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Paperback. Condition: New. The stage-struck daughter of an English rural dean runs off with the family plate to London and a theatrical career-only to die tragically by the bite of a mousetrap in her moment of triumph as a sensational Juliet.

Paperback. Condition: New. Vienna Blood and Other Poems is in some ways the most synthesizing of Jerome Rothenberg's recent collections, pulling together work from the 1970s that stands apart from Poland/1931 (1974) and A Seneca Journal (1978) yet at the same time continuing the enactment of past and present begun in those books. But where before he chose to restrict his exploration to ancestral Jewish and Amerindian poetries, Rothenberg now takes us on a series of broader journeys through the collapsed landscape of what he calls the 'new wilderness," evoked as place, as structure, as mind. Written both to be read quietly on the printed page and aloud in performance, the poems in Vienna Blood, though experimental and language-centered, are nevertheless the work of a poet who, by his own admission, is "crazy for content, make no mistake about it." As if to underscore this point, he has appended brief comments to most of the major sections of the book, in order, as he says, "to give it some context in the way of 'oral tradition' usually reserved for poetry readings, etc., a little of which I now commit to writing.".

Paperback. Condition: New. First published in 1959, this touching fable tells of Auguste, a famous clown who could make people laugh but who sought to impart to his audiences a lasting joy. Originally inspired by a series of circus and clown drawings by the cubist painter Femand Léger, Miller eventually used his own decorations to accompany the text in their stead. "Undoubtedly," he says in his explanatory epilogue, °'it is the strangest story I have yet written. . . . No, more even than all the stories which I based on fact and experience is this one the truth. My whole aim in writing has been to tell the truth, as I know it. Heretofore all my characters have been real, taken from life, my own life. Auguste is unique in that he came from the blue. But what is this blue which surrounds and envelopes us if not reality itself? . . . We have only to open our eyes and hearts, to become one with that which is.".

Paperback. Condition: New. 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 century, captures a child's-eye view and an adult's fond memories of a magical time of presents, aunts and uncles, the frozen sea, and in the best of circumstances, newly fallen snow.

Paperback. Condition: New. Despite having written many acclaimed non-fiction books on the region, he has always considered those writings to be footnotes to the poems. From the long work "Mutra," written in 1952 and accompanied here by a new commentary by the author, to the celebrated poems of East Slope, and his recent adaptations from the classical Sanskrit, Paz scripts his India with a mixture of deft sensualism and hands-on politics.

Paperback. Condition: New. In this brilliant two-part memoir, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Hilton Als distills into one cocktail the deep and potent complexities of love and of loss, of Prince and of power, of desire and of race. It's delicious and it's got the kick of a mule, especially as Als swirls into his mix the downtown queer nightclub scene, the AIDS crisis, Prince's ass in his tight little pants, an ill-fated peach pie, Dorothy Parker, and his desire for true love. Always surprising and stealthily-even painfully-moving, Als plumbs longing: "I inched closer to him as he danced to you, Prince. But already he was you, Prince, in my mind. He had the same coloring, and the same loneliness I wanted to fill with my admiration. I couldn't love him enough. We were colored boys together. There is not enough of that in the world, Prince-but you know that. Still, when other people see that kind of fraternity they want to kill it. But we were so committed to each other, we never could work out what that violence meant. There was so much love between us. Why didn't anyone want us to share it?".

Paperback. Condition: New. Here the spirituality of the East and the West have met in a novel that enfigures deep human wisdom with a rich and colorful imagination.Written in a prose of almost biblical simplicity and beauty, it is the story of a soul's long quest in search of he ultimate answer to the enigma of man's role on this earth. As a youth, the young Indian Siddhartha meets the Buddha but cannot be content with a disciple's role: he must work out his own destiny and solve his own doubt-a tortuous road that carries him through the sensuality of a love affair with the beautiful courtesan Kamala, the temptation of success and riches, the heartache of struggle with his own son, to final renunciation and self-knowledge.The name "Siddhartha" is one often given to the Buddha himself-perhaps a clue to Hesse's aims in contrasting the traditional legendary figure with his own conception, as a European (Hesse was Swiss), of a spiritual explorer.

