It is a typical example of a Romantic closet drama. Manfred was adapted musically by Robert Schumann in 1852, in a composition entitled Manfred: Dramatic Poem with music in Three Parts, and later by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky in his Manfred Symphony, Op. 58, as well as by Carl Reinecke. Friedrich Nietzsche was impressed by the poem's depiction of a super-human being, and wrote some music for it. Byron wrote this "metaphysical drama", as he called it, after his marriage failed in scandal amidst charges of sexual improprieties and an incestuous affair between Byron and his half-sister, Augusta Leigh. Attacked by the press and ostracized by London society, Byron fled England for Switzerland in 1816 and never returned. Because Manfred was written immediately after this and because Manfred regards a main character tortured by his own sense of guilt for an unmentionable offense, some critics consider Manfred to be autobiographical, or even confessional.The unnamed but forbidden nature of Manfred's relationship to Astarte is believed to represent Byron's relationship with his half-sister Augusta. Byron commenced this work in late 1816, only a few months after the famed ghost-story sessions which provided the initial impetus for Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. The supernatural references are made clear throughout the poem. In one scene, for example, (Act III, Scene IV, Interior of the Tower), Manfred recalls traveling through time (or astral projection traveling) to Caesar's palace, "and fill'd up, As 't were anew, the gaps of centuries...".

    Translated by the American poet James Wright.

    Arthur Conan Doyle provides a rich and fascinating set of mysteries to challenge his sleuth in the new stories. As before, Watson is the superb narrator, and the magic remains unchanged and undimmed.This fascinating volume also includes the collection His Last Bow. In the title story, we are told how Sherlock Holmes is brought out of retirement to help the government fight the German threat at the approach of the First World War. Here are two sparkling sets of stories featuring the greatest detective of them all.

    “A haunting, masterful work.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)Plain but precocious Alma has taken up residence with a group of teenage war orphans in the abandoned Hotel Sarajevo.

    Blunden took part in the disastrous battles of the Somme, Ypres and Passchendaele, describing the latter as 'murder, not only to the troops, but to their singing faiths and hopes'. In his compassionate yet unsentimental prose, he tells of the heroism and despair found among the officers. Blunden's poems show how he found hope in the natural landscape; the only thing that survives the terrible betrayal enacted in the Flanders fields.

    It is not just another day: it is the culmination of hundreds of days, hundreds of disappointments and misunderstandings, and thousands of very small lies... From the Publisher 'Demonstrates a wry talent' Guardian 'A true writer of fiction...A writer whose every book has been a pleasure' Scotsman At the moment that Colonel Browne is standing in the shallow end of the swimming pool of the Hotel Alpenrose, preparing for his late afternoon dip, his daughter Charlotte, carrying a suitcase, is getting out of her car back in England, preparing to rob the ancestral home. It is not just another day: it is the cuilmination of hundreds of days, hundreds of disappointments and misunderstandings, and thousands of very small lies... 'Rose Tremain goes from strength to strength. The Colonel's Daughter is a winner...a riveting and satisfying read' New Statesman 'Dialogue and off-beat humour are spot on' Daily Telegraph.

    Some poems incite, others console, as the poet—maestro of his own response and impresario of ours—Looks inward and out."—Los Angeles Times“We are faced with the unavoidable task of critical communication within a world which is empty and is not less full of injustices, punishments and sufferings because it is empty.”—from Pablo Neruda’s Nobel Prize address"This is the first complete English language translation of the late work by Neruda, the greatest of Latin American poets, translated by O'Daly, a specialist in Neruda's late and posthumous work....Highly recommended for poetry and Latin American collections." —Library Journal"William O. Daly's translation of Pablo Neruda's book-length poem, Fin de mundo, is a veritable poet's companion and guide to the twentieth century. This is Pablo Neruda at his best and most honest....Neruda's poems are a quiet but potent celebration of the resilience of the human spirit."—Sacramento Book ReviewIn this book-length poem, completely translated for the first time into English and presented in a bilingual format, Nobel Laureate Pablo Neruda composes a “valediction to the Sixties” and confronts a grim disillusionment growing inside him. Terrifying, beautiful, vast, and energized, Neruda’s work speaks of oppression and warfare, his own guilt, and the ubiquitous fear that came to haunt the century that promised to end all wars.World’s End also marks the final book in Copper Canyon’s dynamic nine-book series of Neruda’s late and posthumous work. These best-selling books have become perennial favorites of poetry readers, librarians, and teachers. Through this series, translator William O’Daly has been recognized as one of the world’s most insightful caretakers of Neruda’s poetry, and Publishers Weekly praised his efforts as “awe-inspiring.”My truest vocationwas to become a mill:singing in the water, I studiedthe motives of transparencyand learned from the abundant wheatthe identity that repeats itself.Pablo Neruda is one of the world’s beloved poets. He served as a Chilean diplomat and won the Nobel Prize in 1971.William O’Daly has dedicated thirty years to translating the late and posthumous work of Pablo Neruda. He lives in California.

