2013 marks Dannie Abse's 90th birthday. In his lifetime he has published an astonishing array of work including poetry, fiction, criticism, plays and autobiography but it is as a poet that he is best known and loved. In Speak, Old Parrot he returns to themes of loss, love, medicine and its moral implications, the nature of creativity, Jewish folk tradition and the passing of time. The poems are observant of the outside world as well as the inner life and emotions but most of all they are a joy to read.

"Joseph Epstein may well be the only first-rate American literary critic who can be said to have--and deserve--fans. His essays have captivated readers with their wit, learning, and unabashed love of reading. . . .He has high standards for craftsmanship and a low tolerance for cant." --Washington Times

"Biespiel’s supple memoir of becoming a poet will surely inspire other writers to embrace the bodily character of writing and feel the power and, sometimes, the emptiness of the act of writing poetry." — Publishers Weekly (starred review) The Education of a Young Poet is David Biespiel’s moving account of his awakening to writing and the language that can shape a life. Exploring the original source of his creative impulse—a great–grandfather who traveled alone from Ukraine to America in 1910, eventually settling as a rag peddler in the tiny town of Elma, Iowa—through the generations that followed, Biespiel tracks his childhood in Texas and his university days in the northeast, led along by the ""pattern and random bursts that make up a life." His book offers an intimate recollection of how one person forges a life as a writer during extraordinary times. From the Jewish quarter of Houston in the 1970s to bohemian Boston in the 1980s, from Russia’s Pale of Settlement to a farming village in Vermont, Biespiel remains alert to the magic of possibilities—ancestral journeys, hash parties, political rallies, family connections, uncertain loves, the thrill of sex, and lasting friendships. Woven throughout are reflections on the writer’s craft coupled with a classic coming–of–age tale that does for Boston in the 1980s what Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast did for Paris in the 1920s and Broyard’s Kafka Was the Rage did for Greenwich Village in the 1950s. Restless with curiosity and enthusiasm, The Education of a Young Poet is a singular and universal bildungsroman that movingly demonstrates, "in telling the story of one’s coming into consciousness, all languages are more or less the same."

As the title Jar Jar Binks Must Die indicates, Daniel M. Kimmel is not only a film critic with strong opinions, he's also a fan. In this collection of essays, he covers movies from Metropolis (1927), answering the absurd claim that the restoration of this silent classic negated its status as a science fiction film, to how Star Trek, Avatar, Moon, and District 9 may have made 2009 a "miracle year" for the genre. Along the way he looks at neglected works like Things to Come (1936), explains why remakes aren't always bad, and how seeing E.T. in an empty screening room changed his mind about Steven Spielberg. Whether to rediscover old favorites or add new titles to your Netflix queue, this is a must-have for lovers of SF movies. Author Bio Daniel M. Kimmel is a past president of the Boston Society of Film Critics. When it was discovered he is also a science fiction fan he started getting invitations to participate at a number of SF conventions, which he continues to do. He reviewed for the Worcester Telegram and Gazette and now writes for Northshoremovies.net. He is a correspondent for Variety, the "Movie Maven" for the Jewish Advocate and teaches film--including a course on SF and horror--at Suffolk University. His essays on classic science films have appeared in several publications including Clarkesworld, Space and Time, and the Internet Review of Science Fiction. He is the author of a history of FOX TV, The Fourth Network (2004) which received the Cable Center Book Award. His other books include a history of DreamWorks, The Dream Team (2006) and I'll Have What She's Having: Behind the Scenes of the Great Romantic Comedies (2008). He is also the author of three novels: Shh! It's a Secret: a novel about Aliens, Hollywood, and the Bartender's Guide (2013) Time On My Hands: My Misadventures In Time Travel (2017), and Father of the Bride of Frankenstein (2019).

For more than fifty years, Geoffrey Hartman has been a pivotal figure in the humanities. In his first book, in 1954, he helped establish the study of Romanticism as key to the problems of modernity. Later, his writings were crucial to the explosive developments in literary theory in the late seventies, and he was a pioneer in Jewish studies, trauma studies, and studies of the Holocaust. At Yale, he was a founder of its Judaic Studies program, as well as of the first major video archive for Holocaust testimonies. Generations of students have benefited from Hartman's generosity, his penetrating and incisive questioning, the wizardry of his close reading, and his sense that the work of a literary scholar, no less than that of an artist, is a creative act. All these qualities shine forth in this intellectual memoir, which will stand as his autobiography. Hartman describes his early education, uncanny sense of vocation, and development as a literary scholar and cultural critic. He looks back at how his career was influenced by his experience, at the age of nine, of being a refugee from Nazi Germany in the Kindertransport. He spent the next six years at school in England, where he developed his love of English literature and the English countryside, before leaving to join his mother in America. Hartman treats us to a "biobibliography" of his engagements with the major trends in literary criticism. He covers the exciting period at Yale handled so controversially by the media and gives us vivid portraits, in particular, of Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, and Jacques Derrida. All this is set in the context of his gradual self-awareness of what scholarship implies and how his personal displacements strengthened his calling to mediate between European and American literary cultures. Anyone looking for a rich, intelligible account of the last half-century of combative literary studies will want to read Geoffrey Hartman's unapologetic scholar's tale.

