Literature

Edited, introduced and annotated by Cedric Watts, Professor of English Literature, University of Sussex Love, sex and death are the components of Shakespeare's classic story of the love of two young people which reaches across the barriers of family and convention. It encompasses great love, high drama, low comedy and a tragic ending. Romeo and Juliet is a pure tragedy of youth told in verse that is both youthful and intense. The loveliness and the music of the poetry make believable the otherwise commonplace afflictions of blighted love.

Inspiring poets from Ben Jonson and Alexander Pope to W. H. Auden and Robert Frost, the writings of Horace and Persius have had a powerful influence on later Western literature. The Satires of Persius are highly idiosyncratic, containing a courageous attack on the poetry and morals of his wealthy contemporaries—even the ruling emperor, Nero. The Satires of Horace, written in the troubled decade ending with the establishment of Augustus’s regime, provide an amusing treatment of men’s perennial enslavement to money, power, glory, and sex. Epistles I, addressed to the poet’s friends, deals with the problem of achieving contentment amid the complexities of urban life, while Epistles II and the Ars Poetica discuss Latin poetry—its history and social functions, and the craft required for its success.

In this impressive first collection of short stories, Hazel
Simmons-McDonald presents a deft exploration of class, of how values are shaped
by religion, and of the tensions that undergird family life. She makes a place
for voices hitherto not heard and creates characters who closely guard the
secrets of their hearts but who through her narrative dexterity come to
experience moments of truth and clarity of memory.

Simmons-McDonald's
energetic prose not only captures the polylinguistic character of St Lucian
society but it also creates a space for the exploration of an Eastern Caribbean
brand of magical realism. With polished assurance, she
weaves folk beliefs into the fabric of her stories, creating memorable tales marked
by notes of sadness yet balanced by tenderness and joy. Simmons-McDonald
takes the reader on a journey where the familiar and the unfamiliar sit side by
side, where the spirit world is always present, and where at all times we are
reminded of the universal reach of love and hope.

"I cannot think of a single work with such a wide and
complex appeal. While many West Indian writers . . . explore the same worlds as
Hazel Simmons-McDonald, none of them bring out the issues of childhood and
family intertwined with religious, environmental, and social conditions with
such surgical grace. The calmness of the style leads the reader into worlds of
joy, or pain and horror made visible and bearable by the calculated moderation,
exactitude, and poignancy of the diction."--Jean
D'Costa, Leavenworth Professor of English Emerita, Hamilton College

Small Island is an international bestseller. It won the Orange Prize for Fiction, The Orange Prize for Fiction: Best of the Best, The Whitbread Novel Award, The Whitbread Book of the Year Award, and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. It has now been adapted for the screen as a coproduction of the BBC and Masterpiece/WGBH Boston.

Hortense Joseph arrives in London from Jamaica in 1948 with her life in her suitcase, her heart broken, her resolve intact. Her husband, Gilbert Joseph, returns from the war expecting to be received as a hero, but finds his status as a black man in Britain to be second class. His white landlady, Queenie, raised as a farmer's daughter, befriends Gilbert, and later Hortense, with innocence and courage, until the unexpected arrival of her husband, Bernard, who returns from combat with issues of his own to resolve.

Told in these four voices, Small Island is a courageous novel of tender emotion and sparkling wit, of crossings taken and passages lost, of shattering compassion and of reckless optimism in the face of insurmountable barriers---in short, an encapsulation of that most American of experiences: the immigrant's life.

Sophocles' greatest plays reissued in the new Classical Greek Dramatists series. Introduced by series editor J Michael Walton

Includes the surviving complete plays: Ajax which plots the downfall of Odysseus's greatest Trojan enemy - who slaughters a whole herd of cattle before killing himself; Women of Trachis in which the seemingly docile Deianira prepares a lethal homecoming for her womanising husband Heracles; in Electra the son and daughter of the ill-starred Agamemnon plan their revenge on their usurping stepfather and mother and finally Philoctetes in which Sophocles brilliantly explores the themes of pain, love and the betrayal of trust.

A sinister organised crime ring in a small island takes the lives of innocent female students. Once again Orlando Marville writes about love and its tendency to redeem the most hopeless of dilemmas.

This is a crime novel with a difference, written in a sensitive, compelling voice.

Written in vivid, colourful detail, these rich, compelling stories recreate with sensitivity and wit a whole range of emotions, from childhood hope to brooding melancholy.

A moving reflection on a subject that touches us all, by the bestselling author of Claire of the Sea Light

Edwidge Danticat's The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story is at once a personal account of her mother dying from cancer and a deeply considered reckoning with the ways that other writers have approached death in their own work. "Writing has been the primary way I have tried to make sense of my losses," Danticat notes in her introduction. "I have been writing about death for as long as I have been writing." The book moves outward from the shock of her mother's diagnosis and sifts through Danticat's writing life and personal history, all the while shifting fluidly from examples that range from Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude to Toni Morrison's Sula. The narrative, which continually circles the many incarnations of death from individual to large-scale catastrophes, culminates in a beautiful, heartrending prayer in the voice of Danticat's mother. A moving tribute and a work of astute criticism, The Art of Death is a book that will profoundly alter all who encounter it.

For a 16-year-old boy out in the world alone for the first time, every day's an education in the hard work and boredom of migrant labor; every day teaches him something more about friendship, or hunger, or profanity, or lust--always lust. He learns how a poker game, or hitching a ride, can turn deadly.
He discovers the secret sadness and generosity to be found on a lonely farm in the middle of nowhere. Then he joins up with a carnival and becomes a grunt, running a ride and shilling for the geek show. He's living the hard carny life and beginning to see the world through carny eyes. He's tough. Cynical. By the end of the summer he's pretty sure he knows it all. Until he meets Ruby.

One of The Atlantic's Great American Novels

A realistic and emotional novel about a woman battling mental illness and societal pressures written by the iconic American writer Sylvia Plath.

"It is this perfectly wrought prose and the freshness of Plath's voice in The Bell Jar that make this book enduring in its appeal." -- USA Today

The Bell Jar chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: young, brilliant, beautiful, and enormously talented, but slowly going under--maybe for the last time. Sylvia Plath masterfully draws the reader into Esther's breakdown with such intensity that Esther's neurosis becomes completely understandable and even rational, as probable and accessible an experience as going to the movies. Such thorough exploration of the dark and harrowing corners of the psyche - and the profound collective loneliness that modern society has yet to find a solution for - is an extraordinary accomplishment, and has made The Bell Jar a haunting American classic.

This P.S. edition features extra insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.