When despair for the world grows, Bertie's theory of ice cream reminds us that it's the simple pleasures in life that we should hold onto. And everyone's favourite seven-year-old has a lot to put up with: at home, Irene is planning lessons on Irish Culture for Bertie; at school, he is forced to join Olive and Pansy's book group, and during a day out with his best friend Ranald Braveheart Macpherson, the boys find themselves unexpectedly invited to a wedding.
Meanwhile, Bruce's latest property venture goes horribly wrong after trying to move a flat's front door to give it a more prestigious address. At Nine Mile Burn, Matthew and the triplets try to adopt an unwillingly-vegan dog. And Sister Maria-Fiori dei Fiore Montagna discovers the missing part of the Stone of Scone in Drummond Place Gardens.
Filled with Alexander McCall Smith's trademark warmth and humour, this latest book in the series is a must-read.
'a toast to the importance of the simple joys of life at a time of global despair' Sally McDonald / Sunday Post
]]>The translations are by Ornella Civardi, a noted scholar of Japanese literature, who also provides an fascinating introduction to the popular kabuki theater tradition in Japan. The book will be treasured by kabuki aficionados as well anyone with an interest in the theatre or Japanese literature.
'Kabuki is action-packed, scenically thrilling and histrionically flamboyant' - The Guardian
]]>A novel about belonging, Else imagines a possible future in the story of one family and lyrical, evocative prose.
'A singular work deeply concerned with relationships, those we have with ourselves, our environment and our pasts.' Romy Ash
'Meticulously crafted and extremely inventive ... timely and prescient.' James Bradley
'A testament to beloved Eastern Kulin Country, a generational saga of settlement, and an embrace of the myriad forms taken by knowledge.' Bonny Cassidy
]]>A 'Book to Look Out For' by The Guardian and BuzzFeed, The Sad Part Was offers an oblique reflection of contemporary Bangkok life.
In these witty, postmodern stories, Yoon riffs on pop culture, experiments with punctuation, flirts with sci-fi and, in a metafictional twist, mocks his own position as omnipotent author. Highly literary, his narrativesexplore the bewildering disjunct and oft-hilarious contradictions of a modernity that is at odds with many traditional Thai ideas on relationships, family, school and work.
]]>Mui Poopoksakul is a lawyer-turned-translator. She grew up in Bangkok and Boston, and practiced law in New York City before returning to the literary field. She is the translator of Prabda Yoon's The Sad Part Was (2017) and Moving Parts (2018), both winners of a PEN Translates award, and of Duanwad Pimwana's Arid Dreams (2020) and Bright (2019).
]]>Featuring work from:
Shola Von Reinhold, Leeor Ohayon, Tom Benn, Alice Haworth-Booth, N. G. F. Clark, Danielle Giles, Francesca Reece, Melody Razak, Mariana Roa Oliva, Giovanna Iozzi, Suey Kweon, K. Lockwood Jefford, Katie Hale, Max Lury, Jay Gao, Aoife Inman, Andrea Mason, Aisha Phoenix, Isha Karki, Jack Houston, Siri Katinka Valdez, Rajasree Variyar.
Foreword by Joanna Walsh and an introduction by Wendy Erskine, former judges of the two prizes.
]]>Robert Loyko-Greer is a writer based in London, where he works for the publisher Profile Books. He co-founded the Desperate Literature Short Fiction Prize in 2017.
]]>Malcolm's suspicions soon prove well-founded; he is discovered brutally murdered in his study, and his invaluable unfinished novel has vanished. Cut off from the mainland, with the killer on the loose and the island's inhabitants circling, Euan feels both his mentor's legacy and his only chance at greatness slipping away. He must venture deep into Malcolm's labyrinthine mansion to find the manuscript before it falls into the wrong hands.
But what he doesn't yet know is that the closer he comes to solving the mystery, the tighter he will bind himself to a fate sealed in time...
]]>Catherine Coldbridge is a complicated woman: a doctor, an occultist, and, briefly, a widow.
In 1879, Catherine's husband, Private Frank Humble, was killed in a Sioux attack. Consumed by grief, she used her formidable skills to resurrect her husband. But after the reanimation, Frank lost his soul, becoming a vicious undead monster.
Twenty-five years later, Catherine has decided she must make things right. She travels to Texas with a pair of hired killers. But Frank is no longer a monster. He has remade himself as the Unkillable Frank Lightning, traveling with the Wild West Show.
With his signature lean, clean prose reminiscent of Raymond Chandler, Josh Rountree (The Legend of Charlie Fish) has penned a Frankenstein-inspired tale unlike any other. With equal parts Cormac McCarthy and Stephen Graham Jones, Rountree coalesces myth and legend into a dramatic tale of love, death, and its terrible aftermath.
