Told by a narrator who has committed a botched robbery and brutal murder, the novel follows him and his adventures in a two-dimensional police station where, through the theories of the scientist/philosopher de Selby, he is introduced to "Atomic Theory" and its relation to bicycles, the existence of eternity (which turns out to be just down the road), and de Selby's view that the earth is not round but "sausage-shaped." With the help of his newly found soul named "Joe," he grapples with the riddles andcontradictions that three eccentric policeman present to him.The last of O'Brien's novels to be published, The Third Policeman joins O'Brien's other fiction (At Swim-Two-Birds, The Poor Mouth, The Hard Life, The Best of Myles, The Dalkey Archive) to ensure his place, along with James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, as one of Ireland's great comic geniuses.

    As he struggles to confront the wilderness surrounding him—from the baying hounds to the relentless northern snows—he journeys into his own haunted memories: a life of wild horses and ballet, fishing skiffs and blizzards, tropical seas and dolphins. Through wind, snow, and the depths of grief, he asks what price he is willing to exact on a world that ravages what we love, and whether redemption awaits those who learn to forgive.A tender story of love and a modern-day parable, The Dark Heart of Every Wild Thing, the debut novel from acclaimed poet Joseph Fasano, guides us into the deepest territories of the human heart.

    The first section of this collection pays homage to the poet's roots in a place where the world hands you nothing and promises less, so you are left to invent yourself or disappear. From there these poems both recount and embody repeated acts of defiant self-creation in the face of despair, loss, and shame, and always in the shadow of annihilation.With darkly raucous humor and wrenching pathos, Seuss burrows furiously into liminal places of no dimension—state lines, lakes' edges, the space "between the m and the e in the word amen." From what she calls "this place inbetween" come profane prayers in which "the sound of hope and the sound of suffering" are revealed to be "the same music played on the same instrument."Midway through this book, a man tells the speaker that beauty is that which has not been touched. This collection is a righteous and fierce counterargument: in the world of this imagination, beauty spills from that which has been crushed, torn, and harrowed. "We receive beauty," Seuss writes, "as a nail receives / the hammer blow." This is the poetry that comes only after the white dress has been blown open—the poetry of necessity, where a wild imagination is the only hope.

    This classic selection of her work, made by her former husband Ted Hughes, provides the perfect introduction to this most influential of poets. The poems are taken from Sylvia Plath's four collections Ariel, The Colossus, Crossing the Water and Winter Trees, and include many of her most celebrated works, such as 'Daddy', 'Lady Lazarus' and 'Wuthering Heights'.

    In Collected Stories, which includes the prize-winning "The Monster" and the fragmentary memoir "Life Story of the Boxer Samson-Korner", fans will find the same directness, lack of affectation, and wry humor that characterize his plays. The new edition of Brecht's Selected Poems includes both Brecht's best-known poems, many of which later made their way into his plays, as well as some that have never before been published in this country. For his new adaptation of The Goad Person of Setzuan, Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winner Tony Kushner commissioned a literal translation, which he then refined as any translator would, but with the flair of an innate dramatist.

    Included are theoretical texts, aberrant journalism, and highly-wrought Symbolist poems; a practical guide to building a time machine; and the bizarre dramatic buffoonery that presaged Jarry's invention of his most famous character, Pere Ubu. Andre Breton had to devise his notion of "Black Humor" to adequately describe and account for the arcane absurdity of Jarry's work.

    Most memorable - and most chilling - is the portrait of the author's father, a maddened shopkeeper who imports rare birds' eggs to hatch in his attic, who believes tailors' dummies should be treated like people, and whose obsessive fear of cockroaches causes him to resemble one. Bruno Schulz, a Polish Jew killed by the Nazis in 1942, is considered by many to have been the leading Polish writer between the two world wars.Bruno Schulz's untimely death at the hands of a Nazi stands as one of the great losses to modern literature. During his lifetime, his work found little critical regard, but word of his remarkable talents gradually won him an international readership. This volume brings together his complete fiction, including three short stories and his final surviving work, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. Illustrated with Schulz's original drawings, this edition beautifully showcases the distinctive surrealist vision of one of the twentieth century's most gifted and influential writers.

