A. J. Liebling, born in Manhattan in 1904, joined the staff of the New Yorker in 1935 and contributed innumerable articles to the magazine throughout his lifetime, on subjects ranging from food to boxing and France to horse racing. As a war correspondent during the Second World War, he reported from France, England and Algeria, and participated in the Normandy landings. In later life he married the writer Jean Stafford, his third wife. He died in 1963.

A. J. Liebling

A. J. Rosen is an author of YA fantasy and is known as @agatharoza on Wattpad.

A. J. Rosen

A. K. Davidson

A. O. Scott has been a film critic at the New York Times since 2000. His writing has appeared in many other publications, including the New York Review of Books, Slate, the New Yorker and the Nation. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism in 2010, Scott is currently Distinguished Professor of Film Criticism at Wesleyan University. He lives with his family in Brooklyn, New York. 
 
@aoscott

A. O. Scott

A.S. Byatt (1936-2023) was a novelist, short-story writer and critic of international renown. Her novels include Possession (winner of the Booker Prize 1990), the Frederica Quartet and The Children’s Book, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. She was appointed CBE in 1990 and DBE in 1999, and was awarded the Erasmus Prize 2016 for her ‘inspiring contribution to life writing’ and the Pak Kyongni Prize 2017. In 2018 she received the Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award.

A. S. Byatt

A. T. Williams won the George Orwell Prize for Political Writing in 2013 for his book A Very British Killing: The Death of Baha Mousa. He lives in Warwickshire.

A. T. Williams

A. W. Chase

Dubbed ‘The new queen of spy fiction’ by the Guardian newspaper, and ‘the real thing’ by the Washington Post, A.C. 'Ava' Glass is the CWA Dagger-shortlisted author of Alias Emma (The Chase), The Traitor and The Trap. The Traitor was a 2023 Richard and Judy Bookclub pick. Alias Emma was a Barnes and Noble book of the month. A former crime reporter and communications consultant, for five years Ava worked closely with spies. Her time in that world fascinated her, and the people she met back then inspire every book she writes.

A.C. Glass

A.E. Housman

Arthur Edward Waite was the designer and co-creator of the now famous Rider Waite Tarot deck. 
 
An American-born British poet and scholarly mystic, his strong interest in all esoteric matters - divination, magic, Kabbalism, alchemy and Freemasony - led to him penning a number of books. These include the Key to the Tarot, The Book of Ceremonial Magic and A New Encyclopedia of Freemasony.

A.E. Waite

A.E. Warren is the author of the Tomorrow's Ancestors series, which consists of Subject Twenty-One, The Hidden Base, The Fourth Species and The Final Rising. 
 
After spending eight years working as a lawyer, she began to write in the evenings and early mornings as a form of escapism from life in a very small cubicle with lots of files. She self-published her first novels in her spare time, which were picked up by Del Rey UK which is the science fiction/fantasy imprint of Penguin Random House. 
 
 She is an avid reader, occasional gamer and fair-weather runner. She lives in the UK with her husband, daughter and hopefully, one day, a wise border terrier named Austen.

A.E. Warren

A.G.D. Maran

A.J. Ayer

A.J. Cronin

A K Benedict writes crime and speculative fiction in a room filled with clowns, mannequins and Doctor Who figures. Her first novel, The Beauty of Murder, was nominated for an eDunnit award and is in development for a major 8-part TV series by Company Pictures. Her second, Jonathan Dark or The Evidence of Ghosts, came out in February 2016. She's written Torchwood audio dramas for Big Finish and her short stories have featured in anthologies including Great British Horror and Best British Short Stories. She lives in St Leonards-on-Sea with her dog, Dame Margaret Rutherford.

A.K.Benedict

A. L. Kennedy has twice been selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists and has won a host of other awards – including the Costa Book of the Year for her novel Day. She lives in Essex.

A.L. Kennedy

A.M. Ellis is a speculative fiction author and lover of everything steeped in myth and mystery. Her stories often lean into diverse voices, not only in her identity as a Black woman, but in exploring neurodivergence and mental health. A proud introvert and nostalgic gamer, she lives in Maryland, USA, with her husband and three children. Angelica is also the author of Hunt A Killer, a PERFECT SCORE novel, under the pen name A.M. Ellis, which she wrote as an IP for Scholastic in the US.

