Concerning the Angels


Rafael Alberti - 1928
    Eliot’s The Waste Land, Pablo Neruda’s Residencia en la tierra, and Federico Garcia Lorca’s Poeta en Nueva York. It marks a major departure from the light-hearted tone of the poet's earlier verse, which was notably influence by Andalusian folksong. It is at once intensely imaginative and intimately realistic, a lyrical illumination of the poet’s “dark night of the soul.”Rafael Alberti, born in 1902, is the last surviving member of the so-called Generation of 1927 that included such notable Spanish poets Federico García Lorca, Vincente Alexandre, Pedro Salinas, Jorge Guillen, and Luis Cernuda.Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno lives in Massachusetts and teaches in the program in Writing and Humanistic Studies at MIT.

Dog Songs


Mary Oliver - 2013
    Oliver's poems begin in the small everyday moments familiar to all dog lovers, but through her extraordinary vision these observations become higher meditations on the world and our place in it.Dog Songs includes visits with old friends, like Oliver's beloved Percy, and introduces still others in poems of love and laughter, heartbreak and grief. Throughout, the many dogs of Oliver's life emerge as fellow travelers and guides, uniquely able to open our eyes to the lessons of the moment and the joys of nature and connection.

79 Park Avenue


Harold Robbins - 1955
    Ambitious and driven, over time she rises from street urchin to stripper, later re-inventing herself as Maryann Flood, the queen of an empire of pleasure. From her posh Park Avenue office, Maryann provides access to exciting and sensual women to sate the desires of New York's most powerful men.All is well-until Maryann runs afoul of the law and leaves her empire facing destruction. Arrested for procurement, blackmail, and bribery, she must face prosecutor Mike Keynes, who stands to benefit greatly by bringing her down-and who is facing a dilemma himself. He loves Maryann, and she loves him in return. Now he faces a choice: set aside his personal feelings for the sake of justice, or fall under Maryann's seductive spell and betray his life's work.The inspiration for the highly rated 1977 miniseries of the same name, 79 Park Avenue tells a sizzling tale of lust, power, and corruption.

The Madman's Tale


John Katzenbach - 2004
    Francis Petrel was barely out of his teens when his family committed him to the asylum, after his erratic behavior culminated in a terrifying outburst. Now middle-aged, he leads an aimless, solitary life housed in a cheap apartment, periodically tended to by his sisters, and perpetually medicated to quiet the chorus of voices in his head. But a reunion on the grounds of the shuttered institution stirs something deep in Francis’s troubled mind: dark memories he thought he had laid to rest, about the grisly events that led to Western State Hospital’s demise. It begins in 1979, when twenty-one-year-old Petrel descends into the state-run purgatory of an overcrowded, understaffed Massachusetts mental hospital. Surrounded by inmates roaming the halls like drugged zombies and raving behind locked doors, well-meaning orderlies, jaded nurses, and patronizing doctors, Francis finds friendship with a motley assortment of fellow patients: a would-be Napoleon, a wise ex-firefighter, and a man obsessed with battling imagined devils. But there’s nothing imaginary about the young nurse found sexually assaulted and brutally murdered late one night after lights-out.The police suspect an inmate, while patients whisper about visions of a white-shrouded “angel.” But the striking and mysterious prosecuting attorney who arrives to investigate has her own chilling theory—about the grim, telltale “signature” left on the victim’s body, a string of unsolved sex killings, and a very real devil who, by chance or design, has come to turn a madhouse into a slaughterhouse.Now, with the past creeping back to haunt his thoughts, and nothing but a pencil and the bare walls of his bleak apartment, Francis surrenders to the overwhelming need to tell the story of those nightmarish days. But because the crime was never solved, it’s a story doomed to remain unfinished. Until, like Francis’s long-buried recollections, the killer resurfaces . . . with a vengeance.A tour de force narrative journey through the eerily unpredictable mind of an utterly unusual hero, The Madman’s Tale will keep even the most astute thriller reader uncertain, unnerved, and unable to resist the tantalizing twists and turns of this fiendishly suspenseful shadow show.From the Hardcover edition.

I Would Leave Me If I Could: A Collection of Poetry


Halsey - 2020
    In I Would Leave Me If I Could, she reveals never-before-seen poetry of longing, love, and the nuances of bipolar disorder.

The Fourth Dimension


Yiannis Ritsos - 1964
    The volume also contains a group of modern narratives, including the famous, and much-anthologized, Moonlight Sonata. Ritsos, rightly, regarded the The Fourth Dimension as his finest achievement. It is now presented to English- speaking readers for the first time in its entirety.From PhiloctetesAll the speeches of great men, about the dead and about heroes. Astonishing, awesome words, pursued us even in our sleep, slipping beneath closed doors, from the banqueting hallwhere glasses and voices sparkled, and the veilof an unseen dancer rippled silentlylike a diaphanous, whirling wallbetween life and death. This throbbingour childhood nights, lightening the shadows of shieldsetched on white walls by slow moonlight.

