Introduction by George Szirtes, winner of the TS Eliot poetry prize

Reznikoff’s subject is one people’s suffering at the hand of another. His source materials are the U.S. government’s record of the trials of the Nazi criminals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunal and the transcripts of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem.

Except for the twelve part titles, none of the words here are Reznikoff’s own: instead he has created, through selection, arrangement, and the rhythms of the testimony set as verse on the page, a poem of witness by the perpetrators and the survivors of the Holocaust themselves. He lets the terrible history unfold – in history’s own words.

"…Reznikoff is the quintessential poet of New York City and one of the key figures in Jewish-American poetry. A writer of astonishing insight and unsurpassable charm, his poems endeavour to make visible much that usually goes unnoticed." - Publisher’s Weekly USA

"When we come to the end of Holocaust we want to find a place to be sick…No poet has ever written a book so nakedly shocking… One marvels at the courage Reznikoff must have drawn upon to write it."
- Anne Stevenson

"His Auschwitz was not… William Styron's "fatal embolism in the bloodstream of mankind," but a real place where men and women lived and died without witnesses, and mourners." - Sylvia Rothchild

Charles Reznikoff was born August, 1894, in Brooklyn, New York. His parents were Russian Jewish immigrants who fled the pogroms that followed the assassination of Alexander II. He was a blood-and-bone New Yorker, a collector of images and stories who walked the city from Bronx to Battery and breathed the soul of the Jewish immigrant experience into a lifetime of poetry. He died in 1976; one year after this book was first published in the USA.

Welcome to the poetry of the night. The graveyard shift. The kingdom of the undead. The Night Shift is a celebration of the moon-lit life of the animal kingdom, the nocturnal hungers that wake when the sun goes down. It is also a book about the midnight world of insomniacs, lovers, long-distance drivers, breast-feeding mothers, bouncers, poets, drunks and shift-workers.
Representing the work of over fifty poets, including W. H. Auden, Ted Hughes, Paul Muldoon, John Clare, Sylvia Plath, Simon Armitage, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Dylan Thomas and Carol Ann Duffy, The Night Shift brings together the late-night music of ticking clocks, hooting owls, crying babies and the BBC World Service.

Michael Baron is involved with Words on the Water in the Lake District. He edited the Five Leaves collection On a Bat’s Wing; poems about bats. Andy Croft has edited several collections for Five Leaves. His latest solo work is The Ghost Writer. Jenny Swann has written three poetry collections, worked as a poetry editor and now runs Candlestick Press.

John Humphrys is a presenter on BBC Radio 4's Today

Catalonia has been one of the major success stories of the last 30 years. Catalonia brings together an account of Catalan history and culture, and the central, multi-faceted concept of nationhood. John Payne places particular emphasis on the Middle Ages and the modern period, when Catalonia has performed upon the world stage. The book concludes by reviewing the complex ideas around identity and nationhood, and the central role of the Catalan language.

"The book contains several original gems. Payne is particularly original when explaining ecology and nationalism... this thoughtful book is a thorough, loving account of Catalonia and its problems." - Times Literary Supplement

John Payne began his working life as a lecturer in English at the University of Barcelona. He is fluent in Catalan and Spanish. His first book on Catalonia appeared in 1991, the first edition of this book in 2004. He is the author of Journey Up the Thames: William Morris and Modern England. He writes for Tribune, London Magazine, Catalonia Today and other magazines. John Payne lives in Frome, near Bath.

From early jazz to the dance bands of the swing era, from bebop to jazz-rock to the avant-garde, as the composers of jazz standards, and as impresarios, record producers and the founders of jazz labels, festivals and venues, Jews have been and are there, wherever jazz is performed.

This book explores the role of Jews in breaking the colour bar in American jazz, and in using jazz as an instrument against apartheid and against Soviet repression, and as a means of survival in Nazi death camps.

The book also investigates the phenomenon and influence of ‘Jewish jazz’, from the Jazz Age to the present day. Mike Gerber has interviewed everyone that matters – Jews and non-Jews, Black and White, and his book includes one of the last interviews with Artie Shaw.

Mike Gerber is a freelance journalist. He lives in London

Following on from the successful The Good Son, Russel McLean’s Scottish Private Eye J McNee gets drawn into trying to find a missing child, the God-daughter of local hard man David Burns who seems to have some friends on the Dundee police force.

"Dark, well-honed and taut. I crave more McNee." - Jen Jordan for Crimespree Magazine

Russel D McLean writes for The Big Thrill (the newsletter of the International Thriller Writers’ Association), At Central Booking and Crime Scene Scotland. He works for Waterstone’s.

Three Men on the Moscow Metro is a journey from the Newcastle Metro to the Moscow Metro. Armed only with a battered copy of Jerome K Jerome’s Three Men on a Boat (a cult classic in the Soviet Union) poets Andy Croft, Bill Herbert and Paul Summers are soon lost underground. Like their predecessors on the Thames, they are completely out of their depth, idealists abroad, adrift in a very foreign medium.