A.M. Ellis

A.N. Wilson was born in 1950 and educated at Rugby and New College, Oxford. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he holds a prominent position in the world of literature and journalism. He is an award-winning biographer and a celebrated novelist, winning prizes for much of his work. He lives in North London.

A.N. Wilson

A.T. Emerald

A.W. Priest

A.B.C. Merriman-Labor was a barrister, writer and munitions worker born in Freetown, Sierra Leone in 1877. His published works include A Series of Lectures on the Negro Race and The Story of the African Slave in a Nutshell. He also edited two editions of the Handbook of Sierra Leone. He arrived in the UK in 1904 to study law. In 1907, he organised a centenary commemoration of the abolition of the slave trade in Westminster Abbey. He later embarked on an 'entertainment-lecture' tour called Life and Scenes in Britain, travelling across thousands of miles of West, South West and Central Africa, which he expanded on to create Britons Through Negro Spectacles.

ABC Merriman-Labor

AJ Cronin

AJ Molloy

Aabria Iyengar is an American actress and author.

Aabria Iyengar

Aaliya Jaleel is a freelance illustrator, designer, and visual development artist, currently majoring in Animation at the University of Texas at Dallas. She is also the illustrator of Under My Hijab and Muslim Girls Rise. You can visit her online at www.aaliyamj.com.

Aaliya Jaleel

Aaron Allston

After more than fifteen years of experience as a clinical psychotherapist, Dr Aaron Balick has taken the amazing insights from psychology and psychotherapy out of the consultation room and made them accessible to the wider world. 
 
He has been an ‘agony uncle’ for many years for both CBBC and BBC Radio 1, as well as on television, including BBC Worldwide, BBC 3 and BBC Learning.

Aaron Balick

Aaron Carroll

Aaron Dignan is the founder of The Ready--a global organizational transformation and coaching practice--that helps companies large and small adopt new forms of self-organization and dynamic teaming. Clients include Johnson &amp; Johnson, Microsoft, Lloyds Bank, Citibank, Boeing, Mailchimp, Airbnb, Dropbox, and charity: water. 
 
He is also the founder of Murmur--a SaaS startup that helps teams scale culture through the magic of working agreements. The Murmur platform will allow every team on the planet to define and share their ways of working. 
 
Dignan is the author of Brave New Work (2019) and Game Frame (2011), co-host of the Brave New Work podcast, and a friend to misfit toys.

Aaron Dignan

Aaron Edwards is a senior lecturer in defence and international affairs at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, specialising in terrorism and counter-insurgency. He is the author and editor of several books, including Defending the Realm: The Politics of Britain’s Small Wars Since 1945, and has lectured all over the world on aspects of national and international security. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Aaron Edwards

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Ralf Webb

In Rotten Days in Late Summer, Ralf Webb turns poetry to an examination of the textures of class, youth, adulthood and death in the working communities of the West Country, from mobile home parks, boyish factory workers and saleswomen kept on the road for days at a time, to the yearnings of young love and the complexities of masculinity. 
 
Alongside individual poems, three sequences predominate: a series of 'Love Stories', charting a course through the dreams, lies and salt-baked limbs of multiple relationships; 'Diagnostics', which tells the story of the death from cancer of the poet's father; and 'Treetops', a virtuosic long poem weaving together grief and mental health struggles in an attempt to come to terms with the overwhelming data of a life. 
 
The world of these poems is close, dangerous, lustrous and difficult: a world in which whole existences are lived in the spin of almost-inescapable fates. In searching for the light within it, this prodigious debut collection announces the arrival of a major new voice in British poetry.

Rotten Days in Late Summer

Wanda Coleman

This is the first ever UK publication of the poetry of Wanda Coleman: a beat-up, broke Black woman who wrote with anger, humour and clarity about her life on the margins, and who went overlooked by the establishment for much of her career even as she was known colloquially as the 'unofficial poet laureate of Los Angeles'. 
 
Nobody wrote about police hassle like she did. Nobody wrote about poverty, about making do with what's on hand, about the slave trade or about their personal vendetta against slow walkers in the supermarket, in quite the same way. Wicked Enchantment gathers 130 of Coleman's best poems, spanning some four decades, in a selection by Terrance Hayes. Mary Karr has called it 'hateful and hilarious, heartbroke and hellbent'; the Washington Post says that 'Wanda Coleman is not just wickedly wise, she is transcendent'; the New Yorker calls her 'one of the greatest poets ever to come out of L. A.' 
 
