What is your favourite author's favourite metaphor? This book will offer you the answers. Nabokov's Favourite Word is Mauve explores what the numbers can reveal about literature's classics, number one bestsellers and our own writing.

This 'perfect gift' (Vogue) is an essential guide to filling your children's shelves with all the books they'll ever need

The moving story of the life and work of novelist Virginia Woolf, revealed through her own letters to those closest to her.

This book is the classic work on forms of the European folktale.

The "Continuum Contemporaries" series provides informative and accessible introductions to some of the most important and influential novels of recent years. Each volume contains a biography of the novelist in question, a detailed summary of plot, characters and context, and details of film and television adaptions.

In conformist 1950s America, Jack Kerouac's "On the Road" was greeted with both delirium and dismay, but in Kerouac's hunt for the big experience and his longing for greatness, he has inspired each successive generation. This title presents an account of Jack's life.

Should you finish every book you start? How has your family influenced the way you read? What is literary style? How is the Nobel Prize like the World Cup? This collection of provocative pieces tells what readers want from books and how to look at the literature we encounter in a new light.

In the space of a single generation, three eighteenth-century writers - Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding - invented an entirely new genre of writing: the novel. This book explains why these authors wrote in the way that they did, and how the complex changes in society - the emergence of the middle-class and more.

An exploration of the intricacies of narrative theory. Considering a range of texts from Western literature over the past two centuries, Miller explores the way rhetorical devices and figurative language interrupt, break into, delay and expand storytelling.

An overview of the life and work of the scandalous Renaissance writer Thomas Nashe.

* This is a major new work from one of the world s leading historians of print culture and the book. * Chartier shows that, in the early history of the book, the roles played by the printer and the typesetter were just as important as the role played by the author: they were often invisible but they were crucial.

Perhaps it's a long journey, or you want to get them off their screens? Perhaps it's a group of restless children and you wish you could catch, hold and reward their attention? You can, and, as you magic from thin air a gripping story, that face-to-face engagement does as good as it feels.

Who is more important: the reader, or the writer? Addressing the issue, this book aims to challenge perceived wisdom. It brings some radical ideas to a wide audience, and argues persuasively for a totally practical way of reading. It is suitable for those interested in the development of literary theory.

This work is part of the "Continuum Contemporaries" series giving readers accessible and informative introductions to 30 of the most popular, most acclaimed and most influential contemporary novels. It contains a biography of the novelist and a full-length study of the novel.

This introductory study explores Margaret Atwood's versatility as a writer and her use of a variety of novel forms. Atwood's writing from the 1970s to the 1990s is analyzed in order to indicate the significant continuities beneath her constant shifts of emphasis.