Readings.com.au: VCE Literature 2009

Hunting the Wild Pineapple

Leverson, the narrator at the centre of these stories, calls himself a 'people freak.' Seduced by north Queensland's sultry beauty and unique strangeness, he is as fascinated by the invading hordes of misfits from the south as by the old established Queenslanders. Leverson's ironical yet compassionate view makes every story, every incident, a pointed example of human weakness or strength.

Emma

Beautiful, clever, rich – and single Emma Woodhouse is perfectly content with her life and sees no need for either love or marriage. Nothing, however, delights her more than interfering in the romantic lives of others. But when she ignores the warnings of her good friend Mr Knightley and attempts to arrange a suitable match for her protigie Harriet Smith, her carefully laid plans soon unravel and have consequences that she never expected. With its imperfect but charming heroine and its witty and subtle exploration of relationships, Emma is often seen as Jane Austin's most flawless work.

This edition includes a new chronology, additional suggestions for further reading and the original Penguin Classics introduction by Tony Tanner.

Selected Poems

The poems of Charles Baudelaire, collected as Les Fleurs du Mal, are filled with unsettling imagery, depicting with intensity subjects dismissed as unpoetic by French literary conventions of the time. 'Tableaux parisiens' describes the poor, the criminal and the forgotten of the modern city – thieves, poets, drunkards, flaunting prostitutes and faded old ladies – yet manages to find beauty in the anonymous settings of their lives. The love poems of 'Spleen et Ideal' combine flights of lyricism and languorous eroticism with sudden, strikingly prosaic detail. Baudelaire's prose poems, to which he gave the title Le Spleen de Paris, contain everything from topical, aggressively political humour to evocations of the rapture inspired by opium.

This edition presents the poems in French with English prose translations, and includes an introduction, suggestions for further reading, a glossary and an index of titles and first lines.

Wolf Notes Second Edition

Beveridge's poetry is remarkable for its attentiveness to the humble rituals of life. It discovers richness and grace in the smallest, the poorest, the most awkward of the most transient of beings.

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Gilbert Markham is deeply intrigued by Helen Graham, a beautiful and secretive young woman who has moved into nearby Wildfell Hall with her young son. He is quick to offer Helen his friendship, but when her reclusive behaviour becomes the subject of local gossip and speculation, Gilbert begins to wonder whether his trust in her has been misplaced. It is only when she allows Gilbert to read her diary that the truth is revealed and the shocking details of the disastrous marriage she ahs left behind emerge. Told with great immediacy, combined with wit and irony, The Tenant of Wildfell Hal l is a powerful depiction of a woman's struggle for domestic independence and creative freedom.

In her introduction Stevie Davies discusses The Tenant of Wildfell Hal as feminist testament, inspired by Anne Bronte's experiences as a governess and by the death her brother Branwell Bronte, and examines the novel's language, biblical references and narrative styles.

Good Earth

Though more than sixty years have passed since this remarkable novel won the Pulitzer Prize, it has retained its popularity and become one of the great modern classics. "I can only write what I know, and I know nothing but China, having always lived there," wrote Pearl Buck. In The Good Earth she presents a graphic view of a China when the last emperor reigned and the vast political and social upheavals of the twentieth century were but distant rumblings for the ordinary people. This moving, classic story of the honest farmer Wang Lung and his selfless wife O-lan is must reading for those who would fully appreciate the sweeping changes that have occurred in the lives of the Chinese people during this century.

Nobel Prize winner Pearl S. Buck traces the whole cycle of life: its terrors, its passions, its ambitions and rewards. Her brilliant novel -- beloved by millions of readers -- is a universal tale of the destiny of man.

Sugar and Other Stories

The constant theme running through this collection of short stories, the first collection by A.S. Byatt, is that of repetition, taking the form of family patterns recurring across generations, the return of the past in the form of ghosts and the disruptive force of family stories.

Plays: Ivanov / Seagull / Uncle Vanya / Three Sisters / Cherry Orchard

Baltasar Kormákur's (Jar City) White Night Wedding is a modernised version of Anton Chekhov’s play Ivanov and is showing at MIFF 2009.

