Search results for ""renard press ltd""

Exponentially increasing levels of unemployment and simmering racial tension in Moss Side, inner Manchester, exploded into mass riots on the 8th of July 1981, following the siege of a police station. In the Moss frames the events from the perspectives of Janet, a student nurse working in A&E, and Nav, a Sikh police officer on the streets. Both crave a return to normality and just want to fit in, but when violence breaks out and a teenage boy is stabbed, they are thrust together and forced to confront questions that arise about what really happened in the Moss.

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Bars Fight, a ballad telling the tale of an ambush by Native Americans on two families in 1746 in a Massachusetts meadow, is the oldest known work by an African-American author. Passed on orally until it was recorded in Josiah Gilbert Holland’s History of Western Massachusetts in 1855, the ballad is a landmark in the history of literature that should be on every book lover’s shelves.

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In 1773, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral became the first book of poetry by an African-American author to be published. At the tender age of seven, Phillis had been brought to Massachusetts as a slave and sold to the well-to-do Wheatley family. There, she threw herself into education, and soon she was devouring the classics and writing verse with whatever she had to hand – odes in chalk on the walls of the house. Once her talent became known, there was uproar, and in 1772 she was interrogated by a panel of ‘the most respectable characters in Boston’ and forced to defend the ownership of her own words, since many believed that it was an impossible that she, an African-American slave, could write poetry of such high quality. As related in the 1834 memoir by an outspoken proponent of antislavery, B.B. Thatcher, also included in this volume, the road to publication was not straight, and while it became clear that such a volume could not be published in America at the time, Phillis was recommended to a London publisher, who brought out the book – albeit with an attestation as to her authorship, as well as a ‘letter from her master’ and a short preface asking the reader’s indulgence. This edition includes the attestation, the ‘letter from her master’ and notes from the original publishers as an appendix, so that the twenty-first-century reader can discover Phillis Wheatley as she should have been read – as a poet, not property.

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The Rover, or, The Banished Cavaliers is the most popular play by the Restoration playwright (and spy) Aphra Behn, first performed in 1677. Although Behn’s work as a spy for Charles II came to a sudden end with a spell in debtor’s prison, she was a stout Royalist, and the title refers to Charles’ supporters, who were living in exile on the Continent. In the tradition of Restoration comedy, the play follows the wild exploits of a group of English gentlemen in Naples at Carnival time, although many of the tropes of the genre are subverted to an extent which sent shockwaves through the theatre world. Behn’s infamous libertine Willmore was an instant hit, and The Rover catapulted her to overnight fame, and brought her an income from the box office, making her one of the first women to earn a living by their pen.

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‘So let’s build the tension – everybody put your hands on your legs and give us a drum roll please! Stamp your feet! Here we go!’ It’s the final performance of a Cinderella panto in a moth-eaten, regional theatre, and backstage tensions between the ugly sisters are threatening to boil over on to the stage. Will the egotism, one-upmanship and sexual politics remain confined to the dressing room, or will the bitter rivalry and jealousy between the two actors steal the show? Oh No It Isn’t! is a brilliantly observed, raucous yet moving new play exploring the highs and lows of life in the theatre.

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Long before Shakespeare's name was synonymous with the stage he built a name as a poet, and Venus and Adonis was likely the first work to be published by the same quill that gave the world Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet and the rest of the canon.

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A trail-blazing writer of great repute in her day, but now unjustly neglected, Baroness Emmuska Orczy’s name was synonymous with the mystery genre in the early twentieth century, particularly for her Scarlet Pimpernel books, set during the French Revolution. But perhaps the most revolutionary of her works is the lesser-known Lady Molly of Scotland Yard, a short-story collection revolving around Molly Robertson-Kirk, a fictional London detective – indeed, published in 1910, Molly was one of the first fictional female detectives, and served as a prototype for many that followed. Beautifully presented and with helpful explanatory notes, this edition celebrates Orczy’s heroine and aims to reintroduce her for a new generation of readers.

