"Demonstrating the lasting brilliance of her voice and her prophetic vision, 'Essential Essays' showcases Adrienne Rich's singular ability to unite the political, personal, and poetical. The essays selected here by feminist scholar Sandra M. Gilbert range from the 1960s to 2006, emphasizing Rich's lifelong intellectual engagement and fearless prose exploration of feminism, social justice, poetry, race, homosexuality, and identity." - Umschlagrückseite

In this richly diverse collection of essays, Joseph Brodsky casts a reflective eye on his experiences of early life in Russia and exile in America. With dazzling erudition, he explores subjects as varied as the dynamic of poetry, the nature of history and the plight of the émigré writer. There is also the humorous tale of a disastrous trip to Brazil, advice to students, a homage to Marcus Aurelius and studies of Robert Frost, Thomas Hardy, Horace and others. The second volume of essays following Less Than One , this collection includes Brodsky's 1987 Nobel Lecture, 'Uncommon Visage'.

Learning to Drive • Now a major motion picture starring Patricia Clarkson and Ben Kingsley Celebrated for her award-winning political columns, criticism, and poetry, Katha Pollitt now shows us another side of her talent. Learning to Drive is a surprising, revealing, and entertaining collection of essays drawn from the author’s own life. With deep feeling and sharp insight, Pollitt writes about the death of her father; the sad but noble final days of a leftist study group of which she was a member; and the betrayal and heartbreak inflicted by a man who seriously deceived her. (Her infinitely patient, gentle driving instructor points out her weakness—“Observation, Katha, observation!”) She also offers a candid view of her preoccupation with her ex-lover’s haunting presence on the Internet, and her search there for a secret link that might provide a revelation about him that will Explain Everything. Other topics include the differences between women and men—“More than half the male members of the Donner party died of cold and starvation, but three quarters of the females survived, saved by that extra layer of fat we spend our lives trying to get rid of”—and the practical implications of political theory: “What if socialism—all that warmhearted folderol about community and solidarity and sharing was just an elaborate con job, a way for men to avoid supporting their kids?” Learning to Drive demonstrates that while Katha Pollitt is undeniably one of our era’s most profound observers of culture, society, and politics, she is just as impressively a wise, graceful, and honest observer of her own and others’ human nature. Praise for Learning to Drive “The kind of book you want to look up from at points so you can read aloud certain passages to a friend or lover.” — Chicago Tribune “A powerful personal narrative . . . full of insight and charm . . . Pollitt is her own Jane Austen character . . . haughty and modest, moral and irresponsible, sensible and, happily for us, lost in sensibility.” — The New York Review of Books “With . . . bracing self-honesty, Pollitt takes us through the maddening swirl of contradictions at the heart of being fifty-something: the sense of slowing down, of urgency, of wisdom, of ignorance, of strength, of helplessness, of breakdown, of renewal.” — The Seattle Times “Essays of breathtaking candor and razor-sharp humor . . . [Pollitt] has outdone herself. . . . [Her] observations are acute and her confessions tonic. Forget face-lifts; Pollitt’s essays elevate the spirit.” — Booklist (starred review)

One of The New Yorker 's "Books We Loved in 2017" A Grace Paley Reader compiles a selection of Paley’s writing across genres, showcasing her breadth of work as well as her extraordinary insight and brilliant economy of words. "A writer like Paley," writes George Saunders, “comes along and brightens language up again, takes it aside and gives it a pep talk, sends it back renewed, so it can do its job, which is to wake us up.” Best known for her inimitable short stories, Grace Paley was also an enormously talented essayist and poet, as well as a fierce activist. She was a tireless member of the antiwar movement, the civil rights movement, the tenants’ rights movement, the anti-nuclear-power movement, and the Women’s Pentagon Action, among other causes, and proved herself to be a passionate citizen of each of her communities—New York City and rural Vermont.

