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Falling into the trap of writing commercially successful literary fiction, sure to alienate literary critics of yore, May Sinclair’s reputation has been unfairly diminished in recent years – although in her day she drew the praise of writers as respected and disparate as George Orwell and Agatha Christie.Combining the traditional ghost story with Freudian logic and Modernist values, these Uncanny Stories – the first of two supernatural story collections – are a thrilling, familiar read, and yet a shocking departure from the genre as it was known, and makes for as compelling a read today as the day they were written.

Was it pure chance that he had run into her so soon? Philip had never believed in destiny, and his father had believed in nothing but his own genius. And yet…From the moment recent Oxford graduate Philip takes the helm of a new marine life institute in Palm Beach, his presence revives old feuds and sparks rivalries among the wealthy resident snowbirds, many of whom have invested heavily in a biotech company soon to be exposed for insider trading. It quickly becomes clear that Philip’s quest for atonement on the behalf of his father will embroil many of the community’s most prominent members.Interwoven with snippets of real-life drama from an insider-trading scandal, Where Snowbirds Play paints a compelling portrait of the lives of the privileged, and what happens when their world is turned upside down.

‘Sometimes men are kissing. Men are sometimes kissing and sometimes drinking. Men are sometimes kissing one another…’One of the foremost writers of the twentieth century, Gertrude Stein was marked for her ground-breaking experimental prose and extraordinary friendship group alike, and her works stand as a monument in the Modernist era. In more recent years Stein has been held up as a queer icon, as she lived openly with her life partner Alice B. Toklas and wrote of queer relationships at a time when this was strictly taboo.While some of Stein’s queer works made it into print in her lifetime, including The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, much of her more daring early queer stories only saw the light of day after her death, when Yale set to publishing her complete works. Now that ‘The love that dare not speak its name’ may be bolder, this collection aims to restore Stein’s short, queer works to the canon, and to burnish her status as an early queer icon.

Best known today for his critical pronouncements, Matthew Arnold has still not received his due as a wonderfully moving poet, and only one of his poems, ‘Dover Beach’, is remembered by most – although it’s a strong candidate for the nation’s favourite. John Greening’s personal selection invites us to imagine ‘Matt’, as he was known, without the sideburns and the scowl. Readers may be surprised to learn just how ahead of his time Arnold was in his tastes and values, as well as in his early use of free verse.Along with a helpful introduction and thorough notes, this collection brings together love poems, retellings of myths and tributes, along with some of Arnold’s better-known works, ‘Dover Beach’, ‘Sohrab and Rustum’, a heart-wrenching story of a doomed father–son relationship, the glorious elegiac ‘The Scholar-Gipsy’ and its sequel, ‘Thyrsis’, about the loss of his dearest friend, and there’s even a genuinely animated version of the Little Mermaid story. This edition aims to restore Arnold’s name as one of the finest poets of the Victorian era.

May the residents of the real Saltburn-by-the-Sea and neighbouring towns forgive my mermaids, my nuclear power stations, my foetus museums and so on and so on. They were written with love.Welcome to Saltburn, an extraordinary town on the English coast with sweeping poverty and nuclear fallout, where young lovers, radioactive and lusty, fall in love, and sea creatures work at the local penny arcade. In a series of interconnected short stories a young orphan is taken in by an alchemist, and falls in love with a mermaid. The son of a glove manufacturer is sent to Paris on business, where he falls for a deep-sea diver. One schoolboy bites another, gains psychic abilities and realises they will one day be in love. A rock salesman exposes a cover-up by big business and frees kidnapped women.In startling prose that could have been concocted by a hallucinating Raymond Carver and Charles Bukowski, Saltburn is a town – and a book – like no other.

In the old back streets o’ PimlicoOn the docks at Monte VideoAt the Ring o’ Bells on Plymouth HoeHe’m arter me now wheerever I go…Charlotte Mew, a Modernist poet who in her day was considered one of the finest of the age by writers of great stature, has lived for long in the shadows of the literary canon. An avant-garde Bloomsbury poet that never quite broke through into the public’s consciousness, Mew’s experimental style, with prose-like lines, has stood the test of time, and is as relevant and powerful today as when it was written.Published in 1929, a year after her tragic death, The Rambling Sailor collects Mew’s final, most powerful verse, in which love, nature and religion all intermingle to paint pictures of pain, hope and a deep love of the natural world through the writer’s knowledgeable eyes.

Charlotte Brontë, one of the best known and widely read novelists of the nineteenth century, surely needs no introduction, her Gothic masterpiece Jane Eyre appearing on curricula and book lovers’ shelves alike; but few have encountered her unfinished novels and shorter works.The final words to flow from Charlotte Brontë’s pen, and published shortly after her death, Emma is a compelling and powerful short work that stands on its own two feet, and leaves the reader to dream where the great writer was headed to next.

‘To begin at the beginning: It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent…’ Commissioned for the BBC for radio, Dylan Thomas’s masterpiece, Under Milk Wood, is set in the fictional Welsh seaside village of Llareggub one spring day. An extraordinary cast of beautifully penned portraits come together, mingling dreams with reality, to give a now immortal depiction of the intertwined lives of a small Welsh community. The work of Dylan Thomas is widely regarded as being amongst the greatest of the Modern period, and his ‘play for voices’, Under Milk Wood, is one of the best-loved works in the literary canon.