'With The Unkillable Frank Lightning, Rountree solidifies himself as not only one of the best writers working today, but makes the case for being the best Western writer of our present century.' C. S. Humble, author of That Light Sublime trilogy
]]>Recent praise for HEAT:
'The revival of HEAT journal has been one of the high points of the year. In the 1990s and 2000s, HEAT was the most exciting, forward-looking literary magazine in the country. After more than a decade on ice, this new series has raised the bar once again. Elegantly designed and thoughtfully curated, and including work from canonical Australian writers to emerging voices to authors in translation, the journal reminds us how crucial such organs are to the vigour and health of our literary ecosystem.' Geordie Williamson, The Saturday Paper's 'Best of 2022'
'So slender and elegant, nothing wasted, nothing grandiose and beautiful work.' Helen Garner
'HEAT magazine was a trailblazer from the day it was launched...[The new series is] still dedicated to publishing non-Anglophone views of the world, alternatives to the mainstream and points of view that are both thought-provoking and expressed in high literary style.' Openbook, NSW State Library Magazine
'A very beautiful and stylish object...long may this new series of HEAT continue!' Sarah Holland-Batt
'I welcome the return of HEAT. Readers and writers alike will revel in its daring audacity, bold exploration and innovative celebration of literature.' Alexis Wright
'HEAT is eclectic and eccentric, bold and often feisty, and above all else, it is a journal that always gives a freer rein to its writers, that we might gallop wherever we will.' Fiona Wright
]]>'The revival of HEAT journal has been one of the high points of the year. In the 1990s and 2000s, HEAT was the most exciting, forward-looking literary magazine in the country. After more than a decade on ice, this new series has raised the bar once again. Elegantly designed and thoughtfully curated, and including work from canonical Australian writers to emerging voices to authors in translation, the journal reminds us how crucial such organs are to the vigour and health of our literary ecosystem.' Geordie Williamson, The Saturday Paper's 'Best of 2022'
'So slender and elegant, nothing wasted, nothing grandiose and beautiful work.' Helen Garner
'HEAT magazine was a trailblazer from the day it was launched...[The new series is] still dedicated to publishing non-Anglophone views of the world, alternatives to the mainstream and points of view that are both thought-provoking and expressed in high literary style.' Openbook, NSW State Library Magazine
'A very beautiful and stylish object...long may this new series of HEAT continue!' Sarah Holland-Batt
'I welcome the return of HEAT. Readers and writers alike will revel in its daring audacity, bold exploration and innovative celebration of literature.' Alexis Wright
'HEAT is eclectic and eccentric, bold and often feisty, and above all else, it is a journal that always gives a freer rein to its writers, that we might gallop wherever we will.' Fiona Wright
]]>'Reid's poems are arresting because their insights are both tactful and revealing; their hesitations, or admissions of doubt, are central. Their questioning of agency is a strength. More than easy celebration or affirmation, they are a poet's genuinely prayerful searching and praising. They are spiritual permissions. If we notice, if we are alert, we may know. Mark Reid is the finest Minimalist poet in Australia.' Philip Salom
'...beneath such simplicity, these poems conceal depths of philosophical and religious thought that are revealed only in repeated readings. Blindside is a work of effortlessly superior intelligence...' Judges' Report, 2019 Kenneth Slessor Award
]]>'In Re: Vision, Isi Unikowski explores the complex histories of places and objects and the people and movements inhabiting them with a lively curiosity, tenderness and deep contemplation. Unikowski's writing "momentarily catches the sunlight" and arrives at the centre of what it is to be human.' Amanda Anasti
'Unikowski's poetry captivates the reader with its masterful imagery and emotional clarity. Many of these poems launch from a recognisable, safe, suburban world, but few finish there. Some swerve away into near-surrealism or the landscape of strange dreams. Others gently draw the reader beyond the workaday surface, into a deeper or sidelong contemplation. In its evocation of the Australia that was, and is, this book is pitch-perfect.' Penelope Layland
]]>'Kathleen Bleakley expresses poignant and vivid feelings for a number of family members and friends in Toupie but the omphalos in this collection is her life with, and deep love for 'pling, her long-term partner, and photographer, who is in slow decline with lymphoma. The striking feature for me in this collection is her skilful and sensitive use of colour. She creates her own chakra-like system with her display of significant colours in a narrative that moves from earthly life to the astral, the afterlife.' Joanne Burns
'Dazzling and polychromatic, Kathleen Bleakley's Toupie: new and selected poetry and prose, is a whirligig of memory and synaesthesia. In ee cumming-esque poems and prose, Bleakley uses fragments and fractured metaphors to explore the unreliability of memory and the poignant quotidian experience. Bleakley's Toupie is a powder keg - it's like "Watch[ing] fireworks cascade.' Cassandra Atherton
]]>This ruminative novella interrogates the impact of severance from those we love, lingering pasts and possible futures, the lives we live and might have lived.
'Prendergast is a great observer of humans. She pulls no punches because she wants the truth.' - Bruce Pascoe
'These stories shun the sentimental and embrace the taboo.' - Maria Takolander
]]>First published in 1954, this was one of two gritty and atmospheric crime novels written by the accomplished children's author Nina Bawden.
