When I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was published to widespread acclaim in 1969 Maya Angelou garnered the attention of an international audience with the triumphs & tragedies of her childhood in the American South. This soul-baring memoir launched a six-book epic spanning the sweep of the authors incredible life. Dedicated fans & newcomers alike can follow the continually absorbing chronicle of Angelous life: her formative childhood in Stamps Arkansas; the birth of her son Guy at the end of World War II; her adventures travelling abroad with the famed cast of Porgy & Bess; her experience of living in a black expatriate colony in Ghana; her intense involvement with the civil rights movement including her association with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. & Malcolm X; & finally the beginning of her writing career. Angelou has chronicled her remarkable journey & inspired people of every generation & nationality to embrace life with commitment & passion. ...

Dorothy Parker more than any of her contemporaries captured the spirit of her age in her writing. The decadent 1920S & 1930s in New York were a time of great experiment & daring for women. For the rich life seemed a continual party but the excesses took their emotional toll. With a biting wit & perceptive insight Dorothy Parker examines the social mores of her day & exposes the darkness beneath the dazzle. Her own life exemplified this duality for a while she was one of the most talked-about women of her day she was also known as a masochist whose passion for unhappiness knew no bounds". As philosopher Irwin Edman said she was "a Sappho who could combine a heartbreak with a wisecrack". Her dissection of the jazz age in poetry & prose is collected in this volume along with articles & reviews." ...

M.R. James is probably the finest ghost-story writer England has ever produced. These tales are not only classics of their genre but are also superb examples of beautifully-paced understatement convincing background & chilling terror. As well as the preface there is a fascinating tail-piece by M.R. James ' Stories I Have Tried To Write' which accompanies these thirty tales. Among them are ' Casting the Runes' ' Oh Whistle & I'll come to you My Lad' ' The Tractate
- h' ' The Ash Tree' & ' Canon Alberic's Scrapbook'. ' There are some authors one wishes one had never read in order to have the joy of reading them for the first time. For me M.R. James is one of these'. Ruth Rendell
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Considered by many to be the most terrifying writer in English M. R. James is an unlikely producer of ghost-stories. An eminent scholar who spent his entire adult life in the academic surroundings of Eton & Cambridge his classic supernatural tales have lost none of their power to unsettle & disturb. They draw on the terrors of the everyday in which documents & objects unleash terrible forces often in closed rooms & night-time settings where imagination runs riot. Lonely country houses remote inns ancient churches or the manuscript collections of great libraries provide settings for unbearable menace from creatures seeking retribution & harm. Stories that were first read aloud in Jamess study late on Christmas Eve have the power to haunt us still. This book presents all of Jamess published ghost stories including the unforgettable Oh Whistle & Ill Come to You My Lad & Casting the Runes & an appendix of Jamess writings on the ghost story. Darryl Joness introduction & notes provide a fascinating insight into Jamess background & his mastery of the genre he made his own. ...

This revised collection gathers together Charles Causleys poetry spanning a period of more than fifty years &

Includes::

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In gathering four decades of work Hugo Williams Collected Poems" brings back into print a vast body of material long since unavailable
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This edition of Larkins poems presents his four published books The North Ship" " The Less Deceived" " The Whitsun Weddings" & " High Windows" in their original sequence. The text 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 collection of poems returns readers to the book Larkin might have intended if he had lived."

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Roger Mc Gough is one of Britains best loved poets & this collection charts [his] passage from youthful exuberance to the wry reflection of his later years. What remains the same throughout the 40 years is the poets winning wit accessibility & abiding readability Independent ---------------------------------- Time has confirmed.. .that Mc Goughs talent was much more substantial than many of his long-forgotten detractors suspected. If he was a pop poet it was not in any ephemeral sense. A shy extrovert.. .he has given voice to poetry & found a voice of his own which is humourful introspective irreverent easy on the ear conversational. It is also memorable & enduring & fresh. Age has not withered [his lines] nor diminished their potency. Of how much modern poetry can you say that? Sunday Herald ...

Though sometimes classified with Owen Rosenberg & Sassoon as a war poet he was rather a poet who died tragically in the war & whose main subjects were the English countryside & its people & the solitude of the observing self. The present edition offers the complete poems together with detailed editorial apparatus in what has become acknowledged as the standard edition by R. George Thomas. It also

Includes:: Thomass remarkable prose War Diary of 1917.

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Allan Ahlbergs five poetry books written over a period of twenty-five years
- Please Mrs Butler" " Heard it in the Playground"
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