Young Jawad, born to a traditional Shi'ite family of corpse washers and shrouders in Baghdad, decides to abandon the family tradition, choosing instead to become a sculptor, to celebrate life rather than tend to death. He enters Baghdad's Academy of...

The companion volume to "Collected French Translations: Prose", this book reflects John Ashbery's lifelong engagement with French poetry. From 1955 Ashbery spent almost a decade in France, working as an art critic, and formed a close relationship wit...

John Ashbery is known as America's foremost poet, but his prose writing and his engagement with prose writers – through translations, essays and criticism – have had a profound impact on the cultural landscape of the past half-century. This book, the...

A plain, blank stationer's notebook from the 1780s in the Bodleian Library contains some of the most famous juvenilia in all of English literature. Copied out in Jane Austen's youthful hand, "Volume the First", which takes its name from the inscripti...

As legend has it, the storyteller Aesop was a slave who lived in ancient Greece during the sixth century B.C. His memorable, recountable fables have brought amusing characters to life and driven home thought-provoking morals for generations of listen...

The publication of "Portnoy's Complaint" in 1969 provoked instant, powerful reactions. It blasted Philip Roth into international fame, subjected him to unrelenting personal scrutiny and conjecture, and shocked legions of readers – some delighted, oth...

In "Quick Question" John Ashbery extends an invitation to readers to accompany him into the extraordinary worlds of the everyday, experienced through the box of tricks that is language. He revels in twist and transformation, the constant mutability o...

Born in Syria in 1930, Adonis is one of the most celebrated poets of the Arabic-speaking world. His poems have earned international acclaim, and his influence on Arabic literature has been likened to that of T. S. Eliot's on English-language verse. T...

A meditation on the nature of betrayal, the constraints of identity, and the power of narrative, the lyric monologues in "Troy, Unincorporated" offer a retelling, or refraction, of Chaucer's tragedy "Troilus and Criseyde". The tale's unrooted charact...

"Geographies of Philological Knowledge" examines the relationship between medievalism and colonialism in the nineteenth-century Hispanic American context through the striking case of the Creole Andres Bello (1781-1865), a Venezuelan grammarian, edito...