]]>As it hurtles towards its feverish denouement under the bells of the capital's most famous clock, this closely observed and stylish study of both character and motive transports the reader from the Stock Exchange to Scotland Yard. It asks the question of what it means to be crooked and how immense power corrupts.
First published in 1934, this novel is now extremely rare, and is long overdue its rediscovery.
]]>Join Weird Walk for a new journey into the ghostly and bizarre, striking out from the shelter of the inn for the places where the path begins to fade, from the sublime wilderness of mountains, coasts and ravines to forbidden, ancient tracts of woodland.
Featuring disorientating classics from John Buchan and Algernon Blackwood alongside modern, thrilling (and sometimes violent) warnings to the intrepid from Lisa Tuttle and Dorothy K. Haynes, The Wayfarer's Weird leads you towards fae dangers, down lost tracks in time and deep into the liminal spaces of Britain and beyond.
]]>From the darkly humorous to the chillingly sinister, tales of the haunted trail are as old as time. We have always travelled on foot and our worst fears have often accompanied us. Whether walking for pleasure or necessity, the ramblers of these classic stories trip across unseen boundaries, plotting routes towards the numinous, the uncanny and the plain evil.
Featuring fifteen pieces from an intrepid band of writers including Robert Aickman, Charlotte Riddell, M. R. James and many more, this new anthology is a haunting trail mate, guiding you into the wild unknown.
]]>Hendry Jones isn't quite Billy the Kid, but he's 'the Kid' all the same, and like Billy's his story doesn't take long to tell. He'll do a fair amount of killing, be done in by an old friend, then get turned into a myth before his body is cold. Years later, one of the Kid's last living partners in crime, 'Doc' Baker old and less than sober tries to set the record straight: who killed who and why, and how none of that old craziness is worth swooning over or rehashing. Except that Doc is a bit of a poet despite himself, and in drawing together what he knows and remembers about the Kid's last days, he winds up saying just about everything that needs to be said about the American West, about kids playing with guns, about boys playing at being men out on the frontier, where they thought no one was watching.
As Will Oldham whose moniker as a musician, Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, was partly inspired by Billy the Kid notes in his introduction, Hendry Jones served as fodder for a field of artists grappling with masculinity and violence in the West: Marlon Brando's One-Eyed Jacks, Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, and Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian are all impossible to imagine without Neider's Kid having first blazed the trail. A concise and brutal modern masterpiece, The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones is one of the few Western novels worthy of the name.
]]>Will Oldham has released more than twenty studio albums, along with EPs, singles, and music for film and television, performing, variously, as himself, Palace Brothers, or Bonnie 'Prince' Billy. He is a longtime denizen of Louisville, Kentucky.
]]>It is a tale of passion and revenge involving Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw, his childhood best friend and the love of his life who deals him a stunning betrayal. Reader and Lockwood both are held spellbound by the story of Heathcliff's quest for vengeance and his bitter acrimony which has devastating consequences for all.
For generations, Emily Bronte's novel of suspense and operatic intensity has enraptured and moved readers to fall in love with Heathcliff's dark moods and brooding intensity. Salient to this day, this novel is a surprisingly modern exploration of race, gender, class, and the ways that love is frustrated and thwarted by bigotry and prejudice.
]]>Derrick Austin is the author of Tenderness (BOA Editions, 2021), winner of the 2020 Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, and Trouble the Water (BOA Editions, 2016), a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry, Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, and the Norma Faber First Book Award. His third collection, This Elegance, is forthcoming from BOA Editions in Spring 2026. A Cave Canem fellow, he is the recipient of a Ron Wallace Poetry Fellowship at the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing, a Stegner Fellowship, and an Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship. In 2016, he was a Hub City Writer in Residence. He has had poems and essays commissioned by The Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, The New Museum, Craft Contemporary, The Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Arts, LAXART, and The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles.
Noreen Masud is a Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Bristol, and an AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker. Her memoir-travelogue, A Flat Place (Hamish Hamilton [Penguin] and Melville House Press, 2023), was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Non-Fiction, the Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Trust Young Writer of the Year Award, the Jhalak Prize, the RSL Ondaatje Prize and the Books are my Bag Reader Awards.
Allison Miriam Smith is a co-founder of Smith & Taylor Classics. She is also an Acquiring Editor and Publishing & Publicity Manager for Unnamed Press. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in English & Creative Writing from the University of Southern California where she was an assistant curator for the USC Doheny Library George Cassady Lewis Carroll Special Collection. She later went on to earn a Masters in 18th & 19th c. Literature from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, working nights at the library. Before Unnamed Press, she was a bookseller at Skylight Books in Los Angeles, CA.
Brandon Taylor is the author of the novels Minor Black Figures, The Late Americans and Real Life, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, and named a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice and a Science + Literature Selected Title by the National Book Foundation. His collection Filthy Animals, a national bestseller, was awarded The Story Prize and shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. He is the 2022-2023 Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. He is an Acquiring Editor at Unnamed Press and co-founder of Smith & Taylor Classics. He lives in NYC.
