In her foreword to "All The Poems" (2003) Muriel Spark wrote, "Although most of my life has been devoted to fiction, I have always thought of myself as a poet. I do not write 'poetic' prose, but feel that my outlook on life and my perceptions of even...

Ezra Pound's "Posthumous Cantos" collects unpublished pages of his great poem, drawn from manuscripts held in the archive at Yale's Beinecke Library and elsewhere. They are assembled by Pound's Italian translator, the critic and scholar Massimo Bacig...

Edited and annotated by leading Proust scholar William Carter, "In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower" is the second volume of one of the twentieth century's great literary triumphs. It was this volume that won the Prix Goncourt in 1919, affirming P...

"Tip" Marugg's "The Roar of Morning" has been widely praised as an intensely personal, often dreamlike literary masterpiece that balances Caribbean mysticism with the magical realism of Latin American fiction while reflecting the Calvinist sensibilit...

Shuntaro Tanikawa has been the most inventive modern Japanese poet, ever since he published "Two Billion Light Years of Solitude" (1952), his first book, aged twenty one. Undamaged by Japan's post-War trauma, he took up the language and ran with it....

In late November 1623, Edward Blount finally took delivery at his bookshop at the sign of the Black Bear near St Paul's of a book that had been long in the making. "Master William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies" was the first collec...

The locations of Shakespeare's plays range from Greece, Turkey and Syria to England, and they range in time from 1000 BC to the early Tudor age. He never set a play explicitly in Elizabethan London, which he and his audience inhabited, but always in...

When Falstaff calls upon the sky to rain potatoes in "The Merry Wives of Windsor", he is highlighting the late sixteenth-century belief that the exotic vegetable, recently introduced to England from the Americas, was an aphrodisiac. In "Romeo and Jul...

"I address you across more than three thousand years, you who live at the conjunction of the Fish and the Water-carrier", speaks Daedalus, an artisan, inventor, and designer born into an utterly alien family of heroes who value acts of war above all...

Eduardo Lalo is one of the most vital and unique voices of Latin American literature, but his work is relatively little known in the English-speaking world. That changes now: this masterful translation of his most celebrated novel, "Simone" – which w...