Composed of 316 unanswerable questions, these poems integrate the wonder of a child with the experiences of an adult. By turns Orphic, comic, surreal, and poignant, Neruda's questions lead the reader beyond reason into the realms of intuition and pure imagination.This complete translation of Pablo Neruda's El libro de las preguntas (The Book of Questions) features Neruda's original Spanish-language poems alongside William O'Daly's English translations. In his introduction O'Daly, who has translated eight volumes of Pablo Neruda's poetry, writes, "These poems, more so than any of Neruda's other work, remind us that living in a state of visionary surrender to the elemental questions, free of the quiet desperation of clinging too tightly to answers, may be our greatest act of faith."When Neruda died in 1973, The Book of Questions was one of eight unpublished poetry manuscripts that lay on his desk. In it, Neruda achieves a deeper vulnerability and vision than in his earlier work-and this unique book is a testament to everything that made Neruda an artist."Neruda's questions evoke pictures that make sense on a visual level before the reader can grasp them on a literal one. The effect is mildly dazzling [and] O'Daly's translations achieve a tone that is both meditative and spontaneous." --Publishers WeeklyPablo Neruda, born in southern Chile, led a life charged with poetic and political activity. He was the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, the International Peace Prize, and served as Chile's ambassador to several countries, including Burma, France, and Argentina. He died in 1973.II.Tell me, is the rose naked or is that her only dress?Why do trees conceal the splendor of their roots?Who hears the regrets of the thieving automobile?Is there anything in the world sadder than a train standing in the rain?XIV.And what did the rubies say standing before the juice of pomegranates?Why doesn't Thursday talk itself into coming after Friday?Who shouted with gleewhen the color blue was born?Why does the earth grievewhen the violets appear?

    As one claustrophobic day follows another, he wonders why no one has found him yet, whether his wife has given him up for dead, and how he'll get by in this society that looks so familiar, yet is so strange. In a vision of hell unlike any previously imagined, Budai must learn to survive in a world where words and meaning are unconnected. A suspenseful and haunting Hungarian classic. Translated by George Szirtes.Ferenc Karinthy was born in Budapest in 1921. He obtained a PhD in linguistics and went on to be a translator and editor, as well as an award-winning novelist, playwright, journalist and water polo champion. He is the author of over a dozen novels. Metropole is the first to be translated into English.

    In these stories spanning his long career from the 1960s to the present, he gives us a gallery of people searching, in love, for escape: factory girls on their day off and assembly-line workers lost in Walter-Mittyesque fantasies; a young woman on a honeymoon with the man she did not marry; a divorce-court judge whose mistress cannot understand his affection for the routines of his marriage; a young wife who falls into a passionate affair with an elderly bookbinder crippled by war. Lovers for a Day is a book stamped with Klima's unique wisdom, a personal history of a national evolution and an acute and moving examination of our attempts to find freedom in love. "Ivan Klima's view of love is often witty, sometimes playful, and has a convincing sense of the erotic....[and] the kindness that can endure between a husband and wife long after the passion has fled." -- Andrew Miller, The New York Times Book Review; "Klima has evolved differently from his contemporaries.... Rather than become embittered by his country's past, Klima has come to a truce with imperfection -- the imperfection of history and of love." -- Jennie Yabroff, San Francisco Chronicle

    This collection brings together some of the most well known stories of M T Vasudevan Nair, fairly representative of his literary works. Written over a broad span of time from 1962 to 2000, the stories collected here reflect the built-in variety of his fictional concerns and the changing tones of his narration.

    However, this anecdote is told ninety-nine more times, each in a radically different style, as a sonnet, an opera, in slang, and with many more permutations. This virtuoso set of variations is a linguistic rust-remover, and a guide to literary forms.

    Amazing in its thematic range and stylistic breadth, his poetry "leaps continents and covers war and peace, intolerance and human striving . . . a passionate and essential edition of his collected poems" ( The New York Times).

    Written in the splendid bareness of her late style, these pages are Marguerite Duras's theory of literature: comparing a dying fly to the work of style; remembering the trance and incurable disarray of writing; recreating the last moments of a British pilot shot during World War II and buried next to her house; or else letting out a magisterial, so what? To question six decades of storytelling, all the essays together operate as a deceitful, yet indispensable confession.

    The cold and gloom of the Russian environment cannot compare to the relationship that Pavel Andreitch, a rich aristocratic, has with his wife, who is no longer in love, or even tolerant of her husband, although helplessly reliant on his financial support. Their disintegrating relationship is set to the backdrop of the starving peasants of the lower classes, illuminating the perennial tension of an egotistical, self-centered man and the struggling goodness of a woman who cares about more than just herself.

