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"Oæguz Atay (1934-1977), one of the most influential figures of 20th century Turkish literature, was not only a writer and a professor, but also a civil engineer. Aside from his widely acclaimed novels, in this book of collected stories, Atay engineers the language of a historically multilayered society that was in the midst of a cultural and political transition. By smoothly mending the autobiographical and the fictional, he invites the reader into a maze of seamlessly shifting narrative voices"--

"Nancy was ... the niece of the star of [Bushmiller's] other strip, Fritzi Ritzi, and meant to serve as a throwaway gag character. But Nancy could not be contained: within a few years, Bushmiller's strip had been renamed for her, and she had begun her ascent into the pantheon of cartooning greats. Nancy, along with on-and-off boyfriend Sluggo, delivered absurd laughs to readers for decades, all rendered in Bushmiller's distinctive line. ... Nancy earned both scorn and acclaim for decades, serving as a muse (and sometimes punching bag) for the likes of Andy Warhol, Joe Brainard, Gary Panter, Matt Groening, and more. This collection ... brings together a selection from the ... Kitchen Sink Press editions of Nancy strips, including How Sluggo Survives! and Nancy Eats Food, as well as a number of newly selected cartoons"--

"Insightful and provocative letters by a great twentieth-century poet to his artist wife about life and, revealingly, his own writing. An intimate look at this canonical poet's process, mental health, and quotidian moments during the early 1950s. Paul Celan, a Jewish poet born in the Bukovina, now part of Romania, who survived the Nazi genocide and moved to Paris while continuing to write in German, is recognized as one of the most powerful poetic imaginations of the second half of the twentieth century. His work, a touchstone not only for poets but for historians and philosophers, has been translated into countless languages. The letters he wrote to his wife, the artist Gisáele Lestrange, now published for the first time in English, provide the best picture we have of Celan's complicated personality and the course of his life, both private and public. The life was troubled by paranoid episodes and repeated mental breakdowns ending in hospitalization, and in 1970 he committed suicide. At the same time, his devotion to his work as a poet and translator (of Shakespeare, Dickinson, and Mandelstam, among others) was unflagging. This selection of his letters to Gisáele, which also includes his letters to his young son, Eric, as well as significant number of Gisáele's own letters, covers almost all of his literary career, and while it is a personal document, offering a remarkable protrait of a great poet, a tender husband and father, and a difficult but enduring marriage, it is also a poetic one, providing Celan's translations for Gisáele of his poems from German into French and his extensive commentaries on them. It takes us to Celan's work desk, capturing him in the act of composition while also giving us Celan's reading of Celan. Bertrand Badiou's notes transmit precious information about Celan's work and life. The volume also includes photographs and a detailed chronology of the poet's life"--

Three household adventures in the life of Mitzi include an intended trip to grandmother's, sharing a family cold, and reversing the President's motorcade.

"Originally published as Il grande ritratto, Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, Milan 1960"--Copyright page.

Three of the legendary Russian dissident writer's greatest poems, two autobiographical and one based on a Russian folktale, now in a new, invigorating English translation. Three by Tsvetaeva collects three dazzling and devastating reckonings with love and the end of love by a poet celebrated for the unequaled verbal inventiveness and emotional intensity of her work. “Backstreets,” translated into English for the first time, is a retelling of a Russian fairy tale that offers a witches’ brew of temptation, bodily transformation, marriage, and murder. “Poem of the Mountain” and “Poem of the End,” perhaps the most celebrated of Marina Tsvetaeva’s poetic sequences, explore the shifting dynamics of a love affair. The voices of the lovers, the voice of the narrator, and the voice of poetry combine and recombine, circle each other and split, engaging the reader in a constantly shifting spectrum of emotion, from unbridled passion to rawest grief, and discovering at last a strange triumph in loss.  Andrew Davis’s translations of Tsvetaeva bring out the wild brilliance of an incomparable artist.

