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These fine stories, sometimes amusing, sometimes sad, portray a wide range of human emotions. All show Berberova at her very best, "as graceful and subtle as Chekhov" (Anne Tyler).

Champion of the International Poetry Slam, winner of the Before Columbus American Book Award, the International Hispanic Heritage Award, the Pushcart Prize, and the prestigious International Award, Jimmy Santiago Baca has been writing as a mestizo (part Native American, part Mexican) and an outsider ever since he learned to read and write-in English-during a six-year Federal prison sentence when he was in his twenties. Drawing on his rich ethnic heritage and his life growing up in poverty in the Southwestern United States, Baca has a created a body of work which speaks to the disenfranchised by drawing on his experiences as a prisoner, a father, a poet, and by reflecting on the lush, and sometimes stark, landscape of the Rio Grande valley.In response to increased demand for Latino poetry in Spanish, and to thousands of Baca fans who are bilingual, this unique collection contains Spanish translations of Baca's poetry selected from the volumes Martín and Mediations on the South Valley (1987), Black Mesa Poems (1989), Immigrants in Our Own Land (1990), Healing Earthquakes (2001), C-Train and Thirteen Mexicans (2002), Winter Poems Along the Rio Grande (2004), and Spring Poems Along the Rio Grande (2007).

Christmas Poems is a pleasing and diverse selection of classic holiday poems that goes all the way back to an eclogue of Virgil, moves along to a wide range of authors such as Chaucer, Herbert, Longfellow, Dickinson, Paul Dunbar, Rilke, Yeats, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, E. E. Cummings, Kenneth Patchen, Thomas Merton, Wallace Stevens, Marie Ponsot, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Frank O'Hara, Denise Levertov, and Bernadette Mayer.Beautifully designed, this New Directions gem (originally published in the 1940s and reissued in the 1970s) rings with the deep sentiments of the season and just the right splash of holiday cheer. Christmas Poems comes with French flaps and is the perfect size for a stocking stuffer.Christmas Poems was originally edited by Albert M. Hayes and New Directions founder and publisher James Laughlin as A Wreath of Christmas Poems, and published as part of the "Poets of the Year" series in 1942. The collection was updated and revised in 1972, and selections for this newly revised 2008 edition have been chosen by the editorial staff at New Directions.

Resembling a musical sextet where no two instruments are the same, but all instruments blend to form a single sound, Henry Miller's Sextet combines six jive-talkin', fresh, and impromptu pieces of writing originally published as individual chapbooks by Capra Press: "On Turning Eighty," "Reflections on the Death of Mishima," "First Impressions of Greece," "The Waters Reglitterized: The Subject of Water Colors in Some of its More Liquid Phases," "Reflections on The Maurizius Case: A Humble Appraisal of a Great Book," and "Mother, China and the World Beyond: A Dream in Which I Die and Find Myself in Devachan (Limbo) Where I Run into My Mother whom I Hated All My Life."Like your favorite band releasing a six-song EP to keep you salivating until its next full-length album, Sextet is a finger-snapping sample of Miller's work with the blare of a clarion call, and lots of raucous humor and jazz.

The stories are all told by and "outsider artist", a writer who is never able to finish his long novel yet easily writes these small touching portraits about the poor who, in their dance halls and bars, long to live the high-life of the Park Avenue "swells." in dance halls, and bars.

Bernadette Mayer mixes together nature poems, pastiches, sonnets, prose poetry, and epigrams to create Poetry State Forest.

Céline's masterpiece-colloquial, polemic, hyper realistic-boils over with bitter humor and revulsion at society's idiocy and hypocrisy: Journey to the End of the Night is a literary symphony of cruelty and violence that hurtles through the improbable travels of the petit bourgeois (and largely autobiographical) antihero, Bardamu: from the trenches of WWI, to the African jungle, to New York, to the Ford Factory in Detroit, and finally to life in Paris as a failed doctor. Ralph Manheim's pitch-perfect translation captures Céline's savage energy, and a dynamic afterword by William T. Vollmann presents a fresh, furiously alive take on this astonishing novel.

