20th Century

One of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped Our World''Rhys took one of the works of genius of the 19th Century and turned it inside-out to create one of the works of genius of the 20th Century' Michele RobertsJean Rhys's masterpiece tells the story of...

'We have become suspicious, rightly, of claims for literary greatness, but in Sebald's case the claim was triumphantly justified. He was, he is, the real thing' John Banville, GuardianFrom acclaimed critic, novelist and academic W. G. Sebald, author of...

An autobiographical work that describes firsthand the great tectonic shifts in English society following the First World War, Robert Graves's Goodbye to All That is a matchless evocation of the Great War's haunting legacy, published in Penguin Modern...

The articles collected in George Orwell's Essays illuminate the life and work of one of the most individual writers of this century - a man who elevated political writing to an art. This outstanding collection brings together Orwell's longer, major...

Your battle wounds are scars upon my heart' wrote Vera Brittain in a poem to her beloved brother, four days before he died in June 1918. The rediscovery of TESTAMENT OF YOUTH has reminded a new generation of the bitter sufferings of women as well as men...

Part of James Joyce's genius was his ability to find the poetry in everyday life. For Joyce, even a simple object like a table becomes magical, "a board that was of the birchwood of Finlandy and it was upheld by four dwarfmen of that country but they...

The classic collection of poetry from the author of I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS.'A brilliant writer, a fierce friend and a truly phenomenal woman' BARACK OBAMAMaya Angelou's poetry - lyrical and dramatic, exuberant and playful - speaks of love,...

The BBC Radio 4 dramatisation of Edna O'Brien's The Country Girls trilogy begins in August 2019.I thought of life's many bounties, to have known the extremities of joy and sorrow, love, crossed love and unrequited love, success and failure, fame and...

"Requiem per un campesino espanol" was first published under the title Mosen Millan in Coleccion Aquelarre,Mexico, 1953. The present text follows the first Spanish edition published by Destino, Barcelona, 1974, which bears a few minor variants, mainly in...

A fascinating insight into the vibrant culture of Modernism, and the rich artistic world of Paris's Left Bank, Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas includes an introduction by Thomas Fensch in Penguin Modern Classics.For Gertrude Stein...

A beautiful and inspiring collection of poetry by Maya Angelou, author of I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS and 'a brilliant writer, a fierce friend and a truly phenomenal woman' (BARACK OBAMA).'I write about being a Black American woman, however, I am...

The response of one writer to the work of another can be doubly illuminating. In this series, a poet selects and introduces another poet whom they have particularly admired. Ted Hughes's classic selection of Sylvia Plath's poetry provides the perfect...

"Hayes leaves resonance cleaving the air." -NPRIn these works based on his Bagley Wright lectures on the poet Etheridge Knight, Terrance Hayes offers not quite a biography but a compilation "as speculative, motley, and adrift as Knight himself." Personal...

Longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-FictionLonglisted for the Orwell Prize for Political WritingThe Ministry of Truth charts the life of George Orwell's 1984, one of the most influential books of the twentieth century and a work that is ever...

Poet, visionary, short-story writer and autobiographer, Gerard de Nerval (1808-1855) explored the uncertain borderlines between dream and reality, irony and madness, autobiography and fiction with his groundbreaking writings. This comprehensive selection...

'Absolutely fascinating . . . A must-read for anyone enthralled by the value and integrity of books' Janice Hallett, author of The Alperton AngelsA true detective story from the age of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers: the literary crime that fooled...

Schuchard's critical study draws upon previously unpublished and uncollected materials in showing how T.S. Eliot's personal voice works through the sordid, the bawdy, the blasphemous, and the horrific to create a unique moral world and the only theory of...

Published posthumously in 1964, A Moveable Feast remains one of Ernest Hemingway's most beloved works. Since Hemingway's personal papers were released in 1979, scholars have examined and debated the changes made to the text before publication. Now this...

One of the literary world's great deceptions was perpetrated when Thomas Hardy wrote his Life in secret for publication after his death as an official biography. Since the true circumstances of its composition have been known The Early Life and Later...

Apocalypse is traditional and familiar, and it is an actual threat; it is feared, desired, and banal. Apocalypse in Crisis discusses fictions from the 1940s to the present, examining shifts in the imagination of apocalypse from the postwar British...

