The poems are written in clear, straightforward free verse. Here is an example of his style from "The Chinese Checker Players": "When I was six years old/I played Chinese checkers/with a woman/who was ninety-three years old."Recurrent themes in the book include love, sex, loss & loneliness. Incorporated throughout are an intriguing mix of pop & 'high' culture references: Jefferson Airplane, Ophelia, the New York Yankees, John Donne etc. The book often has an earthy flavor. He writes about such topics as his own penis or the smell of a fart. Some particularly memorable poems include the following:"All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace," a sci-fi vision of a "cybernetic meadow"; the open-ended "Karma Repair Kit: Items 1-4"; "Discovery," a joyful poem about sexual intimacy; the surreal "The Pumpkin Tide"; the funny, haiku-like "November 3"; & "A Good-Talking Candle," which invites readers into altered states of perception. Altho most of the poems are very short, there is one longer poem: the 9-part, 9-page "the Galilee Hitch-hiker," which chronicles the surreal adventures of Baudelaire — among other experiences, he opens an unconventional hamburger stand in San Francisco. If you only know Brautigan from his weird & wonderful novels, read this collection.-Michael Mazza (edited)

    Included are his Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winners The Walking, Words for the Wind, and The Far Field.

    When soldiers breaking up a protest kill a deaf boy, Petya, the gunshot becomes the last thing the citizens hear--they all have gone deaf, and their dissent becomes coordinated by sign language. The story follows the private lives of townspeople encircled by public violence: a newly married couple, Alfonso and Sonya, expecting a child; the brash Momma Galya, instigating the insurgency from her puppet theater; and Galya's girls, heroically teaching signing by day and by night luring soldiers one by one to their deaths behind the curtain. At once a love story, an elegy, and an urgent plea, Ilya Kaminsky's long-awaited Deaf Republic confronts our time's vicious atrocities and our collective silence in the face of them.Finalist for the T. S. Eliot PrizeFinalist for the Forward Prize for Best Collection

    None of these he allows to overwhelm his spirit or his poems, which demonstrate, through breath and cadence and unrepentant enthrallment, that a gentle palm on a chest can calm the fiercest hungers.

    The 1996 Pulitzer winner in poetry and a major collection, Jorie Graham's The Dream of the United Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994 spans twenty years of writing and includes generous selections from her first five books: Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts, The End of Beauty, Region of Unlikeness,and Materialism.

    She has been called “an American virtuoso of the short story form” (Salon) and “one of the quiet giants . . . of American fiction” (Los Angeles Times Book Review). Now, for the first time, Davis’s short stories will be collected in one volume, from the groundbreaking Break It Down (1986) to the 2007 National Book Award nominee Varieties of Disturbance. The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis is an event in American letters.

    Opens all the doors. You can walk through any one that suits you." -- Jim MorrisonAs the lead singer and song writer for The Doors, Jim Morrison brought the poetry of the damned to rock'n'roll. As a poet, he infused verse with the wild lyricism and mesmerizing beat of rock. By the time of his death in 1971, Morrison had become one of the most haunting voices in the collective unconscious of America, echoed by performers such as Patti Smith.This book, compiled from the Morrison literary estate by his beloved friends, presents Morrison's unpublished work for the first time--poems that celebrate the juju of sex, the touring musician's labyrinth of highways, airports, and motel corridors, and the shamanistic power of rock'n'roll, as well as photographs, drawings, facsimiles from Morrison's diaries, and a self-interview that reveals him as he has never been revealed before. A genuine literary event, Wilderness is the last testament of a writer of liberating ferocity and tenderness whose tremendous impact on an entire generation is still being felt.Cover photo by Frank LisciandroCover design by Wendy Bass

    With a different die-cut on every page, Tree of Codes explores previously unchartered literary territory. Initially deemed impossible to make, the book is a first — as much a sculptural object as it is a work of masterful storytelling. Tree of Codes is the story of an enormous last day of life — as one character's life is chased to extinction, Foer multi-layers the story with immense, anxious, at times disorientating imagery, crossing both a sense of time and place, making the story of one person’s last day everyone’s story. Inspired to exhume a new story from an existing text, Jonathan Safran Foer has taken his "favorite" book, The Street of Crocodiles by Polish-Jewish writer Bruno Schulz, and used it as a canvas, cutting into and out of the pages, to arrive at an original new story told in Jonathan Safran Foer's own acclaimed voice.

    Stein's strong influence on 20th-century literature is evident in this 1915 work of highly original prose rendered in thought-provoking experimental techniques.

    Mostly written on the island paradise of Capri (the idyllic setting of the Oscar-winning movie Il Postino), Love Poems embraces the seascapes surrounding the poet, and his love Matilde Urrutia, their waves and shores saturated with a new, yearning eroticism.And when you appearall the rivers soundin my body, bellsshake the sky,and a hymn fills the world.        © 1973 by Neruda & Walsh

    The greatest Americans Have not been born yet They are waiting quietly For their past to die please give blood Here is the account of a man so ravished by a kiss that it distorts his highest and lowest frequencies of understanding into an Incongruent mean of babble and brilliance...

    As Quoyle confronts his private demons--and the unpredictable forces of nature and society--he begins to see the possibility of love without pain or misery. A vigorous, darkly comic, and at times magical portrait of the contemporary North American family, The Shipping News shows why Annie Proulx is recognized as one of the most gifted and original writers in America today.

    Now Grove Press is proud to reissue this contemporary classic by one of America's most important living writers, in a new edition of 'A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain' that includes two subsequently published stories -- "Salem" and "Missing" -- that brilliantly complete the collection's narrative journey, returning to the jungles of Vietnam.

    Book of Longing is Cohen’s eagerly awaited new collection of poems, following his highly acclaimed 1984 title, Book of Mercy, and his hugely successful 1993 publication, Stranger Music, a Globe and Mail national bestseller. Book of Longing contains erotic, playful, and provocative line drawings and artwork on every page, by the author, which interact in exciting and unexpected ways on the page with poetry that is timeless, meditative, and at times darkly humorous. The book brings together all the elements that have brought Leonard Cohen’s artistry with language worldwide recognition.From the Hardcover edition.

    A young wife and mother, broiling in a suburb of 1940s Los Angeles, yearns to escape and read her precious copy of Mrs Dalloway. And Clarissa Vaughan steps out of her smart Greenwich village apartment in 1990s New York to buy flowers for a party she is hosting for a dying friend.The Hours recasts the classic story of Woolf's Mrs Dalloway in a startling new light. Moving effortlessly across the decades and between England and America, this exquisite novel intertwines the worlds of three unforgettable women.