Readers the world over know his poignant tale of "The Little Mermaid," who sacrifices everything for love, and "The Steadfast Tin Soldier," whose affection for a paper ballerina is symbolized by his transformation into a small tin heart. Several of Andersen's stories are so well known—among them "The Emperor's New Clothes" and "The Ugly Duckling"—that their titles alone have become meaningful figures of speech. Hans Christian Andersen: Classic Fairy Tales collects 100 of Andersen's incomparable fairy tales and stories, among them "Thumbelina," "The Little Match Girl," "The Princess and the Pea," "The Red Shoes," "The Wild Swans," and his fantasy masterpiece, "The Snow-Queen." The book is abundantly illustrated with more than 100 hundred drawings and color plates by Dugald Stewart Walker and Hans Tegner, two of Andersen's best-known illustrators.

    The new version adds two sequences--"Give Me Back My Rage" and "Heaven's Ring"--as well as some previously unpublished sections of the justly famous series, "The Little Box." Simic and Popa are a perfect match. A book for surrealists, mythographers, postmodernists, scientists, and lovers of poetry and games. Winner of the PEN Translation Prize.

    The selling of their family home leads them to an inescapable confrontation with their family history. Their attempt to escape the influence of the city ends in failure as they realize that its tentacles extend to everything in the countryside, including their own relationship. In 1994, Kenzaburo Oe was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Signalling out The Silent Cry, the Nobel Committee stated that his poetic force creates an imagined world, where life and myth condense to form a disconcerting picture of the human predicament. Kenzaburo Oe is one of the great writers of the century and The Silent Cry is his masterpiece.

    Lenz is a dispassionate account on the nervous system of a schizophrenic, perhaps the first third-person text ever written from the “inside” of insanity. At his death at the age of 23 in 1837, Georg Büchner also left behind Leonce and Lena, Woyzeck, and Danton’s Death—psychologically and politically acute plays well ahead of their time.Richard Sieburth’s translations include Hölderlin’s Hymns and Fragments, Walter Benjamin’s Moscow Diary, Gérard de Nerval’s Selected Writings and Henri Michaux’s Emergences/Resurgences. His English edition of the Nerval writings won the 2000 PEN Book-of-the-Month-Club Translation Prize.

    When a beautiful married woman walks into Pastor Daniel Vedra's life and conjures up memories of his first wife, Jitka, he struggles with the chaos the affair creates for his wife, his children, his vocation, and his future.

    The men find a strange world that grows ever stranger, and everywhere there are images of death. The crew's attempt to communicate with this civilization leads to violence and to a cruel truth-cruel precisely because it is so human. Translated by Marc E. Heine. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book

    Historical persona poems and a prose memoir at the center of the book address the illusory freedom of both black and white Americans. In the book's three sequences, McCrae explores the role mass entertainment plays in oppression, he confronts the myth that freedom can be based upon the power to dominate others, and, in poems about the mixed-race child adopted by Jefferson Davis in the last year of the Civil War, he interrogates the infrequently examined connections between racism and love. A reader's companion is available at wesleyan.edu/wespress/readerscompanions.

    The emotional and hilarious story of hard-living Todd Cartwright who falls in love with Tammy Everett, a woman who literally saves Todd from himself. But Tammy's suspicious, overly-protective father, Harry, does everything he can to crush the relationship. Todd is not about to give up the greatest thing that's ever happened to him and goes to war with Harry. But when the unthinkable happens, the men dive into a physical and emotionally tailspin that threatens to consume them both. Todd decides to go on the honeymoon alone and return to his destructive ways only to find Harry at the airport with Tami's ashes which Harry intends to spread on the island. Reluctantly, these two wounded souls go on the honeymoon - both for very different reasons - where the enormous anguish consuming them causes them to react in very diffferent and unexpected ways. Though these two men hate each other, each is the only person who can understand the loss that the other has suffered. Todd and Harry are forced to recognize that they have one thing in common: they loved the same women. And that bond causes them both to begrudgingly help the other overcome the gaping loss that has swallowed them and move on with their lives.

    In the words of Isaac Bashevis Singer, "What he did in his short life was enough to make him one of the most remarkable writers who ever lived." Weaving myth, fantasy, and reality, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, is, to quote Schulz, "an attempt at eliciting the history of a certain family . . . by a search for the mythical sense, the essential core of that history."

    Presenting itself as an investigation into the suicide of a close friend—perhaps real, perhaps fictional—more than twenty years earlier, Levé gives us, little by little, a striking portrait of a man, with all his talents and flaws, who chose to reject his life, and all the people who loved him, in favor of oblivion. Gradually, through Levé’s casually obsessive, pointillist, beautiful ruminations, we come to know a stoic, sensible, thoughtful man who bears more than a slight psychological resemblance to Levé himself. But Suicide is more than just a compendium of memories of an old friend; it is a near-exhaustive catalog of the ramifications and effects of the act of suicide, and a unique and melancholy farewell to life.

    The good wit of bad manners, elegantly spiced with irony and deftly controlled malice, has made Saki stories small, perfect gems of the English language. Here for the first time, are the collected writings of Saki--including all of his short stories ("Reginald", "Reginald in Russia", "The Chronicles of Clovis", "Beasts and Super-Beasts" "The Toys of Peace", and "The Square Egg"), his three novels (THE UNBEARABLE BASSINGTON, WHEN WILLIAM CAME and THE WESTMINSTER ALICE), and three plays (THE DEATHTRAP, KARL-LUDWIG'S WINDOW and THE WATCHED POT. You are invited to meet once again Clovis, Reginald, the Unbearable Bassington, and the other memorable characters etched so superbly by the pen of H.H. Munro. "In all literature, he was the first to employ successfully a wildly outrageous premise in order to make a serious point. I love that. And today the best of his stories are still better than the best of just about every other writer around."--Roald Dahl. Introduction by Noel Coward.(less)

    Concerns about society, gender and imperialism dovetail irresistibly with flights of speculative wonder. And with a kitchen sink in the corner of even her wildest stories, Suzuki reminds us that while society may be limitless, relationships remain impossible

    Clerici is a man with everything under control - a wife who loves him, colleagues who respect him, the hidden power that comes with his secret work for the Italian political police during the Mussolini years. But then he is assigned to kill his former professor, now exiled in France, to demonstrate his loyalty to the Fascist state, and falls in love with a strange, compelling woman; his life is torn open - and with it the corrupt heart of Fascism. Moravia equates the rise of Italian Fascism with the psychological needs of his protagonist for whom conformity becomes an obsession in a life that has included parental neglect, an oddly self-conscious desire to engage in cruel acts, and a type of male beauty which, to Clerici's great distress, other men find attractive.

    Critics have compared his work to such diverse artists as Kafka, Goya, Swift, Klee, and Beckett. Allen Ginsberg called Michaux “genius,” and Jorge Luis Borges wrote that Michaux’s work “is without equal in the literature of our time.” This anthology contains substantial selections from almost all of Michaux’s major works, most never before published in English, and allows readers to explore the haunting verbal and pictorial landscape of a twentieth-century visionary.

    Staring with the Classical Period (645-1604 A.D.), characterized by the wanka and tanka styles,followed by haiku poets of the Tokugawa period (to 1867), the subsequent modern tanka and haiku poets,and including the contemporary school of free verse—Women Poets of Japan records twelve hundred years of poetic accomplishment. Included are biographical notes on the individual poets, an essay on Japanese women and literature, and a table of historical periods.