The career of Eli Mandel (1922–1992) was one of the most prolific and distinguished in all of Canadian literature, yet in recent years his work has gone unsung compared with that of such peers as Margaret Atwood, Leonard Cohen, Robert Kroetsch, Irving Layton, and P.K. Page. Though he was a critic, anthologist, and editor of national prominence, Mandel’s legacy resides most securely in his poetry, which earned many accolades.From Room to Room: The Poetry of Eli Mandel prese...

In 2013, Eli Mandel decided to recreate the 642-mile trek that John Keats completed in the summer of 1818, hoping to learn more about the famous poet who died at the age of twenty-five. As Mandel matches his “ghostly companion’s” journey step-for-step, the moments of discovery turn inward and Mandel is forced to face his own ghosts.

When Miles Franklin-shortlisted novelist Brenda walker became sick she turned to two healers: doctors and books.This is the story of how she recovered.Packing her bag for hospital after being diagnosed with breast cancer, Brenda wondered which book to put in. As a novelist and professor of literature, her life was built around reading and writing. Books had always been her solace and sustenance, and now choosing the right one was the most important thing sh...

**NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS' CHOICE • WINNER OF THE DAVID HIGHAM PRIZE (UK) • NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY: THE GLOBE AND MAIL, THE SUNDAY TIMES, AND THE NEW YORK TIMESRonald Wright’s unforgettable chronicle of love, plague and time travel—in the tradition of Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Handmaid's Tale.**It is 1999, and David Lambert, jilted lover and reluctant museum curator, is about to discover the startling news of th...

pistache (pis-tash): a friendly spoof or parody of another's work. [Deriv uncertain. Possibly a cross between pastiche and p**stake.]From Thomas Hardy's football report to Dan Brown's visit to the cash dispenser, the work of the great and the not-so-great is here sent up with little hope of coming down.Most of these pieces began their life on Radio Four's The Write Stuff, but have been retooled for the printed page. Others, such as Martin Amis's fi...

The British literary sensation—"the most startling, discomforting, complicated, ungovernable, hilarious and heart-rending of memoirs " ( The Telegraph)—the story of a celebrated writer's sudden descent into blindness, and of the redemptive journey into the past that her loss of sight sets in motion. Candia McWilliam, whose novels A Case of Knives, A Little Stranger, and Debatable Land made her a reader favorite throughout the United Kingdom and around th...

If it’s time for a rhyme, or you need a satiric lyric, the Collins Rhyming Dictionary is the fastest and easiest way to refine your line.The most accessible way to find the rhyme you need. Other rhyming dictionaries are characterised by the use of obscure words for padding, subsections for disyllabic and trisyllabic rhymes, and reverse phonetic order – but we avoid such complications and, as a result, have the most practical rhyming book available.The most satisfactory rhym...

'One Hundred Nonsense Pictures and Rhymes' is a delightful collection of Edward Lear's nonsense limericks and illustrations between 1846 and 1877. This edition has been specifically formatted and the 100 illustrations optimised for digital reading devices.

Mark Forsyth - author of the Sunday Times Number One bestseller The Etymologicon - reveals in this essay, specially commissioned for Independent Booksellers Week, the most valuable thing about a really good bookshop.Along the way he considers the wisdom of Donald Rumsfeld, naughty French photographs, why Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy would never have met online, and why only a bookshop can give you that precious thing - what you never knew you were...

Always Unreliable is the collected first three volumes of Clive James's eloquently witty autobiographies, Unreliable Memoirs, Falling Towards England and May Week Was in June.In Unreliable Memoirs we meet the young Clive James – dressed in shorts and growing up in post-war Sydney. With Falling Towards England, we find Clive living in a Swiss Cottage B&B, where he practises the Twist, anticipates poetical masterp...

Robinson Crusoe discovers thousands of ‘half-naked savages’ having it large on Ibiza.James Bond is on a mission, as a 24-hour call-out plumber.‘The young stable lad is a moody fellow,’ say reviewers of Wuthering Heights in The Good Hotel Guide.Hans Christian Andersen gets into the subprime mortgage racket.Stephen King attempts a love story that doesn’t involve buckets of blood.Robbie Burns cheers on Andy Murray at Wimbledon....

In Walter Sickert: A Conversation, Virginia Woolf turns art criticism into a poised modernist dialogue, using the figure of the painter Walter Sickert to explore perception, form, and the elusive traffic between visual and verbal art. Rather than offering a conventional critical essay, Woolf stages thought as conversation, shifting between observation, analogy, and speculation. The piece belongs to the interwar context of British modernism, when painting, fiction, and criticism were active...