The Ghost Road won the 1995 Booker Prize.

    From the heartwrenching times young Frank spent in the slums of Ireland to his struggle for the American dream as an impoverished immigrant, readers can now have both of McCourt's remarkable memoirs conveniently combined in one elegant package.

    Three of the author's most popular works — widely admired for their satiric wit, subtlety, and perfection of style — brilliantly re-create the provincial world of the early-19th-century English countryside, focusing, respectively, on husband-hunting mothers and daughters, the humbling of proud lovers, and the return of a once-rejected lover.

    Only his widow lives there now, grudgingly looked after by a self-serving couple, still complying with the rigid patterns laid down by Charles and his mother. But after her husband's death Madeleine begins to break free from his lingering domination. When her two grown-up children return, each seeking her help, Madeleine discovers in her new independence the ability to offer them the love she has never been able to express before.

    Subscribing to Virginia Woolf's own belief in the fluidity and elusiveness of identity, Lee comes at her subject from a multitude of perspectives, producing a richly layered portrait of the writer and the woman that leaves all of her complexities and contradictions intact.  Such issues as sexual abuse, mental illness, and suicide are brought into balance with the immensity of her literary achievement, her heroic commitment to her work, her generosity and wit,  and her sanity and strength. It is not often that biography offers the satisfactions of great fiction--but this is clearly what Hermione Lee has achieved. Accessible, intelligent, and deeply pleasurable to read, her Virginia Woolf will undoubtedly take its place as the standard biography for years to come.

    A passing encounter, an almost unnoticed gesture, a brief pause--Berger observes and transcribes them, and in so doing uncovers the extraordinary heart of the ordinary. This collection of stories brings a richly imagined landscape of elusive and ephemeral moments into eloquent existence.

    His work, employing traditional and modernist elements in individual poems and open sequences, deals in a range of subjects from the most intense and psychic privacy to political satire and social commentary, from love and the enabling feminine to metaphysical speculation in a variety of earthly settings. Kinsella is a city poet. Born in Dublin in 1928, he attended University College, and entered the Irish Civil Service, but resigned from the Department of Finance in 1965 for a career in poetry in the United States. He published from the beginning with the Dolmen Press, later co-publishing his poetry and translations with Oxford University Press. His translations from the Irish include the Iron-Age prose epic "The Tain" and "Poems of the Dispossessed: 1600-1900". He is editor of the "New Oxford Book of Irish Verse".

    Encompassing radio plays, and pieces for stage and screen, this volume explores familiar Carter preoccupations: myth and fairy tale; domestic murder and the violence underlying everyday life, and the rebellious victims of the repressive society.It includes the screenplays for "The Magic Toyshop" and "The Company of Wolves"; a draft for an opera of Virginia Woolf's "Orlando"; and reworkings for radio of "Puss in Boots" and "Dracula".

    The only thing that matters to Scrooge is business, and making money. But on Christmas Eve three spirits come to visit him. They take him travelling on the wings of the night to see the shadows of Christmas past, present, and future - and Scrooge learns a lesson that he will never forget.

    The most revealing object of this focus, asserts Maggie Berg, is Catherine's diary, written in the blank spaces of culturally revered tomes and reflecting Catherine's oppression by and rebellion against a patriarchal society. Wuthering Heights, Berg avers, "offers a striking demonstration of how patriarchal ideology can issue in the abuse of women and children, and, more importantly, it demonstrates women's creative ways of resisting oppression." In discussions centering on the historical, literary, and critical contexts of the novel, Berg points to its enduring ability to agitate readers, to seize the popular imagination, to meld Gothic with realistic genres in ways that keep eroticism and domestic violence ever present and the novel's characters ever elusive. Also included is a seven-part reading of the novel that focuses on individual characters. Lockwood, Joseph, Nelly, and Edgar Linton, for example, are shown to prefer being inside societal institutions, whereas Catherine, Heathcliff, and Cathy intentionally position themselves outside the social mainstream; Catherine's diary is shown to be paradigmatic of the novel itself, a subversive statement against the repressions of Victorian society. A conclusion, evaluating visual aids to Wuthering Heights furthers readers' appreciation of the novel, as do a detailed chronology, notes, and bibliography.