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There are around 7 million carers in the UK alone - unpaid people who look after someone who needs help because of their illness, frailty, disability, mental health problem or addiction and cannot cope without support. The Curae Prize was established in 2022 to offer a platform to these writer-carers, offering creative focus and access to the publishing industry. Attracting a wealth of extraordinary submissions, the inaugural prize has been widely praised for its inclusivity and spotlighting of neglected talent, and this anthology celebrates the works that made it on to the shortlist.

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In Truth or Dare we follow, spell-bound, as chance encounters bring violent pasts roaring into the present; we wait on tenterhooks as a woman sits by her husband's hospital bed as both their lives hang in the balance; we watch anxiously as a homeless man begs a woman with her life and career stretching ahead of her not to jump to her death. By turns comedic, heart-wrenching and moving, these stories paint powerful pictures of pain, love and empathy, and celebrate the power we have over one another. From the rain-soaked waterways of London to the bustling streets of Dhaka, Truth or Dare is a stunning collection that spans two continents and sees the best and worst in both.

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By Fax to Alice Springs was Simon Mundy’s second book of poems, including work from 1987 to 1995. As the title implies, the poems were written all over the world – North Carolina to Italy, Moravia to Australia – as well as in Mundy’s home territory on the borders of Wales. They reflect his intense sense of the spirit of place as well as his wry approach to politics and bittersweet relationship with women.

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George Orwell set out ‘to make political writing into an art’, and to a wide extent this aim shaped the future of English literature – his descriptions of authoritarian regimes helped to form a new vocabulary that is fundamental to understanding totalitarianism. While 1984 and Animal Farm are amongst the most popular classic novels in the English language, this new series of Orwell’s essays seeks to bring a wider selection of his writing on politics and literature to a new readership. In The Prevention of Literature, the third in the Orwell’s Essays series, Orwell considers the freedom of thought and expression. He discusses the effect of the ownership of the press on the accuracy of reports of events, and takes aim at political language, which ‘consists almost entirely of prefabricated phrases bolted together.’ The Prevention of Literature is a stirring cry for freedom from censorship, which Orwell says must start with the writer themselves: ‘To write in plain vigorous language one has to think fearlessly.’

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The Busybody is the most popular comedy by the eighteenth-century playwright Susanna Centlivre. The play centres on two couples trying to form a relationship against the wills of their guardians, and in a battle of wits, playing with many conventions from theatre traditions across the continent, a conclusion is eventually reached. Like her predecessor Aphra Behn, Centlivre was immensely successful in her day, drawing huge crowds to extended runs of her numerous plays, but the stabbing male pens of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries decried her work as being louche and dangerous, and her name slowly sunk into obscurity. This edition, published with William Hazlitt’s prefatory note and extra material on Centlivre’s life and writing, seeks to highlight the dexterity with which she took on the stage.

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George Orwell set out ‘to make political writing into an art’, and to a wide extent this aim shaped the future of English literature – his descriptions of authoritarian regimes helped to form a new vocabulary that is fundamental to understanding totalitarianism. While 1984 and Animal Farm are amongst the most popular classic novels in the English language, this new series of Orwell’s essays seeks to bring a wider selection of his writing on politics and literature to a new readership. A Hanging, the ninth in the Orwell’s Essays series, tells the story of the execution of an unnamed convict in Burma. With the veracity of the story unknown, but thought to be loosely based on Orwell’s own experiences in Burma, the haunting tale leaves the reader contemplating the heavy topic of colonialism, and the right of one to take the life of another.

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Set in 2013, Flagey in Winter is a comedy of manners that takes place in the European Parliament itself, in bars where love and politics rub shoulders, and in the Italian Dolomites.