"Fifty autobiographical short stories about childhood, life in Italy before and after World War II, and growing old in Milan by the winner of the 1975 Nobel Prize for Literature and one of the most celebrated Italian poets of the twentieth century. Best known for his poetry, Nobel Prize winner Eugenio Montale was also an elegant and incisive prose writer whose stories appeared regularly in the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera. Butterfly of Dinard is a collection of fifty pieces whose distilled language, sprightliness, and subtle irony defy the limits of traditional short stories. Although initially skeptical of inventing fictional worlds, by drawing on his admiration for Katherine Mansfield, Anton Chekov, and Giovanni Verga, and by trusting his own understated sense of humor, Montale began to write about his experiences, "those silly and trivial things which are at the same time important." Butterfly of Dinard represents a sort of autobiographical novel, albeit in fragmented form. It offers occasions for reflection and sudden flashes into the author's inner dialogues, evoking people, objects, and animals dear to him while simultaneously shedding light on the social, cultural, and political events of the times. Divided into four parts, the book begins with Montale's childhood and youth in Liguria; the second and third parts reveal aspects of his adult life in Florence and travels abroad, both before and after World War II; the fourth section is devoted to his final years in Milan. The volume concludes with the prose poem "Butterfly of Dinard," in which Montale encounters a butterfly, his symbol for artistic creation, visible for a moment and then gone again, a vanishing enigma. These culs de lampe, as Montale later termed them, were first published in book form in 1956. Montale added further stories for subsequent editions, culminating in the final 1973 Mondadori edition. This volume is the first complete translation of the final edition and includes five stories never before translated into English"--

"In Globetrotting, Duncan Minshull, the UK's 'laureate of walking,' brings together the work of more than fifty walker-writers who have traveled the world's seven continents by foot. From the 1500s to the present day comes a memorable band of explorers and adventurers, scientists and missionaries, pleasure-seekers and literary drifters recalling their experiences and asking themselves a compelling question -- why travel this way in the first place?"

"When World War I breaks out, a young architecture student in Munich does everything in his power to avoid being enlisted into the German military in this perceptive, wickedly humorous novel by a prominent twentieth-century writer, journalist, and film critic. Siegfried Kracauer's Ginster is the great World War I novel you've never heard of. Here, the sheer horrors are kept offstage, as in Greek tragedy, and merely reported from time to time. The setting is the German home front. Its Chaplinesque antihero-Ginster-spends the war gumming up the German war machine as he maneuvers to stay out of its clutches and save his own skin. Which he does; however, there is a deeper struggle going on between Ginster's dreamy self-absorption and the pitiless organization of society, war or no war. Ginster has no wish to do anything. Alas, his reveries are forever being interrupted by the demands of an other-minded world. All the scenes of Ginster are well to the rear of the military action, yet with Kracauer narrating, military language saturates all aspects of civilian life in the homeland. Ginster's nearest and dearest are so gung-ho, he feels that he's at the front when he visits them. War, the author seems to say, is merely ordinary life seen from the back instead of the front. As a new European war darkens our horizon, one no more expected than was World War I, Kracauer's novel feels timelier than ever"--

Told through the perspective of his sister in poetry, prose, and the sign-language alphabet, when hearing-impaired Carlo begins to lose vision in his only functioning eye he must undergo an operation to try and save his vision.

