These stories are about coming to terms with our animal natures, exploring the ways in which we might renegotiate our fractured relationship with the natural world, and uncovering the wildness - and wilderness - within. Beautifully illustrated by Helen Nicholson, Foxfire, Wolfskin and Other Stories of Shapeshifting Women is her first collection of short stories. All are either reimaginings of older tales, or contain characters, beings and motifs which appear in older tales.

    R. Ammons's long poems—following Tape for the Turn of the Year and preceding Garbage—that mark him as a master of this particular form. The sphere in question is the earth itself, and Ammons's wonderfully stocked mind roams globally, ruminating on subjects that range from galaxies to gas stations. It is a remarkable achievement, comparable in importance to Wallace Stevens's Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction.

    On struggling farms, in Dublin's rain-drenched streets, or in parched exile in Franco's Spain, McGahern's characters wage a confused but touching war against the facts of life.

    It's the tale of Bobby Pickens, assistant manager of Sonny Boy Bargain Store, who gains a new lease on life, though he almost comes to regret it. Bobby's handsome half brother F.X.-ex-con, ex-actor, and ex-husband three times over-moves in, and things go awry all over town. Mistaken identities; entangled romances with Burma, Toinette, and Donna Lee; assault and battery; charges of degeneracy; a nervous breakdown-it all comes to a head at a Christmas Eve party in a cabin on a poisoned swamp. This is sly, madcap romp that offers readers the gift of abundant laughter.

    Now all the documents are in hand to reconstruct Beaumont's life story -- his crime, his trial, his ultimate sin and punishment -- and the historian-narrator of World Enough and Time sets about doing just that. Based on the famous murder case known as the Kentucky Tragedy, World Enough and Time is, like its precursor All the King's Men, a fictional wonder that personifies history, philosophy, politics, and passion.

    Whether writing about lovers, parents and children, or married couples, Gordimer maps out the terrain of human relationships with razor-sharp psychological insight and a stunning lack of sentimentality. The selection, which spans the course of Gordimer's career to date, presents the range of her storytelling abilities and her brilliant insight into human nature. From such epics as "Friday's Footprint" and "Something Out There" to her shorter, more experimental stories, Gordimer's work is unfailingly nuanced and complex. Time and again, it forces us to examine how our stated intentions come into conflict with our unspoken desires.This definitive volume, which includes four new stories from the Nobel laureate, is a testament to the power, force, and ongoing relevance of Gordimer's vision.

    Vaclav Havel gives us the comically absurd and seemingly autobiographical account of Professor Leopold Nettes, a revered but reluctant revolutionary whose most recent book has irked the totalitarian government in power. The authorities demand a retraction; his friends and fans clamor for heroic defiance. Besieged by onslaught of internal demons, whining lovers, suffocating followers, and ineffectual government thugs, the professor sinks nearer and nearer to crisis, unable to confront the conflicting demands that rule his life and leave him tormented by neurotic inertia. One of Havel's best-known plays, Largo Desolato vividly dramatizes the multiple contradictions of the intellectual trapped in a totalitarian nightmare.

    The Woman of the Pharisees--one of Mauriac's most accomplished novels--is a penetrating evocation of the moral and religious values of a Bordeaux community. In Brigitte, we see how the ideals of love and companionship are stifled in the presence of a self-righteous woman whose austere religious principals lead her to interfere--disastrously--in the lives of others. One by one the unwitting victims fall prey to the bleakness of her "perfection." A conscientious schoolteacher, a saintly priest, her husband and stepdaughter and an innocent schoolboy are all confronted with tragedy and upheaval. But the author's extraordinary gift for psychological insight goes on to show how redeeming features inevitably surface from disaster. The unfolding drama is seen through the discerning eye of a young Louis--Brigitte's stepson--whose point of view is skillfully blended into the mature and understanding adult he later becomes.

    Charles Wright’s translation, Jonathan Galassi’s introduction, and, as afterword, Montale’s thoughtful essay on Campana, identify the heart of this poet’s achievement.

    The Blue Estuaries contains her five previous books of verse along with a section of uncollected work, fully representing a unique and distinguished contribution to modern poetry over five decades.

    Previously published in the following books: Poems (1935), Out of the Picture (1937), Letters from Iceland (1937), The Earth Compels (1938), Autumn Journal (1939), Plant and Phantom (1941), Springboard (1944), Holes in the Sky (1948) and Blind Fireworks (1929). Compiled by the author.

    His poetry, whether dealing with art, war, memories of childhood, or the loneliness of everyday life, is powerful and moving. A poet of colloquial language, ample generosity, and intimacy, Jarrell wrote beautifully "of the American landscape," as James Atlas noted in American Poetry Review, "[with] a broad humanism that enabled him to give voice to those had been given none of their own."The Complete Poems is the definitive volume of Randall Jarrell's verse, including Selected Poems (1955), with notes by the author; The Woman at the Washington Zoo (1960), which won the National Book Award for Poetry; and The Lost World (1965), "his last and best book," according to Robert Lowell. This volume also brings together several of Jarrell's uncollected or posthumously published poems as well as his Rilke translations.

    The past: the suicides of his father, wife and daughter, the murder of his son-in-law, a brutal rape, and subsequent mutiny at sea. The present: caring for his granddaughter on a "northern" island where he works as an artificial inseminator of cows, and attempts to reclaim the innocence with which he faced the tragedies of his earlier life. Combining unflinching descriptions of suffering with his sense of beauty, Hawkes is a master of nimble and sensuous prose who makes the awful and mundane fantastic, and occasionally makes the fantastic surreal.

    

    With some of these stories appearing here in book form for the very first time, and others previously unavailable for decades, Short Fiction is a welcome gift for every Flann O'Brien fan worldwide.