What happens when a little orphan girl is forced to live with her cold and frightening grandfather? The heartwarming answer has engaged children for more than a century, both on the page and on the screen. Johanna Spyri's beloved story offers youngst...

"The House of Clay" is Peter McDonald's fourth book of poems, containing lyrics which combine intense resonance of narrative and imagery with powerful formal concentration. Autobiographical material, founded on a childhood in Belfast during the troub...

While England is threatened by the Earl of Northumberland, Young Prince Hal cavorts in London's taverns, accompanied by the dissolute, entertaining Falstaff and his band of rogues. Much of this play's tension involves Prince Hal and Falstaff, as the...

The first metropolis to be depicted in Australian literature was Hell: before cities existed in Australia, Francis McNamara, the convict poet, described the infernal one populated by those who tormented him and his fellow prisoners. Sentenced in 1832...

A striking performer of her own poems, Ros Barber has the gift of recreating her voice – and the voices of others – on the page. The poems in this debut collection demonstrate her wide range in form and subject and her skill in highlighting the extra...

Humphrey Jennings (1907-1950) has long been recognised as one of Britain's greatest film directors. His studies of national life, and particularly his three war time films "Listen to Britain", "Fires Were Started", and "A Diary for Timothy", invaluab...

Houses and gardens, remembered or imagined, dominate Neil Powell's sixth Carcanet collection: his grandmother's home in Chelsea, a magical childhood garden in the Surrey hills, an abandoned, fog-shrouded building on the East Anglian coast. There is a...

Not for sale in Estonia! The artist Giorgio de Chirico's novel, "Hebdomeros" is a dream-like book of situations and landscapes reminiscent of his paintings. In his introduction John Ashbery calls the book "the finest work of Surrealist fiction", no...

The "Annotated Shakespeare" series allows readers to fully understand and enjoy the rich plays of the world's greatest dramatist. One of the most frequently read and performed of all stage works, Shakespeare's "Hamlet" is unsurpassed in its complexit...

Gabriele d'Annunzio (1863-1938), the most influential and controversial Italian poet of the last hundred years, published his masterpiece "Halcyon" in 1903. It is a carefully organized sequence of eighty-eight lyrics which, to gain their full effect,...