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...

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...

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...

Anyone who regularly tackles challenging crossword puzzles will be familiar with the frustration of unanswered clues blocking the road to completion. Together in one bumper volume, Crossword Lists and Crossword Solver provides the ultimate aid for tracking down those final solutions.The Lists section contains more than 100,000 words and phrases, listed both alphabetically and by number of letters, under category headings such as Volcanoes, Fungi, Gilbert & Sulliva...

Here is a collection of stories mixing some of the most compelling and enduring traditional ghostly stories from Lancashire with more recent uneasy everyday experience from the county. Taken from the book, Red Rose Paranormal, this is a selection for ebook readers. Here the reader will be told about spirits from the other world, some loitering by the place of their violent death, and others haunting a place they perhaps cannot leave, even in their passing from this world. These are confron...

This collection, drawing on almost forty years of verse, represents the definitive guide to one of the leading English poets working today. It will allow the reader the chance to survey both the remarkable variety and the consistent quality of O’Brien’s work, as well as the enduring strength of his obsessions: these have helped create a tone and a landscape as immediately recognizable as those of MacNeice, Larkin or Eliot. O’Brien’s hells and heavens, underworlds and urban dystopias, train...

A short memoir of a trip to the wonderful racecourse of Cartmel in the Southern Lakes of Cumbria. Also a day out at the most picturesque reservoir of Thirlmere, a lake that is very rarely visited by tourists. Also I visit the various homes and workplaces of the poet William Wordsworth, amongst others.