Paperback. Condition: New. This landmark novella-one of the central texts of Mexican literature, is eerily relevant to our current dark times-offers a child's-eye view of a society beset by dictators, disease, and natural disasters, set in "the year of polio, foot-and-mouth disease, floods." A middle-class boy grows up in a world of children aping adults (mock wars at recess pit Arabs against Jews), where a child's left to ponder "how many evils and catastrophes we have yet to witness." When Carlos laments the cruelty and corruption, the evils of a vicious class system, his older brother answers: "So what, we are living up to our ears in shit anyway under Miguel Alemán's regime," with "the face of El Señor Presidente everywhere: incessant, private abuse." Sound familiar?      Woven into this coming-of-age saga is the terribly intense love Carlos cherishes for his friend's young mother, which has the effect of driving the general cruelties further under the reader's skin. The acclaimed translator Katherine Silver has greatly revised her original translation, enlivening afresh this remarkable work.

Paperback. Condition: New. The poet has said of himself and his work: "I am not an experimentalist or an inventor, but a derivative poet, drawing my art from the resources given by a generation of masters--Stein, Williams, Pound; back of that by the generations of poets that have likewise been dreamers of the Cosmos as Creation and Man as Creative Spirit; and by the work of contemporaries: Zukofsky, Olson, Creeley and Denise Levertov.".

Paperback. Condition: New. "It all happened because of Elvis Presley." Elvis, down south of the border to film a movie, has insisted his producers hire a proper Spaniard so that he can pronounce his few lines in Spanish with a Castillian accent. But Ruibérriz has taken on much more than he bargained for. One fatal night, horseplay in a local bar goes too far: a fatuous drunken American insults the local kingpin, and when the thug insists that Ruibérriz translate, Elvis himself adds an even more stinging comment-and who must translate that?

Paperback. Condition: New. Several stories inhabit Roger Lewinter's first small book to appear in English, Story of Love in Solitude. Each story takes the form of a loop: a spider who won't stop returning; camellias that flourish and then die; dying parents whose presence is always yet felt; turning again and again to work on Rilke translations; a younger man whom the narrator sees each week at the Geneva street markets. All the tales touch on the possibility, the open possibility of love-a loop without end.Lewinter's short fictional works are at once prose poems and a form of dreaming; they are akin to the great French tradition of things sparking emotions and emotions sparking things-part Sarraute, part Robbe-Grillet, part Perec. Plot is not really the point of his meditative works. Lewinter concerns himself more with perception, apperception, and sudden inflections of grace: loss and beauty meet in an explosion of joy, which becomes, "in its brilliance, a means of transmittal.".

Paperback. Condition: New. The three pieces gathered in The Strange Case of Rachel K roughly map the genesis of Rachel Kushner's fiction. From the fate of a conquistador in "The Great Exception," to the illegal radio broadcasts and then bombs in "Debouchment," to a Havana courtesan's "strange" case, these stories build into a vision of Cuba that is black-humored, brutal, and beautiful. In this collection, which "overflows in atmosphere as it shows off the burgeoning talent of one of our best writers" (NPR), Rachel Kushner is forging her own original path into the wilds of contemporary fiction.

Paperback. Condition: New. "First you take a drink," F. Scott Fitzgerald once noted, "then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you." Fitzgerald wrote alcohol into almost every one of his stories. On Booze gathers debutantes and dandies, rowdy jazz musicians, lost children and ragtime riff-raff into a newly compiled collection taken from The Crack-Up, and other works never before published by New Directions. On Booze portrays "The Jazz Age" as Fitzgerald experienced it: roaring, rambunctious, and lush - with quite a hangover.

