"To Hell with Paradise" is a wonderfully various and mature collection by a scrupulous and accomplished writer. It distills Gareth Reeves' collections "Real Stories" (1984) and Listening In (1993), adding previously unpublished poems and sequences, i...

Lope de Vega "single-handedly created the Spanish national theatre", writes Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria in the introduction to this new translation of "Fuenteovejuna". Often compared to Shakespeare, Moliere, and Racine, Lope is widely considered the...

A timeless story of love, morality, and tragedy, Fernando de Rojas's "Celestina" is a classic of Spanish literature. Second only to "Don Quixote" in its cultural importance, Rojas' dramatic dialogue presents the elaborate tale of a star-crossed court...

By turns funny and abstruse, "The Shimmering Beast" is the newest book by accomplished video artist Steve Reinke, which brings together his best pieces of prose. Hybrids of criticism, fiction, and personal essays, each chapter takes on another's work...

A musician, musicologist, and self-defined "poet of research", Amelia Rosselli (1930-1996) was one of the most important poets to emerge from Europe in the aftermath of World War II. Following a childhood and adolescence spent in exile from Fascist I...

Known for her far-reaching examinations of psychoanalysis, literature, and politics, Jacqueline Rose has in recent years turned her attention to the Israel-Palestine conflict, one of the most enduring and apparently intractable conflicts of our time....

The meteoric and turbulent career of Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) was crammed into four teenage years, in which he wrote two masterpieces, "The Illuminations" and "A Season in Hell", and some wonderful short poems. At nineteen he then turned his back o...

For critics like John Ruskin and Walter Pater, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1892) was one of the great creative figures of the day, a painter and a poet of major stature. Yeats and the young Pound regarded him as an exemplary figure of solitary dedic...

Conservative thinkers of the early Middle Ages conceived of sensual gratification as a demonic snare contrived to debase the higher faculties of humanity, and they identified pagan writing as one of the primary conduits of decadence. Two aspects of t...

Tadeusz Rozewicz is Poland's most popular and influential poet. Born in 1921, he belongs to the generation of writers whose work was indelibly marked by Poland's traumatic and tragic war-time experience. "What I produced is poetry for the horror-stri...