METAMORPHOSIS by FRANZ KAFKA is one of the most haunting and iconic novellas of the twentieth century. First published in 1915, this unsettling story follows Gregor Samsa, a traveling salesman who awakens one morning to discover he has inexplicably transformed into a giant insect. As his body mutates, so does his relationship with his family and the world around him—exposing themes of isolation, guilt, and existential dread. This literary classic has captivated generations of readers and continues to influence writers and artists across the globe. With its surreal premise and razor-sharp social commentary, Metamorphosis has inspired great minds like George Orwell, Albert Camus, Jorge Luis Borges, and Ray Bradbury. THIS DEFINITIVE EDITION FEATURES: A CLEAN, MODERN LAYOUT designed for readability A BOLD TYPOGRAPHIC COVER that reflects the story’s psychological tension THE UNABRIDGED AND UNALTERED TEXT of Kafka’s original masterpiece Perfect for fans of dystopian fiction, psychological horror, and philosophical literature, Metamorphosis remains as relevant and disturbing today as it was over a century ago. Rediscover one of the most important works of modern fiction—and enter the surreal world of FRANZ KAFKA, where transformation reveals the deepest corners of the human soul.

The hilarious and controversial host of HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher has written his funniest, most opinionated, and most necessary book ever—a brilliantly astute and acerbically funny vivisection of American life, politics, and culture. Some of the smartest commentary about what’s happening in America is coming from a comedian—this comedian being Bill Maher. If you want to understand what’s wrong with this country, it turns out that one of the best informed and most thought-provoking analysts is this very funny pothead. The book was inspired by the “editorial” Bill delivers at the end of each episode of Real Time. These editorials are direct-to-camera sermons about culture, politics, and what’s happening in the world. To put this book together, Maher reviewed more than a decade of his editorials, rewriting, reimagining, and updating them, and adding new material to speak exactly to the moment we’re in. Free speech, cops, drugs, race, religion, the generations, cancel culture, the parties, the media, show biz, romance, health—Maher covers it all. The result is a hugely entertaining work of commentary about American culture in the tradition of Mark Twain, Will Rogers, and H. L. Mencken.

Yehuda Amichai (1924-2000) was Israel's most popular poet, as well as a literary figure of international reputation. In this collection, renowned translators Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell have selected Amichai's most beloved poems, including forty poems from his later work. A new foreword by C.K. Williams, written especially for this edition, addresses Amichai’s enduring legacy and sets his poetry in the context of the new millennium.

Written as a cultural weapon and a call to arms, Howl touched a raw nerve in Cold War America and has been controversial from the day it was first read aloud nearly fifty years ago. This first full critical and historical study of Howl brilliantly elucidates the nexus of politics and literature in which it was written and gives striking new portraits of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs. Drawing from newly released psychiatric reports on Ginsberg, from interviews with his psychiatrist, Dr. Philip Hicks, and from the poet's journals, American Scream shows how Howl brought Ginsberg and the world out of the closet of a repressive society. It also gives the first full accounting of the literary figures―Eliot, Rimbaud, and Whitman―who influenced Howl, definitively placing it in the tradition of twentieth-century American poetry for the first time. As he follows the genesis and the evolution of Howl, Jonah Raskin constructs a vivid picture of a poet and an era. He illuminates the development of Beat poetry in New York and San Francisco in the 1950s--focusing on historic occasions such as the first reading of Howl at Six Gallery in San Francisco in 1955 and the obscenity trial over the poem's publication. He looks closely at Ginsberg's life, including his relationships with his parents, friends, and mentors, while he was writing the poem and uses this material to illuminate the themes of madness, nakedness, and secrecy that pervade Howl. A captivating look at the cultural climate of the Cold War and at a great American poet, American Scream finally tells the full story of Howl―a rousing manifesto for a generation and a classic of twentieth-century literature.