Exam Board: AQA A, WJEC, WJEC EduqasLevel: AS/A-levelSubject: English literatureFirst teaching: September 2015First exams: Summer 2016Enable students to achieve their best grade in AS/A-level English Literature with this year-round course companion;...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781681378022Author Cristina CampoFormat PaperbackPage Count 272Imprint NYRB ClassicsPublisher The New York Review of Books, Inc

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781913988012Author Accolade PressFormat PaperbackPage Count 86Imprint Accolade PressPublisher Accolade PressWeight(grams) 118gDimensions(mm) 216mm * 140mm *...

'Hanif Kureishi's literary memoir explores his relationship with his father, a failed writer. Kurieshi is, of course, hugely successful...' EsquireAmongst a batch of papers, Hanif Kureishi discovered an abandoned manuscript - a novel, written by his...

In 1944 the political philosopher and refugee, Hannah Arendt wrote: 'Everywhere the word 'exile' which once had an undertone of almost sacred awe, now provokes the idea of something simultaneously suspicious and unfortunate.' Today's refugee 'crisis' has...

Sylvia Plath is one of the most influential and iconic American writers of the twentieth century, popular with academic and general audiences alike. Plath, who died at age 30, left behind a body of work that changed the direction of modern poetry, and...

Modernism: An Anthology is the most comprehensive anthology of Anglo-American modernism ever to be published. Amply represents the giants of modernism - James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore,...

The essential guide to twentieth-century literature around the worldFor six decades the Penguin Modern Classics series has been an era-defining, ever-evolving series of books, encompassing works by modernist pioneers, avant-garde iconoclasts, radical...

Dorothy Parker, more than any of her contemporaries, captured the spirit of the Jazz Age in her poetry and prose, and The Collected Dorothy Parker includes an introduction by Brendan Gill in Penguin Modern Classics.Dorothy Parker was the most...

He needed to hear Africa speak for itself after a lifetime of hearing Africa spoken about by othersElectrifying essays on the history, complexity, diversity of a continent, from the father of modern African literature.Penguin Modern: fifty new books...

Sylvia Plath is one of the defining voices in twentieth-century poetry. This classic selection of her work, made by her former husband Ted Hughes, provides the perfect introduction to this most influential of poets. The poems are taken from Sylvia...

Out of this collection of twenty-two interviews spanning two decades rises the distinctive voice of ""the princess of black poetry."" Nikki Giovanni entered the literary world at the height of the Black Arts Movement and quickly achieved not simple fame...

Exam Board: WJEC Eduqas Level: GCSE 9-1 Subject: English Suitable for the 2024 exams Complete revision and...

What is The Tiger Who Came to Tea really about? How is Meg and Mog related to Polish embroidery? And why does death in picture books involve being eaten? Fierce Bad Rabbits explores the stories behind our favourite picture books, weaving in tales of...

In the late 1950s, Random House editor Jason Epstein would talk jazz with Ralph Ellison or chat with Andy Warhol while pouring drinks in his office. By the 1970s, editors were poring over profit-and-loss statements. The electronics company RCA bought...

Is a tower block, your unmade bed, your lavatory basin, or the bicycle chained to the gate next door a work of art? Why should a novel have a beginning, a middle, and an end; or even a story? Whether we recognise it or not, virtually every aspect of our...

Jane Austen is the definitive biography of one of Britain's best-loved novelists, from the acclaimed author of Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self, Charles Dickens: A Life and The Invisible Woman'As near perfect a life of Austen as we are likely to get:...

In this Readers' Guide, Nicolas Tredell introduces and sets in context the key critical debates surrounding a novel about which more critical material exists than any other work of American fiction. The extracts and essays included here reflect on The...

Don Gifford's annotations to Joyce's great modern classic comprise a specialized encyclopedia that will inform any reading of "Ulysses". The suggestive potential of minor details was enormously fascinating to Joyce, and the precision of his use of detail...

In a London psychiatric hospital, an enigmatic patient claims to be the son of an African dictator - a story that becomes unnervingly plausible. An incendiary tale of race, madness and a Darwinian power struggle at the heart of a dying National Health...