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The definitive collection of works by one of the Tang Dynasty's most eccentric (and badly-behaved) poets, now back in print for the first time in decades.Li He is the bad-boy poet of the late Tang dynasty. He began writing at the age of seven and died at twenty-six from alcoholism or, according to a later commentator, "sexual dissipation," or both. An obscure and unsuccessful relative of the imperial family, he would set out at dawn on horseback, pause, write a poem, and toss the paper away. A servant boy followed him to collect these scraps in a tapestry bag. Long considered far too extravagant and weird for Chinese taste, Li He was virtually excluded from the poetic canon until the mid-twentieth century. Today, as the translator and scholar Anne M. Birrell, writes, "Of all the Tang poets, even of all Chinese poets, he best speaks for our disconcerting times." Modern critics have compared him to Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Keats, and Trakl. The Collected Poems of Li He is the only comprehensive selection of his surviving work (most of his poems were reputedly burned by his cousin after his death, for the honor of the family), rendered here in crystalline translations by the noted scholar J. D. Frodsham.

Considered the most inovative study of Chinese poetry ever written, François Cheng's Chinese Poetic Writing--now in its first expanded, English-language edition--is an essential read for fans and scholars of Chinese literature and the art of poetry in general. Since its first publication in French in 1977, Chinese Poetic Writing has been considered by many to be the most innovative study of Chinese poetry ever written, as well as a profound and remarkable meditation on the nature of poetry itself. As the American poet Gustaf Sobin wrote, two years after the book's appearance, "In France it is already considered a model of interdisciplinary research, a source book, and a 'star' in the very space it initially explored, traced, and elaborated." Cheng illustrates his text with an annotated anthology of 135 poems he has selected from the Tang dynasty, presented bilingually, and with lively translations by Jerome P. Seaton. It serves as a book within the book, and an excellent introduction to the golden age of Tu Fu, Li Po, Wang Wei, and company. The 1982 translation, long out of print, was based on the first French edition. Since then, Cheng has greatly expanded the book. This is the first English-language edition of the expanded version, with the original translators returning to accommodate the many new additions and revise their earlier work.

A wonderful holiday story about a small bird named Arthur, who lives in New York City.After a fine, green summer in Central Park, all the birds are preparing to fly south. Except for Arthur, that is. Arthur is off playing, gazing into a lake, dreaming of wider seas. And so Arthur is left behind. It begins to get cold. The trees are losing their leaves. Arthur feels uneasy and lonely, especially after his nest is scattered to the winds. Arthur must find a new home, and after he does—he settles down in a statue’s open book—he discovers a new city, where he can play hide-and-seek in the steam from a manhole cover and feast with the pigeons on crumbs, and which soon brings other delightful surprises (and challenges): icicles, a great big sweet-smelling evergreen tree that is all lit up with people gathered around it to sing “Gloria” in the cold night, and snow—a whole winter wonderland! And then the trees begin to bud; the birds come back.... With Arthur as their guide through the city, children will find new poetry and beauty on every corner.

A deeply considered and provocative new look at major American writers—including Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, and W.H. Auden—Edward Mendelson’s Moral Agents is also a work of critical biography in the great tradition of Plutarch, Samuel Johnson, and Emerson. Any important writer, in Mendelson’s view, writes in response to an idea of the good life that is inseparable from the life the writer lives.  Fusing biography and criticism and based on extensive new research, Moral Agents presents challenging new portraits of eight writers—novelists, critics, and poets—who transformed American literature in the turbulent twentieth century. Eight sharply distinctive individuals—inspired, troubled, hugely ambitious—who reimagined what it means to be a writer. There’s Saul Bellow, a novelist determined to rule as a patriarch, who, having been neglected by his father, in turn neglected his son in favor of young writers who presented themselves as his literary heirs. Norman Mailer’s extraordinary ambition, suppressed insecurity, and renegade metaphysics muddled the novels through which he hoped to change the world, yet these same qualities endowed him with an uncanny sensitivity and deep sympathy to the pathologies of American life that make him an unequaled political reporter. William Maxwell wrote sad tales of small-town life and surrounded himself with a coterie of worshipful admirers. As a powerful editor at The New Yorker, he exercised an enormous and constraining influence on American fiction that is still felt today. Preeminent among the critics is Lionel Trilling, whose Liberal Imagination made him a celebrity sage of the anxiously tranquilized 1950s, even as his calculated image of Olympian reserve masked a deeply conflicted life and contributed to his ultimately despairing worldview. Dwight Macdonald, by contrast, was a haute-WASP anarchist and aesthete driven by an exuberant moral commitment, in a time of cautious mediocrity, to doing the right thing. Alfred Kazin, from a poor Jewish émigré background, remained an outsider at the center of literary New York, driven both to escape from and do justice to the deepest meanings of his Jewish heritage. Perhaps most intriguing are the two poets, W.H. Auden and Frank O’Hara. Early in his career, Auden was tempted to don the mantle of the poet as prophet, but after his move from England to America he lived and wrote in a spirit of modesty and charity born out of a deeply idiosyncratic understanding of Christianity. O’Hara, tireless partygoer and pioneering curator at MoMA, wrote much of his poetry for private occasions. Its lasting power has proven to be something different from its avant-garde reputation: personal warmth, individuality, rootedness in ancient traditions, and openness to the world.

