Popular Reading

The tale of a fun-loving, amoral playgirl in New York City is accompanied by "House of Flowers," "A Diamond Guitar," and "A Christmas Memory."

A proofreader at a Portuguese publishing house, Raimundo Silva, undertakes to rewrite a crucial episode in Portuguese history as a romantic saga, with the amorous encouragement of his supervisor.

Narrated by Kathy, Never Let Me Go hauntingly dramatises her attempts to come to terms with her childhood at the seemingly idyllic Hailsham School and the fate that has always awaited her and her closest friends in the wider world. A story of love, friendship and memory, Never Let Me Go is charged throughout with a sense of the fragility of life.

The editors have rummaged the arsenal of English poetry for its most spectacular fizzles. They have been no respecters of persons: Sarah Taylor Shatford and Alfred Austin rub shoulders here with Milton, Keats and Wordsworth. The poems presented are absolutely sincere; no failure is faked. All infelicities are unintended. As one genius of the awful put it, "Literary is a work very difficult to do." But another, the great Edgar A. Guest, reminds us, "Sacred and sweet is the joy that must come/ From the furnace of life when you've poured off the scum". Here there is—as James Wright declared, after hearing these poems—"nothing mediocre!"

While searching for his missing wife, Japanese lawyer Toru Okada has strange experiences and meets strange characters. A woman wants phone sex; a man describes wartime torture; Okada finds himself in a netherworld at the bottom of a well. Along the way he examines his disintegrating marriage—and the buried secrets from Japan's forgotten campaign in Manchuria during World War II.

Yvain is a courtly romance with a moral tenor; it is ironic and sometimes bawdy; the poetry is crisp and vivid. In addition, the psychological and the socio-historical perceptions of the poem are of profound literary and historical importance, for it evokes the emotions and the values of a flourishing, vibrant medieval past.