At the time, Allen was working on the "San Francisco Scene" issue of the Evergreen Review, and Ginsberg and Kerouac brought him manuscripts and news of developments on the West Coast.Over the next three years, Kerouac would send Allen poems for various projects, along with letters in which he discussed his poetry, his life, and the work of his young contemporaries. The unpublished poems are collected here, as are the letters, a comic strip drawn for the Cassady children, and Kerouac's self-penned poetic biography.Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) was a principal actor in the Beat Generation, a companion of Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady in that great adventure. His books include On the Road, The Dharma Bums, Mexico City Blues, Lonesome Traveler, Visions of Cody, Pomes All Sizes (City Lights), Scattered Poems (City Lights), and Scripture of the Golden Eternity (City Lights).

    Or a prediction comes true and I couldn't do anything to stop it, so it seems like a kind of useless magic."

     When Colin Coyne, a young American filmmaker seeking aesthetic inspiration in Ireland, catches a pickpocket red-handed in a hotel pub, all it takes is one look into her dazzling eyes for him to fall hard. Purely for the sake of research -- or so he tells himself -- he hurtles headlong into the bewitching world of Gina Furey, a stunningly beautiful, iron-willed denizen of Dublin's gypsy criminal underground. Before he knows what's happening, he finds himself a star player in a Pygmalion-like relationship rich with dramatic film possibilities: the earnest Yankee auteur woos and wins the dangerous gypsy thief. But the tenuous lines separating art and reality soon dissolve and the neatly linear screenplay unfolding inside Colin's head is eclipsed by the brutal chaos and unpredictability of true life. By turns devastating and hopeful, bittersweet and hilarious, Fork in The Road is both a tragic love story and the riveting drama of one man's heartbreaking journey from exhilaration to desolation.

    That story, Pictor's Metamorphoses, is presented here along with a half century of Hesse's other short writings. Inspired by the Arabian Nights and the tales of the Brothers Grimm, these nineteen stories display the full range of Hesse's lifetime fascination with fantasy--as dream, fairy tale, folktale, satire, and allegory.

    This delightful collection, the most comprehensive ever compiled of his work, presents all of Lear's verse and other nonsense writings, including stories, letters, and illustrated alphabets, as well as previously unpublished material. Featuring Lear's own line drawings throughout and an introduction by leading Lear authority Vivien Noakes, this captivating volume reveals a complex man of ample talents, achievements, and influence-and is teeming with timeless nonsense.

    Calvin Trillin employs everything from a Gilbert and Sullivan style, for describing George Bush’s rescue in the South Carolina primary by the Christian Right (“I am, when all is said and done, a Robertson Republican”), to a bilingual approach, when commenting on the President’s casual acknowledgment, after months of trying to persuade the nation otherwise, that there was never any evidence of Iraqi involvement in 9/11: “The Web may say, or maybe Lexis-Nexis / If chutzpa is a word they use in Texas.”Trillin deals not only with George W. Bush but with the people around him—Supreme Commander Karl Rove and Condoleezza (Mushroom Cloud) Rice and Nanny Dick Cheney (“One mystery I’ve tried to disentangle: / Why Cheney’s head is always at an angle . . .”) The armchair warriors Trillin refers to as the Sissy Hawk Brigade are celebrated in such poems as “Richard Perle: Whose Fault Is He?” and “A Sissy Hawk Cheer” (“All-out war is still our druthers— / Fiercely fought, and fought by others.”).Trillin may never be poet laureate—certainly not while George W. Bush is in office—but his wit and his political insight produce what has been called “doggerel for the ages.”

