1) Nightwood by Djuna Barnes Published in 1936, Nightwood is a haze of alcohol, glamour, sex, and love in all its desperate, unconventional, and painful forms. It tells the story of the mesmerising Robin Vote, who leaves a trail of cigarette ends and
A parentless gypsy of fifteen or sixteen, Esmeralda captures the interest of four very different admirers. There is the philosopher Pierre Gringoire, the playboy Captain Phoebus, the repressed archdeacon Claude Frollo, and the eponymous hunchback, Quasimodo. These admirers, though individually very different, fall
Charlotte Salomon was a German-born Jewish artist of significant achievement and greater promise but aged just 26, and pregnant with her first child, she died in a gas chamber at Auschwitz. The crowning achievement of Charlotte’s tragically short life, Leben?
Written in the 1980s at the height of Thatcher’s Britain, Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta is a politically charged graphic novel set in a dystopian near-future world in which Britain has fallen into fascism following a brief nuclear exchange. The
Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is often used as an example of a work astride two movements: modernism and postmodernism. It was written in 1955 when modernism was experiencing something of a revival in the wake of the Second World
Volume one of The History of England takes us from a geographical overview of prehistory through the tribal chieftain-monarchies of early England and the establishment of single ruling dynasties, up to the reign of the first Tudor monarch, Henry VII. The
The Daemon Knows is an exploration of what Bloom calls the “American sublime”: that class of literature that reaches beyond the human, in a way that is distinctly American. What is beyond the human falls, by Bloom’s estimation, into three
In this book, Robert Colls sets out to chart George Orwell’s changing attitudes towards “Englishness”, and the various positions he holds, and tries to hold, in relation to it. He achieves this through a mixture of biography, political history, and
Umberto Eco’s final novel is a fast-paced historical thriller centred on a newspaper that will never be published, and a conspiracy theory surrounding the death of the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. At just under 200 pages, Numero Zero is the shortest
The emerging field of comics studies has grown rapidly in recent years. This has seen the publication of a number of introductory and theoretically engaged books aiming to provide comics and graphic novels with their own theoretical language, separate from