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Along the Mediterranean coastline of Spain, real-estate developers scramble to transform the once pastoral landscape into tourist resorts, nightclubs, and beachfront properties with lavish bars and pools. The booming post-Franco years have left everything up for grabs. Cremation opens with the death of Matías, a paterfamilias who had rejected all of these changes and whose passing sets off a chain reaction, uncovering a past that had been buried for years, and leading those closest to him to question the paths they've chosen.      In a rich mosaic narrative, filled with a hypnotic chorus of voices, Cremation explores the coked-up champagne fizz of luxurious parties shadowed by underworlds of political corruption, prostitution, and ruthless financial speculation. The novel enters that melancholy ouroboros of capitalist greed that led to the financial crash and captures something essential about our values, our choices, and our all too human mistakes. Like William Faulkner or Francis Bacon, Chirbes stares, clear-eyed, into the abyss, and portrays us as we really are.

The Nonconformist's Memorial is a gathering of four long sequences that underscores Susan Howe's reputation as one of the leading experimentalists writing today. How is a poet of language in history whose work resonates back through Melville, Dickinson, and Shelley to the seventeenth-century Metaphysicals and Puritans (the nonconformism of the title), and forward again to T. S. Eliot and the abstract expressionists. The sequences fall into two sections, "Turning" and "Conversion," in half-ironic nonconforming counterpart to Eliot's Four Quartets. Her collaging and mirror-imaging of words are concretions of verbal static, visual meditations on what can and cannot be said. For Howe, "Melville's Marginalia" is the essential poem in the collection, an approach to an elusive and allusive mind through Melville's own reading and the notations in his library books. This, says Howe, is "Language a wood for thought."

Osip Mandelstam has become an almost mythical figure of modern Russian poetry, his work treasured all over the world for its lyrical beauty and innovative, revolutionary engagement with the dark times of the Stalinist era. While he was exiled in the city of Voronezh, the black earth region of Russia, his work, as Joseph Brodsky wrote, developed into "a poetry of high velocity and exposed nerves, becoming more a song than ever before, not a bardlike but a birdlike song ... something like a goldfinch tremolo."      Peter France-who has been brilliantly translating Mandelstam's work for decades-draws heavily from Mandelstam's later poetry written in Voronezh, while also including poems across the whole arc of the poet's tragically short life, from his early, symbolist work to the haunting elegies of old Petersburg to his defiant "Stalin poem." A selection of Mandelstam's prose irradiates the poetry with warmth and insight as he thinks back on his Petersburg childhood and contemplates his Jewish heritage, the sunlit qualities of Hellenism, Dante's Tuscany, and the centrality of poetry in society.

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 Senor 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.

Little Elegies for Sister Satan presents indelibly beautiful new poems by Michael Palmer, "the foremost experimental poet of his generation, and perhaps of the last several generations" (citation for The Academy of American Poets' Wallace Stevens Award). Grappling with our dark times and our inability to stop destroying the planet or to end our endless wars, Palmer offers a counterlight of wit (poetry was dead again / they said again), as well as the glow of wonder. In polyphonic passages, voices speak from a decentered place, yet are rooted in the whole history of culture that has gone before: "When I think of 'possible worlds,' I think not of philosophy, but of elegy. And impossible worlds. Resistant worlds."In the light of dayperhaps all of thiswill make sense.But have we come this far,come this close to death,just to make sense?

Three subtly connected stories converge in this chimerical debut, each burrowing into a turning point in a person's life: a young woman gives a melancholy account of her obsession with climbing Mount Everest; a Peruvian-Brazilian vanishes into the forest after staying in a musty, semi-abandoned inn in the haunted depths of the Brazilian countryside; a young playwright embarks on the production of a play about the city of Sevastopol and a Russian painter portraying Crimean War soldiers.Inspired by Tolstoy's The Sevastopol Sketches, Emilio Fraia masterfully weaves together these stories of yearning and loss, obsession and madness, failure and the desire to persist, in a restrained manner reminiscent of Anton Chekhov, Roberto Bolano, and Rachel Cusk.

Anna has been living happily for twenty years with loving, sturdy, outgoing Guillaume when she suddenly (truly at first sight) falls in love with Thomas. Intelligent and handsome, but apparently scarred by a terrible early emotional wound, he reminds Anna of Jude the Obscure. Adrift and lovelorn, she tries unsuccessfully to fend off her attraction, torn between the two men. "How strange it is to leave someone you love for someone you love. You cross a footbridge that has no name, that's not named in any poem. No, nowhere is a name given to this bridge, and that is why Anna found it so difficult to cross."      Anne Serre offers here, in her third book in English, her most direct novel to date. The Beginners is unpredictable, sensual, exhilarating, oddly moral, perverse, absurd-and unforgettable.

