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Two novellas about friendship, romance, and family by one of the finest Italian writers of the twentieth century.Carmine, an architect, and Ida, a translator, lived together once, long ago, and even had a child, but the child died, and their relationship fell apart, and Carmine married Ninetta, and their child is Dodo, who Carmine feels is a little dull, and these days Carmine is still spending every evening with Ida, but about that Ninetta has nothing to say. Family, the first of these two novellas from the 1970s, is an examination, at first comic, progressively dark, about how time passes and life goes on and people circle round the opportunities they had but missed, missing more as they do, until finally time is up. Borghesia, about a widow who keeps acquiring and losing the Siamese cats she hopes will keep her company in her loneliness, explores similar ground, along with the confusions of feeling and domestic life that came with the loosening social strictures of the seventies. "She remembered saying that there were three things in life you should always refuse", thinks one of Ginzburg's characters, beginning to age out of youth, "Hypocrisy, resignation, and unhappiness. But it was impossible to shield yourself from those three things. Life was full of them and there was no holding them back."

A selection of original translations of the great Persian poet by an up-and-coming American translator and musician.Up until the age of 40, the 13th century Persian sage Rumi was chiefly known as a preacher and a man of serious and sober views. At that point, however, an encounter with the poet Shams of Tabriz left him utterly transformed. Rumi became a poet himself, a poet in singleminded pursuit of ecstatic illumination and liberation whose poetry is meant to induce a similar revelation in his audience, bringing them to a condition of serenity, compassion, and oneness with the divine. Rumi's poetry is a masterpiece of world literature to which readers in many languages continue to return for inspiration and succour as well as aesthetic delight. This new translation preserves the radical intelligence and the ecstatic drama of poems that are as full of individual character as they are of visionary wisdom.Marilyn Hacker, one of America's finest contemporary poets, praises Haleh Liza Gafori's new translations of Rumi as "the work of someone who is at once an acute and enamored reader of the original Farsi text, a dedicated miner of context and backstory, and, best of all, a marvelous poet in English."

A thrilling, innovative novel about the interplay between nature and humankind by the author of Names on the Land.With Storm, first published in 1941, George R. Stewart invented a new genre of fiction: the eco-novel. California has been plunged into drought throughout the summer and fall when a ship reports an unusual barometric reading from the far western Pacific. In San Francisco, a junior meteorologist in the Weather Bureau takes note of the anomaly and plots “an incipient little whorl” on the weather map, a developing storm, he suspects, that he privately dubs Maria. Stewart’s novel tracks Maria’s progress to and beyond the shores of the United States through the eyes of meteorologists, linemen, snowplow operators, a general, a couple of decamping lovebirds, and an unlucky owl, and the storm, surging and ebbing, will bring long-needed rain, flooded roads, deep snows, accidents, and death. Storm is an epic account of humanity’s relationship to and dependence on the natural world.

The first English translation of an essential Austrian novel about life in early-twentieth-century Vienna, as seen through a wide and varied cast of characters.The Strudlhof Steps is an unsurpassed portrait of Vienna in the early twentieth century, a vast novel crowded with characters ranging from an elegant, alcoholic Prussian aristocrat to an innocent ingenue to “respectable” shopkeepers and tireless sexual adventurers, bohemians, grifters, and honest working-class folk. The greatest character in the book, however, is Vienna, which Heimito von Doderer renders as distinctly as James Joyce does Dublin or Alfred Döblin does Berlin. Interweaving two time periods, 1908 to 1911 and 1923 to 1925, the novel takes the monumental eponymous outdoor double staircase as a governing metaphor for its characters’ intersecting and diverging fates. The Strudlhof Steps is an experimental tour de force with the suspense and surprise of a soap opera. Here Doderer illuminates the darkness of passing years with the dazzling extravagance that is uniquely his.

