In his fourteenth collection of poems, Pulitzer Prize winner Stephen Dunn reveals his concerns, ranging from meditations on salvation and time to the difficulties and pleasures of loving in this "already brutal century." In language that Gerald Stern has called "unbearably fearless and beautiful," Dunn continues to probe the elusive in the lives we live.

    S. Merwin, Allen Ginsberg, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. In work spanning 30 years (1955-1985), Parra, the pioneer of "antipoetry," remains fresh, bold, and inventive, deftly and humorously subverting convention. Editor David Unger brings together poems from Parra's groundbreaking collection Poemas y antipoemas, the witty aphorisms of Artefactos, and his original and uncompromising later work.

    Living to Tell the Tale spans Marquez's life from his birth in 1927 through the beginning of his career as a writer to the moment in the 1950s when he proposed to the woman who would become his wife. It is a tale of people, places and events as they occur to him: family, work, politics, books and music, his beloved Colombia, parts of his history until now undisclosed and incidents that would later appear, transmuted and transposed in his fiction. A vivid, powerful, beguiling memoir that gives us the formation of Marquez as a writer and as a man.

    The writer's job is to tidy it up: he rants, "that was what my work was all about, cleaning up and giving a manicure to the Catholic hands that were piously getting ready to squeeze the balls of the military tiger." Mesmerized by the strange Vallejo-like poetry of the Indians' phrases ("the houses they were sad because no people were inside them"), the increasingly agitated and frightened writer is endangered twice over: by the spell the strangely beautiful heart-rending voices exert over his tenuous sanity, and by real danger—after all, the murderers are the very generals who still run this unnamed Latin American country.

    A former resident of St. Louis, where he founded the Observable Poetry reading series, he now lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina.

    Now, at the height of his powers, Zambra returns with a book that is the natural extension of these qualities: Multiple Choice.   Written in the form of a standardized test, Multiple Choice invites the reader to complete virtuoso language exercises and engage with short narrative passages via multiple-choice questions that are thought-provoking, usually unanswerable, and often absurd. It offers a new kind of reading experience, one where the reader participates directly in the creation of meaning. Full of humor, melancholy, and anger, Multiple Choice is about love and family; privacy and the limits of closeness; how a society is affected by the legacies of the past; and the conviction that, rather than learning to think, we are trained to obey and repeat. Serious in its literary ambition but playful in its execution, Multiple Choice confirms Alejandro Zambra as one of the most important writers working in any language.

    His magnificent Stranger to the Moon portrays a world that seems to exist outside history and geography, but taps into the dark myths and collective subconscious of his country’s harrowing inequality and violence. A parable of pointed social criticism, with naked humans imprisoned in a house to serve the needs of “the vicious clothed-ones,” the novel describes what ensues when a single “naked-one” privately rebels, risking his own death and that of his fellow prisoners. Each subsequent section of the book adds further layers to the ritualistic and bizarre social order that its characters inhabit. Trained insects and reptiles spy on all the naked-ones, and only the most fortunate reach old age (often by taking up strategic spots near the kitchen and grabbing for the fiercely contested food). Stranger to the Moon is a powerfully brave and distinctive novel by a writer who is arguably Colombia’s greatest living author.

    Disfigured and covered in a blanket of bees, little Simonopio is for some locals the stuff of superstition, a child kissed by the devil. But he is welcomed by landowners Francisco and Beatriz Morales, who adopt him and care for him as if he were their own. As he grows up, Simonopio becomes a cause for wonder to the Morales family, because when the uncannily gifted child closes his eyes, he can see what no one else can—visions of all that’s yet to come, both beautiful and dangerous. Followed by his protective swarm of bees and living to deliver his adoptive family from threats—both human and those of nature—Simonopio’s purpose in Linares will, in time, be divined.Set against the backdrop of the Mexican Revolution and the devastating influenza of 1918, The Murmur of Bees captures both the fate of a country in flux and the destiny of one family that has put their love, faith, and future in the unbelievable.

    The title poem is a tribute to Jack Kerouac, fusing a memorial to the poet's dead friend with a bitter lament for the present state of America. Reproduced in facsimile from Corso's handwritten sheets, his marginal decorations, drawings and glyphs are included. The balance of the book is drawn from his shorter poems.

    Product DescriptionPublishers Description:A Prohibition-era novel centering around the occurrence of a dust storm in southern Minnesota, Orchard of Dust follows the lives of a boy and his father as their town is invaded by a speakeasy.From the Back Cover:In the quiet born to the soil, the coming of a fresh generation quaked and rumbled as a people, displaced from their land, dreamed of once and tomorrow; they followed promised whispers of abundance through a desolation where men ripped at the land, wrenching what harvest the fields could spit until a protestation came against man, strangling the fields in dust; and this people broke their homes, shattering hearthstones against the collapsed shelter of forgotten desires that had turned to dead leaves.

    

    He brings to the ordinary--to time, to landscape and stony earth, to bean fields and cities, to events and dreams--magical sound that conveys order, penetrating sight and attention. "The poems written while we are awake...are more original and more beautiful, and sometimes more wild than those made from dreams," Machado said.In the newspapers before and during the Spanish Civil War, he wrote of political and moral issues, and, in 1939, fled from Franco's army into the Pyrenees, dying in exile a month later. When in 1966 a bronze bust of Machado was to be unveiled in a town here he had taught school, thousands of people came in pilgrimage only to find the Civil Guard with clubs and submachine guns blocking their way.This selection of Machado's poetry, beautifully translated by Bly, begins with the Spanish master's first book, Times Alone, Passageways in the House, and Other Poems (1903), and follows his work to the poems published after his death: Poems from the Civil War (written during 1936 - 1939).

    A large and important collection by one of Eastern Europe's major contemporary poets.

    Real people. Real stories.

    Intended as a starting point for a better understanding and appreciation of literature, each analysis also imparts information about the author, the social and historical background, structure and traditions of literary genres, facts about characters, and a bibliography to encourage further intellectual exploration. Esta colección es una herramienta indispensable para el estudio y análisis de obras clásicas de la literatura universal. Los libros de formato agradable y presentación moderna ofrecen un análisis crítico, información sobre los personajes y los géneros literarios, una bibliografía, y un compendio de la obra en particular junto a un estudio del autor y su época.