Renard Press Ltd

While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping… In The Raven, Poe’s poetic masterpiece, a distraught lover is visited by a mysterious bird, which does nothing but repeat ‘Nevermore’ again and again, driving the mourning paramour to despair. A poem of startling fame, The Raven is beloved both for its musicality and its atmosphere, and has won the hearts of generations of readers the world over. This edition also includes Poe’s essay on writing, ‘The Philosophy of Composition’, based on his crafting of The Raven, as well as the hauntingly evocative illustrations Édouard Manet produced for the first French publication, making this the definitive edition of the poem, ripe for rediscovery.

Clément asks me how [the story] begins. I tell him: with your death. Against the backdrop of seaside idyll Marseille, our unnamed narrator recounts the tale of his life from seventeen to nineteen, centring on his relationship with best friend turned lover Clément. These years of discovery and desire take root in secret, and they eke out a precarious existence of emancipation, illness and danger. But leaving school, and grappling with their divergence from societal norms, neither boy escapes unscathed, and they find there’s no looking back. At heart a stirring and sensuous tale, a cry for acceptance pierces through. An extraordinary novel that has received international acclaim for its stirring originality, this is a powerful tale that resounds with passion and proclaims the strength of the will to exist.

After the death of her steady, constraining husband, Catherine discovers that grief can be a liberation. With her adult children appalled by her sudden transformations, and a strangely familiar presence in the house urging her on, she begins to test the boundaries of who she might become. A call arrives on her newly purchased phone – a widower, Alec, still dialling the number once owned by his dead wife. What follows is a transgressive, intoxicating relationship built on longing, lies and the hunger to feel alive. All the Days I Did Not Live is a haunting exploration of loneliness, taboo and the dangerous, but delicious, magic of reinvention – where freedom comes at a cost and even the ghosts refuse to stay quiet…

Jane Austen, one of the nation’s most beloved authors, whose face adorns our currency, surely needs no introduction, but while many are familiar with her groundbreaking novels, few have come across the brilliantly funny short tales she wrote when young.Showcasing one of the final works in Austen’s teenage years, and one of the only tales in which the narrative focuses on a man, ‘Evelyn’ is a short but powerful work in which we see the great writers’ skills transforming into the great literary prowess associated with her name.

Part of Renard’s Christmas Card Classics series, 25% of the RRP of each book sold goes to Three Peas. This year, instead of a Christmas card, why not send a book?‘One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town… that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six…’Commissioned for the BBC for radio, Dylan Thomas’s enchanting tale A Child’s Christmas in Wales takes a nostalgic look at Christmases of yore – idyllic memories of white days and nights. Now considered one of his most enduring works, it has been described as ‘the twentieth-century Christmas Carol''.In a nutshell, Three Peas is a small charity supporting people who have had to flee war and/or persecution and who are seeking refuge and/or asylum in Europe. They are mostly active in Greece. They financially support a housing programme on Lesvos, a community centre in Sindos near Thessaloniki, a sports centre in Athens and NGOs’ emergency interventions in Thessaloniki, Lesvos and Samos. As well as the above they regularly support food and medical care providers.

Jane Austen, one of the nation’s most beloved authors, whose face adorns our currency, surely needs no introduction, but while many are familiar with her groundbreaking novels, few have come across the brilliantly funny short tales she wrote when young.This collection pulls together the short sketches, drama, poems and flash epistolary tales Austen wrote in her youth. Taken together, the author’s warm sense of humour and literary limbering up shines through in this great and memorable bundle of snatched moments of fun.

Jane Austen, one of the nation’s most beloved authors, whose face adorns our currency, surely needs no introduction, but while many are familiar with her groundbreaking novels, few have come across the brilliantly funny short tales she wrote when young.This collection pulls together two of the teenage Austen’s short ‘deceits’ – in which secret plans and gossip are bandied about like currency. Published only in 1933, ‘The Three Sisters’ is considered by many to be the prototype for Pride and Prejudice.

An extraordinary writer whose work has long been woefully neglected in English translation, Quiroga''s tales – and the life of the writer behind them – are a fever dream of morbidity and horror. Frequently compared to the works of Edgar Allan Poe, this avant-garde collection is staggeringly modern in its content, and is suffused with the themes and settings of his later works.Quiroga''s first published short-story collection, Tales of Love, Madness and Death is presented here in a brand-new translation, and also includes his lauded tongue-in-cheek ''Ten Commandments for Short-Story Writers'', readying some of the great writer''s finest work for a new generation of readers.

First published in 1925, and frequently compared to T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, A Fool i’ the Forest is a modernist’s poetic expression of his ongoing struggles with overcoming the trauma of military service in the First World War.Taking its title from Shakespeare’s phantasmagoric Midsummer Night’s Dream, A Fool surveys three aspects of one character – ‘I’, Mezzetin and the Conjuror – as they struggle, and ultimately fail, to find a way to reconcile their differences and live with one another.Enriched with a fascinating introduction and explanatory notes by leading Aldington scholars Michael Copp and Elizabeth Vandiver, this centenary edition seeks to place A Fool firmly back into the canon of postwar poetry, from which it has been missing for too long.

