We are on the cusp of a reading revolution. Increasingly, research is uncovering an intimate connection between reading and wellbeing. The seemingly simple act of being read to brings remarkable health and happiness benefits. It stimulates thought and memory, encourages the sharing of ideas and feelings, hopes and fears. It enriches our lives and minds. This unique book offers a...

As a literary subject, Christmas has inspired everything from intimate domestic dramas, to fanciful flights of the imagination, and the full range of its expression is represented in this wonderfully engaging collection. Goblins frolic in the graveyard of an early Dickens tale; a love-struck ghost disrupts a country estate in Elizabeth Bowen's 'Green Holly'; devils, witches, Cossacks and peasants cavort...

The Beats. a title that Jack Kerouac coined to define the exhausted exaltation of a generation, produced a body of works infected with a new energy. Their spontaneous, often-unedited style epitomised their own era and their famed close-knit literary community continues to inspire writers today. Barry Miles, friend and biographerof Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, was there ,...

George Orwell's best-known novels, Animal Farm, describing a revolution that goes horribly wrong, and Nineteen Eighty-Four, portraying a world where human freedom has been crushed, are two of the most famous, well-quoted and influential political satires ever written. The other novels in this volume also tell stories of people at odds with repressive institutions: the corrupt imperialism of Burmese Days,...

'One of the most dazzling luminaries of contemporary American fiction' Sunday Times 'The most commanding and exciting and inventive rhetorical virtuosity of any writer alive... [He] nailed it like nobody else ever had' Jonathan Franzen '[He was] first among us. The most talented, most daring, most energetic and original, the funniest... This man got inside the world's mind and changed...

Tell Me No Lies is a celebration of the very best investigative journalism, and includes writing by some of the greatest practitioners of the craft: Seymour Hersh on the My Lai massacre; Paul Foot on the Lockerbie cover-up; Wilfred Burchett, the first Westerner to enter Hiroshima following the atomic bombing; Israeli journalist Amira Hass, reporting from the Gaza Strip in...

Primo Levi's entire body of work, newly translated, in three beautifully slip-cased hardback editions, with an introduction by Toni Morrison Primo Levi has long been admired for his harrowing account of suffering in Auschwitz, If This Is a Man. Among the thousands of survivors who have written about their experiences, Levi's work stands out for its understanding of the human...

'Every idiot who goes about with Merry Christmas on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding' Dickens's story of solitary miser Ebenezer Scrooge, who is taught the true meaning of Christmas by a series of ghostly visitors, has had an enduring influence on the way we think about the season. Dickens's other Christmas writings collected here include 'The...

These are Shakespeare's greatest writings on power in all its forms - in love, in war, in politics and in the family. From Macbeth's vaulting ambition to Richard II's fragile grip on authority, from the violent rivalries of King Lear to the exquisite poetry of the love sonnets, these pieces show, with philosophical subtlety and psychological acuity, how we manipulate...

A new collection of journalism from one of the great titans of 20th century literature I don't want to be remembered for One Hundred Years of Solitude or for the Nobel Prize but rather for my journalism, Gabriel García Márquez said in the final years of his life. And while some of his journalistic writings have been made available over...

_________________________ Collects the first three volumes of Anthony Powell's remarkable DANCE TO THE MUSIC OF TIME sequence: A QUESTION OF UPBRINGING; A BUYER'S MARKET; THE ACCEPTANCE WORLD 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...

Thomas Ligotti is often cited as the most curious and remarkable figure in horror literature since H. P. Lovecraft. His work is noted by critics for its display of an exceptionally grotesque imagination and accomplished prose style. In his stories, Ligotti has followed a literary tradition that began with Edgar Allan Poe, portraying characters that are outside of anything that...

This new edition of Brian Aldiss’s classic anthology brings together a diverse selection of science fiction spanning over sixty years, from Isaac Asimov’s ‘Nightfall’, first published in 1941, to the 2006 story ‘Friends in Need’ by Eliza Blair. Including authors such as Clifford Simak, Harry Harrison, Bruce Sterling, A. E. Van Vogt and Brian Aldiss himself, these stories portray struggles...

'Anthology' comes from the Greek word that stands for garlands - a bouquet of flowers. An anthology then, should be a small token of something much larger. In the case of flowers, they bring to mind the colour & fragrance of the fields, of a season. Coelho's anthology, therefore, is not only a collection of texts or poems, but a...

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...