]]>In his only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), Edgar Allan Poe carries his knack for the mysterious and macabre, spilt blood and cryptic messages onto the South Seas. Aboard a whaling ship, stowaway Pym will endure starvation, cannibalism, whirlpools, mad dogs and premature burials on a journey toward the frozen expanse of Antarctica.
Published the year full emancipation was legalised by the UK's Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, Arthur Gordon Pym captures the relentless anxiety and violence of pre-Civil War American expansion. Allegorical, tragic, and based on real events, this adventure story went on to inspire many authors from Herman Melville and Jules Verne, to H. G. Wells and Vladmir Nabokov. This edition also includes accompanying selected letters, essays, and criticism from Poe himself.
]]>Nathan Wolff is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the English Department at Tufts University. He is the author of Not Quite Hope and Other Political Emotions in the Gilded Age (Oxford University Press, 2019), which provides a literary prehistory of today's emotional politics: the cynicism and exhaustion of democratic life in an age of inequality and corruption. His writing has appeared in American Literary History, English Literary History, J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, and The Washington Post.
Joseph Rezek received his PhD in English from the University of California, Los Angeles, and his B. A. from Columbia University. His area of expertise is British and American literature from 1750 to 1850, and his research focuses on early Black Atlantic literature, transatlantic studies, and the history of race and racism. He teaches at Boston University.
Allison Miriam Smith is a co-founder of Smith & Taylor Classics. She is also an Acquiring Editor and Publishing & Publicity Manager for Unnamed Press. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in English & Creative Writing from the University of Southern California where she was an assistant curator for the USC Doheny Library George Cassady Lewis Carroll Special Collection. She later went on to earn a Masters in 18th & 19th c. Literature from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, working nights at the library. Before Unnamed Press, she was a bookseller at Skylight Books in Los Angeles, CA.
Brandon Taylor is the author of the novels Minor Black Figures, The Late Americans and Real Life, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, and named a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice and a Science + Literature Selected Title by the National Book Foundation. His collection Filthy Animals, a national bestseller, was awarded The Story Prize and shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. He is the 2022-2023 Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. He is an Acquiring Editor at Unnamed Press and co-founder of Smith & Taylor Classics. He lives in NYC.
]]>As the assistant of the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, Nicole Underwood has plenty of tasks on her to-do list one of which is the blowout birthday celebration for her nightmare, one-percenter boss, Xander Chambers. But when the party ends in chaos and murder and Nicole is one of the survivors, suspicion from the investigators to the media lands on her. Was she the reason for all the bloodshed?
A year after those deadly events, Nicole tries to set the public record straight by agreeing to consult on a feature film based on her story. However, on the set in LA, she's sidelined by inappropriate casting and persistent, bizarre script changes, while also haunted by the events of that party weekend with visions of her now-deceased boss. It seems clearing her name isn't so simple when the question of guilt or innocence is...complicated.
]]>There are 54 cards in the Lotera game, and for this short story collection you will find one unique story per card based on a Latin American myth, folklore, superstition, or belief with a slant towards the paranormal and horrific. In this deck of cards you will find murderers, ghosts, goblins and ghouls. This collection features creatures and monsters, vampires, werewolves and more.
Many of these legends existed long before their European counterparts passed throughout the Americas via word of mouth, collected just like the tales the Brothers Grimm. These are indeed fairy tales Latin American fairy tales but with a horrifying slant.
]]>Gabriel Josipovici was born in Nice in 1940 to Jewish parents of Italo-Russian, Romano-Levantine extraction. He is the author of some twenty novels, ten books of criticism, a memoir of his mother, the poet Sacha Rabinovitch, and numerous stage and radio plays.
]]>The Book of Homes is the story of a man and his friendships, his upbringing, his discovery of sex and poetry, his detachment from a self-destructive family, and his liberation from the furniture that has followed him through 20 years of moves. His story jumps from home to home, upstairs to downstairs, each home a piece of the puzzle of his life. In its extraordinary, ambitious architecture, this novel brings to light all the stories hidden in the silence of domestic spaces.
]]>Elizabeth Harris is a literary translator specializing in contemporary Italian fiction. She is the author of multiple award-winning full-length translations include works by Giulio Mozzi (Open Letter Books), Antonio Tabucchi (Archipelago Books) and Mario Rigoni Stern (Autumn Hill Books).
]]>In a darkening, post-COVID world, fearless investigative reporter Shona Sandison is seeking meaning and her next big story. A secret contact inside the government has promised her something huge, but she has no idea of the danger she is in. Meanwhile, her old friend Hector Stricken has taken on a position in communications for a new state agency, where he stumbles across a sinister, top-secret project codenamed 'Grendel'. And on the Scottish coast, an ageing spy chief, living in seclusion, grieves his murdered son and contemplates revenge.
