Literature Books

From Hannah Lavery, soon to be appointed Edinburgh's new Makar.In a moment that is demanding you to constantly choose your side, how do you find your humanity, your own voice, when you are being pushed to find safety in numbers?Blood Salt Spring is a...

Edited by Lilias Fraser, Jane Cooper and Kate Hendry,To Learn the Futureis a selection of poems that will grip at first reading perfect if the only time you have is five minutes in a rushed lunch break. The choice of poems includes insight for days when...

In this new Selected Poems, Kathleen Jamie explores the multi-faceted world of George Mackay Brown's Orkney, the poet's lifelong home and inspiration. George Mackay Brown's concerns were the ancestral world, the communalities of work, the fables...

'Two Men at Once' is one of Norman MacCaig best known poems. He was indeed two men at once: Edinburgh, the city where he was born and lived as a teacher and poet, was his home, but no other place shaped his poetry more than Assynt in Sutherland. It is...

Barry Forshaw is acknowledged as a leading expert on European crime fiction, but his principal area of expertise is in the crime arena of the British Isles. Continuing the earlier success of the series with Nordic Noir and Euro Noir, he has now delivered...

Feather, Leaf, Bark & Stone is a book of poems and meditations with a difference. More than a hundred short texts have been typed onto small squares of gold leaf, then photographed. These pieces are arranged in a sequence which culminates in a...

Was Shakespeare a snob? Poor Naked Wretches challenges the idea that our greatest writer despised working people, and shows that he portrayed them with as much insight, compassion and purpose as the rich and powerful. Moreover, they play an important...

Painter, poet and actor Salvator Rosa was one of the most engaging and charismatic personalities of seventeenth-century Italy. Although a gifted landscape painter, he longed to be seen as the pre-eminent philosopher-painter of his age. This new account...

The meaning of life is a common concern, but what is the meaning of midlife?With the help of illustrious writers such as Dante, Montaigne, Beauvoir, Goethe, and Beckett, The Midlife Mind sets out to answer a universal conundrum. Erudite but engaging, it...

'Starting from the Bronze Age and ending with modern emails and a possible future of e-books, Steven Fischer's A History of Reading takes in a wonderful diversity of things.' - Nature'It's an exciting story, which the author tells clearly and...

A Financial Times Travel Book of the Year 2021 Where can travel writing go in the twenty-first century? Author and lifelong travel writing aficionado Tim Hannigan sets out in search of this most venerable of genres, hunting down its legendary...

Time Out of Mind is one of the most ambitious, complex, and provocative albums of Bob Dylan's distinguished artistic career. The present book interprets the songs recorded for Time Out of Mind as a series of dreams by a single singer/dreamer. These...

Invented History, Fabricated Powerbegins with an examination of prehistoric beliefs (in spirits, souls,mana,orenda) that provided personal explanation and power through ritual and shamanism among tribal peoples. On this foundation, spiritual power...

Forker's critical edition fills the need for a fully annotated, historically contextualised and modernised text of the most important Elizabethan chronicle play apart from Shakespeare and Marlowe's Edward II.Now attributed definitely to George Peele,...

Winner of the 2020 Forward Prize for Best Collection. Shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award 2020. A Telegraph Poetry Book of the Month (February 2020). A Telegraph Book of the Year 2020. A Guardian Book of the Year 2020. The Air Year is a time of...

Winner of the 2020 Seamus Heaney First Collection Prize. Winner of the East Anglian Book Award for Poetry 2020. The Guardian's Poetry Book of the Month August 2019. So Many Rooms, the debut collection from Geoffrey Dearmer Prize-winning poet Laura Scott,...

A Poetry Book Society Spring 2019 Recommendation. In Discipline, her third collection, Jane Yeh depicts a haunting and hilarious variety of lives, from an endangered young rhinoceros to the denizens of the 1980s New York club scene. These multifaceted...

A highly illustrated pillow book to prompt dreaming and creativity by Kate Greenaway Medal-winning artist Jackie MorrisLonglisted for the 2021 Kate Greenaway Medal"A quiet masterpiece . . . a love story, a hope story, a story out of time, out of...

This book is not meant to be read from cover to cover.Instead, it is a book for dreamers. Its purpose? To ease the soul.From award-winning writer/illustrator Jackie Morris, on the heels of 2020's The Lost Spells, is a book that enters the realm of...

Selected as one of The Times Books of the Year 2017From the gothic fantasies of Walpole's Otranto to post-modern takes on the country house by Kazuo Ishiguro and Ian McEwan, Phyllis Richardson guides us on a tour through buildings real and imagined to...

Zen monk Santoka Taneda (18821940) is one of Japan's most beloved modern poets, famous for his "free-verse" haiku, the dominant style today. This book tells the fascinating story of his life, liberally sprinkled with more than...

This collection of poetry interrogates the impact of grief and partner violence on a family lineage, as well as the connections between sorrow and joy as they relate to poetry, women's writing, and the process of the "confessional."Inextricably woven...

