Vintage Books

Ambition. Desire. Secrets. Belonging. Don your best tweed and sharpen your daggers: school is in session. In this revelatory collection of over two dozen stories, award-winning anthologist Jared Shurin guides us through the hallowed halls of Dark Academia, from its Gothic roots to its boundary-pushing present. Ranging from the mysterious to the fantastic, the romantic and the horrific, these stories explore the hidden secrets of elite institutions, probe our relationship with power, and examine the darkest corners of human nature. Within these pages, you’ll meet obsessed professors and the students who will do anything to impress them. Artists and musicians who make deals with the devil. Academic rivalries that turn personal, and even deadly. Students who come to study, but learn that ivory towers often contain dark secrets. On the syllabus, you’ll find: Edgar Allan Poe Evelyn Waugh Dorothy Sayers Carmen Maria Machado M.L. Rio Lev Grossman And many more. And for your final assignment: an original story by Olivie Blake. Will you dare to explore this tome's hidden depths?

A divided Las Vegas family is forced to confront the past and reckon with a dangerous future in the searing new novel from Irvine Welsh. Molly and George Warburton are used to living life their own way. Now, in the ferocious heat of Sin City, the couple are facing up to their failures and final years. They announce that their grandson Luke – college dropout, aspiring writer, electronic dance music aficionado – will inherit their millions. It is sudden news that leaves their daughter Gina hell-bent on revenge. Yet Luke’s good fortune will not last. When a strange newcomer to the neighbourhood insinuates himself into the Warburtons’ world, it is the beginning of a chain of chilling events that could split the family permanently and put all their lives at risk. The question is, do they have what it takes to survive?

A modern bestiary with an ancient heart: meet twelve emblematic animals and restore your relationship with the natural world, from the editor of Cunning Folk. The bear deities, Artio and Artaius, who’ll rise from sleep; the salmon of wisdom who gifts understanding of the universe’s past, present and future; the Lion Man carved 40,000 years ago. Join Elizabeth Sulis Kim as she travels across the globe and through time, from our deep past into the future, bringing together the animals which have captivated us for millennia. Steeped in folklore, mythology, magic and religion, The Book of Beasts tells the story of our shapeshifting relationships with animals, from reverence to persecution, friendship to fear, awe to indifference. It asks us what we actually know about the creatures we share this world with – and offers us a different way of living together.

A stunning graphic novel set in 1980s smalltown America about a seventeen-year-old girl and the dying stranger who moves into her family’s home It’s spring 1985 when Emil Wilson’s father, Donald, quietly invites his colleague Jim to move in with his family. What Don doesn’t tell his wife Annemarie or his teenage daughter Lou is that Jim has AIDS. For small-town Oregon in the eighties, a place where Lou’s treasured New York Times arrives three days late, AIDS is still a news story that happens in faraway places to faraway people. Jim is worldly, witty and quickly deteriorating. His presence in the house turns the family upside down. As Annemarie’s fear and resentment grow, adding further strain to the family’s shaky foundations, Lou forms an unlikely friendship with Jim (and his two showbiz Pomeranians, Henny and Penny) – a friendship that pushes Lou to grow up, get out and imagine a life beyond the limits of her town. Tender, funny and gorgeously illustrated in full colour, The Nightingales is an unforgettable portrait of an imperfect family, and a coming of age shaped by love and loss.

London. 1985. A city rife with possibility and desire. One young man who wants it all. Kristian Hadeland, newly arrived in the city, seethes with ambition and contempt. His family in Norway never understood him; his fellow photography students bore him. But he knows he and his art are destined for more. Then he meets Hans, an eccentric artist. Hans makes the future Kristian yearns for feel tangible. But success comes at a price. And when Kristian does the unthinkable, will he be prepared to pay it?

Tokyo, 1912. The closed world of the ancient aristocracy is being breached for the first time by outsiders - rich provincial families, a new and powerful elite. Kiyoaki has been raised among the elegant Ayakura family – members of the waning aristocracy – but he is not one of them. Coming of age, he is caught up in the tensions between old and new, and his feelings for the exquisite, spirited Satoko. His devoted friend Honda watches from the sidelines. It is only when Satoko is engaged to a royal prince that Kiyoaki realises the magnitude of his passion.

