It could not anticipate what was to come after, neither could it grasp what had happened in literary theory in the light of where it was to lead.

    With this brilliantly inventive collection, Ali Smith joins the campaign to save our public libraries and celebrate their true place in our culture and history.

    This richly varied collection of observation, fancy and fiction shows the London he knew so intimately at its best and worst - its streets, theatres, inns, pawnshops, law courts, prisons, omnibuses and the river Thames - in honest and visionary descriptions of everyday life and people. Through pen portraits that often anticipate characters from his great novels, we see the condemned man in his prison cell, garrulous matrons, vulgar young clerks and Scrooge-like bachelors, while Dickens's powers for social critique are never far from the surface, in unflinching depictions of the vast metropolis's forgotten citizens, from child workers to prostitutes. A startling mixture of humour and pathos, these Sketches reveal London as wonderful terrain for an extraordinary young writer.Sketches is a remarkable achievement, and looks towards Dickens's giant novels in its profusion of characters, its glimpses of surreal modernity and its limitless fund of pathos and comic invention.

    Book of Longing is Cohen’s eagerly awaited new collection of poems, following his highly acclaimed 1984 title, Book of Mercy, and his hugely successful 1993 publication, Stranger Music, a Globe and Mail national bestseller. Book of Longing contains erotic, playful, and provocative line drawings and artwork on every page, by the author, which interact in exciting and unexpected ways on the page with poetry that is timeless, meditative, and at times darkly humorous. The book brings together all the elements that have brought Leonard Cohen’s artistry with language worldwide recognition.From the Hardcover edition.

    'Two on a Tower' is Hardy's ninth novel and contains perhaps his most complete treatment of the theme of love across the class and age divide, and also the fullest expression of his fascination with astronomy and science. This story of passion and sacrifice begins when Lady Viviette Constantine discovers the handsome young astronomer Swithin St Cleeve on the lonely tower on her estate.Starring Maggie O'Neill as Lady Constantine, Blake Ritson as Swithin St Cleeve, Conrad Nelson as Parson Torkingham and with Amy Humphreys, Stephen Tomlin, Pauline Jefferson, Richard Heap and Carter Dowland. Directed by Stefan Escreet.

    This selection of De Quincey's writings includes the title piece - his most famous work - as well as On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth, The English Mail-Coach, and the Suspiria de Profundis.

    The wardens have given the boy a light workload because he shows talent as a runner. But if he wins the national long-distance running competition as everyone is counting on him to do, Smith will only vindicate the very system and society that has locked him up. “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner” has long been considered a masterpiece on both the page and the silver screen. Adapted for film by Sillitoe himself in 1962, it became an instant classic of British New Wave cinema.    In “Uncle Ernest,” a middle-aged furniture upholsterer traumatized in World War II, now leads a lonely life. His wife has left him, his brothers have moved away, and the townsfolk treat him as if he were a ghost. When the old man finally finds companionship with two young girls whom he enjoys buying pastries for at a café, the local authorities find his behavior morally suspect. “Mr. Raynor the School Teacher” delves into a different kind of isolation—that of a voyeuristic teacher who fantasizes constantly about the women who work in a draper’s shop across the street. When his students distract him from his lustful daydreams, Mr. Raynor becomes violent.   The six stories that follow in this iconic collection continue to cement Alan Sillitoe’s reputation as one of Britain’s foremost storytellers, and a champion of the condemned, the oppressed, and the overlooked.   This ebook features an illustrated biography of Alan Sillitoe including rare images from the author’s estate.

    It replaced reverence with skepticism and Strachey's wit, iconoclasm, and narrative skill liberated the biographical enterprise. His portraits of Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold, and General Gordon changed perceptions of the Victorians for a generation. Lytton Strachey's biographical essays on four "eminent Victorians" dropped an explosive charge on Victorian England when the book was published in 1918. This edition is unique in being fully annotated and in drawing on the full range of Strachey's manuscript materials and literary remains.

    More than a decade later, death has not slowed his production.This collection is selected from an archive of verse that the author left to be published after his death. It includes poems of love and sex, advice to so-called losers (as he once was) to have confidence in themselves (as he did), gambling laments and humbling poems accepting his own imminent ultimate full stop.