A career-spanning volume drawn from forty years of work and a selection of new poems.Stephen Corey's work is intelligent, moving and engaging. Poem after poem is beautiful, effortless, and thought-provoking. The range of style and subject matter, the...

A timely story of a forgotten emotionCheerfulness: A Literary and Cultural History tells a new story about the cultural imagination of the West wherein cheerfulness - a momentary uptick in emotional energy, a temporary lightening of spirit - functions as...

Cold Candies encapsulate the saccharine strangeness of a woman's life. Fragments of narratives about girls, dolls, sisters, mothers, men, lizards, the moon, and pillows are brought together into otherworldly images that are devastating, yet familiar. Lee...

The First Folio the celebrated collected edition of William Shakespeare's plays was published in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare's death. It was compiled by John Heminge and Henry Condell, both actors in Shakespeare's company, the King's Men, and...

'Everything you ever wanted to know about cats in books. A wonderful idea, beautifully executed.' - Viv GroskopCats have provided the inspiration for an incredible range of fiction, memoir and poetry, from ancient myths and fables to much-loved...

Over more than four decades J.R.R. Tolkien's son and literary executor, Christopher Tolkien, published some twenty-four volumes of his father's work, much more than his father had succeeded in publishing during his own lifetime. Standing on the mountain...

This is the first facsimile publication of 'Martha Lloyd's Household Book', the manuscript cookbook of Jane Austen's closest friend. Martha's notebook is reproduced in a colour facsimile section with complete...

Concrete Poetry: A 21st-century Anthology is the first overview of concrete poetry in many years. Selective yet wide-ranging, this anthology re-evaluates the movement, singling out its most distinctive and influential works. Nancy Perloff, curator of an...

A world of dew And within every dewdrop A world of struggleThe iconic three-line haiku form is increasingly popular today as people embrace its simplicity and grace-and its connections to the Japanese ethos of mindfulness and minimalism. Say more with...

Age range 6+Not a how-to book, kids will instead find over 300 creative prompts to get them putting pencil to paper - and loving it.Write the TRUE story of Goldilocks, what happened after Cinderella got married, what you'd do if YOU were...

Winner of the Dzanc Diverse Voices Prize LA SYRENA. For me home is in the water. When I go to the sea I want to swim forever and never look back. But I know I would die and the earth needs me on shore. My home is Syria and Syria for me is like the sea. I...

Winner of the Big Other Award in Translation Winner of MLA's 17th Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of a Literary Work Formally audacious and remarkably compelling, Yi Sang's works were uniquely situated amid the literary experiments of...

Winner of the 2023 Pacific Northwest Book Award for poetryWinner of the Wren Poetry Prize selected by Ada Limn, Caitlin Scarano's collection wrestles with family violence, escaping home, unraveling relationships, and the complexity of sexuality.The...

2021 Winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry"The book is intimate, expansive, and in moments, willfully hopeful." -Victoria Chang, winner of the PEN Voelcker Award for OBIT Here are poems with music matched to matter, so that reading them often...

A celebrated performance artist's mesmerizing riffs on sex in American politics.Based on her widely praised performance piece Unicorn Gratitude Mystery ("Wickedly funny," as described by The New York Times), Karen Finley's Grabbing Pussy explores the...

Immerse yourself in Shakespeare's magical world, filled with supernatural encounters with faeries, ghosts and witches. Frolic with royalty, wander through forests, and experience love layered with enchantment. The Bard's use of these fantastical...

*Finalist for the US National Book Award for Poetry 2020*A powerful work of cultural memory that recovers voices from Korea's heartbreakingly violent postcolonial history.Woven from poems, prose, photographs, and drawings, Don Mee Choi's DMZ...

Lyrical poems that engage with grief and loss and the toll of overdose and addiction with an activist bent.The title of Cry Perfume is an imperative to bottle sorrow in a beautiful vessel and shed the chemicals that cloud your sight. Written over a...

A debut English translation of contemporary free verse poetry by an award-winning South Korean poet and novelist. By turns humorous and dark, these poems explore the simultaneous intimacy and alienation of everyday life in urban Seoul. Writing in a...

Recent books translated by the translators have won or been finalists for the Man Booker International Prize, the Griffin International Poetry Prize, the PEN Poetry in Translation Award, the Northern California Book Award, and other notable prizes...

In Some Beheadings, winner of The Believer Poetry Award, the "beheaded" poet asks, "What does thinking feel like," as she displaces her mind into landscape, exploring territories as disparate as India's Western Ghats and the cinematic Mojave Desert, and...

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...

This collection leaps into the dangerous currents where poetry and reli-gion meet, and enlivens the lexicon of traditional American Christian belief by testing its doctrines and language against contemporary experience."Beyond the wonderful music of his...

Close friendships are a heart-warming feature of many of our best-loved works of fiction. From Jane Eyre and Helen Burns' poignant schoolgirl relationship to Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn's adventures on the Mississippi, fictional friends have...