Alec Russell

Alec Vidler

Alec Wilkinson

Aled Jones

Aleesha Nandhra

Alejo Carpentier (1904-1980) was one of the major Latin American writers of the twentieth century, as well as a classically trained pianist and musicologist. His best-known novels are The Lost Steps, Explosion in a Cathedral, and The Kingdom of This World. Born in Lausanne, Switzerland, and raised in Havana, Cuba, Carpentier lived for many years in France and Venezuela before returning to Cuba after the 1959 revolution. A few years later he returned to France, where he lived until his death.

Alejo Carpentier

Dr Aleks Krotoski is an award-winning international broadcaster, author and academic. She has topped the ratings for the BBC and Channel 4, winning Emmy, BAFTA, Radio Academy and Royal Society awards, and has written and presented landmark technology and social science series for both radio (with BBC Radio 4’s The Artificial Human and The Digital Human) and international television (with BBC World’s The Virtual Revolution). Krotoski has held fellowships at the University of Oxford and the London School of Economics and received an honorary doctorate from the Open University. She currently teaches at NYU Tisch School of the Arts.

Aleks Krotoski

Aleksandar Ciric

Aleksandar Sotirovski

Aleksandar Zolotic

Aleksandr Orlov

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was born in 1918 and grew up in Rostov-on-Don. He graduated in Physics and Mathematics from Rostov University and studied Literature by correspondence course at Moscow University. In World War II he fought as an artillery officer, attaining the rank of captain. In 1945, however, after making derogatory remarks about Stalin in a letter, he was arrested and summarily sentenced to eight years in forced labour camps, followed by internal exile. In 1957 he formally rehabilitated, and settled down to teaching and writing, in Ryazan and Moscow. The publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in Novy Mir in 1962 was followed by publication, in the West, of his novels Cancer Ward and The First Circle. In 1970 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, and in 1974 his citizenship was revoked and he was expelled from the Soviet Union. He settled in Vermont and worked on his great historical cycle The Red Wheel. In 1990, with the fall of Soviet Communism, his citizenship was restored and four years later he returned to settle in Russia. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn died in August 2008.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Aleksei Bitskoff

Aleksei Evdokimo

Aleksi Hoffman

Alena Tkach is an award-winning Ukrainian freelance illustrator who studied Graphic Arts at Kharkiv State Academy of Design and Arts. She works mostly as children’s book illustrator and 2D artist. Alena loves llamas because they are cute and sweet, and when they jump it's really funny. Follow Alena on Instagram @alena.tkach.

Alena Tkach

Alessandra Peters

Alessandro Manzoni

Alex Bellos is a journalist, broadcaster and puzzle master. He read Mathematics and Philosophy at Oxford University before becoming a journalist and writer. Alex was born in Oxford and grew up in Edinburgh and Southampton and lived in Brazil for five years as a foreign correspondent for the Guardian before returning to the UK He is the author of 8 books about puzzles and mathematics and currently writes weekly puzzle column for the Guardian.

Alex Bellos

Alex Berenson

Alex Boardman

Alex Brummer

Alex Bulmer

Alex Butterworth

Alex Caine

Alex Carter

Alex Chance

Alex Cliff

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Geoffrey Chaucer

In The Canterbury Tales Chaucer created one of the great touchstones of English literature, a masterly collection of chivalric romances, moral allegories and low farce. A story-telling competition between a group of pilgrims from all walks of life is the occasion for a series of tales that range from the Knight's account of courtly love and the ebullient Wife of Bath's Arthurian legend, to the ribald anecdotes of the Miller and the Cook.

The Canterbury Tales

Penguin Classics

Homer

One of the foremost achievements in Western literature, Homer's Iliad tells the story of the darkest episode in the Trojan War. At its centre is Achilles, the greatest warrior-champion of the Greeks, and his refusal to fight after being humiliated by his leader Agamemnon. But when the Trojan Hector kills Achilles' close friend Patroclus, he storms back into battle to take revenge - although knowing this will ensure his own early death. Interwoven with this tragic sequence of events are powerfully moving descriptions of the ebb and flow of battle, of the domestic world inside Troy's besieged city of Ilium, and of the conflicts between the Gods on Olympus as they argue over the fate of mortals.

