Literature Books

Age range 12+Love's Labor's Lost: The 30-Minute Shakespeare plays three action-packed scenes from this tale of King Navarre and his three lords, who have vowed to retire from women for three years. Naturally, the Princess of France and her three...

Age range 12+Planning a school or amateur Shakespeare production? The best way to experience the plays is to perform them, but getting started can be a challenge: The complete plays are too long and complex, while scene selections or simplified language...

Age range 12+Planning a school or amateur Shakespeare production? The best way to experience the plays is to perform them, but getting started can be a challenge: The complete plays are too long and complex, while scene selections or simplified language...

World Literature Today Editor's Pick "Enchanting. . . . The Poetic Species is a wonderful read in its entirety, short yet infinitely simulating." -MARIA POPOVA, Brain Pickings In this shimmering conversation (the outgrowth of an event co-sponsored by the...

A fearless and uproarious litany of contentions and revelations on poetry and the poetic mind, continuing the charge against the sacred in contemporary poetry. Poemland alternates brilliantly between the deadpan, the spectacular, and the outrageous.If...

"Punchy, spiky, and flush with a young writer's love of language, the collection often deglamourizes the acting business. A great find."-Library JournalWith insightful poetry that is quite serious yet has fun with metaphor, imagery, and language, Amber...

Ecliptical addresses contemporary psychological, ethical and philosophical issues including family secrets and tensions, private and public creativity, the enigma of time, surveillance, fake news, environmental damage and homelessness.Ecliptical includes...

Siarad isa Welsh word, meaning to talk, to speak. In this collection of spoken word,prose poetry and micro-fiction, Reid speaks to the memories and emotions thatmove us through decades, continents and cultures. The collection pulses withimages...

In 2019 poet-artist Gommie began walking the coastline of an England with nothing but a backpack, a tent and an unusually large collection of pens. His aim? Searching for hope during increasingly hard times.From losing his way on the Dover Hills to...

Fifty Forgotten Books is a very special sort of book about books, by a great bookman and for book-people of all ages and levels of experience. Not quite literary criticism, not quite an autobiography, it is at once a guided tour through the dusty...

A love song between an angel and an accountant in the suburbs of London from Man Booker shortlisted LevyShe is a shimmering, melancholy angel, flown from Paradise to save him from the suburbs of hell. He an accountant, dreaming of a white Christmas, a...

An unabashedly feminist and womanist anthology honouring Black women across generations and memories.Featuring the work of Black women poets from Botswana to Brazil, in this collection, we encounter ancestors who made love, just for the sake of love, and...

Written in 1928, The Set-Up is a long narrative poem about the US boxing underworld a hard-boiled tragedy told in syncopated rhyming couplets. When the work was first published it made The New York Times bestseller list, and in 1949 it was turned into an...

Epic Annette: A Heroine's Tale is the story of real-life Anne Beaumanoir, a courageous, brilliant woman born in Brittany in 1923. Guided by a passion for justice and a fervent belief in self-determination she joined the French Resistance and moved to...

'Here on the shore, twenty years later, my message in a bottle has reached dry land. Words about our life, his death but mostly love and our journey to the end.' - Olivia HarrisonOlivia Harrison presents Came the Lightening a book of...

First comprehensive selection of Harry Graham's work. Authorized anthology of Harry Graham's famous and funny poems Revives many phrases and verses people already know and can recite by heart. Beautifully designed book which will make an ideal gift...

This new expanded edition of "The Long and the Short of It" covers 55 years of Roy Fisher's poetry. Playing the language, pleasuring the imagination and teasing the senses, Fisher's witty, inventive and anarchic poetry has given lasting delight to his...

This anthology is the record of a revolution in Chinese poetry. As the Cultural Revolution gave way to the post-Mao era - years of political turmoil, economic boom and the return of Hong Kong - the present period has been one of extraordinary and deeply...

"Lara" is a powerful semi-autobiographical novel-in-verse based on Bernardine Evaristo's own childhood and family history. The eponymous Lara is a mixed-race girl raised in Woolwich, a white suburb of London, during the 60s and 70s. Her father, Taiwo, is...

The third book in the Staying Alive poetry trilogy. Staying Alive and its sequel Being Alive have introduced many thousands of new readers to contemporary poetry. Being Human is a companion volume to those two books - a world poetry anthology offering...

"Soul Food" is a feast of thoughtful poems to stir the mind and feed the spirit. Drawn from many traditions, ranging from Rumi, Kabir and Blake, to Rilke, Emily Dickinson and Paul Celan, this wide-ranging selection includes enormously varied work by...