"A stunning, unclassifiable work by one of the 20th century's greatest thinkers and writers, this book is an inspiring amalgam of letters, poetry, and profound musings on everything from Caravaggio to the nature of time itself. 'Those who read or listen to our stories see everything as though through a lens. This lens is the secret of narration, and it is ground anew in every story, ground between the temporal and the timeless ...In our brief mortal lives, we are grinders of these lenses'. When John Berger wrote this apparently unclassifiable book, it was to become a sensation, translated into nine languages and indelible from the minds of those who read it. This stunning work is a shoebox filled with delicate love letters containing poetry and thoughts on mortality, art, love, and absence, capturing moments in time that hover above Berger's surprising landscapes. From his lyrical description of the works of Caravaggio and profound explorations of death and immigration to the sight of some lilac at dusk in the mountains, this is a beautiful and most intimate response to the world around us"-- Provided by publisher.

“Brilliant . . . The dean of American comic writers showcases his varied talents mocking the public and private lives of politicians, average citizens and himself.”— The Star-Ledger Calvin Trillin has committed blatant acts of funniness all over the place—in The New Yorker, in one-man off-Broadway shows, in his “deadline poetry” for The Nation, in comic novels, and in what USA Today called “simply the funniest regular column in journalism.” Now Trillin selects the best of his funny stuff and organizes it into topics like high finance (“My long-term investment strategy has been criticized as being entirely too dependent on Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes”) and the literary life (“The average shelf life of a book is somewhere between milk and yogurt”). He addresses the horrors of witnessing a voodoo economics ceremony and the mystery of how his mother managed for thirty years to feed her family nothing but leftovers (“We have a team of anthropologists in there now looking for the original meal”). He even skewers deserving political figures in poetry. In this, the definitive collection of his humor, Calvin Trillin is prescient, insightful, and invariably hilarious. “A literary treasure . . . There is only one Calvin Trillin, and if he didn’t exist we would have to invent him.”— The Washington Times “Funny is to Trillin what drinking is to Uncle Jed in Annie Get Your Gun —it’s what he does ‘natur’lly.’ He’s also a lot more than funny. Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin is the twenty-eighth book he’s published over not far short of a half-century, and their range of subjects is remarkable.”—Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post “Trillin made his reputation over four decades as the author of ‘U.S. Journal’ in the New Yorker [but he] is incapable of resisting the temptation of comedy. The jokes kept on welling up and Mr. Trillin made a parallel reputation as a writer of funny stuff.”— The Economist “Wry, whip-smart, understated, and entertaining.”— The Miami Herald

A collection of favorite poems. One of them is by Stephen Crane, who wrote: "I saw a man pursuing the horizon; / Round and round they sped. / I was disturbed at this; / I accosted the man. It's futile, I said, / You can never ̓/ You lie, he cried, / And ran on."

The story of the mother-and-daughter goddesses Demeter and Persephone has seized the imagination of people in every age, from ancient times to the present. Considered today by many to be the archetypal myth for women, it touches on timeless themes in every life, such as the male-female relationship, love between women, initiations into puberty and old age, the mother-daughter bond, death, and ecological renewal. Christine Downing has combined essays, prose, poetry, and even performance art with her own insightful commentary to shed new light on the myth's ancient meanings and to offer new insights in its implications for contemporary men and women.

"Denise Levertov's New & Selected Essays gathers three decades' worth of the poet's most important critical statements. Her subjects are various - poetics, the imagination, politics, spirituality, other writers - and her approach independent minded and richly complex. Here in a single volume are recent essays exploring new ground broken by Levertov in the past decade as well as the finest and most useful prose pieces from The Poet in the World (1973) and Light Up the Cave (1981). With their combination of sensitivity and practicality, the New & Selected Essays will prove enormously helpful to the writer and reader of poetry. As Kirkus Reviews remarked about her prose: "This is humanism in its true sense - her attitude as evidenced (not described) by her writing is such that the reader cannot help but experience life, at least temporarily, with more intensity, joy, and imagination.""--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Open City features a dynamic mix of prominent writers, undiscovered aspirants, and lost treasures from writers of past eras. Including fiction, essays, poetry, and artwork by an exciting range of talents, Open City has presented new works by Michael Cunningham, Deborah Garrison, Rick Moody, David Foster Wallace, Geoffrey O'Brien, Sam Lipsyte, Meghan Daum, David Berman, and previously unpublished work by Delmore Schwartz, Richard Yates, Edvard Munch, and Ford Madox Ford. Praised in the pages of publications such as Harper's Bazaar, Library Journal, and The New York Times, Open City is today's most important literary journal. Open City #14 includes John Seabrook on ancestor hunting; Arthur Nersessian, from Fuck-Up to makeup; new fiction by Betsy Bern and Martha McPhee; and the original treatment for the improvised cult-classic film Waiting for Guffman.