"It's no exaggeration to say that Charles Baudelaire invented modern poetry. Flowers of Evil has been a bible for poets from Rimbaud to T.S. Eliot to Edna St. Vincent Millay, who, with Georges Dillon, brought out an inspired rhymed version of the book in 1936. Here it is reprinted, with the French originals, for the first time in many years. Millay and Dillon's versions are virtuosic in their handling of rhyme and meter, and their take on the Flowers of Evil as a whole is among the most persuasive English, capturing in flowing lines comparable to Baudelaire's the tortured consciousness and troubling sensuality that are his opulent music's counterpart. The book also allows readers a new appreciation of the range of Millay's own achievement as a poet and translator"--

"A tsunami slams into the Maluku islands. Giant mollusks wreak havoc. An ominous, quadrilateral UFO appears in the night sky. And a mysterious villain watches and waits in the shadows. Twin paranormal investigators Montgomery and Chris and their best friend Fongor are on the case, delving into this unduly complicated and possibly nefarious plot. They're the only ones who can unravel the mystery, but they might not--especially if they can't stay on task. Between journeys to Uganda, primordial Earth, and the pants store, and confrontations with ghosts frozen in ice cubes, baby turtles, and an army of small, sinister men, the trio will be tested like never before as they search for clues, answers, and a good all-you-can-eat buffet spot"--

"For years, Aidan Koch's comics have been pushing the boundaries of the medium, helping reimagine what a comic can look like, and the kinds of stories it can tell. Koch has been living and working in the desert of California, turning her focus toward the ways humans and the natural world converge. ... Using watercolors, pencils, crayons, charcoals, and collage, Koch builds worlds of dense detail and vast open spaces, urgent scrawled text and long silences, telling a series of stories about people and the places they inhabit"--

"Provocative, hilarious, and tender stories about sex, violence, politics from one of the greatest Russian writers of the post-Soviet era. Red Pyramid is a sort of "greatest hits" collection of short stories from across Vladimir Sorokin's career, beginning with juvenilia like "The Pink Tuber," composed with no expectation of either publication or readership; moving on to scatological conceptual texts like "An Obelisk"; then plunging into the more even-tempered, but still quite uncanny, delights of his post-Soviet work. Stories like "A Month in Dachau" earn Sorokin his moniker as the "Russian De Sade," while others, like "Timka," are shockingly tender-despite their graphic depictions of mass shootings and anal sex. This collection also contains the infamous "Nastya," a story about a family cannibalizing its daughter on the eve of the twentieth century, for which Sorokin was nearly put on trial; "Horse Soup," which was the first translation from the Russian to win an O'Henry Prize; as well as stories published in Anglophone magazines such as The New Yorker, n+1, Harper's, and The Baffler to great acclaim. Translated by Max Lawton with equal attention to chewiness and pop flair, Red Pyramid is introduced brilliantly, brutally, and as always, unexpectedly by Will Self. Red Pyramid is perhaps the best place to begin a dive into Sorokin's arch detonation of Russian violence"--

"ABOUT BLUE LARD The Russian master's most infamous novel, a dystopian fever dream about cloning, alternative histories, and world domination. Vladimir Sorokin's Blue Lard is the most iconic and iconoclastic Russian novel of the last forty years. Thanks in part to its depiction of Stalin and Khrushchev having sex, which inspired a Putinist youth group to throw shredded copies of the author's books into an enormous toilet erected in front of Moscow's Bolshoi Theater, Blue Lard is the novel that tore Sorokin out of the Moscow Conceptualist underground and into the headlines. The book begins in a futuristic laboratory where genetic scientists speak in a Joycean dialect of Russian mixed with Chinese-peppered with ample neologisms-and work to clone famous Russian writers, who are then made to produce texts in the style of their forebears. The goal of this "script-process" is not the texts themselves, but the blue lard that collects in the small of their backs as they write. This substance is to be used to power reactors on the moon-that is, until a sect of devout nationalists breaks in to steal the blue lard, planning to send it back in time to an alternate version of the Soviet Union, one that exists on the margins of a Europe conquered by a long-haired Hitler with the ability to shoot electricity from his hands. What will come of this blue lard? Who will finally make use of its mysterious powers? Blue Lard is a stylistically acrobatic book, translated by Max Lawton into an English idiom just as bizarre as the Russian original. Evoking both Pulp Fiction and the masterpieces of Marquis de Sade, Sorokin's novel is a brutal, heady trip that annihilates all of its twentieth- (and twenty-first-) century competition in the Russian canon-and that annihilates Russia itself in a resounding act of heavy-metal dissidence"--