Chekov wrote that 'narrative is my legal wife and drama a flamboyant, rowdy, impudent, exhausting mistress'. As a playwright he was subversive, even revolutionary, breaking away from the prevailing fashions of contemporary theatre to create an exhilarating new form of drama.

At a time when the Russian stage was dominated by farces, formulaic melodramas and vaudevilles, Chekhov created plays without heroes and villains, focused instead on the individual grappling with a moral dilemma. In place of the happy ending came ambiguity, in place of dramatic conflict came the solitary quest. He defied his audience's expectations, and the premiere of his first major play, Ivanov (1887), was met with bafflement, rage and scorn.

With sensitive explorations of the themes of love, work and time, their complex characters and their blurred boundaries between sorrow and comedy, his plays remain as provocative and subtle today.

Mao's Last Dancer

In a small, desperately poor village in north-east China, a young peasant boy sits at his rickety old school desk, interested more in the birds outside than in Chairman Mao's Red Book and the grand words it contains. But that day, some strange men come to his school – Madame Mao's cultural delegates. They are looking for young peasants to mould into faithful guards of Chairman Mao's great vision for China.

This is the true story of how that one moment in time, by the thinnest thread of a chance, changed the course of a small boy's life in ways that are beyond description. One day he would dance with some of the greatest ballet companies of the world. One day he would be a friend to a president and first lady, movie stars and the most influential people in America. One day he would become a star: Mao's last dancer, and the darling of the West.

The Patron Saint Of Eels

I loved this book so much I read it twice. Set in the Victorian coastal town of Mangowak the protaganist Noel Lea awakes to find the ditches that line the road outside his barn full to brimming with squirming black eels. What transpires from this very real situation is a magic and a realism to rival Calvino or Murakami. The difference, and what makes this book remarkable, is that it is richly Australian in setting, tone and language. Indeed this is the first book by a contemporary Australian author I’ve read that I believe is able to pull the magic realism tag off. That convincingly leads the reader through a remarkable and uplifting story that gains momentum instead of slipping off the rung into absurdity. Part fable, part allegory, mostly ripping good yarn it’s the story not only of Noel Lea and others in the town, but of Fra Ionio a seventeen century Franciscan monk climbing down a ladder from heaven. His stories will leave you with a sense of wonderment and the ending is perfect. Along with some of the best writing on Australian landscape you’ll ever find. A brilliant debut by an exciting new Australian voice.

Chris Grierson is from Readings Port Melbourne

Bleak House

As the interminable case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce grinds its way through the Court of Chancery, it draws together a disparate group of people: Ada and Richard Clare, whose inheritance is gradually being devoured by legal costs; Esther Summerson, a ward of court, whose parentage is a source of deepening mystery; the menacing lawyer Tulkinghorn; the determined sleuth Inspector Bucket; and even Jo, the destitute little crossing-sweeper. A savage, but often comic, indictment of a society that is rotten to the core, Bleak House is one of Dickens's most ambitious novels, with a range that extends from the drawing rooms of the aristocracy to the poorest of London slums.

This edition follows the first edition in book form on 1853. Terry Eagleton's preface examines characterisation and considers Bleak House as an early work of detective fiction.

Penguin Book of the Beach

The average Australian has conducted a lifelong love affair with the beach and the ocean shores, bays, dunes, lagoons and rivers of the coast. Until now, however, no one has attempted to match the ancient sensual and artistic preoccupation with the sea to the intuitive appreciation of the coast felt by modern beachgoers.

In this illustrious international selection, Robert Drewe has drawn together twenty-five of the finest contemporary writers whose stories represent the most stimulating, startling, humorous and deeply moving writing about the beach.

Silas Marner

Wrongly accused of theft and exiled from a religious community many years before, the embittered weaver Silas Marner lives alone in Raveloe, living only for work and his precious hoard of money. But when his money is stolen and an orphaned child finds her way into his house, Silas is given the chance to transform his life. His fate, and that of the little girl he adopts, is entwined with Godfrey Cass, son of the village Squire, who, like Silas, is trapped by his past. Silas Marner, George Eliot's favourite of her novels, combines humour, rich symbolism and pointed social criticism to create an unsentimental but affectionate portrait of rural life.