"This book asks fundamental questions about the uses of history. That it does so from a rootedness in Jewish history, an unassimilated location, is one part of its strength. But history alone doesn't confer this strength; the poet's continuing labor with Jewish meaning does. The other part, of course, is the integrity of its poetics. A Klepfisz poem lives amid complex tensions, even when its texture may appear transparent. There is a voice, sometimes voices, in these poems which can often best be heard by reading aloud. Her sense of phrase, of line, of the shift of tone, is almost flawless. But perfection is not what Irena Klepfisz is after. It is the tension between so many forces: Language, speechlessness, memory, politics, irony, compassion, hunger for what is lost, hunger for a justice still to be made, that makes this poetry crucial to the new unfoldings of history that we begin, in 1990, to imagine." -- from the introduction by Adrienne Rich

Whether you're a savvy mom of teens or a new mom trying to get baby to sleep, this book is for you. A must read for every mom who ever said: "Stop rocking on the chair!" Not your average poetry book, Ode to Chores is a clever and entertaining view of parenting, motherhood, children, pets, and the life and times of moms on call 24/7. ------------------ The Inspiration For This Book The whole thing started because I was lonely. I spent hours every day with my little kids, which I really loved for a while, but my husband was gone A LOT, and when he came home, he was all talked out. He just wanted to spend a little time with his two boys roughhousing and eating Oreo Thins. Plans with friends were few and far between because we were all busy shuffling kids to school and activities when we weren't working jobs, or doing house projects, or stumping for our chosen elected officials, or reconnecting with our significant others. In the meantime, exhausted at the end of every day, I still wanted to be an artist, a writer, and a musician. I'd been on stage for 25 years and suddenly the only singing I was doing was lullabies at 3 AM in a rocking chair trying to get my little muffin to sleep. . . just for a little while. . . sleep muffin, sleep. Somewhere along the way, I put down my pen and found myself deep in the stuff of kids. Then, one evening after an especially frustrating dinner with the boys, I sent everyone off to their rooms, flipped over an envelope lying in the mess on the dining room table, and wrote the poem Stop Rocking on the Chair. I was surprised at how satisfying it was to say it on the page. From there I started writing these "mom poems" all the time. As I did, I felt less and less alone. I was not only writing about my experience but a thread of experience that connected to moms all over the world and through time. The common language of motherhood reconnected me to my creativity and other people at the same time. I first thought I wrote this book for myself, but it turns out I wrote this book for you. I hope it brings you joy and even makes you cry. I hope it brings mothers together and inspires you to make some art and put it out into the world, so we can all have a moment of connection together. Call me. We'll have coffee. ------------------ About the Author Brenda Kahn is a poet, memoirist and an international recording artist who has shared the stage with Bob Dylan, David Byrne, and Jeff Buckley. She has expertise in changing both guitar strings and diapers. She is a writer of songs, poetry, memoir, and excuse notes for sick kids. She can paint and spackle like nobody's business and will also perform a cover of Bessie Smith's Ain't Nobody's Business if you request it at a live show. She lives in South Salem, NY with her husband and two boys, her golden retriever (Barley Patches), her two cats (Fluffy and Colby) and Ekko the crested gecko. Learn more about Bren at www.brendakahn.com Stay connected and support her work at www.BrendaKahn.com/Patreon

"The bardo of waking life is a meditation on the Tibetan Buddhist bardo realm, which is viewed as the bridge between lives, the state people enter after death and before rebirth. This book examines waking life and its history and language as if it were a bardo state rather than ultimate reality. Bardo is at once prose poetry, intimate memoir, and anthropological inquiry"--Provided by publisher.

