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...
'A masterpiece ... a moving image of post-war Poland, and the first breathing of one of the essential voices of the twentieth century... the master of literary reportage' The Times Literary Supplem...
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 -...
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 -...
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...
Speak, memory', said Vladimir Nabokov. And immediately there came flooding back to him a host of enchanting recollections - of his comfortable childhood and adolescence, of his rich, liberal-minded...
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...
These works were written against a background of war and racism. Freud sought the sources of conflict in the deepest memories of humankind, finding clear continuities between our 'primitive' past a...
These works were written against a background of war and racism. Freud sought the sources of conflict in the deepest memories of humankind, finding clear continuities between our 'primitive' past a...
A chemist by training, Primo Levi became one of the supreme witnesses to twentieth-century atrocity. In these haunting reflections inspired by the elements of the periodic table, he ranges from you...
Andy Warhol kept these diaries faithfully from November 1976 right up to his final week, in February 1987. Written at the height of his fame and success, Warhol records the fun of an Academy Awards...
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...
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...
A cultural storm swept through the 1960s -- Pop Art, Bob Dylan, psychedelia, underground movies -- and at its centre sat a bemused young artist with silver hair: Andy Warhol. Andy knew everybody (f...
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...
A cultural storm swept through the 1960s -- Pop Art, Bob Dylan, psychedelia, underground movies -- and at its centre sat a bemused young artist with silver hair: Andy Warhol. Andy knew everybody (f...