"For many, William Wordsworth personifies the Age of Romanticism. The Prelude, his masterpiece, is one of the finest poems in the English language, and the Lyrical Ballads, written with his friend and fellow poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, is a defining text of the Romantic movement. This new selection of his poetry, prepared by his biographer Stephen Gill and the Wordsworth scholar Duncan Wu from Gill's authoritative Oxford Authors edition, offers...

John Milton, the 17th century English poet author, polemicist and civil servant for the Commonwealth of England is of course known best for his famous epic poem "Paradise Lost" which retells the biblical story of "The Fall of Man" and how Adam and Eve were tempted by Satan and ultimately expelled from the Garden of Eden. "Paradise Lost" is included in this volume of "The Complete Poems of John Milton" along with its sequel "Paradise Regained" and...

This is not your high school teacher's Old English epic poem, but a motion-capture animated film. In the age of heroes comes the mightiest warrior of them all, Beowulf, to aid King Hrothgar by slaying the monster Grendel. The troubled Danish kingdom has been bedeviled by the demon for years, but in killing him, Beowulf incurs the undying wrath of the beast's ruthlessly seductive mother. After killing her, Beowulf returns to the castle and becomes...

Algernon pretends to be Jack's troublesome younger brother, in Wilde's satirical assault on nineteenth-century fashions, manners, and morality.

"An entertaining and illuminating collection of weird, wonderful, and downright baffling words from the origins of English--and what they reveal about the lives of the earliest English speakers. Old English is the language you think you know until you actually hear or see it. Unlike Shakespearean English or even Chaucer's Middle English, Old English--the language of Beowulf--defies comprehension by untrained modern readers. Used throughout much of...

“Complete Sonnets” is a collection of 154 poems written by William Shakespeare, first published in 1609. They are considered to be the greatest sonnets and poems ever written, by the greatest poet and playwright in the English language. This powerful, thought-provoking collection is for anyone interested in exploring the themes of love, desire, and the human condition. Over 150 deal with love, friendship, death, the passage of time, and the nature...

"Mark Haddon, author of the international bestselling novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and A Spot of Bother, returns with a collection of unsparing short stories In the prize-winning story "The Gun," a man's life is marked by a single afternoon and a rusty.45; in "The Island," a mythical princess is abandoned on an island in the midst of war; in "The Boys Who Left Home to Learn Fear," a cadre of sheltered artistocrats sets out...

Winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize, "essential reading for the broken-hearted of all ages" (The Guardian) The effortless virtuosity, drama, and humanity of Carol Ann Duffy's verse have made her much admired among contemporary poets. Rapture is a book-length love poem and a moving act of personal testimony. But what sets these poems apart from other treatments of the subject is Duffy's refusal to simplify the contradictions of love and read its transformations-infatuation,...

"In The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, Hilary Mantel's trademark gifts of penetrating characterization, unsparing eye, and rascally intelligence are once again fully on display. Her classic wicked humor in each story--which range from a ghost story to a vampire story to near-memoir to mini-sagas of family and social fracture--brilliantly unsettles the reader in that unmistakably Mantel way. Mantel brutally and acutely writes about gender, marriage,...