Literature

This definitive collection establishes Williams as a major American fiction writer of the twentieth century.

In these hauntingly beautiful stories of abandonment and vengeance, extreme situations lead to disturbing conclusions. A missionary is sent to a place so distant he finds his God has no power there; a husband abandons his wife as they honeymoon in the South American jungle; a splash of water triggers an explosion of violence; and a boy's drug-induced transformation leads to cruelty enjoyed and suffered.

This unique edition presents the complete span of Thomas' short stories, from his urgent hallucinatory visions of the dark forces beneath the surface of Welsh life to the inimitable comedy of his later autobiographical writings. With PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG DOG and ADVENTURES IN THE SKIN TRADE, Thomas found a new voice for his irreverent memories of lust and bravado in south-west Wales and London, leading to a sequence of classic evocations of childhood magic and the follies of adult life. The definitive collection of Dylan Thomas' short stories, showing just why he is considered one of the 20th century's finest writers. Also featuring a bold new livery in celebration of the Dylan Thomas centenary.

This outstanding collection by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist John Cheever shows the power and range of one of the finest short story writers of the last century. Stories of love and of squalor, they include masterpieces such as 'The Swimmer' and 'Goodbye, My Brother' and date from the time of his honourable discharge from the Army at the end of the Second World War.

Who was Alexius Comnenus who would wage war in East and West to save Byzantium from the edge of the abyss? Who were the woman who loved him? Who was it who tried to poison him? Why did his daughter, Anna Comnena, hate her brother, John, the co-Emperor? Why did his wife, Irene Duca, promote Nicephorus Bryennius for the throne? People and events; failures, tears and sorrows, hopes, visions that faded, joys evaporated, meanness and passion. "Come Forth, King" attempts to revive the final glimmer of Byzantium and to take us back on a journey to those difficult years through the narrative of an insignificant palace member who, now retired to Sinope in Pontus, recalls the past with awe.

Born in Colombo, Judith Dunbar spends her teenage years at boarding school, while her beloved mother and younger sister live abroad with her father. When her new friend Loveday Carey-Lewis invites Judith home for the weekend to Nancherrow, the Carey-Lewises' beautiful estate on the Cornish coast, it is love at first sight. She falls in love too with the generous Carey-Lewises themselves. With their generosity and kindness, Judith grows from naive girl to confident young woman, basking in the warm affection of a surrogate family whose flame burns brightly. But it is a flame soon to be extinguished in the gathering storm of war. And Judith herself has far to travel before at last ...coming home.

George Orwell's paean to the end of an idyllic era in British history, Coming Up for Air is a poignant account of one man's attempt to recapture childhood innocence as war looms on the horizon. George Bowling, forty-five, mortgaged, married with children, is an insurance salesman with an expanding waistline, a new set of false teeth - and a desperate desire to escape his dreary life. He fears modern times - since, in 1939, the Second World War is imminent - foreseeing food queues, soldiers, secret police and tyranny. So he decides to escape to the world of his childhood, to the village he remembers as a rural haven of peace and tranquillity. But his return journey to Lower Binfield may bring only a more complete disillusionment ... 'Very funny, as well as invigoratingly realistic ... Nineteen Eighty-Four is here in embryo. So is Animal Farm ... not many novels carry the seeds of two classics as well as being richly readable themselves'John Carey, Sunday Times

Confer is a book between two cities - London and Paris - with detours via rural and small-town England, drunkenness and death camps in Bavaria, the American absurd and the lost libraries of the Roman Empire. It contains love and lust poems, variations on Baudelaire and conversations with Nietzsche and Auden. This impressive debut collection by a young poet already well-known for his innovative, highly musical poetry draws its energy from an interplay between melody and intellect. Ahren Warner's poems seek to amplify the effect of our common experiences and to attenuate the everyday within a matrix of philosophy and art, language and its intervals. Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

Discover Thomas Mann's comic novel of deception and misplaced confidence - back in print for the first time in over twenty years. Waiter by day, man about Paris by night; the young and good looking Felix Krull has created for himself a personality to charm and deceive the world of wealth. When the Marquis de Venosta makes him a proposal that he can't refuse, the young Felix finds himself on the pathway that will elevate him into the world of riches. 'The most astonishing work that Mann ever wrote and also one of the most perfect' Edwin Muir

Sam Riviere is a past master of taking and exploiting 'found' content and process and transforming it into poetry that captivates and unsettles. Here, he harnesses anxiety about AI only to exploit it for his own extraordinary ends. In this case, Generative Pre-trained Transformer 2 (GPT-2), an open source neural network , is used to produce poems that, stripped of the usual authorial clutter, find themselves nonetheless cohering around a voice that speaks of the uncertainties, fears and desires of a world that is desperately, poignantly and recognisably human.