Out of print for decades, this is the legendary American poet's tribute to Federico García Lorca, including translations of the great Spanish poet's work."Frankly I was quite surprised when Mr. Spicer asked me to write the introduction to this volume," writes the long-dead Spanish poet at the start of Jack Spicer's After Lorca, Spicer's first book and one that, since it first appeared in 1957, has continued to exert an an immense influence on poetry in America and in the world. "It must be made clear at the start that these poem are not translations," Lorca continues. "In even the most literal of them, Mr. Spicer seems to derive pleasure in inserting or substituting one or two words which completely change the mood and often the meaning of the poem as I have written it. More often he takes one of my poems and adjoins to half of it another of his own, giving an effect rather like an unwillling centaur. (Modesty forbids me to speculate which end of the animal is mine.) Finally there are an almost equal number of poems that I did not write at all (one supposes that they must be his)."The riddling, ghostly, funny, philosophical, and haunting poetry of After Lorca, interspered with Spicer's letters to Lorca ("A really perfect poem has an infinitely small vocabulary"; "Some poems are easily laid. They will give themselves to anybody") appears here with an introduction by Peter Gizzi, the executor of the Spicer estate and one of America's finest contemporary poets, in an edition that is printed in conformity with the poet's original intentions.

A story of displacement and resistance during the early days of the Nazi occupation of France.Last Times, Victor Serge’s epic novel of the fall of France, is based—like much of his fiction—on firsthand experience. The author was an eyewitness to the last days of Paris in June 1940 and joined the chaotic mass exodus south to the unoccupied zone on foot with nothing but his manuscripts. He found himself trapped in Marseille under the Vichy government, a persecuted, stateless Russian, and participated in the early French Resistance before escaping on the last ship to the Americas in 1941.Exiled in Mexico City, Serge poured his recent experience into a fast-moving, gripping novel aimed at an American audience. The book begins in a near-deserted Paris abandoned by the government, the suburbs already noisy with gunfire. Serge’s anti-fascist protagonists join the flood of refugees fleeing south on foot, in cars loaded with household goods, on bikes, pushing carts and prams under the strafing Stukas, and finally make their way to wartime Marseille. Last Times offers a vivid eyewitness account of the city’s criminal underground and no less criminal Vichy authorities, of collaborators and of the growing resistance, of crowds of desperate refugees competing for the last visa and the last berth on the last—hoped-for—ship to the New World.

The first complete English translation of the nineteenth-century Austrian innovator''s evocative, elemental cycle of novellas.For Kafka he was “my fat brother”; Thomas Mann called him “one of the most peculiar, enigmatic, secretly audacious and strangely gripping storytellers in world literature.” Often misunderstood as an idyllic poet of “beetles and buttercups,” the nineteenth-century Austrian writer Adalbert Stifter can now be seen as a radical experimenter with narrative and a forerunner of nature writing’s darker currents. One of his best-known works, the novella cycle Motley Stones now appears in its first complete English translation, a rendition that respects the bracing strangeness of the original. In six thematically linked novellas, including the beloved classic “Rock Crystal,” human dramas play out amid the natural cycles of the Alps or the urban rhythms of Vienna—environments so keenly observed that they emerge as the tales’ most indomitable protagonists. Stifter’s human characters are equally haunting—children braving perils, eccentrics and loners harboring enigmatic torments. “We seek to glimpse the gentle law that guides the human race,” Stifter famously wrote. What he glimpsed, more often than not, was the abyss that lies behind the idyll. The tension between his humane sensitivity and his dark visions is what lends his writing its heartbreaking power.

A sweet picture book about a little girl's love for her pet lamb, now back in print.M. B. Goffstein was a master of the art of children's books. With the fewest possible words in the best possible order accompanied by precise line drawings, Goffstein created picture books of elemental simplicity, subtle humor, and undeniable charm. Brookie and Her Lamb is a classic tale of reciprocated love between a little girl and her lamb, as memorable as the nursery rhyme about another little lamb and a girl named Mary. Brookie wants to teach her lamb to sing, but all he sings is Baa, baa, baa; she tries to teach him to read, but all he can read is Baa, baa, baa. A bit discouraged, but undeterred, Brookie takes her lamb for a head-clearing walk. She gazes at the lamb grazing, and a smile returns to her face. Back at home, she reconsiders her lesson plan and arrives at a creative solution, a happy ending for both lamb and girl.An ideal read-aloud for young children, Brookie and Her Lamb is a tender tale of mutual love and appreciation and a lasting achievement in story-telling and illustration.