On Stendhal: "The study of human nature, 'the observation of the human heart and its passions, ' was his constant preoccupation. But where could he study the passions better than in himself? Though he lived exuberantly, submitting himself to experience... he went on incessantly writing down everything that happened to him just as it happened. he even led to perform some remarkable experiments upon himself.He laid claim to having been a soldier, a man of fortune, a great lover, a society wit, a diplomat, a traveler, and even, sometimes, a revolutionary conspirator. "Fifty years after his death he becomes one of the demigods of the world's letters, taking his place in the ranks of the great social writers who appeared toward the end of the last century. his manner of life itself has fascinated whole regiments of literary scholars in France, Italy and Germany in the last forty years." -Matthew Josephson, From the Introduction (1946) "Like Josephson's Victor Hugo, it is the best and most comprehensive English study of its subject, a careful collection of material, skillfully assembled and organized...When Freud read Stendhal's memoirs of his childhood and adolescence he called them 'a manifestation of psychological genius.' Stendhal, he saw, had been a Freudian some 70 years before Freud himself."-TIME Magazine (1946)

Early American Poets is a beautiful anthology of the poetry that helped define the American literary tradition. Louis Untermeyer has curated a selection of works from the likes of Whitman, Longfellow, and Poe, as well as many lesser-known poets. This book provides a fascinating glimpse into the early days of American poetry, and is sure to delight poetry lovers of all ages. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Hailed by Publishers Weekly as "an A-1 satire on urban living," William Herrick's Bradovich is now available as a New Directions paperbook. Stephen Bradovich--sculptor, widower, former pro ball player, sometime brawler. Why would this complexly human, anarchist protagonist receive a visit from two impassive, square-shouldered operatives with the alarmling news: "You are under surveillance pending review, that's the message The Authority sends you"? Praised for the compassion, humanism, and "truth-seeking" of his earlier novels, Herrick in Bradovich steps beyond the "lean and muscular prose" of his terrorist trilogy (Shadows & Wolves, Love & Terror, Kill Memory) and beyond the working-class realism that won The Present Tense/Joel H. Cavior Award for That's Life (in 1985) to a surreal--if still recognizable--New York where suddenly not only the improbable but the impossible can happen.

Now available as a New Directions paperbook, Love and Terror, William Herrick's second novel with ND, both reflects and anticipates today's headlines. Terrorist kidnappings, hijackings, and dramatic rescues all form a part of the plot, but Herrick's interest lies less in tension-filled heroics than in the human cost of flawed idealism. Through the notebook of the principal terrorist, Viktor X, the complex characters of Viktor and Gabriele, for whom love and terrorism are intertwined and inseparable, are revealed. And in a series of interviews with a nameless reporter, the lives of three disillusioned revolutionaries--"the old ones," now hostages to a new brand of revolution--gradually and movingly unfold. In his earlier Shadows and Wolves (New Directions, 1980), Herrick showed us the possibility of human solutions that transcend politics. In Love and Terror he shows us why any ideology, inflexibly adhered to, makes such solutions necessary.

An Exaltation of Romance and Revelry

No one before or after Kurt Tucholsky has captured the horrors of the "Great War," as World War I was known, quite like he did. The famed Weimar writer, who would become one of Germany's best-known satirist and journalists, describes surviving in the trenches and fighting a losing battle, the arrogance of the officers and the desperation of the loved ones back home. His writing is similar to that of Heinrich Heine, his role model, in that it appears superficially simple but is replete with hidden meanings. His works are touching, stirring, and precisely to the point. He brings alive the war that still looms even into our own 21st century. This is the first bilingual anthology in German and in English of his works on World War I. The First World War was the "Great War". Everything that happened after this war, even into our own 21st century, is contingent on the years between 1914 and 1918. The Great War also shaped Kurt Tucholsky who emerged from the war.. His style is biting, satirical, and penetrating, full of Berlin gallows humor. This bilingual anthology contains English translation of his short stories as well as a rendition of his poetry about World War I, all representative of his style.

Carole Balin introduces us to dozens of Jewish women writers from late nineteenth- and early twentieth- century Tsarist Russia, focusing on five who were among the most prolific. Their extant literary remains include not only fiction, poetry, drama, translations, and essays, but also memoirs, autobiographies, diaries, and letters. Balin contextualizes the works of each within the culture in which she lived and wrote. Miriam Markel-Mosessohn (1839-1920) toiled to advance the goals of the Russian Haskalah (Enlightenment), translated German works into Hebrew, tried her hand at poetry, and became a foreign correspondent for a Hebrew newspaper at the age of 48. Hava Shapiro (1879-1943) published short stories and newspaper articles in Hebrew, earned a doctorate at the University of Berne, and was an active participant in the writing circle convened at the Warsaw home of Y. L. Peretz. Rashel Mironovna Khin (1861-1928) wrote numerous short stories and plays in Russian, two of which were staged at Moscow's Malyi Theater. Feiga Israilevna Kogan (1891-1974) composed books of Symbolist poetry in Russian while harboring a love of Hebrew, which she nurtured at the Society for Lovers of the Hebrew Language. Sofia Dubnova-Erlikh (1885-1986) was the daughter of historian Simon Dubnov, the wife of socialist Genrikh Erlikh, and an accomplished poet, essayist, biographer, and political activist in her own right. The life-like and touching portraits that emerge of these talented writers allow us a penetrating view of Jewish women within their Russian-Jewish milieu that is far more nuanced than the images of housewife and revolutionary currently held in collective Jewish memory. The lives and works of these women help to tell a larger story of Jewish cultural history in the Russian Empire.

