Literature

Hailed by George Bernard Shaw as 'useful [corrective] to the romantic conception of war', R.C. Sherriff's Journey's End is an unflinching vision of life in the trenches towards the end of the First World War, published in Penguin Classics. Set in the First World War, Journey's End concerns a group of British officers on the front line and opens in a dugout in the trenches in France. Raleigh, a new eighteen-year-old officer fresh out of English public school, joins the besieged company of his friend and cricketing hero Stanhope, and finds him dramatically changed. Laurence Olivier starred as Stanhope in the first performance of Journey's End in 1928; the play was an instant stage success and remains a remarkable anti-war classic. R.C. Sherriff (1896-1975) joined the army shortly after the outbreak of the First World War, serving as a captain in the East Surrey regiment. After the war, an interest in amateur theatricals led him to try his hand at writing. Following rejection by many theatre managements, Journey's End was given a single performance by the Incorporated Stage Society, in which Lawrence Olivier took the lead role. The play's enormous success enabled Sherriff to become a full-time writer, with plays such as Badger's Green (1930), St Helena (1935), and The Long Sunset (1955); though he is also remembered as a screenplay writer, for films such as The Invisible Man (1933), Goodbye Mr Chips (1933) and The Dam Busters (1955). If you enjoyed Journey's End, you might like Robert Graves's Goodbye to All That, available in Penguin Modern Classics. 'Its unrelenting tension, and its regard for human decency in a vast world of human waste, are impressive and, even now, moving'Clive Barnes

I love fire. Fire is the colour of genius. In this audacious new work, Edna O'Brien gives voice to the women who were central to the life of James Joyce.

'James Joyce had been my ultimate hero for sixty years, but to paint the canvas of his life was daunting. Therefore I decided to depict him as seen by the key figures in his life - Mother, Wife, Mistress of a fleeting moment, his patron Harriet Weaver and his beloved Daughter Lucia, of whom he said her mind was but a transparent leaf away from his.'Written to celebrate the centenary of Ulysses, Joyce's Women premiered at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, in September 2022.

Introduction and Notes by Norman Vance, Professor of English, University of Sussex. Jude Fawley is a rural stone mason with intellectual aspirations. Frustrated by poverty and the indifference of the academic institutions at the University of Christminster, his only chance of fulfilment seems to lie in his relationship with his unconventional cousin, Sue Bridehead. But life as social outcasts proves undermining, and when tragedy occurs, Sue has no resilience and Jude is left in despair. Hardy's portrait of Jude, the idealist and dreamer who is a prisoner of his own physical nature, is one of the most haunting and desperate of his creations. Jude the Obscure is a dark yet compassionate account of the insurmountable frustrations of human existence which reflect Hardy's yearning for the spiritual values of the past and his despair at their decline.

Powerful and controversial from its 1895 publication to the present, "Jude the Obscure" scandalized Victorian critics, who condemned it as decadent, indecent, and degenerate. Between its frank portrayals of sexuality and its indictments of marriage, religion, and England's class system, the novel offended a broad swath of readers. Its heated reception led the embittered author to renounce fiction, turning his considerable talents ever afterward to writing poetry. Hardy's last novel depicts a changing world, where a poor stonemason can aspire to a university education and a higher place in society -- but where in reality such dreams remain unattainable. Thwarted at every turn, Jude Hawley abandons his hopes, is trapped into an unwise marriage, and pursues a doomed relationship with his free-spirited cousin, Sue Bridehead. The lovers find themselves equally incapable of living within the conventions of their era and of transcending its legal and moral strictures. Hailed by modern critics as a pioneering work of feminism and socialist thought, Hardy's tragic parable continues to resonate with readers.

'Mr. Anthony Berkeley deserves all gratitude for his energetic efforts to escape from the thraldom of formula... If you are hard-boiled and disillusioned about detectives, you will find this tale very refreshing.' - Dorothy L.