The text uses the Cabinet edition, revised by George Eliot in 1878. David Carroll's introduction is accompanied by the original Penguin Classics introduction by Q. D. Leavis.

Selected Poems

This selection, which was made by Eliot himself, is intended as an introduction to the main body of his poetry prior to Four Quartets, which is available separately in Faber Paperbacks. The selection includes the whole of The Waste Land.

Cloudstreet

A sprawling stage adaptation of Tim Winton’s award-winning novel. Cloudstreet follows the fluctuating fortunes of two families who inhabit a rambling old house in Perth.

Passage to India

When Adela and her elderly companion Mrs Moore arrive in the Indian town of Chandrapore, they quickly feel trapped by its insular and prejudiced British community. Determined to explore the 'real India', they seek the guidance of the charming and mercurial Dr Aziz, a cultivated Indian Muslim. But a mysterious incident occurs while they are exploring the Marabar caves with Aziz, and the well-respected doctor soon finds himself at the centre of a scandal that rouses violent passions among both the British and their Indian subjects. A masterly portrait of a society in the grip of imperialism, A Passage to India compellingly depicts the fate of individuals caught between the great political and cultural conflicts of the modern world.

Copenhagen

In 1941 the German physicist Werner Heisenberg made a strange trip to Copenhagen to see his Danish counterpart, Niels Bohr. They were old friends and close colleagues, and they had revolutionised atomic physics in the 1920s with their work together on quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle. But now the world had changed, and the two men were on opposite sides in a world war. The meeting was fraught with danger and embarrassment, and ended in disaster.Why the German physicist Heisenberg went to Copenhagen in 1942 and what he wanted to say to the Danish physicist Bohr are questions which have exercised historians of nuclear physics ever since. In Michael Frayn's new play Heisenberg meets Bohr and his wife Margrethe once again to look for the answers, and to work out, just as they had once worked out the internal functioning of the atom, how we can ever know why we do what we do.

Stasiland

Truth can be stranger - and more fascinating - than fiction. Anna Funder tells extraordinary stories from the underbelly of the most perfected surveillance state of all time, the former East Germany.

Funder meets Miriam, the sixteen-year-old who might have started World War III. She visits the regime's cartographer, obsessed to this day with the Berlin Wall, then gets drunk with the legendary 'Mik Jegger' of the east, once declared by the authorities 'no longer to exist'. And she finds spies and Stasi men, still loyal to the Firm as they wait for the next revolution.

Stasiland is a lyrical, at times funny account of the courage some people found to withstand the dictatorship, and the consequences for those who collaborated. Funder explores the daily chaos and harsh beauty of Berlin, a place where some people are trying to remember, and others just as hard to forget.

Stasiland is a brilliant debut by a prodigiously gifted writer.

North and South

When her father leaves the Church in a crisis of conscience, Margaret Hale is uprooted from her comfortable home in Hampshire to move with her family to the north of England. Initially repulsed by the ugliness of her new surroundings in the industrial town of Milton, Margaret becomes aware of the poverty and suffering of the local mill workers and develops a passionate sense of social justice. This is intensified by her tempestuous relationship with the mill owner and self-made man John Thornton, as their fierce opposition over his treatment of his employees masks a deeper attraction. In North and South,Elizabeth Gaskell skilfully fused individual feeling with social concern, and in Margaret Hale created on of the most original heroines of Victorian literature.

In her introduction, Patricia Ingham examines geographical, economic and class differences, and male and female roles in North and South. This edition also includes a list for further reading, notes and a glossary.

Dont Take Your Love to Town

Ruby Langford Ginibi's bestselling first book is now back in print.

With sales of over 30,000 copies since publication in 1988, Don't Take Your Love to Town is now a seminal work of Indigenous memoir. It has been set for HSC over a number of years and is one of the most important Indigenous life stories to be published in Australia.

Ruby Langford Ginibi is a remarkable woman whose sense of humour has endured through all the hardships she has experienced. Her first volume of memoir is a story of extraordinary courage in the face of poverty and tragedy. She writes about the changing ways of life in Aboriginal communities – rural and urban; the disintegration of traditional lifestyles and the sustaining energy that has come from the renewal of Aboriginal culture in recent years.

