and... and... and...

Louis-Ferdinand Celine's revulsion and anger at what he considered theidiocy and hypocrisy of society explodes from nearly every page of this novel. Filled with slang and obscenities and written in raw, colloquial language, Journey to the End of the Night is a literary symphony of violence, cruelty and obscene nihilism. This book shocked most critics when it was first published in France in 1932, but quickly became a success with the reading public in Europe, and later in America where it was first published by NewDirections in 1952. The story of the improbable yet convincingly described travels of the petit-bourgeois (and largely autobiographical)antihero, Bardamu, from the trenches of World War I, to the African jungle, to New York and Detroit, and finally to life as a failed doctor in Paris, takes the readers by the scruff and hurtles them toward the novel's inevitable, sad conclusion.

With exacting rigor and wit, Howe pulls Dickinson free of all the sterile and stuffy belle-of-Amherst cotton wool and shows the poet in touch with elemental forces of nature, and as a prophet in all

A self-portrait of a great writer 's rise and fall, intensely personal and etched with Fitzgerald's signature blend of romance and realism.

In a stunning new collection of poems of transport and transcendence, African-American poet Nathaniel Mackey's "asthmatic song of aspiration" scuttles across cultures and historiesfrom America to And

Beautifully spare and deeply strange, Dandelions—exploring love and madness—is Kawabata’s final novel, left incomplete when he committed suicide in April, 1972. The book concerns Ineko’s mother and Ku

Michael Hofmann's startlingly visceral and immediate translation revives Kafka's great comedy, and captures a new Kafka, free from Prague and loose in the new world, a Kafka shot through w

Butterfly Valley: A Requiem collects four medium-length works. "Butterfly Valley" is a sonnet cycle which describes the glowing color and beauty of butterflies, and also their fragility and mortality

The Lion Bridge, Selected Poems 1972-1995 offers for the first time a comprehensive view of Michael Palmer's extraordinary poetry. Dense and haunting, analytic and lyrical, classical and profoundly a

From the acclaimed author of The Employees, a radical, funny, and mercilessly honest novel about motherhood. After giving birth, Anna is utterly lost. She and her family move to the unfamiliar, snowy city of Stockholm. Anxiety threatens to completely engulf Anna, who obsessively devours online news and compulsively orders clothes she can’t afford. To avoid sinking deeper into her depression, she forces herself to read and write.My Work is a novel about the unique and fundamental experience of giving birth, mixing different literary forms—fiction, essay, poetry, memoir, and letters—to explore the relationship between motherhood, work, individuality, and literature.“Olga Ravn writes dazzlingly about the work of motherhood and the work of writing. Reading Ravn’s book, you run through the whole gamut of human emotion, as though you too were a new mother: tears, laughter, anger, fear, pain, frustration. This is powerful writing that’s hard to put down.”—Politiken

Winner of the Romulo Gallego Prize, The Abyss is a caustic masterwork of incredible power and force. The novel tells about the demise of a crumbling house in Medellin, Colombia. Fernando, a writer, visits his brother Dar甐, who is dying of AIDS there. Recounting their wild philandering and trying to come to terms with his beloved brother's inevitable death, Fernando rants against the political forces that cause so much suffering. He hurls vitriolic, savagely funny insults at his country ("I wipe my ass with the new Constitution of Colombia") and at his mother ("the Crazy Bitch") who has given birth to him and his many siblings. Within this firestorm of pain, Fernando manages to get across much beauty and truth: that all love is painful and washed in pure sorrow. And yet he loves his sick brother and the family's Santa Anita farm (the lost paradise of his childhood where azaleas bloomed); and he even loves his country, now torn to shreds. Always, in this savage masterpiece about loss--as

This biography begins with Gogol's death and ends with his birth, an inverted structure typical of both Gogol and Nabokov. The biographer proceeds to establish the relationship between Gogol and his

In this selection of stories and essays, Henry Miller elucidates, revels, and soars, showing his command over a wide range of moods, styles, and subject matters. Writing “from the heart,” always with

Each of the thirty-nine tales of Alexander Kluge's Cinema Stories combines fact and fiction, and they revolve around movie-making. The book compresses a lifetime of feeling, thought, and practice: Klu

This brief and poignant novel by Wilhelm Genazino explores existential questions as its 46-year-old narrator reflects on broken relationships and other failures and struggles to come to terms with li

The Pulitzer Prize and Drama Critics Circle Award winning play--reissued with an introduction by Arthur Miller (Death of a Salesman and The Crucible), and Williams' essay "The World I Live In."

Pompey Casmilus, Stevie Smith’s loquacious alter ego and heroine, works as a secretary and writes down on yellow office paper this wickedly amusing and brainy novel. “Dear Reader,” she addresses us po

In seventeenth-century Denmark, Christenze Kruckow, an unmarried noblewoman, is accused of witchcraft. She and several other women are rumored to be possessed by the Devil, who has come to them in the form of a tall headless man who gives them dark powers: they can steal people's happiness, they have performed unchristian acts, and they can cause pestilence or death. They are all in danger of the stake.The Wax Child, narrated by a wax doll created by Christenze Kruckow, is an unsettling horror story about brutality and power, nature and witchcraft, set in the fragile communities of premodern Europe.Deeply researched and steeped in visceral, atmospheric detail, The Wax Child is based on a series of real witchcraft trials that took place in Northern Jutland in the seventeenth century. Full of lush storytelling and alarmingly rich imagination, Olga Ravn also weaves in quotes from original sources such as letters, magical spells and manuals, court documents, and Scandinavian grimoires.