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Poets have grappled with the vexed question of what constitutes Englishness since time immemorial, and the poetry of the past century has seen perhaps some of the biggest evolutions in national identity. Contraflow takes a completely new approach to the subject of Englishness, and in this stimulating and entertaining anthology two poetic currents flow against each other, so that different decades merge, well-known stanzas brushing shoulders with more neglected verse. What emerges is an extraordinary mosaic of poetic responses to English history, culture and landscape - satirical, visionary, lyrical, comic, political, meditative - yet one which offers a recognisable picture of a land both united and divided through a hundred years. A Guardian and Sunday Times poetry book of the year.

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Way to the West is a glorious collection resulting from a collaboration between disciplines of art. Featuring twenty-five beautiful full-page watercolours alongside accompanying poems, its focus is on the western tip of Cornwall. For Andy and Vally Cornwall’s geographical remoteness, its abiding attraction as a holiday location, its proud fishing and mining history and the varying and often dramatic moods of its weather and sea are an inspiration and cause for celebration. The profound emotional and psychological effects on visitors to Cornwall is not lost on the authors, who have a long association with the area, having walked its entire coastline and holidayed there for over a half a century. Way to the West is a celebration of the natural world and the home, the past and the present, and of the fierce interconnectedness of people with their landscape.

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In 1953 a man wrote a play about waiting. In 1988 he sued five women for trying to perform it. It’s 2022 and we’re still waiting. Since Samuel Beckett’s ground-breaking Waiting for Godot first hit the stage in 1953, countless men across the world have donned the boots of Didi and Gogo and trodden the boards – but those boots can only be filled by men, and the bar against casting anyone else is upheld to this day, almost seventy years on. Hot on the heels of Ariana Grande’s insistence that ‘God is a Woman’, Silent Faces Theatre have decided they’re done waiting. Penned with their trademark playful, political style, Godot is a Woman is a tour de force that explores permission, the patriarchy and pop music.

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In Stone Children Britain's love and usage of the Continent is laid bare. A couple eat their way through France and are overcome by greed; an ashes-scattering goes terribly wrong; a house is haunted by pain and abuse. Through each powerful tale we follow, mesmerised, moving through time and across continents, as the flaws and greed of humanity are exposed with extraordinary skill and wit.

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Set in the valleys of South Wales at the tail end of Thatcher's Britain, The Green Indian Problem is the story of Green, a seven year-old with intelligence beyond his years - an ordinary boy with an extraordinary problem: everyone thinks he's a girl. Green sets out to try and solve the mystery of his identity, but other issues keep cropping up - God, Father Christmas, cancer - and one day his best friend goes missing, leaving a rift in the community and even more unanswered questions. Dealing with deep themes of friendship, identity, child abuse and grief, The Green Indian Problem is, at heart, an all-too-real story of a young boy trying to find out why he's not like the other boys in his class. Longlisted for the Bridport Prize (in the Peggy Chapman-Andrews category)

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1999. Lucy is in labour. She's just been handed a document to sign and her sense of self is beginning to deteriorate. 2024. Claire is an art student. Her latest panic attack means her art course could be over. Oh, and she can't stop contemplating her own mortality. Claire and Lucy have OCD. But they don't know that yet. Misdiagnosis, mistreatment and misinformation around OCD were rife in 1999 And still are now.

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The concept of identity - be it class, gender, sexuality, national, institutional, or anything else we define ourselves by - has gone through radical change over the past half-century, and the idea of definition by binary oppositions is no longer as relevant as it once was. Spectrum is a poetry anthology that seeks to amplify marginalised voices, and to celebrate the great diversity and rich variation in the identities of people from around the world and from a huge cross-section of walks of life.

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Set between the Black Hills of South Dakota in 1973 and East Coast suburbia in 1968, Black Hills picks out a stark portrait of intricate familial relationships, and how dark events in the past must be addressed before they take root. Toying with heavy themes, and engaging with the notions of American identity and domestic violence, Black Hills is a thought-provoking tour of one family's past that leaves a lasting impression.

