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An essential edition of a major avant-garde poet: "Waldrop compels us to seek out new superlatives" (Ben Lerner, Jacket)

A lively and utterly singular travelogue of the intricate curiosities that are directly within one's own reach

Michael Palmer's new book-a collection in two parts, "The Laughter of the Sphinx" and "Still (a cantata-or nada-for Sister Satan)"-contains 52 poems.The title poem begins "The laughter of the Sphinx / caused my eyes to bleed" and haunts us with the ruin we are making of our world, even as Palmer revels in its incredible beauty. Such central tensions in The Laughter of the Sphinx-between beauty and loss, love and death, motion and rest, knowledge and ignorance-glow in Palmer's lyrical play of light and entirely hypnotize the reader. The stakes, as always with Palmer, are very high, essentially life and death: "Please favor us with a reply / regarding our one-time offer / which will soon expire."

An expatriate professor, Vega, returns from exile in Canada to El Salvador for his mother's funeral. A sensitive idealist and an aggrieved motor mouth, he sits at a bar with the author, Castellanos Moya, from five to seven in the evening, telling his tale and ranting against everything his country has to offer. Written in a single paragraph and alive with a fury as astringent as the wrath of Thomas Bernhard, Revulsion was first published in 1997 and earned its author death threats. Roberto Bolano called Revulsion Castellanos Moya's darkest book and perhaps his best: "A parody of certain works by Bernhard and the kind of book that makes you laugh out loud."

With easy, sunny eeriness, Spark lights up the darkest things: blackmail, a drowning, nervous breakdowns, a ring of smugglers, a loathsome busybody, a diabolic bookseller, human evil.

Inside an apartment building on the outskirts of Milan, the working-class residents gossip, quarrel, and conspire against each other. Viewed through the eyes of Chino, an impressionable thirteen-year-old boy whose mother is the doorwoman of the building, the world contained within these walls is tiny, hypocritical, and mean-spirited: a constant struggle. Chino finds escape in reading.One day, a new resident, Amelia Lynd, moves in and quickly becomes an unlikely companion and a formative influence on Chino. Ms. Lynd-an elderly, erudite British woman-comes to nurture his taste in literature, introduces him to the life of the mind, and offers a counterpoint to the only version of reality that he's known. On one level, Lost Words is an engrossing coming-of-age tale set in the seventies, when Italy was going through tumultuous social changes, and on another, it is a powerful meditation on language, literature, and culture.

Sensual and glimmering, Lorenzo Chiera's elliptical fragments evoke nights of bawdy excess in Trastevere ("City made of Roman ruins . . . / what a whorehouse!"), translated here by one of the most renowned poets of our time.In his preface, Lawrence Ferlinghetti describes the experience of reading Chiera for the first time: "We soon realize we are in the presence of a savage erotic consciousness, as if the lust-driven senses were suddenly awakened out of a hoary sleep of a thousand years, a youth shaken awake by a rude medieval hand, senses still reeling, drunk in the hold of some slave ship, not knowing night from day nor sight from sound, the eye and the ear and the nose confounding each other, not yet knowing which function each was to take up in the quivering dawn."

In this classic, groundbreaking exploration of early American literature, Susan Howe reads our intellectual inheritance as a series of civil wars, where each text is a wilderness in which a strange lawless author confronts interpreters and editors eager for settlement. Howe approaches Anne Hutchinson, Mary Rowlandson, Cotton Mather, Hawthorne, Emerson, Melville and Emily Dickinson as a fellow writer-her insights, fierce and original, are rooted in her seminal textural scholarship in examination of their editorial histories of landmark works. In the process, Howe uproots settled institutionalized roles of men and women as well as of poetry and prose-and of poetry and prose. The Birth-mark, first published in 1993, now joins the New Directions canon of a dozen Susan Howe titles.

The epic novel Beauty Is a Wound combines history, satire, family tragedy, legend, humor, and romance in a sweeping polyphony. The beautiful Indo prostitute Dewi Ayu and her four daughters are beset by incest, murder, bestiality, rape, insanity, monstrosity, and the often vengeful undead. Kurniawan's gleefully grotesque hyperbole functions as a scathing critique of his young nation's troubled past:the rapacious offhand greed of colonialism; the chaotic struggle for independence; the 1965 mass murders of perhaps a million "Communists," followed by three decades of Suharto's despotic rule.     Beauty Is a Wound astonishes from its opening line: One afternoon on a weekend in May, Dewi Ayu rose from her grave after being dead for twenty-one years....  Drawing on local sources-folk tales and the all-night shadow puppet plays, with their bawdy wit and epic scope-and inspired by Melville and Gogol, Kurniawan's distinctive voice brings something luscious yet astringent to contemporary literature.

