Examines the attempts of an increasingly bemused researcher to establish certain facts about a famous French novelist and the stuffed bird which used to sit on his desk. This book blends fact and fict
These poems, selected from most of the cultures and histories of world literature, provide magnificent witness to the fact that love is as much an act of the imagination as it is of the body. From fou
It has often been said that love, both sacred and profane, is the only true subject of the lyric poem. Nothing better justifies this claim than the splendid poems in this volume, which range from the
This is Conrad's most subtle, compressed and proleptic work. Acclaimed as a supreme literary achievement, it has also come under literary, historical, and political attack. The profoundly influential
A fictional autobiography of a rumbustious adventurer and poker-player who sets off his native Chicago in the spirit of a latter-day Columbus to rediscover the world - and more especially, twentieth-c
Here are 200 irresistible love letters from over the centuries, love letters both historic and fictional, love letters by poets and by princes, love letters enchanting, tragic, comic, superbly selecte
This collection of beautiful, enduring hardcover editions features modern American masterpieces, including works by Nobel Prize and National Book Award winners. With elegant cloth sewn bindings, gold
Doctor Zhivago is the epic novel of Russia in the throes of revolution and one of the greatest love stories ever told. Yuri Zhivago, physician and poet, wrestles with the new order and confronts the c
Set in British India in the 1920s, this book looks at racial conflict. The characters struggle to overcome their own differences and prejudices, but when the Indian Dr Aziz is tried for the alleged as
Selected as a Book of the Year by The Times and The Economist. A secret history of China - a fresh new way of thinking about a people, a civilisation, an epic story. The Water Kingdom takes us on a gr
Including all of Hemingway's shorter fiction, this collection is introduced by the poet James Fenton. The stories touch on the same themes as his novels: war, love, the nature of heroism, renunciation
Foreshadowing his later detailed accounts of the Soviet prison-camp system, Solzhenitsyn's classic portrayal of life in the gulag is all the more powerful for being slighter and more personal than tho
