The pair's innovative and authentic adaptation of Dante's epic, coupled with Birk's striking play on Gustave Dor's classic illustrations, make this a "Divine Comedy" for the 21st century. Acclaimed by both the literary and art worlds; rife with contemporary turns of phrase and slang (just as the original poem was written in the vernacular of its day) and pointed visions of the afterlife as contemporary cities; and rich with bold allusion, cultural critique, and witthis is the must-have collection of modern classics.

    Its popularity owes much to the lyricism of the prose, thepitch-perfect rendition of black vernacular English, and the memorable characters--most notably, Janie Crawford. Collecting the most widely cited and influential essays published on Hurston's classic novel over the last quarter century, this Casebook presents contesting viewpoints by Hazel Carby, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Barbara Johnson, Carla Kaplan, Daphne Lamothe, Mary Helen Washington, and Sherley Anne Williams. The volume also includes a statement Hurston submitted to a reference book on twentieth-century authors in 1942. As it records the major debates the novel has sparked on issues oflanguage and identity, feminism and racial politics, A Casebook charts new directions for future critics and affirms the classic status of the novel.

    In the century since its first performance, The Cherry Orchard has undergone a wide range of conflicting interpretations: tragic and comic, naturalistic and symbolic, reactionary and radical. Beginning with the 1904 premiere at Stanislavsky's Moscow Art Theatre, this study traces the performance history of one of the landmark plays of the modern theatre. Considering the work of such directors as Anatoly Efros, Giorgio Strehler, Peter Brook, and Peter Stein, Chekhov: The Cherry Orchard explores the way different artists, periods and cultures have reinvented Chekhov's poignant comedy of failure and hope.

    The three long poems in Eye Against Eye convey the wrought particulars of intimate human relations, perceptions of the landscape, and the historical moment, tense with political exigencies. Mayan ruins invoke the collapsing Twin Towers, love between parents and child blister with tension, and a bicycle thief shatters the narcotic illusion of a private accord. Also contained is Late Summer Entry, a series of poetic commentaries on Sally Mann's landscape photographs. Eye Against Eye, Forrest Gander's third book with New Directions, cries out an ethical concern for the ways we see each other and the world, the potential to share a vision that acknowledges our commonality. As always with Gander's poetry, suspensions and repetitions drive toward a complex emotional experience, evoking the multifaceted, multi-vocal surge of our present.

    It portrays Kabbani's style - direct, spontaneous, musical, using the language of everyday life. He was a campaigner for women's rights, and his verses praise the beauty of the female body, and of love.

    Misako's father believes their relationship has been damaged by the influence of a new and alien culture, and so attempts to heal the breach by educating his son-in-law in the time-honoured Japanese traditions of aesthetic and sensual pleasure. The result is an absorbing, chilling conflict between ancient and modern, young and old.

    His collection brings together the best of Kalki’s short stories, which contain some of his most colourful and enduring characters and themes of Tamil popular fiction of the nineteen thirties and forties. There is in these stories the heady urgency of the freedom struggle, the piquant humour of the parodied Tamil gothic and devastating social satire. In her sensitive translations, Gowri Ramnarayan has succeeded in capturing the nuances of the gently mordant wit that made Kalki’s stories the highlight of the magazines they were originally published in, creating for themselves a dedicated following that flourishes undiminished to this day.Coinciding with the centenary of Kalki’s birth, this volume is a well-deserved tribute to a writer whose breadth of vision and genius imagined and served a new India.

    A ruba'i is a two-line stanza with two parts (or hemistichs) per line, hence the word rubáiyát (derived from the Arabic language root for "four"), meaning "quatrains". (Courtesy: Wikipedia)(less)

    The smoke-spewing, banshee-wailing, fearsome black thing hisses like a thousand cobras... and the villagers declare that this Thing is an Iron Demon—a yakada yaka.The Burghers who drive these Iron Demons have a penchant for challenging authority and courting trouble, sometimes just to liven things up in the railway outposts... and so it is that Sonnaboy and Meerwald chase a large group of villagers all across Anuradhapura, mother-naked but not much bothered by it, Ben Godlieb conjures up a corpse in his cowcatcher, Dickie Byrd single-handedly demolishes a Pentecostal Mission and is hailed as the messiah of the Railway fraternity, and Basil Van der Smaght filches a human heart and feeds it to the Nawalapitiya railway staff ...and to cap it all, Sonnaboy takes French Leave to act in The Bridge on the River Kwai!

    The book concerns Ineko’s mother and Kuno, the young man who loves Ineko and wants to marry her. The two have left Ineko at the Ikuta Mental Hospital, which she has entered for treatment of a condition that might be called “seizures of body blindness.” Although her vision as a whole is unaffected, she periodically becomes unable to see her lover Kuno’s body: when this occurs, Ineko breaks down. Whether or not her condition actually constitutes madness is a topic of heated discussion between Kuno and Ineko’s mother… In this tantalizing book, Kawabata explores the incommunicability of desire as well as desire’s relation to the urge to hide. With Dandelions, Kawabata carries the art of the novel, where he always suggested more than he stated, into mysterious new realms.

    Japan is defeated. Together with his country, a young man must rebuild his life. He will begin at a sanatorium, where everyone gets a nickname, surrounded by an interesting ensemble of patients and caregivers.

    In addition to making formal innovations in language and structure, he extended the range of acceptable subject matter to include all aspects of public and private experience, thus becoming in the words of translator David Hinton, “the first complete poetic sensibility in Chinese literature.”This edition of The Selected Poems of Tu Fu is the only comprehensive selection of the poet's work currently available in English. While retaining a scholar's devotion to the text, Hinton has attempted “to recreate Tu Fu's poems as new systems of uncertainty." By reflecting all the ambiguity and density of the originals, he has created compelling English poems that significantly alter our conception of Chinese poetry. Included with the poems are the translator’s introduction and translation principles. as well as a biography of Tu Fu; together these provide a fascinating portrait of a uniquely sensitive spirit during one of the most tumultuous periods in Chinese history.

    In this intimate memoir, Shen Fu recounts the domestic and romantic joys of his marriage to Yun, the beautiful and artistic girl he fell in love with as a child. He also describes other incidents of his life, including how his beloved wife obtained a courtesan for him and reflects on his travels through China. Shen Fu's exquisite memoir shows six parallel "layers" of one man's life, loves and career, with revealing glimpses into Chinese society of the Ch'ing Dynasty.

    When Johnsy becomes sick one winter, she makes up her mind to die when the last leaf falls from the ivy plant growing outside her window. Sue would do anything to help her friend get well, but she is a poor artist. As the winter wind blows and the rain falls, there seems no way to stop the last leaf from falling.