Twelve contemporary stories inspired by Shakespeare and Cervantes, to mark the 400th anniversaries of their deaths. Introduced by Salman Rushdie.

Poetry. The witty, heartfelt and compassionate poems of Gerald Nicosia's first collection come alive in his extraordinary narrative style. Known for his seminal biography of Jack Kerouac, Memory Babe, and the important work on Vietnam Veterans, Home to War, Nicosia evokes the spirit and vitality of the poets from the Beat Generation, yet he speaks with a voice all his own. Haunting and expressive illustrations by Jakub Kalousek are also include in the book and capture Nicosia's intense imagery.

From one of Canada’s most acclaimed poets and the winner of the Governor General’s Award for Poetry. This book, Don McKay’s ninth collection, practises "the dark art of reflection" – which, as one of the poems tells us, whether boldly or capriciously, could not have existed without the moon – as it moves ever more deeply into ideas of home.

Gabriel Gale is an eccentric poet. His madness is the madness of insight and he uses this gift to solve or prevent crimes committed by madmen. Chesterton ably illustrates his own premise that lunacy and sanity may just be a point of view...

For readers of Roberto Bolaño's Savage Detectives and Muriel Spark's Loitering with Intent, this "sublime" and "delightfully unhinged" metaphysical mystery disguised as a picaresque romp follows one poet's spectacular fall from grace to ask a vital question: Is everyone a plagiarist? (Nicolette Polek, author of Imaginary Museums). A scandal has shaken the literary world. As the unnamed narrator of Dead Souls discovers at a cultural festival in central London, the offender is Solomon Wiese, a poet accused of plagiarism. Later that same evening, at a bar near Waterloo Bridge, our narrator encounters the poet in person, and listens to the story of Wiese's rise and fall, a story that takes the entire night—and the remainder of the novel—to tell. Wiese reveals his unconventional views on poetry, childhood encounters with "nothingness," a conspiracy involving the manipulation of documents in the public domain, an identity crisis, a retreat to the country, a meeting with an ex-serviceman with an unexpected offer, the death of an old poet, a love affair with a woman carrying a signpost, an entanglement with a secretive poetry cult, and plans for a triumphant return to the capital, through the theft of poems, illegal war profits, and faked social media accounts—plans in which our narrator discovers he is obscurely implicated. Dead Souls is a metaphysical mystery brilliantly encased in a picaresque romp, a novel that asks a vital question for anyone who makes or engages with art: Is everyone a plagiarist?

Over 150 familiar works by English and American poets: John Donne's "The Ecstasy," William Blake's "The Garden of Love," as well as poems by Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, Whitman, Dickinson, many more.