Collected Poems


Philip Larkin - 1988
    Collected Poems brings together not only all his books--The North Ship, The Less Deceived, The Whitsun Weddings, and High Windows--but also his uncollected poems from 1940 to 1984.This new edition reflects Larkin's own ordering for his poems and is the first collection to present the body of his work with the organization he preferred. Preserving everything he published in his lifetime, the new Collected Poems is an indispensable contribution to the legacy of an icon of twentieth-century poetry.

Project for a Revolution in New York


Alain Robbe-Grillet - 1970
    Set in the towers and tunnels of the quintessential American city, Alain Robbe-Grillet's novel turns this urban space into a maze where politics bleeds into perversion, revolution into sadism, activist into criminal, vice into art—and back again. Following the logic of a movie half-glimpsed through a haze of drugs and alcohol, Project for a Revolution in New York is a Sadean reverie that bears an alarming resemblance to the New York, and the United States, that have actually come into being.

Modern Baptists


James Wilcox - 1983
    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.

The Complete Poems of Michelangelo


Michelangelo Buonarroti
    Yet the magnificence of his achievements as an artist often overshadow his devotion to poetry. Michelangelo used poetry to express what was too personal to display in sculpture or painting. John Frederick Nims has brought the entire body of Michelangelo's verse, from the artist's ardent twenties to his anguished and turbulent eighties, to life in English in this unprecedented collection. The result is a tantalizing glimpse into a most fascinating mind."Wonderful. . . . Nims gives us Michelangelo whole: the polymorphous love sonneteer, the political allegorist, and the solitary singer of madrigals."—Kirkus Reviews"A splendid, fresh and eloquent translation. . . . Nims, an eminent poet and among the best translators of our time, conveys the full meaning and message of Michelangelo's love sonnets and religious poems in fluently rhymed, metrical forms."—St. Louis Post-Dispatch"The best so far. . . . Nims is best at capturing the sound and sense of Michelangelo's poetic vocabulary."—Choice"Surely the most compelling translations of Michelangelo currently available in English."—Ronald L. Martinez, Washington Times

Pelle the Conqueror


Martin Andersen Nexø - 1915
    Boyhood; II. Apprenticeship; III. The Great Struggle; IV. Daybreak. Martin Andersen Nexo (1869-1954) was born in the slums of Copenhagen into extreme poverty. He was the fourth of eleven children. His father, a stone mason, was an alcoholic and his mother was a daughter of a blacksmith. When he was eight, the family moved to the town of Nexo on the island of Bornholm, whose name he adopted in 1894 as his own. His breakthrough work, the Danish classic Pelle the Conqueror, appeared between 1906 (Part I) and 1910 (Part IV). It tells the story of Pelle, a poor boy, whose life in Part I shares much similarities with Nexo's. "The great charm of the book lies in the fact that the writer knows the poor from within; he has not studied them as an outsider may, but has lived with them and felt with them, at once a participant and a keen-eyed spectator. He is no sentimentalist, and so rich is his imagination that he passes on rapidly from one scene to the next, sketching often in a few pages what another novelist would be content to work out into long chapters or whole volumes. His sympathy is of the widest, and he makes us see tragedies behind the little comedies, and comedies behind the little tragedies, of the seemingly sordid lives of the working people whom he loves." (Otto Jespersen) "Pelle" has conquered the hearts of the reading public of Denmark and of the world. The first part of the book was filmed by Bille August; in 1989 the film won the Academy Award as Best Foreign Language Film."

The Collected Stories


Elizabeth Bowen - 1981
    Vividly featuring scenes of bomb-scarred London during the Blitz, frustrated lovers, acutely obcerved children, and even vengeful ghosts, these stories reinforce Bowen's reputation as an artist whose finely chiseled narratives—rich in imagination, psychological insight, and craft—transcend their time and place.

Don Juan


Lord Byron - 1819
    The manner is what Goethe called 'a cultured comic language'-a genre which he regarded as not possible in Geman and which he felt Byron managed superbly.

The Long March


William Styron - 1952
    Deciding that his battalion has been 'doping off', Colonel Templeton calls for a 36-mile forced march to inculcate discipline. The Long March is a searing account of this ferocious ordeal - and of the two officers who resist.

The House with the Green Shutters


George Douglas Brown - 1901
    It is probably semi-autobiographical : Brown was illegitimate and rejected by his father and the village of Barbie is loosely based on Ochiltree in Ayrshire. The brutish John Gourlay is a merchant in the village of Barbie, envied and resented by the villagers because of his success, which is symbolized in his prestigious house with green shutters. He dominates and bullies his family, in particular his sensitive, gifted but weak son. Ultimately, his refusal to acknowledge the arrival of the railway and to adapt to the increasing industrialization of Ayrhire precipitates murder, suicide, and his family's tragic downfall.

The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai


Yehuda Amichai - 1968
    In this revised and expanded collection, renowned translators Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell have selected Amichai's most beloved and enduring poems, including forty new poems from his recent work.from Tourists:Once I was sitting on the steps near the gate at David's Citadel and I put down my two heavy baskets beside me. A group of tourists stood there around their guide, and I became their point of reference. "You see that man over there with the baskets? A little to the right of his head there's an arch from the Roman period. A little to the right of his head." "But he's moving, he's moving!" I said to myself: Redemption will come only when they are told, "Do you see that arch over there from the Roman period? It doesn't matter, but near it, a little to the left and then down a bit, there's a man who has just bought fruit and vegetables for his family."

Second Skin


John Hawkes - 1964
    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.

The Ring and the Book


Robert Browning - 1869
    The ambitious 21,000 line poem is sure to captivate today's reader just as much as its unconventional form surprised those who first rummaged through its pages when it was first published..

Selected Writings


Guillaume Apollinaire - 1971
    He had led migration of Bohemian Paris across the city from Montmartre to Montparnasse, he had helped formulate the principles of 'Cubism', having written one of the first books on the subject, and coined the word 'Surrealist'; and he had demonstrated in his own work those innovations we have come to associate with the most vital investigations of the avente - garde.

Use of Speech


Nathalie Sarraute - 1980
    Translated from the French by Barbara Wright. In this classic later work from French novelist Nathalie Sarraute, one finds a "delectably austere, beady-eyed book.... Phrases that give rise to the scenes or episodes are ordinary enough until Sarraute imagines for them a context which turns them from bland civilities into weapons of psychological warfare. Friends meet and converse, in a cafe or in the street, and are all sociability; except underneath, where the best of friends can be the most savage of opponents. Sarraute resorts sardonically to metaphor to indicate what words will not capture: the shameful and ineffable animosities that...imperil our urbanity" (The Times Literary Supplement).

Selected Poems, 1963-1983


Charles Simic - 1985
    Simic is a master of the absurd and unexpected.