Brutal, hilarious, triumphant, wild and paradoxically, sometimes horrifically precise, these are not poems written for a course, for establishment approval or for polite applause; they were written because Coleman had to write what she saw and felt, and wrote brilliantly. Few if any writers, before or since, have had the courage to write with such honesty about the daily experience of life in a racist world.

Wicked Enchantment

Selected Poems

Gyles Brandreth

Following the recent success of the bestselling Have You Eaten Grandma? Gyles Brandreth is back with his next love-letter to language. 
 
In his last book Gyles lamented the rise of emojis, this misuse of punctuation and the younger generation's lack-lustre approach to language. In this stunning new book, Gyles celebrates the finest uses of English by handpicking the ultimate anthology of Great Britain's best-loved poems. 
 
He urges us to savour the perfect couplets, delicate words, and clever quips by learning these exquisite poems by heart. By savouring, memorising and sharing these poems we can begin to increase literacy rates, which are at an all-time low, while enriching our lives with the joy of language. 
 
Gyles writes emphatically about the beauty, diversity and ingenuity of the language used in these poems, and the way in which they can transform our lives.

Dancing By The Light of The Moon

Over 250 poems to read, relish and recite

August Wilson

In Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, the great blues diva Ma Rainey is due to arrive at a run-down Chicago recording studio with her entourage to cut new sides of old favourites. Waiting for her are the black musicians in her band, and the white owners of the record company. A tense, searing account of racism in jazz-era America that the New Yorker called 'a genuine work of art'. 
 
Fences centres on Troy Maxson, a garbage collector, an embittered former baseball player and a proud, dominating father. When college athletic recruiters scout his teenage son, Troy struggles against his young son's ambition, his wife, who he understands less and less, and his own frustrated dreams.

Fences & Ma Rainey's Black Bottom

Caleb Femi

What is it like to grow up in a place where the same police officer who told your primary school class they were special stops and searches you at 13 because 'you fit the description of a man' - and where it is possible to walk two and a half miles through an estate of 1,444 homes without ever touching the ground? 
 
In Poor, Caleb Femi combines poetry and original photography to explore the trials, tribulations, dreams and joys of young Black boys in twenty-first century Peckham. He contemplates the ways in which they are informed by the built environment of concrete walls and gentrifying neighbourhoods that form their stage, writes a coded, near-mythical history of the personalities and sagas of his South London youth, and pays tribute to the rappers and artists who spoke to their lives. 
 
Above all, this is a tribute to the world that shaped a poet, and to the people forging difficult lives and finding magic within it. As Femi writes in one of the final poems of this book: 'I have never loved anything the way I love the endz.'

Poor

Florence Welch

The perfect gift for fans of Florence + the Machine, featuring lyrics, never-before-seen poetry, and scrapbook entries from the award-winning singer 
 
‘An alchemy of memoir and imagination’ Waterstones Newsletter 
 
Songs can be incredibly prophetic, like subconscious warnings or messages to myself, but I often don't know what I'm trying to say till years later. Or a prediction comes true and I couldn't do anything to stop it, so it seems like a kind of useless magic. 
 
Florence Welch needs no introduction. 
 
As the lead vocalist of the award-winning band Florence + The Machine, who burst onto the scene with their cult-classic debut album Lungs, she has won the hearts of fans across the globe with her ethereal voice and theatrical stage presence and, more recently, for her collaboration with Taylor Swift on Florida!. 
 
Now, ahead of the release of the band’s new album, Everybody Scream, explore the iconic voice of their acclaimed singer with this stunning collection of her lyrics, poems and scrapbook entries. 
 
Featuring beautiful illustrations and journal-style intimacy, Useless Magic is the must-have book for any Florence + The Machine fan. 
 
Praise for Useless Magic 
 
'Pop's high priestess bares her soul in this candid collection of poems and lyrics' Observer 
 
'A treasure . . . beautiful. Generous in its honesty, by the end you feel as though you have climbed into the colourful, and sometimes tortured, world of a passionate artist' i News 
 
'Makes the reader feel as though they're peeking into a private journal' Refinery29

Useless Magic

Lyrics, Poetry and Sermons

Lyrics and Poetry

Daniel Poppick

These poems tell the story of a generation in crisis: at odds with its own ideals, precariously (or just un-) employed, and absolutely terrified of seeing itself in the planet's future. Is our contemporary moment pure tragedy, or a dark joke? Can it be both? 
 