    With the exception of his three novels, the whole of Kafka’s narrative work is included in this volume. --penguinrandomhouse.comTwo Introductory parables: Before the law --Imperial message --Longer stories: Description of a struggle --Wedding preparations in the country --Judgment --Metamorphosis --In the penal colony --Village schoolmaster (The giant mole) --Blumfeld, and elderly bachelor --Warden of the tomb --Country doctor --Hunter Gracchus --Hunter Gracchus: A fragment --Great Wall of China --News of the building of the wall: A fragment --Report to an academy --Report to an academy: Two fragments --Refusal --Hunger artist --Investigations of a dog --Little woman --The burrow --Josephine the singer, or the mouse folk --Children on a country road --The trees --Clothes --Excursion into the mountains --Rejection --The street window --The tradesman --Absent-minded window-gazing --The way home --Passers-by --On the tram --Reflections for gentlemen-jockeys --The wish to be a red Indian --Unhappiness --Bachelor's ill luck --Unmasking a confidence trickster --The sudden walk --Resolutions --A dream --Up in the gallery --A fratricide --The next village --A visit to a mine --Jackals and Arabs --The bridge --The bucket rider --The new advocate --An old manuscript --The knock at the manor gate --Eleven sons --My neighbor --A crossbreed (A sport) --The cares of a family man --A common confusion --The truth about Sancho Panza --The silence of the sirens --Prometheus --The city coat of arms --Poseidon --Fellowship --At night --The problem of our laws --The conscripton of troops --The test --The vulture --The helmsman --The top --A little fable --Home-coming --First sorrow --The departure --Advocates --The married couple --Give it up! --On parables.

    The first of Roussel's two major prose works, Impressions of Africa is not, as the title may suggest, a conventional travel account, but an adventure story put together in a highly individual fashion and with an unusual time sequence, whereby the reader is even made to choose whether to begin with the first or the tenth chapter.A veritable literary melting pot, Roussel's groundbreaking text makes ample use of wordplay and the surrealist techniques of automatic writing and private allusion.

    Whether illuminating a common laborer or a legendary thinker, Dubie meets his subjects with utter compassion for their humanity and the dignity behind their creative work. In pursuit of the well-told story, his love of history is ever-present—though often he recreates his own.“With its restoration of so many out-of-print poems and its addition of new works, The Mercy Seat was one of last year’s most significant publications.” —American Book Review“The voices of Dubie’s monologues are full of astonishing intimacy.” —The Washington Post Book World

    With shades of wit, insomnia, and terror, The Midnight becomes a kind of dialogue in which the prose and poetry sections seem to be dreaming fitfully of each other.

    The first of the plays, The Real Inspector Hound, is the longer of the two; here the author has created a looking glass comedy of great suspense and intrigue about two drama critics. The second play, After Magritte, is 'a surrealist comedy in detective form-or is it a comedy in surrealist form? A husband and wife argue whether the figure they saw in the street was a one-legged football player with the ball under his arm, or a man in pajamas with a tortoise under his arm. The play shows that Stoppard is as amusing and clever as always.'

    There's Rob, Bob, Tom, Paul, Ralph, and Phil; Siegfried, the sculptor in burning steel; blind Albert and ninety-three-year-old Hiram; Foster, the New Age psychoanalyst; and Maxwell, the tropical botanist, who, since returning from the rain forest, has seemed a little screwed up somehow.  When PEN/Faulkner Award finalist Donald Antrim brings them and their eighty-nine equally eccentic kinsmen together in the decaying library of their family estate for cocktails, a light supper, and a little ritual sacrifice, the result suggests a high-speed collision between The Brothers Karamazov and the Brothers Marx.  Moving swiftly from slapstick to horror and back, The Hundred Brothers establishes Antrim as one of our most mordantly and satanically playful young writers, whose insights into the agonies of kinship are as serious as they are hilarious.

    The poems deal with the impossibility of such an endeavor and celebrate our persistence in striving anyway.At its core, the collection is built around a very wise line from a Beatles song: I want to hold your hand. I want to hold your hand with no further expectations. I want to hold your hand instead of telling you I understand when I don’t. I want to hold your hand although we don’t always get along. I want to hold your hand despite the calluses, scratches, and scars that get in the way. I want to hold your hand knowing I’ll have to let it go one day.I just want to hold your hand.

    He experiences material reality as a hindrance, so he tries to stay in an inner realm composed only of abstract concepts like gravity, motion, sound and light. He lives with Mom, who stays alone in her bedroom. Once he killed a man with gleaming tools from a hardware store. He has a friend with whom he does burglary and drugs and seances. Then Dad comes to stay, and Phillip descends to a subterranean otherworld where he makes contact with "dead black things, obloid and featureless, like faintly disembodied laundry hampers." A sad, beautiful book.