Connecting them all is an insidious conspiracy within the UK's most powerful institutions, a rot so deep that the only way to cure it may be to cut it out or burn the whole thing down.
]]>Lesbian pulp fiction thrived in the oppressive 1950s, telling subversive stories of lonely sapphic women who find connection, passion, and revenge. InThe New Lesbian Pulp, editors Sarah Fonseca and Octavia Saenz revive the genre for today, layering nuance into classic tropes while dialing up the melodrama, romantic peril, and collateral damage.
In these pages which pair revived classics from Lorraine Hansberry and Alice Dunbar Nelson with new stories from Sarah Schulman, Grace Byron, Shamim Sharif, and more vigilante lesbians gather roadkill for revenge, a woman and her former high school bully hook up and commit murder, Brooklyn witches cruise kink parties for human sacrifice, and a sinister kidnapping goes horribly wrong (or horribly right).
Here, gathered just for you, are some of today's best lesbian pulp stories. Don't be afraid. Pick them up.
]]>Octavia Saenz (she/they) is an editor and cartoonist based in El Paso, TX. She creates speculative fiction and visual narratives about queer life and temporality. Octavia grew up in Puerto Rico and has a BFA in Creative Writing and Illustration from Ringling College, as well as a Lambda Fellowship. Find her on Twitter and Instagram @shrimpwonder.
Trish Bendix is a GLAAD-nominated writer and regular contributor to the New York Times. Her book Sappho Was a Pop Star is forthcoming from St. Martin's Press in 2027.
]]>The word versus means one thing pitched against another. To be versus versus, therefore, is a paradox, but paradox can be helpful it can open a space for deeper thought. This anthology aims to be such a space.Here, the reader will encounter poems of love and pain, self-care and companionship; poems which challenge cultural, medical and political agendas and policies. There are war poems, poems as acts of witness and solidarity, poems which address the impacts of the climate emergency. There are humorous poems, nature poems, and much more. The selection also draws together poetry in a wide variety of styles and forms, and from different traditions, such as haiku, renga, sonnet, villanelle, prose poem, performance poem, and sign language. Building on the work of decades of disability justice advocacy, Versus Versus offers a poetry of assertiveness and immense vitality.
The anthology draws upon a wide range of voices from across the globe, including many indigenous poets and poets of color. Writer based in the US include:Agha Shahid Ali,Threa Almontaser, Kay Ulanday Barrett, John Lee Clarke, Meg Day, Kwame Dawes, Anita Endrezze, Megan Fernandes, torrin a. greathouse, Ona Gritz, Stephanie Heit, Linda Hogan, Cynthia Huntington, Rachael Johnson, Cyree Jarelle Johnson, I.S. Jones,Fady Joudah, Ilya Kaminsky,Tsipi Keller,Jane Kenyon, Petra Kuppers, Stephen Kuusisto, Adrienne Leddy, Ada Limn,Ibtihal Rida Mahmood,Airea D. Matthews, Lateef McLeod, Erica Mena, Leroy F. Moore Jr., Naomi Ortiz, Saleem Hue Penny, Lucia Perillo, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and heidi andrea restrepo rhodes.
This anthology was prepared with the help of an Advocacy and Advisory Panel: grateful thanks to Karthika Nar, Chisom Okafor and Daniel Sluman. Many thanks to the Royal Society of Literature and to the judges of the 2023 Literature Matters Awards for selecting this anthology as one of the winning entries.
]]>A lesbian mother feels out of place taking her daughter to a princess party; a gay couple turns to unconventional means to create their baby; a grieving man winds up on a date with a centaur; an agoraphobic must make an impossible choice before time runs out. This is the unnerving world of Runs in the Blood, Matthew J. Trafford's story collection, and it pulses with humour, anxiety, and profound disquiet.
Darkly satirical and unflinchingly human, the stories of Runs in the Blood unsettle our notions of family, whether biological or chosen. Careening through the space beyond nature versus nurture, its characters betrayed, wounded, unequipped wrangle with their own worst instincts and the grotesqueries of the modern world, attempting to create families worth holding on to and to protect the children they love.
Delightful and disarming, odd and audacious, Runs in the Blood reveals the work of a bold and fearless writer.
'What I love about Runs in the Blood aside from Trafford's masterful writing is the way the stories unravel to reveal such tenderness, horror, and heartbreak. I've never read a collection of stories with this unique focus on families. This book and these characters feel like a revelation.' Brian Francis, author of Fruit
'Runs in the Blood is a collection of stories that traces the lines of our darkest thoughts with intimate care. I found myself drawn to each complex and complicated character, whether beast or human, yearning to know more, ferociously consuming every single story.' Daniel Zomparelli, co-editor of Queer Little Nightmares
'Trafford's stories are intimate and imaginative, written with a blend of delicate observation and a ruthless curiosity about the origins and outcomes of desire. Runs in the Blood is full of passion, secrets, the tenderness and agonies of love, and an often disturbing vitality.' Naben Ruthnum, author of Helpmeet
]]>Jason Purcell's debut collection of poems rests at the intersection of queerness and illness, staking a place for the queer body that has been made sick through living in this world. Part poetic experiment and part memoir, Swollening attempts to diagnose what has been undiagnosable, tracing an uneven path from a lifetime of swallowing bad feelings-homophobia in its external and internalized manifestations, heteronormativity, anxiety surrounding desire, aversion to sex-to a body in revolt.
