Advice on conflict resolution and genuine intimacy. The author doesnt forget to include treatments on couple crises, ruptures, and the mourning of heartbreak as a previous step to be prepared to fall in love again.

    Guest editor Robert Hass, a former Poet Laureate and a central figure in the poetry world, brings his passionate intelligence to "The Best American Poetry 2001." In his engaging introduction, Hass writes that after sifting through dozens of literary magazines, he "found that there were large numbers of poems that gave me pleasure, seemed to have inventive force, or intellectual passion or surprise." The works he selected are diverse in every way with only their excellence in common. With comments from the poets illuminating their work, and series editor David Lehman's always entertaining foreword assessing the current state of the art, "The Best American Poetry 2001" presents the richness and originality of this exciting moment in the history of American poetry.

    Stereotypes of Mexican identities and fictions are identified and transcended. Traditional tales rub shoulders with mindbending new worlds. Welcome to the new Mexican fantastic.Eduardo Jiménez Mayo's translations include books by Bruno Estañol, Rafael Pérez Gay, and José María Pérez Gay.Chris N. Brown lives in Austin, Texas. He is a contributor to the blog No Fear of the Future.Bruce Sterling lives in Turin, Italy, and blogs at Wired's Beyond the Beyond.

    The animal kingdom has prompted some of the liveliest and most enjoyable writing by poets, from Homer to our contemporaries. Among the creatures gathered here, tame or wild; common or exotic, are mammals, reptiles, birds, insects, and others perhaps more fanciful than real. A zoologist's delight.There is, too, a moral or philosophical purpose. As Paul Muldoon says in his introduction: 'We are most human in the presence of animals.' And it is just this sense of how our humanity is illuminated by the contemplation of bestial life that he has set out to celebrate. The results are wonderfully rich and thought-provoking.

    And the discovery of her corpse—by a group of children playing near the irrigation canals—propels the whole village into an investigation of how and why this murder occurred. Rumors and suspicions spread. As the novel unfolds in a dazzling linguistic torrent, with each unreliable narrator lingering on new details, new acts of depravity or brutality, Melchor extracts some tiny shred of humanity from these characters that most would write off as utterly irredeemable, forming a lasting portrait of a damned Mexican village.Like Roberto Bolano’s 2666 or Faulkner’s greatest novels, Hurricane Season takes place in a world filled with mythology and violence—real violence, the kind that seeps into the soil, poisoning everything around: it’s a world that becomes more terrifying and more terrifyingly real the deeper you explore it.

    The story of the last member of the aristocratic Azcoitia family, a monstrous mutation protected from the knowledge of his deformity by being surrounded with other freaks as companions, The Obscene Bird of Night is a triumph of imaginative, visionary writing. Its luxuriance, fecundity, horror, and energy will not soon fade from the reader’s mind.The story is like a great puzzle . . . invested with a vibrant, almost tangible reality.—The New York TimesAlthough many of the other “boom” writers may have received more attention—especially Fuentes and Vargas Llosa—Donoso and his masterpiece may be the most lasting, visionary, strangest of the books from this time period. Seriously, it’s a novel about the last member of an aristocratic family, a monstrous mutant, who is surrounded by other freaks so as to not feel out of place.—Publishers WeeklyNicola Barker has said: "I'm no expert on the topic of South American literature (in fact I'm a dunce), but I have reason to believe (after diligently scouring the internet) that Chile's Jose Donoso, while a very highly regarded author on home turf, is little known on this side of the Atlantic. His masterpiece is the fabulously entitled The Obscene Bird of Night. It would be a crass understatement to say that this book is a challenging read; it's totally and unapologetically psychotic. It's also insanely gothic, brilliantly engaging, exquisitely written, filthy, sick, terrifying, supremely perplexing, and somehow connives to make the brave reader feel like a tiny, sleeping gnat being sucked down a fabulously kaleidoscopic dream plughole."

    In a single day, a man is guillotined for preaching the intellectual pleasures of sex; an ostrich in a zoo, reversing roles, devours a lion; and a man, while urinating, goes bungee jumping through time itself—and manages to escape. Or does he? Witness the weird machinery of Yesterday, where the Chilean master Juan Emar deploys irony, digression, and giddy repetitions to ratchet up narrative tension again and again and again, in this thrilling whirlwind of the ecstatically unexpected—all wed to the happiest marriage of any novel, ever.Born in Chile at the tail end of the nineteenth century, Juan Emar was largely overlooked during his lifetime, and lived in self-imposed exile from the literary circles of his day. A cult of Emarians, however, always persisted, and after several rediscoveries in the Spanish-speaking world, he is finally getting his international due with the English-language debut of Yesterday, deftly translated by Megan McDowell. Emar’s work offers unique and delirious pleasures, and will be an epiphany to anglophone readers.

    She’s been staying out till all hours of the night and grows more disagreeable by the day. Should Lucio have Diana committed to the Psychiatric Institute, as her friend the dog trainer suggests? Before Lucio can even make up his mind, Diana is carted away by the mysterious head of the institute. Never mind, Diana’s sister, who looks just like Diana—and yet is nothing like her—has moved in. And on the recommendation of the dog trainer, Lucio acquires an adoring German shepherd, also named Diana. Then one glorious day, Diana returns, affectionate and pleasant. She’s been cured!—but have the doctors at the institute gone too far?Asleep in the Sun is the great work of the Argentine master Adolfo Bioy Casares's later years. Like his legendary Invention of Morel, it is an intoxicating mixture of fantasy, sly humor, and menace. Whether read as a fable of modern politics, a meditation on the elusive parameters of the self, or a most unusual love story, Bioy's book is an almost scarily perfect comic turn, as well as a pure delight.

    A landmark compilation of popular music, this collection contains Paul Simon's lyrics from his first album in 1964 to the present, now with 2011’s So Beautiful Or So What?

    The scope and fire of Dante's genius in a single volume.Includes "The Divine Comedy," "The New Life," and other selected poems, prose, and letters accompanied by biographical and introductory sections.

    A concise, chronological history of Latin America spans six centuries and encompasses twenty countries as it discusses the people, events, and factors that shaped Latin America--including colonization, revolution, ethnic diversity, and the struggle for economic growth and political and social equality.

    All five authors are among the greatest Portuguese poets ever, but whereas the first two have been consistently translated in English and are now part of the global poetic legacy, the other three are far more ignored beyond the borders of the Portuguese-speaking world where they are widely praised.

    The writing straddles the shifting line between pure, unadorned storytelling and satire, exploring the sometimes hilarious and sometimes heartbreaking nature of survival in a decidedly cruel world.

    The Last American Valentine is a unique anthology of non-sappy love poetry and flash fiction. Poet Laureates, rock musicians, actors, famed prose writers and a few talented American barfly's have been handpicked, hunted down and crammed together with an artist the world has never met.

    They discuss their endlessly connected neighbors the daughter of what was her name? Miganne, who lived in front of Cabanillas s office Which Cabanillas? The one married to Artola s daughter? They talk about a mysterious pit that opened up one day, and the old bricklayer who sometimes walked to the Cemetery to cheer himself up. Anxious to show off his valuable antiques, the host shows his guests old wind-up toys, and takes them to admire an enormous doll. Back at home, the bachelor decides to watch some late night TV before retiring. The news quickly takes a turn for the worse as, horrified, the newscaster finds herself reporting about the dead rising from their graves, leaving the cemetery, and sucking the blood of the living all the figures are disturbingly reminiscent of the dinner party. And how can the citizens save their town when deep down there is always such a dark thirst for life?"