Ranging between elegiac lyrics and autobiographical accounts of a group of poets moving from Iowa to Brooklyn in the years just before and after the 2016 election, Fear of Description reinvigorates the prose poem, exploring the slippery terrain between grief and friendship, artifice and technology, writing and ritual, hauntings and obsessions - searching for joy in art but instead finding it in pitch darkness. 
 
As the narrative cuts back and forth in time and circles around itself, the stories which begin to emerge in this remarkable book - of dead dogs speaking through Ouija boards, lives cut short, and youthful brilliance - explore at once the struggle to find one's place in the world, and the fear of being trapped once there.

Fear of Description

Eve Ewing

In 1919, award-winning poet Eve L. Ewing recovers the essentially human stories at the heart of the Chicago Race Riot of 1919: of the people who took part in it, and of the lives that were marked by it. 
 
This most intense of the riots of the USA's 'Red Summer' lasted eight days, resulting in thirty-eight deaths and almost 500 injuries; it was a signal and traumatic event which has now shaped the history of the city where it took place for a century. As well as telling the tale of the riot itself and the cruel murder which precipitated it, the poems of 1919 explore its aftermath and bring to vivid life the mass migrations which had set the stage for this violence in the preceding years. 
 
Poetically recounting the stories of everyday people trying to survive and thrive in the city, and using speculative and Afrofuturist lenses to reimagine history, the result is a book which unearths the universal at the heart of the particular, and illuminates the fine line between past and present.

1919

Ariana Reines

Deadpan, epic, and searingly charismatic, A Sand Book is at once relatable and out-of-this-world. In poems tracking climate change, bystanderism, state murder, sexual trauma, shopping, ghosting, love, and the transcendent shock of prophecy, A Sand Book chronicles new dimensions of consciousness for our strange and desperate times. 
 
What does the destruction of our soil have to do with the weather in the human soul? From sand in the gizzards of birds to the iridescence on the surface of spilt oil, from sand storms on Mars to our internet-addicted present, from the desertifying mountains of Haiti to natural disasters and state violence, A Sand Book is both a travelogue and a book of mourning.

A Sand Book

Blending stark realism with the surreal and fantastic, Eve L. Ewing's narrative takes us from the streets of Chicago to an unspecified future, deftly navigating the boundaries of space, time, and reality. Ewing imagines familiar figures in magical circumstances, and identifies everyday objects - hair moisturizer, a spiral notebook - as precious icons. 
 
Her visual art is spare, playful and poignant: a cereal-box decoder ring that allows the wearer to understand what Black girls are saying; a teacher's angry, subversive message scrawled on the chalkboard. Electric Arches invites fresh conversations about race, gender, the city, identity and the joy and pain of growing up.

Electric Arches

Bernardine Evaristo

Meet Zuleika: sassy girl about town, former child bride, A-list Roman babe, black immigrant in ancient Londinium. She knows this city like the back of her hand - its squalor and bustle, its slum tenements and sumptuous villas. But she doesn't know how it feels to fall in love. 
 
Sold in marriage to a rich, fat Roman, stranded in luxurious neglect with only slaves and sex workers for company, it's not long before Zuleika is up to no good. And one day, when the Roman Emperor himself strolls into town and catches her eye, the trouble really starts... 
 
Irresistibly funny and whip-smart, this is a deeply relatable coming-of-age tale with a surprising historical twist.

The Emperor's Babe

From the Booker prize-winning author of Girl, Woman, Other

Julia Watson

Summoning the words to express our feelings of loss for a loved one in the days following a death can feel almost impossible. And often the choice of readings available can seem daunting. 
 
Poems and Readings for Funerals is a carefully curated collection of the very wisest words about death by some of the world's greatest poets, thinkers, playwrights and novelists. 
 
Featuring beautifully and thoughtfully written poems, prose extracts and prayers, these readings have been chosen to move and console, sympathize and relieve - to bring everyone attending a funeral or memorial closer together.

Poems and Readings for Funerals

If you're lost for words for a loved one's big occasion then instead of worrying what to say to express your feelings simply turn to the words of the greats. 
 
Here are collected the very best readings by world-renowned poets, bards, playwrights and novelists who have written passionately, thoughtfully and deeply over hundreds of years about love, marriage and commitment. 
 