A powerful selection of Susan Howe's previously uncollected essays, The Quarry moves backward chronologically, from her brand-new "Vagrancy in the Park" (about Wallace Stevens) through such essential texts as "The Disappearance Approach," "Personal Narrative," "Sorting Facts," "Frame Structures," and "Where Should the Commander Be," and ending with her seminal early criticism, "The End of Art." The essays of The Quarry map the intellectual territory of one of America's most important and vital avant-garde poets.

The King, young Shah Naser, takes to the throne of Persia at a turning point of history: he inherits an enchanted medieval world of harems, eunuchs, and treasures as well as a palace of secret doors, sudden deaths, and hidden agendas. Within the court is danger enough: outside all manner of change threatens-industrialization, colonization.  Russia and England conspire to open the King's empire; his mother and his vizier take opposing sides. The poor King-almost an exact contemporary of Queen Victoria-is trapped.  He likes some aspects of modernity (electricity, photography) but can't embrace democracy. He must be a sovereign: he must keep his throne. The King cannot face change and he cannot escape it.With this gleaming and seemingly simple story, breathlessly paced and beautifully told, Kader Abdolah, the acclaimed Iranian émigré novelist, speaks of deeper truths. A novel which has many timely things to say about eras of change and upheaval, The King is an unforgettable book.

The End of Days, by acclaimed German writer Jenny Erpenbeck, consists essentially of five "books," each leading to a different death of an unnamed woman protagonist. How could it all have gone differently? the narrator asks in the intermezzos between. The first chapter begins with the death of a baby in the early twentieth-century Hapsburg Empire. In the next chapter, the same girl grows up in Vienna, but her strange relationship with a boy leads to another death. In the next scenario, she survives  adolescence and moves to Russia with her husband. Both are dedicated Communists, but our heroine is sent to a labor camp. She is spared in the next chapter with the help of someone's intervention and returns to Berlin to become a respected writer. . . . The End of Days is a brilliant novel of contingency and fate. A novel of incredible breadth, yet amazing concision, The End of Days offers a unique overview of German and German-Jewish history by "one of the finest, most exciting authors alive" (Michael Faber).

Published in his centenary year, The Collected Poems of James Laughlin encompasses in one majestic volume all of the poetry (with the exception of his verse memoirs, Byways) written by the publisher-poet. Witty, technically brilliant, slyly satiric and heartbreakingly poignant about the vagaries of love, Laughlin charted his own poetic course for over six decades prompting astonishment and joy in those fellow poets who had discovered his unique genius. As Charles Simic enthused, "The secret is out, the publisher of Williams and Pound is himself a great lyric poet."Compiled and edited by Peter Glassgold, Laughlin's chosen poetry editor for the last two decades, The Collected Poems of James Laughlin includes more than 1250 poems from the early lyrics written in Laughlin's signature "typewriter" metric, to the "long-line" poems of his later years, to the playful antics of his dopplegänger Hiram Handspring, to the trenchant commentary of the five-line pentastichs that occupied his last days. Despite all the awards and accolades that James Laughlin received for his publishing achievements and service to literature, the honor that pleased him most was his election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1996)-as a poet.

Three mini-plays by the German wunderkind and asylum-dweller.

Considered the greatest long poem in 20th century Brazilian poetry, Ferreira's Gullar's Dirty Poem was written as a response to the Brazilian dictatorship that put him in exile and murdered thousands.

A high-octane paranoia deranges a writer and fuels a dangerous plan to return home to El Salvador.

A novel about a mysterious love triangle and the almost mythological power-and potentially lethal danger-of eros.

A selection of poems by the ancient Chinese poet and statesman Wang Ah-Shih, translated by David Hinton.

Often called "the Kafka of Romania," Max Blecher died young but not before creating this incandescent novel.