As a tribute to her life and work, this rejacketed edition of Don't Take Your Love to Town is being published to coincide with Ruby's new memoir, All My Mob.

Idea of Perfection

Douglas Cheesman is 55 years old, and the kind of man you would definitely not look at twice. But he can tell you more than you'll ever want to know about bridges. Harley Savage, big and plain, is a thrice-married woman who freely admits that she bores easily. And Yuribee, a little rural town in NSW that used to think it had a big future, is a place desperately in need of Cultural Heritage.

To attract much-needed tourist dollars, Yuribee must find some worthy pieces for its Heritage Museum - items just a little more inspired than crocheted toilet roll holders. The townspeople seem to think that rickety old Bent Bridge is part of this Cultural Heritage. But Douglas Cheesman is in Yuribee to tear it down, and it seems things are about to get complicated.

Winner of the 2001 Orange Prize for Fiction.

Gwen Harwood: Collected Poems

This generous-sized collection contains all six published volumes, as well as most of Gwen Harwood's uncollected poems. It is the outcome of several years of collecting and research by editors who have specialised in Harwood's work. With an incisive Introduction and extensive notes providing background to particular poems or obscure references, their treatment allows several entry levels into the work of this provocative and multi-talented writer.

Harwood's own biographical notes on the pseudonymous selves she adopted in her poems of the 1960s and 1970s add further value. Readers knew them as Walter Lehmann, the Tasmanian farmer and author of the Bulletin hoax acrostic sonnets of 1961; Francis Geyer, the young Hungarian refugee; Miriam Stone, the frustrated housewife; and Timothy Kline, the Vietnam protester.

A Moveable Feast

'If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.' Hemingway's memories of his life as an unknown writer living in Paris in the 1920s are deeply personal, warmly affectionate and full of wit. Looking back not only at his own much younger self, but also at the other writers who shared Paris with him - literary 'stars' like James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein - he recalls the time when, poor, happy and writing in cafes, he discovered his vocation.

Hedda Gabler & Other Plays

In these three unforgettably intense plays, Henrik Ibsen explores the problems of personal and social morality that he perceived in the world around him and, in particular, the complex nature of truth. "The Pillars of the Community" (1877) depicts a corrupt shipowner's struggle to hide the sins of his past at the expense of another man's reputation, while in "The Wild Duck" (1884) an idealist, believing he must tell the truth at any cost, destroys a family by exposing the lie behind his friend's marriage. And "Hedda Gabler" (1890) portrays an unhappily married woman who is unable to break free from the conventional life she has created for herself, with tragic results for the entire family.

Washington Square

When timid and plain Catherine Sloper acquires a dashing and determined suitor, her father, convinced that the young man is nothing more than a fortune-hunter, decides to put a stop to their romance. Torn between her desire to win her father's love and approval and her passion for the first man who has ever declared his love for her, Catherine faces an agonising dilemma, and becomes all too aware of the restrictions that others seek to place on her freedom. James' masterly novel deftly interweaves the public and private faces of nineteenth-century New York society; it is also a deeply moving study of innocence destroyed.

My Brother Jack

David and Jack Meredith grow up in a patriotic suburban Melbourne household during the First World War‚ and go on to lead lives that could not be more different.Through the story of the two brothers‚ George Johnston created an enduring exploration of two Australian myths: that of the man who loses his soul as he gains worldly success‚ and that of the tough‚ honest Aussie battler‚ whose greatest ambition is to serve his country during the war.Acknowledged as one of the true Australian classics‚ My Brother Jack is a deeply satisfying‚ complex and moving literary masterpiece.

Major Works

This authoritative edition was originally published in the acclaimed Oxford Authors series under the general editorship of Frank Kermode. It brings together a unique combination of Keats's poetry and prose - all the major poems, complemented by a generous selection of Keats's letters - to give the essence of his work and thinking. In his tragically short life Keats wrote an astonishing number of superb poems; his stature as one of the foremost poets of the Romantic movement remains unassailable. This volume contains all the poetry published during his lifetime, including Endymion in its entirety, the Odes, 'Lamia', and both versions of 'Hyperion'. The poetry is presented in chronological sequence, illustrating the staggering speed with which Keats's work matured. Further insight into his creative process is given by reproducing, in their original form, a number of poems that were published posthumously. Keats's letters are admired almost as much as his poetry and were described by T. S. Eliot as 'certainly the most notable and most important ever written by any English poet'. They provide the best biographical detail available and shed invaluable light on Keats's poems.

