Book picks similar to
The Great Zoo/El Gran Zoo by Nicolás Guillén


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El sol de los venados


Gloria Cecilia Diaz - 1996
    This sad event clearly marks the end of her childhood and, at the story's close, the "sun of the deer", the red light at the end of the day, becomes the eternal symbol of her mother.

Tape for the Turn of the Year


A.R. Ammons - 1965
    R. Ammons’s long, thin poem was written on a roll of adding-machine tape, then transferred foot by foot to manuscript. He chose this method as a serious experiment in making a poem adapt to something outside itself. The tape determined both the length of the poem’s lines and when it ends. Tape for the Turn of the Year is a poem of infinite variety, blessed by the rich resources of one of this century’s greatest poets. By turns witty, serious, lyrical, and meditative, it is at once a superbly entertaining book and a significant literary achievement.

Boris by the Sea


Matvei Yankelevich - 2009
    The world was 'somewhere inside his skull. And it hurt.' These poems and dramatic sketches, however, delight even when they hurt" -- ROSMARIE WALDROP"BORIS BY THE SEA was born when Aesop was reading Chekhov, and Chekhov was reading Nietzsche, and Nietzsche was watching The Brother From Another Planet. Actually Matvei Yankelevich wrote this book, but 'wrote' is incomplete... he seems more to inhabit this stateless, beautiful being who uses language to move his body or erase the sea: 'Boris looked over himself and realized there were many parts of him that he could not see. And only a small part of these parts was on the surface.' BORIS BY THE SEA could be a children's fable if it weren't so freakin' real, unreal, hyper-real: 'But people need each other to open each other up and see what is inside.' This is Boris--and he, like Pinnochio--has a clever master." -- ROBERT FITTERMANMatvei Yankelevich's first full-length book, BORIS BY THE SEA, is a work of existential theater that destroys the distance between puppeteer and puppet, between ego and id, between what is real and what is absurd. Consisting of prose, poems, and plays, the book creates its own world and then confronts the loneliness of having to exist within one's own creation. Like Daniil Kharms, Yankelevich has written a children's book for only the bravest of adults.

C.P. Cavafy: Collected Poems


Constantinos P. Cavafy - 1972
    P. Cavafy (1863 - 1933) lived in relative obscurity in Alexandria, and a collected edition of his poems was not published until after his death. Now, however, he is regarded as the most important figure in twentieth-century Greek poetry, and his poems are considered among the most powerful in modern European literature.Here is an extensively revised edition of the acclaimed translations of Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, which capture Cavafy's mixture of formal and idiomatic use of language and preserve the immediacy of his frank treatment of homosexual themes, his brilliant re-creation of history, and his astute political ironies. The resetting of the entire edition has permitted the translators to review each poem and to make alterations where appropriate. George Savidis has revised the notes according to his latest edition of the Greek text.About the first edition: The best [English version] we are likely to see for some time.--James Merrill, The New York Review of Books [Keeley and Sherrard] have managed the miracle of capturing this elusive, inimitable, unforgettable voice. It is the most haunting voice I know in modern poetry.--Walter Kaiser, The New Republic ?

Madonna Anno Domini: Poems


Joshua Clover - 1997
    Clover fuses formal control, a solid grounding in poetic tradition (his allusions range from Shakespeare to Dickinson to John Cale), and sheer visionary exhilaration into a technical, moral, aesthetic, and imaginative lexicon that irradiates each page.The eerie cyberglow of Clover's lines illuminates a pageant of blurred and fragmented desolation: the Bomb, death camps, the Persian Gulf War, the beating of Rodney King, the whole numbing litany of modern horrors. Clover is a master of poetic shorthand, of the stark, unnerving image as immediate as yellow tape at a crime scene.Madonna anno domini is a sacrament for the twilight of the atomic age, a hellish Interzone with "God in abeyance" where dazed speakers search through the vertigo of negation for love and belief. And here. in this utterly convincing vision of a world whose center has long since lost its hold, we see the life on whose brink we, at the end of the millennium, find ourselves poised.

Miss Appleby's Academy


Elizabeth Gill - 2013
    And because she has a child with her, seemingly out of marriage, they want nothing to do with her – except for pub landlord Mick Castle. When Emma opens an academy and sets herself up in competition with the local school, she provokes a savage response from the community. But she will not be deterred – even when her past catches up with her and Mick is forced to choose between family and love.

