Midnight in the Kant Hotel is an absorbing account of contemporary art, composed over twenty years. The essays revisit the same artists as they develop, following them in time, changing perspectives as he, and they, develop. Mengham is a significant curator, organising exhibitions: 'There is no more productive engagement with someone else's artworks than finding the right way to show it, since artworks are always direct statements or questions about articulations of space, and the curator's job obviously is to enhance such questions and statements.' This discipline gives the writer a series of uniquely privileged perspectives, touching, lifting, moving and re-moving the objects: 'nothing compares to living with art'. The book opens with themes: what is domestic space? what does the atrocity exhibition tell us? what is the refugee aesthetic? Essays on particular artists follow, including Marc Atkins, Stephen Chambers, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Tony Cragg, Antony Gormley, Damien Hirst, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Anselm Kiefer, Laura Owens, Doris Salcedo, Agnes Thurnauer, Koen Vanmechelen and Alison Wilding. Always, he is in dialogue with the work, rather than with the artist.

British Fiction Today provides students and readers with a critical introduction to key authors and novels since 1990 through a collection of the latest critical perspectives on current British fiction. These essays offer comprehensive and up-to-date coverage of a broad range of novelists, drawing together both established and emerging literary voices reflecting the scope of new British writing. Organised around key themes in contemporary writing - Modern Lives, Contemporary Living; Distortions and Dreams; States of Identity and Histories, each section begins with a short introductory essay. Each section includes newly commissioned essays by leading critics on: Peter Ackroyd, Martin Amis, Pat Barker, Julian Barnes, A. S. Byatt, Jonathan Coe, Jenny Diski, Alan Hollinghurst, Toby Litt, Ian McEwan, Ben Okri, Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith, Adam Thorpe, Sarah Waters and Jeanette Winterson. Introducing key works, writers and major themes including post-colonialism, gender and history, this is the ideal guide to British fiction today.

Henry Green (1905-1974) was the writer of nine technically outstanding novels, and of an autobiographical text. In the role of author he was intensely private, even secretive (Henry Green being a pseudonym), and his strange and heady writings derive their power in some way from their very secretiveness. In this 1982 study, Dr Mengham sets out to uncover the systematic basis of this quality in Green's writing, and to account for it in terms of the 'conditions of knowledge' of each text. Green, he argues, writes to maintain an 'idiom of the time', which constantly renews itself in a critical relation with the changing understanding of what goes to make us up - intellectually, socially, unconsciously. On the one hand, each of Green's books is treated on its own chronological succession; on the other, there is a continuous examination of manuscripts and typescripts making clear the development of certain writing procedures.

Rod Mengham’s new offering comprises two complementary halves: a poetic meditation on a place (the Bronze Age site of Grimspound on Dartmoor); and a series of short essays on different cultural habitats. Grimspound is a four-part work combining prose and verse, composed on site over the course of ten years. It combines a `wild analysis’ of Hound of the Baskervilles (whose climactic scene takes place at Grimspound), a portrait of the Victorian excavator Sabine Baring-Gould, and a series of poems that draw on the Russian linguist Aharon Dolgopolsky’s experimental Nostratic Dictionary. Inhabiting Art gathers essays on cultural history in relation to landscape and cityscape, viewed either episodically or in the form of a palimpsest, where the present state of the habitat both reveals and conceals its own history and prehistory.

For Rod Mengham sculpture and painting exist in the world the way poems do. He invokes the Polish sculptor Katarzyna Kobro, who believes that sculpture must be understood as part of the world around it. In Chance of a Storm, poetry is language that comes trailing bits of other forms of speech and writing. 'Poems should be finished, but be still hot to the touch, giving a vivid sense of the thinking and feeling that went into their creation,' he says. Drew Milne speaks of the poems' 'beautiful, belligerent laconicism'. While the lyric is central to his work, it cannot shrug off the ambition of epic, scaled down but still latent. This telescoping informs the structure of these prose poems, a species of modernist fable.

"British Fiction Today" provides students and readers with a critical introduction to key authors and novels since 1990 through a collection of the latest critical perspectives on current British fiction. It offers comprehensive and up-to-date coverage of a broad range of selected contemporary authors, drawing together both established and emerging literary voices reflecting the scope of the new British writing. Organised around key themes in contemporary writing - Modern Lives, Contemporary Living; Distortions and Dreams; States of Identity and Histories, each section begins with a short introductory essay. Each section includes newly commissioned essays by leading critics on: Peter Ackroyd, Martin Amis, Pat Barker, Julian Barnes, A. S. Byatt, Jonathan Coe, Jenny Diski, Alan Hollinghurst, Toby Litt, Ian McEwan, Ben Okri, Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith, Adam Thorpe, Sarah Waters, and Jeanette Winterson. Introducing key works, writers and major themes including post-colonialism, gender and history, "British Fiction Today" is the ideal guide to the contemporary literary scene for students and readers.

