"Yelchin delivers a darkly humorous slice-of-life account of growing up in the Soviet Union. . . . Humorous, heartbreaking, and ultimately hopeful." -- Kirkus Reviews (starred review) Drama, family secrets, and a KGB spy in his own kitchen! How will Yevgeny ever fulfill his parents' dream that he become a national hero when he doesn't even have his own room? He's not a star athlete or a legendary ballet dancer. In the tiny apartment he shares with his Baryshnikov-obsessed mother, poetry-loving father, continually outraged grandmother, and safely talented brother, all Yevgeny has is his little pencil, the underside of a massive table, and the doodles that could change everything. With equal amounts charm and solemnity, award-winning author and artist Eugene Yelchin recounts in hilarious detail his childhood in Cold War Russia as a young boy desperate to understand his place in his family.

Voted Britain's favourite poem in 1996, 'Warning', written in 1961, is known and loved the world over. Its declaration of defiance, so vividly and cleverly expressed, appeals to the rebel in all of us as we secretly yearn to throw off the shackles of propriety and enjoy the gleeful freedom of cocking a snook at the rest of the world. In the poem's respectable middle-aged woman, as she indulges in her fantasy of the gabby old crone with her outrageous clothes and dotty behaviour, Jenny Joseph has created a character whose thoughts have been quoted at conferences and funerals, used to cheer up sick friends, remembered with pleasure by children and adults alike. Found in schoolbooks from Alaska to Singapore, the poem has been stitched, stamped, quilted, set to music, printed on cards, written on cakes and made into films. Now, for the first time, 'Warning' appears as an illustrated book with drawings by Pythia Ashton-Jewell specially designed to suit its unique character.

"Forgive my bluntness, but... Goddamn, Sam Sax can write some poems. Devastating, comic, inventive, weird, dangerous, smart as hell. I could talk about the diction sometimes glass and sometimes bouquet. Or the syntax jagged here, balletic there. Or the metaphors, good lord. But the bottom line is that when reading the poems in A GUIDE TO UNDRESSING YOUR MONSTERS, one after the next, I kept saying to myself, probably twisting my face a little bit or squirming in my seat, 'Goddamn, Sam Sax can write some poems.'"-Ross Gay

Who better than her mother to offer advice and comfort? In seventeen pairs of sensitive verse, poets Jane Yolen and Heidi E. Y. Stemple--real-life mother and daughter--exchange their thoughts on a variety of adolescent issues great and small.

"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.

English poet and critic Alvarez begins this autobiography with his recollections of his childhood as the sickly son of deeply unhappy parents. Alvarez courted danger as a way of overcoming his infirmities and found in the deadly ballet of the Battle of Britain - Messerschmitts and Spifires dancing and dueling across the London sky - an image of beauty and risk that would never leave him. And, yet, poetry and the literary life were his first loves as an adult, and he describes the excitement of his early successes at Oxford and as poetry critic at the Observer.

In The Clinic, Memory , Elaine Feinstein has selected poems from the last half century of her writing life. They range widely: tender, early lyrics from 'In a Green Eye'; elegies for her father and close friends, amused reflections on ageing and longer poems such as 'Gold', based on the life of Lorenzo da Ponte, Mozart's librettist, or the lot of refugees in 'Migration'. Other poems explore the conflicts in a long marriage, teased out most poignantly in poems for her late husband in 'Talking to the Dead'.

A unique mix of prose and poetry, of the joy of life and the agony of loss, Tadeusz Rozewicz creates a rich and complex portrait of his mother Stefania and of her indelible influence on her extraordinary family."