The Iliad

Petrarch

The 'Canzoniere', a sequence of sonnets and other verse forms, were written over a period of about 40 years. They describe Petrarch's intense love for Laura, whom he first met in Avignon in 1327, and her effect on him after she died in 1348. The collection is an examination of the poet's growing spiritual crisis, and also explores important contemporary issues such as the role of the papacy and religion.

Canzoniere

Pierre Ronsard

Ronsard is considered one of France's greatest love poets, yet his poetic achievements are not restricted to his verses of love, wine and nature.  A true Renaissance figure, his themes ranged from politics, science and philsophy, to the bawdy and risqué.  Using Greco-Roman and Italian poetic models, and drawing on the rich images of classical mythology, Ronsard revolutionised the tradition of French poetry.   In the 20th century, Ronsard's poetry was influential for W. B. Yeats, translated by Sylvia Plath, and illustrated by Henri Matisse.  He stands as one of the most innovative and diverse voices in the history of European poetry.

Selected Poems

Euripides

Heracles/ Iphigenia Among the Taurians/ Helen/ Ion/ Cyclops: Of these plays, only 'Heracles' truly belongs in the tragic sphere with its presentation of underserved suffering and divine malignity. The other plays flirt with comedy and comic themes. Their plots are ironic and complex with deception and elusion eventually leading to reconciliation between mother and son in 'Ion', brother and sister in 'Iphigenia', and husband and wife in 'Helen'. The comic vein is even stronger in the satyric'Cyclops' in which the giant's inebriation and subsequent violence are treated as humorous. Together, these plays demonstrate Euripides' challenge to the generic boundaries of Athenian drama.

Heracles and Other Plays

Federico García Lorca

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'There has been no more terribly acute critic of America than this steel-conscious and death-conscious Spaniard, with his curious passion for the modernities of nickel and tinfoil and nitre . . .' So wrote Conrad Aiken of Lorca's violent response to the New York he encountered as a student at Columbia University in 1929 and 1930. Born and brought up in Andalusia, Lorca's reaction to the brutality and loneliness of the vast city was one of amazement and indignation. His poetry moved away from the lyricism of the early Romanceros and became a vehicle for experimental techniques through which he expressed tortured feelings of alienation and dislocation. Based on a new edition of the original text, Greg Simon's and Steven White's new translation brings to life Lorca's arresting imagery. Christopher Maurer, a leading authority on Lorca's work, provides an enlightening introduction placing Poet in New York in context, and there are translations of Lorca's letters as well as a lecture he gave about the work. Illustrated with archive photographs, this comprehensive volume will make Lorca's masterpiece available to a whole new generation of readers.

Poet in New York

Stevie Smith

Stevie Smith was one of the few modern poets to reach a wide general audience. Bizarre, witty, sad, sometimes caustic, her poems impart a zest for life, and reveal her unique eye for the marvels of the ordinary and her deep sensibility to the paradoxical nature of all human emotions.

Spain's greatest and most well-loved modern poet, Lorca has long been admired for the emotional intensity and dark brilliance of his work, which drew on music, drama, mythology and the songs of his Andulucian childhood. From the playful Suites and stylized Gypsy Ballads, to his own dark vision of urban life, Poet in New York, and his elegaic meditation on death, Lament for Ignacio S&aacute;nchez Mej&iacute;as; his range was remarkable. This bilingual edition provides versions by distinguished poets and translators, drawing on every book of poems published by Lorca and on his uncollected works.

John Dryden

A new and comprehensive selection of Dryden's poetry, revealing him as a master of theatricality, ventriloquism, and unmistakable originality. Brought together here are many of the poems from his time as Poet Laureate and loyal servant of the crown, including the Biblical allegory 'Absalom and Achitophel', in which the poet attacked those who intrigued against the King and earned himself a reputation for menace and a number of powerful enemies. His 'Works of Virgil' set the standard for the translation of Latin poetry. His last work, 'Fables Ancient and Modern' combined original verse and new translations, showing how he transformed the idioms and gestures of other voices and made them his own.