In poems that speak using the grammar and logics of sickness, Purcell offers a dizzying collision of word and image that is the language of pain alongside the banality of living on. Beginning by reading his own life and body closely and slowly zooming out to read illness in the world, Purcell comes to ask: how might a sick, queer body forgive itself for a natural reaction to living in a sick world and go on toward hope? In Swollening, Purcell coughs up his own poetics of illness, his own aesthetics of pain, to form a tender collection that lands straight in the gut.
]]>A playfully concocted, fast-paced novel committed to the irresistible pleasure of reading, both a celebration and a critique of our relationship to objects (from fetishes, to curios, to commodities, to objectum sexuality, to our becoming cyborgs through our addiction to technology), Philosophical Toys travels through different times, countries and experiences as chance leads Nina to encounter time and again the enigmatic nature of things, which end up transforming her into that most rare of species: a female philosopher.
Witty and elegiac, Philosophical Toys takes the reader on a tour of fetishism, late capitalist culture, Buuel's films, psychoanalysis, Alzheimer's disease, as well as the avatars of belonging to two cultures, an experience increasingly shared by a myriad of expatriates.
]]>Presenting itself as an investigation into the suicide of a close friend perhaps real, perhaps fictional more than twenty years earlier, Leve gives us, little by little, a striking portrait of a man, with all his talents and flaws, who chose to reject his life, and all the people who loved him, in favor of oblivion. Gradually, through Leve's casually obsessive, pointillist, beautiful ruminations, we come to know a stoic, sensible, thoughtful man who bears more than a slight psychological resemblance to Leve himself. But Suicide is more than just a compendium of memories of an old friend; it is a near-exhaustive catalog of the ramifications and effects of the act of suicide, and a unique and melancholy farewell to life.
]]>Jan Steyn is Associate Professor and the Director of the MFA in Literary Translation at the University of Iowa.
]]>This is the gripping saga of three World War II freedom fighters: Robert, an Algerian Jew, who runs away from home to join the army in Algiers; Mike, a cocky American pilot who enlisted in the Royal Air Force at the outset of the war; and Janine, a passionate and determined Frenchwoman leading missions to smuggle Allied airmen over the Pyrenees, out of France, and to safety. When fate forces the trio together, an easy friendship forms, one that soon blossoms into a fragile love triangle. With dangers mounting and SS operatives closing in, one of them is captured and must be rescued at all costs.
The story brings to life the significant cruelty of the occupation, and how the war brought out the ugliest aspects of human nature in some, but the gifts of courage, self-sacrifice, and grit in others. Filled with action-packed battle scenes, daring escapes, and a colourful cast of characters, this saga evokes the bravery and compassion that fueled the Resistance and helped win the war.
]]>Dorothy and her little dog, Toto, are swept away from their home in Kansas by a powerful tornado and dropped into an enchanting new land called Oz. To get home, the Witch of the North tells Dorothy she must follow the yellow brick road to the Emerald City and ask the mysterious Wizard of Oz for help. Along the way, she meetsthe Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, and the Cowardly Lion, and together they embark on a strange and magical adventure.
]]>This edition collects a wide selection of Dickinson's brief but memorable poems. Bursting with insights about life, love, nature, death, and immortality, these works are among the most beloved in American poetry.
]]>An exhilarating and unforgettable love song for our world. Heartbroken and in fear for his life, corporate whistle blower, Jagger Eckerman, escapes to hide out in a remote cave, but kick-arse radical, Nia Moretti, is furious a 'capitalist suit' has taken over her cave. It is hatred at first sight.
Yet Nia is hiding for reasons of her own, ones that drag Jagger closer to death as they are forced on the run together and he is unwittingly pulled deeper into Nia's reckless mission to help save the planet. But who can save Jagger from the relentless pursuit of the man who wants him dead?
Both an electrifying cat-and-mouse-chase and an odd couple love story, The Rewilding captures the essence of what it means to be alive today in this cusp of change pulsing with possibilities.
It is a passionate intimation of hope.
'A breathless chase thriller with a warm ecological heart.' - Inga Simpson, author of The Last Woman in the World
'Fiction at its rebellious, fast-paced best with hope as its touchstone, making The Rewilding an urgent novel for our times.' - Sally Piper, author of Bone Memories
'A genre-bending page-turner from an author of the highest calibre: Cameron's writing is rich, evocative and comes straight from the heart.' Anna Downes, author of The Safe Place
]]>Set between the Blue Mountains and a Sydney hospital, Lisa Kenway's All You Took From Me is a thriller brimming with great characters and nail-biting tension.
