In "Air's Appearance", Jayne Elizabeth Lewis enlists her readers in pursuit of the elusive concept of atmosphere in literary works. She shows how diverse conceptions of air in the eighteenth century converged in British fiction, producing the modern...

Although "Disposable Camera" is Janet Foxman's first book-length collection, one would not know it given the wry sophistication of the poems found within. The notion of the disposable camera permeates the entire book, where Foxman considers the insta...

An actor's deepest desire is to be understood. But when asked to pronounce such words as "chanson", "phantasime", or "quaestor", many otherwise unflappable actors can be rendered speechless. "The Eloquent Shakespeare" aims to untie those tongues a...

Not for sale in Estonia! When Marcel Schwob published "The Book of Monelle" in French in 1894, it immediately became the unofficial bible of the French Symbolist movement, admired by such contemporaries as Stephane Mallarme, Alfred Jarry and Andre...

John F. Deane is a vital and generous presence in Irish poetry. New and "Selected Poems" gathers work from Deane's five previous Carcanet collections, alongside a new sequence, "Snow Falling on Chestnut Hill". Written with an inquiring intelligence,...

"The King James Bible" stands at "the sublime summit of literature in English", sharing the honour only with Shakespeare, Harold Bloom contends in the opening pages of this illuminating literary tour. Distilling the insights acquired from a significa...

Gustave Flaubert, one of the key figures in literary modernism, is famous for his determined pursuit of stylistic perfection. This notably involved the attempt to eliminate from his prose all sorts of assonances, consonances, and repetitions, in larg...

In this beautifully translated memoir Jacques Reda chooses the height of the mirabelle season in Lorraine for a long-delayed visit to his home town, Luneville. For France's distinguished "poete flaneur" – motorized for such occasions on his antiquate...

Programmable memories, fatherless reproduction, nano-tech implants, amphibian-powered scar treatment, full body modification, brain-scanning lie-detectors, inter-species reproduction, self-determining synthetic "green goo"... Which of these would yo...

The characters in Jane Rogers' first short story collection are each blessed with an unwavering conviction. Buoyed up on self-belief, they enthuse, take calculated risks, and refuse to be deterred by the odds stacked against them. But just as Rogers'...