A selection of new and revised essays from eminent scholar and critic Professor Christopher Ricks. Christopher Ricks brings together new as well as substantially augmented critical essays across a wide range. Several derive from his term as the Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford, when his inaugural lecture engaged with the illuminatingly puzzled relations between poetry and prose. Comparison and analysis (the tools of the critic, as T.S. Eliot insisted) are en...

True Friendship looks closely at three outstanding poets of the past half-century—Geoffrey Hill, Anthony Hecht, and Robert Lowell—through the lens of their relation to their two predecessors in genius, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. The critical attention then finds itself reciprocated, with Eliot and Pound being in their turn contemplated anew through the lenses of their successors. Hill, Hecht, and Lowell are among the most generously alert and discriminating readers, as is borne out not on...

Robert Frost and Edward Thomas met in a bookshop in London in 1913. During the next four years, the two writers—Frost, an unknown poet who had sold his farm in New Hampshire in order to take his family to England for one last gamble on poetry and Thomas, a sad literary journalist—formed the most important friendship between poets since that of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Their friendship only ended with Thomas' death in Arras, France, a casualty of the First World War.The story of Ed...

'L-d! said my mother, what is all this story about? - A COCK and a BULL, said Yorick - And one of the best of its kind, I ever heard'Laurence Sterne's great masterpiece of bawdy humour and rich satire defies any attempt to categorize it, with a rich metafictional narrative that might classify it as the first 'postmodern' novel. Part novel, part digression, its gloriously disordered narrative interweaves the birth and life of the unfortunate 'hero' Tristram Shandy, ...

IT’S HARD TO LIVE FOREVER WHEN THE WHOLE WORD WANTS YOU DEAD.Prepare to die screaming with laughter with the final FOUR novels of The Tome of Bill series – over 50 hours of laugh-out-loud horror comedy.Gamer turned vampire Bill Ryder would rather play D&D than take this supernatural shit seriously. Too bad the ancient horrors threatening the world don’t appreciate his attitude.Includes:GODDAMNED FREAKY MONSTERS (Boo...

THERE ARE REASONS WE FEAR THE NIGHT. HE STILL ISN’T ONE OF THEM.My name’s Bill Ryder and six months ago I died. However, I didn’t stay dead. Instead, I woke up a vampire, freshly recruited into a coven of immortal assholes.I thought I’d earned a break after defeating our former master, with maybe a bit of help from my friends, but no such luck.Now things are getting surreal in the world of the strange. New and powerful forces are rearing th...

The Poems of T. S. Eliot is the authoritative edition of one of our greatest poets, scrupulously edited by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue. It provides, for the first time, a fully scrutinized text of Eliot's poems, carefully restoring accidental omissions and removing textual errors that have crept in over the full century in which Eliot has been so frequently printed and reprinted. The edition also presents many poems from Eliot's youth which were published only decades later, a...

THERE ARE REASONS WE FEAR THE NIGHT. HE’S NOT ONE OF THEM.My name’s Bill and I have no life, but not because I enjoy video games or D&D. I literally have no heartbeat thanks to the night I met Sally. She was too good to be true, a woman worth dying for. So, I did.Problem is, I didn’t stay dead.Now I’m a vampire, surrounded by undead freaks who are stronger and faster than me – not to mention better looking. It’s enough to give a guy a compl...

Pete Morrow is an alienated FBI agent whose only escape from thecolleagues and society he despises is through reading literary classics. Whenhis boss sends him to warn away a drug dealer on an obscure army base, hediscovers a murder and becomes obsessed with Jade McClellan, a mysterious manwhose rock band just performed at the crime scene. Tough-guy Morrow has neverbeen in love before—but Jade is almost magical, an embodiment of myth andliter...

At last, a cookbook that brings Mexican food within easy reach: named to Food & Wine Magazine’s Year’s 25 Best Cookbooks as part of its annual Best of the Best cookbook.In his previous books, Rick Bayless transformed America's understanding of Mexican cuisine, introducing authentic dishes and cooking methods as he walked readers through Mexican markets and street stalls. As much as Rick loves the bold flavors of Mexican foods, he understands that preparing many Mexican spe...

Creative Lives and Works: Frank Kermode, George Steiner, Gillian Beer and Christopher Ricks is a collection of interviews conducted by one of England’s leading social anthropologists and historians, Professor Alan Macfarlane. Filmed over a period of 40 years, the four conversations in this volume, are part of a larger set of interviews that cut across various disciplines, from the social sciences, the sciences and to even the performing and visual arts. The current volume on four of Englan...

Regarded by many as the greatest of the Metaphysical poets, John Donne (1572-1631) was also among the most intriguing figures of the Elizabethan age. A sensualist who composed erotic and playful love poetry in his youth, he was raised a Catholic but later became one of the most admired Protestant preachers of his time. The Collected Poetry reflects this wide diversity, and includes his youthful songs and sonnets, epigrams, elegies, letters, satires, and the profoundly moving Divin...