"Notes from the Dream House" is a 'best of' selection of reviews by the celebrated Observer film critic Philip French. Spanning half the history of cinema, his reviews cover a great variety of films, from westerns and gangsters to art movies and musi...

<p>"Beowulf" tells the story of a Scandinavian hero who defeats three evil creatures – a huge, cannibalistic ogre named Grendel, Grendel's monstrous mother, and a dragon – and then dies, mortally wounded during his last enco...

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...

When a meteor crashes into greaser Rockabilly's backyard, a ripple of strange events ensues. The tattoo of a pin-up girl on his back comes to life and begins to exert her murderous control over the suburb in which he lives. His precocious teenage nei...

"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...

"The devil is at our heels... at the heart of the city's aberrations". Picture a lost city in northern England during the momentous winter of 1978 – the final winter before the onset of the Thatcher era, at the peak of the punk rock movement. A notor...

Praised in recent years as a "calculating, improvisatory, essential poet" by Daisy Fried in the New York Times, and as "the foremost poet-critic of our time" by Craig Dworkin, Charles Bernstein is a leading voice in American poetry".Near/Miss", Berns...

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...

Thomas Bernhard's "Old Masters" has been called his "most enjoyable novel" by the New York Review of Books. It's a wild satire that takes place almost entirely in front of Tintoretto's "White-Bearded Man", on display in the Kunsthistorisches Museum,...

Iraqi poet Salah Al Hamdani has lived a remarkable life. The author of some forty books in French and Arabic, he began life as a child laborer, with little or no education. As a political prisoner under Saddam Hussein, he learned to read and write Ar...