William Empson

Empson has long been applauded for the dazzling intelligence and emotional passion of his poems. Praised in his lifetime by the likes of T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas and John Betjeman, his reputation contines to be high. His poems take a wide range of themes from metaphysics to melancholy, social climbing to political satire, and from love to loss.

The Complete Poems

In The House of Bernarda Alba, a tyrannical matriarch rules over her house and five daughters, cruelly crushing their hopes and needs. The other plays here also portray female characters whose desires are tragically and violently frustrated: a woman&rsquo;s longing for a child in Yerma, and a bride&rsquo;s yearning for her lover in Blood Wedding. All appeal for freedom and sexual and social equality, and are also passionate defences of the imagination: in Christopher Maurer&rsquo;s words, &lsquo;poetic drama unsurpassed by any writer of our time&rsquo;.

The House of Bernarda Alba and Other Plays

J B Priestley

An Inspector Calls, first produced in 1946 when society was undergoing sweeping transformations, has recently enjoyed an enormously successful revival. While holding its audience with the gripping tension of a detective thriller, it is also a philosophical play about social conscience and the crumbling of middle class values. Time and the Conways and I Have Been Here Before belong to Priestley&rsquo;s &lsquo;time&rsquo;plays, in which he explores the idea of precognition and pits fate against free will. The Linden Tree also challenges preconceived ideas of history when Professor Linden comes into conflict with his family about how life should be lived after the war.

An Inspector Calls and Other Plays

Peter Jones

Imagism was a brief, complex yet influential poetic movement of the early 1900s, a time of reaction against late nineteenth-century poetry which Ezra Pound, one of the key imagist poets, described as &lsquo;a doughy mess of third-hand Keats, Wordsworth &hellip; half-melted, lumpy&rsquo;. In contrast, imagist poetry, although riddled with conflicting definitions, was broadly characterized by brevity, precision, purity of texture and concentration of meaning: as Pound stated, it should &lsquo;use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something &hellip; it does not use images as ornaments. The image itself is the speech&rsquo;. It was this freshness and directness of approach which means that, as Peter Jones says in his invaluable Introduction, &lsquo;imagistic ideas still lie at the centre of our poetic practice&rsquo;.

Imagist Poetry

Allen Ginsberg

1947-1995

Rainer Maria Rilke

Hailed as the greatest modern lyrical poet of Germany, Rainer Maria Rilke&rsquo;s genius lies in his passion for perfection, artistic integrity and &lsquo;willingness to remain a perpetual beginner&rsquo;. 
 
The verse contained in this selection ranges from the objective, naturalistic descriptions of his earliest works to the increasingly effusive outpourings of half-religious ecstasy and anguish that characterize his later poems and culminates in the overwhelmingly personal vision of the famous &lsquo;Duino Elegies&rsquo; and &lsquo;The Sonnets to Orpheus&rsquo;, in which his most intense experiences of living and being find their noblest expression.

Fernando Pessoa

The writing of Fernando Pessoa reveals a mind shaken by intense inner suffering. In these poems he adopted four separate personae: Alberto Caeiro, Alvaro de Campos, Ricardo Reis and himself, using them to express 'great swarms of thought and feeling'. While each personae has its own poetic identity, together they convey a sense of ambivalence and consolidate a striving for completeness. Dramatic, lyrical, Christian, pagan, old and modern, Pessoa's poets and poetry contribute to the 'mysterious importance of existence'.

R. C. Sherriff

Set in the First World War, Journey's End concerns a group of British officers on the front line and opens in a dugout in the trenches in France. Raleigh, a new eighteen-year-old officer fresh out of English public school, joins the besieged company of his friend and cricketing hero Stanhope, and finds him dramatically changed ... 
 
Laurence Olivier starred as Stanhope in the first performance of Journey's End in 1928; the play was an instant stage success and remains a remarkable anti-war classic.

Journey's End

Auden, Day, Lewis, Spender, MacNeice and the other key poets of the Thirties were children of the First World War, obsessed by war and by communalism, by the class-struggle and a passionate belief in poets as people whose actions are as publically important as their poems.For them, the Spanish Civil War epitomized the mood of the times, as their symbolic obsessions were transmuted into tragic reality. But from within their strongly defined unity of ideals, an astonishingly varied body of poetry emerged. 
 
