Told is about the art of story, not the science. It defines the twenty great principles of storytelling and then shows how they work by weaving them into 30 illustrated short stories that vary in format from poetry to screenplay. From genre to premi...

"Twenty Contemporary New Zealand Poets" is the first anthology in decades to present to British readers the remarkable freshness and vitality of New Zealand poetry. Starting in the mid-1980s, it captures turning points in the work of Allen Curnow and...

The fourth volume of Frederic Raphael's notebooks, "Ticks and Crosses" covers the years 1976 to 1978 with the sharp wit and provocative intelligence that made the earlier books an acclaimed success. Raphael observes the inner workings of film studios...

In this collection of essays, Ashis Nandy uses the metaphor of the future – imagined utopias, conceptions of cultural possibilities, social critiques of things to come – to redefine the present. Nandy's effort is to demonstrate that, in a world incre...

"Third Day" is a selection from the poems Grey Gowrie has written between 1958 and the present. At the centre of the book is the sequence "The Domino Hymn: Poems from Harefield", first published to great acclaim in 2005. This work draws on the best p...

The six sequences of "There Is an Anger that Moves" travel from Jamaica to England and back. A mother's heart is broken; men fall in love secretly; people dance until they die. Religion haunts these disbelieving poems which move sometimes to the meas...

Dick Davis's seventh collection contains poems as intelligent and graceful as ever – and as immediate in their impact, as rewarding when savoured at leisure. Their complexities engage rather than bemuse the reader as Davis addresses subjects as vario...

"Twelfth Night" is one of Shakespeare's funniest plays and also one of his most romantic. A young noblewoman, Viola, shipwrecked in a foreign land and separated from her twin brother, dresses as a man in order to enter the service of Orsino, duke of...

Opening with a death in winter, this is a tender work of mourning which is wonderfully moving but never dispiriting. Elaine Feinstein uses the remembered words of a much-loved husband – sometimes affectionate, sometimes querulous – to invoke his soli...

"Following Looking Through Letterboxes", her first collection (2002), Caroline Bird was acclaimed as a vivid and precocious new talent. "Trouble Came to the Turnip" confirms her originality as she strikes out again in new directions, taking nothing f...