Blending memories and family myths, Mary McCarthy takes us back to the twenties, when she was orphaned in a world of relations as colourful, potent and mysterious as the Catholic religion. There were her grandmothers: one was a blood-curdling Catholic who combined piousness and pugnacity; the other was Jewish and wore a veil to hide the disastrous effects of a face-lift. There was wicked Uncle Myers who beat her for the good of her soul and Aunt Margaret who laced her orange juice with castor oil and taped her lips at night to prevent unhealthy 'mouth-breathing'. 'Many a time in the course of doing these memoirs,' Mary McCarthy says, 'I have wished that I were writing fiction.' But these were the people, along with the ladies of the Sacred Heart convent school, who helped to inspire her devastating sense of the sublime and ridiculous and her witty, novelist's imagination.

Liliom is a play written by Hungarian author Ferenc Molnar. The story follows the life of a charismatic and impulsive carnival barker named Liliom, who falls in love with a young woman named Julie. Despite their differences in social status, the two begin a tumultuous relationship that eventually leads to tragedy. Liliom's reckless behavior and criminal activities catch up with him, and he is given the opportunity to redeem himself through a series of supernatural events. The play explores themes of love, redemption, and the consequences of one's actions. Molnar's writing is known for its poetic language and vivid characterizations, making Liliom a timeless classic in the world of theater.THIS 68 PAGE ARTICLE WAS EXTRACTED FROM THE BOOK: The Theatre Guild Anthology V1, by Ferenc Molnar. To purchase the entire book, please order ISBN 1419156225.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.

Choosing his own best work from his eight previous books of poetry, beginning with "Pictures of the Gone World", Ferlinghetti also includes a long poem, "Endless Life", from a work in progress.

Admirers and detractors of Vladimir Nabokov have viewed him as an ingenious contriver of literary games, teasing and even outsmarting his readers through his self-reflexive artifice and the many codes and puzzles he devises in his fiction. Nabokov himself spoke a number of times about reality as a term that always has to be put in scare quotes. Consequently, many critics and readers have thought of him as a writer uninterested in the world outside literature. Robert Alter shows how Nabokov was passionately concerned with the real world and its complexities, from love and loss to exile, freedom, and the impact of contemporary politics on our lives. In these essays, Alter spans the breadth of Nabokov's writings, from his memoir, lectures, and short stories to major novels such as Lolita. He demonstrates how the self-reflexivity of Nabokov's fiction becomes a vehicle for expressing very real concerns. What emerges is a portrait of a brilliant stylist who is at once serious and playful, who cared deeply about human relationships and the burden of loss, and who was acutely sensitive to the ways political ideologies can distort human values.

Product Description WCW, I Wanted to Write a Poem. Williams discusses the procedure of poetry. From the Back Cover 'I Wanted to Write a Poem' is, then, a brief 'talking' bibliography, alive with the Williamses' memories of the circumstances in which the books were brought into being-in Miss Heal's words, 'a nostalgic review of the early twentieth-century literary world.'

In this unforgettable collection, Malouf once again reaffirms himself as one of Australia's most celebrated and beloved poets. Demonstrating an intimate sense of place and language and evoking both the charm and power of the natural world, Earth Hour comes to rest at the perfect, still moment of 'silence, following talk'. Interweaving light and dark, levity and gravity, this timeless collection offers a vision of life on 'this patch/of earth and its green things', charting imagination and mortality, and the resilience of beauty amidst stubborn human grace.

Book by Keene, Donald

Dorothy Parker ( 1893 to 1967) was an American poet and satirist, best known for her wit, wisecracks, and eye for 20th century urban foibles. From a conflicted and unhappy childhood, Parker rose to acclaim, both for her literary output in such venues as The New Yorker and as a founding member of the Algonquin Round Table. Following the breakup of the circle, Parker traveled to Hollywood to pursue screenwriting. Her successes there, including two Academy Award nominations, were curtailed as her involvement in left wing politics led to a place on the infamous Hollywood blacklist. Parker went through three marriages (two to the same man) and survived several suicide attempts, but grew increasingly dependent on alcohol. Dismissive of her own talents, she deplored her reputation as a "wisecracker". Nevertheless, her literary output and reputation for her sharp wit have endured. She sold her first poem to Vanity Fair magazine in 1914 and, some months later, she was hired as an editorial assistant for another Condé Nast magazine, Vogue. She moved to Vanity Fair as a staff writer following two years at Vogue. In 1917, married a Wall Street stock broker, Edwin Pond Parker II but they were separated by his army service in World War I. She had ambivalent feelings about her Jewish heritage given the strong antisemitism of that era and joked that she married to escape her name. In the 1920s alone she published some 300 poems and free verses in outlets including the aforementioned Vanity Fair, Vogue, "The Conning Tower" and The New Yorker along with Life, McCall's and The New Republic. She published her first volume of poetry, Enough Rope, a collection of previously published work along with new material in 1926. The collection sold 47,000 copies]and garnered impressive reviews. The Nation described her verse as "caked with a salty humor, rough with splinters of disillusion, and tarred with a bright black authenticity."

