Literature & Poetry

Published in association with the Royal Shakespeare Company, and illustrated with contemporary images from Shakespeare's time as well as photographs of RSC performances, this book explores the poet's life and the enduring legacy of his work.

This book explores Sir Angus Wilson's many faces as a writer and investigates the ways in which his literature depicts people who undergo a crisis and/or collapse of self-belief, and then have to find the courage to invent themselves anew.

From the author of The Empathy Exams comes a profound meditation on isolation, longing and the conflicts faced by all those who choose to tell true stories about the lives of others.

Franz Kafka died almost unacknowledged but he is now recognised as one of the greatest authors of the 20th century and the creator of some of modern literature's most unsettling and memorable images. This biography shows that this world was very much Kafka's own: his personal life was as complicated and troubled as anything in his books.

In this revealing collection of personal essays, renowned essayist, Phillip Lopate, shares his unique views on the big subjects of parenthood, marriage, sex, friendship, and 'the nail parings of daily life'. At turns funny, tender, and searingly honest, he searches with a cool eye for that elusive truth about himself and the world.

A poet and banker who knew everybody, Samuel Rogers (1763-1855) was a brilliant recorder of things said by his famous and powerful contemporaries, from Edmund Burke to Talleyrand, from Charles James Fox to the Duke of Wellington. He was all ears, very good at hearing what was said, and assiduous about ...

Love in a Life, Andrew Motion's sixth volume of poetry, marks a conspicuous development in the work of the founder of the modern Narrative School. Directness and a new colloquialism are wedded to Motion's distinctive obliquities in a volume where the idea of marriage governs the architecture of each poem and the book as a whole.

Randomly Moving Particles is built from two long poems that form its opening and close, connected by three shorter pieces. The title poem, in a kaleidoscope of compelling scenes, engages with subjects that include migration, placement, loss, space exploration and current British and American politics.

Zonal is an experiment in science-fictional and fantastic autobiography, with all of its poems taking their imaginative cue from the first season of The Twilight Zone (1959-1960), playing fast and loose with both their source material and their author's own life.

It contains love songs, work songs, songs about the pains and anxieties of existence, songs of consolation, songs about various kinds of spiritual quest and the realms of the mystical, and songs which deal with healing and reconciliation, both with the self and with others.

Ryuosuke Akutagawa was one of Japan's great writers. He lived through Japan's turbulent Taisho period, including the devastating 1923 earthquake, only to take his own life at the age of just thirty-five in 1927.

Inpsired by Akutagawa's stories, essays and letters, David Peace has fashioned an extraordinary novel of tales.

'They belong to each other in mood, in tone and by way of certain images and words that form a ricochet of echoes - not least the word "salt".' Mineral, eerie, sensory, the poems in the collection are experienced as encounters - some with the surety of daylight, others in dream-life - that refresh with the turning of each page.

Penned with a dexterous wit and a steady nerve, The Noise of a Fly is a mesmeric imagining of our later years by one of this country's most senior and celebrated writers.

'It is hard to think of many poets who can equal his combination of imaginative ambition, formal resource and range of tone .

The Armistice of 1918 brought ceasefire to the war on the Western Front, but 'the Great War' would not as hoped be 'the war to end all wars'.

The story of Scotland at war in the poetry of the time, in English, Gaelic and Scots, by servicemen, volunteers, and those on the home front.

Depicting the ravages of modern warfare through reported speech, redacted documents, and vivid evocations of place, this book includes poems that are moving and measured, delicate and clear-eyed, and bear witness to the futility of war and the suffering of those left behind.

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Arranged in three parts, Kant's Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write opens with Claire's most personal essays - reflections on a childhood divided between cultures, and between dueling models of womanhood. It is here, in these early years, that we see the seeds of Messud's inquiry into ...

We all need a bit of poetry in our lives - to inspire and to elevate. But what happens when poetry goes wrong and how bad can it get? Stephen Robins has scoured the anthologies of the world to collect together the most delightful examples of really awful poetry.

Poems about horses by the world's greatest poets.