"In this brilliant and hilarious jailbreak of a novel, Charyn channels the genius poet and her great leaps of the imagination." —Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review) Jerome Charyn, "one of the most important writers in American literature" (Michael Chabon), continues his exploration of American history through fiction with The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson , hailed by prize-winning literary historian Brenda Wineapple as a "breathtaking high-wire act of ventriloquism." Channeling the devilish rhythms and ghosts of a seemingly buried literary past, Charyn removes the mysterious veils that have long enshrouded Dickinson, revealing her passions, inner turmoil, and powerful sexuality. The novel, daringly written in first person, begins in the snow. It's 1848, and Emily is a student at Mount Holyoke, with its mournful headmistress and strict, strict rules. Inspired by her letters and poetry, Charyn goes on to capture the occasionally comic, always fevered, ultimately tragic story of her life-from defiant Holyoke seminarian to dying recluse.

"To all those who have for several years sought to discredit the new American literature, Lawrence Ferlinghetti has just dealt a most powerful blow," wrote French critic Pierre Lepape in 1961 when Her was published in France as La Quatrième Personne du Singulier. Calling it "a masterpiece of the young American novel," Lepape declared it was "the confirmation of a great American writer who, in the hall of American literary glories, takes the place left vacant by the death of Hemingway." Lepape went on to speak of the "incredible verbal virtuosity" by which the reader is led through this "laby-rêve," and it is this image of the "labyrinth-dream" which relates Her to the anti-novels of the young French school of Robbe-Grillet and Butor. Being thus very far from the kind of novels produced by Ferlinghetti's immediate contemporaries (whether Beat or academic) this book has met with little but bafflement among American critics. With well over 50,000 now in print Her nevertheless continues to make its own way.

In this unforgettable book, Arthur Waley brings together a number of his articles, poems and translations. Included in this collection are pieces on the eighth-century Chinese poet Ts'�n Sh�n and the great Chinese prose writer, Han Y�, as well as some of Waley's original poems and stories. But the most compelling is 'The Secret History of the Mongols', consisting of long extracts from a thirteenth-century Chinese saga. Written in vivid, elegant prose, it recounts fantastic tales of epic battles; of betrayal and love; of tyrants and prisoners. Suffused with symbolism and folklore, it is a masterpiece of storytelling which will appeal to the scholar and the ordinary reader alike.

A beautifully written prose work, Tsing is a multi-layered narrative that combines a wholly fictional novel-within-a-novel with an episodic chronicle of the narrator's present as a traveler to and visiting writer in the United States. Much more than an "ordinary" postmodern text, Tsing is a quiet and moving paean to the narrator's deceased father. Beginning with a series of imagined vignettes involving a father and a daughter, Albahari weaves both real and imagined narrative fragments together with considerable skill. As Albahari's fragments - simple stories about persons approaching each other, spending some time together, and eventually going their separate ways - accumulate, his deft combination of paradox and poetry provides a kaleidoscopic view of memory, love, and loneliness.