    It entails a Remake, to capture not facts but the contents of those facts, the feelings of a war-time child, the textures of her clothing, the tastes and smells, the tones and the touch of her mother, the felt absence of her father, and the gradual transformation into womanhood. The facts are simple: birth in Geneva; bilingual childhood in Brussels, then London and Liverpool; work in Intelligence at the Bletchley Park decoding centre during the war; marriage; Oxford; London; literary journalism; the emergence of the novelist. But what do facts add up to? Remake is an autobiographical novel with a difference. It uses life material to compose a third-person fiction, transformed in an experiment whose tensions are those of memory - distorting and partial - checked by a rigorous and sceptical language which probes and finds form underlying the wayward impulses and passions of the subject. Remake is a fascinating and original book by one of our finest modern novelists.

    Daniel Feeld, a successful screenwriter, is in physical crisis: he is dying. His latest screenplay is being butchered by a patrician director who favours his mistress-star in every scene. But, worse than this, Feeld more than half-imagines that he hears people everywhere speaking his dialogue. Fact and fiction collide. Daniel starts drinking heavily and his real life begins to mirror that of his own screenplay character. Cold Lazarus is set 400 years in the future. Feeld's cryogenically preserved head is being commercially exploited. An American media tycoon realizes the astronomical ratings potential of a TV show in which the 'real' twentieth-century story of Daniel Feeld's life, via his chemically induced memories, can be fed to millions of viewers. Whilst Daniel's 'memories' ebb and flow and the moguls fight over him, a dissident organization of Luddites, RON (Reality or Nothing), seeks to return to what it believes to have been a gentler age - the twentieth century.

    Here are 200 irresistible love letters from over the centuries, love letters both historic and fictional, love letters by poets and by princes, love letters enchanting, tragic, comic, superbly selected, beautifully printed, conveniently portable, to have with you wherever and whenever you're in the mood for love.

    Escaping the drabness of post-war England for the freedoms and excitements of bohemian Paris, he started to write and publish poems as a member of the expatriate community which also included Samuel Beckett and Henry Miller. He then returned to London and participated in the cultural revolution of the sixties, writing song lyrics, inventing the poster poem and appearing at literary happenings. More recently he has devoted himself to a new English version of Homer's Iliad - 'the best translation of Homer since Pope's' (New York Review of Books) - three instalments of which have now been published by Faber. Selected Poems gives the reader, for the first time, a proper idea of Christopher Logue's lyrical gifts, as well as his irrepressible outspokenness and sense of artistic adventure. It contains fine poems which have been out of print for too long and others now regarded as classics.

    A nautical tour-de-force featuring tales by some of the outstanding writers of the genre, including:Jonathan SwiftCharles DickensDaniel DefoeRobert Louis StevensonEdage Allan PoeHerman MelvilleFrancois RabelaisJules VerneDante AlighieriGiovanni BoccaccioChristopher ColumbusSir Walter Raleigh

    Examining Austen's literary works; her letters - in the context of those of other Regency women; as well as contemporary texts such as television adaptations of her work, Jane Austen and Representations of Regency England reconstructs the breadth of Jane Austen's writing. It also examines: * her representations of dandyism and masculine identities * the events of the Regency crisis of 1810-12 * the way in which Austen engaged in topical debates such as healthcare in both Emma and Persuasion.

    She represents herself arguing forcefully, learnedly, and wittingly with her accusers, continually demonstrating their theological errors and her own refusal to be the traditional silent woman in public debate on religion. As a spiritual autobiography, a historical document, and a carefully crafted polemic, this work gives new insight into Reformation politics and society in England. After Askew was burned at the stake in 1546, her work was immediately published by John Bale who wove his own historical commentary with her text to "elucidate" her role as a Protestant martyr. Askew's work also exists in several early editions without Bale's commentary, most importantly in John Foxe's Acts and Monuments (1563).This volume includes two texts: the first edition of Askew's Examinations with Bale's Elucidation, and Foxe's edition uninterrupted version of her work. This book will have strong appeal for scholars and students of English Renaissance literature, Reformation history, and women's history.

    From the author of DOMESTIC MANNERS OF THE AMERICANS.