Literature & Poetry

In this series, a contemporary poet selects and introduces a poet of the past.

Ben Jonson (1572-1637) was born in London, and became a leading poet, playwright and essayist of the Elizabethan age. In 1598 he killed an actor in a duel but escaped hanging by pleading benefit of the clergy, and by 1616 had re-established enough Court favour to be awarded a pension by James I - in effect making him the first Poet Laureate.

Entertains and diverts by bizarre stories of mapless roads and unreal cities, the Ostrich Palisades and the erotic stones of Bonehenge.

The poems in this fifth collection of his poetry were written before, during and after Matt Simpson's two-month period as poet-in-residence at the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery in Launceston, Tasmania.

This is a biography of one of the most famous and best-selling authors of our time. Salinger's 'Catcher in the Rye' has sold more than 65 million copies and, today, still sells 250,000 a year. Famously reclusive, little, until now, has been known of Salinger.

With the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, four decades of separation seemed to have been brought to an end. In the literary arena as in many others, this seemed to be the surprising but ultimately logical end to the situation in which, after the extreme separation of the two Germanies' literatures during most of the period up to 1980...

With the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, four decades of separation seemed to have been brought to an end. In the literary arena as in many others, this seemed to be the surprising but ultimately logical end to the situation in which, after the extreme separation of the two Germanies' literatures during most of the period up to 1980...

The dialogue between form and message is intrinsic to the novel as genre. Yet the strength of that discourse has been shaken in the twentieth century by an increasing doubt about affirmations of any kind and a growing awareness of the relativity of knowledge and perception.

While the first decade after the fall of the Berlin wall was marked by the challenges of unification and the often difficult process of reconciling East and West German experiences, many Germans expected that the new centuryA" would achieve normalization.A" The essays in this volume take a closer look at Germany's new normalcy...

Enid Blyton gave us the "Famous Five" and "Fatty's Find-Outers", the "Enchanted Wood" and the "Wishing Chair". Some of us, encouraged by austere critics, have pretended no longer to want what Enid gave. Suitable for those willing to acknowledge that Enid Blyton once mattered, this work investigates what made Enid, Enid.

'These [How to Read] books let you encounter thinkers eyeball to eyeball by analysing passages from their work' Terry Eagleton, New Statesman

With a half-dozen books of poetry published to date, Kenneth Fields distills some forty years of teaching and writing about poetry into Classic Rough News, a collection of fresh sonnets and sonnet-like lyrics that attests to both Fields's skills as a writer and the inexhaustible possibilities of the form.

'One of Scotland's most accomplished literary talents' The Times

Features the work by the twenty writers that Granta's judges - including novelists Edmund White and AM Homes - have selected as the most interesting young voices in American fiction.

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Repressed personal experiences, neglected battles, forgotten civilisations: an issue of Granta that excavates the unfairly buried event, the secret life, the overlooked.

This novel is a satiric comedy of manners contrasting the background of an American social climber with the standards of her third husband, a French aristocrat. It is the story of the voracious and calculating Undine Spragg and her slightly-flawed victory in society.