This important work, first published in 1934, is a concise statement of Pound's aesthetic theory. It is a primer for the reader who wants to maintain an active, critical mind and become increasingly sensitive to the beauty and inspiration of the world's best literature. With characteristic vigor and iconoclasm, Pound illustrates his precepts with exhibits meticulously chosen from the classics, and the concluding "Treatise on Meter" provides an illuminating essay for anyone aspiring to read and write poetry. ABC of Reading displays Pound's great ability to open new avenues in literature for our time.

Set in the turbulent years before the 1952 revolution that would overthrow King Farouk and bring Gamal Abdel Nasser to power, Stealth - by Sonallah Ibrahim, one of Egypt's most respected and uncompromising novelists - is a gripping story seen through the eyes of an eleven-year-old boy. A young Egyptian's coming of age proves halting and uncertain as he fails to outgrow dependence on his aging father and tries to come to terms with the absence of his mother. Through the boy's memories, fantasies, and blunt observations, we experience his attempts at furtively spying on the world of Egyptian adults. His adventures portray a Cairo full of movie stars, royalty, revolutionaries, and ordinary people trying to survive in the decaying city.

The Iraqi Nights is the third collection by the acclaimed Iraqi poet Dunya Mikhail. Taking The One Thousand and One Nights as her central theme, Mikhail personifies the role of Scheherazade the storyteller, saving herself through her tales. The nights are endless, seemingly as dark as war in this haunting collection, seemingly as endless as war. Yet the poet cannot stop dreaming of a future beyond the violence of a place where "every moment / something ordinary / will happen under the sun." Unlike Scheherazade, however, Mikhail is writing, not to escape death, but to summon the strength to endure. Inhabiting the emotive spaces between Iraq and the U.S., Mikhail infuses those harsh realms with a deep poetic intimacy. The author's vivid illustrations - inspired by Sumerian tablets - are threaded throughout this powerful book.

Now available for the first time as a paperbook, Quetzalcoatl is D.H. Lawrence's last "unpublished manuscript" and the early version of his great Mexican novel, The Plumed Serpent. Kate Burns is the widow of a failed Irish patriot, strong-minded and independent, who unlike the heroine of The Plumed Serpent, refuses to simply join the Mexican revolutionary movement based on a revival of the Aztec gods. Quetzalcoatl is arguably one of Lawrence's most feminist works: the rise of a revolution filtered through the consciousness of a woman of tremendous individuality. Quetzalcoatl, a more cohesive novel than The Plumed Serpent, is classic D. H. Lawrence-- for its vivid evocation of the Mexican culture and mythology, and its intensity of feeling and psychological insight. This edition includes an illuminating introduction and textual commentary by Sterling Professor of English at Yale, Louis Martz. "The Plumed Serpent," Martz says, "may be judged a success within its own mode of existence. For a different sort of novel, we may turn now to Quetzalcoatl."

Paterson is both a place-the New Jersey city in whom the person (the poet's own life) and the public (the history of the region) are combined. Originally four books (published individually between 1946 and 1951), the structure of Paterson (in Dr. Williams' words) "follows the course of teh Passaic River" from above the great falls to its entrance into the sea. The unexpected Book Five, published in 1958, affirms the triumphant life of the imagination, in spite of age and death. This revised edition has been meticulously re-edited by Christopher MacGowan, who has supplied a wealth of notes and explanatory material.

Rimbaud-a mythic name-his life as extraordinary as his work was influential in redirecting the course, first of French, and then of world poetry. He is, indeed, the very symbol of what we now call "modern" literature; nearly a hundred years before the arrival of the "mind-expanding" drugs, Rimbaud understood that the borders of the writer's consciousness must be extended and made the deliberate attempt to use hallucination as a creative method.Dr. Starkie, a lecturer in French literature at Oxford, has devoted many years of research to Rimbaud, revising her biography three times as new manuscript material and information about him has come to light.

Throughout his life, Dr. Williams tirelessly defended and promoted the best in modern literature and art. He contributed widely to leading literary magazines, wrote prefaces and introductions, and lectured at many universities. This selection represents his finest work in criticism. Much of it concerns poetry and poets--T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Karl Shapiro, E. E. Cummings, Ezra Pound, Carl Sandburg, Robert Lowell and many others. Williams also spoke out on painters and paintings as well as music and literature. There are essays on James Joyce, Shakespeare, Federico Garcia Lorca, the basis of faith in art, the American Revolution, H. L. Mencken's The American Language, Ford Madox Ford, American primitive painters, Antheil's music, and the work of Gertrude Stein.

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."