Surely the Mediterranean sea breeze will blow away memories of the disastrous anniversary dinner-that-never-was??During a chance visit to a nearby perfumery, Rosie meets the owner, Jean-Michel de Fleurenne, whose distillery and crumbling chateau are desperately in need of her PR expertise. Everyone knows you should never mix business with pleasure… but in the heat of Provence the rules seem to melt away. The soft perfume of the lavender fields and the rich citrus aromas of the fruit trees are blissfully intoxicating and soon, maybe all too soon, Rosie is falling madly in love with a certain impossibly handsome French perfumier and his aristocratic life at Chateau de Fleurenne.But if French is the language of love then why doesn't the path of true love run smoothly for Rosie?

    The novel’s elusive narrative thread ties landscape to character to an expanse just beyond our grasp. The narrator encounters a shepherding family and glimpse by glimpse, each family member and the shepherding way of life is revealed to us. The novel culminates in a large shepherds’ gathering where a traditional Shepherd’s Play—a kind of creation myth that includes in its cast The River, The Sea, The Man, and The Mountain—is enacted. The work’s proto-environmental world view as well as its hybrid form—part play, part novel—makes The Serpent of Stars astonishingly contemporary. W.S. Merwin’s "Green Fields" begins, "By this part of the century few are left who believe in the animals for they are not there in the carved parts/of them served on plates and the pleas from slatted trucks..." This novel leaves the reader believing not only in the animals, but the terrain they are part of, the people who tend them, and the life all these elements together compose.

    I can think of just about no contemporary poets who publish such consistently great work.” —Corduroy Books “Bob Hicok's poetry is a fleeting comfort, a temporary solace from the chaos of the world. Smart, honest, powerfully inventive, his writing asks the biggest questions while acknowledging that there are no answers beyond the imposed structure of the page.” —Los Angeles Times on This Clumsy Living “The most potent ingredient in virtually every one of Bob Hicok's compact, well-turned poems is a laughter as old as humanity itself, a sweet waggery that suggests there's almost no problem that can't be solved by this poet's gentle humor.” —New York Times Book Review on Insomnia Diary

    Drawing its name from the spacecraft currently departing our solar system on an embassy to the beyond, Voyager unfolds as three books within a book and culminates in a chilling Dantean allegory of leadership and its failure in the cause of humanity. At the heart of this volume lies the historical figure of Kurt Waldheim—Secretary-General of the U.N. from 1972-81 and former intelligence officer in Hitler’s Wehrmacht—who once served as a spokesman for humanity while remaining silent about his role in the collective atrocities of our era. Resurrecting this complex figure, Reddy’s universal voyager explores the garden of forking paths hidden within every totalizing dream of identity.

    Targeted fold-out area maps guide your explorations through the sights and neighborhoods of Paris, both on and off the beaten path. Insider tips accompany this compilation of must-not-miss landmarks; arts and entertainment venues; and places to eat, drink, shop, and stay. You can't do without it! 216 pages plus 10 fold-out maps.

    In a world of machinists, loggers, mill workers, and hairdressers, the poems collected here bear witness to a landscape, an industry, and a people teetering on the edge of ruin. From tightly constructed narratives to expansive and surreal meditations, the various styles in this book not only reflect the poet's range, but his willingness to delve into his obsessions from countless angles Full of despair yet never self-loathing, full of praise yet never nostalgic, Dismantling the Hills is both ode and elegy. McGriff's vision of blue-collar life is one of complication and contradiction, and the poems he makes are authentic, unwavering, and unapologetically American.

    How have we thought "the body"? How can we think it anew? The body of mortal creatures, the body politic, the body of letters and of laws, the "mystical body of Christ"-all these (and others) are incorporated in the word Corpus, the title and topic of Jean-Luc Nancy's masterwork.

    A passionate exploration of the forces that shape us, The Last Love Poem I Will Ever Write explores themes of survival and the powerlessness of the self in a chaotic and unfair world, finding hope in the emotions and vitality of poetry. With characteristic meditative lyricism, the poet reflects on grief and the power of language in extended odes (“Ode to Nothing,” “Ode to Words”) and slips effortlessly from personal trauma (“Song of What Happens”) to public catastrophe (“Charlottesville Elegy”).The Last Love Poem I Will Ever Write confirms Orr’s place among the preeminent lyric poets of his generation, engaging the deepest existential issues with wisdom and humor and transforming them into celebratory song.