Sophie Hannah's first book was greeted with amazement. The Poetry Review declared, 'Shall I put it in capitals? SOPHIE HANNAH IS A GENIUS.' Each subsequent collection has been formally more inventive, thematically more complex, yet each has met with a similar welcome, and she has become that rare thing, an acclaimed and bestselling poet. Published for the first time in Penguin, this volume includes all of Hannah's best loved verses from The Hero and the Girl Next Door, Hotels Like Houses, Leaving and Leaving You and First of the Last Chances .

"This book is a study of the conflicts between the quest for power and the bonding of human friendship and love in Paradise Lost, Moby-Dick and The Brothers Karamazov, with a focus on the role of the vengeful spirits of Satan, Captain Ahab and Ivan Karamazov"--

"This is a collection of poetry & art by the author-artist Carolyn Mary Kleefeld, dedicated in memoriam to David Campagna, the great romantic interest in Kleefeld's life, co-published by Cross-Cultural Communications of Merrick, New York, and The Seventh Quarry Press of Swansea, Wales. What is "immortal"? That which is not subject to death and decay. As Hippocrates wrote, Ars longa, vita brevis. And what is a "seed"? Origin, root, fountainhead-come to mind. Immortal Seeds is a collection of art and poetry, of that which cannot decay and is a planting of creative eternality. Borne of a heart nurtured by true love, he love of David Campagna, Carolyn Mary Kleefeld, the artist-poet has, in image and word, produced a volume that brings to mind Shakespeare's: "So long lives this and this gives life to thee." Or, to paraphrase: "So long as these Immortal Seeds exist, they give life to Carolyn's beloved." -Stanley H. Barkan, Poet-Publisher Cross-Cultural Communications"--

By studying the diction of Romeo and Juliet , Robert O. Evans examines this, the most rhetorical of Shakespeare's plays, in terms of an Aristotelian critical category, which has been neglected in modern times. Inherent in his methodology is the assumption that Romeo and Juliet is best regarded as drama, not as pure poetry, though essentially it is the rhetorical brilliance of the poetry that is considered. Evans begins with an analysis of the important speeches of Romeo and Juliet and defines the controlling devices Shakespeare wove into them, especially oxymoron. He then follows with a discussion of the role of Friar Laurence, whom the author finds is a catalyst between the warring houses and between the lovers and the outer world of Verona. Evans concludes with an examination of Mercutio's famous Queen Mab speech, which, he points out, has an integral relationship to the structure of the tragedy as a whole. An analysis of the rhetorical devices of the play, Evans believes, demonstrates the thesis that the tragic effect of Romeo and Juliet is one of fulfillment, with the tragedy arising from the character of the protagonists rather than from circumstance.

"Fantasy once again, deftly and convincingly -- as only Robert Nathan can do it -- handled, with a satiric twist now and again, and a pull at the heartstrings. He has told the story of a failure whose one escape into a dream world comes through the imposed background of the ship he has built for himself in his own drab front yard. When the wife who demands results, sells it as a hot dog stand, he takes one last stand -- and Fate plays into his hands and launches the ship on the high road of adventure, southward bound. He picks up a "crew" as rudderless as himself, and they make their way against insuperable obstacles until "the law" catches up with them. But -- he has won something as a bulwark for the future. There is pathos and humor and that indefinable tug at the love of makebelieve that gave One more spring its impetus. It lacks the immediate application to current problems -- but it has the same adult fairy tale quality."--Kirkus.

A fantastic essayist, the inimitable Muriel Spark addresses here the writing life, cats, favorite writers (the Brontës, T. S. Eliot, Robert Burns, Mary Shelley), love, Piero della Francesca, life in wartime London and in glamorous "Hollywood-on-the-Tiber" 1960s Rome, faith, and parties (on her first New Year's Eve, as a baby sipping her mother's sherry: "I always loved a party"). No one was as "fearless and original" (TLS) as Muriel Spark, who believed that "art is an act of daring." Here she glides from the mysteries of Job's sufferings to Dame Edith Sitwell's cocktail advice about how to handle a nasty publisher: "'My dear, ' she said, 'you must acquire a pair of lorgnettes, make an occasion to see that man again, focus the glasses on him and sit looking at him through them as if he was an insect. Just look and look.'"