The poignant and fascinating story of a young man who is caught between the breakup of the traditions of a northern Japanese aristocratic family and the impact of Western ideas.
This collection is made up of four sections: "Far West"—poems of the Western mountain country where, as a young man. Gary Snyder worked as a logger and forest ranger; "Far East"—poems written between
Published in rapid succession in the middle 1930s, these two books shocked European literatue and world consciousness. Nominally fiction but more rightly called "creative confessions," they told of t
"Wild nature as the ultimate ground of human affairs"––the beautiful, precarious balance among forces and species forms a unifying theme for the new poems in this collection. The title, Rega
Set in a modern, urban Paris, the prose pieces in this volume constitute a further exploration of the terrain Baudelaire had covered in his verse masterpiece, The Flowers of Evil: the city and its sq
Written between 1920 and 1932, all five were first published in small editions, three of them in France. These are pivotal and seminal works, books in which a great writer was charting the course he
In 1958, when Henry Miller was elected to membership in the American Institute of Arts and Letters, the citation described him as: "The veteran author of many books whose originality and rich
“The fine style of writing and the clear outlines of illustration, which are not even remotely ‘suggestive’ give Saikaku’s pornography grace and wit and charity.” —James Kirkup
William Carlos Williams’s medical practice and his literary career formed an undivided life. For forty years he was a busy doctor in the town of Rutherford, New Jersey, and yet he was able to write m
Revised twice since it first appeared, it has remained one of the most widely read and quoted works of literary analysis.Ambiguity, according to Empson, includes "any verbal nuance, however slight, w
They are full of the perception of life as it is, and the passion for life as it ought to be, which have made The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire classics of the American theater. Only o
The peerless young Kôvalan leaves his loyal wife Kannaki for the courtesan Mâdhavi, and though he returns to her, he still meets his death because of her ill-omened ankle bracelet. The Shilappadikaram
This macabre but beautiful work, Les Chants de Maldoror, has achieved a considerable reputation as one of the earliest and most extraordinary examples of Surrealist writing.
“A brilliant selection . . . it is in short a voyage of discovery, an adventure and this the log of that voyage in the life of a probing and powerful writer.” —Robert R. Kirsch, Los Angeles Times.
One of Henry Miller's most luminous statements of his personal philosophy of life, Stand Still Like the Hummingbird, provides a symbolic title for this collection of stories and essays.
Championed by Dadaists and Surrealists as the first absurdist drama, the play features a main character that is cruel, gluttonous, and grotesque-the author's metaphor for modern man. This drama in fi
It is true that he has been one of the inner circle of the 'Beats' from the first, but many admirers of his poetry feel that it belongs quite as much to other and older traditions in world literature
The greatest French poet of the 19th century, Baudelaire was also the first truly modem poet, and his direct and indirect influence on the literature of our time has been immeasurable.Flowers of Evil
The poems are drawn chiefly from the traditional Manyoshu, Kokinshu and Hyakunin Isshu collections, but there are also examplaes of haiku and other later forms. The sound of the Japanese texts i repr
An extraordinary masterpiece of German literature, now in a gripping new English translationMichael Kohlhaas has been wronged. First his finest horses were unfairly confiscated and mistreated. And thi
Poor, poor, hard-luck Herbert Sarkar: born into a fancy Calcutta family but cursed from birth (his philandering movie director father is killed in a car crash and his mother dies soon after, when he’s
Set in contemporary times, Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming tells the story of a Prince Myshkin–like figure, Baron Bela Wenckheim, who decides to return at the end of his life to the provincial Hungarian
The Chandelier, written when Lispector was only twenty-three, reveals a very different author from the college student whose debut novel, Near to the Wild Heart, announced the landfall of “Hurricane C
Clarice Lispector wrote The Besieged City in Switzerland (“a cemetery of sensations”), where her diplomat husband was posted, in 1948. “What saved me from the monotony of Bern,” Clarice stated, “was l
Written while Adonis was on a scholarship in Paris from 1960 to 1961, Songs of Mihyar the Damascene is widely considered to be the apex of the modernist poetry movement in the Arab world. Drawing not
Mazurka for Two Dead Men, the culmination of Camilo José Cela‘s literary art, opens in 1936 at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War: Lionheart Gamuzo is savagely murdered. In 1939, as the war ends,
The Condition of Secrecy is a poignant collection of essays by Inger Christensen, widely regarded as one of the most influential Scandinavian writers of the twentieth century. As The New York Times pr
In 1506, Michelangelo—a young but already renowned sculptor—is invited by the Sultan of Constantinople to design a bridge over the Golden Horn. The sultan has offered, alongside an enormous payment, t
The title section of Kim Hyesoon’s powerful new book, Autobiography of Death, consists of forty-nine poems, each poem representing a single day during which the spirit roams after death before it ente
Set in a Mexican prison in the late 1960s, The Hole follows three inmates as they plot to sneak in drugs under the noses of their ape-like guards. The inmates desperately need to secure their next fix
In a large country house shut off from the world by a gated garden, three young governesses responsible for the education of a group of little boys are preparing a party. The governesses, however, see
Boris Leonidovich, a North American professor who specializes in the history of prison architecture, has been invited to Buenos Aires for an academic conference. He’s planning to present a paper on Mo
A professor prepares to retire—Gustavo is set to move from Sao Paulo to the countryside, but it isn’t the urban violence he’s fleeing: what he fears most is the violence of his memory. But as he sorts
Here, gathered in one volume, are the stories that made Clarice a Brazilianlegend. Originally a cloth edition of eighty-six stories, now we have eighty-nine in all, covering her whole amazing career,
For sheer unpredictable brilliance, Gogol may come to mind, but no author alive today takes a reader as far as Helen DeWitt into the funniest, most yonder dimensions of possibility. Her jumping-off po
“Language arrived fragmentary / split in syllables / spasmodic / like code in times of war,” writes Luljeta Lleshanaku in the title poem to her powerful new collection Negative Space. In these lines,
The Linden Tree was written in 2003. In it the narrator, who could be Aira himself (born the same year, in the same place, a writer who is now also living PBK in Buenos Aires) revisits down his childh
