At first, Robinson Crusoe finds himself with little hope of survival when he is shipwrecked on a deserted tropical island. He begins to write in a journal of his fight to live, recording every incredible step forward and each miserable setback that b...

In "Red House", her third collection, Sasha Dugdale evokes the ghosts and presences that flit about on the margins of our lives. She finds them at the edge of towns where superstores and allotments blur an older landscape, in Europe where emigrants l...

In this major collection of his essays, Alberto Manguel, whom George Steiner has called "the Casanova of reading", argues that the activity of reading, in its broadest sense, defines our species. "We come into the world intent on finding narrative in...

Katherine Larson is the winner of the 2010 Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition. With "Radial Symmetry", she has created a transcendent body of poems that flourish in the liminal spaces that separate scientific inquiry from empathic knowledge, as...

"Red Rover" is both the name of a children's game and a formless spirit, a god of release and permission, called upon in the course of that game. The "red rover" is also a thread of desire, and a clue to the forces of love and antipathy that shape ou...

"We got to talking" – so David Antin begins the introduction to "Radical Coherency", embarking on the pursuit that has marked much of his breathless, brilliantly conversational work. For the past forty years, whether spoken under the guise of perform...

With the economy of proverbs and the psychological insight of a novel, Toon Tellegen's acclaimed sequence "Raptors" depicts the dynamics of a family held hostage by the mood-swings and histrionics of a father, a figure both comic and terrifying, grot...

"Rough music" is the old English name for a custom of public scapegoating. This is a book full of disturbing musical echoes, in which brilliant renewals of carol, charm, folksong and ballad explore themes of violence, loss and belonging. Fiona Sampso...

"Romey's Order" is an indelible sequence of poems voiced by an invented (and inventive) boy-speaker called Romey, set alongside a river in the South Carolina lowcountry. As the word-furious eye and voice of these poems, Romey urgently records – and...

Teasing, funny and celebratory – "Rays" is a wry and tender lover's gift. Continuing Richard Price's virtuosic playfulness of form, it improvises on the formal shape of sonnet and canzone, charging them with the energy of blues and rock, glimpsing na...