Vera & Linus


Jesse Ball - 2006
    VERA & LINUS is a series of short sketches. The book's theme is the love between the two protagonists, Vera and Linus. They are mischief makers and tricksters of the most daring sort, and they are constantly up to no good, but the language holds them with a clear restraint, a restraint born perhaps out of the peculiar nature of their love, a love both for each other and the things of the world. Their mastery, and shifting natures allow them to compel the workaday world as they see it, but not to rule over each other, and so their game begins, as Vera struggles to outwit Linus, and Linus to outwit Vera.

Count the Waves: Poems


Sandra Beasley - 2015
    A man and a woman sit at the same dinner table, an ocean of worry separating them. An iceberg sets out to dance. A sword swallower ponders his dating prospects. "The vessel is simple, a rowboat among yachts," the poet observes in "Ukulele." "No one hides a Tommy gun in its case. / No bluesman runs over his uke in a whiskey rage."Beasley's voice is pithy and playful, with a ferocious intelligence that invites comparison to both Sylvia Plath and Dorothy Parker. In one of six signature sestinas, she warns, "You must not use a house to build a home, / and never look for poetry in poems." The collection’s centerpiece is a haunting sequence that engages The Traveler's Vade Mecum, an 1853 compendium of phrases for use by mail, telegraph, or the enigmatic “Instantaneous Letter Writer."Assembled over ten years and thousands of miles, these poems illuminate how intimacy is lost and gained during our travels. Decisive, funny, and as compassionate as she is merciless, Beasley is a reckoning force on the page.

Can't Help Falling in Love


Prachi Gupta - 2018
    Is it true? In the case of Radhika, maybe it did. She’s all ready for a fresh start in a new city. She starts living with her cousin, Meera and a series of unexpected events start to unfold which turns her life upside-down. She meets someone new, Rishi. He is very different from what she likes yet intriguing. When everything is going smooth, a lover from the past, Sameer, suddenly re-appears. Now she’s torn between the past and the present. Adding to this craziness, appear two funny characters Zain and Nancy. They are cousins and work in the same office with Radhika. Also, in the picture is Radhika’s aunt, a single lady in her fifties; who’s way too much interested in Radhika’s love life. While Nancy wants Radhika to date Sameer her aunt wants her to pair with Rishi. All entangled, no way out. Now with both the males trying hard to get her, her life becomes more troubled.

The Legend of Jake Jackson (Jake Jackson #7)


William H. Joiner Jr. - 2020
    

U.S. Marshal Shorty Thompson - Mister You Was Shot In The Head: Tales of the Old West Book 83


Paul L. Thompson - 2020
    

Rain Of Gold Part 1 Of 2


Victor Villaseñor - 1991
    And Rain of Gold is possibly his finest work -- a sweeping tableau of family ties and cultural traditions.pA pair of strong families, two proud but embattled lineages, find themselves bound together by time and circumstance. Through political upheavals, loves gained and lives lost, the families struggle to keep what is precious to them. This premise would make a mesmerizing novel -- but this story is all true.p"A great love story...magnificent." (Albuquerque Journal)

The Turning


A.L. Masters - 2021
    They realize too late that this is no ordinary plague...and that the enemy they have to fight may not be the only thing they need to worry about.Book One of The Salvation Plague series.The Turning includes foul language, graphic violence, and some mature themes.

In the Dismal Swamp


Patrick Balester - 2008
    He is quickly disappointed when a dead body turns up floating in the Great Dismal Swamp. And this is not just any dead body. Ashley Myrtle was the wife of a prominent local politician. Greg soon discovers that Ashley, an apparent drowning victim, may have been murdered. Unfortunately, no one wants to believe him. The mayor, the woman's husband, an old boyfriend and even her coworkers seem eager to rule her death an accidental drowning. With help from a reluctant FBI agent, Greg follows a trail of small town secrets and lies to discover what really happened on that cold spring day. Refusing to give up, he discovers a vital clue deep in the swamp that leads to the killer. But justice won't be served until he can prove it was a case of murder.

The Unemployed Fortune-Teller: Essays and Memoirs


Charles Simic - 1995
    Provides glimpses into the origins of Charles Simic's poetry