Steve Roud was Local Studies Librarian for the London Borough of Croydon and served as Honorary Librarian of the Folklore Society for over fifteen years. He has been researching British folklore for over thirty years and is the joint author of the Oxford Dictionary of English Folklore, plus other books on traditional drama and folk song, and the Penguin Guide to the Superstitions of Britain and Ireland, which won the Katharine Briggs Folklore Award in 2004. His publications include London Lore (2008) and The Lore of the Playground (2010). He also compiles the Folk Song Index and the Broadside Index, two internationally acclaimed computer databases of traditional folk and popular song. He lives in Sussex.

Steve Roud

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Julia Bishop

The definitive collection of folk music - one of the great English popular art forms 
 
One of the great English popular art forms, the folk song can be painful, satirical, erotic, dramatic, rueful or funny. This magical new collection brings together all the classic folk songs as well as many lesser-known discoveries, complete with music and annotations on their original sources and meaning. Published in cooperation with the English Folk Dance and Song Society, it is a worthy successor to Ralph Vaughan Williams and A. L. Lloyd's original Penguin Book of English Folk Songs.

The New Penguin Book of English Folk Songs

Jack Kirby

Joe Simon

Stan Lee

Jim Steranko

John Romita Sr.

It is impossible to imagine American popular culture without Marvel Comics. For decades, Marvel has published groundbreaking visual narratives that sustain attention on multiple levels: as metaphors for the experience of difference and otherness; as meditations on the fluid nature of identity; and as high-water marks in the artistic tradition of American cartooning, to name a few. 
 
Drawing upon multiple comic book series, this collection includes Captain America's very first appearances from 1941 alongside key examples of his first solo stories of the 1960s, in which Steve Rogers, the newly resurrected hero of World War II, searches to find his place in a new and unfamiliar world. As the contents reveal, the transformations of this American icon thus mark parallel transformations in the nation itself. 
 
A foreword by Gene Luen Yang and scholarly introductions and apparatus by Ben Saunders offer further insight into the enduring significance of Captain America and classic Marvel comics. 
 
The Deluxe Hardcover edition features gold foil stamping, gold top stain edges, special endpapers with artwork spotlighting series villains, and full-colour art throughout.

Captain America

Laurie Lee

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'Magical' Daily Mail 
'I finished it with an ache in my heart and a tear in my eye' Spectator 
 
From the author of Cider With Rosie, Village Christmas is a moving, lyrical portrait of England through the changing years and seasons. 
 
Laurie Lee left his childhood home in the Cotswolds when he was nineteen, but it remained with him throughout his life until, many years later, he returned for good. This collection brings to life the sights, sounds, landscapes and traditions of his home - from centuries-old May Day rituals to his own patch of garden, from carol singing in crunching snow to pub conversations and songs. Here too he writes about the mysteries of love, living in wartime Chelsea, Winston Churchill's wintry funeral and his battle, in old age, to save his beloved Slad Valley from developers. 
 
Told with a warm sense of humour and a powerful sense of history, Village Christmas brings us a picture of a vanished world. 
 
'Brings to life the landscapes and traditions of Lee's home in Gloucestershire, from centuries-old May Day rituals and carol-singing on Christmas Eve, to his battle in old age to save his beloved Slad valley from developers' Guardian 
 
'Simply written, observant and shot through with Lee's characteristic humility ... Against his whitewashed prose are touches of beauty' The Times Literary Supplement

Village Christmas

And Other Notes on the English Year

Jean-Paul Sartre

Nausea is both the story of the troubled life of a young writer, Antoine Roquentin, and an exposition of one of the most influential and significant philosophical attitudes of modern times - existentialism. The book chronicles his struggle with the realization that he is an entirely free agent in a world devoid of meaning; a world in which he must find his own purpose and then take total responsibility for his choices. A seminal work of contemporary literary philosophy, Nausea evokes and examines the dizzying angst that can come from simply trying to live.

Nausea

A landmark collection of poems from the author of Cider with Rosie 
 
Laurie Lee is beloved for his writing on a lost rural world. His evocative poetry springs from his deep connection with nature, as he tracks the seasons changing and the years turning over. Yet Lee's poems also captured war, human relationships and distant places, informed by his own experiences of lives uprooted by change and conflict. Written during the course of his lifetime, the verses brought together in Collected Poems range over Lee playing his fiddle in a Spanish town; ecstatic in springtime of his beloved Slad valley; or digging for faith in the depths of winter. 
 
Gathered in one volume for the first time, and including a generous selection of previously unseen verses from Lee's archives, these timeless, poignant poems show him expressing the essence of life, love and loss.