Philip Larkin: Collected Poems

This new edition of Larkin's poems for the first time presents his four published books, The North Ship, The Less Deceived, The Whitsun Weddings and High Windows in their original sequence.

It also includes an appendix of poems that Larkin published in other places, from his juvenilia to his final years. Preserving everything that he published in his lifetime, this new Collected Poems returns readers to the book Larkin might have intended if he had lived.

Skinned by Light: Selected Poems

Selected poems of award-winning poet and novelist Anthony Lawrence.

The Fox / The Captain's Doll / The Ladybird

These three novellas display D. H. Lawrence's brilliant and insightful evocation of human relationships - both tender and cruel - and the devastating results of war. In The Fox, two young women living on a small farm during the First World War find their solitary life interrupted. As a fox preys on their poultry, a human predator has the women in his sights. The Captain's Doll explores the complex relationship between a German countess and a married Scottish soldier in occupied Germany, while in The Ladybird a wounded prisoner of war has a disturbing influence on the Englishwoman who visits him in hospital.

Doctored Evidence

When the body of an wealthy elderly woman is found, brutally murdered in her Venetian flat, it is soon clear to the police that the prime suspect is her Rumanian maid, who has disappeared and is heading for Rumania. When the woman is approached by the border police as her train is leaving Italy, she makes a run for it and is killed as she crosses the tracks in front of an oncoming train. She has a considerable sum of money on her and her papers are obvious forgeries. Case closed. But when the old woman's neighbour returns from a business trip in London, it becomes clear that the maid could not have had time to kill the old woman before catching her train, and that the money on her was not stolen. Commissario Brunetti decides - unofficially - to take the case on himself. As Brunetti learns more of the old woman's family, it becomes clear that this is probably not a crime motivated by greed, rather that the probable motive connects with the temptations of lust. But perhaps Brunetti is following a false trail and thinking of the wrong deadly sin altogether.

Robert Lowell: Selected Poems

In this series, a contemporary poet selects and introduces a poet of the past. By their choice of poems and by the personal and critical reactions they express in their prefaces, the editors offer insights into their own work as well as providing an accessible and passionate introduction to the most important poets in our literature.

Michael Hofman was born in 1957 in Freilburg, Germany, and came to England in 1961. He has published four volumes of poems and won a Cholmondely Award and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for Poetry. His translations have won many awards, including the Independent's Foreign Fiction Award and the P.E.N/Book of the Month Club Translation Prize. His reviews and criticism are gathered in Behind the Lines (2001).

The White Earth

One spring day in late 1992, when William was halfway between his eighth birthday and his ninth, he looked out from the back verandah of his home and saw, huge in the sky, the mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion. He stared at it, wondering. The thunderhead was dirty black, streaked with billows of grey. It rolled and boiled as it climbed into the clear blue day, casting a vast shadow upon the hills beyond. But there was no sound, no rumble of an explosion. William was aware of the smell of burning . . . but it was a good smell, a familiar smell. The smell of grass, of wheat, of the farm itself.

His father dead by fire and his mother plagued by demons of her own, William is cast upon the charity of his unknown uncle - an embittered old man encamped in the ruins of a once great station homestead, Kuran House. It's a baffling and sinister new world for the boy, a place of decay and secret histories. His uncle is obsessed by a long life of decline and by a dark quest for revival, his mother is desperate for a wealth and security she has never known, and all their hopes it seems come to rest upon William's young shoulders. But as the past and present of Kuran Station unravel and merge together, the price of that inheritance may prove to be the downfall of them all. The White Earth is a haunting, disturbing and cautionary tale.

