The Waste Land and Other Poems


T.S. Eliot - 1922
    In addition to the title poem, this selecion includes "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", "Gerontion", "Ash Wednesday", and other poems from Mr. Eliot's early and middle work. "In ten years' time," wrote Edmund Wilson in Axel0s Castle (1931), "Eliot has left upon English poetry a mark more unmistakable than that of any other poet writing in English." In 1948 Mr. Eliot was awarded the Nobel Prize "for his work as trail-blazing pioneer of modern 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.

Spain, Take This Chalice from Me and Other Poems: Parallel Text edition


César Vallejo - 1974
    Challenging, intense, and difficult to translate, Vallejo's work has often been overshadowed by his fervent endorsement of communism. Noted scholar Ilan Stavans tackles the avant- garde poet's politics head-on in an enlightening new introduction that places Vallejo in his proper literary context, while Margaret Sayers Peden's new translation does full justice to Vallejo's complex literary style. Including Spanish and English versions of more than eighty poems that span the arc of his career, this volume is certain to become the leading collection of Vallejo's work for years to come.For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

View with a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems


Wisława Szymborska - 1995
    With acute irony tempered by a generous curiousity, she documents life's improbability as well as its transient beauty.

La Lupa


Giovanni Verga - 1880
    We should be fed to the pigs, mothers like me." A mother fumes about her daughter's love affair as they hurtle towards tragedy in Verga's passionate Italian drama, first performed in 1894.David Lan's acclaimed new version premiered at the RSC in June 2000.

Largo Desolato


Václav Havel - 1985
    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 Harder They Come


Michael Thelwell - 1980
    With passion and precision, Michael Thelwell recounts Rhygin’s journey from a morally coherent rural universe to the teeming, predatory slums of Kingston, his rebellion against the poverty and corruption of postcolonial Jamaica, his blazing, simultaneous rise to the top of the charts and the Most Wanted list.

Selected Poems


H.D. - 1957
    With both the general reader and the student in mind, editor Louis L. Martz of Yale University (who also edited H.D.'s Collected Poems 1912-1944) has provided generous examples of H.D.'s work. From her early "Imagist" period, through the "lost" poems of the thirties where H.D. discovered her unique creative voice, to the great prophetic poems of the war years combined in Trilogy, the selection triumphantly concludes with portions of the late sequences Helen in Egypt and Hermetic Definition which focus on rebirth, reconciliation, and the reunion of the divided self.

A Dance of the Forests


Wole Soyinka - 1963
    This drama was first performed as part of the Nigerian Independence Celebrations.

Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice


Louis MacNeice - 1949
    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.

The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer


Isaac Bashevis Singer - 1982
    They include supernatural tales, slices of life from Warsaw and the shtetls of Eastern Europe, and stories of the Jews displaced from that world to the New World, from the East Side of New York to California and Miami.

Sepulchres


Ugo Foscolo - 1807
    Expressing the author’s political, civic, and sentimental concerns, these poems captivate with their immediacy and intimacy. Each work reveals the inner recesses of a passionate, restless, and surprisingly modern mind.

The Collected Poems, Vol. 2: 1939-1962


William Carlos Williams - 1967
    'And when the second and final colume of Williams' 'Collected Poems' is published, it should become even more apparent that he is this century's major American poet.' --Larry Kart, 'Chicago Tribune'

Gogol's Wife and Other Stories


Tommaso Landolfi - 1961
    It is based in a prodigious imagination, a very curious sense of humor and a rare command of irony.The short stories included are:- Gogol's Wife- Pastoral- Dialogue on the Greater Harmonies- The Two Old Maids- Wedding Night- The Death of the King of France- Giovanni and His Wife- Sunstroke- A Romantic's Letter on Gambling

Spanking the Maid


Robert Coover - 1981
    The maid comes to the bedroom to clean. She inevitably forgets something -- the soap, fresh sheets, a bucket -- or does something wrong. The master has had a nightmare he can't quite recall that had something to do with when he was in school: lectures, or was it lechers? No matter, the maid must be reprimanded for her neglect, and out comes the handy paraphernalia -- a hairbrush, a cat-o'-nine-tails, a rod, a cane -- and the spanking begins.Included in Harold Bloom's The Western Canon and named by Daphne Merkin in The New Yorker as one of her "favorite" S/M books, Spanking the Maid is a spare, tantalizing, and perfect book by an American master.