Poetry, Plays & Short Stories

We Seldom Talk About the Past is John MacKenna’s first selected collection of short stories, from a career spanning over three decades. The stories selected come from four collections of short fiction, and represent a culmination …

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…

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 …

Clarity in vision, thought and language, distinguishes The Time Being, John FitzGerald's first collection. With poems that explore place and memory, family, relationships and the natural world, John FitzGerald establishes a potent…

With an Introduction and Notes by Katherine McGowran. Christina Rossetti is widely regarded as the most considerable woman poet in England before the twentieth century. No reading of nineteenth century poetry can be complete witho…

Edited, introduced and annotated by Cedric Watts, M.A., Ph.D., Emeritus Professor of English, University of Sussex. Richard III is one of the finest of Shakespeare's historical dramas. Although it has a huge cast, Richard himself,…

Edited, introduced and annotated by Cedric Watts, M.A., Ph.D., Emeritus Professor of English, University of Sussex. Antony and Cleopatra is one of Shakespeare's greatest tragedies: a spectacular, widely-ranging drama of love and w…

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…

With an Introduction and Notes by Anne Varty, Royal Holloway, University of London. Oscar Wilde took London by storm with his first comedy, Lady Windermere's Fan. The combination of dazzling wit, subtle social criticism, sumptuous…

Edited, introduced and annotated by Cedric Watts, M.A., Ph.D., Emeritus Professor of English, University of Sussex. In the hope of saving her brother's life, should a woman submit to rape? Should the law be respected when its admi…

Translated by H.F. Cary With an Introduction by Claire Honess. Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) is one of the most important and innovative figures of the European Middle Ages.Writing his Comedy (the epithet 'Divine' was added by later…

Do our passions control us or us them? These poems find themselves asking such questions in hospitals, in cellars, in Parisian parks and American laundromats, inside our screens and beyond them. Poems of blood and birdsong, of rai…

Amanda Gorman's powerful and historic poem 'The Hill We Climb,' read at President Joe Biden's inauguration, is now available as a collectible gift edition. 'Stunning' CNN 'Dynamic' NPR'Deeply rousing and uplifting' VogueOn 20 Janu…

With a new Introduction by Cedric Watts, Research Professor of English, University of Sussex. W. B. Yeats was a Romantic and Modernist, mystical dreamer and leader of the Irish Literary Revival, Nobel prizewinner, dramatist and, a…

Introduction, Notes and Bibliography by Dr Bruce Woodcock, Senior Lecturer in English, University of Hull. William Blake was an engraver, painter and visionary mystic as well as one of the most revolutionary of the Romantic poets.…

With an Introduction, Notes and Bibliography by Dr Bruce Woodcock, Senior Lecturer in English, University of Hull. Shelley's short, prolific life produced some of the most memorable and well-known lyrics of the Romantic period. Bu…

Selected by Rosemary Gray. Poignant, wry, chilling, challenging, amusing, thought-provoking and always intriguing, these accomplished tales from the pens of great writers are object-lessons in the art of creating a literary master…

With an Introduction by Tim Cook. Shakespeare's sonnets have an intensity of both feeling and meaning unmatched in English sonnet form. They divide into two parts; the first 126 sonnets are addressed to a fair youth for whom the p…

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…

With an Introduction and Bibliography by Stephen Matterson, Trinity College, Dublin. Walt Whitman's verse gave the poetry of America a distinctive national voice. It reflects the unique vitality of the new nation, the vastness of …

With an Introduction by Antonia Till. William Wordsworth (1771-1850) is the foremost of the English Romantic poets. He was much influenced by the events of the French Revolution in his youth, and he deliberately broke away from th…

With an Introduction by Paul Wright. 'What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth' So wrote the Romantic poet John Keats (1795-1821) in 1817. This collection contains all of his poetry: the early work, which is often under…

With an Introduction, Bibliography and Glossary by Michael Irwin, Professor of English Literature University of Kent at Canterbury. Thomas Hardy started composing poetry in the heyday of Tennyson and Browning. He was still writing…

With an Introduction and Notes by Dr Sally Minogue. Elizabeth Barrett Browning was such an acclaimed poet in her own life that she was suggested as a candidate for the Poet Laureateship when Wordsworth died in 1850. Yet today we h…

With an Introduction, Bibliography and Glossary by Dr Paul Wright, Trinity College, Carmarthen. 'I mean to show things really as they are, not as they ought to be'. wrote Byron (1788-1824) in his comic masterpiece Don Juan, which …

'A matchless compound of hug, tonic and kiss' Stephen Fry on William Sieghart's bestselling Poetry Pharmacy The Poetry Pharmacy is one of the bestselling (and most giftable) poetry anthologies of recent decades. Now, after huge de…

'Every poem in this book is a marvel. Taken all together they make up a work of almost miraculous depth and beauty' Sally Rooney 'A poetry debut fit to compare with Seamus Heaney. This wonderful long poem is up there with the grea…

The Long Gaze Back, edited by Sinead Gleeson, is an exhilarating anthology of short stories by some of the most gifted women writers this island has ever produced. Niamh Boyce, Mary Costello, June Caldwell, Lucy Caldwell, Evelyn C…

This educational edition, with the full play text and an introduction to the playwright, features a detailed analysis of the language, structure and characters of the play, and textual notes explaining difficult words and referenc…

With an Introduction by M.J. Elliott. 'My eyes, perversely shaken open, gazed for an instant upon a sight which no human creature could even imagine without panic, fear and physical exhaustion...' A wax museum in London boasts a n…