'The novel is beautifully structured, filled with parallels and reverberations which come back to haunt and illuminate the reader as the story unfolds.' - Katharine England, Adelaide Advertiser

'A great Australian story embracing national themes that should engage us all.' Lucy Clark, The Sunday Telegraph

Bypass: The Story Of A Road

""All the dirt on the Hume Highway"" (Shane Maloney)

The Hume Highway runs from Sydney to Melbourne. Like all the great roads of the world, it is longer than it is wide. Flabby, unfit and forty, Michael McGirr decided to ride a pushbike from one end to the other. For most of his life, he had regarded the Hume as an obstacle to negotiate as quickly as possible. But Michael was discovering that middle age takes longer to do things. There's a good side to this: on a slow ride to Melbourne, Michael was overtaken by a strange cast of fellow travellers. He also had a chance to ponder the history of Australia's major thoroughfare, a road which winds through the story of bushrangers and bus drivers, politicians and poets, truckies and refugees. The Hume is neither our legendary coastline, nor the mysterious outback. It is the road most travelled, a place so common that few stop to hear the stories it carries. In McGirr's hands, however, the road is an occasion for both insight and comedy And maybe even a fine romance.

""Give a man a road and he has a library"" (Mary Gilmore)

The Collected Stories

Katherine Mansfield's clear, sparkling and perceptive short stories revolutionized the genre, and this collection represents the whole range of her writing. Moving, resonant, full of light and colour, they range from short sharp studies to longer, richer tales, encompassing her three major volumes Bliss, The Garden Party and In a German Pension, and fifteen tantalizing fragments of unfinished stories published after her tragic death, including 'Honesty', an intriguing tale of two bachelors, and 'The Doves' Nest', an exquisite story of a widowed mother and her daughter in the Riviera who receive a mysterious gentleman caller. Graceful, delicate and quietly devastating, they observe apparently trivial incidents to create sensitive, often painful revelations of her characters' inner lives.

Parisian Affair and Other Stories

Set in the Paris of society women, prostitutes and small-minded bourgeousie, and the isolated villages of rural Normandy that de Maupassant knew as a child, the thirty-three tales in this volume are among the most darkly humorous and brilliant short stories in nineteenth-century literature. They focus on the relationships between men and women, as in the poignant fantasy of 'A Parisian Affair', between brothers and sisters, and between masters and servants. Through these relationships, Maupassant explores the dualistic nature of the human character and his stories reveal both nobility, civility and generosity, and, in stories such as 'At Sea' and 'Boule de Suif', vanity, greed and hypocrisy. Maupassant's stories repeatedly lay humanity bare with deft wit and devastating honesty.

Rose Notes

Charming, infuriating Dobie Kinnear, widower and manipulator extraordinaire, is battling to retain his wits, his authority, and his only daughter, Pearl.

Pearl, a hostage to her ageing father's needs, fiercely resents her role as Dobie's unofficial housekeeper. The years are passing on their southern Riverina farm, and still her life lacks meaning or purpose. She loves the farm with a passion but, tending her rose garden, she dreams of escape.

Then a stranger comes to Mamerbrook Farm bearing a secret from the past and a gift for the future. Along with an old scrapbook of roses, a hitchhiking angel, and an onion farmer with a knack for rescuing people, he will turn their world upside down . . . and change their lives forever.

The Rose Notes has been listed for VCE Literature Studies 2008/9/10.

Map of the Gardens

A gutsy new collection of short stories by a writer gifted in the language of emotions, these tales read like parables of loss and renewal, and reflect the rural landscape in all its various forms. Rich in images from many cultures, award-winning writer Gillian Mears effortlessly combines the wisdom of nature, ancient Taoism and Christian saints (to name a few) with the frailties of our human condition. Gillian Mears won the Vogel with her first novel The Mint Lawn and continues to write with both beauty and precision.

Dance of the Happy Shades

Alice Munro's territory is the farms and semi-rural towns of south-western Ontario. Described by one of her peers as going around with a 'delicate, rueful smile and a wicked pen', she says of herself: 'I guess that maybe as a writer I'm kind of an anachronism. . . because I write about places where your roots are and most people don't live that kind of life anymore at all. Most writers, probably, the writers who are most in tune with our time, write about places that have no texture because this is where most of us live. ' In these powerful tales she brings the landscape of her childhood back to life as she deals with the self-discovery and guilt of those caught in a narrow existence. And in sensitively exploring the lives of ordinary men and women, she makes us aware of the universal nature of their fears, sorrows and aspirations.

