FaberBooks

Adventurous and illuminating, Matthew Francis’s new poetry collection is full of flight, air and possibility. Read by the author. Matthew Francis’s latest collection celebrates the richness of nature and of our responses to it. The pleasures of summer are emblazoned in the colourful wings and evocative names of butterflies, while a nocturnal encounter with an earwig becomes a joyous incantation to...

Flèche (the French word for ‘arrow’) is an offensive technique commonly used in fencing, a sport of Mary Jean Chan’s young adult years, when they competed locally and internationally for their home city, Hong Kong. This cross-linguistic pun presents the queer, non-white body as both vulnerable (‘flesh’) and weaponised (‘flèche’), and evokes the difficulties of reconciling one’s need for safety alo...

Taken from Julia Copus’s collection, Girlhood, – a book of transgressed boundaries and seductive veneers. Restlessly inquisitive, it exposes the shifting power balance between things on the verge of becoming and the forces that threaten to destroy them. Reading these poems, we have the sense of encountering a series of filmic installations arranged by episode in a gallery. Lost, censored or dispar...

'An immersive, polyphonic adventure.' Deborah Levy Celebrating 100 years since first publication of 'modernism's lost masterpiece' (Julia Briggs). In just twenty-two pages, Hope Mirrlees combines sensuous psychogeography with modernist avant garde poetics to create a dazzling single-day journey through interwar Paris in the eyes of a jaded flâneuse. Sights, smells, music, gem-encrusted tortoises,...

Manhattan is a Lenape Word Natalie Diaz It is December and we must be brave. The ambulance’s rose of light blooming against the window. Its single siren-cry: Help me. A silk-red shadow unbolting like water through the orchard of her thigh. Her, come—in the green night, a lion. I sleep her bees with my mouth of smoke, dip honey with my hands stung sweet on the darksome hive. Out of the eater I eat....

Ilya Kaminsky reads We Lived Happily During the War, from Deaf Republic. We Lived Happily During the War BY ILYA KAMINSKY And when they bombed other people’s houses, we protested but not enough, we opposed them but not enough. I was in my bed, around my bed America was falling: invisible house by invisible house by invisible house. I took a chair outside and watched the sun. In the sixth month of...

A piercing scream, shattering the evening calm, brings Superintendent Adam Dalgliesh hurrying from his literary party to the nearby Steen Psychiatric Clinic, where he discovers the body of a woman sprawled on the basement floor, a chisel thrust through her heart. As Dalgliesh probes beneath the apparently unruffled calm of the clinic, he discovers that many an intrigue lies hidden behind the Georg...

Emily Berry reads Emily Dickinson's poem 419, We Grow Accustomed to the Dark.

A journey into the heartland of psychiatry. This book debunks myths, challenges assumptions and offers fresh insight into what it means to be mentally ill. And what it means to be human. This is an extract from Costa Prize-winner Nathan Filer's This Book Will Change Your Mind About Mental Health, read by the author. 'I cannot recommend it highly enough.' Caitlin Moran 'Brims with compassion and wi...

A journey into the heartland of psychiatry. This book debunks myths, challenges assumptions and offers fresh insight into what it means to be mentally ill. And what it means to be human. This is an extract from Costa Prize-winner Nathan Filer's This Book Will Change Your Mind About Mental Health, read by the author. 'I cannot recommend it highly enough.' Caitlin Moran 'Brims with compassion and wi...

‘Writing poems is a conundrum for me, not my professional identity, but a passion as deep as memory.' We're pleased to announce Barbara Kingsolver's revelatory poetry collection, How to Fly (In Ten Thousand Easy Lessons). How to Fly (In Ten Thousand Easy Lessons) offers emotionally rich reflections on the practical, the spiritual and the wild. The book’s interwoven sections form a carefully patter...

In her first collection of new poetry since 2011’s acclaimed Family Values, Wendy Cope celebrates ‘the half-forgotten stories of our lives’ with compassion, wisdom and wit. Cope continues to be the most generous of authors, sharing her experience of childhood and marriage and writing poignantly about the passing of time. In several of the poems she reimagines Shakespeare in unorthodox fashion; in...

