If F. Scott Fitzgerald was the hero of the Jazz Age, Edna St. Vincent Millay, as flamboyant in her love affairs as she was in her art, was its heroine. A winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Millay was dazzling in the performance of herself. Her voice was likened to an instrument of seduction, and her impact on crowds and on men was legendary. Yet beneath her studied act, all was not well.

January 1946: London is emerging from the shadow of the Second World War, and writer Juliet Ashton is looking for her next book subject. Who could imagine that she would find it in a letter from a man she’s never met, a native of the island of Guernsey, who has come across her name written inside a book by Charles Lamb.... As Juliet and her new correspondent exchange letters, Juliet is drawn into the world of this man and his friends - and what a wonderfully eccentric world it is.

First published in 1869, Little Women is the story of four sisters growing up against the background of the American Civil War. Alcott wrote the book at the urging of the publisher, Thomas Niles, who was seeking a story about girls that would have popular appeal. Although it was commenced essentially as a children's book, it developed into something of a bildungsroman, which touches on more serious issues such as the difficulties faced by single-parent families, the death of a sibling, and fractured relationships.

Cat's Cradle is Vonnegut's satirical commentary on modern man and his madness. An apocalyptic tale of this planet's ultimate fate, it features a little person as the protagonist; a complete, original theology created by a calypso singer; and a vision of the future that is at once blackly fatalistic and hilariously funny.

The final novel of one of America’s most beloved writers - a tale of degeneration, corruption, and spiritual crisis. A Penguin Classic In awarding John Steinbeck the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature, the Nobel committee stated that with The Winter of Our Discontent, he had “resumed his position as an independent expounder of the truth, with an unbiased instinct for what is genuinely American". Ethan Allen Hawley, the protagonist of Steinbeck’s last novel, works as a clerk in a grocery store that his family once owned.

In his inimitably entertaining and wonderfully witty style, he takes apart famous phrases and shows how you too can write like Shakespeare or quip like Oscar Wilde. Whether you’re aiming to achieve literary immortality or just hoping to deliver the perfect one-liner, The Elements of Eloquence proves that you don’t need to have anything important to say - you simply need to say it well.

As a pair of young scholars research the lives of two Victorian poets, they uncover their letters, journals, and poems and track their movements from London to Yorkshire - from spiritualist seances to the fairy-haunted far west of Brittany. What emerges is an extraordinary counterpoint of passion and ideas.

Timeless Tales for Kids is an enchanting compilation of children's classic stories read by an all-star cast. Olivia Colman reads E. Nesbit's classic novel The Railway Children, a masterpiece in children's fiction wonderfully evoking a bygone age, packed with fun, excitement and adventure. Bill Nighy reads a much-loved children's classic, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which continues to delight young and old with its enchanting tale of witches, flying monkeys and magical shoes.

What do you do when you discover information that is before its time? What do you do when your curiosity takes you on an adventure that is so bizarre that there is nothing normal to relate to? This is what happened to Dolores Cannon in 1968, long before she began her career as a past-life hypnotherapist and regressionist. Travel back with us to that time when the words reincarnation, past-lives, regression, walk-ins, New Age were unknown to the general population.

Discovered in the attic in which she spent the last years of her life, Anne Frank’s remarkable diary has since become a world classic - a powerful reminder of the horrors of war and an eloquent testament to the human spirit. In 1942, with Nazis occupying Holland, a 13-year-old Jewish girl and her family fled their home in Amsterdam and went into hiding. For the next two years, until their whereabouts were betrayed to the Gestapo, they and another family lived cloistered in the “Secret Annex” of an old office building.

Tom Stoppard's Arcadia merges science with human concerns and ideals, examining the universe's influence in our everyday lives and ultimate fates through relationship between past and present, order and disorder and the certainty of knowledge. Set in an English country house in the years 1809-1812 and 1989, the play examines the lives of two modern scholars and the house's current residents with the lives of those who lived there 180 years earlier.

For years, they were the best of friends: the grand, erratic Humboldt and the ambitious young Charlie. But now Humboldt has died a failure, and Charlie's success-ridden life has taken various turns for the worse. Then Humboldt acts from the grave to change Charlie's life: he has left Charlie something in his will.

Author of many novels and short stories, best-selling writer Lee Smith has received numerous awards for her works, including two O. Henry Awards. Fair and Tender Ladies is an epistolary novel that traces the life of Ivy Rowe, born in the isolated Virginia mountain community of Sugar Fork.

Jeanette is a bright and rebellious orphan who is adopted into an evangelical household in the dour, industrial North of England and finds herself embroidering grim religious mottoes and shaking her little tambourine for Jesus. But as this budding missionary comes of age, and comes to terms with her unorthodox sexuality, the peculiar balance of her God-fearing household dissolves. Jeanette’s insistence on listening to truths of her own heart and mind - and on reporting them with wit and passion - makes for an unforgettable chronicle of an eccentric, moving passage into adulthood.

Ever since the untimely death of her mother, 14-year-old Joan Skraggs has been desperately unhappy. Under the thumb of her cruel father and three sullen brothers, Joan lives like a servant on their farm just outside of Lancaster, forever cooking, cleaning, and attending to the many demands of the home. But she has little freedom and less support from her family for her love of reading and blossoming interest in education.

