Paul Hoover's 'The Novel' is a booklength poem written in response to the author's experience of having his first novel, 'Saigon, Illinois' (Vintage, 1988), published after a mere six months in the making.
An epic of great vision and complexity, Pound's Cantos addresses the profound human issues in history and in our time. Each of the nine groupings of poems can be seen as a fresh wave that swells out from and falls back upon the earlier cantos, extending them structurally, adding new layers of meaning. "A Draft of XXX Cantos" (1930), which introduces the work, thus anticipates the full Cantos' essential themes and provides the surest entry into...
A Draft of Shadows and Other Poems is the most recent collection of the work of Mexico's leading poet and essayist, Octavio Paz. The first section of poems, from Ladera este (East Slope, 1969), reflects some of Paz's experiences as his country's ambassador to India (1962-68). Following stays in England, France, and the United States, he returned to Mexico in 1971, reacting to the urban sprawl and violence of Mexico City with the four long poem...
This publisher is re-publishing the works of William Carlos Williams and in the Money, the second volume in the "Stecher Trilogy" first appeared in 1940. (Kirkus Reviews)
The first major book of short prose poetry in Spanish, Eagle or Sun? (Aguila o Sol?) exerted an enormous influence on modern Latin American writing. Written in 1949-50 by Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz, Eagle or Sun? has as its mythopoeic "place" Mexico--a country caught up in its pre-Columbian past, the world of modern imperialism, and an apocalyptic future foretold by the Aztec calendar. Indeed, three personae of the book--the goddess Itzapaplot...
New poetry by one of America's most acclaimed and respected poets. The poems of If I Were Writing This, Robert Creeley's first major collection since the highly praised Life & Death (1998), have an "aching sweetness" that speak to the preciousness of life as the poet both faces his own mortality and simultaneously looks on a world suddenly more precarious and fragile. In these poems there is longing, a twinge of regret sometimes, a bit of nost...
There are a number of English translations of The Dhammapada, but this version by Irving Babbitt, for many years professor at Harvard and founder, with Paul Elmer More, of the movement known as "New Humanism, " concentrates on the profound poetic quality of the verses and conveys, perhaps more than any other, much of the vitality of the original Pali text. Babbitt devoted many years to this translation--it was a labor of love. Together with hi...
The devil in Henry Miller's Big Sur paradise is Conrad Moricand: "A friend of his Paris days, who, having been financed and brought over from Europe as an act of mercy by Mr. Miller, turns out as exacting, sponging, evil, cunning and ungrateful a guest as can be found in contemporary literature. Mr. Miller has always been a remarkable creator of character. Conrad Moricand is probably his masterpiece. . . .A Devil in Paradise is the work of a g...
This book collects for the first time all the writings by R. P. Blackmur (1904-1965), a pioneer of New Criticism and major literary force of our century, on Henry James (1843-1916), author of such classic novels as The Europeans, The Portrait of a Lady, and The Ambassadors.
With this collection of twenty-four stories, New Directions introduces to American readers a wonderful new writing voice from Australia. Carmel Bird deftly walks the thin line between the ordinary world and the world of the imagination and the fantastic.
With an astute eye for irony and a sardonic humor, Veza Canetti weaves together stories about the people of Yellow Street, the home of the leather-merchants in the Leopoldstadt district. Set in Vienna in the 1930s, 'Yellow Street' is a novel that captures the despair, poverty, enforced idleness, and crumbling moral values of those years just before the political catastrophes of World War II.
In Curve Away from Stillness, John Allman affirms the connections between poetry and science. They are, he says, as "old as the ones between poetry and cosmology, beauty and knowledge, pleasure and speculation." In reading this collection of "Science Poems, " we are reminded of a philosophical tradition in literature that, with Lucretius, sees in the power of love the binding force of the universe. Allman's poems, however-meditations on "Physi...
A P.O.W. in Russia after WWII, Bobrowski (1917-1965) returned to his forever-changed native province, former East Prussia, in 1949. His lost homeland - which he called by the region's ancient name of Sarmartia - haunts all his work. Full of longing and an astonishing poetic beauty, his stories are visionary elegies to vanished ways of life. Some of the stories, set in the nineteenth century or in the darkness of WWII, are directly elegiac. But...
Called by its author a "false novel, " Dark Back of Time, the latest work of "the most subtle and gifted writer in contemporary Spanish literature" (Boston Globe) is a splendid new hybrid. Javier Marias's singular new production Dark Back of Time begins with the tale of the odd effects of publishing All Souls, his 1989 Oxford novel. All Souls, narrated by a visiting Spanish lecturer, is a book he swears to be fiction, but which its "characters...
When Death of a Man was first published in 1936, the anonymous reviewer in Time described the novel as a "Nazi idyll." Nothing could be further from the truth. Boyle, who lived in the town of Kitzbühel in the Tirolean Alps during the mid 30s, recalls that "In 1934, mothers, fathers, children-all barefoot-stood in the ankle-deep snow on the sidewalks of Vienna, their hands out-stretched for help .... Nazism as to them mutely accepted as the one...
Nine of Yukio Mishima's finest stories were selected by Mishima himself for translation in this book, they represent his extraordinary ability to depict a wide variety of human beings in moments of significance. Often his characters are sophisticated modern Japanese who turn out to be not so liberated from the past as they had thought.
Written in 1790, Hasan Shah's autobiographical romance, The Dancing Girl, is remarkable for both its lyrical prose and its fine recreation of a time, a place, and a culture - India in the 1780s, a tolerant, affable era before the full establishment of British colonial rule. The Dancing Girl tells of the doomed love of Hasan Shah (aide-de-camp to a British officer) and Khanum Jan (a courageous and gifted dancer of the courtesan caste) whose sec...