Anthropology is a science whose most significant discoveries have come when it has taken its bearings from literature, and what makes Paul Radin’s Primitive Man as Philosopher a seminal piece of anthropological inquiry is that it is also a book of enduring wonder. Writing in the 1920s, when anthropology was still young, Radin set out to show that “primitive” cultures are as intellectually sophisticated and venturesome as any of their “civilized” counterparts. The basic questions about the structure of the natural world, the nature of right and wrong, and the meaning of life and death, as well as basic methods of considering the truth or falsehood of the answers those questions give rise to, are, Radin argues, recognizably consistent across the whole range of human societies. He rejects both the romantic myth of the noble savage and the rationalist dismissal of the primitive mind as essentially undeveloped, averring that the anthropologist and the anthropologist’s subject meet on the same philosophical ground, and only when that is acknowledged can anthropology begin in earnest. The argument is clearly and forcibly made in pages that also contain an extraordinary collection of poems, proverbs, myths, and tales from a host of different cultures, making Primitive Man as Philosopher not only a lasting contribution to the discipline of anthropology but a unique, rich, and fascinating anthology, one that both illuminates and enlarges our imagination of the human.

In My Century the great Polish poet Aleksander Wat provides a spellbinding account of life in Eastern Europe in the midst of the terrible twentieth century. Based on interviews with Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz, My Century describes the artistic, sexual, and political experimentation --in which Wat was a major participant-- that followed the end of World War I: an explosion of talent and ideas which, he argues, in some ways helped to open the door to the destruction that the Nazis and Bolsheviks soon visited upon the world. But Wat's book is at heart a story of spiritual struggle and conversion. He tells of his separation during World War II from his wife and young son, of his confinement in the Soviet prison system, of the night when the sound of far-off laughter brought on a vision of "the devil in history." "It was then," Wat writes, "that I began to be a believer."

An NYRB Classics Original Simone Weil-philosopher, activist, mystic-is one of the most uncompromising of modern spiritual masters. In "On the Abolition of All Political Parties" she challenges the foundation of the modern liberal political order, making an argument that has particular resonance today, when the apathy and anger of the people and the self-serving partisanship of the political class present a threat to democracies all over the world. Dissecting the dynamic of power and propaganda caused by party spirit, the increasing disregard for truth in favor of opinion, and the consequent corruption of education, journalism, and art, Weil forcefully makes the case that a true politics can only begin where party spirit ends. This volume also includes an admiring portrait of Weil by the great poet Czeslaw Milosz and an essay about Weil's friendship with Albert Camus by the translator Simon Leys.

An NYRB Classics OriginalDon Lope is a Don Juan, an aging but still effective predator on the opposite sex. He is also charming and generous, unhesitatingly contributing the better part of his fortune to pay off a friend’s debts, kindly assuming responsibility for the friend’s orphaned daughter, lovely Tristana. Don Lope takes her into his house and before long he takes her to bed.It’s an arrangement that Tristana accepts more or less unquestioningly— that is, until she meets the handsome young painter Horacio. Then she actively rebels, sets out to educate herself, reveals tremendous talents, and soon surpasses her lover in her open defiance of convention. One thing is for sure: Tristana will be her own woman.And when it counts Don Lope will be there for her.  Benito Pérez Galdós, one of the most sophisticated and delightful of the great European novelists, was a clear-eyed, compassionate, and not-a-little amused observer of the confusions, delusions, misrepresentations, and perversions of the mind and heart. He is the unsurpassed chronicler of the reality show called real life.

Josep Pla's masterpiece, The Gray Notebook, is one of the most colorful and unusual works in modern literature. In 1918, when Pla was in Barcelona studying law, the Spanish flu broke out, the university shut down, and he went home to his parents in coastal Palafrugell. Aspiring to be a writer, not a lawyer, he resolved to hone his style by keeping a journal. In it he wrote about his family, local characters, visits to cafés; the quips, quarrels, ambitions, and amours of his friends; writers he liked and writers he didn't; and the long contemplative walks he would take in the countryside under magnificent skies. Returning to Barcelona to complete his studies, Pla kept up his diary, scrutinizing life in the big city with the same unflagging zest and humor.Pla, one of the great Catalan writers, held on to this youthful journal for close to fifty years, reworking and adding to it, until he finally published The Gray Notebook as both the first volume and the capstone of his collected works. It is a beautiful, entrancing, delightful book-at once a distillation of the spirit of youth and the work of a lifetime.

