Not for sale in the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic! Prague-born Karel Michal (1932-1984) lived a significant part of his adult life under Czechoslovakia's oppressive communist regime. Prevented from studying at the university as a young man...

In this collection of essays, Ashis Nandy uses the metaphor of the future – imagined utopias, conceptions of cultural possibilities, social critiques of things to come – to redefine the present. Nandy's effort is to demonstrate that, in a world incre...

In the title poem of her second collection, "Salvation Jane" (a purple thistle-like weed), Stoddart suggests that in naming something we empower it to fulfil our idea of its meaning and purpose. The poem typifies, as Vernon Scannell wrote, "the way h...

Matthew Mead began publishing his poetry in the 1960s. By then he had, as Peter Riley noted, "located a sense of poetry for which he drew widely from Anglo-American writing, avoiding any programmes of allegiance". Over the years he has published five...

"King Driftwood" teems with characters and narratives: treasure hunters, drug dealers, small-town eccentrics – blue-rinsed Mrs Dawes-Llewellyn, John the Song and Mothman, George Bush and Saddam Hussein glimpsed at a phantasmagoric funfair; the mourni...

Fyodor Dostoevsky completed his final novel, "The Brothers Karamazov", in 1880. A work of universal appeal and significance, his exploration of good and evil immediately gained an international readership and today "remains harrowingly alive in the f...

In Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke's poetry the body, myth, the soul, nature and language are deeply entangled concepts. Yet her poetry is passionate and direct: "I am not interested in distorting reality when I play with language". With translations by suc...

Bengali is the world's seventh most popular language in terms of the number who use it, but few have made the journey from the West to its cultural or spiritual interior. Its intellectual tradition is without equal in present-day India. Rabindranath...

"I wish to God that I were more intelligent and everything would finally become clear to me – or else that I didn't live much longer!" Clarity or Death! takes its title from this letter of Wittgenstein's. That desire for clarity in our knowledge of t...

MUDs are Multi-User Dimensions, online worlds created by language alone. In a collection that throws Irish poetry into the electronic age, John Redmond explores the Internet and car culture, MUDs and moods. New forms of post-industrial community enab...