Literature
For prices and how to order, please see the complete list of titles on our Home Page.
You can also order via Simon Webb's Amazon author page:
Born in London to highly cultured Italian parents, the poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti was a passionate translator of the poetry of Dante Alighieri and his contemporaries. The Langley Press selection includes love sonnets not included in Dante's Vita Nuova, and others by poets including Guido Cavalcanti, Guido Orlandi and Cecco Angliolieri.
Aimed at readers with little or no prior knowledge of Laurence Sterne or his writings, Simon Webb’s book offers a brief but comprehensive biography of the author of Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey, and includes up-to-date analyses of all his major works. This new study attempts to put Sterne, his writings and his characters in the context of the eighteenth century in Europe: a time of enlightenment, but also of ignorance, corruption and slavery.
Was the Dark Lady of Shakespeare's sonnets a vampire? This darkly comic poem entertains the possibility, telling the story of of a darkly beautiful Elizabethan vampire who also turns up in modern London.
Recently discovered in a second-hand bookshop in the English cathedral city of Piltdown, the previously unknown 1610 Quarto of Shakespeare's Scottish Play gives us 'Macbeth' as the Bard originally wrote it: with swarms of the Living Dead.
Heather lives just outside Durham with her son and a neurotic half-Siamese cat. Under the name of Heather Cawte Winskill, her poetry was published in a variety of magazines and anthologies in the 1980s and 90s, including Psychopoetica, Krax, Tees Valley Writer, Braquemard and Coriander 1 and 2. She performed at numerous venues, from Cabaret à Go Go to the first Durham Literature Festival, where she supported Dannie Abse.
The ideas for Shakespeare's plays did not just spring from his head fully formed: there had to be some reading and research before the playwright put pen to paper.
In this highly accessible book, Simon Webb looks at how the man from Stratford 'borrowed' ideas from a wide range of sources - from the Bible and the Greek and Roman classics to traveller's tales and even plays written by his rivals.
A mysterious tomb discovered on Mars, zero-g sex with aliens, feeding doughnuts to a woolly mammoth, and the plans of the highly suspect Department of Interplanetary Affairs are just some of the delights to be found in this new collection of science fiction and fantasy short stories.