Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812-1818) is a book length poem by British Romantic Lord Byron. Published in cantos, the narrative poem is arranged in four parts, each following the journey of Harold, a character based on Byron himself. Childe Harold's Pilgrimage established Byron's reputation as a leading poet of his era, laying the foundation for many of the elements of Romantic poetry-melancholy, sublime and beautiful landscapes, and a wandering hero-that...

Samuel Beckett was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969; his literary output of plays, novels, stories and poetry has earned him an uncontested place as one of the greatest writers of our time. Endgame, originally written in French and translated into English by Beckett himself, is considered by many critics to be his greatest single work. A pinnacle of Beckett’s characteristic raw minimalism, it is a pure and devastating distillation...

Lord Dunsany was one of the most influential fantasy authors of the twentieth century. In addition to his famous fantasy stories he was also an accomplished playwright. Collected here are four of his plays: 'The Laughter of the Gods', 'The Queen's Enemies', 'The Tents of the Arabs', 'A Night at an Inn'. Fantastic settings combined with vivid characters make these plays most memorable.

Once a month, Lord Loam encourages his servants to enter the drawing room for tea. This ritual defiance of tradition disturbs Crichton, the butler, who regards the class system as "the natural outcome of a civilized society." When the entire household is shipwrecked and stranded on a desert island, a new social order emerges ― with comic results for master and servant. This classic English comedy, written by the author of Peter Pan, combines light...

Written in the form of biblical prophecy, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell presents philosophical ideas about God, humanity and the complex nature of ethics. It's a bold yet humorous examination of binary belief systems and their conflicting principles. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is a remarkable narrative that explores common religious themes such as good versus evil. The author uses vibrant storytelling to expand on the importance of these contradictory...

The Seagull is the first of Anton Checkov's four full-length plays. It explores the romantic and artistic tension in the relationships between a young woman, a fading older lady, her playwright son and a popular story writer. The play references Shakespeare's Hamlet both in text and content. It has a cast of eclectic characters whose principle dramas play themselves out off stage and in unvoiced subtext. As this opposed the melodramatic

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"This dynamic new study of Charles Dickens will make readers re-examine his life and work in a completely different light. First, partly due to the massive digitalization of papers and letters in recent years, Helena Kelly has unearthed new material about Dickens that simply wasn't available to his earlier biographers. Second, in an astonishing piece of archival detective work, she has traced and then joined the dots on revelatory new details about...