    If a novelist's first duty is to tell the truth, then the author has done his duty with unflinching courage. Intimacy gives us the thoughts and memories of a middle-aged writer on the night before he walks out on his wife and two young sons for of a younger woman. A very modern man, without political convictions or religious beliefs, he vaguely hopes to find fulfillment in sexual love. No one is spared Kureishi's cold, penetrating gaze or lacerating pen. "She thinks she's feminist, but she's just bad-tempered," the unnamed narrator says of his abandoned wife. A male friend advises him, "Marriage is a battle, a terrible journey, a season in hell, and a reason for living." At the heart of Intimacy is this terrible paradox: "You don't stop loving someone just because you hate them." Male readers will wince with recognition at the narrator's hatred of entrapment and domesticity, and his implacable urge towards freedom, escape, even loneliness. Female readers may find it a truly horrific revelation. Kureishi is only telling it like it is, in staccato sentences of pinpoint accuracy. By far the author's best yet: a brilliant, devastating work. --Christopher Hart, Amazon.co.uk

    These texts are characterized by a startling and macabre novelty, with elements of the grotesque, fantastic and child-like touching the imagination of the everyday. They express the cultural landscape of Stalinism -- years of show trials, mass atrocities and stifled political life. Their painful, unsettling eloquence testify to the humane and the comic in this absurdist writer's work. The translator Neil Cornwall gives a biographical introduction to his subject, enlarged upon by the poet Hugh Maxton in a contextual assessment of the writing of Flann O'Brien, Le Fanu and Doyle, and of their shared concerns with detective fiction, terror and death. Daniil Kharms 91905-42) died under Stalin. Along with fellow poets and prose-writers of the era -- Khlebnikov, Biely, Mandelstam, Zabolotsky and Pasternak -- he is one of the emerging experimentalists of Russian modernism.

    Rebellious in spirit, conservative in philosophy, Nashe's brilliant and comic invective earned him a reputation as the 'English Juvenal' who 'carried the deadly stockado in his pen.' In its mingling of the devout and the bawdy, scholarship and slang, its brutality and its constant awareness of the immanence of death, his work epitomizes the ambivalence of the Elizabethans. Above all, Nashe was a great entertainer, 'his stories are told for pleasure in telling, his jokes are cracked for the fun of them, and his whole style speaks of a relish for living.'In addition to The Unfortunate Traveller, this volume contains Pierce Penniless, The Terrors of the Night, Lenten Stuff, and extracts from Christ's Tears over Jerusalem, The Anatomy of Absurdity, and other works.

    He misses the routine of the academic year and has lost his appetite for research. His wife Winifred’s late-flowering career goes from strength to strength, reducing his role to that of escort, while the rejuvenation of her appearance makes him uneasily conscious of the age gap between them. The monotony of his days is relieved only by wearisome journeys to London to check on his aged father who stubbornly refuses to leave the house he is patently unable to live in with safety.But these discontents are nothing compared to the affliction of hearing loss — a constant source of domestic friction and social embarrassment, leading Desmond into mistakes, misunderstandings and follies. It might be comic for others, but for the deaf person himself, it is no joke. It is his deafness which inadvertently involves Desmond with a young woman whose wayward behaviour threatens to destabilize his life completely.

    WILLIAM SOMERSET MAUGHAM [1874-1965] was a British writer of novels, plays, and short stories. He was a medical student at King's College London. While a student learning midwifery in the London slum of Lambeth, He wrote Liza of Lambeth (1897). The novel was a hit, selling out its first edition in a few weeks. This success convinced Maugham to write full time. By 1914, he produced ten novels and ten plays. In World War I, he was one of the "Literary Ambulance Drivers" including Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos and E. E. Cummings. While serving near Dunkirk, he proof-read Of Human Bondage (1915). Theodore Dreiser considered Of Human Bondage "a work of genius." In 1916, in the Pacific, he researched Paul Gauguin's life for his novel The Moon And Sixpence (1919). In 1928, he moved to the French Riviera, where he resided for the rest of his life. In 1947, he established the Somerset Maugham Award for British writers. V. S. Naipaul, Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, and Thom Gunn are some notable recipients of the award.

    Under the direction of Stephen Greenblatt, General Editor, the editors have reconsidered all aspects of the anthology to make it an even better teaching tool.