"The twenty-four tales included in Oceans of Cruelty constitute one of the oldest collections of stories in the world, a book that offers both a set of uncanny, unsettling, and unforgettable narratives and a profound meditation on what weird thing it is that drives us to tell and to listen to stories. "Tales of the Vetala" is one of the names under which these stories have made their way from ancient India to the world at large, a Vetala being a corpse-spirit, and the frame story to the collection as a whole tells of a young king who bears the burden of a double spell. He has fallen under the power of a sorcerer, whose demand is that he fetch to him a Vetala to be his servant, and he has fallen under the power of the Vetala itself. Like a bat, the Vetala roosts upside down in the branches of a tree, and night after night the king is driven to take it down and bear it on his back to the burial ground where, once laid to rest, it will fall into the sorcerer's hands. Night after night, king and spirit make their way from tree to burial ground, and as they do the spirit whispers a riddling story in the king's ear. If the king knows the answer to the riddle, he must tell it; as soon as he tells it, the spirit flies back to the tree. Thus story follows story, the king's labors continue, and neither he nor the spirit finds rest. Only when the king has no idea what the answer to the riddle may be, when he is unable at last to respond to the story at all, will his obligation to the sorcerer be fulfilled and will he be set free, though when that comes to pass-well, that's when the whole story takes a new turn. Within this framework, Oceans of Cruelty unfolds a suite of tales of suicidal passion, clever deceit, patriarchal oppression, obligatory self-sacrifice, changing bodies, and narrow escapes from death. Here are all the passions, and here is the play of appearance and desire from which stories are drawn and that make us come back hungry for story, wondering how will the story end and when at last will we be done with all those stories? Douglas Penick's recreation of this ancient work brings out all its humor and horror and vitality, as well its unmistakeable relevance in a world of stories gone viral"--

"In the early 1960s, the Japanese manga artist Shigeru Sugiura took the well-loved literary character Ninja Sarutobi Sasuke and made him his own. In this legendary gag manga ... Shigeru sends the famous Ninja on a wild, eye-popping adventure: Sarutobi encounters cowboys and aliens, spaceships and sailing ships, mid-'60s celebrity cameos, mushroom clouds, detectives with squirt guns, and more in a delightful and ever-surprising world. Available for the first time in English and with a new essay by Ryan Holmberg, Ninja Sarutobi Sasuke [provides] trippy visuals and silly storytelling"--

Mr. Sillypants worries so much about his swimming lesson that he has a dream in which he turns into a fish.

"Anna has married an Italian seaman, Ilario. Beginning-and ending-at a point shortly before her death, the story told in The Limit draws upon her past and his future to focus attention, with increasing intensity, along the lines of narrowing perspective. In each chapter, dying becomes an appraisal of memory, a confession, perhaps, of secrets shred and not shared. In the ten years of the couple's marriage, the limits of devotion had somehow to be reached. And yet, when Anna can no longer speak, appears to understand nothing, Ilario feels at his closest to her: Anna, so old, ill, and wasted, is a child again. The Limit, inevitably, is not about dying, but living. To read it is to have one's perception and humanity heightened"--

The first English-language collection of its kind, this anthology offers an overview of the past and present history of a long-underappreciated—and now quickly burgeoning—poetic tradition.For decades, the prose poem has variously delighted, confounded, and incensed readers and critics. Until recent years, it had been confined to the margins of literary history as a rather disturbing and elusive oddity. All this is changing.The prose poem, which has long been neglected and underrepresented in mainstream and experimental publications alike, is growing in popularity in the world of contemporary poetry. It is more widely available than ever before, thanks to the joint efforts of an ever-increasing number of imaginative writers, publishers, and editors. And still, this volume is the first anthology of the French prose poem to see the light in the English-speaking world.This anthology gathers a wide range of poets practicing what Michael Riffaterre memorably called “the literary genre with an oxymoron for a name,” from the prose poem’s official “inventors” (Aloysius Bertrand and Charles Baudelaire) to a younger generation of poets from all over the French-speaking world. The poems in this bilingual collection have been rendered into English by some of the finest translators of French literature, including John Ashbery, Mark Polizzotti, Richard Sieburth, Rosmarie Waldrop, and many others.