A young man journeys from Paris to Rwanda to discover the truth about his mother's past and the country of her birth, from bestselling and prize-winning Rwandan-French novelist and hip-hop artist Gaël Faye 'A luminous poetic quality … unforgettable' Leila Slimani 'Utterly, captivatingly brilliant' Philippe Sands Milan - the twelve-year-old son of a French father and a Rwandan mother - blames flunking his exams on the emotional trauma of the genocide in his mother's homeland. It's a convenient excuse: growing up outside Paris in the 1990s, the violence is an abstraction that only reaches him through distant television broadcasts. That is, until Milan's mother introduces him to Claude, a young cousin with a bandaged head who has come to France seeking medical treatment. Thrilled to have a new playmate, Milan treats Claude as a brother until one day, he is sent back to Rwanda as quickly as he came. Four years later, Milan travels for the first time to Rwanda, encountering a beguiling country and family members he never knew existed, and reuniting with Claude. But the trip raises more questions than it answers - about Milan's family history, the war and its aftershocks. Over the course of many years, Milan returns to Rwanda again and again, compelled to confront the past and imagine a new kind of future. Jacaranda is a deeply felt portrait of a man seeking to understand his family and his nation. 'A writer of great promise and grace' Chigozie Obioma 'Gaël Faye's talent is breathtaking' Imbolo Mbue

What if a lie is told to reveal some underlying truth? Are feelings that seem inappropriate, such as hysteria following the death of a celebrity, any less true than the grief we feel over the death of a loved one? Even if the plot of an opera seems preposterous, can't it still express emotions that ring true with the audience? At the heart of this fascinating and iconoclastic book lies Werner Herzog's concept of 'ecstatic truth' - a truth that is often hidden behind the facts and our conceptions of reality but can be gleaned through the poetic imagination, in art, literature and cinema, when we open ourselves up to an aesthetic experience. Written in Herzog's inimitable style, these stories, anecdotes and reflections take us from present-day deep fakes and the opportunities and perils of AI to ancient Egypt and Rome, where rulers resorted to lies and propaganda in the same way as governments do today; from Scott and Amundsen's race to the South Pole to alien abduction claims and the making of Herzog's own films. With its singular vision and unique voice, The Future of Truth is a compelling meditation on the relationship between fact and fiction - evidence and imagination - by one of today's most fascinating and idiosyncratic thinkers.

Dazzling new short stories from Salman Rushdie that transport us around the world from Bombay neighbourhoods to elite English universities If old age was thought of as an evening, ending in midnight oblivion, they were well into the eleventh hour. ‘Salman Rushdie is a genius’ A.M. Homes Two quarrelsome old men in Chennai, India, experience private tragedy during national calamity. Revisiting the Bombay neighbourhood of Midnight's Children, a magical musician is unhappily married to a multibillionaire. In an English university college, an undead academic asks a lonely student to avenge his former tormentor. These five dazzling works of fiction move between the three countries that Salman Rushdie has called home – India, England and America – and explore what it means to approach the eleventh hour of life. Do we accommodate ourselves to death, or rail against it? How can we bid farewell to the places that we have made home? The Eleventh Hour ponders life and death, legacy and identity with the penetrating insight and boundless imagination that have made Salman Rushdie one of the most celebrated writers of our time.

Enter the haunted world of Japan in this spine-tingling collection of ghostly tales, beautifully bound in a luxurious special edition. From goblin-infested caves and haunted tombs to vengeful spirits and strange, sinister happenings, ancient Japan was a country and culture that lived between realms: the world of the everyday and the world of the supernatural. It was a place where men could be brought down by karmic forces or lured into deadly danger by ghostly apparitions, and where the land held sorrowful secrets or stories that long awaited an opportunity to reveal themselves and seek reparation. Committed to paper at the turn of the twentieth century by a unique set of folklorists, the ghost stories presented in this anthology will transport readers to a time of magic and mystery. VINTAGE JAPANESE CLASSICS - nine masterpieces of Japanese fiction in gorgeous new gift editions.

