encountering an eccentric cast of characters along the way, Sebald confronts the frailty of human existence as he voyages along the Suffolk coast on foot • What begins as the record of a journey on foot through coastal East Anglia becomes the great, constellated story of people and cultures past and present: of Chateaubriand, Thomas Browne, Swinburne and Conrad, of fishing fleets, skulls and silkworms. A rich meditation on the past via a melancholy trip along the Suffolk coast, The Rings of Saturn is an intricately patterned and haunting book on the transience of all things human • Vintage Voyages: A world of journeys, from the tallest mountains to the depths of the mind

An outrageously funny spoof about the ascent of a 40,000-and-a-half-foot peak, discover this laugh-out-loud cult favourite • Led by the reliably under-insightful Binder, a team of seven British men including Dr Prone (constantly ill); Jungle the route finder (constantly lost), Constant the diplomat (constantly arguing) and 3,000 Yogistani porters, set out to conquer the highest peak in the Himalayas • Vintage Voyages: A world of journeys, from the tallest mountains to the depths of the mind

In the winter of 1954, in a construction camp in the remote Tasmanian highlands, when Sonja Buloh was three years old and her father was drinking too much, her mother disappeared into a blizzard never to return • Thirty-five years later, Sonja returns to the place of her childhood to visit her drunkard father. The shadows of the past begin to intrude ever more forcefully into the present, changing forever his living death and her ordered life

‘A wonderful and important book, that from its first pages draws the reader along on a fascinating, gripping, often funny journey.’ Robert Macfarlane, bestselling author of Underland • An idiosyncratic history of our island story told through five iconic fish • On these rain-swept islands in the North Atlantic man and fish go back a long way. Fish are woven through the fabric of the country’s history: we depend on them – for food, for livelihood and for fun – and now their fate depends on us in a relationship which has become more complex, passionate and precarious in the sophisticated 21st Century • In Silver Shoals Charles Rangeley-Wilson travels north, south, east and west through the British Isles tracing the histories, living and past, of our most iconic fish – cod, carp, eels, salmon and herring – and of the fishermen who catch them and care for them

There aren't many scientists famous enough in their lifetime to be canonized by the US Congress as one of America's 'living legends'. Yet few would have grudged this accolade to Stephen Jay Gould, whose writings on history - both of the natural world and of the study of the natural world - had made him a household name by the time of his death in 2002 • A committed Darwinian and robust critic of creationist myths, he nevertheless made major revisions to orthodox Darwinian theory, from his concept of punctuated equilibrium to his insistence on the importance of chance in the history of life on earth. And in addition, his trenchant attacks on scientific racism and the pretensions of sociobiology still resonate, nearly three decades after they were first written

Winner of the National Jewish Book Award and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award • A youthful tale of geriatric amateur theatrics and one of the most powerful and affecting comedies of modern times • In the Emma Lazarus retirement home in uptown Manhattan, the Jewish inmates embark on a chaotic, bitchy production of Hamlet. But for our hero, Otto Korner more is at stake than simply directing his quirky, libidinous fellow residents in the play. Somebody knows Otto's secret, and as comedy and tragedy combine he is transported back to his pre-American past in Germany, Zurich, and finally, Auschwitz • Winner of the National Jewish Book Award and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, The Prince of West End Avenue was a critical sensation on its first publication in 1994

Долгое время характеризовавшийся как вероломный убийца за убийство Ричарда II, достижения Генриха IV как короля преуменьшались на протяжении всей истории. Однако в увлекательном исследовании его правления "Страхи Генриха IV. Жизнь английского короля, ставшего самозванцем" Иэн Мортимер переоценивает то, чего Генриху удалось достичь, несмотря на все невзгоды, как королю. Спровоцировав социальную революцию, а также политическую, он привел плохо управляемую нацию к новой династии Ланкастеров, и, хотя, возможно, это не самый славный король, который когда-либо был в Англии, он, безусловно, оказался одним из самых храбрых • Книга на английском языке • From the saviour of the realm to the subject of multiple attempted assassinations in the space of six years

A captivating new book from Wade Davis - winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize for Into the Silence - that brings vividly to life the story of the great Rio Magdalena, illuminating Colombia's complex past, present, and future • For Wade Davis, Colombia was the first country that captured his heart and gave him license to be free. Here, he tells of his travels on the mighty Magdalena, the river that made possible the nation. Along the way, he finds a people who have overcome years of conflict precisely because of their character, informed by an enduring spirit of place, and a deep love of their remarkable land • Braiding together memoir, history and journalism, Magdalena is at once an absorbing adventure through a spectacular landscape and a kaleidoscopic picture of Colombia as it stands on the verge of a new period of peace

Thomas More is one of the great figures in English history. Pre-eminent as a courtier and as a humanist, a friend to Henry VIII and the author of Utopia, More's life and career epitomise the great transformation of England in the space of 35 years • In this illuminating book, Peter Ackroyd investigates the paradox of this 'man for all seasons': the man of the world who travelled across Europe to negotiate on behalf of his king, and the unworldly man who's careful silence on the matter of Henry's marriage to Anne Boleyn would lead to his disgrace and execution • A magnificent achievement, The Life of Thomas More gives us a rich portrait of the man and the social and cultural world in which he lived