Ros Barber's second book forms a meditation on human loss; it is a more personal and autobiographical collection than her first, described by Neil Rollinson as "an honest, unflinching and hugely satisfying debut". Sarah Law described her as "a 'tradi...

In hospital for a scan, Jon Glover became fascinated by the ways in which Magnetic Resonance Imaging creates pictures of the hidden processes of the nervous system. It could express what is already written within the human body, in all organic life a...

MUDs are Multi-User Dimensions, online worlds created by language alone. In a collection that throws Irish poetry into the electronic age, John Redmond explores the Internet and car culture, MUDs and moods. New forms of post-industrial community enab...

Bei Dao, described by Michael Hofmann as "one of the great poets of our time", has gained international acclaim for his haunting interior poetic landscapes. Now he brings to the essay the elliptical precision of his poetry, combined with a diarist's...

China's tradition of rivers-and-mountains poetry is the earliest and most extensive literary engagement with the idea of wilderness. David Hinton traces the tradition in his concise introductions to the nineteen poets featured here, who included virt...

Wordsworth's "meanest flower that blows" suggested to him "thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears". The lyrics, elegies, songs and ghazals in Mimi Khalvati's new book pay attention to things the imagination generally disregards, an attention t...

Few novelists have taken films as seriously, or been as closely involved in so many aspects of the film business, as Graham Greene. His experience included producing, performing, script-writing and adaptation. And twenty years before he wrote the scr...

"Marabou", Jane Yeh's first book of poems, is a meditation on the nature of artifice, and on the self. Her snapshots freeze fraught instants in the lives of a broad cast of characters: the horror movie mummy, an Elizabethan shoemaker, a flock of Cumb...

In "Merchant Prince" Thomas McCarthy presents two groups of poems, set largely in Cork, and a novella set in Italy, in the period from 1769 and 1831. They tell the story of Nathaniel Murphy: his training for the priesthood, the loss of his virginity...

This is a story of life in the age of Mandelson: politician, aesthete, director of communication. Is it possible to be happy in the age of Mandelson? Moderniser, trouble-shooter, king-maker, architect of New Labour, power-broker, agent, asset, conf...