Literature & literary studies

Ten essays on how reading and meaningfully engaging with literature can help us live better, more purposeful lives. How do we live fully? How do we...

‘A lively picture of multiple operators scrambling to steal a march on the competition . . . Lavishly detailed’ FINANCIAL TIMES ‘This is Shakespear...

‘One of the greatest writers of our time.’ Toni Morrison ‘You Don’t Know Us Negroes adds immeasurably to our understanding of Hurston … her words m...

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A dazzling tragicomic tale from the author of modern classic The Unbearable Lightness of Being. 'Anyone reading Kundera's books is unlikely to for...

About the Author Previously an actor, Mike Packer's first play Card Boys was performed at The Bush in 1999. A Carpet, A Pony and A Monkey is his s...

Harold Hart Crane was born in Ohio in 1899. In 1923 he became a copy-writer in New York. White Buildings, his first collection, appeared in 1926, a...

June has a terrible secret. Gash has an outrageous plan. Leah is open to possibilities. And Joy is drinking to forget. When June's best friends un...

God is on fire - his fever is plague. All that was sweet is spilt and gone. The people of Thebes look to Oedipus to lift a terrible curse from the...

About the Author August Strindberg (1849-1912) was a Swedish dramatist, novelist, poet and essayist. His plays include The Father (1887), Miss Jul...

Product Description Seamus Heaney's poetic career has been one of constant development and expansion, and his place among the world's greatest lit...

Product Description This entirely new edition brings together all of Philip Larkin's poems. In addition to those in Collected Poems (1988), and in...

This seminal book, Eliot's first collection of literary criticism, appeared in London in 1920, two years before The Waste Land. It contains some of...

Product Description The first volume of Alan Ayckbourn's collected work contains his morality plays from the 1980s. It includes the plays A Chorus...

A play translated by Tom Stoppard which premiered at the Wyndham's Theatre, October 2005. Storyline - it's 1959 and three veterans from the first w...

In this entertaining and always stimulating collection of seven essays, Kundera deftly sketches out his personal view of the history and value of t...

About the Author Mick Imlah was born in 1956 and brought up near Glasgow and in Kent. He was educated at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he taught...

David Herbert Lawrence was born in Nottinghamshire in 1885. Predominantly remembered as a novelist, Lawrence began writing poetry when he was ninet...

About the Author Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), Norwegian poet and playwright, was one of the shapers of modern theatre, who tempered naturalism wi...

Celebrated children's writer Hans Christian Andersen arrives, unannounced, for a stay at Gad's Hill Place in the Kent marshes - home to Charles Dic...

The second volume of Sean O'Casey's plays includes The Shadow of a Gunman, The Plough and the Stars, The Silver Tassie, Purple Dust and Hall of Hea...

About the Author Ruth Padel was born in London in 1947 and educated at Oxford. She lived several years in Greece and worked as a Greek scholar...

The Prime Minister and his cabinet have been assassinated and England's most treasured writers are being murdered one by one. Back at the universit...

This collection of Szymborska's work reveals her to be concerned with the unglamorized actualities of the human condition. She is one of a generati...

Lorca's Blood Wedding is a classic of twentieth-century theatre. The story is based on a newspaper fragment which told of a family vendetta and a b...

In this series, a contemporary poet selects and introduces a poet of the past. By their choice of poems and by the personal and critical reactions ...

About the Author David Hare has written over thirty stage plays and thirty screenplays for film and television. The plays include Plenty, Pravda (...

Fifteen years ago Una and Ray had a relationship. They haven't set eyes on each other since. Now, years later, she's found him again. Blackbird pr...

Gathers all of Beckett's texts for theatre, from 1955 to 1984. This book includes both the major dramatic works and the short and more compressed t...

About the Author Martin Crimp was born in 1956. His play Attempts on Her Life (1997) established his international reputation. His other work for ...

Product Description Love is just fear I suppose. Masquerading as a fever. Then you explore each other and suddenly you have licence to become tota...

About the Author Ted Hughes (1930-1998) was born in Yorkshire. His first book, The Hawk in the Rain, was published in 1957 by Faber & Faber an...