20th Century

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...

What exactly are the Weird and the Eerie? In this new essay, Mark Fisher argues that some of the most haunting and anomalous fiction of the 20th century belongs to these two modes. The Weird and the Eerie are closely related but distinct modes, each...

'In the first decade of the twentieth century, it was not a good time to be born black, or woman, in America.' So begins this stunning portrait of Vivian Baxter Johnson: the first black woman officer in the Merchant Marines, purveyor of a gambling...

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...

'To die will be an awfully big adventure.' Peter Pan, the boy who refused to grow up, is one of the immortals of children's literature. J. M. Barrie first created Peter Pan as a baby, living in secret with the birds and fairies in the middle of...

In 1926, Tom Rolt who was then sixteen years old, abandoned his public school education. Having taken a job with a small firm of agricultural engineers, he realised that he had found his life’s calling. But the way ahead was neither smooth nor easy...

The perfect Father's Day giftTolkien's One Ring, at the centre of one of the greatest fantasy tales ever told, is an undeniably iconic and powerful symbol in literature. Tracing centuries of ancient folklore, The Ring Legends of Tolkien is a deep and...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781935625018Author Helen M WussowFormat PaperbackPage Count 524Imprint Pace University PressPublisher Pace University PressWeight(grams) 694gDimensions(mm)...

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...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780684867632Author Judith ViorstFormat HardbackPage Count 79Imprint Simon & SchusterPublisher Simon & SchusterWeight(grams) 249g

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

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,...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781611456882Author E M CioranFormat PaperbackPage Count 272Imprint Arcade PublishingPublisher Skyhorse PublishingWeight(grams) 438gDimensions(mm) 210mm *...

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...

Of all the great novelists writing today, none shows the same gift as Martin Amis for writing non-fiction - his essays, literary criticism and journalism are justly acclaimed. The Rub of Time comprises superb critical pieces on Amis's heroes Nabokov,...

"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...

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...

Like John Updike, Martin Amis is the pre-eminent novelist-critic of his generation. The War Against Cliche is a selection of his reviews and essays over the past quarter-century. It contains pieces on Cervantes, Milton, Donne, Coleridge, Jane Austen,...

"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...

'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...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780060919887Author Annie DillardFormat PaperbackPage Count 111Imprint HarperPerennialPublisher HarperCollins Publishers Inc

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;...

Crime fiction has been one of the most popular genres since the 19th century, but has roots in works as varied as Sophocles, Herodotus, and Shakespeare. In this Very Short Introduction Richard Bradford explores the history of the genre, by considering...

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

Never has contemporary fiction been more widely discussed and passionately analysed; recent years have seen a huge growth in the number of reading groups and in the interest of a non-academic readership in the discussion of how novels work. Drawing on...

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,...

Ulysses is one of the foundational texts of modern literature, yet has a reputation for complexity and controversy. In Ulysses Unbound, Joyce expert Terence Killeen untangles this seemingly knotty classic to reveal the wonders beneath, in a clear and...

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...

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...

Brian Lee's study of American fiction from 1865 to 1940 draws on a wealth of material by, amongst others, Twain, James, Dreiser, Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Faulkner. Though the works of these writers have been closely scrutinised by postwar critics in...

'Witty and well researched.' THE TIMES 'A scientific dose of reality.' MAIL ON SUNDAY 'A fun and comprehensive exploration.' LINDA McROBBIE 'Endlessly fascinating.' LIBRARY JOURNAL The science behind James Bond's exploits - armaments, tactics,...

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...

This book features original readings of Pound and Eliot from a major literary critic. In this classic work, Maud Ellmann examines T. S. Eliot's and Ezra Pound's criticism in terms of what she calls the 'poetics of impersonality'. She convincingly shows...

Taking up a teaching appointment in Tokyo in 1931, the English poet and literary critic William Empson found himself captivated by the Buddhist sculptures of ancient Japan, and spent the years that followed in search of similar examples all over Korea,...

From its first magnificent sentence, "In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing", to the last, "I am haunted by waters", A River Runs Through It is an American classic. Based on Norman Maclean's childhood experiences, A...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781907776786Author Sophie RatcliffeFormat PaperbackPage Count 48Imprint Connell GuidesPublisher CONNELL PUBLISHING LTD

Reality Hunger questions every assumption we ever made about art, the novel, journalism, poetry, film, TV, rap, stand-up, graffiti, sampling, plagiarism, writing, and reading. In seeking to tear up the old culture in search of something new and more...

Written in three weeks of creative inspiration, Rainer Maria Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus (1923) is well known for its enigmatic power and lyrical intensity. The essays in this volume forge a new path in illuminating the philosophical significance of this...