Featuring an astonishing range of poems, prose extracts, prayers and songs, these moving readings have been chosen to enhance the occasion whether they be moving, witty, irreverent, thoughtful or heartfelt. 
 
Above all, these words will be recognized as timeless and true.

Poems and Readings for Weddings

Susan Sontag

As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh

Diaries 1964-1980

Dale Shaw

A collection of haikus that each sum up the complex, confusing and frequently confounding character of the British. 
 
In a time of political turbulence and societal rancour, the idea of Britishness and national identity is being widely discussed. What does it mean to be British? 
 
Very British Haikus, makes light of what it means to be British in a refreshing and funny way using the classical, elegant five, seven, five syllable poetic structure to celebrate everything idiosyncratic that defines what it means to be British. All of the minutiae of British life is portrayed in Haiku form: parking, queuing, tea, chips, violently repressed emotion, pets, gardening and anger. 
 
Divided into categories concerning work, leisure, travel, family, food, pets and relationships - the entire British psyche will be devilishly skewed. 
 
With a nod to the hilarious Very British Problems and the bestselling What I Lick Before Your Face and Other Haikus By Dogs, Very British Haikus attempts to get under the skin of those citizens of Blighty and reveals what makes them tick.

Painfully British Haikus

Roger McGough

For more than fifty years, Roger McGough has entranced generations of readers with poetry which is at once playful and poignant, intimate and ambitious in its scope. Joinedupwriting delivers on all the wry observation, warmth and subtle heartache that readers have come to expect from his collections. 
 
From forgotten friendships to the idiosyncrasies of family life, to the trauma of war right through to contemporary global politics - these poems explore the human experience in all its shades of light and dark, but always with McGough's signature wit, irreverence and vivacity. This is the nation's favourite poet at his very finest.

joinedupwriting

Anne Boyer

''Around that time my daughter and I had this exchange: 
 
Anne, imagine if the world had nothing in it. 
 
Do you mean nothing at all - just darkness - or a world without objects? 
 
I mean a world without things: no houses, chairs, or cars. A world with only people and trees and dirt. 
 
What do you think would happen? 
 
People would make things. We would make things with trees and dirt.' 
 
When the cold comes, when our needs announce themselves, it is with clothing, with possessions, in literature, through dreams - in all the forms and categories that shape, contain and constrain - that we keep ourselves alive. Yet, in a society in which some are rich and some are poor, who gets to dream, and who invents our forms? This is a book made of money and the lack of money; of writing and of not-writing; of illness and of care; of low-rent apartments, cake-baking mothers, Socratic daughters and bodies that refuse to become information.

Garments Against Women

Stephen Sexton

Memories of going 'through the looking-glass' into the land of video games are some of the most evocative of all childhood. In these poems we are rushed back to years spent playing Super Mario World, a place where people are small and flowers are large, a place of treacherous labyrinths and heart-stopping leaps of faith, where the materiality, wonder and peril of that world bleeds into our own as the young player bravely travels with his mother on the journey of her life-ending illness. 
 
 Drawing on traditions of elegy and pastoral, this is a daring, moving and lyrically beautiful exploration of memory, grief and the unreal.

If All the World and Love Were Young

Tracy K. Smith

Tracy K. Smith's poetry seems to contain the whole universe. From the earliest work gathered here, we find the voices and experiences of women who have lived adventurously, who have travelled, desired, and found themselves drinking at bars with strangers in lands far from home; we find records of tenderness and of conflict, of the cruelty inflicted on humanity by humanity, and remarkable documentary work bearing witness to the victims of injustice, from a Native American boy separated from his family by the US Government to the girls kidnapped as 'wives' for rebel commanders in Uganda. 
 
This volume gathers the poet's selections from her four collections published since 2003, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Life on Mars, which expands the scope still further, finding in outer space - and the work of David Bowie - a rich vein of questions about life and death, power and paternalism, and race; and Wade in the Water, whose explorations of motherhood and the destruction of the environment intertwine with verbatim histories of slavery and the American Civil War. These are sensuous, light-filled poems, capable of finding the luminous, the transcendent and a principle of love in even the most difficult of subjects.