Long, long ago in Japan there lived an old man and his wife. The old man was a good, kind-hearted, hard-working old fellow …First published in 1903, Japanese Fairy Tales is a classic compendium of Japanese folklore. From the stirring opening tale of ‘My Lord Bag of Rice’, where a ferocious warrior faces a mythical beast, to moving fables of compassion like ‘The Tongue-Cut Sparrow’, the twenty-two collected stories present a glorious patchwork of Japan’s rich folkloric tradition.Representing the West’s first commercial introduction to the storytelling tradition of Japan, these tales are as brilliantly entertaining – and important – now as they were at the beginning of the last century, and are presented here in a handsome new edition for a new generation.

Relearning to Read: Adventures in Not-Knowing invites you to turn the way you read upside down and see what falls out. Drawing on an approach to reading developed over more than a decade of interactions with stories and booklovers around the world through the author’s hit blog ayearofreadingtheworld.com, the book puts not-knowing centre stage and plays with what examining the gaps in our understanding and the assumptions we use to plug them can teach us about ourselves and our world.Many books about books celebrate the cosiness and consolation of reading; Relearning to Read does the opposite. Built on the realisation that to read widely we must make friends with incomprehension – because no one can be an expert in all the world’s literatures – it explores how getting comfortable with discomfort and owning our limitations can take us further and deepen our appreciation of the world’s complexity and richness.

What happened, nobody saw, but everybody knew… Why should blood on the floor make anyone mad against automobiles and telephones and desks. Why. This is what happened.’Written in 1933, immediately following the publication of the wildly successful Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Blood on the Dining-Room Floor is one of Stein’s most avant-garde pieces of writing, taking the murder mystery genre and working it masterfully into a Modernist mould.Based in part on truth, the narrative is set in – and written from – the country house where Stein and Toklas were living in rural France, and describes the strange death of their acquaintance Madame Pernollet. The novella takes the mystery and warps it, shot through as it is with the comings and goings of servants and the unstoppable march of modern life. Reissued as part of Renard’s accessible series of Stein’s work, this is the perfect edition for lovers of the Modernist icon’s work, and a new generation that is just as fascinated by crime and detection.

A Quarter Dead and Half Alive is a beautifully crafted, wide-ranging collection that lingers on the intersection of humanity and the environment. Foregrounding ageing parents and new family members arriving, and zooming out to take in the beauty of the natural world, this is a wildly relatable collection, shot through with humour – a companion in all life has in store.A prolific and widely published Irish poet, Steve’s seventh collection builds on the strength of his previous works, in which everyday experiences and the profound sit side by side with the joys of the creative arts and the darker side to life on Planet Earth.

First published in 1928, Federico García Lorca’s collection of Gypsy Ballads (Romancero gitano) marked his first major publication, and the beginning of his rise to fame. Depicting life in his native Andalucía, and the Romany peoples who lived there, it takes motifs of the countryside into its view, describing the night, the sky and the moon alongside more universal themes like life and death.Written in a stylised version of the countryside ballads that proliferated at the time, the Gypsy Ballads propelled Lorca to overnight fame, and he soon became counted amongst Spain’s finest poets. Later in his career his name became synonymous with the theatre, but this new edition of the Gypsy Ballads returns the reader to where it all began. Presented here in a smart new translation, this edition is the perfect place to discover Lorca the Poet.

In Compass Light we cross landscapes, unravelling time, discovering how change and journeys become a celebration of a life. Poems move through the points of the compass and across sacred sites, exploring the many different ways in which we live in time and space, and considering how our experience of time is fundamental to meaning in human life.We are carried along through years spent in Greece, observing the markets, the ancient rhythms of village life, the sudden appearance of the gods in a violent countryside, the cycles of love, death and the earth. With a flick of the compass we find ourselves gazing across the seascapes and night skies of Cornwall and west Wales, then hurtling along on the Underground and through the East End of London.Beautifully crafted and wildly evocative, Compass Light is a wide-ranging collection that illuminates the dazzling richness of how we perceive time, and how it makes us who and what we are.

A group of pilgrims assembles at the Tabard Inn in Southwark and sets out for the shrine of Thomas a Becket in Canterbury. Along the way they tell tales to one another, painting pictures of their varied lives.When The Canterbury Tales first appeared it was groundbreaking – showing characters speaking in the vernacular, giving readers for centuries to come an insight into medieval England. This annotated, illustrated edition collects the most enjoyable, witty and crude pieces into a unique collection, and is the perfect edition for those who have yet to meet The Canterbury Tales, as well as those who know and love it.