You enter the world of this spellbinding book through one of its many dreamlike portals, and each time you enter it's the same place but it has been arranged differently. You were a woman. You were a man. This is a story of adventure, an encounter wi...

In this unparalleled study of the forms of Hebrew poetry, preeminent authority Benjamin Harshav examines Hebrew verse during three millennia of changing historical and cultural contexts. He takes us around the world of the Jewish Diaspora, comparing...

Lucy Tunstall's striking debut collection features a cast of characters ranging from Paul Muldoon and Marianne Moore to Aunt Jane, who fell in love "in 1956, or thereabouts", and Cousin Gillian, who keeps the family's long-case clock in her caravan (...

Muriel Spark always regarded the Brontes with a novelist's eye. As Boyd Tonkin argues in his lively introduction, written for the new edition, the Brontes inspired Spark at the very beginning of her own career, but not in a straightforward way. Throu...

Short story writers often say that, for maximum dramatic effect, you should arrive fashionably late to a scene. After years of living in the literary wilderness, it seems the short story's own moment has finally arrived. The last twelve months have m...

The poems in Eavan Boland's new collection consider questions of inheritance and identity, of what is handed down and what is lost. Boland's poems are acts of preservation: they are aware of the significance of objects, memories, words, in keeping al...

I am Iphigenia, daughter of the daughter of Tyndareus My father killed me Few contemporary poets elicit such powerful responses from readers and critics as Anne Carson.  "The New York Times Book Review" calls her work "personal, necessary, and impor...

Over the course of a fifty-year career, Donald E. Westlake published nearly one hundred books, including not one but two long-running series, starring the hard-hitting Parker and the hapless John Dortmunder. In the six years since his death, Westlake...

"King Lear" is perhaps the most fierce and moving play ever written. And yet there is a curious puzzle at its center. The figure to whom Shakespeare gives more lines than anyone except the king – Edgar – has often seemed little more than a blank, ign...

Rene Char (1907-1988) is considered the most important French poet of his generation. A member of the surrealists in the early 1930s, he became increasingly preoccupied by the rise of Nazi Germany and later played a key role in the French Resistance....