Nives


Sacha Naspini - 2020
    She didn’t cry when she found the body, she didn’t cry at the funeral. Even the fog of her loneliness evaporates quickly when she decides to keep her favorite chicken Giacomina with her in the bedroom. She suddenly feels relieved, almost happy, but also guilty: how can the company of a chicken replace her dead husband?Then one day, Giacomina becomes paralyzed in front of the tv. Unable to wake her up, Nives has no choice but to call the town’s veterinarian, Loriano Bottai, an old acquaintance of hers. What follows is a phone call that seems to last a lifetime. The conversation veers from the chicken to the past—to the life they once shared, the secrets they never had the courage to reveal, wounds that never healed.Nives echoes the stories we tell ourselves at night, when we can’t sleep: stories of love lost, of abandonment, of silent and heart-breaking nostalgia. With delicate yet sharp prose and raw, astonishing honesty, Sacha Naspini bravely explores the core of our shared humanity.

The Last Night of the Earth Poems


Charles Bukowski - 1992
    Poems deal with writing, death and immortality, literature, city life, illness, war, and the past.

Unmarked Treasure: Poems


Cyril Wong - 2004
    The poet wonders at his own existence and struggles between actual living and the desire to die."Cyril Wong continues to explore the nuances of relationships, in language that is lyrical, beautifully crafted, and erotically charged. There are several fine love poems that reach out to embrace a common humanity. Wong swims into the undercurrents of family tensions, hidden desires, and the meaning of a self... as well as questioning our understanding of both life and death."- Rebecca Edwards, author of Scar Country and Holiday Coast Medusa"Reading Cyril Wong is always to encounter risk, the painful suturing of art and life, trials of faith and baptisms of fire. I have only the deepest respect for someone who has razed the walls between the private and the public, and in doing so, carved more space for all of us."- Alfian Sa'at, author of One Fierce Hour and A History of Amnesia

Amplitude: New and Selected Poems


Tess Gallagher - 1987
    Poems consider women's roles in society, childhood, home, nature, language, communications, the past, and mortality.

The Animal Gazer


Edgardo Franzosini - 2015
    . . . Franozosini illuminates the life of this singular artist . . . an artist capable of sculpting in bronze the movements of animals and grasping their vitality in such a way that critics, after years of neglect, are discovering its unique power." —Il GiornaleA hypnotic novel inspired by the strange and fascinating life of sculptor Rembrandt Bugatti, brother of the fabled automaker. With World War I closing in and the Belle Époque teetering to a close, Bugatti leaves his native Milan for Paris, and then volunteers in Antwerp during the war. While there, he obsessively observes and sculpts the baboons, giraffes, and panthers in the zoo, finding empathy with their plight and identifying with their life in captivity. With the Germans dropping bombs over the city, the Belgian authorities are forced to make a heart-wrenching decision about the fate of the caged animals, and Bugatti is stricken with grief from which he'll never recover. His own end follows suit shortly: he returns to Paris, and at the age of thirty-one, he is dead of suicide.Rembrandt Bugatti's work is now displayed in major art museums around the world and routinely fetches millions at auction. Edgardo Franzosini recreates the young artist's life with intense lyricism, passion, and sensitivity.Edgardo Franzosini, born in 1952, is the author of five novels. The Animal Gazer won two distinguished Italian literary awards in 2016, the Premio Comisso and the Premio Dessi.

Follow Your Heart


Susanna Tamaro - 1994
    Originally published in Italy, "Follow Your Heart" won the coveted Premio Donna Citta di Roma and sold over 800,000 copies in that country alone before hitting bestseller lists throughout the rest of Europe. Now North American readers can enjoy the novel that has won over the world.It begins in late autumn 1992 as an elderly Italian woman, prompted by the knowledge of her encroaching death, sits down to write a letter to her granddaughter now grown and living in far-off America. Through these moving reflections, we see one life laid bare--joys, sorrows, regrets, and all. And through the eyes of a woman nearing the end of her days, we come to understand what life experience has taught her: that no matter what the stakes, we must look within ourselves and gather the courage to follow our hearts.