Selected Poems

This is the first port of call for anyone wanting to experience the poetry of Les Murray. Completely up to date, it contains Murray's finest work (excluding Fredy Neptune), selected by the poet himself. This beautifully designed edition is also the perfect gift for someone wanting an introduction to Australia's greatest poet.

Honour

What happens when everything you have used to define yourself—every quality, role and affiliation—suddenly abandon you? What happens when a mature, intelligent, responsible and loving woman finds her life disappearing?

Radiance: Play and Screenplay

Three half-sisters who have drifted far apart meet again at the ramshackle house on stilts where they grew up. They have come to bury their mother. This volume includes the original play, the screenplay and an essay by Louis Nowra discussing the adaptation process.

Dead Heart

In the isolated community of Wala Wala, Senior Constable Ray Lorkin struggles to keep an uneasy peace between Aboriginal tradition and the law he is sworn to uphold. But when a local man dies in mysterious circumstances, Ray decides he can no longer do things 'blackfella way'.

Hotel Sorrento

Three sisters, reunited after ten years in different worlds, again feel the familiar constraints of family life. Hotel Sorrento looks at conflicting concepts of national identity and family loyalty.

Wide Sargasso Sea

Jean Rhys's late, literary masterpiece, Wild Sargasso Sea, was inspired by Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, and is set in the lush, beguiling landscape of Jamaica in the 1830s. Born into an oppressive, colonialist society, Creole heiress Antoinette Cosway meets a young Englishman who is drawn to her innocent sensuality and beauty. After their marriage disturbing rumours begin to circulate, poisoning her husband against her. Caught between his demands and her own precarious sense of belonging, Antoinette is driven towards madness.
'Rhys took one of the works of genius of the 19th century and turned it inside-out to create one of the works of genius of the 20th century.'
Michele Roberts, The Times

Hamlet: Cambridge School Shakespeare

Cambridge School Shakespeare considers Hamlet as theatre and its text as script, enabling students to inhabit the imaginative world of the play in an accessible, meaningful and creative way. It approaches the play in a new way, encouraging students to participate actively in examining it, to work in groups as well as individually, to treat the play as a script to be re-created, and to explore the theatrical/dramatic qualities of the text. The editorial comments cater for pupils of all ages and abilities, providing clear, helpful guidelines for school study. The format is also designed to help teachers, whether experienced or inexperienced.

Much Ado About Nothing

A vivacious woman and a high-spirited man both claim that they are determined never to marry. But when their friends trick them into believing that each harbours secret feelings for the other, they begin to question whether their witty banter and sharp-tongued repartee conceals something deeper. Schemes abound, misunderstandings proliferate and matches are eventually made in this sparkling and irresistible comedy.

Frankenstein

Obsessed with creating life itself, Victor Frankenstein plunders graveyards for the material to fashion a new being, which he shocks into life with electricity. But his botched creature, rejected by Frankenstein and denied human companionship, sets out to destroy his maker and all that he holds dear. Mary Shelley's chilling gothic tale was conceived when she was only eighteen, living with her lover Percy Shelley near Byron's villa on Lake Geneva. It would become the world's most famous work of horror fiction, and remains a devastating exploration of the limits of human creativity.

Based on the third edition of 1831, this text contains all the revisions Mary Shelley made to her story, as well as her 1831 introduction and Percy Bysshe Shelley's preface to the first edition. It also includes as appendices a select collation of the texts of 1818 and 1831 together with 'A Fragment' by Lord Byron and Dr John Polidori's 'The Vampyre: A Tale'.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

Two minor characters from Hamlet offer a novel view of the melancholy Dane.

Slaughterhouse Five

Prisoner of war, optometrist, time-traveller – these are the life roles of Billy Pilgrim, hero of this miraculously moving, bitter and funny story of innocence faced with apocalypse. Slaughterhouse 5 is one of the world's great anti-war books. Centering on the infamous fire-bombing of Dresden in the Second World War, Billy Pilgrim's odyssey through time reflects the journey of our own fractured lives as we search for meaning in what we are afraid to know.

