20th Century

Contemporary Literature and the Body: a Critical Introduction introduces readers to key theorists and shifting critical trends in the field from 1940 to the present and examines these in relation to close readings of texts from a range of different...

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...

Fascinated and often baffled by China, Anglophone writers turned to classics for answers. In poetry, essays, and travel narratives, ancient Greece and Rome lent interpretative paradigms and narrative shape to Britain's information on the Middle Kingdom...

Declan Kiberd, a professor of Anglo-Irish literature at the University College Dublin, offers an audacious new take on Joyce's classic novel. Ulysses, he argues, is a work written for and about the common person, offering a humane vision of a more...

In Ulysses and Us, Declan Kiberd argues that James Joyce's Ulysses offers a humane vision of a more tolerant and decent life under the dreadful pressures of the modern world. As much a guide to contemporary life as it is virtuoso work of literary...

J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit and The Silmarillion are some of the greatest tales of good versus evil ever told. From the creation of Arda to the War of the Ring, Tolkien's Middle-earth has seen war and rebellion, devastation and...

The 'Theatre of the Absurd' has become a familiar term to describe a group of radical European playwrights - writers such as Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Jean Genet and Harold Pinter - whose dark, funny and humane dramas wrestled profoundly with the...

In this one-of-a-kind book, novelist and academic Nicholas Royle brings together two remarkably different creative figures: Enid Blyton and David Bowie. His exploration of their lives and work delves deeply into questions about the value of art, music...

Poetry and astronomy often travel together in the political sphere, from Milton's meeting with Galileo under house arrest to NASA's practice of launching poems into space. Anchored in the post-war period but drawing on a long history of poetry and...

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...

"I lived the same life as everyone else, the life of ordinary people, the masses." Sitting in a prison cell in the autumn of 1944, the German author Hans Fallada sums up his life under the National Socialist dictatorship, the time of "inward emigration"...

'An absolute belter of a biography' MARINA HYDE A Times Literary Non-Fiction Book of the Year 2022 An LA Times Best Book of the Year 2022 An...

Once a young girl in Somalia who wanted to be in films and escape the domineering grasp of her father, Adua is now an "Old Lira," a woman who immigrated to Italy during the first wave in the 1970's. With the end of the Somalian civil war, Adua begins to...

A superb autobiography by one of the great literary figures of the twentieth century, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter offers an intimate picture of growing up in a bourgeois French family, rebelling as an adolescent against the conventional expectations of...

This is the never-before-told story of George Orwell's first wife, Eileen, a woman who shaped, supported, and even saved the life of one of the twentieth century's greatest writers.In 1934, Eileen O'Shaughnessy's futuristic poem, 'End of the Century,...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781952386329Author David CollardFormat PaperbackPage Count 358Imprint Sagging Meniscus PressPublisher Sagging Meniscus PressWeight(grams) 480g

"Every line we succeed in publishing today...is a victory wrested from the powers of darkness." So wrote Walter Benjamin in January 1940. Not long afterward, he himself would fall prey to those powers, a victim of suicide following a failed attempt to...

Narrative innovation is typically seen as the domain of the avant-garde. However, techniques such as nonlinear timelines, multiple points of view, and unreliable narration have long been part of American popular culture. How did forms and styles once...

Hailed as 'the indispensable critic' by The New York Review of Books, Harold Bloom has for decades been sharing with readers and students his genius and passion for understanding literature and explaining why it matters. In The Daemon Knows, he turns...

This book provides a new account of Bowen's fiction that highlights in particular the force and originality of Bowen's virtually psychoanalytic thinking about development, sexuality and gender. Focusing on the relationship between Bowen's work and the...

Erudite and entertaining in equal measure, Somewhere Becoming Rain is a love letter from the much-loved writer Clive James to one of the world's most cherished poets: Philip Larkin.'This is the finest critic of his generation on the best poet of his...

It is April 1793 and the final power struggle of the French Revolution is taking hold: the aristocrats are dead and the poor are fighting for bread in the streets. In a Paris swept by fear and hunger lives Gamelin, a revolutionary young artist appointed...

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year Erich Fromm (1900-1980) is known to most readers as the author of the international bestseller The Art of Loving (1956). What may be less widely known is that Fromm was a social psychoanalyst whose...

Edward Thomas wrote a lifetime's poetry in two years. Already a dedicated prose writer and influential critic, he became a poet only in December 1914, at the age of 36. In April 1917 he was killed at Arras. Often viewed as a 'war poet', he wrote nothing...

This book tells the story of the struggle to imagine new forms of justice after Nuremberg. Returning to the work of Hannah Arendt, Lyndsey Stonebridge traces the emergence of a critical aesthetics of judgment in a group of writers - often hard to place...

'I obey my happy hour's command, which seems curiously imperative. May-be, if I don't do anything else, I shall send out the most wayward, spontaneous, fragmentary book ever printed.' One of the best kept secrets of modern autobiographical literature,...

Katherine Mansfield is the celebrated biography be bestselling author Claire Tomalin'One of the best biographies I have ever read: a perfect match of author and subject. It should become a classic' Alison LuriePursuing art and adventure across Europe,...

Demented Particulars offers a detailed annotation of Samuel Beckett's first published novel, Murphy. The book includes an extensive Introduction, which outlines the compositional and publishing history of the novel, the critical debate, an account of...

First published in 1974, this novel is a semi-autobiographical reflection on the author's experience of having been the subject of Stanley Kubrick's film adaptation of A Clockwork Orange in 1971. This is the end of Enderby, Anthony Burgess's finest comic...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780936756677Author Eileen MylesFormat PaperbackPage Count 204Imprint MIT PressPublisher MIT Press Ltd

This new, select edition of Wilfred Owen's letters provides a fresh understanding of the poet's life in his own words. Wilfred Owen's fame as one of the great war poets of the twentieth century is unsurpassed, with Dulce et Decorum est possibly the...

This collection of essays, each one by a recognized expert, provides lively and innovative readings of every aspect of Forster's wide-ranging career. It includes substantial chapters dedicated to his two major novels, Howards End and A Passage to India,...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781504046800Author Worth BooksFormat PaperbackPage Count 60Imprint Open Road MediaPublisher Open Road Media

James Joyce is one of the most famous--and controversial--writers of the twentieth century. The myth of his difficulty has discouraged many readers from works such as "Ulysses," but David Norris explores his life and work in this engaging and...

Dublin is one of the world's great literary cities, immortalized in works by some of the most celebrated international authors. It is a city of warmth and character, which combines the richest of histories with a vibrant contemporary edge, and which...

Now the subject of major Disney film starring Ewan McGregor, this is Christopher Robin in his own words.Millions of readers throughout the world have grown up with the stories and verses of A. A. Milne; have envied Christopher Robin in his enchanted...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781871551358Author Warren HopeFormat PaperbackPage Count 65Imprint Greenwich Exchange LtdPublisher Greenwich Exchange Ltd

James Joyce is one of the greatest writers in English. His first book, A Portrait of the Artist as A Young Man laid down the template for the Coming of Age novel, while his collection of short stories, Dubliners, is of perennial interest. His great...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781905512331Author Bernard KopsFormat PaperbackPage Count 244Imprint Five Leaves PublicationsPublisher Five Leaves Publications

The life of Siegfried Sassoon has been recorded and interpreted in literature and film for over half a century. He is one of the great figures of the First World War, and Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man and Memoirs of an Infantry Officer are still widely...