The stories range from the sweetly heartwarming to the often surprising and make a uniquely memorable and inspiring gift to animal lovers around the world.

    His colleagues are an assortment of misfits, including Prendy (plagued by doubts) and captain Grimes, who is always in the soup (or just plain drunk). Then Sports Day arrives, and with it the delectable Margot Beste-Chetwynde, floating on a scented breeze. As the farce unfolds and the young run riot, no one is safe, least of all Paul. Taking its title from Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Evelyn Waugh's first, funniest novel immediately caught the ear of the public with his account of an ingénu abroad in the decadent confusion of 1920s high society.

    From the author of My Song For Him Who Never Sang to Me and We Hardly See Each Other Any More, another intimate, illustrated collection of verse to share with those we love.

    It also reads like a fairytale of Sayle's own literary career. Like Harriet, he just seems to keep getting better - more supple, more confident and more violent. This is a funny, frightening book which is also refreshingly bonkers. In terms of technique it's a big step forward from his last novel, Overtaken. It's meticulously plotted and persuasive and even has a nice line in nature description. But every now and then old Alexei stops the action, puts on his boots and stamps all over someone. He is not shy about naming names. There's a pair of hateful children called the Yentob twins. There's a fraudulent South American guru-novelist called Paulho Puoncho. Sometimes it's hard to know what the target is. I couldn't, for instance, figure out what Warbird - a charity that rescues talking birds from war zones - was supposed to be. But somehow the more disproportionate and undeserved the anger is, the funnier it is; the gratuitous rants give the book an unpredictable, hectic pace.

    Yet Cummings could also be difficult, truculent, opinionated, wrong-headed, emotional, bigoted and egotistical. Dubbed by Ezra Pound as "Whitman's one living descendant," Cummings sang of himself and of America in a unique voice, as resonant now as it was a half-century ago. Charismatic and famous among the famous, Cummings always seemed to be in the right place at the right time, and was a major presence wherever he resided, whether in Cambridge, Europe or New York. He counted some of the most important artists of his time as friends: Pound, Hemingway, Dylan Thomas and many more. "Sawyer-Lau�anno emphasizes the relation of the private man to his work, offering fresh insights into the grand optical arrangement of Cummings's books."--Starred Library Journal ReviewbrbrFor nearly half a century, the personal papers, journals and diaries of Edward Estlin Cummings were kept from public view. These documents reveal far more about the inner life of the famous poet and painter than has ever been known. Now, noted biographer Christopher Sawyer-Lau�anno presents the first, definitive, revelatory life story of E.E. Cummings (1894 1962), an American original. brbr"Well-researched, comprehensive, and essential to understanding the artist and the artistry."--Starred Kirkus ReviewsbrbrFor E.E. Cummings#58; A Biography, the author had unprecedented access toall of Cummings's papers-anguished diary entries, reflections on consultations with two psychoanalysts, an autobiographical novel, and a carefully prepared manuscript containing more than one hundred blatantly erotic poems. brbrIn the words of William Corbett, author of Boston Vermont and Don't Think Look, "E.E. Cummings, Yankee individualist and, rare for an American poet, satirist is here in full. This means warts and all, but Sawyer-Lau�anno has not come to judge. In this readable and absorbing life he has paid Cummings the honor of clear-eyed candor." Christopher Sawyer-Lau�anno paints a full and memorable portrait of this extraordinary American poet.

    Included here is some of the most celebrated verse in modern literature-”The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “Gerontion,” “The Waste Land,” “The Hollow Men,” and “Ash Wednesday”-as well as many other fine selections from Eliot’s early work.

    Millions of fans from Montreal to Miami and Edmonton to Anaheim attend NHL games leach year, millions more watch on TV and the league pays its best players multi-million annual salaries.Over the course of its first century, the NHL's fortunes have ebbed and flowed. It has experienced setbacks and triumphs and innumerable crises. The league has awarded many franchises only to see some of them falter, fail and fold. The board of governors - which has included rich eccentrics and at least one future convict - has sometimes been fractured by men who loathed each other. How on earth has the NHL survived? The answer lies in the remarkable fact that it has had only five presidents and one commissioner. Two of these chiefs were stop-gaps. For the balance of league's ninety-plus years, four men have shaped and guided its fortunes and controlled the tough, hard-nosed, sometimes unruly owners who constituted the board of governors.      This is the story of two perpetual struggles -- the one on the ice and the one going on behind the scenes to keep the whole enterprise afloat. D'Arcy Jenish was granted unprecedented access to previously unpublished league files, including revelatory minutes of board meetings, and conducted dozens of hours of interviews with league executives, including commissioner Gary Bettman and former president John Ziegler, as well as well as owners, coaches, general managers and player representatives. He now reveals for the first time the true story behind some of the most significant events of the contemporary era.     This is a definitive, revelatory chonicle that no serious hockey fan will want to be without.

    

    Raif is a stalled academic, as uncertain of the past as he is the future, whose girlfriend is about to move in. They meet by chance, nothing important is said, yet Iris turns away and starts to run. She is running from what this encounter has woken in her. In the City of Love's Sleep is a contemporary fable about what it means to fall in love in middle age. It charts the steps two people take towards one another and what it means to have taken those steps before.

    What results is a whimsical anthology that brings to mind the challenges of just being human and fitting into a world that sometimes feels like a tight squeeze.

    Everything you need to hear, but already know.

    Then there's the story of the story, and there's no arguing with that. -#6There are few things in life I am sure of.I am sure that books have the answer.I am sure that lightbulbs on string are dancing. I am sure that well-lit basements hold the songs of all of us.--On 6th & 7th October 2015, author Jen Campbell wrote 100 Poems in 48 hours to raise money for The Book Bus - a charity which funds mobile libraries across Africa, Ecuador and India. These poems were made into a limited edition pamphlet & you can also read them over here: http://100poemchallenge.blogspot.co.uk/

    It is a love letter, a journey of struggles, and a beautiful journey. Unconditional love spills out of every page, from a deep well of beautiful love unlike anything else in this world. "As long as I'm alive, you will always have fresh roses waiting for you on your dresser." Put on some music, do some self care, and let this book be a gentle embrace to your soul.

    That the marriage should fail and poor Lilia die tragically are only to be expected. But that Lilia should have had a baby - and that the baby should be raised as an Italian! - are matters requiring immediate correction by Philip Herriton, his dour sister Harriet, and their well-meaning friend Miss Abbott.

    Each anthology in the Staying Alive trilogy has 500 poems to touch the heart, stir the mind and fire the spirit. These books have been enormously popular with readers, especially as gift books and bedside companions. The poems - by writers from many parts of the world - have emotional power, intellectual edge and playful wit. This new pocketbook selection of 100 essential poems from the trilogy is a Staying Alive travel companion (also available as an e-book). As well as selecting favourite poems from the trilogy - readers' and writers' choices as well as his own favourites - editor Neil Astley provides background notes on the poets and poems. This format makes it even more suitable as a gift book for all those people you're sure would love modern poetry if only they were familiar with these kinds of poems. These essential poems are all about being human, being alive and staying alive: about love and loss; fear and longing; hurt and wonder; war and death; grief and suffering; birth, growing up and family; time, ageing and mortality; memory, self and identity; faith, hope and belief; acceptance of inadequacy and making do - all of human life in a hundred highly individual, universal poems.