The Feast of the Goat


Mario Vargas Llosa - 2000
    Rafael Trujillo, the depraved ailing dictator whom Dominicans call the Goat, controls his inner circle with a combination of violence and blackmail. In Trujillo's gaudy palace, treachery and cowardice have become the way of life. But Trujillo's grasp is slipping away. There is a conspiracy against him, and a Machiavellian revolution already underway that will have bloody consequences of its own. In this 'masterpiece of Latin American and world literature, and one of the finest political novels ever written' ("Bookforum"), Mario Vargas Llosa recounts the end of a regime and the birth of a terrible democracy, giving voice to the historical Trujillo and the victims, both innocent and complicit, drawn into his deadly orbit.

Faces in the Crowd


Valeria Luiselli - 2011
    In Harlem, a translator is desperate to publish the works of Gilberto Owen, an obscure Mexican poet. And in Philadelphia, Gilberto Owen recalls his friendship with Lorca, and the young woman he saw in the windows of passing trains. Valeria Luiselli's debut signals the arrival of a major international writer and an unexpected and necessary voice in contemporary fiction.

The Verdant Passage


Troy Denning - 1991
    But if the people are to be freed, the mismatched trio of steadfast rebels must look into the face of terror and choose between love and life.

De Profundis & the Ballad of Reading Gaol


Oscar Wilde - 1898
    Wilde's prison writings include his most celebrated essay DE PROFUNDIS, written to Lord Alfred Douglas, and his legendary epic poem THE BALLAD OF READING GAOL.

The Paris Enigma


Pablo De Santis - 2007
    The Twelve Detectives—a society of the twelve most famous, compelling, and dazzling detectives from around the world—have been asked to discuss the secrets of their trade as part of the fair's lineup of events. The Twelve travel to Paris to convene as a single body for the first time, but also, if some whispers are to be believed, to debate the very philosophy that underlies their pursuit of the world's most wanted criminals.But one detective is conspicuously absent: the legendary founding member of The Twelve, Renato Craig, will not attend. In his place he sends his novice assistant, Sigmundo Salvatrio—son of a shoemaker, a lifelong detective-arts devotee, and the only remaining student of Craig's famed Academy for Detectives in Buenos Aires. Salvatrio arrives in Paris, carrying a secret message meant only for Craig's best friend and cofounder of The Twelve, the brilliant, brooding, and fiercely competitive Viktor Arzaky.When a member of The Twelve is discovered dead at the foot of the gleaming Eiffel Tower, the first in what turns into a series of grisly murders, Arzaky and Salvatrio find themselves in a race against time around glorious fin de siècle Paris, encountering all manner of secret societies, solving philosophical puzzles, while also trying to save a dangerously beautiful woman.The pair soon realizes that the stakes involved are unimaginably high; they must not only catch the stalking murderer but also alter the fate of their precious brotherhood.Written in a strikingly original voice, and poignantly evoking a world about to lose its innocence forever, The Paris Enigma opens a window onto crime solving's early days, when wit, common sense, and intelligence were the only tools a detective could rely on.

Mangaka. Lágrimas en la arena


María José Tirado - 2014
    Her father left when she was only two and her mother is an early Alzheimers patient recovering from alcohol. Her only love in life rejected her shortly before an incident that destroyed her ability of relating to others forever. Carla cant even imagine how much her life is about to change.

Life of the Party


Olivia Gatwood - 2019
    In Life of the Party, she weaves together her own coming of age with an investigation into our culture's romanticization of violence against women. In precise, searing language—at times blistering and riotous, at times soulful and exuberant—she explores the boundary between what is real and what is imagined in a life saturated with fear. How does one grow from a girl to a woman in a world wracked by violence? Where is the line between perpetrator and victim? What is the meaning of bravery? Visceral and haunting, this multifaceted collection illustrates that what happens to our bodies makes us who we are.

El ciclo del amor marica


Gabriel J. Martín - 2017
    Advice on conflict resolution and genuine intimacy. The author doesnt forget to include treatments on couple crises, ruptures, and the mourning of heartbreak as a previous step to be prepared to fall in love again.

The Book of Disquiet


Fernando Pessoa - 1982
    He attributed his prolific writings to a wide range of alternate selves, each of which had a distinct biography, ideology, and horoscope. When he died in 1935, Pessoa left behind a trunk filled with unfinished and unpublished writings, among which were the remarkable pages that make up his posthumous masterpiece, The Book of Disquiet, an astonishing work that, in George Steiner's words, "gives to Lisbon the haunting spell of Joyce's Dublin or Kafka's Prague." Published for the first time some fifty years after his death, this unique collection of short, aphoristic paragraphs comprises the "autobiography" of Bernardo Soares, one of Pessoa's alternate selves. Part intimate diary, part prose poetry, part descriptive narrative, captivatingly translated by Richard Zenith, The Book of Disquiet is one of the greatest works of the twentieth century.