Paperback. Condition: New. The Bridegroom Was a Dog is perhaps the Japanese-German writer Yoko Tawada's most famous story. Its initial publication in 1998 garnered admiration from The New Yorker, who praised it as, "fast-moving, mysteriously compelling tale that has the dream quality of Kafka."The Bridegroom Was a Dog begins with a schoolteacher telling a fable to her students. In the fable, a princess promises her hand in marriage to a dog that has licked her bottom clean. The story takes an even stranger twist when that very dog appears to the schoolteacher in real life as a dog-like man. They develop a very sexual, romantic courtship with many allegorical overtones - much to the chagrin of her friends.

Paperback. Condition: New. Never Love a Gambler is a showcase for the exceptional talents of Keith Ridgway. The Times (London) praised his stories as "flawlessly structured yarns told in lovingly crafted prose." Ridgway's characters negotiate their way through love, madness, lust, anger, religious obsession, crime, and absence in stories told with innovative mastery - brightened by fiercely vivid dialogues. Never Love a Gambler is a mental rust-remover: refreshing, bracing, and often violently funny.

Paperback. Condition: New. New Edition. 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 century, captures a child's-eye view and an adult's fond memories of a magical time of presents, aunts and uncles, the frozen sea, and in the best of circumstances, newly fallen snow.

Paperback. Condition: New. Gloriously translated by Margaret Jull Costa, Adam and Eve in Paradise by Eça de Queirósis not the rosy prelapsarian tale of your childhood Bible: yellow-eyed Adam is a slope-browed Neanderthal all alone and panicked, and Paradise is abominable (seethingly alive with vicious insects and roving primordial carnivores). Luckily for Adam, Eve appears: "O wonder, there before Adam, as if it were both him and not him, was another Being very similar to him, only more slender and covered with a more silken down, and who was regarding him with wide, lustrous, liquid eyes. And slowly, gently rubbing its bare knees together, the whole of this silken, tender Being was offering itself up in astonished, lascivious submission. It was Eve. It was you, O Venerable Mother!"     But still we must pity poor Adam and Eve: "Our Parents' tireless, desperate efforts were devoted entirely to surviving in the midst of a Nature that was ceaselessly, furiously plotting their destruction. And Adam and Eve spent those days-which Semitic texts celebrate as delightful-always trembling, always whimpering, always fleeing!"        Eça de Queirós's pleasure in the glories of language and his delight in skewering all complacencies are richly palpable, leaving the reader smiling and sighing: Ahhh, those Genesiac days.

Paperback. Condition: New. Gathered here are the gems of William Carlos Williams's astonishing achievements in poetry. Dramatic, energetic, beautiful, and true, this slim selection will delight any reader-The Red Wheelbarrow and Other Poems is a book to be treasured.

Paperback. Condition: New. For over thirty years, Eiko and Koma, the Japanese-born choreographers and dancers,have created an influential theatre of movement out of stillness, shape, light, and sound. In tribute and collaboration, the acclaimed American poet Forrest Gander has written a mesmerizing series of poems - hinging around a dance schematic - that captures and extends the dancers' performance with lyrical intensity and vividness.

Paperback. Condition: New. The Beautiful Contradictions is an awe-inspiring vortex of mythology, history, and anthropology that pushes the lyric to its upper limit. A vast ecopoem for a dying Earth,a socially radical poem, a matrilineal drama, a Judeo-Mayan-Buddhist initiation, a transatlantic epic ending as a transamerican arrival, a testament uniting science and imagination.

Paperback. Condition: New. What does northness sound like? The music of Iceland, Greenland, the Svalbard archipelago. Songs of birds and ice and wind. In Lesley Harrison's Blue Pearl, her first collection to appear in the United States, northern landscapes come alive through an intimacy of language that forms a collective sense of place through weather, history, local myths and customs, and childhood fairy tales. Dogs on the shale, eels in the current, a ship strains as it's pulled up by a needle, a whaler unwinds the skin-Harrison's poems voyage forth with visible breath, "as snow falls    as light is in paper.".