Robin Skelton has arranged the poetry to make an illuminating &lsquo;critical essay&rsquo; of the period, and in his introduction he brilliantly probes the moods and mores of an intensely troubled and creative decade.

Poetry of the Thirties

Jorge Luis Borges

Selected Poems brings together some two hundred poems - the largest collection of Borges' poetry ever assembled in English, including many never previously translated. The brilliance of the Spanish originals is matched with luminous English versions rendered by a remarkable cast of translators, among them W.S. Merwin, John Updike, Robert Fitzgerald, Mark Strand and Alastair Reid.

Jean-Paul Sartre

These three plays, diverse in subject but thematically coherent, illuminate one of Sartre's major philosophical concerns: the struggle to live and act freely in a complex and constricting world. Lucifer and the Lord, Sartre's favourite among his plays, explores this theme in depth, dealing in the process with fundamental questions of faith and disillusionment; in Huis Clos - arguably Sartre's most important play - he contends that 'Hell is other people', and details the afterlife of three souls trapped together in locked room and the torments that they inflict on each other; while The Respectable Prostitute, set in the Deep South of America, is concerned with racism, subjugation and the demands of conscience.

Huis Clos and Other Plays

Thornton Wilder

Finding the theatre of the 1920s lacking in bite and conviction, Thornton Wilder set out to bring back realism and to celebrate the innocent, simple and religious. Yet he also tried to endow individual experience with cosmic significance and Our Town is both an affectionate portrait of American life and 'an attempt to find a value above all price for the smallest events in our daily life'. The Skin of our Teeth deals with human survival in a 'comic strip' way, and The Matchmaker is a hilarious farce which urges rebellion against all the constraints that deny a rich, full life.

Our Town and Other Plays

Algernon Charles Swinburne

This volume brings together Swinburne's major poetic works, ATALANTA IN CALYDON (1865) and POEMS AND BALLADS (1866). ATALANTA IN CALYDON is a drama in classical Greek form, which revealed Swinburne's metrical skills and brought him celebrity. POEMS AND BALLADS brought him notoriety and demonstrates his preoccupation with de Sade, masochism, and femmes fatales. Also reproduced here is 'Notes on Poems and Reviews', a pamphlet Swinburne published in 1866 in response to hostile reviews of POEMS AND BALLADS.

Poems and Ballads & Atalanta in Calydon

Eugene Ionesco

These three great plays by one of the founding fathers of the theatre of the absurd, are alive and kicking with tragedy and humour, bleakness and farce. In Rhinoceros we are shown the innate brutality of people as everyone, except for Berenger, turn into clumsy, unthinking rhinoceroses. The Chairs depicts the futile struggle of two old people to convey the meaning of life to the rest of humanity, while The Lesson is a chilling, but anarchically funny drama of verbal domination. In these three 'antiplays' dream, nonsense and fantasy combine to create an unsettling, bizarre view of society.

Rhinoceros, The Chairs, The Lesson

William Yeats

This selection of the works of W B Yeats, includes the final book from the unfairly neglected narrative poem 'The Wanderings of Oisin' and a number of lyrics from Yeats's work as poetic dramatist. It breaks new ground by allowing the reader to engage with a dozen poems in alternative versions; in many other cases it provides significant variants, so that Yeats's struggle to revise his poetry can be experienced with unusual immediacy.

Patrick Kavanagh

Published in order of first publication as far as possible, this selection ranges from initial offerings such as 'Tinker's Wife' and 'Inniskeen Road: July Evening' to his tragic masterpiece 'The Great Hunger' (1942) and his celebratory later verse, 'To Hell with Common Sense' and 'Come Dance with Kitty Stobling', which show his increasing comic verve and detachment. The first comprehensive selection of Kavanagh's poetry to be published, this volume offers a timely reassessment of a poet unfairly neglected outside Ireland.

