Happy 40th anniversary Picador.
To celebrate, we have a great prize for one lucky Booktopia customer.
Win the full 40th anniversary Picador collection worth $315.00
The winner will be chosen from the customers who buy books from this collection before April 1st 2012.
Click here to view the entire Picador 40th Anniversary Collection
We also have 35 of Picador’s iconic tote bags to give away. We will draw the lucky winners from a hat. Soon you could be strutting down the street in your neighbourhood like one of those cool dudes strutting down the street with a Picador tote bag on their shoulder. Know what I mean? Cool.
The Picador’s 40th anniversary editions are a re-issue of some of its classic fiction titles. Among them you will find prize-winning books, books that have become global sales hits, books that caused huge controversy when published or were published to huge critical acclaim. Together they are a valuable set of must-reads.
Every cover is different and each works individually, but they certainly all work together as a set. Better still, each book comes with a section of extra material which puts it in its historical context and provides a spring board for readers to discover more. These pages include contemporary review coverage, author interviews and essays, original jacket art work, reading guides, information about adapting the books for film as well as information about other books by the authors and recommended reading lists.
AMERICAN PSYCHO
By Bret Easton Ellis
Blurb: An international bestseller and true modern classic
Patrick Bateman is twenty-six and works on Wall Street; he is handsome, sophisticated, charming and intelligent. He is also a psychopath. Taking us to a head-on collision with America’s greatest dream – and its worst nightmare – American Psycho is a bleak, bitter, black comedy about a world we all recognize but do not wish to confront.
Celebrating 40 years of outstanding international writing, this is one of the essential Picador novels reissued in a beautiful new series style.
Click here to buy American Psycho
DIRT MUSIC
By Tim Winton
Blurb: Georgie Jutland is a mess. At forty, with her career in ruins, she finds herself stranded in White Point with a fisherman she doesn’t love and two kids whose dead mother she can never replace. Her days have fallen into domestic tedium and social isolation. Her nights are a blur of vodka and pointless loitering in cyberspace. Leached of all confidence, Georgie has lost her way; she barely recognises herself.
One morning, in the boozy pre-dawn gloom, she looks up from the computer screen to see a shadow lurking on the beach below, and a dangerous new element enters her life. Luther Fox, the local poacher. Jinx. Outcast…
In prose as haunting and beautiful as its western setting, Dirt Music confirms Tim Winton’s status as one of the finest novelists of his generation.
This special edition celebrates 40 years of Picador with one of Australia’s finest literary reads. With 16 pages of extra content, including Reading Group notes, an essay and awards list, this special edition will make a valuable contribution to your bookshelf.
THAT DEADMAN DANCE
By Kim Scott
Blurb: Bobby Wabalanginy never learned fear, not until he was pretty well a grown man. Sure, he grew up doing the Dead Man Dance, but with him it was a dance of life, a lively dance for people to do together…
Told through the eyes of black and white, young and old, this is a story about a fledgling Western Australian community in the early 1800s known as the ‘friendly frontier’.
Poetic, warm-hearted and bold, it is a story which shows that first contact did not have to lead to war.
It is a story for our times.
This special edition celebrates 40 years of Picador with one of Australia’s finest literary reads. With 16 pages of extra content, including Reading Group notes, an interview and awards list, this special edition will make a valuable contribution to your bookshelf.
Click here to buy That Deadman Dance
ROOM
By Emma Donoghue
Blurb: The story of a mother, her son, a locked room and the outside world.
Jack is five and, like any little boy, excited at the prospect of presents and cake. He’s looking forward to telling his friends it’s his birthday, too. But although Jack is a normal child in many ways – loving, funny, bright, full of energy and questions – his upbringing is far from ordinary: Jack’s entire life has been spent in a single room that measures just 12 feet by 12 feet; as far as he’s concerned, Room is the entire world.
He shares this world with his mother, with Plant, and tiny Mouse (though Ma isn’t a fan and throws a book at Mouse when she sees him). There’s TV too, of course – and the cartoon characters he thinks of as his friends – but Jack knows that nothing else he sees on the screen is real. Old Nick, on the other hand, is all too real, but only visits at night – like a bat – when Jack is meant to be asleep and hidden safely in Wardrobe. And only Old Nick has the code to Door, which is otherwise locked…
Told in Jack’s voice, Room is the story of a mother’s love for her son, and of a young boy’s innocence.
Celebrating 40 years of outstanding international writing, this is one of the essential Picador novels reissued in a beautiful new series style.
BRIDGET JONES’S DIARY
By Helen Fielding
Blurb: In the course of the year recorded in Bridget Jones’s Diary, Bridget confides her hopes, her dreams, and her monstrously fluctuating poundage, not to mention her consumption of 5277 cigarettes and Fat units 3457 (approx.) (hideous in every way). In 365 days, she gains 74 pounds. On the other hand, she loses 72! There is also the unspoken New Year’s resolution–the quest for the right man.
A dazzling urban satire of modern human relations? An ironic, tragic insight into the demise of the nuclear family? Or the confused ramblings of a pissed thirty-something?
Celebrating 40 years of outstanding international writing, this is one of the essential Picador novels reissued in a beautiful new series style.
Click here to buy Bridget Jones’s Diary
So what is the Picador story?
In the early 1970s, an Englishman by the name of Simon Master convinced his bosses at Macmillan that a new paperback imprint was needed, and in 1972 Picador was officially launched. Its aim was to publish the very best writing by the very best writers, irrespective of genre or nationality. Neither parochial nor strictly populist – its standards were necessarily high – it quickly drew fans from from New Farm to New York, and many places in between. Early Picador authors included Angela Carter, Samuel Beckett and Thomas Pynchon; while the first Picador million-copy seller was Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. This was soon followed by Alex Haley’s Roots.
As the list of books grew, Picador established a reputation for publishing outstanding narrative non-fiction, travel writing, American fiction and contemporary memoir. These included Dispatches by Michael Herr, Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story, P.J. O’Rourke’s Holidays in Hell and Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho. In paperback, Picador published the 1981 Booker Prize winner, Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie, as well as the 1985 Booker Prize winner, The Bone People by Keri Hulme.
The year 1986 saw the launch of the Australian Picador list. From that day on, our literary landscape would be forever changed. Kate Grenville, David Malouf, Kathy Lette, Peter Carey, Helen Garner, David Foster and a host of other acclaimed Australian authors flocked to the imprint.
Alongside such international heavyweights as Roberto Bolaño, John Banville, Graham Swift, Bret Easton Ellis, Don DeLillo and Cormac McCarthy, new Australian talent continues to flourish: James Bradley, Brendan Cowell, Sam de Brito, Karen Hitchcock, Elisabeth Holdsworth, Christopher Kremmer, Emily Maguire, Gregory David Roberts, Kim Scott, Carrie Tiffany and Markus Zusak, to name just a few.
As well as strong fiction, Picador continues to publish groundbreaking non-fiction in the areas of reportage, literary biography and memoir. Local and international authors include Waleed Aly, Augusten Burroughs, Les Carlyon, Robert Dessaix, Charles Firth, Helen Garner, Clive James, Michael McGirr, Andrew Mueller, Oliver Sacks, Matthew Thompson and Don Watson.
Click here to view the entire Picador 40th Anniversary Collection at Booktopia,
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