Symposium of the Whole traces a discourse on poetry and culture that has profoundly influenced the art of our time, with precedents going back two centuries and more. Beginning with a reassertion of the complexity of poetry among peoples long labeled “primitive” and “savage,” many recent poets have sought to base a new poetics over the fullest range of human cultures. The attempt to define an ethnopoetics has been significantly connected with the most experimental and future-directed side of Romantic and modern poetry, both in the Western world and, increasingly, outside it. As a visionary poetics and as a politics, this complex redefinition of cultural and intellectual values has involved a rarely acknowledged collaboration between poets and scholars, who together have challenged the narrow view of literature that has excluded so many traditions. In this gathering, the Rothenbergs follow the idea of an ethnopoetics from predecessors such as Vico, Blake, Thoreau, and Tzara to more recent essays and manifestos by poets and social thinkers such as Olson, Eliade, Snyder, Turner, and Baraka. The themes range widely, from the divergence of oral and written cultures to the shaman as proto-poet and the reemergence of suppressed and rejected forms and images: the goddess, the trickster, and the “human universe.” The book’s three ethnographic sections demonstrate how various poetries are structured and composed, how they reflect meaning and worldview, and how they are performed in cultures where all art may be thought of as art-in-motion. Among the poetries discussed are the language of magic; West African drum language and poetry; the Huichol Indian language of reversals; chance operations in African divination poetry; picture-writings and action-writings from Australia and Africa; and American Indian sacred-clown dramas and traditional trickster narratives. The cumulative effect is a new reading of the poetic past and present—in the editors’ words, “a changed paradigm of what poetry was or now could come to be.”

One of the five Confucian classics, The Book of Songs (Shijing) is the oldest collection of poetry in world literature and the finest treasure of traditional songs left from antiquity. Where the other Confucian classics treat outward things: deeds, moral precepts, the way the world works,” as Stephen Owen tells us in his foreword, The Book of Songs is the classic of the human heart and the human mind.”

The Wrong Door is the first English-language translation of the complete plays of Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg (1916-1991). Bringing together the eleven plays Ginzburg wrote between 1965 and the months before her death, this volume directs attention to Ginzburg's unique talent as a dramatist. Ginzburg's plays, like her novels and short stories, are incisive, finely tuned studies of family drama, of the breakdown of relations between the sexes, and of the tribulations of Italian domestic life. The plays showcase Ginzburg's fearless social commentary, her stark and darkly comic observations of Italian life, and her prescient analyses of the socio-economic changes that have transformed modern Italy. Along the way, Ginzburg creates memorable female characters in a series of fascinating roles. In this fluent and faithful translation, Wendell Ricketts highlights Ginzburg's scalpel-sharp dialogue and lays bare the existential absurdities that lie at the heart of her plays. Including an introduction by the translator and two essays by Ginzburg on her approach to the theatre, The Wrong Door adds a new dimension to the literary portrait of one of Italy's most significant modernist writers.