‘A book that everyone should read’ The Times A harrowing, heart-rending first-hand account of the bombing of Nagasaki – and the acts of human kindness left in its wake. On 9th August 1945, the Japanese city of Nagasaki is hit by an atomic bomb. Forty thousand people are killed instantly. Doctor Takashi Nagai is not one of them. Pulling himself, broken and bloodied, from the wreckage that was once the city’s university hospital, Takashi bundles together a tattered group of survivors. Doctors, nurses, students, each with their own losses, their own fears for the future: they work tirelessly at the impossible task of aiding the countless wounded and easing the deaths of those they cannot save. They remain determined to heal their fallen city, to find solace and hope among the rubble, even as a strange and growing sickness begins to claim them. Eyewitness to one of the most fatal events in human history, this is Takashi’s record, written from his sickbed – a chilling historical document, and undeniable evidence of the capacity for human kindness. Published now in the UK to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. WITH AN INTRODUCTION FROM RICHARD LLOYD PARRY

On an unnamed island, objects are disappearing: first hats, then ribbons, birds, roses. . . Most of the inhabitants are oblivious to these changes, while those who remember live in fear of the Memory Police. To the people on the island, a disappeared thing no longer has any meaning. It can be burned in the garden, thrown in the river, or handed over to the Memory Police. Soon enough, the island forgets it ever existed. When a young novelist discovers that her editor is in danger of being taken away by the Memory Police, she desperately wants to save him. For some reason, he doesn't forget, and it's becoming increasingly difficult for him to hide his memories. Who knows what will vanish next?

A beautiful special edition of the haunting, enigmatic love story which is Murakami's bestselling title throughout the world. Autumn 1969, and soon I would be 20. When he hears her favourite Beatles song, Toru Watanabe recalls his first love Naoko, the girlfriend of his best friend Kizuki. Immediately he is transported back almost twenty years to his student days in Tokyo, adrift in a world of uneasy friendships, casual sex, passion, loss and desire – to a time when an impetuous young woman called Midori marches into his life and he has to choose between the future and the past. VINTAGE JAPANESE CLASSICS - nine masterpieces of Japanese fiction in gorgeous new gift editions. TRANSLATED BY JAY RUBIN

A smart, incisive take-down of so-called 'artificial intelligence', exposing the real harm these technologies do to our jobs, health, society and environment, who stands to gain from them, and how to fight back. Have tech companies created artificial minds? Are they going to replace all our jobs? Will they take over the world? The answers to these questions, as the expert authors of The AI Con make clear, are 'no', 'they wish' and 'LOL, definitely not'. In fact, these fears are all symptoms of the hype being used to justify data theft, motivate surveillance capitalism and devalue human creativity in order to replace meaningful work with jobs that treat people like machines. Packed with real-world examples of the injustices and harms already being done in the name of 'AI', The AI Con arms you to spot the hype in all its guises, expose the exploitation it aims to hide and push back against it at work and in your daily life.

Outrageous, and wickedly funny, Lady Susan introduces Jane Austen at her most scandalous Recently widowed and dangerously charming, Lady Susan Vernon arrives among her relatives determined to secure her own advantage. Through a flurry of letters, alliances shift, affections are tested, and reputations quietly unravel. Lady Susan is Jane Austen's sharp, mischievous portrait of a woman who refuses to behave. Bold, manipulative and irresistibly alive, it reveals Austen at her most daring - and her most amused. BRIEF ENCOUNTERS: classic novellas and captivating stories, to be read in a single sitting or savoured over days

Two of Dostoevsky's most powerful novellas of obsession, cruelty, and the fragility of the heart A pawnbroker paces beside his young wife's body, attempting to piece together the circumstances that led to her suicide. A young man is overwhelmed by his own contentment and sows his ruin in a fierce attempt to protect it. BRIEF ENCOUNTERS: classic novellas and captivating stories, to be read in a single sitting or savoured over days