The nation's favourite annual guide to the short story, now in its fourteenth yearInspired by Giles Gordon and David Hughes's Best Short Stories series, which ran to ten volumes between 1986 and 1995, Best British Short Stories this year reaches its fourteenth volume.Best British Short Stories 2024 showcases an excellent and varied selection of stories, by British writers, first published during 2023 in magazines, journals, anthologies, collections, chapbooks and online.

Known for both its industrial roots and arboreal abundance, Sheffield has always been a city of two halves.From its botanical gardens and elegant parks, to the brutalist high-rise estates of Park Hill, and the hinterland nightclubs of ‘Centertainment’, it is a city caught between the forges of the past and the melting pot of the present.Bringing together new short stories from some of the city’s most celebrated writers, The Book of Sheffield traces the contours of this comp...

A simple act of gallantry in the Malaysian jungle spawns a lifelong feud in the Home Counties...A fading actor with a terminal illness devises a meticulous plan to leave the stage in style...A pregnant composer contemplates motherhood at the end of civilisation...Spanning centuries and continents, the stories in this collection amount to a tour de force of literary worldbuilding. From deeply insecure time travellers to medieval mystics and futuristic body modificati...

Thumbnails is a collection of short stories or “micrograms” in which Gregory Norminton once again experiments with form, using his stylish and witty prose to examine the nooks and crannies of our distracted lives. Witty and thought-provoking, the stories are brief but clear sketches very different people and places in very different times. Taken as a whole, the collection is an exercise in storytelling, proving that narrative can be found in the most unlikely packages. Sexual love flourish...

The Lost Art of Losing is a collection of aphorisms by award-winning novelist Gregory Norminton. By turns comic and despairing, jubilant and wry, they present, through fragments, a picture of the mind — and of troubling times. Gregory Norminton transforms the aphorism into something more accessible and personal. Ultimately he uses aphorisms to question everything — including the aphorism itself: "Incessantly we ask the meaning of life to protect us from hearing the perfectly obvious answer...

A spoof encyclopedia of contemporary accepted wisdom and commonplaces, the Dictionary of Received Ideas sees Flaubert at his witty and satirical best. Perhaps intended as a companion to his final, unfinished novel Bouvard and Pecuchet, this compilation was the result of a lifetime of collecting the absurd and the cliched with darkly humorous explanations. A playful look at nineteenth-century values and talking points, this dictionary will provide enduring entertainment and prove relevant e...

Presented here in a new translation and featuring the author's own watercolour illustrations, The Little Prince has become a classic philosophical fable for young and old, as well as a global publishing phenomenon, selling tens of millions of copies worldwide and being translated into dozens of languages.Alma Junior Classics series of illustrated classics includes some of the greatest books ever written for younger readers and new translations of unjustly neglected international wo...

If it’s time for a rhyme, or you need a satiric lyric, the Collins Rhyming Dictionary is the fastest and easiest way to refine your line.The most accessible way to find the rhyme you need. Other rhyming dictionaries are characterised by the use of obscure words for padding, subsections for disyllabic and trisyllabic rhymes, and reverse phonetic order – but we avoid such complications and, as a result, have the most practical rhyming book available.The most satisfactory rhym...

This book is also available as an ebook: buy it from Amazon here.When the Barbarians Arrive is a selected works from Singaporean poet Alvin Pang's five previous collections, including Testing the Silence (1997) and City of Rain (2003). Wry, sensitive and intelligent throughout, the selection ranges from unsentimental love poems to sharply satirical writing. They mock, celebrate and unsettle, at once recognisably national and international...

A powerful new collection by the bestselling translator of Beowulf.In the finland of perch, the fenland of alder, on airThat is water, on carpets of Bann stream, on holdIn the everything flows and steady go of the world.--from "Perch"Seamus Heaney's new collection travels widely in time and space, visiting the sites of the classical world and revisiting the poet's childhood: rural electrification and th...

Fleur Adcock is one of Britain's most accomplished poets. Her poised, ironic poems are tense and tightly controlled as well as shrewdly laconic, and often chilling as she unmasks the deceptions of love or unravels family lives. Disarmingly conversational in style, they are remarkable for their psychological insight and their unsentimental, mischievously casual view of personal relationships. Born in New Zealand, she has explored questions of identity and rootedness throughout her work, bot...

"Country Girl is Edna O'Brien's exquisite account of her dashing, barrier-busting, up-and-down life."-National Public RadioWhen Edna O'Brien's first novel, The Country Girls, was published in 1960, it so scandalized the O'Briens' local parish that the book was burned by its priest. O'Brien was undeterred and has since created a body of work that bears comparison with the best writing of the twentieth century. Country Girl brings us face-to-face with a life of high drama and...