Showing titles in Themes & Styles

The Divine Comedy describes Dante's descent into Hell with Virgil as a guide, his ascent of Mount Purgatory and his encounter with his dead love Beatrice, and finally, his arrival in Heaven. Examining questions of faith, desire and enlightenment, the poem is a brilliantly nuanced and moving allegory of human redemption. This major translation is published here for the first time in a single volume.

The Ancient Greeks recognized seven different types of love. This debut collection of poetry from Aubrey Marcus, one of the world's leading psychonauts and erotic mystics, explores the themes and ideas that emerge from each of these types of love. Marcus's poems will fill your heart, enrich your soul, and challenge your preconceptions and understanding of love.

In Clarity and Connection, Yung Pueblo explores how intense emotions accumulate in our subconscious and condition us to act and react the ways we do. With his distinctive voice, at once spare and evocative, the author guides us through the excavation and release of the past that is required for growth.

In Paradise Lost, Milton produced a poem of epic scale, conjuring up a vast, awe-inspiring cosmos and ranging across huge tracts of space and time. And yet, in putting a charismatic Satan and naked Adam and Eve at the centre of this story, he also created an intensely human tragedy on the fall of man....

Ovid's sensuous and witty poetry brings together a dazzling array of mythological tales, ingeniously linked by the idea of transformation - often as a result of love or lust - where men and women find themselves magically changed into new and sometimes extraordinary beings. Beginning with the creation of the world and ending with the deification of Augustus, Ovid interweaves many of the best-known myths and legends of Ancient Greece and Rome, including Daedalus and Icarus, Pyramus and Thisbe, Pygmalion, Perseus and Andromeda, and the fall of Troy.

Blake Ritson, David Warner, Hattie Morahan and John Hurt star in this BBC Radio 4 dramatisation of Dante's epic poem. Inferno: Thirty-five year old Dante finds himself in the middle of a dark wood, in extreme personal and spiritual crisis. Hope of rescue appears in the form of the venerable poet Virgil, now a shade himself, who offers to lead Dante on an odyssey through the afterlife, beginning in the terrifying depths of Hell.

The Iliad tells the dramatic story of the Trojan War, focusing on the wrath of Achilles and the clash between honor, pride, and fate. This timeless masterpiece, attributed to the Greek poet Homer, is brought to life through an immersive narration that captures the grandeur, fury, and poetry of ancient warfare. With dramatic performances, vibrant storytelling, and evocative soundscapes, this audiobook invites listeners into the heart of one of the most influential works in literary history.

In this collection of all new poems, Whitney Hanson explores the progression of a life through the lens of music. We each begin with a simple note, but as life progresses, we're led to the next note, and the next - all of which combine to form the melody of a song and the cadence of a life. As life becomes more complicated and complex, we find that loss, grief, and heartache can muffle our music, making the world go silent. But as Whitney's poems show, all of these rests and pauses in the music are part of the magnificent composition of life.

The definitive collection from a writer whose transgressive legacy and raw, funny, acutely observant writing has left an enduring mark. Here is Bukowski eating walnuts and scratching his back, rolling a cigarette while listening to Brahms, showering with Linda in the midafternoon. Here is Bukowski knowing that the secret is beyond him, that people who never go crazy live truly horrible lives, that there's a bluebird in his heart that wants to get out.

In One Thousand Gifts, Ann Voskamp invites you to discover a way of seeing that opens your eyes to ordinary amazing grace, a way of living that is fully alive, and a way of becoming present to God that brings deep and lasting joy.

Upon becoming a mother, Jessica Urlichs was reminded that the everyday ordinary is extraordinary. As sacred and tender as early motherhood is, it also comes with its struggles. Beautiful Chaos is a collection that chronicles it all - the highs, the lows, the confusion, the loss of identity, the becoming, and the brutal but beautiful ways our children hold mirrors up to us. This collection inspires vulnerability and will be a cathartic, healing read for anyone who needs it.

If you never knew disappointment, would you ever grow? If you had never felt loss, could you have compassion for another? Without real heartache, would you ever know the greatness of love? On When the Heart Breaks, David Whyte invites you to join him in an investigation of a question that rests at the center of human experience. With a poet's insight into the landscape of the soul, he offers a deeply moving exploration of how we experience love and loss, and how with resilience and time we can rise again each time we are broken.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s ‘novel in verse’ is an epic poem that voices with enchanting beauty and literary courage the perspective of Victorian women. Aurora Leigh forges her own path to become a poet, successfully proving her worth, defying the ideals of her era, and rescuing her spirit from the suppression of a routine domestic life. Infusing the work with her own experience and passion, Browning produced a true masterpiece.

This collection of words from Havva Ramadan has its origins during lockdown and her work continues to resonate to this day, finding an even wider audience through her rapidly growing online presence. Now, in her first book, A Voice: Turning Pain into Power, her words take a different form, collected to give us a very personal journey that we can all relate to, reflecting the pain of grief, the struggle of mental health and the journey we need to take to help us collect our pieces and find a way to rebuild ourselves once again.

Megan Fox showcases her wicked humor throughout a heartbreaking and dark collection of poetry. Over the course of more than 80 poems, Fox chronicles all the ways in which we fit ourselves into the shape of the ones we love, even if it means losing ourselves in the process.

Guided by the Roman poet Virgil and the love of his life, Beatrice, Dante traverses the three realms of the dead—Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven—encountering sinners, souls seeking forgiveness, and divine beings. With vivid imagery, sharp social commentary, and profound spiritual insight, The Divine Comedy is an unforgettable exploration of the human soul’s journey toward salvation.

The great Indian Buddhist master Nagarjuna wrote his celebrated poem Letter to a Friend as a gift of advice to a South Indian king, and it has since become a monument in the Indian shastra tradition. Despite its short length (only 123 verses), it covers the entire Mahayana path, combining a practical approach to daily conduct with a theoretical exposition of the different stages leading to enlightenment. It has thus been an ideal source for many of Tibet’s greatest scholars seeking a scriptural authority to enhance their own descriptions of the Buddhist path.

Dick Davis—“our pre-eminent translator from the Persian” (The Washington Post)—has revised and expanded his acclaimed translation of Ferdowsi’s masterpiece, adding more than 100 pages of newly translated text. Davis’s elegant combination of prose and verse allows the poetry of the Shahnameh to sing its own tales directly, interspersed sparingly with clearly marked explanations to ease along modern audiences.

Dante's Divine Comedy is considered to be not only the most important epic poem in Italian literature, but also one of the greatest poems ever written. It consists of 100 cantos, and (after an introductory canto) they are divided into three sections. Each section is 33 cantos in length, and they describe how Dante and a guide travel through Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso.

Legendary Black Veil Brides' founder and frontman Andy Biersack curated his favorite Edgar Allan Poe tales, presented here in their original language with supplemental materials.