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All of Us: The Collected Poems by Raymond Carver
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The Ballad of Reading Gaol
Oscar Wilde - 1896
One hundred years after his release from Reading Gaol, the life and work of Oscar Wilde has lost none of its fascination. In his day, his wit and writings enchanted and scandalized society in equal measure; his downfall came at the height of his powers. Devastated by his notorious trial for indecency, imprisoned for ``homosexual offenses,'' he was to spend two ruinous years in solitary confinement. As he was later to tell Andre Gide, Reading Gaol ``was not fit for dogs. I thought I would go mad.'' The Ballad was written from personal experience, and there was to be no more writing after this. As Wilde observed: ``Something is killed in me.'' Bankrupt, disgraced, and in exile, Wilde was to die not long after his release at the age of 46. His final resting place is the cemetery of Pere Lachaise in Paris. His tomb bears an inscription from The Ballad of Reading Gaol: ``And alien tears will fill for him/Pity's long broken urn/For his mourners will be outcast men/And outcasts always mourn.'' This commemorative edition of the poem is illustrated with the powerfully moving wood engravings of Garrick Palmer. 48 pp 5 x 8 8 wood engravings
The Touchstone
Edith Wharton - 1900
But despite its masterly control, this startlingly modern tale is also a simmering, rebel cri de coeur unleashed by a writer who was herself unappreciated in her own time. The combination of these attributes make this edgy novella a moving and suspenseful homage to the power of literature itself.The Art of The Novella SeriesToo short to be a novel, too long to be a short story, the novella is generally unrecognized by academics and publishers. Nonetheless, it is a form beloved and practiced by literature's greatest writers. In the Art Of The Novella series, Melville House celebrates this renegade art form and its practitioners with titles that are, in many instances, presented in book form for the first time.
The Angel Esmeralda
Don DeLillo - 2011
From one of the greatest writers of our time, his first collection of short stories, written between 1979 and 2011, chronicling—and foretelling—three decades of American life Set in Greece, the Caribbean, Manhattan, a white-collar prison and outer space, these nine stories are a mesmerizing introduction to Don DeLillo’s iconic voice, from the rich, startling, jazz-infused rhythms of his early work to the spare, distilled, monastic language of the later stories. In “Creation,” a couple at the end of a cruise somewhere in the West Indies can’t get off the island—flights canceled, unconfirmed reservations, a dysfunctional economy. In “Human Moments in World War III,” two men orbiting the earth, charged with gathering intelligence and reporting to Colorado Command, hear the voices of American radio, from a half century earlier. In the title story, Sisters Edgar and Grace, nuns working the violent streets of the South Bronx, confirm the neighborhood’s miracle, the apparition of a dead child, Esmeralda. Nuns, astronauts, athletes, terrorists and travelers, the characters in The Angel Esmeralda propel themselves into the world and define it. DeLillo’s sentences are instantly recognizable, as original as the splatter of Jackson Pollock or the luminous rectangles of Mark Rothko. These nine stories describe an extraordinary journey of one great writer whose prescience about world events and ear for American language changed the literary landscape.
Selected Poems
Marina Tsvetaeva - 1971
An admired contemporary of Rilke, Akhmatova, and Mandelstam, Russian poet Marina Tsvetayeva bore witness to the turmoil and devastation of the Revolution, and chronicled her difficult life in exile, sustained by the inspiration and power of her modern verse.The poems in this selection are drawn from eleven volumes published over thirty years.
The Wild Palms
William Faulkner - 1939
In New Orleans in 1937, a man and a woman embark on a headlong flight into the wilderness of illicit passion, fleeing her husband and the temptations of respectability. In Mississippi ten years earlier, a convict sets forth across a flooded river, risking his own chance at freedom to rescue a pregnant woman. From these separate stories Faulkner composes a symphony of deliverance and damnation, survival and self-sacrifice, a novel in which elemental danger is juxtaposed wiht fatal injuries of the spirit. The Wild Palms is grandly inventive, heart-stopping in its prose, and suffused on every page with the physical presence of the country that Faulkner made his own.