Natalia Ginzburg, arguably the most important woman writer of postwar Italy, always spoke of herself with irrepressible modesty. Yet the woman who claimed she "never managed to climb up mountains" in fact wrote the history of twentieth-century Italy with her sparse and captivating prose, chronicling Fascism, war, and the Nazi occupation as well as the intimacies of family life. Ginzburg's marriage to Leone Ginzburg, who met his death at the hands of the Nazis for his anti-Fascists activities, and her work for the Einaudi publishing house placed her squarely in the center of Italian political and cultural life. But whether writing about the Turin of her childhood, the Abruzzi countryside, where her family was interned during World War II, or contemporary Rome, Ginzburg never shied away from the traumas of history-even if she approached them only indirectly, through the mundane details and catastrophes of personal life. Intensely reserved, Ginzburg said that she "crept toward autobiography stealthily like a wolf." But she did openly discuss her life and her work in an extraordinary series of interviews for Italian radio in 1990. Never before published in English, It's Hard to Talk about Yourself presents a vivid portrait of Ginzburg in her own words on the forces that shaped her remarkable life-politics, publishing, literature, and family. This fluid translation will join Ginzburg's autobiography, Family Sayings , as one of the most important records of her life and, as the editors write in their preface, "the last, unexpected, original book by Natalia Ginzburg."

Leonid Andreyev's "Anathema: A Tragedy in Seven Scenes" explores profound questions of faith, existence, and the nature of good and evil. This landmark work of Russian literature delves into the realm of existentialism through a dramatic and philosophical lens. Andreyev, known for his intense and thought-provoking writing, crafts a compelling narrative that challenges conventional notions of morality and the divine. As a pivotal work in European drama, "Anathema" remains a powerful and relevant exploration of the human condition. This carefully prepared print edition allows readers to experience Andreyev's enduring vision. This tragedy invites reflection on timeless themes and continues to resonate with those interested in Russian literary collections and the philosophical currents of existentialism. 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.

"Since 1997, author and scholar Maxim D. Shrayer has been offering seminars on Vladimir Nabokov, the great Russian American immigrant writer, at Boston College. This volume features essays by undergraduate and graduate students, which originated in the Nabokov seminar, as well as scholarship by Boston College faculty who work on Nabokov. The essays cover a broad thematic and intellectual terrain and showcase cutting-edge Nabokov scholarship and criticism. The topics include but are not limited to: translingualism, sexuality, Cold War politics, food studies, Nabokov and the visual arts, religion and metaphysics, urban studies, immigration studies, and modernist poetics. The collection will be of great interest to students and scholars, as well as to the broad audience of Nabokovians"--

The New Trial is Peter Weiss’s final drama, completed only months before his death in 1982 and never before published in English.One of Europe’s most important twentieth century playwrights—often considered as influential as Brecht and Beckett—Weiss is best known to American audiences as the author of the Broadway play Marat/Sade and the three-volume novel The Aesthetics of Resistance, which has elicited comparison with Joyce’s Ulysses and Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Initially influenced by Franz Kafka and later by the American Henry Miller, Weiss worked to expose the hypocrisy, the deception, and the nature of aggression in the contemporary world. A transformative “updating” of Kafka’s novel The Trial, The New Trial presents a surreal, hallucinatory look at the life of “Josef K.,” chief attorney in an enormous multinational firm that exploits both his idealism and his self-doubt in order to present to the world a public face that will mask its own dark and fascistic intentions. Fusing Marxist and capitalist perspectives in a manner that anticipates aspects of the current global market expansion, Weiss evokes a world in which nothing is private and everything is for sale. This edition of The New Trial is designed to facilitate theatrical teaching and stage production of the play. An extensive introduction by James Rolleston and Kai Evers situates the work in the full context of Weiss’s life, including his Swedish exile during the regime of the Third Reich. In addition, the play’s text is followed by interviews with Weiss and his original codirector (and wife) Gunilla Palmstierna-Weiss, as well as an account of the challenges of the first English staging by director Jody McAuliffe.

Poetry. ELEGY FOR BOB KAUFMAN is poetry of elegance and feeling, a beautiful tribute to a "gone world." It speaks to the author's youthful memories of a great poet, Bob Kaufman--an enormously complex and difficult man. Cherkovski brings to life San Francisco's bohemian community in the late fifties and early sixties. "Neeli Cherkovski has written a magnificent tribute to the memory of Bob Kaufman. Neeli and Bob were close friends and true colleagues in the art of poetry. This gathering of poems is an expression of an era in San Francisco's North Beach literary community. I recommend it to all readers"--Eileen Kaufman.