Eternity

Maureen N. McLane

At times loose-limbed, freewheeling and conversational, at times musically taut, and often miraculously both at once, Maureen N. McLane's poetry has been described as having 'a tonal register somewhere between teenage fangirl and Wordsworth professor' (London Review of Books). What I'm Looking For gathers selections from her first five books of poetry, from the mixture of love poems and breezy skewerings of Great Literature that characterize her debut, Same Life, to the later collections' shadowing of a mind roaming wittily through nature, philosophy, music and sex, and the bravura life-story-in-episodes of Mz N: the serial. 
 
Brainy, funny, passionate, uncool and always utterly charming, these 'sexy, cerebral and romantic' poems (The New York Times Book Review) will make you 'laugh, cry and think in quick succession, or all at once' (Sarah Howe).

What I'm Looking For

Selected Poems 2005–2017

Patrizia Cavalli

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Two hours ago I fell in love 
and trembled, and tremble still, 
and haven't a clue whom I should tell. 
 
Any hall she reads her poetry in is invariably filled to the gills. In Italy, Patrizia Cavalli is as beloved as Wislawa Szymborska is in Poland, and if Italy were Japan she'd be designated a national treasure. The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben said of Cavalli that she has written 'the most intensely ethical poetry in Italian literature of the 20th century'. One could add that it is, easily, also the most sensual and comical. Though Cavalli has been widely translated into German, French, and Spanish, she remains little known in Britain; My Poems Won't Change the World is the first substantial gathering of translations of her work into the English language. 
 
The book is made up of poems from Cavalli's collections published by Einaudi from 1974 to 2006, here translated by an illustrious group of poets including Mark Strand, Jorie Graham, Jonathan Galassi and Gini Alhadeff. Thoughtful, sly and full of life, these are poems of the self, the body, pasta, cats, the city traversed on foot or by car, and - always, and above all - love.

My Poems Won't Change the World

Penguin

Love itself might be blind, but over millennia it has inspired some of the most perceptive and visionary poetry ever written. From the fragments of Sappho, to the sonnets of Shakespeare and the Romantic verses of Byron, Keats and Shelley, right through to Simon Armitage and Carol Ann Duffy, The New Penguin Book of Love Poetry collates and curates the very finest poems on this subject from across cultures and ages. Whether it's the burning passion of two young lovers, the steady companionship of a married couple, the unconditional love of a parent for a child or the enduring affection of lifelong friendship, this is Penguin's definitive collection of the most treasured writing on the most universal of themes.

The New Penguin Book of Love Poetry

Toby Martinez de las Rivas

Geoffrey Hill

Rowan Evans

Geoffrey Hill (1932-2016) was often considered the greatest English-language poet of his generation. Penguin Modern Poets 7: God Is Distant gathers a selection spanning Hill's full body of poetry, from the astonishing power and compression of the first five decades to the greater experimentalism and fluency of the creative outpouring that began in 1997, and places it alongside work by two younger British poets: Rowan Evans, whose 'tirelessly inventive' and 'vivid lyrical work' (Denise Riley, Eric Gregory Award citation) plays with the legacy of late modernism to create poetry of great beauty, energy and precision; and Toby Martinez de las Rivas, whose first two collections have seen his 'visionary disposition' (Guardian) build to astonishing rhetorical heights of Blakean dimensions. 
 
Taken together, these are poems of lucid intensity, high seriousness and knowing sidelong glances, as alert to the natural world of the British countryside as they are to the body that suffers and to questions of the soul. They take a long view of humanity's riches and crises, and consider along the way such issues as morality, faith, innocence, redemption, the public spaces of democracy and the acts of violence that rupture them, as well as that patron animal of the Modern Poets series: the urban fox.

Penguin Modern Poets 7

These Hard and Shining Things

Stephen Fry

The Greek myths are amongst the best stories ever told, passed down through millennia and inspiring writers and artists as varied as Shakespeare, Michelangelo, James Joyce and Walt Disney. 
 
They are embedded deeply in the traditions, tales and cultural DNA of the West. You'll fall in love with Zeus, marvel at the birth of Athena, wince at Cronus and Gaia's revenge on Ouranos, weep with King Midas and hunt with the beautiful and ferocious Artemis. 
 
Spellbinding, informative and moving, Stephen Fry's Mythos perfectly captures these stories for the modern age - in all their rich and deeply human relevance.