Collected Poems

'Living in our valley was like broad beans in a pod, so snug and enclosed and protective.' 
 
 Laurie Lee walked out of his childhood village one summer morning to travel the world, but he was always drawn back to his beloved Slad Valley, eventually returning to make it his home. 
 
 In this never-before-published portrait of his Cotswold home, Laurie Lee guides us through its landscapes, and shares memories of his village youth - from his favourite pub, The Woolpack, to winter skating on the pond, the church through the seasons, local legends, learning the violin and playing jazz records in the privy on a wind-up gramophone. 
 
 Filled with wry humour and a love of place, Down in the Valley is a writer's tribute to the landscape that shaped him, and where he found peace.

Down in the Valley

A Writer's Landscape

John Mortimer

Horace Rumpole, the irrepressible barrister fuelled by cigars, Tennyson, steak-and-kidney pud and the cooking claret from Pommeroy's wine bar, is back for further misadventures. Amid an unfortunate and temporary downturn in London crime, the Old Bailey hack sits in Chambers (he never writes at home for fear of She Who Must Be Obeyed) and picks up his pen to recount six classic tales of his recent trials. Here he deals with, among others, a clergyman on a shoplifting rampage, a backstage theatrical murder, a villain with unfortunate sartorial taste and, worst of all, the possibility that he may have to hang up his wig and retire.

The Trials of Rumpole

Cicero

Cicero's speeches "In Defence of Sextus Roscius of Amerina," "In Defence of Aulus Cluentius Habitus," "In Defence of Gaius Rabirius," "Note on the Speeches in Defence of Caelius and Milo," and "In Defence of King Deiotarus" provide insight into Roman life, law, and history.

Murder Trials

Len Deighton

The three confidence tricksters had a style that earned them millions. Silas was the leader, slick and self-assured - but dissatisfied. Bob was the junior partner, longing for the open road where pickings were rich and the living was easy. And Liz, Silas' mistress, was in between. Theirs was a built-in love triangle with its own rewards ... and its own dangers. 
 
In New York these con-artists do a 'business deal' worth millions. But back in London Silas' plan to bilk an emergent African nation misfires. Then Bob takes over the running of the operation - and Liz. A Beirut bank is their target and each member of the trio gets what he or she deserves - each with a twist of lemon.

Only When I Larf

Ishmael Reed

Deep in the American South, 'land of the hunted and the haunted,' three young slaves have broken free. But they have their former master hot on their heels, and they must outrun, outwit, or outgun him and his personal 'CIA' if they are to secure their freedom--all while dodging the bullets of the Civil War raging on around them. When the three men part ways, the adventure begins: the first buys up a huge number of arms in readiness for a final showdown; the second sells his body for pornographic flicks; while the third, Raven Quickskill, hero, poet, heartbreaker, swigs champagne on a non-stop jumbo jet to Canada. Flight to Canada is fun, pacey, adventurous, and touched by Reed's taste for the absurd. Reed takes us on a wild ride through a nineteenth-century Virginia that looks a lot like the West today, littered with everything from Xerox copiers to jumbo jets, and casts an unsettling sideways look at history, race and the American media.

Flight to Canada

Ernesto Che Guevara

'All we could see was the dust on the road ahead and ourselves on the bike, devouring kilometers in our flight northward' 
 
'In late 1951, Guevara and Alberto Granado set off on the 500cc Norton they nicknamed La Poderosa ('The Powerful One') with no other agenda than a lust for life and a desire to see it all. The Motorcycle Diaries offer a unique perspective on what led this would-be doctor from relatively affluent Argentina to become one of the 20th century's most important political figures ... genuinely exhilarating' Guardian 
 
'For every comic escapade of the carefree roustabout there is an equally eye-opening moment in the development of the future revolutionary leader. By the end of the journey, a politicized Guevara has emerged to predict his own legendary future' Time

The Motorcycle Diaries

Arthur Miller

A reticent personnel manager living with his mother, Mr Newman shares the prejudices of his times and of his neighbours - and neither a Hispanic woman abused outside his window nor the persecution of the Jewish store owner he buys his paper from are any of his business. Until Newman begins wearing glasses, and others begin to mistake him for a Jew.

Focus

Ambrose Bierce

An incomparable satirist, Ambrose Bierce became the &quot;laughing devil&quot; of the San Francisco news media, for he was about as discreet as a runaway locomotive, according to H.L.Mencken, and nowhere are his uninhibited irony and gift for verse parody more in evidence than in this &quot;dictionary&quot;.

