Sub-titled 'Writers, Artists and a Peculiarly British Tradition', the book explores three fascinating examples of relationships between artists and writers - the illustrations of Paradise Lost and Pilgrim's Progress, Hogarth and Fielding; a writer and artist dealing with common material; Wordsworth and Thomas Bewick, a poet and engraver working separately but imbued with the spirit of their age. A brief coda turns to a fourth kind of relationship, the writers and artists who collaborate from the start, beginning with Dickens and Phiz and Lewis Carroll and Tenniel. All were great innovators who shared common aims and this is a book for all with an interest in the poetry, novel writing, painting, engraving or cartooning of the period, a rewarding and generally illustrated book. Includes colour plates, several of Thomas Bewick's birds and Hogarth's The Shrimp Girl and Blake's The Temptation of Eve. 162pp, softback.

Gray authored, designed and illustrated seven novels, several books of short stories, a collection of his stage, radio and TV plays and a book of his visual art. In November 2019 he received a Lifetime Achievement award by the Saltire Society. He died in December 2019 at the age of 85. He is now regarded as the doyen of Scottish letters, and this publication is a fitting acknowledgement of his status. Born in 1934 in Glasgow, Alasdair Gray is considered by many to be one of the great Scottish writers and artists. In this frank, playful and typically unorthodox autobiography, he tells of how his early life experiences influenced his writing, including the creation of those landmarks of literature, Lanark and 1982, Janine. He details the inspirations behind his many acclaimed murals and artworks, and makes clear how his moral, social and political beliefs and his work are inextricably linked. Constructed from essays published and unpublished, the book is as much about people, place and politics as it is about Gray's own life in art. 'One of the most gifted writers to have put pen to paper in the English language.' - Irvine Welsh. A beautifully produced hefty softback, 470pp, beautifully typeset and with fairly large print covering many of his wee articles and radio talks, obituaries and postscripts and names from the art community like playwright Joan Ure, Ian Hamilton Finley, Anthony Burgess and Jack Vettraino, John Connelly and Will Self among them.

Sub-titled 'Dostoevsky and the Gentleman Murderer Who Inspired a Masterpiece', Kevin Birmingham's impressive research is combined with his flair for characterising the teeming intellectual debates of the day and giving insight into one of the world's great novels. It is the immersive tale of how Fyodor Dostoevsky came to write Crime and Punishment and why it changed the world. As a young man, Dostoevsky was a celebrated writer, but his involvement with the radical politics of his day condemned him to a long Siberian exile. There he spent years studying the criminals who were his companions. Upon his return to St Petersburg in the 1860s, he fought his way through multiple hardships - gambling addiction, debilitating debt, epilepsy, the deaths of loved ones, and literary banishment - to craft an enduring classic. The germ of the novel came from the sensational story of Pierre-Francois Lacenaire, a notorious murderer who charmed and outraged Paris in the 1830s. Lacenaire was a glamorous egotist who embodied the instincts that lie beneath nihilism, a western-influenced philosophy inspiring a new generation of Russian revolutionaries. Lacenaire was a character who could demonstrate the errors of radical politics and ideas through the character of Raskolnikov. Raskolnikov began to merge with Dostoevsky. The novelist was determined to tell a murder story from the murderer's perspective, but his character couldn't be a monster because he wanted so desperately to be good. The writing consumed Dostoevsky. As his debts and the predatory terms of his contract caught up with him, he hired a stenographer so that he could dictate the final chapters in time. Anna Grigorievna Snitkina became Dostoevsky's first reader and chief critic, and she changed the way he wrote forever. By the time he finished his great novel, he had fallen in love. We are brought back into the fevered panic of Raskolnikov as he murders an old woman, and Birmingham braids a hat trick of three biographies - the life of the man who wrote the novel, the murderer who inspired the tale, and the evolution of the novel itself. A magnificent achievement, 416pp, photos. Remainder mark.

A classic novel about smuggling, intrigue and love. Harry Morgan is an honest man who is forced into running contraband between Cuba and Key West to make a living during the Depression from his motorboat in Florida. His adventures lead him into the world of the wealthy and dissipated yachtsmen who throng the region and involve him in a strange and unlikely love affair. Although he normally takes out fishing parties, sometimes his boat can be put to other uses and if the money offered is worth his while, Harry will run guns, rum and men to and from Cuba, but he is playing a dicey game. In this harshly realistic, yet oddly tender and wise novel, Ernest Hemingway perceptively delineates the personal struggles of both the 'haves' and the 'have nots' and his hardest hero risks not just his living, but his life. By turns funny and tragic, lively and poetic, this is literary high adventure at its finest. 180pp, paperback.

How do you find a book when you can't recall the title...or the author? This homage to a bibliophile's dilemma is inspired by this torturous predicament. Artist Marina Luz creates paintings of books based on the descriptions we use when we can't remember their titles like 'Cat, possibly named Henry.' 'It was a dream, girl, horse, lightning, paranormal romance, a witch who owns a candle shop, man dies in embrace of hated woman, magic alleyway to prostitutionland, insane husband burns down house, polar bear wearing pants possibly named Victor or Vincent.' I think you get the picture! A unique appreciation of book love and the bizarre ways that books leave impressions on our souls. Marina Luz is an Emmy-Award-winning illustrator whose work has appeared in the New York Times and here she created some very clever book 'covers' for misremembered books. One beautiful artwork in colour per page, 96pp, 20.7 x 15.9cm.