Nothing More to Lose is the first collection of poems by Palestinian poet Najwan Darwish to appear in English. Hailed across the Arab world and beyond, Darwish's poetry walks the razor's edge between despair and resistance, between dark humor and harsh political realities. With incisive imagery and passionate lyricism, Darwish confronts themes of equality and justice while offering a radical, more inclusive, rewriting of what it means to be both Arab and Palestinian living in Jerusalem, his birthplace.

Bob, Son of Battle, is a sheepdog so canny and careful of his flock, so deeply devoted to his master, James Moore, and so admired for his poise and wisdom by the residents of a small village in the rugged mountains of England's North Country, that young though he is, he is already known as Owd Bob. In a recent contest, Bob has proved himself a matchless sheepdog, and if he wins the trophy two more times, he'll be seen as equal to the legendary sheepdogs of yore. But Bob has a real rival: Red Wull, with his docked tail and bristling yellow fur, a ferocious creature, just like his diminutive master, Adam McAdam, a lonely Scot, estranged not only from his English neighbors but from his son, David. McAdam just can't stop belittling this strapping young man, all the more so since David began courting Moore's beautiful daughter Maggie. But what McAdam really wants is for his beloved Wullie to wrest the prize from Bob once and for all. The story takes a darker turn when a troubling new threat to the local flocks emerges. A dog has gone rogue, sneaking out at night to feast on the flesh and blood of the sheep he is bound to protect. Again and again, new sheep fall prey to this relentless predator; again and again, he slips away undetected. This master hunter can only be among the boldest and sharpest of dogs . . . Bob, Son of Battle has long been a beloved classic of children's literature both in America and in England. Here the celebrated author and translator Lydia Davis, who first read and loved this exciting story as a child, has rendered the challenging idioms of the original into fluent and graceful English of our day, making this tale of rival dogs and rival families and the shadowy terrain between Good and Bad accessible and appealing to readers of all ages.

During the twelve years of Hitler's Third Reich, very few Germans took the risk of actively opposing his tyranny and terror, and fewer still did so to protect the sanctity of law and faith. In No Ordinary Men, Elisabeth Sifton and Fritz Stern focus on two remarkable, courageous men who did-the pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his close friend and brother-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi-and offer new insights into the fearsome difficulties that resistance entailed. (Not forgotten is Christine Bonhoeffer Dohnanyi, Hans's wife and Dietrich's sister, who was indispensable to them both.)From the start Bonhoeffer opposed the Nazi efforts to bend Germany's Protestant churches to Hitler's will, while Dohnanyi, a lawyer in the Justice Ministry and then in the Wehrmacht's counterintelligence section, helped victims, kept records of Nazi crimes to be used as evidence once the regime fell, and was an important figure in the various conspiracies to assassinate Hitler. The strength of their shared commitment to these undertakings-and to the people they were helping-endured even after their arrest in April 1943 and until, after great suffering, they were executed on Hitler's express orders in April 1945, just weeks before the Third Reich collapsed.Bonhoeffer's posthumously published Letters and Papers from Prison and other writings found a wide international audience, but Dohnanyi's work is scarcely known, though it was crucial to the resistance and he was the one who drew Bonhoeffer into the anti-Hitler plots. Sifton and Stern offer dramatic new details and interpretations in their account of the extraordinary efforts in which the two jointly engaged. No Ordinary Men honors both Bonhoeffer's human decency and his theological legacy, as well as Dohnanyi's preservation of the highest standard of civic virtue in an utterly corrupted state.

In The Interior Landscape the great Indian poet and translator A.K. Ramanujan has drawn on a celebrated anthology of classical Tamil poetry to compose an unforgettable sequence of love poems. The story unfolds in a series of dramatic exchanges between a shifting array of characters-the lovers, relatives, friends, rivals, and sundry passersby-and as it does we are conducted through five phases of love, from first meeting, anxiety, infidelity and separation to final union, each associated with a lush interior landscape of its own. Immersed in the glories of the natural world, the poems evoke the whole spectrum of love while also capturing the gossip and wisecracking of those who look on from outside.

An NYRB Classics OriginalCharacters from every corner of society and all walks of life-lords and ladies, businessmen and military men, poor clerks, unforgiving moneylenders, aspiring politicians, artists, actresses, swindlers, misers, parasites, sexual adventurers, crackpots, and more-move through the pages of The Human Comedy, Balzac's multivolume magnum opus, an interlinked chronicle of modernity in all its splendor and squalor. The Human Comedy includes the great roomy novels that have exercised such a sway over Balzac's many literary inheritors, from Dostoyevsky and Henry James to Marcel Proust; it also contains an array of short fictions in which Balzac is at his most concentrated and forceful. Nine of these, all newly translated, appear in this volume, and together they provide an unequaled overview of a great writer's obsessions and art. Here are "The Duchesse de Langeais," "A Passion in the Desert," and "Sarrasine"; tales of madness, illicit passion, ill-gotten gains, and crime. What unifies them, Peter Brooks points out in his introduction, is an incomparable storyteller's fascination with the power of storytelling, while throughout we also detect what Proust so admired: the "mysterious circulation of blood and desire."