Shunra is Aramaic for "cat." Schmetterling is German for "butterfly." In Yoel Hoffmann's new book, these and numerous other creatures, cultures, and languages meet in a magical shimmering hymn to childhood. Hoffmann traces his hero's developing consciousness of the ways-and-wonders of the world as though he were peering through a tremendous kaleidoscope: all that was perceived, all that is remembered, is rendered in fluid fragments of color and light. With remarkable delicacy and sweep, Hoffmann captures childhood from the amazed inside out, and without the backward-looking wash of grown-up sentiment. Instead, the boy's deadpan registration of the human comedy around him is offered up as strangely magical fact. Beautifully translated by Peter Cole, The Shunra & the Schmetterling is fiction for lovers of poetry and poetry for lovers of fiction--a small marvel of a book, and one of the author's finest to date.

At last in a single volume: the breadth and depth of Denise Levertov's poetic achievements. Culled from two dozen poetry books, and drawing from six decades of her writing life, The Selected Poems of Denise Levertov offers a chronological overview of her great body of work. It is splendid and impressive to have at last a clear, unobstructed view of her groundbreaking poetrythe work of a poet who, as Kenneth Rexroth put it, "more than anyone, led the redirection of American poetry...to the mainstream of world literature." Described by Publishers Weekly as "at once as intimate as Creeley and as visionary as Duncan," Levertov was lauded as "one of the indispensable poets of our language, one of those few writers to whom it is necessary to pay attention" by The Malahat Review. No poet is more overdue for a single accessible volume; no career could be better to have within easy reach. As a child, Denise Levertov (1923-1997) sent her poems to T. S. Eliot, who admired and encouraged her. Born in England and educated at home, she emigrated to the United States in 1948, and became one of the most important American poets of the second half of the 20th century. Levertov - who won the Robert Frost Medal, the Shelley Memorial Award, and the Lannan Prizewas also a staunch anti-war activist and environmentalist. "One of the essential poets of our time" (Poetry Flash), Denise Levertov was an inspiration to generations of writers.

In addition to substantial new work, Allen Grossman in The Ether Dome and Other Poems New and Selected 1979-1991 gives his readers a retrospective of a life in poetry that has brought him such honors as a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Witter Bynner Prize of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and a MacArthur Fellowship. The Ether Dome is his seventh book of poems.

In the carefully controlled, homogenized future society evoked in innovative German writer Martin Grzimek's new novel, Shadowlife, the patterned lives of the characters turn out to be anything but orderly and serene. Ostensibly the perfect bureaucrat, Felix Seyner, top interviewer for the Central Institute for Biographics, writes a long letter to his old love, Felicitas, explaining himself and his choice of the CIB over their relationship. Her reply calls into question the truth of almost everything Felix has revealed. An appended report from the "reliable" government security forces puts yet another spin on the events. In a world where national distinctions have been washed away by an undefined ecological cataclysm, the characters struggle to find identity by both exploiting the system and simultaneously subverting it. As a guide to our collective future, Shadowlife is intriguing, disquieting, and blackly amusing.

As a preeminent modernist poet and translator of the classics, John Frederick Nims's work is an elegant fusion of contemporary sensibility with formalist experimentation. But form, for this writer of meditative verse, is only a helpmeet to the quintessential content of the poem, the meaning that gives it value in our time and, one hopes, beyond. Concerning the formal elements of poetry, Nims comments: "One might say they are like the scaffolding at a construction site, meant to be thrown away and not regarded once the building is completed." In his newest collection, The Six-Cornered Snowflake, his poems range through an astonishing variety of complex structures: the shaped-poem of the title work, the sestina, the vocal "Pindar's lattice" of the "First Olympian Ode," the nervous galliambics of "Catullus 63"-just to name a few. As William Pritchard, writing for The New York Times Book Review, so aptly observed, "Mr. Nims has consistently had the nerve to be interested in what language could be made to do, rather than what the psyche would be made to reveal."

The Theatre of Tennessee Williams brings together in a matching format the plays of one of America's most influential and innovative dramatists. Arranged in chronological order, this ongoing series includes the original cast listings and production notes. Volume 1 leads with Battle of Angels, Williams' first produced play (1940), an early version of Orpheus Descending. This is followed by the texts of his first great popular successes: The Glass Menagerie (1945) and the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), which established Williams's reputation once and for all as a genius of the modern American theatre.

