LITERARY CRITICISM

A.C. Bradley put Shakespeare on the map for generations of readers and students for whom the plays might not otherwise have become "real" at all' writes John Bayley in his...

This is a remarkable dictionary, exploring the vast and various symbols which abound in literature, religion, national identity and are found at the very heart of our dreams and sub-conscious....

In this frank, playful and typically unorthodox collection of essays, Alasdair Gray tells how his early life experiences influenced his writing, including the creation of those landmarks of literature, Lanark...

Could drugs offer a new way of seeing the world? In 1953, in the presence of an investigator, Aldous Huxley took four-tenths of a gramme of mescalin, sat down and...

Books; reading, collecting and the physical housing of them has brought the book-lover joy - and stress - for centuries. Fascinated writers have tried to capture the particular relationships we...

An award-winning study of England's unique and peculiarly insular variant of modernism. While the battles for modern art and society were being fought in France and Spain, it has seemed...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.Alarms are alarming. They wake us up, demand our attention and force us to...

A unique history of the Beats, in the words of the movement's most central member, Allen Ginsberg, based on a seminal series of his lecturesIn 1977, twenty years after the...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.Grave takes a ground-level view of how burial sites have transformed over time and...

A working father whose life no longer feels like his own discovers the transforming powers of great (and downright terrible) literature in this laugh-out-loud memoir. Andy Miller had a job...

Bird by Bird is the bible of writing guides - a wry, honest, down-to-earth book that has never stopped selling since it was first published in the United States in...

In her spare, stark style, Annie Ernaux documents the desires and indignities of a human heart ensnared in an all-consuming passion. Blurring the line between fact and fiction, she attempts...

In her latest work, Annie Ernaux recounts a relationship with a student thirty years her junior - an experience that transforms her, briefly, back into the 'scandalous girl' of her...

Apocalyptic Ruin and Everyday Wonder in Don DeLillo's America is a fresh and engaging study of "last things" in Don DeLillo's works-things like death, mourning, and the decline of the...

A richly illustrated book in which leading cultural critics, authors, and academics reflect on the radical achievement and innovation of Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece Maus'The most affecting and successful...

SHORTLISTED FOR THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE 2019WINNER OF A WINDHAM-CAMPBELL PRIZE 2017'I love this book' MAGGIE NELSON'An essay collection unlike any I've read' New York TimesIn Can You Tolerate This?...

This book introduces Asian American literary studies by engaging the conditions, contingencies, and immediate and long-term effects of its major debates. Two rationales inform Ling's presentation of the field in...

From cultural icon Margaret Atwood comes a brilliant collection of essays -- funny, erudite, endlessly curious, uncannily prescient -- which seek answers to Burning Questions such as: Why do people...

This book examines the writings of the American novelist Ayn Rand, especially The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957), which Rand considered her definitive statement about the need for an...

It's one of the most successful - and surprising - of phenomena in the entire crime fiction genre: detectives (and protodetectives) solving crimes in earlier eras. There is now an...

'Every devotee of literature and art should read this rare, bright-lit, hard-won book, and every student of life - that is to say, everyone.' - Sebastian BarryIn this contemplative short...

A collection of exquisitely crafted essays by Ben Okri, one of Britain's foremost poets, and a Booker Prize-winning novelist, that explore such diverse themes as childhood and creativity, beauty, censorship,...

Foreword by bestselling and award-winning author Smriti Halls.The indispensable guide to writing for children of all ages from pre-school to young adults, this Yearbook provides inspirational articles from dozens of...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. No matter how much you fight against it, dust pervades everything. It gathers...

Brendan Behan wrote over one hundred articles for Irish newspapers between 1951 and 1956 as he rose to international fame, with most of them written in a weekly column in...

In his essay on Patrick Kavanagh, Brendan Kennelly writes: 'A poet's critical judgements are always, at bottom, necessary justifications of his own most dearly held aesthetic.' This selection of his...

THE CONTROVERSIAL SUNDAY TIMES TOP TEN BESTSELLER.Candid, fearless and provocative - the author of American Psycho on who he is and what he thinks is wrong with the world today....

THE CONTROVERSIAL SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER. Candid, fearless and provocative - the author of American Psycho on who he is and what he thinks is wrong with the world today. Bret...

In Suppose a Sentence, Brian Dillon turns his attention to the oblique and complex pleasures of the sentence. A series of essays prompted by a single sentence - from Shakespeare...

Irish life between 1930 and 1960 is normally presented as a sort of cultural wasteland. In a radical re-examination of the period, Brian Fallon challenges this sterotype and argues that...

An irresistible, nostalgic, insightful-and "consistently intelligent and funny" (The New York Times Book Review)-ramble through classic children's literature from Vanity Fair contributing editor (and father of two) Bruce Handy.The dour...

Armed with a degree in medieval history and a flair for the macabre, Caitlin Doughty took a job at a crematory and turned morbid curiosity into her life's work. She...

Teeming with life and compulsively readable, the pieces gathered together in The Tribe aggregate into an extraordinary mosaic of Cuba today. Carlos Manuel Alvarez, one of the most exciting young...

'A loot drop of brilliance' Naomi Alderman, author of The PowerWhether you're an avid gamer, a Twitch subscriber, or just an incidental Subway Surfer, video games have changed the way...

Why would anyone write a letter and then not send it?`What a Hazard a Letter is,' wrote the poet Emily Dickinson, thinking of `the Hearts it has scuttled and sunk'....

In James Joyce and the Matter of Paris, Catherine Flynn recovers the paradigmatic city of European urban modernity as the foundational context of Joyce's imaginative consciousness. Beginning with Joyce's underexamined...

'Make this your next inspirational read. Trust us, it's Oprah's Book Club worthy' ViceIn London in 1958, a play by a 19-year-old redefined women's writing in Britain. It also began...