The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays

Oscar Wilde's complex identity, as family man and homosexual outsider, socialite, socialist and Irish nationalist, underpins his unique insight into role-playing and the masks we all wear. A Woman of No Importance, for all its charm and wit, exposes an aristocratic world as smug, snobbish and morally bankrupt. An Ideal Husband portrays a glittering diplomatic gathering which is revealed as a masquerade to cover up the shady past of a prominent establishment figure. Lady Windermere's Fan is a brilliant critique of conventional morality. In The Importance of Being Earnest every character is revealed as leading a hypocritical double life, while Salome and A Florentine Tragedy deploy historical settings to explore the politics of sex and gender in contemporary society. Wilde was undoubtedly a brilliant and witty wordsmith. Yet, as Richard Cave shows in his Introduction, Wilde's innovative use of colour and design and spatial relationships on stage also made his plays 'revolutionary in the theatre of their time'.

The Surgeon of Crowthorne

Simon Winchester's The Surgeon of Crowthorne was an international bestseller and tells an extraordinary true story of murder, madness and an extraordinary friendship in the nineteenth century. It is the tale of James Murray, the compiler of the first Oxford English Dictionary, and his most valued helper: Dr Minor of Crowthorne, who was also a homicidal lunatic, confined to Broadmoor asylum for murder. This is an enthralling and beautifully written work of literary detection.

This Boy's Life

At just ten years old, Tobias Wolff is reluctantly on the road. His restless, spirited mother is desperate to build a life for them both, but Tobias is struggling with this ever-changing routine. When they finally reach Utah, he decides to change his name to Jack, after his hero Jack London, because he longs for adventure and to start afresh. This Boy's Life traces Jack's experiences growing up against the background of a violent and wildly optimistic America.

Room of One's Own

Virginia Woolf's blazing polemic on female creativity, the role of writers and the silent fate of Shakespeare's imaginary sister remains a powerful reminder of a woman's need for financial independence and intellectual freedom.

Wordsworth: Selected Poems

One of the most enduringly popular of Romantic poets, William Wordsworth epitomized the spirit of his age with his celebration of the natural world and belief in the importance of feeling. This volume brings together a rich selection from the most creative period of Wordsworth's life – from 'Tintern Abbey', an ode on the restorative powers of nature written during his intense friendship with Coleridge, to excerpts from his epic autobiographical poem, The Prelude. Also included are much-loved short works such as 'I wandered lonely as a Cloud', 'Composed Upon Westminster Bridge' and the poignant 'Lucy Gray'. These poems demonstrate Wordsworth's astonishing range, power and inventiveness, and the sustained and captivating vision that informed his work.

Sir Thomas Wyatt: Complete Poems

As a diplomat in Renaissance Europe, and a luminary at the court of Henry VII, Sir Thomas Wyatt wrote in an incestuous world where everyone was uneasily subject to the royal whims and rages. Wyatt had himself survived two imprisonments in the Tower as well as a love affair with Anne Boleyn, and his poetry - that of an extraordinarily sophisticated, passionate and vulnerable man - reflects these experiences, making disguised reference to current political events. Above all, though, Wyatt is known for his love poetry, which often dramatizes incidents and remembered conversations with his beloved, with an ear acutely sensitive to patterns of rhythm and colloquial speech. Conveying the actuality of betrayal or absence, and the intense pressure of his longing for a love that could be trusted, these are some of the most haunting poems in the English language.

Casablanca: Special Edition

They had a date with fate in Casablanca!Arguably one of the greatest movies ever produced, Casablanca is a romantic masterpiece. Humphrey Bogart takes the leading role in this "love will conquer all" movie that regularly makes it into any top ten list of films. Featuring the often-misquoted line "play it again Sam" this MGM title is a true classic. The magic of the movie lies in Bogart's understanding performance, Bergman's depiction of a torn lover and a supporting cast that includes Claude Rains as the police Chief. However, cinema history will always have a special place for Dooley Wilson's rendition of 'As Time Goes By'.

Grave of the Fireflies: Collector's Edition

In the aftermath of a World War II bombing, two orphaned children struggle to survive in the Japanese countryside. To Seita and his four-year-old sister, the helplessness and indifference of their countrymen is even more painful than the enemy raids. Through desperation, hunger and grief, these children's lives are as heartbreakingly fragile as their spirit and love is inspiring.