'I want to use the moment as a springboard for some big ideas. I want to use the past and present to stimulate and challenge the listener and seduce them into thinking differently.' Lisa Jardine Provocative and inspirational, Lisa Jardine is one of our pre-eminent thinkers. A leading academic, she is a polymath who embraces both the arts and the...

The Essential Hemingway brings together a wide selection of Hemingway's works, providing the perfect introduction to his extensive writing. The collection includes the full text of Fiesta, Hemingway's first major novel; long extracts from his three greatest works of fiction, A Farewell to Arms, To Have and Have Not and For Whom the Bell Tolls; twenty-five complete short stories; and...

Spanning the fifth century to the sixteenth, and ranging from Afghanistan to Spain, this unique collection provides a profound insight into the sheer vitality and depth of Classical Arabic literature. From the earliest surviving fragments of The Thousand and One Nights to the elegant beauty and profound power of the Qur'an - believed by the Islamic faith to contain the...

A brilliant new anthology that shows how fiction was reinvented in the twelfth century after an absence of hundreds of years. Essential for all students of medieval literature, Early Fiction in England includes extracts by Geoffrey of Monmouth, Wace, Marie de France, Chaucer and many others, in new translations and with illuminating introductions. Before the twelfth century, fiction had completely...

Royalties from the sale of this book will go to charities working towards the reconstruction of north-eastern Japan. 11th March 2011. An earthquake occurring off the north-eastern coast of Japan - magnitude 9.0, duration six minutes - unleashed a 50-foot tsunami that within fifteen minutes had slammed its way ashore, rushing inland six miles, crushing all in its path -...

An indelible portrait of one of the most famous and beloved authors in the canon of American literature – a collection of letters between Harper Lee and one of her closest friends that reveals the famously private writer as never before, in her own words. The violent racism of the American South drove Wayne Flynt away from his home in...

Volume 2 contains novels four, five and six of the Dance To The Music Of Time sequence. Anthony Powell's brilliant twelve-novel sequence chronicles the lives of over three hundred characters, and is a unique evocation of life in twentieth-century England. It is unrivalled for its scope, its humour and the enormous pleasure it has given to generations. This volume contains...

A selection of George Orwell's prescient, clear-eyed and stimulating writing on the subjects of truth and lies. With an introduction by Alan Johnson. 'Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two equals four. If that is granted, all else follows.' This selection of George Orwell’s writing, from both his novels and non-fiction, gathers together his thoughts on the...

Audrey Niffenegger, bestselling author of The Time Traveler's Wife, invites you to creep through haunted houses and commune with the undead in this anthology of all things ghostly. Haunted houses, spectral chills, and of course, the odd cat. . . In this volume, Audrey Niffenegger has brought together her selection of the very creepiest, weirdest and wittiest ghost stories...

Beginning in the late 1940's, American literature discovered a four-letter word, and the word was beat. Beat as in poverty and beatitude, ecstasy and exile. Beat was Jack Kerouac touring the American road in prose as fast and reckless as a V-8 Chevy. It was the junk-sick surrealism of William Burroughs; the wild, Whitmanesque poetry of Allen Ginsberg; and the...

The hilarious writing of James Thurber, author of 'The Secret Life of Walter Mitty', collected in this classic anthology. This collection brings together the best of James Thurber's brilliantly funny, eccentric and anarchic writings. It includes his most famous work, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, in which an ordinary man's fantasies have a more powerful hold on him than...

Brought to you by Penguin. Tarana Burke and Dr. Brené Brown bring together a dynamic group of Black writers, organisers, artists, academics and cultural figures to discuss the topics the two have dedicated their lives to understanding and teaching: vulnerability and shame resilience. Contributions by Kiese Laymon, Imani Perry, Laverne Cox, Jason Reynolds, Austin Channing Brown, and more. It started...

'It was a very momentous day, the day on which I was to be slaughtered' Bringing together tales of melancholy and madness, nightmare and fantasy, this is a new collection of the most haunting German stories from the past 200 years. Ranging from the Romantics of the early nineteenth century to works of contemporary fiction, it includes Hoffmann's hallucinatory portrait...

‘O tell me the truth about love.’ W.H. Auden Many of the most popular works in the English language celebrate love in all its forms: that heady first flush, the agony of heartbreak, joyful reunions, the love of a parent for a child… And what better way to share these beautiful pieces than to read them aloud, to someone you...

A classic introduction to Latin literature, with translations of the best passages from Virgil, Livy, Ovid, Seneca and many others. This classic anthology traces the development of Latin literature from the early Republican works of Cicero and Catullus, to the writers of the Empire such as Lucan and Petronius, to the later writings of St Augustine. The selections cover comedy...