Born in 1908, Niccolo Tucci is the author of six books (three in Italian, three in English). He first became known in America for his articles and stories published in various leading periodicals--among them Partisan Review, Harper's, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker. The Rain Came Last is the first collection of Tucci's English-language stories to be published. Mary McCarthy remarks in her introduction that the material Tucci delineates lies "somewhere between excruciated memory and 'happy' invention." He writes of his childhood and adolescence in the remote Tuscany countryside where his family lived, dislocated from its grand and opulent past. Later, in a different dislocation, Tucci's stories spring from his urbane and bohemian adult years in Manhattan, to which he emigrated in the 1930s. Very few other writers for whom English was not a native language have adopted and adapted it in so masterly and personal a fashion--Conrad and Nabokov among the rare exceptions. "He is," comments Mary McCarthy, "an international man, a very unusual thing, and it is that perhaps that has put and kept him in a class by himself."

Thomas Merton spent two weeks in Alaska in 1968 just prior to his fateful trip to the East. He had no thought of publication either of his journal or his conferences-the talks he gave to religious communities there. Although it was his nature to give his attention to what was immediately before him, he was counting the days until he would step onto the plane that would take off across the Pacific. This book contains the journal and letters Merton wrote during his Alaskan visit that were published in a limited edition in 1988 as The Alaskan Journal by Turkey Press. To this have been added the transcriptions of the informal but pithy talks he gave in Eagle River and Anchorage. These conferences are interesting for the direct light they throw on Merton's thinking about prayer, religious life and community, the priestly tradition, and they are enhanced by their spontaneous quality which gives a palpable sense of being in Merton's presence. Robert E. Daggy, curator of The Thomas Merton Studies Center, transcribed Merton's journal and letters and has contributed a fine introduction. Also included is a preface by David D. Cooper of Michigan State University and a group of some of the photographs Merton took on his Alaskan adventure.

Seven stories depict harsh realities of life in urban Mexico and the tragedies of childhood innocence betrayed.

In The Green Morning: Memories of Federico, Francisco García Lorca tells of the charmed childhood he, his sisters, and his older brother, the Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca, spent in the "quiet, very fragrant" Andalusian village of Fuente Vaqueros. Digressions into family history enable us to see Federico, the son of a well-off landowning family with a tradition of literacy, poetry-writing, and musical accomplishment-as the culmination of a particular family type his brother describes as "happy, spontaneous, and instinctive." The Lorca family eventually moved to Granada, where both brothers attended university. However, real education took place at the vividly described deliberations of the "Back Corner" group of the Granadan avant-garde.As the "green morning" of childhood came to an end with Federico's first poetic successes, the brothers' lives diverged; Francisco's account ends with Federico's departure for Madrid. Francisco became a distinguished professor of Spanish at Columbia University, and the second half of this volume includes ten of his lectures on his brother's work-discussions which draw upon his personal knowledge of the gradual gestations of the plays and his recollections of rehearsals where Federico was a skilled director.

"Poetry," Michael McClure has said, "is not a system but is real events spoken of, or happening, in sounds." And for thirty years, whether in his early "Dionysian" lyrics or his evolving "bio-alchemical" wisdom, his work has shown a ferocious energy and driving physicality. A poet of and for our time, his own formal structures-the shape of his poems and his highly charged breath-line-nevertheless look back to the classics, to the Provençal troubadours, and to the Romantic verse of Blake, Keats, and Shelley. McClure's Selected Poems is the first major retrospective collection of a poet and Obie-winning playwright associated with the San Francisco Renaissance from its start as well as the early Beat movement. The poems in the book, chosen by McClure himself, hold the undiminished force of three decades' work distilled. Included in Selected Poems are poems and long passages from nine of the author's earlier collections.

Russell Haley has been dubbed 'probably / The best Yorkshire surrealist writing in New Zealand.' The joke teasingly anticipates the tales in Real Illusions. These fictions range across specific locations (especially Yorkshire, especially New Zealand) but they also explore all of the 'dislocations' which lie between. Real Illusions is a book about migration--haunted by journeys, bridges, ancestral ghosts; mirrors and houses, families, coastlines, landscapes which have the disturbing familiarity of dreams. Events take place in that territory where history and imagination manoeuvre and collide. Each of the stories sets out from the point defined by Salman Rushdie in his novel Shame: 'As for me: I, too, like all migrants, am a fantasist. I build imaginary countries and try to impose on them the ones that exist. I, too, face the problem of history: what to retain, what to dump.' Real Illusions is a collection of strikingly individual stories but is also something more. Russell Haley has constructed a discontinuous narrative which seeks at every point for continuities--and he writes in a prose which is alert and supple, stretching its skin from one place to the next.

