Poetry, Plays & Short Stories

Composed towards the end of the first millennium, the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf is one of the great Northern epics and a classic of European literature. In his new translation, Seamus Heaney has produced a work which is both true, …

The extraordinary new story collection from one of Ireland's greatest writers and bestselling author of Mindwinter Break. Bernard MacLaverty is a consummately gifted short-story writer and novelist whose work - like that of John M…

The extraordinary new story collection from one of Ireland's greatest writers and bestselling author of Mindwinter Break. Bernard MacLaverty is a consummately gifted short-story writer and novelist whose work - like that of John M…

Does a child come wailing into this world with the patterns that define it already beating in the blood? Do daughters ever believe that mother knows best and can a father come to respect the skills of a son? This collection of sto…

The Blue Mondays Writing Group brings together fourteen writers from USA to Ukraine, and from Germany to Italy, with the beautiful Cork City in Ireland as its focal point. The group's debut anthology features an eclectic mix of po…

Book of Longing is Leonard Cohen's astonishing new collection of poems, the first since Book of Mercy was published nearly three decades ago. Leonard Cohen made his name as a poet before he came to worldwide attention as a singer …

The poems in Book of Mercy brim with praise, despair, anger, doubt and trust. Speaking from the heart of the modern world, yet in tones that resonate with an older devotional tradition, these verses give voice to our deepest, most…

Boulevard Wren and Other Stories is the stunning follow-up to the bestselling Gospel According to Blindboy, and a warped mirror held up to the Irish psyche. Provocative and unsettling, the stories rove through the centuries, from …

Hurled words. Thrown objects. Dodged burgers. A burger was thrown at Travis Alabanza on Waterloo Bridge in 2016. From this experience they have created a poetic, passionate performance piece based around the 'burger': the texture,…

The breakout poetry collection by Sunday Times bestselling author and presidential inaugural poet Amanda Gorman‘Poetry so alive you want to hold it and protect it’ Malala YousafzaiThe luminous poetry collection captures a shipwrec…

With an Introduction and Notes by James Fowler, Senior Lecturer in French, University of Kent Candide (1759) is a bright, colourful literary firework display of a novella. With sparkling wit and biting humour, Voltaire hits severa…

A sizzling drama of desire, avarice and deception set in the American Deep South, Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is published in Penguin Modern Classics.  'Big Daddy' Pollitt, the richest cotton planter in the Mississi…

The essential collection of Christmas stories by Charles Dickens in one book. Charles Dickens continues to be considered one of the greatest western writers of all time.

Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collectionhistory is what we call / what might have happened differently / and didn'tIt is the decade of centuries, and Cheryl tells us our fortune. Radicals liberate a zoo, teenagers fli…

With an Introduction and Notes by Sally Minogue. Dylan Thomas wrote some of the best-known and best-loved poems of the twentieth century, amongst them ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’, ‘Fern Hill’ an…

Carol Ann Duffy has been a bold and original voice in British poetry since the publication of Standing Female Nude in 1985. Since then she has won every major poetry prize in the United Kingdom and sold over one million copies of …

With an Introduction, Notes and Bibliography by Anne Varty, Royal Holloway, University of London. WILDE, GLAMOROUS AND NOTORIUS, more famous as a playwright or prisoner than as a poet, invites readers of his verse to meet an unkno…

Robert Burns, the most celebrated of all Scottish poets, is remembered with great devotion - his birthday on 25th January provokes fervour and festivity among Scots and many others the world over. Born in 1759 into miserable rusti…

Sweeping through crumbling towns, travelling fairs and windswept ports, Gabriel Garci­a Marquez introduces a host of extraordinary characters and communities in his mesmerising tales of everyday life: smugglers, bagpipers, the Pre…

Crisis Actor chronicles various failures and farewells. It is peopled by faded heroes and deferential devotees; a hanged donkey, a bloated rat; solitary bachelors and disillusioned youths - these are the watchers, not the players.…