Anaesthetist Clare Carpenter has just lost her husband and her memory in a single-vehicle accident. So why is a stranger following her? After questioning patients about their dreams, she becomes convinced that an anaesthetic drug might help her access missing memories. But there's no way to be certain without jeopardising her career or her life.
As unexplained threats escalate, Clare realises she must take matters into her own hands to learn the uncomfortable truth about her secretive husband, his connection to a mysterious club and what she did to trigger a stranger's crusade for vengeance. But how far will she go?
'Truly exciting. It's a rare treat to read a book that I am still thinking about long after the last page - the surprising reveals are both earned and satisfying. Readers are destined to fall in love with the ways Kenway brings such expertise and a unique perspective to the psychological thriller genre.' - Shelley Burr, author of Wake and Ripper
'A taut psychological thriller with a driving plot, All You Took From Me interrogates the limits of memory, both lost and recovered. From its compelling opening mystery, every page bristles with threat and intrigue.' - Ashley Kalagian Blunt, bestselling author of Dark Mode
'Kenway brings an exciting level of insider authenticity to this simmering drama about an anaesthetist struggling to make sense of a life unspooling in the aftermath of a tragic accident. Tense, twisty and unique, this is an unforgettable debut.' - Anna Downes, author of The Safe Place and Red River Road
'I found myself first pulled in by the prose - Kenway writes like a dream - but soon I was consumed by the mystery at the heart of the story the question of where we go and what happens to us under the narcotic oblivion of anaesthesia. Charged with menace and paranoia, this is a masterfully plotted psychological thriller.' - J. P. Pomare, author of In The Clearing and 17 Years Later
]]>**Winner, NSW Literary Awards 2025, Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry**
**Shortlisted, Prime Minister's Literary Awards 2025, Poetry**
**Shortlisted, NSW Literary Awards 2025, Glenda Adams Award for New Writing**
**Shortlisted, Victorian Premier's Literary Awards 2025, Poetry**
A moving testament to the displacement and dispossession of the Palestinian people.
rock flight is a book-length poem that, over five chapters, follows a personal and historical narrative, to compose an understated yet powerful allegory of Palestine's occupation. The poem uses refrains of suffocation, rubble, and migratory bird patterns to address the realities of forced displacement, economic restrictions and surveillance technology that Palestinians face both within and outside Palestine. It depicts a restlessness brought about by dispossession, and a determination to find significance in fleeting objects and fragments. It looks to the literary form as an interactive experience, and the book as an object in flux, inviting the reader to embark on an exploration of space, while limited by the box-like confines of the page. Formally claustrophobic, the poem morphs into irony, declaring everything a box while refusing to exist within one.
'Here is a poetry of passion; a poetry of necessity; a poetry of survival, and a poetry-triumphant.' Maxine Beneba Clarke
'rock flight is a work of timelessness, rigour, precision, relationality and guts just like its poet. A must-read for all of us who yearn and stretch and reach for a world beyond colonies, and an even more urgent read for those who don't.' Alison Whittaker
]]>Strange things happen on the dark wintry nights of December. Welcome to a new collection of haunting Christmas tales, ranging from traditional Victorian chillers to weird and uncanny episodes by twentieth-century horror masters including Daphne du Maurier and Robert Aickman.
Lurking in the blizzard are menacing cat spirits, vengeful trees, malignant forces on the mountainside and a skater skirting the line between the mortal and spiritual realms. Wrap up warm and prepare for the longest nights of all.
]]>From the troves of the British Library collections comes a new volume for Christmas nights-when the boundary between the mundane and the unearthly is ever so thin-ushering in a new throng of revenants, demons, spectres and shades drawn to the glow of the hearth.
Included within are eighteen classic stories ranging from 1864 to 1974, with vintage Victorian chillers nestled alongside unsettling modern pieces from L. P. Hartley and Mildred Clingerman; lost tales from rare anthologies and periodicals; weird episodes from unexpected authors such as Winston Graham and D. H. Lawrence; stories simmering with a twisted humour from Elizabeth Bowen and Celia Fremlin and many more haunting seasonal treats.
]]>The gifts are unwrapped, the feast has been consumed and the fire is well fed but the ghosts are still hungry. The ghosts are at the door.
Welcome to a new collection of Christmas nightmares, ushering in a fresh host of ghastly phantoms and otherworldly intruders bent on ruining, or partaking in, the most wonderful time of the year. With classic tales from Algernon Blackwood, Elizabeth Bowen, Charlotte Riddell and L. P. Hartley jostling with rare pieces from the sleeping periodicals and literary magazines of the British Library collections, it's time to open the door and let the real festivities begin.
]]>DEATH ON POSSETT ISLAND
Well-known Playwright Found Dead on Christmas Tree.
Dimpson McCabe - Dimpsie - has invited all of his closest friends of the theatre world to join him for Christmas at his castle on a private island some hours' drive from Edinburgh. The festivities have barely had a chance to begin when poor Dimpsie is found draped atop the Christmas tree, electrocuted by the lights with which it is festooned.