Fungi from Yuggoth and Other Poems
H.P. Lovecraft - 1920
Since publication of The Outsider and Others in 1939, his work has been published in many parts of the world, widely anthologised, and filmed. His books include The Survivor and Others, The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath, The Doom That Came to Sarnath, Fungi from Yuggoth and Other Poems, The Tomb and Other Tales, At the Mountains of Madness, The Lurker at the Threshold (Lovecraft and Derleth) and The Lurking Fear. Lovecrat was born and lived most of his life in Providence, Rhode Island.1."Foreword", by August Derleth2."Providence"3."On a Grecian Colonnade in a Park"4."Old Christmas"5."New England Fallen"6."On a New England Village Seen by Moonlight"7."Astrophobos"8."Sunset"9."To Pan"10."A Summer Sunset and Evening"11."To Mistress Sophia Simple, Queen of the Cinema"12."A Year Off"13."Sir Thomas Tryout"14."Phaeton"15."August"16."Death"17."To a Youth"18."My Favorite Character"19."To Templeton and Mount Monadnock"20."The Poe-et's Nightmare"21."Lament for the Vanished Spider"22."Regnar Lodbrug's Epicedium"23."Little Sam Perkins"24."Drinking Song from the Tomb"25."The Ancient Track"26."The Eidolon"27."The Nightmare Lake"28."The Outpost"29."The Rutted Road"30."The Wood"31."The House"32."The City"33."Hallowe'en in a Suburb"34."Primavera"35."October"36."To a Dreamer"37."Despair"38."Nemesis"39."Yule Horror"40."To Mr. Finlay, Upon His Drawing for Mr. Bloch's Tale, 'The Faceless God'"41."Where Once Poe Walked"42."Christmas Greetings to Mrs. Phillips Gamwell—1925"43."Brick Row"44."The Messenger"45."To Klarkash-ton, Lord of Averoigne"46."Psychopompos"47."The Book"48."Pursuit"49."The Key"50."Recognition"51."Homecoming"52."The Lamp"53."Zaman's Hill"54."The Port"55."The Courtyard"56."The Pigeon-Flyers"57."The Well"58."The Howler"59."Hesperia"60."Star Winds"61."Antarkos"62."The Window"63."A Memory"64."The Gardens of Yin"65."The Bells"66."Night Gaunts"67."Nyarlathotep"68."Azathoth"69."Mirage"70."The Canal"71."St. Toad's"72."The Familiars"73."The Elder Pharos"74."Expectancy"75."Nostalgia"76."Background"77."The Dweller"78."Alienation"79."Harbour Whistles"80."Recapture"81."Evening Star"82. "Continuity"Cover Illustration: Gervasio Gallardo
Bright Dead Things
Ada Limon - 2015
Limón has often been a poet who wears her heart on her sleeve, but in these extraordinary poems that heart becomes a “huge beating genius machine” striving to embrace and understand the fullness of the present moment. “I am beautiful. I am full of love. I am dying,” the poet writes. Building on the legacies of forebears such as Frank O’Hara, Sharon Olds, and Mark Doty, Limón’s work is consistently generous and accessible—though every observed moment feels complexly thought, felt, and lived.
Lyrical Ballads
William Wordsworth - 1798
They were written chiefly with a view to ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure - William Wordsworth, from the Advertisment prefacing the original 1798 edition. When it was first published, Lyrical Ballads enraged the critics of the day: Wordsworth and Coleridge had given poetry a voice, one decidedly different to what had been voiced before. For Wordsworth, as he so clearly stated in his celebrated preface to the 1800 edition (also reproduced here), the important thing was the emotion aroused by the poem, and not the poem itself. This acclaimed Routledge Classics edition offers the reader the opportunity to study the poems in their original contexts as they appeared to Coleridge's and Wordsworth's contemporaries, and includes some of their most famous poems, including Coleridge's Rime of the Ancyent Marinere.
New American Best Friend
Olivia Gatwood - 2017
Gatwood's poems deftly deconstruct traditional stereotypes. The focus shifts from childhood to adulthood, gender to sexuality, violence to joy. And always and inexorably, the book moves toward celebration, culminating in a series of odes: odes to the body, to tough women, to embracing your own journey in all its failures and triumphs.