    In his Introduction, Memon traces the evolution of the Urdu short story from its origins in the work of writers like Munshi Premchand the first professional short story writer in Urdu through the emergence of the Progressives in the late 1930s, whose writings were unabashedly political and underpinned their Marxist ideologies, to the post-Independence Modernist era, and today s generation of avant-garde, experimental writers of Urdu fiction. Every story in the anthology illustrates one or the other facet of the form in the Urdu literary tradition. But even more than for their formal technique and inventiveness, these stories have been included because of their power and impact on the reader. Death and poverty face off in Premchand's masterpiece The Shroud. In Khalida Asghar's The Wagon, a mysterious redness begins to cloak the sunset in a village by the Ravi. Behind closed doors and cracks in the windows lies desire but also a sense of queer foreboding in Naiyer Masud's Obscure Domains of Fear and Desire. The tragedy and horror of Partition are brought to life by Saadat Hasan Manto's lunatic (in Toba Tek Singh ) and the eponymous heroine of Rajinder Singh Bedi's Laajwanti. Despairing, violent, passionate, humorous, ironic and profound the fiction in The Greatest Urdu Stories Ever Told will imprint itself indelibly on your mind. M. U. Memon is a translator without parallel and this book, which brings together the best of short fiction in the literary Urdu tradition, is sure to be classic. This collection spans the entire spectrum of the Urdu literary tradition from Premchand, who is considered the first Urdu short-story writer, to contemporary writers like S. M. Ashraf and Tassaduq Sohail. In The Greatest Urdu Stories Ever Told, you will find much-loved gems like Premchand's Kafan , Rajinder Singh Bedi's Laajwanti , Saadat Hasan Manto's Toba Tek Singh as well as new classics like Sajid Rashid's Fable of a Severed Head and Anwer Khan's The Pose . This book is part of a continuing series that gave us the highly popular The Greatest Bengali Stories Ever Told.

    

    She writes about her influences, her struggles, and her formation as both a reader and a writer; she describes the perils of “bad language” and suggests ways in which it has long excluded women’s truth; she proposes a choral fusion of feminine talent as she brilliantly discourses on the work of Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, Ingeborg Bachmann, and many others.Here is a subtle yet candid book by “one of the great novelists of our time” about adventures in literature, both in and out of the margins.“Everyone should read everything with Elena Ferrante’s name on it.”—The Boston Globe

    This brilliantly ironic novel about literature and writing, in Vila-Matas’s trademark witty and erudite style, is told in the form of a lecture delivered by a novelist clearly a version of the author himself. The “lecturer” tells of his two-year stint living in Marguerite Duras’s garret during the seventies, spending time with writers, intellectuals, and eccentrics, and trying to make it as a creator of literature: “I went to Paris and was very poor and very unhappy.” Encountering such luminaries as Duras, Roland Barthes, Georges Perec, Sergio Pitol, Samuel Beckett, and Juan Marsé, our narrator embarks on a novel whose text will “kill” its readers and put him on a footing with his beloved Hemingway. (Never Any End to Paris takes its title from a refrain in A Moveable Feast.) What emerges is a fabulous portrait of intellectual life in Paris that, with humor and penetrating insight, investigates the part literature plays in our lives.

    In Schneider's Berlin, real people cross the Wall not to defect but to quarrel with their lovers, see Hollywood movies, and sometimes just because they can't help themselves—the Wall has divided their emotions as much as it has their country."An honest, rich book. . . . It is one those rare books that come back at odd moments to intrude on your comfortable conclusions and easy images."—Robert Houston, Nation

    Fantastical and wonderfully strange, this political parable has an uncanny resonance with today's Russia under Putin.Oleg Kashin is a famous Russian journalist and activist who, in 2010, was beaten to within an inch of his life by unknown assailants, in an attack most likely politically motivated by his reporting. The events of Fardwor, Russia! (the title is taken from a flag with a slogan—"Forward, Russia!"—gone wrong) could seem grotesque, if they did not so eerily echo the absurd state of affairs in modern Russia. Under Putin's regime, authors dare to criticize the state of affairs and affairs of the state only through veiled satire&—and even then, as Kashin's experience shows, the threat of repercussions is real.A witty, playful, brave, and incisive work that blends science fiction with political satire, Fardwor, Russia! is a must-read for anyone interested in contemporary Russia&—or the hilarious and frightening follies of power.

    In this collection of lively and provocative pieces he talks about what readers want from books and how to look at the literature we encounter in a new light.