Literary friends and foes prove that the pen is truly mightier than the sword. The world's most respected writers reveal their acerbic side of beloved authors who can become brutal critics when writing about their fellow wordsmiths. Curated from letters, essays and reviews, this sometimes stinging, sometimes good natured and always delightful collection will ignite the armchair critic in us all. Edna St Vincent Millay on e.e. cummings: 'Some of the most pompous nonsense I ever let slip to the floor with a wide yawn.' Virginia Woolf on James Joyce: 'A queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.' Evelyn Waugh: 'I am reading Proust for the first time. Very poor stuff. I think he was mentally defective.' And Charlotte Brontë on Jane Austen's Emma: 'She ruffles her reader by nothing vehement, disturbs by nothing profound.' Page after page of amusement ending with the quite brilliant Lord Byron on William Wordsworth: 'Turdsworth'. One quote per page, nicely typeset. 144pp.

With a biographical introduction by David Bradshaw and a foreword by J. G. Ballard, the Sunday Times described this as a masterpiece, 'Concise, evocative, wise and, above all, humane.' In 1953, in the presence of an investigator, Aldous Huxley took four-tenths of a gram of mescalin, sat down and waited to see what would happen. When he opened his eyes, everything from the flowers in a vase to the creases in his trousers was transformed, Huxley describes his experience with breathtaking immediacy in this novel. In its sequel Heaven and Hell, he goes on to explore the history and nature of mysticism. Still bristling with a sense of excitement and discovery, these illuminating and influential writings remain the most fascinating account of the visionary experience ever written. In that afternoon in Los Angeles, Huxley experienced the suspension of time and space and the melting away of the ego. He talks about artists and their heightened ability to perceive things, about the experiences of schizophrenics and moments of despair but also of unadulterated joy. He talks about the profundity of religious experience and Eastern and Western philosophical views of the world. 'The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge...' and that was before the Internet! 123pp, paperback.

Like a restorative, extended spa treatment, this revisiting of a selection of diaries and essay-reviews from the London Review of Books stretches tired brains. Christopher Hitchens was a star writer wherever he wrote and he contributed 60 pieces over two decades to the LRB. Anthologised here for the first time are reviews, diaries and essays along with a smattering of ferocious letters. Familiar bêtes noires - Kennedy, Nixon, Kissinger, Clinton - rub shoulders with lesser-known preoccupations - P. G. Wodehouse, Princess Margaret and Isaiah Berlin. Here is Hitchens on the first Gulf War and the Salman Rushdie Acid Test, on being spanked by Mrs Thatcher in the House of Lords, and taking his son to the Oscars, on America's homegrown Nazis and 'Acts of Violence in Grosvenor Square' in 1968. Barnstorming, cauterising and ultimately uncontainable journalism, he truly was an original of his time. 340pp, paperback, illus.

The Chinese poetic tradition which dates back to almost 1000BC is one of the most cherished parts of the nation's cultural heritage. This collection of translated classical poems is presented in a beautiful gold foil decorated textured cover hardback with satin pagemarker. It is a stunning chronicle of Chinese life, culture and history, with vital and evocative imagery demonstrating why Chinese poetry was so inspiring to modern Western poets, particularly Ezra Pound and the Imagist movement. China truly is a country of songbirds and it was under the influence of Confucius's view that 'Poetry intones Aspirations that poets express their attitudes and philosophical inclinations between the lines.' The Tang Dynasty alone produced numerous great poets including Li Bai (Li Po), Du Fu (Tu Fu), and Wang Wei who stand out in this volume by quantity of selected poems. Organised by theme- Life and Nature, The Passage of Time, The Toll of War, and Love and Loss - beautifully designed and laid out, 160pp.

The winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature has created a masterpiece of evocation, conjuring up its imaginary island with superb immediacy and a magnificent panorama of the last days of the Ottoman Empire. A tale of spies, conspiracy and murder, full of vivid characters, Pamuk cleverly combines true facts with imagined scenes and has patiently plotted the course of a nationalistic revolution in Turkey. An historical murder mystery set in 1901 amid an epidemic of bubonic plague, it is a wry meditation on nationalism and identity, history and myth, science and superstition. Night draws in. With the stealth of a spy vessel, the royal ship Aziziye approaches the famous vistas of Mingheria, 'an emerald built on pink stone', the 29th state of the ailing Ottoman Empire. The ship carries Princess Pakize, the daughter of a deposed sultan, her doctor husband, and the Royal Chemist, Bonkowski Pasha. Each of them holds a separate mission. Not all of them will survive the weeks ahead, because Mingheria is on the cusp of catastrophe. There are rumours of plague, rumours some in power will try to suppress. But plague is not the only killer. Soon the eyes of the world will turn to this ancient island where the future of a fragile empire is at stake. 683 magnificent pages in large softback 12.9 x 19.8cm.