Born in 1903, Shimpei Kusano has long been among Japan's best-loved poets. Asking Myself/ Answering Myself introduces him to a wide American audience, with selections from over half a century of his work, in translation by Cid Corman. There is scarcely a child (or an adult) in Japan unfamiliar with Kusano's frogs. Their trills, transcribed and fancifully translated by the poet into frog soliloquies, dirges ("Lululu's Funeral" to be accompanied by Chopin's "Funeral March"), and celebrations are, says Corman, "figures of nature--in its largest sense--and of absolute innocence ... . They mock our pretentions but share them too--gently." Witty, lyrical, vigorous, Kusano is a poet of praise--for the savor of snake-liver sake or crunchy raw potatoes, the hissing night sea, a changing sky: "O half a sun now./ mightiest member of the universe./blind my two upstanding eyes with a whack of light." Kusano has traveled widely, and Cantonese as well as the English he studied during his years in China still find their way into his poems. In 1935, he and friends founded Rekitei ("Historical Process"), a monthly magazine out of which grew a poetry group with over a thousand members--now the largest in Japan. Head and heart of the Rekitei group, Shimpei Kusano is still writing, giving readings, and promoting other poets as well as haunting Gaku ("School"), his famous little bar in downtown Tokyo.

"NOW IT IS TIME FOR A NATION,/ a spiritual Nation/based/and formed on open freedom,/on flesh and biology..." The antipolitical activism, biologically based aesthetics, and exuberantly sensuous spirituality that have won Michael McClure acclaim since the birth of the San Francisco poetry renaissance in 1955 are affirmed with new range and eloquence in Fragments of Perseus. The title poem presents fragments of an imaginary journal by Perseus, son of Zeus and Danae, slayer of the snake-haired Medusa, and husband of Andromeda. With "The Death of Kim Chuen Louie," we move from myth to reportage, ancient Greece to modern San Francisco's Chinatown, where the poet has come upon a murder. Following are "Baja Bundle," six poems composed under the spell of travel through Baja California, Mexico, as well as invocations, proclamations, love poems, and dream narratives. Radiating symmetrically from a central axis, McClure's poems spiral across the page with the grace of organisms. As Aram Saroyan has noted, "he sees poetry itself as a 'muscular principle--an athletic song or whisper of fleshly thought,' and in his poems he is able to make his vision compelling."

Gregory Corso is still kicking "the ivory applecart of tyrannical values," heralding the wild and keenly experienced life. Since the 1950s, when with Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and others, Corso electrified the literary establishment with what he describes as "spontaneous subterranean poesy of the streets," he has fathered "three fleshed angels," traveled through Europe and Egypt, seen the demise of several fellow "Daddies of an Age," and now finds himself over half a century old.The lush, fervent oratory of Shelley is evident in these poems of one who may be his most ardent American heir, and the author of The Happy Birthday of Death and Elegiac Feelings American never entirely forgets that a "leaky lifeboat" is the mortal's only home. "You'd think there would be chaos/the futility of it all/Yet children are born/oft times spitting images of us/ ... and the gift keeps on coming."Corso knows death, despair, and silence only too well, and his first major collection in eleven years is permeated with a sense of crucial choices to be made. "Columbia U Poesy Reading--1975" begins with Beat history and ends with a solitary vision of God in the form of the muse: "Seated on a cold park bench/I heard her moan: 'O Gregorio Gregorio/you'll fail me, I know/Walking away/a little old lady behind me was singing: True! True!'/'Not so!'/ rang the spirit, 'Not so!'" In a cocky, exuberant blend of high style and down-home New Yorkese, the Herald of the Autochthonic Spirit brings more auspicious tidings.

In Chinese, Tao means simply way or path, and the mysticism of the early Taoists grew out of the longing and search for union with an eternal "Way." To attune oneself to the rhythms of nature rather than to conform to the artificialities of man-made institutions (embodied in the rigid hierarchies of orthodox Confucianism) became the goal of Taoist masters such as Chuang-tzü, who refused high office so that he could, like the turtle, "drag his tail in the mud." As the British authority on early Chinese religion, D. Howard Smith, expresses it in his lucid introduction to The Wisdom of the Taoists: "To seek and find that mysterious principle, to discover it within one's inmost being, to observe its workings in the great universe outside, and to become utterly engulfed in its serenity and quietude came to be the supreme goal of the Taoist mystics." In presenting the wide spectrum of Taoist thought and experience, Professor Smith has newly translated excerpts from a variety of mystical writings. He concentrates, however, on the two basic sources of Taoism, the humorous and satirical stories of Chuang-tzu (who lived in the fourth century B. C. in Honan) and the Tao-Te-Ching, a classic of mysticism attributed to Lao-tzü. Eventually, Taoism broadened into a magical folk religion, but the dedication to the inward path, the emptying of self, and the search for the nameless principle that could be apprehended only in quiet periods of ecstatic vision contributed to the Chinese form of Buddhism known as Ch'an--which we in the West know better by its Japanese name of Zen.

