Nightwood, Djuna Barnes' strange and sinuous tour de force, "belongs to that small class of books that somehow reflect a time or an epoch" (Times Literary Supplement). That time is the period between the two World Wars, and Barnes' novel unfolds in the decadent shadows of Europe's great cities, Paris, Berlin, and Vienna a world in which the boundaries of class, religion, and sexuality are bold but surprisingly porous. The outsized characters who inhabit this world are some of the most memorable in all of fiction there is Guido Volkbein, the Wandering Jew and son of a...

An anthology of opera-inspired stories by some of the most acclaimed writers of modern fiction includes new work by Kate Atkinson, Alexander McCall Smith, Ruth Rendell, Anne Enright, and many moreJeanette Winterson's request ofmany of herbest-lovedcontemporaries was that they"choose an opera, and from its music or its characters, its plot or its libretto, or even a mood evoked, write a story." This specially commissioned collection of comedies, tragedies, and tales of love won or lost is contemporary fiction at its very finest, a book as broad in content as it is deep in atmosphere. The...

From one of Britain's best-loved literary novelists comes a magical, lyrical tale of the young orphan Silver, taken in by the ancient lighthousekeeper Mr. Pew, who reveals to her a world of myth and mystery through the art of storytelling.

A collection of short stories that reveals various facets of an extraordinary imagination. In prose that is full of imagery and word-play, it creates physical and psychological worlds that are at once familiar and yet shockingly strange.

Presents the story of an adopted child, and the thwarted giantess Mrs Winterson.

A collection of pieces on modernism, autobiography, style, and painting, arguing the importance of art in our lives. The essays also discuss intimately the author's relationship to her own work and the books that she loves.

On the airwaves, all the talk is of the new blue planet - pristine and habitable, like our own 65 million years ago, before we took it to the edge of destruction. And off the air, Billie and Spike are falling in love. What will happen when their story combines with the world's story, as they whirl towards Planet Blue, into the future?

Set on board the QE2, and in New York and Liverpool, Gut Symmetries welds together sex and science into a celebration of love in all its frailty, confusion and excess.

Written on the Body is a secret code only visible in certain lights: the accumulation of a lifetime gather there. In places the palimpsest is so heavily worked that the letters feel like braille. I like to keep my body rolled away from prying eyes, never unfold too much, tell the whole story. I didn't know that Louise would have reading hands. She has translated me into her own book.

The PowerBook is twenty-first century fiction that uses past, present and future as shifting dimensions of a multiple reality. The story is simple. An e-writer called Ali or Alix will write to order anything you like, provided that you are prepared to enter the story as yourself and take the risk of leaving it as someone else. You can be the hero of your own life. You can have freedom just for one night. But there is a price to pay.