"The Dancing Other" takes readers to France and Martinique to reveal the struggles of people who belong both places, but never quite feel at home in either. Suzanne Dracius tells the story of Rehvana, a woman who feels she is too black to fit in when...

Not for sale in Estonia! Honore de Balzac's "Treatise on Modern Stimulants" is a meditation on five stimulants – tea, sugar, coffee, alcohol and tobacco – by an author very conscious of the fact that his gargantuan output of work was driven by an e...

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times... Set in London and Paris, "A Tale of Two Cities" paints a story of economic and political unrest at the time of the French Revolution. It remains one of Dicken's most popular books.

The much-loved tales from "The Thousand and One Nights" first appeared in English translation in the early nineteenth century. The popularity of these ancient and beguiling tales set against the backdrop of Baghdad, a city of wealth and peace, stoked...

"Walden. Yesterday I came here to live". That entry from the journal of Henry David Thoreau, and the intellectual journey it began, would by themselves be enough to place Thoreau in the American pantheon. His attempt to "live deliberately" in a small...

A charming memento of the Victorian era's literary colossus, "The Daily Charles Dickens" is a literary almanac for the ages. Tenderly and irreverently anthologized by Dickens scholar James Kincaid, this collection mines the British author's beloved n...

Receiving a call from the State Department that her daughter Pearl has been protesting global violence by chaining herself to a flagpole at the American embassy in Dublin and refusing to eat, liberal New Yorker and single mother Maria Meyers heads to...

Guyanese-British poet Fred D'Aguiar's poetry has been shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. His new book wonderfully recreates moments of his and our wider history, making inclusions where exclusions have occurred before.

John F. Deane's poetry of Christian belief in a decisively secular age explores how redemption and renewal might emerge. He writes in the sincere, troubled, wide-awake tradition of Gerard Manley Hopkins and R. S. Thomas. Like theirs, his concerns are...

Not for sale in the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic! For "The Pied Piper", Czech writer Viktor Dyk found his muse in the much retold medieval Saxon legend of the villainous, pipe-playing rat-catcher. Dyk uses the tale as a loose frame for hi...