Michael McClure's Josephine: The Mouse Singer, a play in verse, is based on a story of Franz Kafka's, "Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk." Kafka and McClure? And yet the combination is bound to work, for in essence both writers in their different ways ponder the trials of the artist in an arbitrary universe. McClure's exuberant, inspired adaptation, in fact, reminds us of the bizarre whimseys Kafka's tales were originally intended to be. The first New York production of Josephine: The Mouse Singer, in November 1978 at the WPA Theatre, received The Village Voice's prestigious Obie award for the Best Play of the Year. "As so often happens Off-Off-Broadway," the Voice's citation reads. "it is a play that was performed for only three weekends, but it is a play of extraordinary wit and grace and wisdom, at once utterly charming and almost unbearably painful, a play which tells us that the relationship between artists and their society is often intolerable, but which also tells us that for a society to endure without its artists is impossible."

A "melo-melo in seven scenes," Just Wild About Harry is Henry Miller's only excursion into playwriting. Harry is pure Miller, welling up from the same abundant love of life and freedom from convention that made its author the dean of writers dedicated to human liberation. Admittedly inspired by lonesco and the Theatre of the Absurd, Miller's tragicomic slapstick is nevertheless as American as the Marx Brothers and the blues--the simple story of a heartless Harry (the one the ladies are wild about) who learns a bittersweet lesson about life, death, and love. Begun in Europe in 1960, Just Wild About Harry was first published by New Directions in 1963.

Words and Silence: On the Poetry of Thomas Merton brings to the study of the late Trappist monk's verse the special perceptions born of a friendship of nearly three decades' duration. It started with a brief correspondence between two poets in 1939, two years before Merton entered the monastery of Gethsemani in Kentucky, and lasted until his tragic accidental death in 1968. Throughout these years, Sister Therese Lentfoehr held a number of university positions in her native Wisconsin and elsewhere, all the while amassing an extensive Merton archival collection, including various drafts of individual poems and prose pieces, translations, books and pamphlets, and even portions of hand-written private journals. The comparison of variant readings--sometimes three or four drafts of a single poem--proved invaluable in preparing this study. But of greater worth was the continued intellectual sharing that not only gave Sister Therese growing insight into Merton the monk and contemplative but afforded her a working understanding, as it were, of his poetic vision. Beginning with his pre-Trappist writing and his first published collection in 1911, Sister Therese systematically analyses the entire corpus of Merton's poetry--the earlier monastic preoccupations to the later Zen influences, the recurrent religious and social themes, the increasingly surreal imagery, and the developing "antipoetry" of his final books. Provided with a bibliography and index, Words and Silence is a recommended companion to The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton (1977), a key to the very mind and spirit of an extraordinary monk and poet.

Life in the Forest is Denise Levertov's first major collection since the publication in 1975 of The Freeing of the Dust, winner of the Leonore Marshall Poetry Prize, and is her eleventh book with New Directions, in a connection of nearly twenty years' standing. Ms. Levertov's work holds that tenuous yet inspiring ground between reflection and discourse. The dynamics of this sensitive balance is pointed up in Life in the Forest by a thematic grouping which invites internal association from poem to poem and section to section. "The poems I had been moving towards," she explains, "were impelled by two forces: first, a recurring need...to vary a habitual lyric mode; not to abandon it, by any means, but from time to time explore more expansive means; and second, the decision to try to avoid over use of the autobiographical, the dominant first-person singular of so much American poetry-good and bad-of recent years."

In the sixty poems that comprise The Freeing of the Dust, Denise Levertov continued to explore the personal and public themes that threaded through her work during the disastrous American involvement in Indochina. Relations with family and close friends are depicted with unique poignancy as she pits the at times terrifying concrete image against her vision of the ideal. Here we have poems that speak out of the direct tragedy of war, the result of Ms. Levertov's visit to North Vietnam in the fall of 1972, while others reflect the anguish and the exultation of what she has called the 'inner/outer experience in America during the '60's and the beginning of the '70's.