Beneath the unassuming surface of a progressive women's college lurks a world of intellectual pride and pomposity awaiting devastation by the pens of two brilliant and appalling wits. Randall Jarrell's classic novel was originally published to overwh...

Nikolai Bukharin (1888-1938), an original Bolshevik leader and a founder of the Soviet state, spent the last year of his life imprisoned by Stalin, awaiting a trial and eventual execution. Remarkably during that time, from March 1937 to March 1938, B...

Even after half a century of amazing readers, John Ashbery continues to delight and challenge with his inventiveness. "Planisphere" takes the reader on a dizzying journey in the company of a virtuoso and sorcerer who makes the commonplace magical, di...

Polder begins with extinction. The dust that existed from the first instant of creation is the dust to which in the end all creation will return, "sinking under its weight". The prose-poem "Dust' was written when the poet was being treated for alcoho...

Ford Madox Ford spent his last years in the south of France, near Toulon. In "Provence" (1935), written four years before his death, he explores both the place and the idea of it: "not a country nor the home of a race, but a frame of mind". Suffused...

"Painting Rain" explores an Ireland where uncontrolled development is tearing apart a sustaining ecology. Paula Meehan sifts through the lore and memory available to her: her own journey through life, the small victories and large defeats that shape...

"Prose Occasions" gathers over half a century's critical writing by the poet Thomas Kinsella. It makes available for the first time in a single volume key works including "The Divided Mind", his influential discussion of Anglo-Irish poetry, writings...

James Sutherland-Smith has lived and worked in Serbia and Montenegro through the difficult transitions. Old states fragmented and a new Balkan political landscape emerged. He writes, not as an observer, but from within cultures rebuilding after polit...

Not for sale in the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic! Novelist Bohumil Hrabal (1914-1997) was born in Brno, Czechoslovakia and spent decades working at a variety of laboring jobs before turning to writing in his late forties. From that point,...

Baroque in its extravagance of language, in its delight in the bizarre and the prodigious, Peter Davidson's collection is a cabinet of curiosities, a world of ruined palaces, ghostly gardens and the fragile marvels of a secret past. It moves between...