Selected as a Caldecott Honor Book in 1977, this is a charming picture book about a grandmother and her simple, idyllic daily routine, now back in print for the first time in a decade.Fish for Supper is M. B. Goffstein's Caldecott Honor story of a grandmother and her regular routine in summer: waking at five o'clock in the morning to make the most of a day on the lake, "with cans of worms and minnows, some fruit for lunch, bobbers, lines, hooks, and sinkers." Delightfully and wittily, Goffstein departs from the usual fisherman's tale to give us a day in the life of this no-nonsense, patient fisherwoman who catches "sunfish, crapper, perch, and sometimes a big northern pike," who capably cleans her catch, and who can bake to boot. She relishes every bite of her well-earned supper, and the pleasure she takes in her self-sufficiency and graceful work becomes the reader's as well. Based on Goffstein's own childhood summers at her grandparents' house on Lake Minnetonka, Minnesota, Fish for Supper transforms the author and illustrator's indelible memories into a story that is as honed and gratifying as its heroine's days.

A personal and critical work that celebrates the pleasure of books and reading.Largely unknown to readers today, Sir Philip Sidney's sixteenth-century pastoral romance Arcadia was long considered one of the finest works of prose fiction in the English language. Shakespeare borrowed an episode from it for King Lear; Virginia Woolf saw it as "some luminous globe" wherein "all the seeds of English fiction lie latent." In Gallery of Clouds, Renaissance scholar Rachel Eisendrath has written an extraordinary homage to Arcadia in the form of a book-length essay divided into passing clouds: "The clouds in my Arcadia, the one I found and the one I made, hold light and color. They take on the forms of other things: a cat, the sea, my grandmother, the gesture of a teacher I loved, a friend, a girlfriend, a ship at proud sail, my mother. These clouds stay still only as long as I look at them, and then they change."Gallery of Clouds opens in New York City with a dream, or a vision, of meeting Virginia Woolf in the afterlife. She holds out her manuscript to her--an infinite moment passes--and Woolf takes it and begins to read. From here, in this act of magical reading, the book scrolls out in a series of reflective pieces connected through an association of metaphors and ideas. Golden threadlines tie each part to the next: a rupture of time in a Pisanello painting; Montaigne's practice of revision in his essays; a segue through Vivian Gordon Harsh, the first African-American librarian in the Chicago public library system; a fragment of Spenser; a brief history of prose style; a meditation on the active versus the contemplative life; the story of Sarapion, a fifth-century monk; the persistence of the pastoral; image-making and thought; reading Willa Cather to her grandmother in her Chicago apartment; the deviations of Benjamin's "scholarly romance" The Arcades. Eisendrath's wondrously woven hybrid work extols the materiality of reading, its pleasures and delights, with wild leaps and bounding grace.

An incisive reflection on black electoral politics, disenfranchisement, and the lasting legacy of the civil rights movement-now with a brand-new essay on the Covid-19 pandemic, reparations, and the 2020 George Floyd protests.Blackballed is Darryl Pinckney's meditation on a century and a half of participation by blacks in US electoral politics. In this combination of memoir, historical narrative, and contemporary political and social analysis, he investigates the struggle for black voting rights from Reconstruction through the civil rights movement to Barack Obama's two presidential campaigns. Drawing on the work of scholars, the memoirs of civil rights workers, and the speeches and writings of black leaders like Martin Luther King and Stokely Carmichael, Andrew Young and John Lewis, Pinckney traces the disagreements among blacks about the best strategies for achieving equality in American society as well as the ways in which they gradually came to create the Democratic voting bloc that contributed to the election of the first black president.Interspersed through the narrative are Pinckney's own memories of growing up during the civil rights era and the reactions of his parents to the changes taking place in American society. He concludes with an examination of ongoing efforts by Republicans to suppress the black vote, with particular attention to the Supreme Court's recent decision striking down part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Also included here is Pinckney's essay "What Black Means Now," on the history of the black middle class, stereotypes about blacks and crime, and contemporary debates about "post-blackness," as well as a new essay, "Buck Moon in Harlem," which reflects on Juneteenth and the ongoing fight for racial justice, and offers a glimpse of New York City amid the Covid-19 pandemic and the protests following the killing of George Floyd.