The Art of Struggle


Michel Houellebecq - 1996
    Deeply melancholic and despairing at the inhumanity of the present-day world, yet brimming with vitality and invention, these timely, poignant poems clear away the dross of hollow optimism and call for an end to the nightmare of modern existence.

soul like thunder


Sophia Elaine Hanson - 2018
    Sophia Elaine Hanson is the author of the critically acclaimed chapbook hummingbird as well as the #1 bestselling young adult series the Vinyl Trilogy. She resides in New York City and loves pigeons and Star Wars.

The Story of My Life


Giacomo Casanova - 1789
    He lived a life stranger than most fictions, and the tale of his own adventures is his most compelling story, and one that remained unfinished at the time of his death. This new selection contains all the highlights of Casanova's life: his youth in Venice as a precocious ecclesiastic; his dabbling in the occult; his imprisonment and thrilling escape; and his amorous conquests, ranging from noblewomen to nuns.

Rumi, Day by Day


Maryam Mafi - 2014
    These poems have been selected on the basis of the poignancy of their message and their relevance to contemporary life.This is timeless wisdom translated for modern readers. It is a guide for meditation and a light switch that you can turn on to make your daily connection with spirit. Use these words as tools to better your life each day, to draw continued guidance, inspiration and spiritual wealth.

The Vixen


W.S. Merwin - 1996
    "Merwin writes, " J.D. McClatchy has said in THE NEW YORKER, "with one of the most distinctive and original voices in American poetry."

Illuminations


Arthur Rimbaud - 1875
    They are offered here both in their original texts and in superb English translations by Louise Varèse. Mrs. Varèse first published her versions of Rimbaud’s Illuminations in 1946. Since then she has revised her work and has included two poems which in the interim have been reclassified as part of Illuminations. This edition also contains two other series of prose poems, which include two poems only recently discovered in France, together with an introduction in which Miss Varèse discusses the complicated ins and outs of Rimbaldien scholarship and the special qualities of Rimbaud’s writing. Rimbaud was indeed the most astonishing of French geniuses. Fired in childhood with an ambition to write, he gave up poetry before he was twenty-one. Yet he had already produced some of the finest examples of French verse. He is best known for A Season in Hell, but his other prose poems are no less remarkable. While he was working on them he spoke of his interest in hallucinations––"des vertiges, des silences, des nuits." These perceptions were caught by the poet in a beam of pellucid, and strangely active language which still lights up––now here, now there––unexplored aspects of experience and thought.

Margherita Dolce Vita


Stefano Benni - 2005
    This is his twelfth bestselling book of fiction. Fifteen-year-old Margherita lives with her eccentric family on the outskirts of town, a semi-urban wilderness peopled by gypsies, illegal immigrants, and no end of bizarre characters: a reassuring and fertile playground for an imaginative little girl like Margherita. But one day, a gigantic, black cube shows up next door. Her new neighbors have arrived, and they’re destined to ruin everything.

The Homecoming Party


Carmine Abate - 2004
    Sitting on the steps of the village church in front of an enormous bonfire lit in celebration of the season, a father and his son exchange stories. The father speaks of life as an emigrant from Italy, in perpetual limbo between departure and return, between France and his home. The son tells of a life marred by his father's long is absemces, but also of an otherwise idyllic childhood spent in a vivid, enchanting land. Each hides an awful secret concerning the fate of a mysterious man whose affair with the boy's older sister changed their lives. On this night of nights, a shared truth that has long been buried in the hearts of both men will finally emerge.Set in an Arberesh town in southern Italy and told in alternating first-person voices, The Homecoming Party is simultaneoulsy a coming-of-age novel, a love story, and a heartfelt cry against the atrocious standards of living that force so many southern Italians to seek a better life elsewhere.In Antony Shugaar's masterful translation, The Homecoming Party is an intense and moving novel about the difficulties of saying goodbye from one of Italy's greatest storytellers.

The Voronezh Notebooks


Osip Mandelstam - 1980
    It is a great gift to be able to read these ninety poems together and complete in English for the first time, with explanatory notes provided for each. They form a wrenching diary of 'iron tenderness' and doomed, penetrative brilliance". -- Publishers Weekly. Childish and wise, joyous and angry, at once complex and simple, he was sustained for twenty years by his wife and memoirist Nadezhda Mandelstam, who became, with Anna Akhmatova, the savior of his poetry. After his exile to Voronezh and his sentencing to hard labor for counter-revolutionary activities, he died of 'heart failure' in the winter of 1938 in Siberia.