Useful Work versus Useless Toil

Author

Tracy Chevalier

1932. After the Great War took both her beloved brother and her fiancé, Violet Speedwell has become a "surplus woman," one of a generation doomed to a life of spinsterhood after the war killed so many young men. Yet Violet cannot reconcile herself to a life spent caring for her grieving, embittered mother....

Author	Robert Macfarlane
ISBN	0393242145

An exploration of the Earth’s underworlds as they exist in myth, literature, memory, and the land itself.

In this sequel to The Old Ways, Macfarlane takes us on an journey into our relationship with darkness, burial, and what lies beneath the surface of both place and mind. Traveling through...

Author	Laurie Lee
ISBN	0140033181

It was 1934 and a young man walked to London from the security of the Cotswolds to make his fortune.

He was to live by playing the violin and by labouring on a London building site. Then, knowing one Spanish phrase, he decided to see Spain. For a year he tramped through a country in which the signs...

Author	Franz Kafka
ISBN	0805204261

I have felt very uncomfortable reading this letter. And the thought that I--together with a very large number of people-- have read something which was not intended for us, as well as the knowledge that the original addressee never read it, contributed further to my uneasiness.

Franz...

Author	Hannah Sullivan
ISBN	0571337678

Winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize 2018
One of Bustle's 12 Most Anticipated Poetry Collections for 2018

Hannah Sullivan’s debut collection is a revelation – three long poems of fresh ambition, intensity, and substance. Though each poem stands apart, their inventive and looping encounters...

Author

Intan Paramaditha

Inspired by horror fiction, myths and fairy tales, Apple and Knife is an unsettling ride that swerves into the supernatural to explore the dangers and power of occupying a female body in today’s world.

These short fictions set in the Indonesian everyday—in corporate boardrooms, in shanty...

Author	John Ruskin
ISBN	0143036289

Nietzsche said that with the death of the sacred, Beauty would continue, albeit accidentally.

Mr. John Ruskin, however, set his sights on an earlier age, developing six principles that could be applied to gothic beauty, and in so doing, in my eyes, set down the principles for Beauty in general.

The...