Ishion Hutchinson reads an extract of Marina by T.S Eliot. Hear the whole poem here: #ShareAPoem

‘The most perfect microscopic structures in the known universe’ – that is the exquisite description of sub-nuclear scattering amplitudes given by theorist Lance Dixon, based at the Stanford Linear Accelerator in California. Having made his name as a string theorist in the 1980s, Dixon became one of the leading pioneers in the field of scattering-amplitudes, developing a host of ingenious ideas and...

The Dutchman Robbert Dijkgraaf is a rarity – not only is he a top-class mathematical physicist, he is also one of the world’s finest science communicators. In this bracing interview with Graham, Dijkgraaf lucidly describes the state of modern fundamental physics and the continually surprising – and extraordinarily productive – symbiosis between this science and modern mathematics. As Graham says:...

Science writer Graham Farmelo in conversation with Greg Moore. Physics and mathematics seem to be in ‘pre-established harmony’, a phrase that has long been popular with physicists and mathematicians working at the subjects’ interface. Greg Moore, based at Rutgers University, has discovered many surprising new relationships between quantum field theories and the string framework and concepts in con...

Science writer Graham Farmelo in conversation with Freeman Dyson. Freeman Dyson talks about his being both a theoretical physicist and a mathematician, the troubled relationship between mathematics and physics in his youth, the impressive physicist he knew (no, it’s not Feynman) and string theory. This interview was recorded last summer at the IAS, Princeton, in Freeman’s office – and he’s as live...

What do philosophers of physics do, and what light might they shed on the work of today’s physicists and astronomers? Michela Massimi, a distinguished philosopher of science at the University of Edinburgh, discusses these and other matters with Graham in this lively interview, recorded last March in Michela’s office. She has a bracingly optimistic vision for her subject in the coming decades, as G...

Schizophrenia: whether it’s the associations it conjures or the people it brings to mind, it is a word we all have a view on. How we perceive it – and how we treat people living with it – is at the core of how we understand mental health. But what do we really know? How much time do we spend listening? Do we truly comprehend this complex and often contradictory diagnosis? In The Heartland Nathan F...

Science writer Graham Farmelo in conversation with Juan Maldacena. Juan Maldacena has been described as the first great theoretician of the twenty-first century. In a series of brilliantly imaginative insights, he has enriched our understanding of gravity, space-time and black holes. During this relaxed and informative interview with Graham, recorded last summer in Princeton, Maldacena describes h...

Science writer Graham Farmelo in conversation with Sir Roger Penrose. Sir Roger Penrose, a hybrid mathematician-cosmologist, is one of the most accomplished scientific thinkers of the past fifty years. In this compelling interview with Graham, Penrose describes some of the key events of his remarkable career. Based on Graham Farmelo's book The Universe Speaks in Numbers. https://www.faber.co.uk/97...

Science writer Graham Farmelo in conversation with Nima Arkani-Hamed(part 2). This is the second part of Graham’s interview with Nima Arkani-Hamed, recorded at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Here, Nima is in brilliant form as he recalls how he fell in love with scattering amplitudes – aptly described by the theoretician Lance Dixon as ‘the most perfect microscopic structures in the...

Science writer Graham Farmelo in conversation with Michael Green. Michael Green is one of the pioneers of the string framework. In collaboration with the Caltech theorist John Schwarz, he made a crucial breakthrough that led in 1984 to the what became known as the First String Revolution. Based on Graham Farmelo's book The Universe Speaks in Numbers. https://www.faber.co.uk/9780571321803-the-unive...

Science writer Graham Farmelo in conversation with Edward Witten. Edward Witten is widely regarded as the pre-eminent theoretical physicist of the past four decades. Based at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, he has made dozens of path-breaking contributions to both physics and mathematics. Based on Graham Farmelo's book The Universe Speaks in Numbers. https://www.faber.co.uk/97805713...

Science writer Graham Farmelo in conversation with Val Gibson. Val Gibson is a leading experimental particle physicist and is head of the high energy physics research group at the Cavendish Laboratory at the University Cambridge. She is a prominent member of one of the teams of experimenters at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, where the Higgs boson was discovered in 2012. Based on Graham Farmelo's bo...