Prepositions: The Collected Critical Essays, published first in 1967 and then in an expanded edition in 1981, was a definitive set of critical statements by Louis Zukofsky, one of the most important poets of the 20th century. These central expositions of Zukofsky's own poetics, and enduring examinations of the art of poetry, range over the entire length of Zukofsky's career and include sensitive and prescient readings of Henry Adams, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, E. E. Cummings, and others. Prepositions + brings this essential collection back into print, and adds generous selections of Zukofsky's uncollected prose, most notably the crucial 5 Statements for Poetry. Published in a small edition in 1958 and out of print ever since, 5 Statements gathers the essays that Zukofsky felt best presented his own poetics. Among them are the three essays, in their original and expansive forms, that crystallized the "Objectivist" movement of the early 1930s. Prepositions + also includes an extended in-depth interview in which Zukofsky discusses his poetry and poetics.

“… the shadows of death are the spices of love, and eternal life would be the school of absolute coldness. We love a being that the morrows threaten, and love her all the more as she is more threatened….” Albert Caraco was born in 1919 in Constantinople in a Jewish family established in Turkey for four centuries. He grew up in Prague, Berlin, and Paris, where he attended Janson-de-Sailly high school, and got his degree from the École des Hautes Études Commerciales. In 1939, he and his parents fled Europe to South America at the break of World War II, and settled in Montevideo after living in Brazil and Argentina, where his first books were published. Albert Caraco acquired Uruguayan citizenship and retained it for the rest of his life. Back in Paris in 1949, he started writing his immense body of work, part of which remains unpublished to this day. An ambiguous figure, Albert Caraco built nothing short of a baroque literary cathedral, rife with contradictions, yet rising from an uncompromisingly pessimistic foundation. In 1971, consistent with what he had announced recurrently in his semainiers (weekly diaries), he killed himself just a few hours after his father died. The death of his mother in 1963 was the occasion for a reckoning of his relationship with the woman he reproached for having given him birth, while praising her for forming his taste and character and uprooting the sheer possibility of consoling illusions in her only son. The result was Post Mortem, a bittersweet lament and a love poem in prose that offers a glimpse into his bleak worldview and an abstract of his works.

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.

"Part travelogue, part literary criticism, this book brings together six interlinked essays that probe the physical, cultural, and imaginative geography of the eastern seaboard of the Levant and its deserts. Its essay evolves out of the author's own travels through a certain region: the Judean desert extending to the Dead Sea, Wadi Rumm south of Petra, the Negev of modern-day Israel, the Galilee, the Arabian desert in which the great pre-Islamic poets once roamed. When the author is not encountering other presences, such as the Bedouin and writers from the distant and near past, he finds himself stumbling over the physical traces of vanished civilizations."--publisher.

Much of A.M. Klein's finest prose is to be found in the mass of uncompleted work that he abandoned at the time of his breakdown, and that became accessible only when his papers were deposited in the National Archives. Notebooks offers a generous selection of this work, revealing previously unsuspected facets of Klein's character and artistry. The fiction, criticism, and memoirs collected here focus on Klein's exploration of the role of the artist. The works illuminate crucial periods of his career, especially the early 1940s, when he was transforming himself into a modernist, and the early 1950s, when he was struggling to overcome the misgivings about his art that were to lead to his final breakdown. The semi-autobiographical text which Klein referred to as 'Raw Material' and the unfinished novel of prison life entitled 'Stranger and Afraid' cast a new light on Klein's often frustrating relationship with the Montreal Jewish community. In 'Marginalia' he discusses poetic form and technique and makes observations on the nature of poetry, thereby providing insights into his own concerns as a writer. In 'The Golem,' a profoundly ambiguous treatment of the act of creation, a self-portrait emerges of a storyteller who has lost faith in the power and value of his story. The volume includes a critical introduction, that places the material in the context of Klein's other works, as well as textual and explanatory notes.

Pour Lire Au Bai (1884) est un recueil de po�����mes �����crit par l'auteur fran�����ais Catulle Mendes. Les po�����mes sont caract�����ris�����s par leur style lyrique et leur th�����me romantique. Le titre du livre est un jeu de mots sur ""pour lire au lit"", sugg�����rant que les po�����mes sont destin�����s ������ ������tre lus dans un endroit confortable et intime. Les po�����mes se concentrent sur des th�����mes tels que l'amour, la beaut�����, la nature et la mort. Les po�����mes sont �����crits en vers libres et en prose po�����tique. Le livre a �����t����� bien accueilli par la critique de l'�����poque et est consid�����r����� comme l'un des meilleurs travaux de Mendes.This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the old original and may contain some imperfections such as library marks and notations. 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 their original work.