Duel text translations of twenty-five Polish poets all under 45. Practically of the work in this selection was written in the post-communist period, but in cultural historical terms it reflects the evolution of a sensibility that began to emerge in the mid-1980s, when Polish poetry was being realisned contemtiously with the newly visible traditions of European and American writing,

This critical study of Hardy's short stories provides a thorough account of the ruling preoccupations and recurrent writing strategies of his entire corpus as well as providing detailed readings of several individual texts. It relates the formal choices imposed on Hardy as contributor to "Blackwood's Magazine" and other periodicals to the methods he employed to encode in fiction his troubled attitude towards the social politics of the West Country, where most of the stories are set. No previous criticism has shown how the powerful challenges to the reader mounted in Hardy's later stories reveal the complexity of his motivations during a period when he was moving progressively in the direction of exchanging fiction for poetry.

Features

*The only book to provide comprehensive criticism of Hardy's entire output of short stories.

*The provision of extremely full, extremely detailed, close readings of a number of key stories enhances the book's attractiveness as a potential teaching resource.

*Draws on the work of social historians to make clear the background of social and political unrest in Dorset that is partly uncovered and partly hidden in Hardy's portrayals of his fictional Wessex.

*Offers fascinating insights into Hardy's near-obsession in his mature phase with the marriage contract, and with its legal binding of erratic men and women.

This major international anthology provides students and the general reader with an invaluable introduction to contemporary modernist poetry. Containing over thirty poets from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and USA, this selection offers a powerful vision of late-Twentieth-century poetic achievement: international, politically- and socially-engaged, and radical in imaginative vision and practice. It celebrates risk, resistance, protest and diversity within poetry, reaching across national and cultural boundaries. Vanishing Points provides students of Creative Writing, Cultural Studies, English and American Studies, as well as the general reader, with an important survey of modernist poetry at the start of the new millennium. * A unique introduction to the wide range of modernist experiment in contemporary poetry * Ideal study aid for students of poetry and poetics * Broad, international selection of acclaimed modernist poets * Substantial contributions offer important insights into the range of each poet's work From the Introduction: The vanishing point lies beyond the horizon established by ruling conventions, it is where the imagination takes over from the understanding. Most anthologies of contemporary verse are filled with poems that do not cross that dividing-line, but our contention is that many poems in this volume are situated on the threshold of conventional sense-making. They go beyond the perspective of accepted canons of taste and judgement and ask questions about where they belong, and who they are meant for, often combining the pathos of estrangement with the irascibility of the refusenik. All anthologies enter the world fully aware of their genealogy, of where they fit in, of how they relate to certain traditions of writing by affiliation or rejection. This combination of dependent and independent gestures is inevitable, particularly in the case of selections of work aligned with national or regional versions of literary history. The present anthology does not fall into that category; its international reach does not, however, bring exemption from the dilemma of wanting to stand apart from conditions of rivalry while also needing to claim a special value in comparison with publications already available.

Provides a comprehensive criticism of Hardy's entire output of short stories This critical study of Hardy's short stories provides a thorough account of the ruling preoccupations and recurrent writing strategies of his entire corpus as well as providing detailed readings of several individual texts. It relates the formal choices imposed on Hardy as contributor to Blackwood's Magazine and other periodicals to the methods he employed to encode in fiction his troubled attitude towards the social politics of the West Country, where most of the stories are set. No previous criticism has shown how the powerful challenges to the reader mounted in Hardy's later stories reveal the complexity of his motivations during a period when he was moving progressively in the direction of exchanging fiction for poetry. Key Features The only book to provide comprehensive criticism of Hardy's entire output of short stories The provision of extremely full, extremely detailed, close readings of a number of key stories enhances the book's attractiveness as a potential teaching resource Draws on the work of social historians to make clear the background of social and political unrest in Dorset that is partly uncovered and partly hidden in Hardy's portrayals of his fictional Wessex Offers fascinating insights into Hardy's near-obsession in his mature phase with the marriage contract, and with its legal binding of erratic men and women