Reissued with a new afterword Leonard Cohen is back! With a #1 bestselling poetry collection, The Book of Longing, flying off bookshelves; Lian Lunson’s acclaimed documentary, Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man, in theatres this summer (the DVD will release this fall); and the superb soundtrack in music stores everywhere, Leonard Cohen proves he is Canada’s most enduring icon. Now, in the newly reissued Various Positions, Ira Nadel peels back the many layers to reveal the man and explain the fascinating relationship between Leonard Cohen’s life and his art. This book is a remarkable and rare look at Leonard Cohen, up close and personal. For nearly forty years, Leonard Cohen has endured the ups and downs of an international career that has alternately identified him as the "Prince of Bummers" and Canada's most respected poet and performer. Now, author Ira Nadel brings us closer to understanding these conflicting descriptions and allows us to enter Cohen's private world. He peels back the many layers to reveal the man and explain the fascinating relationship between Cohen's life and his art. This is a remarkable and rare look at Leonard Cohen, up close and personal. From the Trade Paperback edition.

At once praised and condemned by his contemporaries and by critics ever since for his highly complex poetic vision, William Butler Yeats remains one of the most important and controversial twentieth-century poets. In what has become a classic work of literary criticism, award-winning critic Harold Bloom breaks new ground with his radical interpretation of Yeats' relationship to the English Romantic tradition. Yeats tells the continuous story of the lifelong influence of Shelley, Blake, and the Romantic tradition upon Yeats' work. Through his analysis of the full spectrum of Yeats' poems and plays, Bloom offers a profound reinterpretation of poetic influence in general.

Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996) is unquestionably the greatest poet to emerge from postwar Russia and one of the great minds of the last century. After his expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1972, Brodsky transformed himself from a stunned and unprepared émigré into, as he himself termed it, "a Russian poet, an English essayist, and, of course, an American citizen." In interviews from 1972 to 1995, 'Joseph Brodsky: Conversations' covers the course of his exile. The last interview dates from just ten weeks before his death. In talks, he calibrates the process of his remarkable reinvention from a brilliant, brash, but decidedly provincial Leningrad poet to an international man of letters and an erudite Nobel Prize laureate. --

The author of Call Me by Your Name returns with a deeply romantic memoir of his time in Rome while on the cusp of adulthood. In Roman Year , André Aciman captures the period of his adolescence that began when he and his family first set foot in Rome, after being expelled from Egypt. Though Aciman’s family had been well-off in Alexandria, all vestiges of their status vanished when they fled, and the author, his younger brother, and his deaf mother moved into a rented apartment in Rome’s Via Clelia. Though dejected, Aciman’s mother and brother found their way into life in Rome, while Aciman, still unmoored, burrowed into his bedroom to read one book after the other. The world of novels eventually allowed him to open up to the city and, through them, discover the beating heart of the Eternal City. Aciman’s time in Rome did not last long before he and his family moved across the ocean, but by the time they did, he was leaving behind a city he loved. In this memoir, the author, a genius of “the poetry of the place” (John Domini, The Boston Globe ), conjures the sights, smells, tastes, and people of Rome as only he can. Aciman captures, as if in amber, a living portrait of himself on the brink of adulthood and the city he worshipped at that pivotal moment. Roman Year is a treasure, unearthed by one of our greatest prose stylists.

Throughout her career, Judith Viorst has written numerous books reflecting on life as she ages. Now in her nineties, she shares her experiences in life's "final fifth" in this collection of poetry and essays. On her retirement community, she notes that it is "wonderful, marvelous, swell--good as gold. Except for this one little problem: everyone's old." On her late husband (who died of COVID-19 in 2022), she pleads: "I need you fixing our damn circuit breakers. I need you! Could you please stop being dead?" With humor and vulnerability, Viorst invites readers to dance with her between grief and levity and to enjoy the time we have left to share.

"In repressive Elizabethan England, artists are frightened into dull conventionality; foreigners are suspect; popular entertainment largely consists of coarse spectacles, animal fights, and hangings. Into this crude world of government censorship and religious authoritarianism comes an ambitious cobbler's son from Canterbury with a daring desire to be known--and an uncanny ear for Latin poetry. A torment for most schoolboys, yet for a few, like Christopher Marlowe, a secret portal to beauty, visionary imagination, transgressive desire, and dangerous skepticism. What Marlowe seizes in his rare opportunity for a classical education, and what he does with it, brings about a spectacular explosion of English literature, language, and culture. His astonishing literary success will, in turn, nourish the talent of a collaborator and rival, William Shakespeare. Dark Renaissance illuminates both Marlowe's times and the origins and significance of his work--from his erotic translations of Ovid to his portrayal of unfettered ambition in a triumphant Tamburlaine to Doctor Faustus, his unforgettable masterpiece about making a pact with the devil in exchange for knowledge. Introducing us to Marlowe's transgressive genius in the form of a thrilling page-turner, Stephen Greenblatt brings a penetrating understanding of the literary work to reveal the inner world of the author, bringing to life a homosexual atheist who was tormented by his own compromises, who refused to toe the party line, and who was murdered just when he had found love. Meanwhile, he explores how the people Marlowe knew, and the transformations they wrought, gave birth to the economic, scientific, and cultural power of the modern world including Faustian bargains with which we reckon still." --

Sleeping with Cats is the intimate memoir of acclaimed author and poet, Marge Piercy whose bestselling novels include Woman on the Edge of Time, Body of Glass and Braided Lives. Focusing on her emotional life, rather than her literary or political adventures, here she reveals the life behind her poems and novels, and the origins of her remarkable literary career. Piercy includes several of her memorable poems and revisits the people, the circumstances, and the actions which inspired her to write them, laying bare the origins of both her fiction and poetry. Throughout her life are her cats, steadfast companions who remain while the people in her life come and go. Always honest and thoroughly compelling, Sleeping with Cats is a fascinating account of this extraordinary and complex woman's life.

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This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.