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As recounted by the Roman poet Ovid, a young nymph, Salmacis, one day spied Hermaphroditus bathing; consumed with passion, she entered the water and, begging the gods to allow them to stay together, the two became one - part man, part woman. An Eclectic Pagan, for Elizabeth Ovid's fables are more than fiction, and form a framework for exploring identity. Drawing on the rich mythological history associated with the tale of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, and re-examining the tale through the lens of metaphor, Salmacis: Becoming Not Quite a Woman is a stirringly relatable and powerful exploration of gender, love and identity. this is my lake salmacis, and i am the wild nymph with a hollow in her belly and nothing between her legs

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Engaged, W.S. Gilbert’s most popular stage work after the comic operas he produced in collaboration with Arthur Sullivan, is a farcical comedy that has long lived in the literary shadows – although wildly neglected today, the play influenced literary names as great as George Bernard Shaw, and directly inspired Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. Centring on a rich young man’s search for a wife and his uncle and best friend’s attempts to hinder him, the play toys with conventional notions of love and sincerity. In this edition, which also contains notes and an essay by the undisputed authority on W.S. Gilbert, Andrew Crowther, Engaged deserves to step out into the spotlight once more.

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Nightmare Abbey is a novella by Thomas Love Peacock, first published in 1818, widely considered to be Peacock’s most enduringly popular work. The narrative centres on Christopher Glowry, a miserly widower, his son Scythrop and a host of dismal-sounding servants in his family pile, Nightmare Abbey. Recovering from an ill-fated love affair, Scythrop dreams up various schemes to reform and regenerate the human species, but misanthropy lurks around every corner, and everything changes when a mermaid is spotted and a strange woman appears in his chamber. Although fundamentally a Gothic novel, and rich in allusion – from Pope to Dante, Rossini to Mozart – Nightmare Abbey is, at heart, a satire, as Peacock makes clear in the preface to a later edition, in which he describes the characters – allusions to his friends – as ‘status-quo-ites’, ‘morbid visionaries’, ‘romantic enthusiasts’ and ‘lovers of good dinners’.

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Hannah Snell's story begins with tragedy. In 1744 she married James Summs, a Dutch seaman. Soon after their marriage she fell pregnant, and Summs abandoned her and the child, who died just a year later. At this juncture, Snell donned a suit, assumed her brother-in-law's identity and set off in search of her errant husband. Boarding the sloop of war the Swallow in Portsmouth, Snell set sail to capture Pondicherry. Along the way she fought in many battles, sustaining multiple injuries, some of which made it difficult to keep her sex concealed. In 1750, she returned to London and told her story, setting down in The Female Soldier one of the most captivating military legends of all time, which went on to inspire generations of men and women alike. 'One of the most exotic and mysterious legends of military history.' (The Sunday Times) 'The most famous of all female warriors.' (Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self)

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A listless aristocrat, Lord Jones, finds himself in London during the Blitz, attending to insurance matters. A zebra and her foal, having escaped from the London Zoo during a bombing, cross his path, and he decides to take them back to his estate in Pembrokeshire. Little loved by his fascist-sympathiser parents, something in Lord Jones softens, and he realises he is lost, just like these zebras. The arrival of the zebras sparks a new lease of life on the Pembrokeshire estate, and it is not only Lord Jones but the families his dynasty has displaced that benefit from the transformation. Full of heart and mischief, The Zebra and Lord Jones is a hopeful exploration of class, wealth and privilege, grief, colonialism, the landscape, the wars that men make, the families we find for ourselves, and why one lonely man stole a zebra in September 1940 - or perhaps why she stole him.

