Derek Jarmans Garden is the last book Jarman ever wrote. It is a fitting memorial to a brilliant and greatly loved artist and film maker who, against all odds, made a breathtaking garden in the most inhospitable of places the flat, bleak, often desolate expanse of shingle overlooked by the Dungeness nuclear power station. Here is Jarmans own record of how the garden evolved, from its earliest beginnings in 1986 to the last year of his life. More than 150 photographs by his friend Howard Sooley capture the garden at all its different stages and at every season of the year, revealing its complex geometrical plan, magical stone circles and the beautiful and bizarre scupltures. We also catch glimpses of Jarman at work on the garden. This beautiful book will appeal to all those who love gardens and gardening, as well as the legions of admirers of this extraordinary man.

Originally published: Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press, 1994.

Part autobiography and part social history: the acclaimed director’s filmmaking process revealed through his private sketchbooks Legendary filmmaker Derek Jarman recorded his life and work in highly detailed sketchbooks. Encompassing both the private and the professional, these offer a personal view into the life and career of a highly influential filmmaker and artist. Drawn from the collection of handmade books that Jarman gave to the British Film Institute shortly before his death in 1994, Derek Jarman’s Sketchbooks showcases the most insightful and beautiful pages. Each of the original volumes is composed of drawings, photographs, and cuttings; pressed flowers are set beside scrawled ideas, and carefully penned poems accompany typed and edited working scripts. These once-private books are an intimate pictorial record of the detailed planning and research and the creative and emotional engagement behind every scene in Jarman’s films.

Rowland Wymer gives detailed, original critical readings of Derek Jarman's eleven feature-length films, and argues that he occupies a major and influential place in European and world cinema.

“One of the finest writers of the new nonfiction” (Harper’s Bazaar) explores the role of art in our tumultuous modern era. In this remarkable, inspiring collection of essays, acclaimed writer and critic Olivia Laing makes a brilliant case for why art matters, especially in the turbulent political weather of the twenty-first century. Funny Weather brings together a career’s worth of Laing’s writing about art and culture, examining their role in our political and emotional lives. She profiles Jean-Michel Basquiat and Georgia O’Keeffe, reads Maggie Nelson and Sally Rooney, writes love letters to David Bowie and Freddie Mercury, and explores loneliness and technology, women and alcohol, sex and the body. With characteristic originality and compassion, she celebrates art as a force of resistance and repair, an antidote to a frightening political time. We’re often told that art can’t change anything. Laing argues that it can. Art changes how we see the world. It makes plain inequalities and it offers fertile new ways of living.