The Enlarged Devil's Dictionary

Mário de Andrade

'My life's done a somersault,' wrote acclaimed modernist writer Mário de Andrade. After years of dreaming about Amazonia, he finally embarked on a three-month odyssey up the great river and into the wild heart of his native Brazil with a group of avant-garde luminaries. All abandoned ship but a socialite, her two nieces, and, of course, the author himself. And so begins the humorous account of Andrade's steamboat adventure into one of the most dangerous and breathtakingly beautiful corners of the world. 
 
Rife with shrewd observations and sparkling wit, his sarcastic, down-to-earth diary entries not only offer comedic and awe-inspiring details of life and the landscape but also trace his internal metamorphosis: his travels challenge what he thought he knew about the Amazon, and drastically alter his understanding of his motherland.

The Apprentice Tourist

Geoffrey Willans

Ronald Searle

School is 'wet and weedy', according to Nigel Molesworth, the 'goriller of 3B', 'curse of St Custard's' and superb chronicler of fifties English life. Nothing escapes his disaffected eye and he has little time for such things as botany walks and cissy poetry with an assortment of swots, snekes and oiks. Instead he is very good at missing lessons, charming masters and putting down little brothers, in fact he is exceptional at most things except spelling. Wildly funny and full of sharp observations on life, the &lsquo;Molesworth tetralogy&rsquo; is magnificently complemented by the illustrations of Ronald Searle

Molesworth

Tennessee Williams

Tennessee Williams's controversial Hollywood screenplay Baby Doll opens with Archie Lee's teenage bride driving him to distraction, as she has refused to consummate their marriage until the day of her twentieth birthday. Enter wily Sicilian Silva Vaccaro, Archie's rival both in the cotton business and for the affections of the flirtatious Baby Doll, and things reach breaking-point. This volume also contains Something Unspoken, a brilliantly comic study of a wealthy, manipulative Southern spinster, and Summer and Smoke, a sexually charged portrayal of Alma, a sensitive, unmarried minister's daughter, and her childhood love, the wild, sensual doctor's son John.

Baby Doll and Other Plays

Mai Jia

Decoded tells the fictional story of mathematical genius Rong Jinzhen. Abducted and recruited to the cryptography department of China's secret services, Jinzhen rises to eventually become China's greatest and most celebrated code-breaker; until he makes a mistake. Then begins his descent into madness. Decoded takes place in the shadowy world of Chinese secret service, where Mai Jia himself worked for decades.

Decoded

A Novel

Every night for three years the vengeful King Shahriyar sleeps with a different virgin, executing her next morning. To end this brutal pattern and to save her own life, the vizier's daughter, Shahrazad, begins to tell the king tales of adventure, love, riches and wonder - tales of mystical lands peopled with princes and hunchbacks, the Angel of Death and magical spirits, tales of the voyages of Sindbad, of Ali Baba's outwitting a band of forty thieves and of jinnis trapped in rings and in lamps. The sequence of stories will last 1,001 nights.

The Arabian Nights: Tales of 1,001 Nights

Volume 2

Volume 3

Jean-Baptiste Moliere

In the seventeenth century, Moli&egrave;re raised comedy to the pitch of great art and, three centuries later, his plays are still a source of delight. He created a new synthesis from the major comic traditions at his disposal. This collection demonstrates the range of Moli&egrave;re's comic vision, his ability to move between the broad and basic ploys of farce to the more subtle and sophisticated level of high comedy. The Misanthrope appears along with Such Preposterously Precious Ladies, Tartuffe, A Doctor Despite Himself, The Would-Be Gentleman, and Those Learned Ladies.

The Misanthrope and Other Plays

Harry Crews

A favourite of long-time Harry Crews fans, The Knockout Artist (1988) portrays Eugene Talmadge Biggs, a young boxer from rural Georgia whose champion rise is diverted by a vulnerability, or gift, for knocking himself unconscious. 
 
As he begins to exploit his talents, the notorious Knockout Artist journeys into the New Orleans underworld and meets characters who have long since checked their morals at the door. The unforgettable climax shows Crews at his virtuoso best, when Eugene confronts his truth, and sets out to claim his freedom and win his own self-respect.

The Knockout Artist

William Shakespeare

The beautiful but sharp-tongued Katherina has sworn never to accept the demands of any would-be husband. But when she is pursued by the wily Petruchio, it seems that she has finally met her match. And as he meets her own caustic words with a feigned, capricious cruelty, Katherina quickly comes to understand the absurdity of her shrewish behaviour, in one of the greatest of all comic battles of the sexes.