SayersAt a costume party with the dubious theme of 'famous murderers and their victims', the know-it-all amateur criminologist Roger Sheringham is settled in for an evening of beer, small talk and analysing his companions. One guest in particular has caught his attention for her theatrics, and his theory that she might have several enemies among the partygoers proves true when she is found hanging from the 'decorative' gallows on the roof terrace. Noticing a key detail which could implicate a friend in the crime, Sheringham decides to meddle with the scene and unwittingly casts himself into jeopardy as the uncommonly thorough police investigation circles closer and closer to the truth.

Tightly paced and cleverly defying the conventions of the classic detective story, this 1933 novel remains a milestone of the inverted mystery subgenre.

A #1 "New York Times" bestseller, this is the classic thriller of science run amok that took the world by storm. Available for the first time in a tall Premium Edition. Reissue.

The Camel gets his Hump, the Whale his Throat, and the Leopard his Spots in these bewitching stories that conjure up distant lands, the beautiful gardens of splendid palaces, and the jungle and its creatures. Inspired by Rudyard Kipling's delight in human eccentricities and the animal world, and based on bedtime stories he told to his daughter, these strikingly imaginative fables explore the myths of creation, the nature of beasts, and the origins of language and writing. They are linked by poems and scattered with Kipling's illustrations, which contain hidden jokes, symbols, and puzzles.

'An ambitious story of love and betrayal' - Irish Times'The ending is like a bomb thrown into your room -- you'll be reeling for days and weeks to come.' - Neel MukherjeeBerlin. 11 July 1986. They meet by chance on a bus. She is a young student, he is older and married. Theirs is an intense and sudden attraction, fuelled by a shared passion for music and art, and heightened by the secrecy they must maintain. But when she strays for a single night he cannot forgive her and a dangerous crack forms between them, opening up a space for cruelty, punishment and the exertion of power. And the world around them is changing too: as the GDR begins to crumble, so too do all the old certainties and the old loyalties, ushering in a new era whose great gains also involve profound loss. From a prize-winning German writer, this is the intimate and devastating story of the path of two lovers through the ruins of a relationship, set against the backdrop of a seismic period in European history.

To kalá της Αν Πεντέρς είναι μια συνεχής αλληλεπίδραση των διασταυρούμενων αναζητήσεων, μια ποίηση που τρέφεται από την πολιτική, την ιστορία, τη γεωγραφία, τη φιλοσοφία, και διερευνά την έννοια της αναδρομής. Η γραφή ξετυλίγεται «εξ αποστάσεως», από το αλλού για το οποίο μιλάει (την Ελλάδα), ολοκληρώνεται όταν η συγγραφέας έρχεται για πρώτη φορά εδώ (Μάρτιος 2016), και από τότε ανοίγεται σε άλλα πράγματα (afto). Η απόσταση είναι το βλέμμα πίσω από την κάμερα όταν η συγγραφέας φτάνει στη «φανταστική χώρα». Είναι η ξαφνική αντιπαράθεση με αυτό που μας προσφέρεται να διαβάσουμε, αυτό που δημιουργεί εγγύτητα. Είναι η φυσική απόδειξη ότι κάτι που είναι ορατό ίσως δεν το βλέπουμε καθόλου. Αυτή είναι η καρδιά του θέματος. Μια προσπάθεια αποσαφήνισης... Φέρνει πίσω στο προσκήνιο το ζωντανό –και στην ποιητική γλώσσα– το καθολικό.

That is Acheron? A river in the north-west of Greece, in Epirus, which, in ancient Greek mythology, was the boundary between life and death. What is Kalamas? It too is a river, in the same region, which Byron associated with the Acheron in "Childe Harold`s Pilgrimage", and History, after a hundred and fifty years was to give it, and in a dramatic way, the same meaning.

What is "Kalamas and Acheron"? A cycle of stories, closely connected, which can be read as a novel, where the two rivers become the boundary not only between life and death, but also between human passions of enemies and friends, between utopia and reality, love and violence, joy and misery, past and present, nostalgia and revulsion, memory and fantasy. And finally, a boundary like a taut rope, on which human fate teeters in the balance.

"Kalamas and Acheron" is also the book that, when it was first published in 1985, won the First State Award.