After the publication of "Butcher's Moon" in 1974, Donald Westlake said, "Richard Stark proved to me that he had a life of his own by simply disappearing. He was gone". And readers waited. But nothing bad is truly gone forever, and Parker's as bad...

The sixteenth Parker novel, "Butcher's Moon" is more than twice as long most of the master heister's adventures, and absolutely jammed with the action, violence, and nerve-jangling tension readers have come to expect. Back in the corrupt town where h...

All those beguiled by the work of William Blake recognise the importance of the Bible for his poetic genius, whether as an object of criticism, or an inspiration. This book, the first substantial study for sixty years, attempts to locate Blake within...

Not for sale in Estonia! The eternal mystique of Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) stems largely from his practice of writing under "heteronyms". More than just nom de plumes, Pessoa's heteronyms came with distinct biographies, careers,...

Unlike most of Mahasweta Devi's works, which focus on Bengali tribes and the rural dispossessed, the four stories collected in Bait are located in the urban and suburban criminal underworld, and form an unusual segment of Devi's oeuvre. The first s...

A corrupt African colonel has converted half his country's wealth into diamonds and smuggled them to a Manhattan safe house. Four upstanding citizens plan to rescue their new nation by stealing the diamonds back – with the help of a "specialist" – Pa...

"Bugs" are the insects we live alongside, necessary and unsettling; they're the fears, the ailments and spies that keep us wide awake at night. The stories in Antony Dunn's third collection range from the microscopic lives of parasitic worms to the l...

When Elaine Feinstein first read the poems of Marina Tsvetaeva in Russian in the 1960s, the encounter transformed her. "What drew me to her initially", she writes, "was the intensity of her emotions, and the honesty with which she exposed them". Her...

Fyodor Dostoevsky completed his final novel, "The Brothers Karamazov", in 1880. A work of universal appeal and significance, his exploration of good and evil immediately gained an international readership and today "remains harrowingly alive in the f...

"The Book with Twelve Tales" is a gallimaufry of stories: comic, frightening, exotic and magical. Here, in John Gallas's richly imagined narrative worlds, are the American gothic of Morten Mortenssen, the pig who eats his owners; the sexual folktale...