Ebenezer Le Page, cantankerous, opinionated and charming, is one of the most compelling literary creations of the late 20th century. Eighty years old, Ebenezer has lived his whole life on the Channel Island of Guernsey, a stony speck of a place caught between England and France yet a world away from either. Ebenezer himself is fiercely independent, but as he reaches the end of his life he is determined to tell his own story and the story of those he has known.

This poignant and poetic 2003 Pulitzer Prize-winning play captures 1929 Florida at a time when cigars are still rolled by hand and "lectors" are employed to educate and entertain the workers. The arrival of a new lector is a cause for celebration. But when he reads aloud from Anna Karenina, he unwittingly becomes a catalyst in the lives of his avid listeners, for whom Tolstoy, the tropics, and The American Dream prove a volatile combination.

In 2012, Ali Smith delivered the Weidenfeld lectures on European comparative literature at St. Anne’s College, Oxford. Those lectures, presented here, took the shape of discursive stories that refused to be tied down to either fiction or the essay form. Thus, Artful is narrated by a character who is haunted - literally - by a former lover, the writer of a series of lectures about art and literature. A hypnotic dialogue unfolds between storytelling and a meditation on art that encompasses love, grief, memory, and revitalization.

This first novel in The Deptford Trilogy introduces Ramsay, a man who returns from World War I decorated with the Victoria Cross but who is destined to be caught in a no man's land where memory, history, and myth collide. As we hear Ramsey tell his story, we begin to realize that, from childhood, he has influenced those around him in a perhaps mystical, perhaps pernicious way.

In his inimitably entertaining and wonderfully witty style, he takes apart famous phrases and shows how you too can write like Shakespeare or quip like Oscar Wilde. Whether you’re aiming to achieve literary immortality or just hoping to deliver the perfect one-liner, The Elements of Eloquence proves that you don’t need to have anything important to say - you simply need to say it well.

When Bev and Felix arrive at the King farm in Prince Edward Island, they have no idea of the adventures and memories in store for them. Is old Peg Bowen really a witch? What secrets does the neighbor keep hidden in his spare room? What if tomorrow is the end of the world? And what is in the old blue chest? Along with their cousins, they learn the value of work and play, the wisdom of proverbs, how to struggle with temptations and face their fears.

From navigating the oft competing worlds of religion and desire, to balancing society’s expectations with the raw experience of being a woman in the world; from detailing the experiences of growing up as a first generation black British woman, to working through situations of dependence and abuse; from finding solace in the echoing caverns of depression and loss, to exploring the vulnerability and redemption in falling in love, each of the raw and immediate poems in Daley-Ward’s bone resonates to the core of what it means to be human.

With only a yellowing photograph in hand, a young man—also named Jonathan Safran Foer—sets out to find the woman who might or might not have saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Accompanied by an old man haunted by memories of the war, an amorous dog named Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior, and the unforgettable Alex, a young Ukrainian translator who speaks in a sublimely butchered English, Jonathan is led on a quixotic journey over a devastated landscape and into an unexpected past.

First published in 1869, Little Women is the story of four sisters growing up against the background of the American Civil War. Alcott wrote the book at the urging of the publisher, Thomas Niles, who was seeking a story about girls that would have popular appeal. Although it was commenced essentially as a children's book, it developed into something of a bildungsroman, which touches on more serious issues such as the difficulties faced by single-parent families, the death of a sibling, and fractured relationships.

The sudden death of the father of the family results in the drastic reduction of the Careys' income and they must leave their comfortable home in Boston. Nancy Carey, the eldest, recalls a vacation in Maine when they all picnicked in the garden of a big, vacant house that her father loved. She discovers that the house is available, the rent is cheap, and persuades her mother that life in The Yellow House in Beulah, Maine is the perfect place to begin their new life.

Fairy-tale romances end with a wedding and the fairy tales don't get complicated. In this book, celebrated writer Mr. Fox can't stop himself from killing off the heroines of his novels, and neither can his wife, Daphne. It's not until Mary, his muse, comes to life and transforms him from author into subject that his story begins to unfold differently....

For years, they were the best of friends: the grand, erratic Humboldt and the ambitious young Charlie. But now Humboldt has died a failure, and Charlie's success-ridden life has taken various turns for the worse. Then Humboldt acts from the grave to change Charlie's life: he has left Charlie something in his will.

Soseki Natsume's comic masterpiece, I Am a Cat, satirizes the foolishness of upper-middle class Japanese society during the Meiji era. With acerbic wit and sardonic perspective, it follows the whimsical adventures of a world-weary stray kitten who comments on the follies and foibles of the people around him. A classic of Japanese literature, I Am a Cat is one of Soseki's best-known novels. Considered by many as the greatest writer in modern Japanese history, Soseki's I Am a Cat is a classic novel sure to be enjoyed for years to come.

"It was in the first week of October in the year 1391 that I first came face to face with the man who owned me… the man whose lightest word was to us, his villeins, weightier than the King’s law or the edicts of our Holy Father…” So began the story of Martin Reed - a serf whose resentment of the automatic rule of his feudal lord finally flared into open defiance.

The story opens on the first sledding day of the season, and all of the children in town are out in force. Our hero and heroine, 13-year-olds Jack Minot and Janey Pecq, go down a particularly treacherous run and are both seriously injured. Over the next year, Jack and Jill (as she is called) are nurtured back to health by their widowed mothers. As the seasons pass, we become intimately acquainted with not only Jack and Jill, but their group of friends.