A House of Air
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY HERMIONE LEE
The previously uncollected occasional prose of a great English writer – full of wit, feeling and illumination.
Literature: history and criticism
The Poet and the Murderer: A True Story of Verse, Violence and the Art of Forgery
The true story of a brilliantly forged Emily Dickinson poem sold at Sotheby’s in 1997. The author’s detective work led him across America to a prison cell in Salt Lake City, where the world’s greatest literary forger, Mark Hofmann, is serving a life sentence for double-murder.
So I Have Thought of You: The Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald
A fascinating collection of letters from the great English novelist – and prolific correspondent – Penelope Fitzgerald.
Leviathan: Text only edition
This edition does not include illustrations.
The story of a man’s obsession with whales, which takes him on a personal, historical and biographical journey – from his childhood to his fascination with Moby-Dick and his excursions whale-watching.
Madame Depardieu and the Beautiful Strangers
A razor-sharp and achingly funny memoir of the men and movies that shaped one woman’s life…
The Age of the Warrior: Selected Writings
A selection of Robert Fisk’s finest ‘Comment’ pieces from the Saturday ‘Independent’.
Time Bites: Views and Reviews
Assembled here for the first time in book form are the very best occasional writings from the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Miracles of Life
J. G. Ballard was, for over fifty years, one of this country’s most significant writers. Beginning with the events that inspired his classic novel, ‘Empire of the Sun’, this revelatory autobiography charts the course of his astonishing life.
John Stanislaus Joyce: The Voluminous Life and Genius of James Joyce’s Father
The life of John Stanislaus Joyce, father of James, Fenian, Parnellite, drunk who claimed to have cured himself of syphilis.
Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
Harold Bloom, the doyen of American literary critics and author of The Western Canon, has spent a professional lifetime reading, writing about and teaching Shakespeare. In this magisterial interpretation, Bloom explains Shakespeare’s genius in a radical and provocative re-reading of the plays.
The Year of Magical Thinking: A Play by Joan Didion based on her Memoir
‘This happened on December 30, 2003. That may seem a while ago but it won’t when it happens to you…’
Miracles of Life: Abridged edition
‘Miracles of Life’ opens and closes in Shanghai, the city where J.G.Ballard was born, and where he spent the most of the Second World War interned with his family in a Japanese concentration camp.
Box 18: The Unpublished Spike Milligan
This third wonderful anthology from the Spike Milligan archives uncovers a wealth of previously unpublished material from one of Britain’s best loved comedians.
Stuart: A Life Backwards
‘Stuart does not like the manuscript. He’s after a bestseller, “like what Tom Clancy writes”. “But you are not an assassin trying to frazzle the president with anthrax bombs,” I point out. You are an ex-homeless, ex-junkie psychopath, I do not add.’
Irish Peacock and Scarlet Marquess: The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde
‘As good as being in the gallery. Enthralling.’ Peter Ackroyd, The Times
The original transcript of the famous Wilde vs Queensberry trial, containing previously unseen details and exchanges. With extensive footnotes and a new introduction, this definitive account is a dramatic read that will delight Wilde enthusiasts and the general reader.
Oscar Wilde: A Life in Letters
Wilde the writer is known to us from his plays and prose fiction, but apparently it was in his conversation that his genius reached its summit. His talk is lost and his autobiography was never written, but his letters reveal him at his spontaneous, sparkling best.