Explore the tradition of the political essay with this brilliant anthology.David Bromwich is one of the most well-informed, cogent, and morally uncompromising political writers on the left today. He is also one of our finest intellectual historians and literary critics. In Writing Politics, Bromwich presents twenty-seven essays by different writers from the beginning of the modern political world in the seventeenth century until recent times, essays that grapple with issues that continue to shape history-revolution and war, racism, women's rights, the status of the worker, the nature of citizenship, imperialism, violence and nonviolence, among them-and essays that have also been chosen as superlative examples of the power of written English to reshape our thoughts and the world. Jonathan Swift, Edmund Burke, Henry David Thoreau, Harriet Taylor, Abraham Lincoln, George Eliot, W. E. B. Du Bois, Mohandas Gandhi, Virginia Woolf, Martin Luther King, and Hannah Arendt are here, among others, along with a wide-ranging introduction.

A bilingual collection of poetry, from elegies to poem memoirs, by a revered French master.For more than four decades Claire Malroux has forged a unique path in contemporary French poetry, informed by the French tradition, by poets such as Yves Bonnefoy and Mallarmé, and, more unusually, by the Anglophone tradition, especially Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop, and Derek Walcott. A preeminent translator of English poetry into French, Malroux claims as a signal event in her literary life her discovery in 1983 of Dickinson's poetry, which she describes as "an encounter with the uncanny" and the awakening of a "personal affinity." Malroux is one of those rare poets whose work is informed by a day-to-day intimacy with a second language in its greatest variations and subtleties. Her poems move between an intense but philosophical and abstract interiority and an acute engagement with the material world. In almost every poem there is a characteristic and unsettling amalgam of past and present that collapses distance and incarnates through metaphor. This bilingual selection by the award-winning poet and translator Marilyn Hacker presents Malroux's oeuvre, from her early lyric poems to an excerpt from A Long-Gone Sun--a poem-memoir of life in southern France before and during World War II--to new and uncollected poems from two sequences of elegies written after the death of her life partner, the writer Pierre Sylvain.

A stunning novel about childhood, marriage, and divorce by one of the most interesting minds of the 20th century, now back in print for the first time since 1969.Dream and reality overlap in Divorcing, a book in which divorcing is not just a matter of marital collapse but names a rift that runs right through the inner and outer worlds of Sophie Blind, its brilliant but desperate protagonist. Can the rift be mended? Perhaps in the form of a novel, one that goes back from present-day New York to Sophie's childhood in pre-World War II Budapest, that revisits the divorce between her Freudian father and her fickle mother, and finds a place for a host of further tensions and contradictions of her life now. The question that haunts Divorcing, however, is whether any novel can be fleet and bitter and true and light enough to gather up all the darkness of a given life. Susan Taubes's startlingly original novel was published in 1969 but largely ignored; after the author's tragic early death, it was forgotten. Its republication presents a chance to rediscover a dazzlingly intense and inventive writer whose work in many ways anticipates the fragmentary, glancing, lyrical novels that Renata Adler and Elizabeth Hardwick would write in the 1970s.

A fantastic and philosophical vision of the apocalypse by one of the most striking Italian novelists of the twentieth century.From his solitary buen retiro in the mountains, the last man on earth drives to the capital Chrysopolis to see if anyone else has survived the Vanishing. But there's no one else, living or dead, in that city of "holy plutocracy," with its fifty-six banks and as many churches. He'd left the metropolis to escape his fellow humans and their striving, but to find that the entire human race has evaporated in an instant is more than he had bargained for.Guido Morselli's arresting post-apocalyptic novel, written just before he died, a suicide, in 1973, depicts a man much like the author himself-lonely, brilliant, difficult-and a world much like our own, mesmerized by money, speed, and machines. He travels around searching for signs of life at the US army base-palm trees, convertibles, and missile bays under the roadway-and scouts the well-appointed kitchens of his alpine valley's grand hotels for provisions, all the while brooding on the limits of human vision: his own, but also that of humankind. Meanwhile, life itself-the rest of nature-is just beginning to flourish now that human beings are gone.A precocious portrait of our Anthropocene world and a philosophical last will and testament from a great Italian outsider.

