Edgar Allan Poe once claimed the greatest literary works were those that could be read "in one sitting". "Brevity must be in direct ratio of the intensity of the intended effect", he argued, once the effect has been established, of course. The stori...

"New Selected Poems" includes the key poems from Eavan Boland's remarkable half century of writing. It began with "23 Poems" in 1962 and it has continued through more than a dozen collections, each finding new dimensions in language, history and in t...

This book, the first published anthology of British surrealist poetry, takes its title from Herbert Read's words when he opened the "Surrealist Poems and Objects" exhibition at the London Gallery at midnight on 24 November 1937. Within a few years th...

"Oracabessa" is a book of risky journeys, mappings and re-mappings, as the poet navigates place, history and imagination. Goodison travels to Spain and Portugal, to Canada ("Winter has landed") and back to the Hope Gardens of her childhood in Jamaica...

A plain, blank stationer's notebook from the 1780s in the Bodleian Library contains some of the most famous juvenilia in all of English literature. Copied out in Jane Austen's youthful hand, "Volume the First", which takes its name from the inscripti...

In "Trade and Romance", Michael Murrin examines the complex relations between the expansion of trade in Asia and the production of heroic romance in Europe from the second half of the thirteenth century through the late seventeenth century. He shows...

"The Mahabharata" tells a story of such violence and tragedy that many people in India refuse to keep the full text in their homes, fearing that if they do, they will invite a disastrous fate upon their house. Covering everything from creation to des...

In "El Dorado", Peter Campion explores what it feels like to live in America right now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Splicing cell-phone chatter with translations of ancient poems, jump-cutting from traditional to invented forms, and...

Sergio De La Pava's "A Naked Singularity" was one of the most highly praised debut novels in decades".The Wall Street Journal" called it "a propulsive, mind-bending experience", and named it one of the ten best books of the year. The "Toronto Star" d...

For sale in CIS only! Overlooked by many as mere propaganda, poetry offers an unfettered insight into the wider worldview of the Afghan Taliban. This collection of over two hundred poems draws upon Afghan tradition and the recent past as much as upo...