George Bernard Shaw

While some of Shaw&rsquo;s earlier plays are still performed, his later plays, such as the ones in this volume, are barely known. As the collective title indicates, the themes here are political; yet, frankly, it is doubtful how seriously we can now take Shaw as a political thinker. Despite writing in the 1930s, he has little to say of the nature of totalitarianism: although he satirises Fascist dictators in &ldquo;Geneva&rdquo;, the satire is disappointingly mild. Neither did Shaw appear to foresee (on the evidence of these plays, at least) the imminent collapse of the British Empire.But it is Shaw the dramatist rather than Shaw the political philosopher who still holds our attention &ndash; even in plays as explicitly political as these. He had a sharp intellect and a quirky sense of humour, and his dialogue still glints and sparkles: he couldn&rsquo;t write a dull line if he tried. No matter how serious the themes he addresses, the crispness of his writing and his lightness of touch still scintillate.Shaw seems, perhaps unfairly, out of fashion nowadays. But even in these lesser-known works, he demonstrates his matchless ability, still undimmed, to provoke and to entertain.

Plays Political

The Apple Cart, On the Rocks, Geneva

One of the greatest epics in Western literature, THE ILIAD recounts the story of the Trojan wars. This timeless poem still vividly conveys the horror and heroism of men and gods battling amidst devastation and destruction, as it moves to its tragic conclusion. In his introduction, Bernard Knox observes that although the violence of the Iliad is grim and relentless, it co-exists with both images of civilized life and a poignant yearning for peace.

Various

Published to commemorate the eightieth anniversary of Armistice, this collection is intended to be an introduction to the great wealth of First World War Poetry. The sequence of poems is random - making it ideal for dipping into - and drawn from a number of sources, mixing both well-known and less familiar poetry.

Poems of the Great War

1914-1918

Daniel Karlin has selected poetry written and published during the reign of Queen Victoria, (1837-1901). Giving pride of place to Tennyson, Robert Browning, and Christina Rossetti, the volume offers generous selections from other major poets such asArnold, Emily Bronte, Hardy and Hopkins, and makes room for several poem-sequences in their entirety. It is wonderful, too, in its discovery and inclusion of eccentric, dissenting, un-Victorian voices, poets who squarely refuse to 'represent' their period. It also includes the work of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Meredith, James Thomson and Augusta Webster.

The Penguin Book of Victorian Verse

Friedrich Schiller

This dramatic story recounts Mary, Queen of Scots's remaining days held captive in Fotheringay Castle. In scenes alternating between Mary's prison and Elizabeth's court at Westminster, Schiller's play gradually builds a compelling picture of a tragic heroine rising above her suffering to gain in insight and spiritual depth. In contrast Elizabeth, in turmoil over the correct course of action for her country and trapped by the cruel demands of Realpolitik, can achieve worldly victory only at a terrible moral cost. Culminating in a fictitious meeting of the two women, Mary Stuart is a dramatic meditation on the nature of political power, but also a deeply moving human tragedy that captures the emotional essence of complex events.

Mary Stuart

Green Ideas

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Grumpy Monkey

Guillermo Downes Thriller

Guru Guru Pon Chan

Hairy Maclary and Friends

Meet Nathan Byrn. 
 
He's half White Witch, half Black Witch 
His mother was a healer, his father is a killer 
He's been kept in a cage since he was fourteen. 
 
If White Witches are good 
And Black Witches are evil... 
What happens if you are both?

Half Bad

Hammarby Thrillers

Intellectually brilliant, cultured and sophisticated, with refined tastes in art, music and cuisine. And a pure sociopath. This is the series that launched the world’s number one villain – Hannibal Lecter.

Hannibal Lecter

Happy Families

Harlem Renaissance Series

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Heartbreaking romances from Rebecca Yarros

Heartland Trilogy

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Heavenly Bodies

Henry Pratt is the epitomy of the great British underdog. Nothing is ever simple in his world, just when it seems things are going right, life throws him another unwanted curve-ball. Join Pratt as he traverses the highs and lows of everyday life in this comic masterpiece.

Henry Pratt

Her Hidden Fire

To some a brilliant warrior, to others a devil in human form; Hereward is as adept in the art of slaughter as the enemies that gather to claim England's throne. With King Edward heirless and ailing, Hereward has been declared an outlaw. What is he willing to risk in order to save the land he loves? 
 
Hereward's tales are of heroism, treachery, rebellion and bloody battles, with William the Bastard never too far away.

Hereward

Heroes of Olympus

Heroes of Olympus Graphic Novels

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