A classic of alternative biography and feminist writing, this empathetic and witty book gives due to a "lesser" figure of history, Mary Ellen Peacock Meredith, who was brilliant, unconventional, and at odds with the constraints of Victorian life. “Many people have described the Famous Writer presiding at his dinner table. . . . He is famous; everybody remembers his remarks. . . . We forget that there were other family members at the table—a quiet person, now muffled by time, shadowy, whose heart pounded with love, perhaps, or rage.” So begins The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith and Other Lesser Lives, an uncommon biography devoted to one of those “lesser lives.” As the author points out, “A lesser life does not seem lesser to the person who leads one.” Such sympathy and curiosity compelled Diane Johnson to research Mary Ellen Peacock Meredith (1821–1861), the daughter of the famous artist Thomas Love Peacock (1785–1866) and first wife of the equally famous poet George Meredith (1828–1909). Her life, treated perfunctorily and prudishly in biographies of Peacock or Meredith, is here exquisitely and unhurriedly given its due. What emerges is the portrait of a brilliant, well-educated woman, raised unconventionally by her father only to feel more forcefully the constraints of the Victorian era. First published in 1972, Lesser Lives has been a key text for feminists and biographers alike, a book that reimagined what biography might be, both in terms of subject and style. Biographies of other “lesser” lives have since followed in its footsteps, but few have the wit, elegance, and empathy of Johnson’s seminal work.

Peek inside one of New York City''s grandest homes—that of Benjamin Sonnenberg, Sr., the inventor of modern public relations—in this smart and hilarious memoir of privilege and excess, told by the son of a powerful and seductive man. Lost Property is a book of memoirs and confessions. The memoirs are of 19 Gramercy Park, once described by The New Yorker as “the greatest house . . . in private hands in New York.” Much like an ocean liner, it was commanded by the author’s immensely powerful and seductive father, Benjamin Sonnenberg Sr., the man said to have invented the modern business of public relations. The memoirs are also of a son’s aesthetic, sexual, and political education, as he both rejects his father’s influence and strives to be his equal.  The confessions in Lost Property are of Ben Sonnenberg’s sometimes absurd flight into “anarchy and sabotage”; of an infidel life in sex and politics in Europe during the Cold War (at one point he was reporting to both the CIA and East German intelligence) and in New York City in the late 1960s. Lost Property is also about marriage, children, debt, divorce, and multiple sclerosis.  A savage comedy, Lost Property is deepened by reflections upon class, culture, and illness. “At last,” writes James Salter, “a defiant life that does not end in bathos, drugs, or stacks of old newspapers, one that draws its distinction from, and ends up as, art.”

A new collection from one of the most exciting voices in American poetry.For many years, Melissa Monroe has been assembling one of the most distinctive bodies of work in contemporary American poetry, drawing on all different kinds of writing, from technical manuals to books of spells to dictionaries of slang, to explore the many ways-poetry is, after all, one of them-in which we human beings seek to know and control the elusive realities of the world around and within us. Her subject is both the strangeness of things and the strangeness of the things we think, and she has an unsurpassed eye for the wilderness between them that we inhabit. The poems collected in Medusa Beach include "Planetogenesis," recording the life of an imaginary planet; "Whiz Mob," a sequence of haikus composed in the criminal argot of 1940s America; "Frequently Asked Questions About Spirit Photography"; and the title poem, which interweaves an account of the life and thought of the great German philosopher and marine biologist Ernst Haeckel with a meditation on the many historical and natural historical avatars of the figure of Medusa. As formally adventurous as they are rigorous, disconcertingly comic, and deeply strange, the poems in Medusa Beach are the work of a true American original.

Enter the mind of French literary giant Honoré de Balzac through a study of nine of his greatest characters and the novels they inhabit. Balzac's Lives illuminates the writer's life, era, and work in a completely original way.Balzac, more than anyone, invented the nineteenth-century novel, and Oscar Wilde went so far as to say that Balzac had invented the nineteenth century. But it was above all through the wonderful, unforgettable, extravagant characters that Balzac dreamed up and made flesh-entrepreneurs, bankers, inventors, industrialists, poets, artists, bohemians of both sexes, journalists, aristocrats, politicians, prostitutes-that he brought to life the dynamic forces of an era that ushered in our own. Peter Brooks's Balzac's Lives is a vivid and searching portrait of a great novelist as revealed through the fictional lives he imagined.