    One of America's most important twentieth-century poets, Stevens forever changed the landscape of modern poetry with his provocative, experimental style.This first-rate collection by the winner of the 1955 Pulitzer Prize for poetry invites students and other readers to enjoy the richness and variety found in 82 of Stevens's finest creations. Included are such well-known compositions as "Sunday Morning," "Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock," "Anecdote of the Jar," "Peter Quince at the Clavier," "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," and the title piece — the author's favorite — as well as lesser known yet equally stimulating works such as "The Florist Wears Knee-Breeches" and "The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad."Invaluable to students of American literature, this volume will be an indispensable treasury for lovers of modern poetry.

    From the epic Irish legend of Cuchulain to tales of banshees, leprechauns and wizards, these short stories and fables cover a wide range of Ireland's mythology and legends, forming a companion volume to Michael Scott's Irish Folk and Fairy Tales.

    It's the first summer of lust for 14-year-old Jim Finnegan, a boy trying to become a man in 1980s Dublin. Jim's vivid and winning voice leaps off the page and into the reader's heart as he watches his parents argue, his five older sisters fight, and the local network of mothers gossip. Jim hilariously recounts his life dealing with the politics of his boisterous family, taking breakneck bike rides with his best friend, dancing to Foreigner on his boombox, and quietly coveting the local girls from afar. Over the summer, Jim wins the attention of a beautiful older girl, but he also becomes the unwilling target of a devious religious figure in the community. His life starts to unravel as he faces consequences from both his love for his girlfriend and his attempts to avoid the Parish Priest. When he and his girlfriend take a ferry for a clandestine trip to London, the dark and difficult repercussions from the trip force Jim to look for the solution to all his problems in some very unusual places. The Fields is an unforgettable story of an extraordinary character. It's a portrait of a boy who sinks into troubles as he grows into a man, and the loving but fractured family that might be his downfall -- or his salvation. Lyrical, funny, and endlessly inventive, it is a brilliant debut from a remarkable new voice.

    Baldwin's language is deceptively simple--this poetry is easily understood. But the emotions behind the words go to the core not only of the poet's soul, but of America's. Readers will see Baldwin here in both a familiar and an altogether different light.

    Life is now nowhere Else. Live, live for Today I say, but The moments tick And groan, moan With the dismal passage Of time and I wait Forever for what Cannot be. Poems of feeling and experience, the anthology encompasses all of life and beyond: death, the universe, hopes, dreams, love, loss - all of existence contained in one work. Poetry that captures both moments and lifetimes, memories and hopes, reality and dreams. Poems to identify with, poems of life.

    For twins Chloe and Alex the future looks bright, if a bit uncertain. But turbulence is not far from the horizon and begins when Alex is in a car crash on the way home from a drinking binge with friends.

    The poems also address gender inequality and our inharmonious relationship with the natural world. A poem on Lilian Bland – the first woman to design, build and fly her own aeroplane – celebrates the audacity and ingenuity of a great Irish heroine. Elsewhere, explorers in Greenland set foot on a fjord system accessible to Europeans for the first time in millennia as a result of global warming. But if life is fragile then its traces are persistent, insistent, and in ‘Articulation’ we are invited to stop and wonder at the reconstructed skeleton of Napoleon’s horse, Marengo, ‘whose very hooves trod mud at Austerlitz’, suspended in time ‘for however long he lasts before he crumbles’.

    As warm and intelligent as it is ribald and cunning, this collection of Thom Gunn's is his richest yet.

    That was the essence of the life an poetry of Langston Hughes.”—Senator John Kerry, from the PrefaceA beautifully designed collection of some of the greatest poems by a quintessentially American poet, whose theme of the promise of American inclusiveness continues to ring true.Langston Hughes was uncommonly attuned to the ideals of freedom and democracy and the sometimes elusive American dream. The poems collected here offer a hopeful, truly democratic vision for America. Incantatory and stirring, passionate and provocative, they are as resonant for our times as they were over half a century ago.Contents:“Let America Be America Again,” “Dream of Freedom,” “America,” “Search,” “Some Day,” “In Time of Silver Rain,” “Dare,” “Give Us Our Peace,” “I Dream a World.”