A classic novel about smuggling, intrigue and love. Harry Morgan is an honest man who is forced into running contraband between Cuba and Key West to make a living during the Depression from his motorboat in Florida. His adventures lead him into the world of the wealthy and dissipated yachtsmen who throng the region and involve him in a strange and unlikely love affair. Although he normally takes out fishing parties, sometimes his boat can be put to other uses and if the money offered is worth his while, Harry will run guns, rum and men to and from Cuba, but he is playing a dicey game. In this harshly realistic, yet oddly tender and wise novel, Ernest Hemingway perceptively delineates the personal struggles of both the 'haves' and the 'have nots' and his hardest hero risks not just his living, but his life. By turns funny and tragic, lively and poetic, this is literary high adventure at its finest. 180pp, paperback.

How do you find a book when you can't recall the title...or the author? This homage to a bibliophile's dilemma is inspired by this torturous predicament. Artist Marina Luz creates paintings of books based on the descriptions we use when we can't remember their titles like 'Cat, possibly named Henry.' 'It was a dream, girl, horse, lightning, paranormal romance, a witch who owns a candle shop, man dies in embrace of hated woman, magic alleyway to prostitutionland, insane husband burns down house, polar bear wearing pants possibly named Victor or Vincent.' I think you get the picture! A unique appreciation of book love and the bizarre ways that books leave impressions on our souls. Marina Luz is an Emmy-Award-winning illustrator whose work has appeared in the New York Times and here she created some very clever book 'covers' for misremembered books. One beautiful artwork in colour per page, 96pp, 20.7 x 15.9cm.

Literary friends and foes prove that the pen is truly mightier than the sword. The world's most respected writers reveal their acerbic side of beloved authors who can become brutal critics when writing about their fellow wordsmiths. Curated from letters, essays and reviews, this sometimes stinging, sometimes good natured and always delightful collection will ignite the armchair critic in us all. Edna St Vincent Millay on e.e. cummings: 'Some of the most pompous nonsense I ever let slip to the floor with a wide yawn.' Virginia Woolf on James Joyce: 'A queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.' Evelyn Waugh: 'I am reading Proust for the first time. Very poor stuff. I think he was mentally defective.' And Charlotte Brontë on Jane Austen's Emma: 'She ruffles her reader by nothing vehement, disturbs by nothing profound.' Page after page of amusement ending with the quite brilliant Lord Byron on William Wordsworth: 'Turdsworth'. One quote per page, nicely typeset. 144pp.

With a biographical introduction by David Bradshaw and a foreword by J. G. Ballard, the Sunday Times described this as a masterpiece, 'Concise, evocative, wise and, above all, humane.' In 1953, in the presence of an investigator, Aldous Huxley took four-tenths of a gram of mescalin, sat down and waited to see what would happen. When he opened his eyes, everything from the flowers in a vase to the creases in his trousers was transformed, Huxley describes his experience with breathtaking immediacy in this novel. In its sequel Heaven and Hell, he goes on to explore the history and nature of mysticism. Still bristling with a sense of excitement and discovery, these illuminating and influential writings remain the most fascinating account of the visionary experience ever written. In that afternoon in Los Angeles, Huxley experienced the suspension of time and space and the melting away of the ego. He talks about artists and their heightened ability to perceive things, about the experiences of schizophrenics and moments of despair but also of unadulterated joy. He talks about the profundity of religious experience and Eastern and Western philosophical views of the world. 'The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge...' and that was before the Internet! 123pp, paperback.

Like a restorative, extended spa treatment, this revisiting of a selection of diaries and essay-reviews from the London Review of Books stretches tired brains. Christopher Hitchens was a star writer wherever he wrote and he contributed 60 pieces over two decades to the LRB. Anthologised here for the first time are reviews, diaries and essays along with a smattering of ferocious letters. Familiar bêtes noires - Kennedy, Nixon, Kissinger, Clinton - rub shoulders with lesser-known preoccupations - P. G. Wodehouse, Princess Margaret and Isaiah Berlin. Here is Hitchens on the first Gulf War and the Salman Rushdie Acid Test, on being spanked by Mrs Thatcher in the House of Lords, and taking his son to the Oscars, on America's homegrown Nazis and 'Acts of Violence in Grosvenor Square' in 1968. Barnstorming, cauterising and ultimately uncontainable journalism, he truly was an original of his time. 340pp, paperback, illus.

The Chinese poetic tradition which dates back to almost 1000BC is one of the most cherished parts of the nation's cultural heritage. This collection of translated classical poems is presented in a beautiful gold foil decorated textured cover hardback with satin pagemarker. It is a stunning chronicle of Chinese life, culture and history, with vital and evocative imagery demonstrating why Chinese poetry was so inspiring to modern Western poets, particularly Ezra Pound and the Imagist movement. China truly is a country of songbirds and it was under the influence of Confucius's view that 'Poetry intones Aspirations that poets express their attitudes and philosophical inclinations between the lines.' The Tang Dynasty alone produced numerous great poets including Li Bai (Li Po), Du Fu (Tu Fu), and Wang Wei who stand out in this volume by quantity of selected poems. Organised by theme- Life and Nature, The Passage of Time, The Toll of War, and Love and Loss - beautifully designed and laid out, 160pp.

The winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature has created a masterpiece of evocation, conjuring up its imaginary island with superb immediacy and a magnificent panorama of the last days of the Ottoman Empire. A tale of spies, conspiracy and murder, full of vivid characters, Pamuk cleverly combines true facts with imagined scenes and has patiently plotted the course of a nationalistic revolution in Turkey. An historical murder mystery set in 1901 amid an epidemic of bubonic plague, it is a wry meditation on nationalism and identity, history and myth, science and superstition. Night draws in. With the stealth of a spy vessel, the royal ship Aziziye approaches the famous vistas of Mingheria, 'an emerald built on pink stone', the 29th state of the ailing Ottoman Empire. The ship carries Princess Pakize, the daughter of a deposed sultan, her doctor husband, and the Royal Chemist, Bonkowski Pasha. Each of them holds a separate mission. Not all of them will survive the weeks ahead, because Mingheria is on the cusp of catastrophe. There are rumours of plague, rumours some in power will try to suppress. But plague is not the only killer. Soon the eyes of the world will turn to this ancient island where the future of a fragile empire is at stake. 683 magnificent pages in large softback 12.9 x 19.8cm.

Christopher Hitchens at his very best. Set consists of Blood, Class and Empire: The Enduring Anglo-American Relationship, Thomas Paine's Rights of Man and A Hitch In Time: Writings from the London Review of Books. Buy all three and save even more. Paperbacks.

This C. S. Lewis classic is based on lectures he gave in 1944 and has remained a benchmark of literary criticism ever since. Excluding drama, the collection of essays is a study of the literature that flourished in the age of Shakespeare. Lewis divides the century into three periods: "Late Medieval", "Drab" and "Golden". There is insight into Spenser, Shakespeare, Tyndale, John Knox, Dr Johnson, Richard Hooker, Hugh Latimer, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Cranmer and many more. The writing of the early 16th century is characterised by a regularity which Lewis judges to be uninspired, with the exception of Wyatt and the Prayer Book. In Scotland, poets such as Dunbar and Lyndsay, the last of the Scottish medieval poets, had more impact, and in England the satirist Skelton revolutionised verse with his "Skeltonic" metre which Lewis notes gives the effect of being the voice of the people. The mid-century is too earnest, but then in the late 16th century comes a burst of fantasy, conceit, paradox, colour and incantation: "Youth returns." Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare and Hooker represent what is almost a new culture. Magic and witchcraft survived from the 15th century, and appear in the works of Pico, Ficino and England's own Dr Dee, leading proponents of the Neo-Platonism which is the dominant philosophy of the time. Lewis dismisses the idea that the astronomy of Galileo or New World geography was the inspiration for a new literary impetus. In Lewis's judgment Humanism and Puritanism both supplied a richer source of inspiration, with Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity defending reason as God-given. Lewis quotes Shakespeare's rejection of the saving power of "merit" in Love's Labour's Lost: "My beauty will be saved by merit! O heresy!". The Puritan-Catholic contest between faith and works became a stock gag in commercial theatre. In the mid-century the English Bible and Book of Common Prayer are a lasting literary achievement, reflecting diverse streams of influence mainly but not exclusively Protestant. Sidney's Arcadia is a work of distillation, saying what a whole generation wanted to say, while Spenser's Faerie Queene draws on masque, pageants, tapestry, carvings, tournaments and the whole panoply of the court. Shakespeare's sonnets are the heart of the Golden Age, and for Lewis they tell a story of a young man's passion both for another man and also for a fickle woman. 744pp, chronology.

Helene Guerber was an acclaimed expert on mythology in the Edwardian era, and her book on Norse Myths is a classic. Many of the Old Norse poets were natives of Iceland, where the priest Saemund created the collection known as the Elder Edda which ranks alongside the Sagas as one of the great works of early literature. Northern mythology celebrates the fight against darkness, for instance the abyss called Ginnunga-gap or the misty space known as Nifl-heim. Midgard, earth, was placed at the centre of this space, with the dwarves Nordri, Sudri, Austri and Westri at its four corners. Odin, the father of gods and men, had three palaces, of which the most famous is Valhalla, hall of the slain where, as in Wagner's Ring Cycle, the Valkyrs conduct the dead heroes. Frigga and Tannhauser are also names we find in Wagner, and the Volsungasaga includes the stories of Sigurd and Sigmund, but the myth also has other significant characters such as the White Lady Bertha. Odin is at constant war with the dwarfs, who manufactured a magic inspirational fluid from the blood of Kvasir, prompting Odin to don his hat and cloak to go out into the world in search. Stealing the mead from Gunlod by seducing her, he appropriated poetic inspiration for the gods, letting a few stray drops fall on humans. He frequently visited the Norns for their prophecies. Odin and Frigga gave birth to twins, Hodur god of darkness and Balder the Beautiful, who was not long for the world when Hodur enlisted Loki's help to slay him. The story represents the alternation of day and night, and Balder worship was long associated with midsummer. 301pp, paperback, line drawings.