In her seventh collection, Kocot strings one word per line into dark and dazzling recitals of her capacity for emotion.

Pulled back onto the Arcadia Project after losing her partner Teo to the lethal magic of an Unseelie fey countess, Millie must prove the innocence of her former boss, Caryl, when she is accused of murdering an agent, which draws Millie into an insidious, arcane terrorist plot that would leave two worlds in ruins.

Why is pain so poorly understood? Why do we still distinguish between mental pain and physical pain, when pain is always an emotional experience? How can it be that science is about to clone a human being but still can't cure the pain of a bad back? If pain is the reason why most people visit the doctor, why are most doctors so bad at addressing the problem of suffering? Marni Jackson's PAIN: THE FIFTH VITAL SIGN is a witty, personal and groundbreaking inquiry into the nature, treatment and definition of human pain, one of the most misunderstood and elusive subjects to challenge humankind. In the questing and narrative manner of Oliver Sacks, Jackson takes us back into the history of pain and forward into the possibilities of pain genetics, Jackson brings us stories both of people in pain and the pain pioneers: eccentrics and artists, wrestlers and writers, psychologists and philosophers, nurses and doctors. Above all, Pain makes an elusive subject vivid and readable. We all know what pain is. Now Marni Jackson has given it a voice.

A one-time literary novelist of some respectability, now brought low by the double insult of obscurity and crippling debt, Robert G. Mehlman is a man in need of money and recognition, fast. But Mehlman's publisher is only interested in his long overdue novel, since the people don't want short stories, and his portfolio was liquidated months ago. So, it is to culinary writing that he turns. A practiced decadent, a habitual spendthrift, and a serial womanizer, he has, ostensibly, all the right qualities. But the path to fame is never a smooth one. Phantom Pain is the bitterly funny but unpublished manuscript of Mehlman's autobiography. In it, he tells the parallel stories of his decaying marriage and his puzzling affair with a woman he meets by chance and who accompanies him on the road. York City to Atlantic City where they gamble away most of Mehlman's remaining funds and then North, to Albany, where he finds unlikely salvation and the inspiration for his book, Polish-Jewish Cuisine in 69 Recipes. Framed by Mehlman's son's account of his famous father, this novel-within-a-novel is a darkly hilarious tale of a writer's fall and his subsequent rise. Phantom Pain has all the characteristic mixture of slapstick and stark despair that has made Arnon Grunberg one of the most interesting, certainly the funniest, and arguably the best Dutch writer working today.

An imaginative and sensitive story of the life of the Phantom of the Opera; winner of the Boots Romantic Novel Award.

An electric new collection, built from the rubble and strangeness of daily life.

Addresses the limits in treating pain psychoanalytically, and offers a phenomenological description of psychic pain, particularly the pain of a lost loved one.

In this issue, acclaimed nature writer Barry Lopez meditates on language and seeing; Australian writer Rebecca Giggs witnesses the monumental death of a stranded whale; science writer Fred Pearce describes the Herculean effort to keep nuclear Sellafield safe; Kathleen Jamie travels to the Alaskan wilderness; and Adam Nicolson investigates murder in rural Romania, with photographs by Gus Palmer. Plus: unpublished extracts from the notebooks of Roger Deakin, introduced by Robert Macfarlane. Fiction by Ann Beattie, Ben Marcus, David Szalay and Deb Olin Unferth. Poetry by Noelle Kocot, Maureen N. McLane, Ange Mlinko and Andrew Motion. Photography by Helge Skodvin with an introduction by Audrey Niffenegger. Cover art Stanley Donwood, Hurt Hill, 2013

What came before the wastelands was almost entirely forgotten when the skies turned dark, the days cold and the nights colder. Ash fell like snow and falls still. Sunlight, clean air, clear water, healthy crops and civil society are all becoming things of the past. Some cling to what was and rake over the ashes looking for embers to warm themselves. Some want to burn what remains to the ground. When rumours surface of an intact entrance to the underground cities of the ancient dwarves, the dying sparks of hope erupt into a flame. Sustainable sunless settlements left untouched, ripe for research and perhaps even replication. But first the entrance must be reached. To face a long journey across the wastes. Surviving its treacherous environment and inhabitants. A dangerous undertaking, true, but perhaps the most important since the rising cold. After all, it appears that the best chance for the world’s recovery lies in its ruins.