Kohima, 2007. A young man has just been gunned down in cold blood – the latest casualty in the conflict that has brutalized the people of Nagaland, in the neglected northeastern corner of India. Rich in culture and history, "Bitter Wormwood" traces t...

When Beauty's father steals a rose from the Beast's garden, the Beast demands his life in return – unless Beauty comes to live in his castle. Will Beauty ever be able to see that the Beast's ugliness is only skin deep?

In this novel by celebrated South African writer Zakes Mda, Kristin Uys, a tough magistrate who lives alone with her cat in the Roodepoort district of Johannesburg, goes on a one-woman crusade to wipe out prostitution in her town. Her reasons are per...

"The Bay Psalm Book" was the first book to be printed in North America, twenty years after the arrival of the Pilgrim Fathers in Massachusetts. Now extremely rare – only eleven copies survive – it is also the most expensive book in the world, fetchin...

In the wildly entertaining novel "The Blue Soda Siphon", the narrator unexpectedly finds himself back in the world of his childhood: Switzerland in the 1940s. He returns to his childhood home to find his parents frantic because their son is missing....

Mahasweta Devi is one of India's foremost literary figures, a prolific and best-selling author in Bengali of short fiction and novels, and a deeply political social activist who has been working in marginalized communities for decades. "Breast Storie...

Martina Evans's fifth collection moves from the impact of American culture and rock'n'roll in the 1960s on her home town, a small Catholic community in rural Ireland, to life in contemporary London. Her poems spring from memories, anecdotes of local...

Short story writers often say that, for maximum dramatic effect, you should arrive fashionably late to a scene. After years of living in the literary wilderness, it seems the short story's own moment has finally arrived. The last twelve months have m...

From modest beginnings in 1988, when it was a listings newsletter, "Poetry London" has developed into one of the UK's leading poetry magazines. Do not be mislead by its name: "Poetry London" has the same relation to London as "The New Yorker" has to...

Computers are changing. Soon the silicon chip will seem like a clunky antique amid the bounty of more exotic processes on offer. Robots are changing too; material evolution and swarm intelligence are creating a new generation of devices that will div...