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Van Jennings, a sociology student, and his two friends, Terry Nicholson and Jeff Margrave, set out one day to explore an uncharted area said to be home to a colony consisting entirely of women. Their biplane suitably hidden in the surrounding forest, the men begin their search for civilisation. But it is not long before they are discovered, and they are captured and taken in by the society they set out to study. As boundaries are broken down and the web of mystery is brushed aside, the men soon begin to realise that there is much to be envied about this society, and perhaps it is they that have some reckoning to do. Dealing with the powerful themes of consent, consumerism and colonialism, Herland is a thought-provoking tale that trains a lens on our own concepts of society.

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George Orwell set out 'to make political writing into an art', and to a wide extent this aim shaped the future of English literature - his descriptions of authoritarian regimes helped to form a new vocabulary that is fundamental to understanding totalitarianism. While 1984 and Animal Farm are amongst the most popular classic novels in the English language, this new series of Orwell's essays seeks to bring a wider selection of his writing on politics and literature to a new readership. Fearing that England was about to be wiped from the face of the earth by the Nazi bombers flying overhead, Orwell put pen to paper and set out to make a record of English culture. England Your England, the sixth in the Orwell's Essays series, is this record, and is an important tableau of the nation's history, and demonstrates a resolute refusal to bow to the threatening forces of Fascism.

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In 1940 the Second World War continued to rage, and atrocities wreaked around the globe made international waves. Wells, a socialist and prominent political thinker as well as a first-rate novelist, set down in The Rights of Man a stirring manifesto, designed to instruct the international community on how best to safeguard human rights. The work gained traction, and was soon under discussion for becoming actual legislation. Although Wells didn't live to see it enacted, his words laid the groundwork for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which enshrined human rights in law for the first time, and was adopted by the United Nations in 1948, changing the course of history for ever and granting fundamental rights to billions.

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One of the earliest known published works written by an African author, The Interesting Narrative was a groundbreaking memoir that helped pave the way for the abolition of slavery. In it, Equiano describes his early life in Africa, his abduction and his gruelling journey across the world on a slave ship. Published in London once Equiano had secured his freedom, the runaway success of the book led to his financial independence, and he toured England, Scotland and Ireland lecturing on the horrors described in the book, and he dedicated his life to advocating for the abolition of slavery. Forgotten until the 1960s, The Interesting Narrative has again shot to fame, and is now considered the most detailed account of a slave's life, exposing the trials of the long road to freedom.

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The poetry of Dylan Thomas has long been heralded as amongst the greatest of the Modern period, and along with his play, Under Milk Wood, his books are amongst the best-loved works in the literary canon. This new selection of his poetry contains all of his best-loved verse - including 'I See the Boys of Summer', 'And Death Shall Have No Dominion', 'The Hand that Signed the Paper' and, of course, 'Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night' - as well as some of his lesser-known lyrical pieces, and aims to show the great poet in a new light.

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Fifteen-year-old Ashleigh is clever and charming, and she soon becomes the neighbourhood's favourite babysitter. But she has an appetite for secrets. Fast-paced, witty and scalpel-sharp, One Woman Crime Wave examines the limits of what money can buy, and how easily the fragile web of middle-class privilege can be torn.

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The Alchemy is a robust, frank and loving guide to an often opaque industry. As well as offering tips on working in gentle increments and re-imagining what productivity and the work of writing look like, there is advice on sending out work and navigating the industry, looking after your mental health as you go. Full of practical advice, strategies, comfort and the occasional entertaining essay, The Alchemyy is about writing a book when you thought you could not. It is for all writers, but with a particular eye on those who are tired and lacking in confidence, and those who face significant challenges – perhaps you are chronically ill or care for a loved one. It is a book for beginners, but it is also for those of you who are stuck in your habits and practice – perhaps you just need a pal to guide you through the day to day with the book you wanted to write. That’s what The Alchemy is. Let’s do this together.

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Jane Austen, one of the nation's most beloved authors, whose face adorns our currency, surely needs no introduction, but while many are familiar with her groundbreaking novels, few have come across her short burlesque work The History of England. Billed a history 'from the reign of Henry IV to Charles I by a partial, prejudiced and ignorant historian', The History of England pokes fun at the overly verbose and grand histories of Austen's day. Written when she was just fifteen, this is a comic tour de force that shows Austen's wit developing into the satirical prowess she is remembered for.