    Georgy bears her fate bravely as she alternates between playing the fool and humbling herself before Meredith, her pretty, callous flatmate, although when James, middle-aged socialite and self-imposed 'Uncle', asks Georgy to become his mistress, she is tempted to accept. Then Meredith announces that she is pregnant and Jos, the expectant father, decides he is in love with Georgy...

    The resonance of this image grows through each section of the book as Hahn skillfully employs theme and variation, counterpoint and mirroring techniques. The ibis first appears as part of an illusion, the disappearing object in a magician’s trick, which then evokes the greatest disappearing act of all—death—where there are no tricks to bring about a reappearance. The rich complexity multiplies as the second section focuses on a disappearing lady and a dramatic final section brings together the bird and the lady in their common plight—both caged by their mortality, their assigned time and role.  All of the illusions fall away during this brilliant denouement as the two voices share a dialogue on the power of metaphor as the very essence of poetry. bird trick iv It’s all about disappearance. About a bird in a cagewith a mirror, a simple twiston the handle at the sidethat makes it come and go at the magician’s insistence. It’s all about innocence.It’s all about acceptance.It’s all about compliance.It’s all about deference.It’s all about silence. It’s all about disappearance.

    This lens is the secret of narration, and it is ground anew in every story, ground between the temporal and the timeless . . . . In our brief mortal lives, we are grinders of these lenses."This brooding, provocative, and almost unbearably lovely book displays one of the great writers of our time at his freest and most direct, addressing the themes that run beneath the surface of all his work, from Ways of Seeing to his Into Their Labours trilogy.In an extraordinary distillation of his gifts as a novelist, poet, art critic, and social historian, John Berger reveals the ties between love and absence, the ways poetry endows language with the assurance of prayer, and the tensions between the forward movement of sexuality and the steady backward tug of time. He re-creates the mysterious forces at work in a Rembrandt painting, transcribes the sensorial experience of viewing lilacs at dusk, and explores the meaning of home to early man and to the hundreds of thousands of displaced people in our cities today.A work of unclassifiable innovation and consummate beauty, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos reminds us of Nabokov and Auden, Brecht and Lawrence, in its seamless fusion of the political and the personal.

    Timid, scrawny Willie Beech -- the abused child of a single mother -- is evacuated to the English countryside. At first, he is terrified of everything, of the country sounds and sights, even of Mr. Tom, the gruff, kindly old man who has taken him in. But gradually Willie forgets the hate and despair of his past. He learns to love a world he never knew existed, a world of friendship and affection in which harsh words and daily beatings have no place. Then a telegram comes. Willie must return to his mother in London. When weeks pass by with no word from Willie, Mr. Tom sets out for London to look for the young boy he has come to love as a son.

    The son of a stonemason attempts to win the hand of a squire's daughter, in a lush pastoral portrait of nineteenth-century life that depicts the pain of young love and the unpredictable twists of fortune.

    A landmark achievement as expansive, erudite, and passionate as its renowned author, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human is the culmination of a lifetime of reading, writing about, and teaching Shakespeare. Preeminent literary critic-and ultimate authority on the western literary tradition-Harold Bloom leads us through a comprehensive reading of every one of the dramatist's plays, brilliantly illuminating each work with unrivaled warmth, wit and insight. At the same time, Bloom presents one of the boldest theses of Shakespearean scholarships: that Shakespeare not only invented the English language, but also created human nature as we know it today.

    Drawing from his eleven collections and including twenty-three previously unpublished poems, Search Party is the essential compilation of this beloved poet's work. Edited by his son, Sebastian Matthews, and William Matthews's friend and fellow poet Stanley Plumly (who also introduces the book), Search Party is an excellent introduction to the poet and his glistening riffs on twentieth-century topics from basketball to food to jazz.

    The Dead Sea Poems, his fourth collection, culminates in a long visionary poem, 'Five Eleven Ninety Nine'. Elsewhere, questions of belief and trust, of identity and knowledge, dealt with as they occur in everyday domestic life, contribute to a picture of our contemporary world that is at once realistic and touched with a unique imaginative intensity.