A warm welcome to the website of Reaktion Books. Visitors from North, Central or South America please see our website at www.reaktionbooks.com.

The first of our new titles for Spring/Summer 2010 asks why we are embarrassed by our own bodies, and why do the police arrest people for streaking when there is no specific law against it? Philip Carr-Gomm’s A Brief History of Nakedness explains all this and more, cataloguing humanity’s preoccupation with nudity in religion, politics and culture, from the naked sages of India and St Francis of Assisi to modern day witches, naturists, strippers and streakers.

There are three new titles in our Edible series: Caviar looks at the problems of maintaining the supply of this luxury food, Cake, one of the most popular foods in the world, is described in its many manifestations and as the centrepiece of birthdays, weddings, children’s parties and in culture, and Milk, which provides a social history of what we think of as a timeless commodity but one which was, in the past, quite dangerous to drink.

In the Critical Lives series we are publishing William S. Burroughs, which looks at the dream- and drug-addicted life of this iconic figure of the beat generation, Vladimir Nabokov, published coincidentally at the time of publication of one of Nabokov’s unfinished works, Stéphane Mallarmé, a key French poet with a unique voice, and Constantin Brancusi, one of the foremost sculptors of the modern age, and whose persona is demystified here.

Two notable art titles this season: Water and Art by David Clarke, which focuses on the relationship between water and art from the Italian Renaissance to the present, and The Sensory World of Italian Renaissance Art, a book which discusses Renaissance art in relation to the senses.

Wasteland with Words: A Social History of Iceland is a thoughtful and detailed account of how the Icelandic people, throughout their long history, have endured hardships but retained a sense of their own culture and identity. Imprint and Trace makes us think again about the relationship between handwriting and the age of the machine and the technologies involved in this transformation.

We hope you enjoy these and all our new titles this season – for a complete list please click here.

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To download a PDF version of our Autumn 2009 catalogue click here (4Mb), for our Spring 2010 catalogue click here (1Mb), and for our complete backlist catalogue click here (3.3Mb).

Please note: All prices on this website are recommended retail prices and are subject to alteration without notice. Details given of illustrations, format, content, and month of publication were as accurate as possible at the time the website was last updated.