The Sherriff's Court yields a verdict of Accidental Death, but in the swirling snow suspicion is dancing among the flakes. Through Dimpsie's cadre of directors, producers, actors and agents runs a hot streak of hidden grievances and theatrical scheming, and as the group return to London the dogged Inspector Smith begins to circle, seeking to find the leading man or prima donna responsible for this ghoulish crime.
First published in 1948 and lost for over 75 years, this lost Christmas novel returns to bedazzle a fresh audience of mystery-lovers.
]]>On Christmas Eve, heavy snowfall brings a train to a halt near the village of Hemmersby. Several passengers take shelter in a deserted country house, where the fire has been lit and the table laid for tea - but no one is at home. Trapped together for Christmas, the passengers are seeking to unravel the secrets of the empty house when a murderer strikes in their midst.
]]>The Princess Olga Karukhin, who fled from Russia at the time of the Revolution, has lived in terror of being discovered ever since. Olga's grandson, Ivan, appears to have run from the scene, but is later seen returning to the flat as though oblivious to the terrible crime. Taking place between 22nd and 24th December, Nightingale's enquiry takes him across London, culminating in the wrapping of the mystery on Christmas Eve.
This never-before-republished novel from 1958 has a noticeably different feel to the neat puzzles and country house mysteries of crime fiction's golden age, revealing the darker side of police detection in an evocative urban setting.
]]>Good old Uncle Willie-rich, truculent and seemingly propped up by his fierce willpower alone-has come to stay with the Redpaths for the holidays. It is just their luck for him to be found dead in the snow on Boxing Day morning, dressed in his Santa Claus costume and seemingly poisoned by something in the Christmas confectionery. As the police flock to the house, Willie's descendants, past lovers and distant relatives are drawn into a perplexing investigation to find out how the old man met his fate, and who stands to gain by such an unseasonable crime.
First published in 1944, Murder After Christmas is a lively riot of murder, mince pies and misdirection, cleverly twisting the tropes of Golden Age detective fiction to create a pacey, light-hearted package admirably suited for the holiday season.
]]>Another of the series' popular anthologies celebrating forgotten classics and material not printed since its original publication. Perfect bitesize holiday reading for the Classic Crime enthusiast and the casual sleuther alike, featuring mysteries focused on British holidays and abroad.
]]>But one lazy summer vacation and an apparently harmless infatuation will push Edna beyond this quiet, settled life, placing her directly at odds with society's expectations of what a woman should be.
This volume features additional short stories, including works that wrestled with such topics as racial passing in Desiree's Baby, infidelity in A Respectable Woman, and queer attraction in Fedora.
]]>Catherine has no clue that Isabella's tendency to say one thing and do another might make her an unreliable friend. It never occurs to her that her brother James, arriving unannounced in Bath with Isabella's brother John, has come to see Isabella, not her. After making a mistake that would shame any true heroine falling in love with the wry and witty Henry Tilney before knowing his feelings for her she fails to notice that the odious John Thorpe fancies himself in love with her, and vice versa. By the time Catherine visits Henry and his sister Eleanor at Northanger Abbey, her misconceptions and novel-fuelled expectations virtually guarantee disaster. Yet, Catherine remains blissfully unaware of what awaits her.
]]>The novel that translated the stormy ethos of the gothic novel into the foundation for modern science fiction, Frankenstein is a terrifying story about how monsters - of all kinds - are made.
]]>Featuring gripping plot twists and surprises,Jane Eyreoffers rich insight into the life of a woman who, despite oppression and precarious circumstances, refuses to yield her sense of self.
]]>The Age of Innocencebegins with Newland Archer gentleman-lawyer and scion of one of New York's most privileged families anticipating his marriage to the gentle, lovely, and equally privileged May Welland. But when Newland meets May's cousin, the beautiful and scandal-ridden Countess Ellen Olenska, he begins to doubt his choice of bride and his place within the shallow, gilded cage of society life. If the Countess Olenska can dare to leave her disastrous marriage, can defy the unspoken, iron-clad rules that have shaped her life what freedoms are possible for him? And what does true innocence look like in a world strangled by hollow custom, trivial squabbles, and the appearance of goodness?The Age of Innocenceis one of Edith Wharton's greatest novels and a true classic that continues to inspire and transfix readers today.
]]>This collector's edition of Bram Stoker's Dracula is illustrated with artwork that Edward Gorey created for his stage designs for the novel's Broadway stage adaptation. The book also features an introduction and appendices by renowned fantasy editor Marvin Kaye.
]]>Edward Gorey (1925-2000) was renowned for his cover art and illustrated books, many of which he wrote himself. He was celebrated for his excursions into the macabre and won a Tony Award for Best Costume Design for the 1977 revival of Dracula on Broadway.
]]>Immensely popular from the day it was published, Little Women struck a chord with generations of young American women, demonstrating that women can pursue their dreams freely without compromising their values.
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