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Emily Brontë

Yes, as my swift days near their goal, 
’Tis all that I implore; 
In life and death, a chainless soul, 
With courage to endure. 
 
In this new selection of Emily Brontë’s heart-rending poems, we uncover a soul unafraid to confront mortality, tragedy and the wild cruelty – and beauty – of nature. These verses capture her profound passion and indomitable spirit, plumbing the depths of the human heart and revealing the raw power of Brontë’s poetic genius.

No Coward Soul Is Mine

Carson McCullers

On a military base in 1930s Georgia, Private Ellgee Williams catches sight of his captain’s wife in the nude and becomes obsessed with her. But Captain Penderton – unhappily married to the unfaithful Leonora – in turn erotically fixates on Williams. Spare, muscular and sensual, with the dramatic vision of a Greek myth, Carson McCullers’ novella is a timeless work about the alienation of forbidden desire.

Reflections in a Golden Eye

D. H. Lawrence

This small group of stories by D. H. Lawrence show him in a number of moods. The hope is that in such a limited number of pages, the reader will come away with a compressed, rich sense of Lawrence’s wonderful prose style, precision of language and expansive vision of the human struggle and how it can be transcended. Is ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’ perhaps the greatest of all English short stories?

Odour of Chrysanthemums

Clarice Lispector

'One of the hidden geniuses of the twentieth century' - Colm Tóibín 
 
A housewife’s life is shattered by a sudden epiphany. A simple tale of killing cockroaches fragments into multiple narratives, each uncovering new truths. In this selection of haunting short stories, Lispector reveals the permeable boundaries between past and present, the real and the surreal, showing ordinary moments to contain the deepest existential truths.

The Burned Sinner and the Harmonious Angels

Wu Cheng’en

Wu Cheng’en’s 16th-century novel Journey to the West is widely regarded as one of the most important Chinese novels ever written. Here, in Julia Lovell’s witty and charismatic translation, we meet one of its heroes: Sun Wukong, or Monkey King, whose powers include shape-shifting, immortality and being incredibly rude. Though he rises to a position of power in the heavenly bureaucracy, Monkey King’s arrogant exploits attract the attention of the Buddha – with very unfortunate consequences.

Monkey King Makes Havoc in Heaven

Karen Blixen

‘As for me I have one ambition only: to invent stories, very beautiful stories’ 
 
Gothic, expansive and truly spellbinding, Karen Blixen’s short stories offer incisive psychological portraits and imaginative visions of war, longing and tender love. Here, an orphan boy creates an elaborate fantasy of a life of grandeur, a feudal lord sets a peasant woman a deadly task, and a young woman resists against her captors, in the midst of conflict.

The Dreaming Child

Mary Gaitskill

A writer engulfed by a new obsession, an occasional sex-worker, a runaway, a teenager entering the workplace: these four tales of desire and dislocation explore the rough edges of relationships and the inner lives of women negotiating their precarious place in the world. In these coolly compelling and quietly devastating stories, Gaitskill evokes with razor-sharp precision the pleasure, pain, fear and longing that haunt modern life.

Secretary

Czeslaw Milosz

Collecting two of his most celebrated works – Rescue, written in Warsaw in the shadow of Nazi occupation, and A Treatise on Poetry – a momentous history of Poland, told in four cantos – here lie the sharpest fruits of one of the greatest poets of the 20th century: the Nobel Laureate who narrates the rise and fall of nations, who ‘voices man’s exposed condition in a world of severe conflicts’.

Rescue

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark claimed The Driver’s Seat to be her best and creepiest novel. Once you have met her heroine Lise – heading for the holiday of a lifetime in an extraordinarily garish dress and with violence on her mind – you will understand why.

The Driver's Seat

Hans Christian Andersen

Many years ago there lived an Emperor who was so terribly fond of beautiful new clothes that he spent all his money on dressing elegantly... 
 
Jewels in storytelling, these magical fairytales by Hans Christian Andersen were inspired by his own life as an outsider. From ‘The Little Mermaid’ to ‘The Red Shoes’, his fables show the ugliest of humanity – its power, greed, vanity – but also how suffering can lead to beauty.

The Emperor's New Clothes

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Fabien tonight was wandering over the vast splendour of a sea of clouds, but below him lay eternity.Inspired by his career as an aviator, Saint-Exupéry’s soaring novel follows the journeys of three pilots delivering mail overnight. The author’s beautiful, weightless prose is as haunting as his own disappearance in flight, eerily foreshadowed by his protagonist Fabien, who becomes lost in otherworldly darkness. Letter to a Hostage, Saint-Exupéry’s meditation on displacement and friendship, also explores solitude and questions the human condition.

Night Flight

H. P. Lovecraft

‘Assuming that I was sane and awake, my experience on that night was such as has befallen no man before’ 
 
After five years of 'strange amnesia', Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee remains haunted by madness and memories that cannot be real. Desperate for answers he travels to Western Australia, joining an archaeological excavation into Earth’s deep past. 
 
Journey with Peaslee to discover his fate in the story described by author Lin Carter as ‘Lovecraft’s single greatest achievement in fiction’.

The Shadow out of Time

Georges Simenon

‘Maigret moved slowly, edging his bulky frame through the throng in Rue Saint-Antoine, which burst into life every morning, the sunshine streaming down from a clear sky on to the little barrows piled high with fruit and vegetables’ 
 
In these three tales of deception, set in and around Paris, Simenon's celebrated detective uncovers chilling truths about the depths of the human instinct for self-preservation.

Stan the Killer

Katherine Mansfield

She drew a long, soft breath, as though the paper daffodils between them were almost too sweet to bearKatherine Mansfield was a magician of the short story, whose work was described by Virginia Woolf as ‘the only writing I have ever been jealous of’. These eight tales show her gift for transforming fleeting moments – a chance meeting, a letter received, a careless remark – into small miracles of language and feeling.

A Dill Pickle

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I am a ridiculous man. They call me mad now. That would be a promotion in rank 
 
A delusional man whose strange dream changes his life; a self-justifying husband who causes his wife’s suicide; a witness to a young girl’s ruin; a writer who stretches out on a gravestone and listens to the gossip of the dead … the narrators of these four confessional tales show how little we understand ourselves.

The Dream of a Ridiculous Man

Ota Pavel

‘Of all the sleep a man can have, the fisherman’s sleep is the sweetest. It is the greatest of luxuries – sleep and fishing.’ 
 
Through tender, vivid, and often humorous recollections – from magical fishing trips to the rivers and ponds of Bustehrad to his charismatic father’s eccentric business ventures - this bittersweet memoir tells the story of a childhood in Czechoslovakia, against the backdrop of World War II.

Showing results for: ‘Dougie Poynter’

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