Fifty years of writing on literature, film, and art by one of the most influential poets and critics of our time

Reprint of the original, first published in 1836.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1836.

In this new selection and translation, Peter Wortsman mines Franz Kafka's entire opus of short prose--including works published in the author's brief lifetime, posthumously published stories, journals, and letters--for narratives that sound the imaginative depths of the great German-Jewish scribe from Prague. It is the first volume in English to consider his deeply strange, resonantly humane letters and journal entries alongside his classic short fiction and lyrical vignettes "Transformed" is a vivid retranslation of one of Kafka's signature stories, "Die Verwandlung," commonly rendered in English as "The Metamorphosis." Composed of short, black comic parables, fables, fairy tales, and reflections, Konundrums also includes classic stories like "In the Penal Colony," Kafka's prescient foreshadowing of the nightmare of the Twentieth Century, refreshing the writer's mythic storytelling powers for a new generation of readers. Contents: • Words are Miserable Miners of Meaning • Letter to Ernst Rowohlt • Reflections • Concerning Parables • Children on the Country Road • The Spinning Top • The Street-Side Window • At Night • Unhappiness • Clothes Make the Man • On the Inability to Write • From Somewhere in the Middle • I Can Also Laugh • The Need to Be Alone • So I Sat at My Stately Desk • A Writer's Quandary • Give it Up! • Eleven Sons • Paris Outing • The Bridge • The Trees • The Truth About Sancho Pansa • The Silence of the Sirens • Prometheus • Poseidon • The Municipal Coat of Arms • A Message from the Emperor • The Next Village Over • First Sorrow • The Hunger Artist • Josephine, Our Meistersinger, or the Music of Mice • Investigations of a Dog • A Report to an Academy • A Hybrid • Transformed • In the Penal Colony • From The Burrow • Selected Aphorisms • Selected Last Conversation Shreds • In the Caves of the Unconscious: K is for Kafka (An Afterword) • The Back of Words (A Post Script)

This selection brings together the best prose writings of the great early nineteenth-century essayist Charles Lamb, whose shrewd wit and convivial style have endeared him to generations of readers. These pieces include early discussions of Hogarth and Shakespeare; masterly essays written under the pen-name 'Elia' that range over such subjects as drunkenness, witches, dreams, marriage and the joy of roast pig; and letters to Lamb's circle of contemporaries, among them Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. Wryly amused by the world, allusive, searching and endlessly inventive, these are the essential works of a master of English prose. In his introduction Adam Phillips discusses how Charles Lamb's tragic life and sainted reputation, caring for his mentally ill sister Mary, belied the quality of his work. This edition also includes a biographical index of Lamb's correspondents. Charles Lamb (1775-1834) was an English essayist best known for his humorous Essays of Elia from which the essay 'A Dissertation Upon Roast Pig' is taken. Lamb enjoyed a rich social life and became part of a group of young writers that included William Hazlitt, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron and Samuel Taylor Coleridge with whom he shared a lifelong friendship. Lamb never achieved the same literary success as his friends but his influence on the English essay form cannot be underestimated and his book, Specimens of the English Dramatic Poets is remembered for popularising the work of Shakespeare's contemporaries.

The essential work of Mallarmé, collected in a bilingual French and English edition.

A selection of prose by “Portugal’s greatest writer of the twentieth century . . . as addictive, and endearing, as Borges and Calvino” (The Washington Post Book World). Building on the wonderful Fernando Pessoa & Co.: Selected Poems, which was acclaimed by Booklist as “a beautiful one-volume course in the soul of the twentieth century,” translator Richard Zenith has now edited and translated selections from Pessoa’s prose, offering a second volume of this forgotten master’s flights of imagination and melancholy wit. Though known primarily as a poet, Pessoa wrote prose in several languages and every genre—the novel, short stories, letters, and essays. The pieces collected here span intellectual inquiry, Platonic dialogue, and literary rivalries between Pessoa’s many alter egos—a diverse cast of literary voices he called ‘heteronyms’—who launch movements and write manifestos. There are appreciations of Shakespeare, Dickens, Wilde, and Joyce; critical essays in which one heteronym derides the work of another; experiments with automatic writing; and works that toy with the occult. Also included is a generous selection from Pessoa’s masterpiece, The Book of Disquiet, freshly translated by Richard Zenith from newly discovered materials. Fernando Pessoa was one of the greatest exponents of modernism. The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa is an important contribution to literature that brings back to life a forgotten but crucial part of the canon.

This is the first comprehensive critical edition of the unpublished writings of Pulitzer Prize-winning objectivist poet George Oppen (1908-1984). Editor Stephen Cope has made a judicious selection of Oppen's extant writings outside of poetry, including the essay "The Mind's Own Place" as well as "Twenty-Six Fragments," which were found on the wall of Oppen's study after his death. Most notable are Oppen's "Daybooks," composed in the decade following his return to poetry in 1958. Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers is an inspiring portrait of this essential writer and a testament to the creative process itself.

Hailed as one of the most important Eastern European writers of the post-Communist era, Pavel Vilikovsky actually began his career in 1965. But the political content of his writing and its straightforward treatment of such taboo topics as bisexuality kept him from publishing the works collected here until after the Velvet Revolution.

"Anna Akhmatova is known as one of twentieth-century Russia's greatest poets, a member of the quartet that included Mandelstam, Pasternak, and Tsvetaeva. This is the first paperback collection of her prose available in English." "The subjects of her memoirs are extraordinary: she describes Modigliani as she knew him in Paris, Blok near the end of his days, and Mandelstam as a close friend. The autobiographical prose section reveals the elusive poet's personality more clearly than any biography could, including her thoughts about how difficult it was to be a poet at a time when women writers were rarely taken seriously." --Book Jacket.