"Flaubert was not only a great novelist, one of the inventors of of the modern novel, but a great letter writer, writing letters that are among other things a remarkable exploration of the art of the novel. The Letters of Gustave Flaubert: 1830-1880 is Francis Steegmuller's extensive selection from the writer's correspondence, to which he adds deft biographical bridgework and agile annotation. "If there is one article of faith that dominates the Credo of Gustave Flaubert's correspondence," Steegmuller's introduction begins, "it is that the function of art is not to provide 'answers,'" and The Letters of Gustave Flaubert is above all a record of the intransigent questions, personal, political, artistic, with which Flaubert struggled throughout his life. Here we have Flaubert's youthful, sensual outpourings to his mistress, the poet Louise Colet, and, as he advances, still unknown, into his thirties, his wrestle to write Madame Bovary. (Looking back on his early work, he writes, "How I congratulate myself on the prescience I had not to publish!") Here we have Flaubert's correspondence with family and friends describing his life-changing trip to Egypt, exchanges with Baudelaire, the influential critic Sainte-Beuve, and Guy de Maupassant, his young protege, as well as the letters that went back and forth between him and the great confidante of his later life, George Sand. Steegmuller's book, recognized as a classic in its own right, is both a splendid life story of Flaubert in his own words and the ars poetica of a master. Originally issued in two volumes, the book appears here for the first time under a single cover"

"This documentary novel was written shortly after the suicide of a close friend of Drieu La Rochelle. Set in a sanatorium during the early 1930s, this is an account of the last forty-eight hours in the life of a young French drug addict, Alain. It is, in effect, a sober meditation on suicide, and a scathing attack on a society which, in the author's eyes, is perched on the brink of moral and intellectual bankruptcy"--

"Lakdhas Wikkramasinha (1941-1978) was arguably Sri Lanka's most influential poet of the 20th century.1 Wikkramasinha who wrote in both English and Sinhala, published eight volumes of poetry between 1965-1977, before his death by drowning in 1978. He attended the elite boys school St. Thomas College, Mt. Lavinia, and went on to study law briefly before becoming an instructor in English at the University of Peradeniya"--

Now available for the first time in the United States, a celebrated translation of the first volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Swann’s Way, the first of the seven volumes that con­stitute Marcel Proust’s lifework, In Search of Lost Time, introduces the larger themes of the whole work while standing on its own as a brilliant evocation of childhood, hopeless love, and the French Belle Époque. We first encounter Proust’s narrator in middle age, consumed with regret for his misspent life. Suddenly, he is back in the past, seized by memories of childhood: his clinging attachment to his mother, his dread of his father, summers in the country and the two walks his family was in the habit of taking—one by an aristocratic estate, the other by the house of a certain Charles Swann, to whom a mystery was attached. A child’s world, and the world of adults the child struggles to imagine, spread out before us, while Proust’s pages teem with incident and puzzle­ment, pathos and humor. The novel then takes a further step backwards to tell the story of Swann’s infatuation with the courtesan Odette. Swann, man­-about­-town and familiar of royalty, is reduced to walking after midnight, forlorn as a child awaiting a good­night kiss. James Grieve began his career translating Proust in the early 1970s, driven by his dismay at how many readers recoiled from what they imagined to be the difficulty of Proust’s work, and his translation of Swann’s Way brings out the book’s fluency and speed as no other version does. It offers an unequaled introduction to an incompa­rably absorbing work of art.