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British South Asian poetry is flourishing throughout the UK, but it is still not being amply reflected in mainstream publishing. The Third Space project was conceived by award winning artist and poet, Suman Gujral, and has its eye on filling this gap and celebrating the best of the South Asian poetry scene.

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The debut poetry collection from a talented, fresh-voiced poet, People: Unfinished Poems is a lyrical, thought-provoking and moving selection that observes and enjoys the beauty and strangeness of people, exploring their connections to themselves, each other and the places in which they live. With particular attention paid to family, friendship, love, belonging and acceptance, the collection is a real celebration of human individuality and connection. Following a late diagnosis of ADHD, one strand of Ruth’s poetry explores and foregrounds the condition; the reader is invited into a mind that is endlessly thinking and never truly at rest. For Ruth, one result of this is intricate patterns and fragments of poetry sprawled across endless notebooks. This collection includes several poems presented in the poet’s own handwriting, decorated in much the same way as her notebooks, giving the reader an intimate insight into some of the artistic and creative aspects of neurodiversity.

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‘You see that Anna led an arduous and troubled life… Her face was worn, her cheeks were thin, her mouth drawn and firm, and her light blue eyes were very bright. Sometimes they were full of lightning and sometimes full of humour, but they were always sharp and clear.’ Under the grey, industrial skies of Bridgepoint (modelled on Baltimore), three women – Anna, Melanctha and Lena – live, work and love. Painting a powerful portrait of women trapped in drudgery, Stein’s Three Lives is a ground-breaking portrayal of abuse and non-heteronormative sexuality, and is a searing indictment of the struggles of the working class in turn-of-the-century America. An astonishing work that toys with style and conventions, Three Lives stands as a monument in Modernism and experimental literature, and comes from the pen of a writer whose intelligence and understanding bleeds from every page.

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Salomé, the haunting one-act tragedy that marks Wilde’s first great success in the theatre, retells the Biblical story in which the stepdaughter of the tetrarch Herod Antipas demands the head of John the Baptist on a silver platter as a reward for her dancing for her stepfather’s amusement. Written in 1891, and prepared for its first run in 1892, rehearsals of Salomé had to be cancelled when the play was banned by the Lord Chamberlain due to its depiction of religious characters. Undaunted, Wilde moved on to the drawing-room and society comedies he is today best known for, wowing London audiences with Lady Windermere’s Fan and A Woman of No Importance, and it was only in 1894 that Salomé saw the light of day in an English translation, with a series of specially commissioned illustrations by the up-and-coming Aubrey Beardsley.

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Waiting for Music is the fifth collection of poetry from the acclaimed writer Simon Mundy. A great champion of the arts, his relationships with musicians, visual artists and dancers are the main driving force behind his poetry, and this book sets out a playlist that stems from music, visual art and dance – from Brahms’ late piano works to a scene for soprano and dancers, written to be set by Roxanna Panufnik, that was inspired by a 16th century picture in the National Gallery. Published after a year spent waiting for music to appear on our landscape once more, Waiting for Music collects the voices of an array of composers, cultures and forms, set against backdrops ranging from Valparaiso to the Veneto, and celebrates the sounds and stages that have been missing from our lives this silent year.

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‘Sometimes I wonder, if I had known that it was going to take me fourteen years to paint this painting of the Crucifixion with Douglas as Jesus, and what it would take for me to paint this painting, would I have been as happy as I was then?’ Susan Alison MacLeod, a Glasgow School of Art graduate with a dark sense of humour, first lays eyes on Douglas MacDougal at a party in 1988, and resolves to put him on the cross in the Crucifixion painting she’s been sketching out, but her desire to create ‘good’ art and a powerful, beautiful portrayal means that a final painting doesn’t see the light of day for fourteen years. Over the same years, Douglas’s ever-more elaborately designed urine-based installations bring him increasing fame, prizes and commissions, while his modelling for Susan Alison, who continues to work pain and suffering on to the canvas, takes place mostly in the shadows. This Good Book is a wickedly funny, brilliantly observed novel that spins the moral compass and plays with notions of creating art.