Combining fact and fiction, each of the one hundred and two tales of Alexander Kluge’s Temple of the Scapegoat (dotted with photos of famous operas and their stars) compresses a lifetime of feeling an

Tennessee Williams knew how to tell a good tale, and this steamy, wrenching play about a faded movie star, Alexandra Del Lago, and about the lost innocence and corruption of Chance Wayne, reveals the

After getting a haircut in London and a few new outfits (“she bought two pairs of shoes and began to enjoy herself”), Millie, the neglected American wife of an academic pill, is transformed—and, upon

For the "old crocodile," as Williams called himself late in life, the past was always present, and so it is with his continual shifting and intermingling of times, places, and memories as he weaves t

Kay Boyle’s Fifty Stories is an eloquent testament to the possibility of living and writing with passion and honor. In Paris in the twenties, in Austria before and after the Anschluss, in New York, in

In a spoof of Victorian bourgeois morals, Godofredo walks in on his wife in the embrace of his best friend and business partner, and struggles alternately with the need to defend his honor and his nee

This gem of lyric prose has enchanted both young and old for over half a century and is now a modern classic. Dylan Thomas (1914–1953), one of the greatest poets and storytellers of the twentieth cent

Sato Reang enjoys an idyllic childhood of soccer, fighting crickets, and mischief in his Indonesian village--until the day he must be circumcised, and his observant father forces him into a life of Islamic piety. For years, Sato outwardly obeys his father, but all the while the boy chafes at the strictures of his religious routine, longing for everyday pleasures and vowing to himself that he will "become a child who was not pious." His freewheeling linked anecdotes--mixing worldliness and na鴳et? cruelty and innocence--are narrated with a toggling between first and third person ("I"/"he" or "Sato Reang") that potently conveys his disassociation. His adolescent, hormone-fueled crotchetiness expresses dissent: I stopped going to mosque. I no longer joined in worship. I never said my prayers before bed. Sato Reang eats with his left hand--so stupid--and barges in where he pleases, without calling out a greeting. If I was feeling lazy, I'd just piss on a banana tree, and I wouldn't wash mys

Shares the thoughts and memories of eight elderly men and women living in a nursing home

Gathers poems written by the eighth-century Chinese poet, and briefly discusses his life and influence on Asian poetry

Essays discuss East and West, Columbus, Christian missionaries in China, Tibetan government, Kampuchea under Pol Pot, and modern poets

Sacred and intimate poems by the great German poet, written between 1899 and 1903 when Rilke was in his twenties.

Poems by a distinguished Japanese author explore the author's emotions and experiences and describe the beauty of the natural world

Completes the trilogy wich began with "Coming to Jakarta" and "Listening to the Candle," interweaving elements of history, philosphy, and autobiography.

Poems address the nature of faith, the beauty of nature, the horrors of war, and the pain and tenderness of love

A chronological arrangement of the noted American playwright's complete stories, published and unpublished, provides a veiled look at his life and concerns

Working from existing translations, Thomas Merton composed a series of his own versions of the classic sayings of Chuang Tzu, the most spiritual of Chinese philosophers. Chuang Tzu, who wrote in the fourth and third centuries B.C., is the chief authentic historical spokesperson for Taoism and its founder Lao Tzu (a legendary character known largely through Chuang Tzu's writings). Indeed it was because of Chuang Tzu and the other Taoist sages that Indian Buddhism was transformed, in China, into the unique vehicle we now call by its Japanese name--Zen.The Chinese sage abounds in wit and paradox and shattering insights into the true ground of being. Thomas Merton, no stranger to Asian thought, brings a vivid, modern idiom to the timeless wisdom of Tao.

The fourth installment of Balle’s expansive, and highly ambitious On the Calculation of Volume teems with new faces, new people, and voices from every corner of the western worldWe’re a little more than halfway through Balle’s hypnotic, monumental seven-volume novel about a woman set adrift within the walls of November 18th. Balle’s riveting project continues to wring ever more fascinating dimensions from time and its hapless, mortal captives. In Book III we saw the addition of a handful of new characters to Tara’s world—fellow travelers within November 18th—and now Book IV heralds the arrival of many others, and soon to be even more, roaming uncertainly through the same November day. Could this be the first stirrings of an alternate civilization? The big house in Bremen turns into the headquarters for this growing group of time-trapped individuals. But who are they and what has happened to them? Are they loopers, repeaters, or returners? A brilliant modern spin on the myth of Babel in

Awake the voice! Awake the string!Dark and dull night fly hence away,And give the honor of this dayThat sees December turned to May. --Wi

Rosmarie Waldrop's Curves to the Apple brings together three highly praised and influential titles: The Reproduction of Profiles, Lawn of Excluded Middle, and Reluctant Gravities. Tho

The author recounts the special relationship he had with his mother and explains how he worked to achieve the many goals and accomplishments she expected of him

Hilda Doolittle's portrait of Ezra Pound is based upon their brief romance and deep and lasting friendship which began in 1905 when they were both college students

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