Books by Nicholas Royle

A mix of memoir and narrative non-fiction, White Spines is a book about Nicholas Royle's passion for Picador's fiction publishing from the 1970s to the end of the 1990s.

Before the exquisitely painful ''loss of her marbles'', Mrs Royle, a nurse by profession, is a marvellously no-nonsense character, an autodidact who reads widely and voraciously from Trollope to Woolf, White to Winterson - swears at her fox-hunting neighbours, and instils in the young Nick a love of reading and wildlife that will form his character and his career. He captures the spirit of post-war parenting as well as of his mother whose dementia and death were triggered by the tragedy of losing her other son - Royle''s younger brother - to cancer in his twenties.

A lucid, original and inventive critical introduction to Helene Cixous (1937-). Royle offers close readings of many of her works, from Inside (1969) to the present. He foregrounds Cixous's importance for 'English literature' as well as creative writing, autobiography, narrative theory, psychoanalysis, ecology, gender studies and queer theory. -- .

Paul Kinder, a novelist with one forgotten book to his name, teaches creative writing in a university in the north-west of England. Either you'll laugh, or you'll cry. Or maybe both.

This is the first book-length study of the uncanny, an important topic for contemporary thinking on literature, film, philosophy, psychoanalysis, feminism and queer history. -- .