Mythos

The Greek Myths Retold

Terrance Hayes

The black poet would love to say his century began 
With Hughes or God forbid, Wheatley, but actually 
It began with all the poetry weirdos &amp; worriers, warriors, 
Poetry whiners &amp; winos falling from ship bows, sunset 
Bridges &amp; windows. In a second I'll tell you how little 
Writing rescues. 
 
So begins this astonishing, muscular sequence by one of America's best-selling and most acclaimed poets. Over seventy poems, each titled 'American Sonnet for my Past and Future Assassin' and shot through with the vernacular energy of popular culture, Terrance Hayes manoeuvres his way between touching domestic visions, stories of love, loss and creation, tributes to the fallen and blistering denunciations of the enemies of the good. 
 
American Sonnets builds a living picture of the whole self, and the whole human, even as it opens to the view the dividing lines of race, gender and political oppression which define the early 21st century. It is compassionate, hilarious, melancholy, bewildered - and unstoppably, rhythmically compelling, as few books can hope to be.

American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin

W. G. Sebald

In 1939, five-year-old Jacques Austerlitz is sent to England on a Kindertransport and placed with foster parents. This childless couple promptly erase from the boy all knowledge of his identity and he grows up ignorant of his past. Later in life, after a career as an architectural historian, Austerlitz - having avoided all clues that might point to his origin - finds the past returning to haunt him and he is forced to explore what happened fifty years before.

Austerlitz

Kathryn Maris

But back to the summer day the spike 
grazed my brother's scalp: I slept beside him 
in his racing car bed and my father woke me 
and slapped my face, thinking, I assume, of sex, 
whereas I was already thinking about death. 
 
Urban, suburban, observant, obsessive and wickedly witty, the poems in Kathryn Maris's third book range over such subjects as parenthood, marriage, adultery, the politics of children's sports contests, female incarceration and psychoanalysis. The House with Only an Attic and a Basement is that rare thing: a darkly funny collection of poems that courses with keen intelligence, yet carries its sophistication lightly so that it is a pleasure to stride along with every poem.

The House with Only an Attic and a Basement

Primo Levi

'Back, away from here, drowned people, go. I haven't stolen anyone's place' 
 
A selection of poetry from the author of If this is a Man and The Periodic Table. 
 
Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.

The Survivor

Even the men in black armor, the ones 
Jangling handcuffs and keys, what else 
 
Are they so buffered against, if not love's blade 
Sizing up the heart's familiar meat? 
 
In Wade in the Water, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Tracy K. Smith's signature voice - inquisitive, lyrical and wry - turns over what it means to be a citizen, a mother and an artist in a culture arbitrated by wealth, men and violence. The various connotations of the title, taken from a spiritual once sung on the Underground Railroad which smuggled slaves to safety in 19th-century America, resurface throughout the book, binding past and present together. Collaged voices and documents recreate both the correspondence between slave owners and the letters sent home by African Americans enlisted in the US Civil War. Survivors' reports attest to the experiences of recent immigrants and refugees. Accounts of near-death experiences intertwine with the modern-day fallout of a corporation's illegal pollution of a major river and the surrounding land; and, in a series of beautiful lyrical pieces, the poet's everyday world and the growth and flourishing of her daughter are observed with a tender and witty eye. Marrying the contemporary and the historical to a sense of the transcendent, haunted and holy, this is a luminous book by one of America's essential poets.

Wade in the Water

Federico García Lorca

My heart 
brims with billows 
and minnows 
of shadows and silver 
 
Beautiful, brutal, strange and lovely: this is Lorca reborn, in a selection of previously unpublished pieces and masterful new translations. 
 
Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.

The Dialogue of Two Snails

A Private Thriller

A series of children's modern classic novels by renowned 20th century children's writers. All the titles in this series have the A Puffin Book logo, contemporary-style covers, and child-friendly endnotes.

A Puffin Book

A Ripley Novel

A Slice of the Moon

A Victorian Mystery

A Walk in...

A Women’s Murder Club Thriller

A chef Paul Delamare Mystery

Aberrations

Across the Universe

Actiphons

Adelia Aguilar

Adrian Mole

Adventures in Time

Aftermath

Against War

Age of X

Agent 21

Agent Z

Detective Aidan Waits is a troubled junior detective haunted by his past. Facing an uncertain future, and disconnected from his history, DC Waits and his partner, Detective Inspector Peter 'Sutty' Sutcliffe work on Manchester's streets to uncover the city's worst criminals among the grime of the underworld.

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