Here's Parker – planning to steal the entire payroll of an Air Force base in upstate New York, with help from Marty Fusco, fresh out of the pen, and a smart aleck finance clerk named Devers. Holed up with family in a scrappy little town, the hoisters...

Bank robberies should run like clockwork, right? If your name's Parker, you expect nothing less. Until, that is, one of your partners gets too greedy for his own good. The four-way split following a job leaves too small a take for George Uhl, who beg...

Newly famous in the wake of the publication of her groundbreaking "Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas", Gertrude Stein delivered her "Narration" lectures to packed audiences at the University of Chicago in 1935. Stein had not been back to her home coun...

Available for the first time as an independent work, David Grene's legendary translation of "Oedipus the King" renders Sophocles' Greek into cogent, vivid, and poetic English for a new generation to savor. Over the years, Grene and Lattimore's "Compl...

Muriel Spark in the autobiography traces how one of the great modern writers in English emerged. Beginning with luminous evocations of a 1920s childhood in Edinburgh and memories of school, taught by the original Miss Jean Brodie, Spark recalls her f...

What does a library say about the mind of its owner? How do books map the intellectual interests, curiosities, tastes, and personalities of their readers? What does the collecting of books have in common with the practice of architecture? "Unpacking...

For a hundred years, "Poetry Review" has been at the heart of British literary life. Founded as "The Poetical Gazette" in May 1909, it has become the country's most widely read poetry magazine, playing a vital role in giving readers access to a gener...

"Smoke and Lilacs" is full of play and shadow, whispered intimations of mortality and glances of humour, elegiac lyric playing against steely classicism, an easy modern vernacular eliding with timeless grace. Sibum's meditative narratives move betwee...

C. K. Stead's "Collected Poems" is a milestone in English-language poetry: half a century's work from fourteen collections, along with early uncollected poems. A New Zealander, Stead's family connections in that country start in the early 1830s, and...

James Sutherland-Smith has lived and worked in Serbia and Montenegro through the difficult transitions. Old states fragmented and a new Balkan political landscape emerged. He writes, not as an observer, but from within cultures rebuilding after polit...