Mary Gaitskill's tales of desire and dislocation in 1980s New York caused a sensation with their frank, caustic portrayals of men and women's inner lives. As her characters have sex, try and fail t...
Horace Rumpole - dishevelled barrister at law, drinker of claret and smoker of cigars, inveterate quoter of Wordsworth and eternal defender of the underdog - is one of the greatest English comic ch...
Raymond Chandler created the fast talking, trouble seeking Californian private eye Philip Marlowe for his first great novel The Big Sleep in 1939. Marlowe's entanglement with the Sternwood family -...
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire is the tale of a catastrophic confrontation between fantasy and reality, embodied in the characters of Blanche DuBois and...
Full grown with a long, smoke-coloured beard, requiring the services of a cane and fonder of cigars than warm milk, Benjamin Button is a very curious baby indeed. And, as Benjamin becomes increasin...
Originally written in 1952 but not published till 1985, Queer is an enigma - both an unflinching autobiographical self-portrait and a coruscatingly political novel, Burroughs' only realist love sto...
Alex Leamas is tired. It's the 1960s, he's been out in the cold for years, spying in Berlin for his British masters, and has seen too many good agents murdered for their troubles. Now Control wants...
Alex Leamas is tired. It's the 1960s, he's been out in the cold for years, spying in Berlin for his British masters, and has seen too many good agents murdered for their troubles. Now Control wants...
Holly Golightly, glittering socialite traveller, generally upwards, sometimes sideways and once in a while down. She's up all night drinking cocktails and breaking hearts. She's a shoplifter, a d...
It is the Day of the Dead. The fiesta in full swing. In the shadow of Popocatepeti ragged children beg coins to buy skulls made of chocolate...and the ugly pariah dogs roam the streets. Geoffrey Fi...
A colourful, multi-facted chronicle of New York in the early 1920s, Manhattan Transfer ranks with Joyce's Ulysses as a powerful and often lyrical meditation on the modern city. Using experimental m...
A colourful, multi-facted chronicle of New York in the early 1920s, Manhattan Transfer ranks with Joyce's Ulysses as a powerful and often lyrical meditation on the modern city. Using experimental m...
Their troubled courtship long behind them, Jenny Bunn and Patrick Standish have settled into London life. Patrick works in publishing and Jenny teaches sick children in a hospital. They have reache...
Brimming with gluttony, booze and lust, Roger Micheldene is loose in America. Supposedly visiting Budweiser University to make deals for his publishing firm in England, Roger instead sets out to of...
Karl Rossman has been banished by his parents to America, following a family scandal. There, with unquenchable optimism, he throws himself into the strange experiences that lie before him as he slo...
Set in the days of the Empire, with the British ruling in Burma, Burmese Days describes both indigenous corruption and Imperial bigotry, when 'after all, natives were natives – interesting, n...
The most beautiful and powerful of Milosz's poems from across his writing lifeThis selection brings together the most beautiful and powerful of Czeslaw Milosz's poems, spanning his writ...
Ayn Rand's story of Howard Roark, a brilliant architect who dares to stand alone against the hostility of second-hand souls. First published in 1943, this best-selling novel is a passionate defense...
Jacob, a Jewish slave held in a mountain village after escaping a massacre by Cossacks, will be killed if he tries to escape. The one saving grace is his love for his master's daughter, Wanda. They...
It's 1959 and Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom, one time high school sports superstar, is going nowhere. At twenty-six he is trapped in a second-rate existence - stuck with a fragile, alcoholic wife, a hou...