Paperback. Condition: New. Ranging from the humorous and scathing to the evocative and strange, this 9th century collection of list poems by the late Tang dynasty poet Li Shangyin documents one poet's scrutiny of his riotous times. Li gives a glimpse into the mundane experiences of the waning years of Chinese poetry's golden age, while providing an uncanny reflection of the minutiae of our own contemporary lives, loves, and irritations.Besieged by a drunk person, no escape.Beautiful concubine, jealous wife.

Paperback. Condition: New. Vale Ave - Latin for "Farewell, Hail" - is a hymn to Eros that unfolds as a gorgeous palimpsest of eternal recurrence and reincarnation, charting the course of two lovers who each seek the other across cultures, myths, and centuries. Vale Ave is alchemical - "mystery and portent, yes, but at the same time," as H. D. writes, "there is Resurrection and the hope of Paradise.".

Paperback. Condition: New. Kaufman promotes a spontaneous, prophetic verse, mixing street talk and jazz with vision. Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness contains odes to Charles Mingus, Hart Crane, Ray Charles, and Albert Camus as well as love lyrics, political rants, "Prison Poems," and the prose meditation "Second April.".

Paperback. Condition: New. Spanning fifty-four years, this collection record the creative growth of one of the twentieth century's most influential and versatile writers.

Paperback. Condition: New. The stage-struck daughter of an English rural dean runs off with the family plate to London and a theatrical career-only to die tragically by the bite of a mousetrap in her moment of triumph as a sensational Juliet.

Paperback. Condition: New. Young Dr. Bromgard has come to a small country town to assume a new practice. No sooner has he arrived than he receives word that a colleague, Dr. Polyakov, has fallen gravely ill. Before Bromgard can go to his friend's aid, Polyakov is brought to his practice in the middle of the night with a self-inflicted gunshot wound, and, barely conscious, gives Bromgard his journal before dying. What Bromgard uncovers in the entries is Polyakov's uncontrollable and merciless descent into morphine addiction - his first injection to ease his back pain, the thrill of the drug as it overtakes him, the looming signs of addiction, and the feverish final entries before his death.

Paperback. Condition: New. Across the ages, cats have provided their adopted humans with companionship, affection, mystery and innumerable metaphors; cats cast a mirror on their beholders; cats endlessly captivate and hypnotise, frustrate and delight. And to poets, in particular, these enigmatic creatures are the most delightful and beguiling of muses (Charles Baudelaire: "the sole source of amusement in one's lodgings") as they go about purring, prowling, hunting, playing, meowing and napping, often oblivious to their so-called masters (Jorge Luis Borges: "you live in other time, lord of your realm-a world as closed and separate as a dream").Cat Poems offers a litter of odes to our beloved felines by Charles Baudelaire, Stevie Smith, Christopher Smart, Denise Levertov, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Rainer Maria Rilke, Muriel Spark, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound and many others.

Paperback. Condition: New. The title of this book is taken from Henry Miller's "Into the Night Life" and expresses the way Lawrence Ferlinghetti felt about these poems when he wrote them during a short period in the 1950's-as if they were, taken together, a kind of Coney Island of the mind, a kind of circus of the soul.

Paperback. Condition: New. The running theme in Michael McClure's Simple Eyes and Other Poems is: looking at the world directly. The results are often as disquieting as they are illuminating, whether he directs his unblinking gaze on the American cityscape, the landscapes of Mexico and Kenya, or the mind's own terrain. In the long title poem, "Simple Eyes (Fields)," the stanzas on the Persian Gulf War bloom out of images of all wars the poet has known--"the spiritual wars, the napalm and cordite and nuclear wars, and the war against nature"--and become a kind of spiritual autobiography. At the heart of the poetry is McClure's return to the ancient concept of agnosia, the idea of knowing through unknowing, as a way of living in desperate times, in which deep human or humane feelings have almost become outlaw. Simple Eyes is an outspoken poet's statement, unsentimental, yet with mind and eye quickened by love.