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...

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...

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...

Tickets, merchandise, money, drugs. All are just a phone call away. H is a Manc, Ray is a Scouser. They service the needs and exploit the chaos of ...

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...

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...

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...

What happens when two sets of parents meet up to deal with the unruly behaviour of their children? A calm and rational debate between grown-ups abo...

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

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...

An adaptation by the Poet Laureate of Racine's play of the same name. Phedre burns with passion for Hippolytus, her stepson. His father, Theseus, i...

Thom Gunn's The Man with Night Sweats shows him writing at the height of his powers, equally in command of classical forms and of looser, more coll...

The first collection of plays by Marina Carr introduces the work of a major new voice in playwriting. Low in the Dark 'One of the most exciting, n...

Finders Keepers is a gathering of Seamus Heaney's prose of three decades. Whether autobiographical, topical or specifically literary, these essays ...

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 ...

Eliot's poetry has been charged with coldness, antisemitism, misogyny, elitism, prissiness. It is a poetry which invites or incites prejudice; how ...

The central character of Alan Ayckbourn's new play is Susan, a parson's wife, 'one of the most moving and devastating that he has created...' Robin...

Ezra Pound Selected Poems, 1908-1959

Product Description Marriage consists of two sequences of poems. The first is loosely based on the relationship between Pierre Bonnard and his mus...

Hear what I have to say about the cherry orchard, because it is mine. I say bring it down, tear it down. Smash it down and tear it down. Watch, wat...

With the same dazzling mix of emotion and idea that characterizes his novels he illuminates the art and artists who remain important to him and who...

This first collection of plays by Charlotte Jones includes her multi-award winning Humble Boy (Susan Smith Blackburn Award 2001, the Critics' Circl...

About the Author John Byrne was born in Paisley in 1940. He worked as a 'slab boy' at AFT Stoddard, the carpet manufacturers, before going to Glas...

When The Orators was originally published in 1932 it was described by Poetry Review as 'something as important as the appearance of Mr Eliot's poem...

Moscow, 1938. A dangerous place to have a sense of humour; even more so a sense of freedom. Mikhail Bulgakov, living among dissidents, stalked by s...

About the Author Penelope Skinner's plays include The Village Bike (Royal Court Upstairs; 2011); The Sound of Heavy Rain (Paines Plough/Crucible T...

Product Description A tragedy of maritime decline, Bound follows the fortunes of six trawlermen from Devon as they embark on one final voyage...

About the Author Michael Wynne was born and brought up in Birkenhead. His first play, The Knocky, was performed at the Royal Court Theatre: it was...

When they called saying your body had been found, I had one immediate thought. I remember thinking that maybe now I'd be free. Sam hasn't spoken t...

'I have been thinking I might go berserk.' When Claire, a priest, survives an atrocity she sets out on a quest to answer the most difficult questi...

Review Highly intelligent, deeply moving poems that provide a new lens through which to consider grief. -- Sarah Crown ― Guardian This is powerfu...