Andy Croft’s many books include Red Letter Days and the poetry collections Ghost Writer and Sticky. He has written forty non-fiction books (mostly about football) and three novels for teenagers. His edited books for Five Leaves include Red Sky at Night and Not Just a Game. He lives in Middlesbrough.

W.N. Herbert’s poetry includes Cabaret McGonagall (short-listed for the Forward Prize), The Big Bumper Book of Troy (long-listed for Scottish Book of the Year) Forked Tongue and Bad Shaman Blues (both shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize). He is Professor of Poetry and Creative Writing in the School of English at the University of Newcastle.

Paul Summers’ poetry publications include Vermeer’s Dark Parlour, Beer & Skittles, The Last Bus, The Rat’s Mirror, Cunawabi and Big Bella’s Dirty Café. He was founding co-editor of the magazines Billy Liar and Liar Republic. He lives in North Shields.

1911, East London. The police collaborate with racketeers to keep an uneasy peace, periodically broken by vicious street wars. Dido Peach comes to prominence running protection rackets by breaking the unwritten rules of the underworld. His fall is just as spectacular, shaking even the callous and vicious world he lived in.

"Enthralling" - Sunday Times

"Alexander Baron was a skilled traditionalist, a contriver of plotdriven, socially perceptive meditations on place." - Iain Sinclair

Alexander Baron is a major writer of the past. His From the City, From the Plough was a classic of writing about WWII. The re-issue of his The Lowlife is currently on hold pending a film deal, the last publication of which was introduced by Iain Sinclair, long a champion of Alexander Baron’s work.

…He was a doctor for God’s sake. I was told to strip and they tossed my clothes away saying, ‘You won’t need these here either,’ and I was handed a blue boiler suit to wear. I began to protest but got a slam in the mouth and lost my front teeth. They then pushed me into the pool, to disinfect me, they said. And that was my start in the hospital. I was there eighteen years. They took everything away.
Patient R. Recounted to the author 1997.

Dr Jack Shade’s long time girlfriend vanishes, presumed dead. Through his professional contacts Shade moves to work within the secure hospital system – to try to understand, and take revenge on those who might be responsible.

During his time in the hospital he realises he is as much a prisoner as those he works with.

Shade observes, gets involved with, hurts but ultimately comes to understand his clients. Meantime his own dissolute life of drugs and affairs takes its toll.

Like WG Sebald, the author includes photos to help tell the story - are they real or is this all fiction?

Rod Madocks has spent ten years writing this unforgettable novel, drawing on his experience of secure units. He is a policy officer in Mental Health Commissioning in Nottinghamshire.

This novella tells the story of Johnny and Diane Laski, a sculptor and his wife, and their attempt to bring a new life into the world, during a cold Maine winter, deep in the country.

William Kotzwinkle tells the story of the couple’s night drive to the hospital, their long labour, and their ultimately, unsuccessful breech birth. Unafraid of his subject, Kotzwinkle destroys any sentimental illusions about the beauty of childbirth or the distance of birth from death; he reminds us of how closely the two are intertwined, of the frightening power of the life force, and of the unpredictability and uncanniness of death.

And yet, his small book is not without hope.

"A beautiful piece of work... the economy of the writing and the matter-of-fact acceptance make it immensely moving" - The Daily Telegraph

"Swimming in the Secret Sea is a deeply moving book. The textures of its delicately conveyed anguish, simplicity make its grief all the more stunning." - Publishers Weekly

"Swimmer in the Secret Sea reveals a depth of emotion and an immensity of feeling seldom seen in American writers today."
- The San Francisco Review of Books

William Kotzwinkle, well-known for his many enduring children's books such as Trouble in Bugland and his novelisation of the movie E.T. The Extraterrestrial, is equally adept at writing seriously and poetically about life in extremis. He is also well known in the UK for his adult novel Fata Morgana and Dr. Rat.

The thirty years between the Russian Revolution and Stalin’s destruction of Yiddish culture produced some of the best 20th C writing in Yiddish. Brilliant avant-garde work challenged the best of European modernism during the 1920s. This was stamped out in the 1930s by Stalin’s repressive demand for “socialist realism”. The greatest challenge to Yiddish writing under Stalinism came during World War II when Soviet policy insisted that German atrocities did not single out the Jews for special extermination but applied equally to all Soviet citizens. Jewish writers in the USSR, well aware of the extent of the Holocaust, had to find ways to express their horror and grief without falling foul of the official Soviet censorship. The results were remarkable.

Remarkable stories from the forgotten world of Soviet Yiddish writing during World War II.

Jewish writers in the USSR, aware of the extent of the Holocaust, find ways to express their horror and grief without falling foul of the official Soviet censorship o An important book for anyone interested in Soviet or Jewish literature.

We regret to announce that Joseph Sherman died in March of 2009. His book will now be published in February 2010 with a foreword by Gennady Estraikh.

Joseph Sherman taughts at the Oriental Institute, Oxford. He edited a number of books on Yiddish literature and wrote regularly for the Times Literary Supplement.

The Soviet writers include: David Bergelson, Peretz Markis, and Dovid Hofshteyn.