Being Alive is the sequel to Neil Astley's Staying Alive, which became Britain's most popular poetry book because it gave readers hundreds of thoughtful and passionate poems about living in the modern world.Now he has assembled this equally lively...

Staying Alive is an international anthology of 500 life-affirming poems fired by belief in the human and the spiritual at a time when much in the world feels unreal, inhuman and hollow. These are poems of great personal force connecting our aspirations...

This epoch-marking anthology presents a map of poetry from Britain and Ireland which readers can follow. You will not get lost here as in other anthologies. Instead, Edna Longley shows you the key poets of the century, and through interlinking commentary...

The Heavy Bear Who Goes with Me is the ultimate reader's companion to poetry: a selection of 100 classic poems from five centuries with lively companion commentaries to go with and illuminate each poem.The heavy bear can be many things which go with the...

French-English bilingual edition. Andre Breton called Cesaire's Cahier 'nothing less than the greatest lyrical monument of this time'. It is a seminal text in Surrealist, French and Black literatures - published in full in English for the first time in...

The Making of Shakespeare's First Folio offers the first comprehensive biography of the earliest collected edition of Shakespeare's plays. In November 1623, the book arrived in the bookshop of the London publisher Edward Blount at the Black Bear. Long in...

The Curfew tolls the knell of parting day...Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard has been loved and admired throughout the centuries. First circulated to a select group of friends, it was rushed to official publication in 1751 in order to...

Rachel Owen's hauntingly beautiful illustrations for Dante's Inferno take a radically new approach to representing the world of Dante's famous poem. The images combine the artist's deep cultural and historical understanding of 'The Divine...

What is life? This was a question of particular concern for Mary Shelley and her contemporaries. But how did she, and her fellow Romantic writers, incorporate this debate into their work, and how much were they influenced by contemporary science,...

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass are two of the most famous, translated, and quoted books in the world. What began as a simple tale told by eccentric Oxford mathematician Charles Dodgson (better...

Homecoming, haunting, nostalgia, desire: these are some of the themes evoked by the beguiling motif of the lighted window in literature and art. In this innovative combination of place-writing, memoir and cultural study, Peter Davidson takes us on...

'Invention...does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos' - Mary Shelley In the 200 years since its first publication, the story of Frankenstein's creation during stormy days and nights at Byron's Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva has...

Novel Houses visits unforgettable dwellings in twenty legendary works of English and American fiction. Each chapter stars a famous novel in which a dwelling is pivotal to the plot, and reveals how personally significant that place was to the writer who...

In late medieval England, ordinary people, apothecaries and physicians gathered up practical medical tips for everyday use. While some were sensible herbal cures, many were weird and wonderful. This book selects some of the most revolting or remarkable...

This collection of essays offers an intimate history of Austen's art and life told through objects associated with her personally and with the era in which she lived. Her teenage notebooks, music albums, pelisse-coat, letters, the homemade booklets in...

When Falstaff calls upon the sky to rain potatoes in The Merry Wives of Windsor, he is highlighting the late sixteenth-century belief that the exotic vegetable, recently introduced to England from the Americas, was an aphrodisiac. In Romeo and Juliet,...

Within Shakespeare's lifetime there was already some curiosity about what the writer of such brilliant poems, sonnets and plays looked like. Yet like so much else about him, Shakespeare's appearance is mysterious.Why is it so difficult to find images of...

No work has challenged its readers like Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. His 'Proverbs of Hell' have been culled for the slogans of student protest and become axioms of modern thought. Iconoclastic, bizarre, unprecedented, it is all of these...

The locations of Shakespeare's plays range from Greece, Turkey and Syria to England, and they range in time from 1000 BC to the early Tudor age. He never set a play explicitly in Elizabethan London, which he and his audience inhabited, but always in...

Muhammad Iqbal (d.1938), thinker and philosopher - poet of Indo-Pakistani sub-continent was one of the key architects of contemporary Islam. Through the medium of his thoughtful writing and soul-transforming poetry, both Urdu and Persian, he infused a...

Rumi is North America's best-selling poet. A selection of his inspirational verse, focused on his mystical teachings of reconnecting with the Divine, are collected here with commentaries, making it the perfect introduction to his poetry and its deeper...

Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, both suffering from shell shock, were sent to convalesce at Craiglockhart hospital in Edinburgh in 1917. Owen, who referred to himself as the 'poet's poet' was unpublished at the time. It was the influence and...