Pop Fiction's unique essays individually consider one song within a cinematic context. Unlike previous collected volumes about pop music in film, where a generalised approach has been adopted, this offers instead a close examination of two pervasive and significant mediums in combination. The collection introspects, assembling the pop song into various guises and documenting how individuals dissemble the multiple roles that the pop song plays in cinematic moments. The song as: role-play, m...

Trawlerman’s Turquoise, Matthew Caley’s sixth collection, features various seemingly recherché elements – telepathy, Madame Blavatsky, epistolary novels, muse worship, Balzac’s coffee addiction and Thomas Merton’s accidental electrocution amongst them – not always as straightforward ‘subject matter’, but caught up in the backdraft of the poems’ acceleration. The book’s title derives from the long, central, hyper-associative poem, ‘from The Foldings’ – trawlerman’s turquoise being a phrase...

Throughout Rake, Matthew Caley’s fifth collection, it can appear as if we are leafing through the oblique diary of an immortal time-travelling rake, one who is seeking his ‘one true beloved’ through an heroic tally of amorous encounters, desperately trying to get beyond appetite; or possibly a number of parallel immortal time-travelling rakes; or maybe even someone, having drunk too many espressos, imagining themselves to be such a rake. The forms used are equally promiscuous: tanka, sonne...

The renowned philosopher and political theorist presents a summation of his influential work in this series of Columbia University lectures.A pioneer in the fields of modern linguistics and cognitive science, Noam Chomsky is also one of the most avidly read political theorist of our time. In this series of lectures, Chomsky presents more than half a century of philosophical reflection on all three of these areas.In precise yet accessible language, Chomsky e...

Seamus Heaney's new collection elicits continuities and solidarities, between husband and wife, child and parent, then and now, inside an intently remembered present - the stepping stones of the day, the weight and heft of what is passed from hand to hand, lifted and lowered. Human Chain also broaches larger questions of transmission, as lifelines to the inherited past. There are newly minted versions of anonymous early Irish lyrics, poems which stand at the crossroads of oral and...

Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters are addressed, with just two exceptions, to Sylvia Plath, the American poet to whom he was married. They were written over a period of more than twenty-five years, the first a few years after her suicide in 1963, and represent Ted Hughes's only account of his relationship with Plath and of the psychological drama that led both to the writing of her greatest poems and to her death. The book became an instant bestseller on its publication in 1998 and wo...

Almost everything you need to know in one essential guideSeeing a film is only half the fun. The real joy comes from arguing about it afterwards in the pub or on the journey home. But have you ever felt you needed to know a little more?This book offers a concise introduction to the appreciation and study of film. This second edition begins with an examination of early film theory before analysing how films are put together - framing, performance, setting, costume and editin...

**NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the two-term Poet Laureate of the United States Billy Collins comes his first volume of new and selected poems in twelve years.“America’s favorite poet.”—The Wall Street Journal**Aimless Love combines fifty new poems with generous selections from his four most recent books—Nine Horses, The Trouble with Poetry, Ballistics, and Horoscopes for the Dead. Collins’s unmistakable voice, which brings to...

A treasure trove of collected works from the legendary author of The Handmaid's Tale and Alias GraceQueen Gertrude gives Hamlet a piece of her mind.An ugly sister and a wicked stepmother put in a good word for themselves.A reincarnated bat explains how Bram Stoker got Dracula hopelessly wrong.Bones and Murder is a bewitching cocktail of prose and poetry, fiction and fairytales, as well as some of Atwood's own illustr...

A concise introduction to the genre about that one last big score, The Heist Film: Stealing With Style traces this crime thriller's development as both a dramatic and comic vehicle growing out of film noir (Criss Cross, The Killers, The Asphalt Jungle), mutating into sleek capers in the 1960s (Ocean's Eleven, Gambit, How to Steal a Million) and splashing across screens in the 2000s in remake after remake (The Thomas Crown A...

Known for his work as a performer and songwriter with the Birthday Party, the Bad Seeds and Grinderman, Australian artist Nick Cave has also pursued a variety of other projects, including writing and acting. Covering the full range of Cave's creative endeavours, this collection of critical essays provides a comprehensive overview of his multifaceted career. The contributors, who hail from an array of disciplines, consider Cave's work from many different angles, drawing on historical, psych...

'An irresistibly coherent book which celebrates the rising and the raising of the human spirit.' Michael Hofmann, The Times'If any poetry written today can have this 'redemptive effect' - as Heaney in his critical writing has begun to claim it can - then this is it.' Mick Imlah, Independent on Sunday