    Five years later the past has found her and to protect herself and her beloved child she'll have to perform one last act of dazzling daring more audacious than any she has previously attempted.With her internationally bestselling novels Chocolat, Blackberry Wine, Five Quarters of the Orange, and Coastliners, Joanne Harris has woven intoxicating spells that celebrate the sensuous while exposing the passion, secrets and folly beneath the surface of rustic village life. In Holy Fools, her most ambitious and accomplished novel to date, she transports us back to a time of intrigue and turmoil, of deception and masquerade. In the year 1605, a young widow, pregnant and alone, seeks sanctuary at the small Abbey of Sainte Marie-de-la-mer on the island of Noirs Moustiers off the Brittany coast. After the birth of her daughter, she takes up the veil, and a new name, Soeur Auguste. But the peace she has found in remote isolation is shattered five years later by the events that follow the death of her kind benefactress, the Reverend Mother. When a new abbess -- the daughter of a corrupt noble family elevated by the murder of King Henri IV -- arrives at Sainte Marie-de-la-mer, she does not arrive alone. With her is her personal confessor and spiritual guide, Père Colombin, a man Soeur Auguste knows all too well. For the newcomer is Guy LeMerle, a charlatan and seducer now masquerading as a priest, and the one man she fears more than any other. Soeur Auguste has a secret. Once she was l'Ailée, "The Winged One," star performer of a troupe led by LeMerle, before betrayal forced her to change her identity. But now the past has found her. Before long, thanks to LeMerle, suspicion and debauchery are breeding like a plague within the convent's walls -- fueled by dark rumors of witchcraft, part of the false priest's brilliantly orchestrated scheme of revenge. To protect herself and her beloved child, l'Ailée will have to perform one last act of dazzling daring more audacious than any she has previously attempted.

    Loneliness, loss, sadness, and mystery mark this wonderful volume of forty-nine poems by Charles Simic, winner of the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and praised as “one of the truly imaginative writers of our time” by the Los Angeles Times.

    The character lives beyond her means in order to escape the banalities and emptiness of provincial life. When the novel was first serialized in La Revue de Paris between 1 October 1856 and 15 December 1856, public prosecutors attacked the novel for obscenity. The resulting trial in January 1857 made the story notorious. After Flaubert's acquittal on 7 February 1857, Madame Bovary became a bestseller in April 1857 when it was published in two volumes. A seminal work of literary realism, the novel is now considered Flaubert's masterpiece, and one of the most influential literary works in history.

    

    But since its original prewar translation there has been no completely new version in English. Now, Penguin brings Proust's masterpiece to new audiences throughout the world, beginning with Lydia Davis's internationally acclaimed translation of the first volume, Swann's Way.Swann's Way is one of the preeminent novels of childhood: a sensitive boy's impressions of his family and neighbors, all brought dazzlingly back to life years later by the taste of a madeleine. It also enfolds the short novel "Swann in Love," an incomparable study of sexual jealousy that becomes a crucial part of the vast, unfolding structure of In Search of Lost Time. The first volume of the work that established Proust as one of the finest voices of the modern age — satirical, skeptical, confiding, and endlessly varied in its response to the human condition — Swann's Way also stands on its own as a perfect rendering of a life in art, of the past re-created through memory.

    Among the poems he left behind are a particularly unsettling four that feature the mysterious Robinson: both a prototypical member of the smart set—masking his desperation with urbane savoir-faire—and an alter ego for the troubled Kees himself.In ROBINSON ALONE, Kathleen Rooney performs a bold act of literary mediumship, conjuring Kees through his borrowed character to sketch his restless journey across locales and milieus—New York, San Francisco, the highways between—and to evoke his ambitions, his frustrations, and his skewed humor. The product of a decade-long engagement with Kees and his work, this novel in poems is not only a portrait of an under-appreciated genius and his era, but also a beam flashed into haunted boiler-rooms that still fire the American spirit, rooms where energy and optimism are burnt down to ash.

    In compiling this landmark anthology, Wayne Miller and Kevin Prufer enlisted twenty-four regional editors to select 270 poets whose writing was first published after 1970. These poets represent every country in Europe, and many of them are published here for the first time in English and in the United States. The resulting anthology collects some of the very best work of a new generation of poets who have come of age since Paul Celan, Anna Akhmatova, Federico García Lorca, Eugenio Montale, and Czeslaw Milosz.The poetry in New European Poets is fiercely intelligent, often irreverent, and engaged with history and politics. The range of styles is exhilarating—from the lyric intimacy of Portuguese poet Rosa Alice Branco to the profane prose poems of Romanian poet Radu Andriescu, from the surrealist bravado of Czech poet SylvaFischerová to the survivor's cry of Russian poet Irina Ratushinskaya. Poetry translated from more than thirty languages is represented, including French, German, Spanish, and Italian, and more regional languages such as Basque, Irish Gaelic, and Sámi.In its scope and ambition, New European Poets is destined to be a seminal anthology, an important vehicle for American readers to discover the extraordinary poetry being written across the Atlantic.