In the searing poems of his new collection, Twice Alive, the Pulitzer Prize-winner Forrest Gander addresses the exigencies of our historical moment and the intimacies, personal and environmental, that bind us to others and to the world. Drawing from his training in geology and his immersion in Sangam literary traditions, Gander invests these poems with an emotional intensity that illuminates our deep-tangled interrelations.      While conducting fieldwork with a celebrated mycologist, Gander links human intimacy with the transformative collaborations between species that compose lichens. Throughout Twice Alive, Gander addresses personal and ecological trauma-several poems focus on the devastation wrought by wildfires in California where he lives-but his tone is overwhelmingly celebratory. Twice Alive is a book charged with exultation and tenderness.

Whether investigating refugee parrots, indentured elephants, the pathetic fallacy, or the revolving absurdity of the human role in the "invasive species crisis," Personhood reveals how the unmistakable problem between humans and our nonhuman relatives is too often the derangement of our narratives and the resulting lack of situational awareness. Building on her previous collection, Bird Lovers, Backyard, Thalia Field's essayistic investigations invite us on a humorous, heartbroken journey into how people attempt to control the fragile complexities of a shared planet. The lived experiences of animals, and other historical actors, provide unique literary-ecological responses to the exigencies of injustice and to our delusions of special status.

A series of poems traces the course of a love affair from both the man's and the woman's point of view.

The great German Romantic poet Friedrich Hoelderlin's spirit infuses this gorgeous cycle of poems that sing of the loves and devastations of our times

Three new books in a spectacular limited edition box carry the tradition of the long poem far into the 21st century with a "low-lit, slow-drag ebullience"

Following the death of a renowned and eccentric collector-the author of Stuff, a seminal philosophical work on the art of accumulation-the fate of the privately endowed museum he cherished falls to a peripatetic stranger who had been his fervent admirer. In his new role as caretaker of The Society for the Preservation of the Legacy of Dr. Charles Morgan, this restive man, in service to an absent master, at last finds his calling. The peculiar institution over which he presides is dedicated to the annihilation of hierarchy: peerless antiquities commune happily with the ignored, the discarded, the undervalued and the valueless. What transpires as the caretaker assumes dominion over this reliquary of voiceless objects and over its visitors is told in a manner at once obsessive and matter-of-fact, and in language both cocooning and expansive. A wry and haunting tale, The Caretaker, like the interplanetary crystal that is one of the museum's treasures, is rare, glistening, and of a compacted inwardness.       Kafka or Shirley Jackson may come to mind, and The Caretaker may conjure up various genres-parables, ghost stories, locked-room mysteries-but Doon Arbus draws her phosphorescent water from no other writer's well.

Seasons of Sacred Lust is Kazuko Shiraishi's challenge to the conventions of Japanese erotic poetry. Born in Vancouver, Canada, Shiraishi was taken to Japan by her family just prior to World War II, and her first poetry (written at age seventeen, published at twenty) emerged from the violence and ugliness of postwar Tokyo. Her earliest work, associated with the avant-garde magazine Vou, shows her talent for vivid, bizarre, almost surrealistic imagery. Her later writing, coming out of her deepening involvement in the world of modern jazz and her increasing emphasis on the performance of her poetry, dramatizes a society of estrangement and alienation where music and poetry provide the only values, and sex the only solace, in a disintegrating world. This selection is translated by a group of Japanese and American poets: Iluko Atsumi, John Solt, Carol Tinker, Yasuyo Morita, and Kenneth Rexroth who provided an informative, perceptive introduction.

Pigeons on the Grass is told over a single day in Munich in 1948. The first new cinemas and insurance offices are opening atop the ruins, Korea and Persia are keeping the world in panic, planes rumble in the sky (but no one looks up), newspaper headlines announce war over oil and atomic bomb tests. Odysseus Cotton, a black man, alights at the station and hires a porter; Frau Behrend disowns her daughter; with their interracial love affair, Carla Behrend and Washington Price scandalize their neighbors-who still expect gifts of chocolate and coffee; a boy hustles to sell a stray dog; Mr. Edwin, a visiting poet, prepares for a reading; Philipp gives himself up to despair; Emilia sells the last of her jewelry; Alexander stars as the Archduke in a new German Super-production; and Susanne seeks out a night to remember. In Michael Hofmann's words, "in their sum, they are the totality of existence."Koeppen spares no one and sees all in this penetrating and intense novel that surveys those who remain, and those who have just arrived, in a damaged society. As inventive as Joyce and as compulsively readable as Dickens, Pigeons on the Grass is a great lost classic.