The Taming of the Shrew

Joanne Greenberg

Two young deaf people, Abel and Janice, leave their punitive school and begin their life as a married couple &lsquo;Outside&rsquo; &ndash; in the unwelcoming world of the hearing. A misunderstanding about the payment plan on a car kickstarts years of debt, hard labour and ostracization; but they find solace and expression in the richness of Sign, in their hard-won independence and in the birth of their daughter Margaret. 
 
First published in 1970, only a decade after ASL&rsquo;s formal recognition as a language, In This Sign is a rare, compassionate portrait of the deaf community and a moving family saga that spans the twentieth century. 
 
With an introduction by Sara Novic and a new afterword by the author.

In This Sign

Eddie Carbone is a longshoreman and a straightforward man, with a strong sense of decency and of honour. For Eddie, it's a privilege to take in his wife's cousins, straight off the boat from Italy. But, as his niece begins to fall for one of them, it's clear that it's not just, as Eddie claims, that he's too strange, too sissy, too careless for her, but that something bigger, deeper is wrong, and wrong inside Eddie, in a way he can't face. Something which threatens the happiness of their whole family.

A View from the Bridge

Sigmund Freud

Building on the crucial insight that jokes use many of the same mechanisms he had already discovered in dreams, Freud developed one of the richest and most comprehensive theories of humour that has ever been produced. 
 
Jokes, he argues, provide immense pleasure by allowing us to express many of our deepest sexual, aggressive and cynical thoughts and feelings which would otherwise remain repressed. In elaborating this central thesis, he brings together a dazzling set of puns, anecdotes, snappyone-liners, spoonerisms and beloved stories of Jewish beggars and marriage-brokers. Many remain highly amusing, while others throw a vivid light on the lost world of early twentieth-century Vienna.

The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious

John le Carré

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A mole, implanted by Moscow Centre, has infiltrated the highest ranks of the British Intelligence Service, almost destroying it in the process. And so former spymaster George Smiley has been brought out of retirement in order to hunt down the traitor at the very heart of the Circus - even though it may be one of those closest to him. 
 
The first part of le Carré's acclaimed Karla Trilogy, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy sees the beginning of the stealthy Cold War cat-and-mouse game between the taciturn, dogged Smiley and his wily Soviet counterpart.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Virginia M. Axline

In 1964, renowned psychotherapist Virginia M. Axline visited a New York school. There she encountered a little boy apart from teachers and children. Dibs sat alone, or gently traced the edge of the room, defying approach and every attempt at interaction. Every day was like this, and every day his teachers feared further that their support was not enough. As a last resort, Axline was asked to meet with Dibs for a series of weekly play therapy sessions. There, through the guise of time spent will toys and paint, Dibs' extraordinary character -- and the circumstance of his pain -- is slowly revealed... 
 
Based on the transcripts of their sessions together, Dibs in Search of Self is a seminal testament to the power of psychotherapy, and a classic of twentieth century nonfiction -- an incredible true story of personal transformation.

Dibs in Search of Self

Personality Development in Play Therapy

Embattled agent Bernard Samson is used to being passed over for promotion as his younger, more ambitious colleagues - including his own wife Fiona - rise up the ranks of MI6. When a valued agent in East Berlin warns the British of a mole at the heart of the Service, Samson must return to the field and the city he loves to uncover the traitor's identity. This is the first novel in Len Deighton's acclaimed Game, Set and Match trilogy.

Berlin Game

Penguin Modern Classics

A Soviet space scientist defects to win academic freedom, but western intelligence has other plans for him, and sends an unnamed spy - perhaps the same reluctant hero of The IPCRESS File - to look after him. But what follows is a blood-streaked trail across three continents... 
 
Twinkle, Twinkle Little Spy reveals a more mature Deighton exploring relationships between couples: professional rivals and private allies, spy and counter-spy, master and slave. Some are drawn together mutual comfort, others for exploitation. With an uncanny feeling for landscape, he begins his story in the awesome emptiness and remorseless heat of the Sahara desert. From there a trail of blood leads to Manhattan, Paris, Dublin and halfway back across Africa. 
 
In a narrative as compelling as it is tantalizing, Deighton surpasses all his previous triumphs and holds the reader spellbound to the very last page.

Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Spy

Alexander Pushkin

Eugene Onegin is the master work of the poet whom Russians regard as the fountainhead of their literature. Set in 1820s Russia, Pushkin's verse novel follows the fates of three men and three women. Engaging, full of suspense, and varied in tone, it contains a large cast of characters and offers the reader many literary, philosophical, and autobiographical digressions, often in a highly satirical vein. Eugene Onegin was Pushkin's own favourite work, and this new translation by Stanley Mitchell conveys the literal sense and the poetic music of the original.

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