Showing all 11 resultsSorted by latest
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£10.00
Sylvia Plath always knew that she wanted to be a writer and she always wrote. This unique gathering of excerpts from her journals, letters, poems and prose offers razor-sharp, inspiring, amusing and painful insights into what it means to commit to a writing life. Plath wants, above all, to be truthful and exact, whether unlocking a childhood memory, exulting in new landscapes and lives or squaring up to marriage and motherhood. She doesn’t think poems should be all that chaste; and reaches past decorum and convention to capture her subject exactly with an astonishing image or phrase. This is a book for writers as much as for readers, and for anyone wanting to understand how a commitment to craft, to precision and technique, to looking hard and seeing clearly, is what lays the foundations for work such as Plath’s with all its radical genius and enduring emotional power.
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£16.99
In this book, Emily Crane invites us to share her observations on the extraordinary and the everyday: stacks of washing up sit alongside musings on God; hot coffee accompanies thoughts about creativity; and memories of snails in her childhood garden slip in beside notes on writing, and books. We find Nietzsche living in a house-share with Keats, and a grieving Demeter keeps us company on wintry Sunday morning walks. Drawing upon philosophy, literature, mythology and memoir, ‘In Search of Lost Thoughts’ is an antidote to the stresses and distractions of the world we live in. Above all, it is a vivid and striking insight into what it means to be a young woman today.
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£25.00
Who were Chaucer’s thirty-three pilgrims, and why were they heading to Canterbury? What do they and their tales tell us about medieval England as a place, and about the daily lives of its people? Leading historian Nicholas Orme brings literature and history together to answer this question, using the ‘Canterbury Tales’ and the other great writings of Chaucer’s day. In ten chapters, he explains what people thought: about time and space, religion and the social system. He shows their wide degree of literacy and how they spent their leisure. He takes us through the politics of the day, the crusades, and the lifestyles of the nobility, clergy, townsfolk and country dwellers, along with the landscapes they lived in. This is an intimate and intriguing guide to the world which produced some of the greatest poetry in the English language, re-creating Chaucer’s England in all its richness and variety.
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£14.99
Books are dying. Across the world the number of people reading is in free fall. Literacy is declining or stagnating in most developed countries. At universities, students are unable to read the books assigned to them by their teachers. Addictive digital entertainment technologies have colonised our free time with infantilising ‘slop’. The golden chain of knowledge linking reader to reader through the centuries is breaking for the first time since the collapse of the Western Roman Empire ushered in the Dark Ages. This book is an impassioned attack on the trivial and meaningless culture of the screen and a defence of the written word.
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£18.99
Twenty literary greats. One victim. Can you solve the puzzle – and the murder? The Literary Detectives Murder Club are gathered in the library at Murderly Manor when disaster strikes: the Literary Critic is found dead in the study, his whisky laced with poison. The Literary Critic has never written a novel, but he has ruined dozens. Every member has the motive and means for murder, and Inspector Jigsaw suspects them all. Can you piece together the puzzle, follow the clues on the fold-out poster, and use your deductive powers to crack the case? You can enjoy this as a standard jigsaw puzzle – or step into the role of detective with the bonus murder mystery. Don your finest deerstalker hat, pick up your magnifying glass and solve the case using the fold-out poster. Record your deductions, then open the envelope to check your answer. The twenty suspects are fictionalized versions of some of the most iconic crime writers of all time, fr
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£25.00
Set sail into a year of sea-themed writing with the sixth title in the beloved ‘Bedside Companion’ series, collating 366 extracts selected from across the spectrum of literature.
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★ STAFF PICK!
Selected by Aude
£18.99
Staff Pick!
Aude Says…
Such a small but powerful and intense novel.
Fictionalised biography? Auto fiction? Essay on Art and artists in 20th Century Paris? This book takes many forms and they are all fascinating. Every sentence matters, you will not want to miss a single word, a single thought.
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Who was Gertrude Stein? Avant-garde American poet and art collector who made her home in Paris, godmother of modernism, queer icon, friend to Picasso and Hemingway, self-declared genius – a writer who has baffled readers and critics for a century. And why does she matter? The narrator of Deborah Levy’s novel has gone to Paris to find out. There she meets Eva with the blinding gaze, an artist in a long-distance marriage, and Fanny, a sexually adventurous financier; together they cook, walk, read and argue late into the nights. As Paris sweeps her along in its ceaseless flow, she thinks – about what we have to lose to become modern, navigating anxiety, living with uncertainty, angry fathers, making a new life in another country, art and language – how all these things looked to Gertrude Stein in the early days of the twentieth century, and how they look to her and her friends in the early twenty-first.
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£25.00
A bold reimagining of the life of a much-loved writer, from the author of RED ROSA and THREADS
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£9.99
A fascinating literary overview of London across the centuries, through the beautiful and varied writing it has inspired.
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£19.95
Terry Eagleton argues that the art of reading poetry is as much in danger of becoming extinct as thatching or clog dancing. He summons the aid of such critics as the Russian Formalists to raise some general questions: What is poetry, and how does it differ from prose? And, is there a language peculiar to poetry?
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£7.99
York Notes Advanced offer a fresh and accessible approach to English Literature. This market-leading series has been completely updated to meet the needs of today's A-level and undergraduate students. Written by established literature experts, York Notes Advanced intorduce students to more sophisticated analysis, a range of critical perspectives and wider contexts.