Selected by the preeminent Kafka biographer and scholar Reiner Stach and newly translated by the peerless Michael Hofmann, the seventy-four pieces gathered here have been lost to sight for decades and two of them have never been translated into English before. Some stories are several pages long; some run about a page; a handful are only a few lines long: all are marvels. Even the most fragmentary texts are revelations. These pieces were drawn from two large volumes of the S. Fischer Verlag edition Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente (totaling some 1100 pages)."Franz Kafka is the master of the literary fragment," as Stach comments in his afterword: "In no other European author does the proportion of completed and published works loom quite so...small in the overall mass of his papers, which consist largely of broken-off beginnings."   In fact, as Hofmann recently added: "'Finished' seems to me, in the context of Kafka, a dubious or ironic condition, anyway. The more finished, the less finished. The less finished, the more finished. Gregor Samsa's sister Grete getting up to stretch in the streetcar. What kind of an ending is that?! There's perhaps some distinction to be made between 'finished' and 'ended.' Everything continues to vibrate or unsettle, anyway. Reiner Stach points out that none of the three novels were 'completed.' Some pieces break off, or are concluded, or stop-it doesn't matter!-after two hundred pages, some after two lines. The gusto, the friendliness, the wit with which Kafka launches himself into these things is astonishing."

This anthology series draws on authors fromcountries across the world and features selections of the finest new prose and poetry.

The verse narrative Cawdor, set on the ruthless California coast which Jeffers knew so well, tells a simple tale: an aging widower, Cawdor, unwilling to relinquish his youth, knowingly marries a young girl who does not love him. She falls in love with his son, Hood, and the narrative unfolds in tragedy of immense proportions.Medea is a verse adaptation of Euripides' drama and was created especially for the actress Judith Anderson. Their combined genius made the play one of the outstanding successes of the 1940s. In Medea, Jeffers relentlessly drove toward what Ralph Waldo Emerson had called "the proper tragic element"-terror.

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. Though originally published separately, these prose poems have always been intended as a loose trilogy of thought and feelingor of thought manifested as feeling. The author comments: "Just as the title Curves to the Apple combines the organic and geometry (not to mention myth and history of science) the poems navigate the conflicting, but inextricable claims of body and mind, especially the female body and feelings in a space of logic and physics. The poems could all be called dialogic, reaching out across a synaptic (sometimes humorous) gap to a possible 'you' (though it may be rhetorical, another point of view in the same mind). But while the 'I' dominates the first two volumes, the third gives both voices equal space and chance."

Poet, Trappist monk, religious philosopher, translator, social critic: the late Thomas Merton was all these things. This classic selection from his great body of poetry affords a comprehensive view of his varied and progressively innovative work. Selected by Mark Van Doren and James Laughlin, this slim volume is now available again as a wonderful showcase of Thomas Merton's splendid poetry.

Originally a cloth coedition with the Christine Burgin Gallery, this rapturous hymn to discoveries and archives is now a paperback

At once a chase novel, black comedy, and softly keening death song, Count Luna starts off at a gallop and accelerates into warp speed

Four beguiling tales for children of all ages. A surprising new facet of Clarice Lispector's genius

A new poetry book by Susan Howe is always an event

In these essays, the acclaimed artist, photographer, writer, and filmmaker Moyra Davey often begins with a daily encounter-with a photograph, a memory, or a passage from a book-and links that subject to others, drawing fascinating and unlikely connections, until you can almost feel the texture of her thinking. While thinking and writing, she weaves together disparate writers and artists-Mary Wollstonecraft, Jean Genet, Virginia Woolf, Janet Malcolm, Chantal Akerman, and Roland Barthes, among many others-in a way that is both elliptical and direct, clearheaded and personal, prismatic and self-examining, layering narratives to reveal the thorny but nourishing relationship between art and life.

A riveting lyrical constellation centered on the Battle of Passchendaele in Flanders Fields and tibetan protective magic

A writer is offered a devil's bargain: will he give up reading books in exchange for total world domination?

A joyful ode-in a single soaring, crazy sentence-to the interconnectedness of great (and mad) minds

A bilingual companion to The Book of Disquiet, by Fernando Pessoa