Literature

Anil's Ghost transports us to Sri Lanka, a country steeped in centuries of tradition, now forced into the late twentieth century by the ravages of a bloody civil war. Enter Anil Tissera, a young woman and forensic anthropologist born in Sri Lanka but educted in the West, sent by an international human rights group to identify the victims of the murder campaigns sweeping the island. When Anil discovers that the bones found in an ancient burial site are in fact those of a much more recent victim, her search for the terrible truth hidden in her homeland begins. What follows is a story about love, about family, about identity - a story driven by a riventing mystery.

From her appearance in a small magazine in 1906 to her death in 1965, Anna Akhmatova was a dominant presence in Russian literary life. But this friend of Pasternak and Mandelstam was a poet in a country where poetry was literally a matter of life and death, as she found when Mandelstam and her own husband, Gumilyev, were executed, and her son imprisoned for many years in the Gulag. Akhmatova's first collection, Evening, appeared in 1912.

Rosary (1914) made her a household name. After the Revolution she went in and out of favour with the authorities, who sometimes allowed her to publish, sometimes banned her work. She is now most celebrated in the West for Poem Without A Hero and Requiem, a sequencemourning the victims of Stalin's Terror which was only published (and then outside Russia) in 1963.

'One of the greatest books of the century' - Guardian'Hiding...where would we hide?... Margot and I started packing our most important belongings into a satchel. The first thing I stuck in was this diary...'In July 1942 thirteen-year-old Anne Frank and her family, fleeing the horrors of Nazi occupation, went into hiding in an Amsterdam warehouse. Over the next two years Anne vividly describes in her diary the frustrations of living in such confined quarters. This unabridged, definitive text reveals Anne's innermost thoughts and feelings as she grows up, and provides a deeply moving true-life story that comes to an abrupt and tragic end. Contains an Afterword, chronology of events and glossary of terms.

Annie Dunne and her cousin Sarah live and work on a small farm in a remote and beautiful part of Wicklow in late 1950s Ireland. All about them the old green roads are being tarred, cars are being purchased, a way of life is about to disappear. Like two old rooks, they hold to their hill in Kelsha, cherishing everything. When Annie's nephew and his wife are set to go to London to find work, their two small children, a little boy and his older sister, are brought down to spend the summer with their grand-aunt. It is a strange chance of happiness for Annie. Against that happiness moves the figure of Billy Kerr, with his ambiguous attentions to Sarah, threatening to drive Annie from her last niche of safety in the world. The world of childish innocence also proves sometimes darkened and puzzling to her, and she struggles to find clear ground, clear light - to preserve her sense of love and place against these subtle forces of disquiet. A summer of adventure, pain, delight and ultimately epiphany unfolds for both the children and their elderly caretakers in this poignant and exquisitely told story of innocence, loss and reconciliation.

'A masterwork... an almost unbearable, tumultuous, blood-pounding experience' Washinton PostWhen Another Country appeared in 1962, it caused a literary sensation. James Baldwin's masterly story of desire, hatred and violence opens with the unforgettable character of Rufus Scott, a scavenging Harlem jazz musician adrift in New York. Self-destructive, bad and brilliant, he draws us into a Bohemian underworld pulsing with heat, music and sex, where desperate and dangerous characters betray, love and test each other to the limit. 'In Another Country, Baldwin created the essential American drama of the century' Colm Tóibín

P.B. Jones is the amoral, bisexual protagonist of this unfinished novel. He discovers that bed-hopping rather than literary ability is the way to get published. He discovers along the way that prayers that are answered cause more pain than those that remain ignored.

Filled with passionate speeches and sensitive probing of moral and philosophical issues, this powerful and often-performed Greek drama reveals the grim fate that befalls the children of Oedipus. Footnotes.

"While it is common practice in contemporary theatre to re-contextualize a piece of work, the riskier--and Slavoj Zizek would argue more faithful--approach might be to change the actual story itself. Zizek's Antigone not only re-positions Antigone as a revolutionary political figure, it alters the narrative of the play itself. As Zizek puts it himself in the introduction to the play, 'Only one thing is sure: sticking to the traditional letter is the safest way to betray the spirit of the classic'. Philosophers have long been preoccupied with Antigone--Kierkegaard, Hegel, Plato and Judith Butler to name but a few--but never before has a philosopher had the audacity to throw fidelity to the wind and re-write one of the most classic plays in the history of theatre. This lack of fidelity is, of course, precisely the point: not only is this a fascinating new play in its own right, it is a political work calling into question our ideas of reverence to the canon, fidelity to the text and the notion of what 'faithfulness' might really mean. A brilliantly funny, moving and political play for those who are interested in reading and watching Antigone in a new way. "--

Sophocles stands as one of the greatest dramatists of all time, and one of the most influential on artists and thinkers over the centuries. His plays are deeply disturbing and unpredictable, unrelenting and open-ended, refusing to present firm answers to the questions of human existence, or to provide a redemptive justification of the ways of gods to men or women. These three tragedies portray the extremes of human suffering and emotion, turning the heroic myths into supreme works of poetry and dramatic action. Antigone's obsession with the dead, Creon's crushing inflexibility, Deianeira's jealous desperation, the injustice of the gods witnessed by Hyllus, Electra's obsessive vindictiveness, the threatening of insoluble dynastic contamination... Such are the pains and distortions and instabilities of Sophoclean tragedy. And yet they do not deteriorate into cacophony or disgust or incoherence or silence: they face the music, and through that the suffering is itself turned into the coherence of music and poetry. These original and distinctive verse translations convey the vitality of Sophocles' poetry and the vigour of the plays in performance, doing justice to both the sound of the poetry and the theatricality of the tragedies. Each play is accompanied by an introduction and substantial notes on topographical and mythical references and interpretation.