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The Westminster Alice is a collection of humorous vignettes by Saki, first published in the Westminster Gazette in 1902, which form a political pastiche of the Alice books by Lewis Carroll, featuring an unforgettable cast of notable politicians of the day, and brought to life with illustrations by F. Carruthers Gould – ‘with apologies to Sir John Tenniel’ for their striking likeness to the original Alice illustrations. Desperately trying to navigate her way through the world of Ineptitudes, Knights, Queens and Mad Hatters, Alice delivers a stinging satire of Westminster politics – which, imbued with Saki’s charm and delicate wit, and set in a world evocative of Carroll’s timeless Wonderland, is as charming today as when it was written, and belongs on every Alice fan’s bookshelf.

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First published in 1688, Oroonoko, or, The Royal Slave is a short, politically charged novella by the Restoration playwright – and spy – Aphra Behn, and is arguably one of the founding texts of the novel form. Purporting to chart the life of an African prince, Oroonoko, who is tricked into slavery and taken to South America, the narrative follows the Prince through his trials of love, loss and rebellion. Vying for the title of the first English novel – and certainly the first to be read as an indictment of the treatment of Africans – Oroonoko has all the hallmarks of Behn’s stage works, which are widely considered to be amongst the most important of the Restoration period.

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Described by Virginia Woolf herself as 'easily the best of my books', and by her husband Leonard as a 'masterpiece', To the Lighthouse, first published in 1927, is one of the milestones of Modernism. Set on the Isle of Skye, over a decade spanning the First World War, the narrative centres on the Ramsay family, and is framed by Mrs Ramsay's promise to take a trip to the lighthouse the next day - a promise which isn't to be fulfilled for a decade. Flowing from character to character and from year to year, the novel paints a moving portrait of love, loss and perception. Bearing all the hallmarks of Woolf's prose, with her delicate handling of the complexities of human relationships, To the Lighthouse has earned its reputation - frequently appearing in lists of the best novels of the twentieth century, it has lost not an iota of brilliance.

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Stephen Leacock is an unjustly neglected master of the short-story genre, once considered the best-known humorist in the world. Although he was a prolific writer, producing about fifty novels, biographies and histories, he was best known for his humorous articles and short stories in magazines. One of his later collections, Frenzied Fiction shows a master of a genre at the height of his game, and contains all the hallmarks of his earlier work and the trademark wit which he had refined over the previous decades. By turns laugh-aloud hilarious and poignant, and containing such gems as ‘My Recollections as a Spy’ and ‘Simple Stories of Success, or How to Succeed in Life’, this collection builds a strong case against prohibition, paints a moving picture of a war-torn world, caricatures and lampoons novelists, actors and princes, and demonstrates why he met with such success and stacked a fan base with figures as varied John Lane, A.P. Herbert and Groucho Marx.

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Dracula, Bram Stoker's 1897 Gothic vampire story, needs no introduction - a perennial on syllabuses and screens alike, generations have been enchanted and enthralled by the Count from Transylvania. But few of Dracula's fans have heard of Dracula's Guest, a short story following - it is thought - Jonathan Harker, as he makes his way to Transylvania, and falls prey to Walpurgis Nacht terrors when he stops off in Munich. Unpublished until after Stoker's death, when it was collected in a volume of short stories by his widow Florence, who revealed that Stoker had intended for it to be the opening section of his great work, Dracula's Guest is the missing chapter that will captivate all fans of Stoker's 'dangers from snow and wolves and night'.

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