Sometimes all you need to get through the day is a good chuckle. Our list of Vintage’s top ten books to make you laugh is a great place to start.
Read an extract from Emmeline Pankhurst’s My Own Story, an inspiration for the film Suffragette.
With Laurie Lee’s classic coming of age story, Cider With Rosie coming to BBC1 this Autumn, we dip into the archives to share Harold Nicolson’s review of the book from November, 1959.
In The White Road, acclaimed writer and potter Edmund de Waal sets out on a quest – a journey that begins in the dusty city of Jingdezhen in China and travels on to Venice, Versailles, Dublin, Dresden, the Appalachian Mountains of South Carolina and the hills of Cornwall to tell the history of porcelain. Read an extract from the new book from the author of The Hare With the Amber Eyes.
An accomplished novelist and short story writer, and a professor of creative writing at the University of Warwick, A. L. Kennedy understands the perils of relying on real life to draw your fictional characters. In this extract from On Writing, Kennedy describes the responsibility of invading a reader’s space, and how not to fill your fiction with the ghosts of your past.
Michael Joseph editor Emad Ahktar takes a trip to the Penguin archive to rediscover some of the best sci-fi covers from the past 80 years.
After a spot of August reading inspiration? Look no further as Senior Editor for Vintage Classics, Frances Macmillan has shared her top ten gardens in literature.
Endearingly affable, the Bennet sister’s long suffering father enjoys the quieter things in life, such as tranquil strolls in the country and curling up with a book. Read an extract from Austen’s classic, Pride and Prejudice in which Mr Bennet stands up to his wife on the question of Lizzie’s impending nuptials.
It’s fairly rare that the written word moves us to actual tears, but we’ve shed a few reading the very moving letter that Kurt Vonnegut, author of Slaugherhouse-Five and Cat’s Cradle, wrote to the Vietnam Draft Board about his son’s registration as a conscientious objector in 1967. Demonstrating the meaning of fatherly love, it details the reasons Vonnegut is proud of his son for making the choice to refuse to fight.
Azar Nafisi, the author of the internationally acclaimed Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, marks Saul Bellow’s 100th birthday.
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