In the mid-twentieth century, a new generation of poets writing in Irish emerged, led by the young Sean O. Riordain, among others. O. Riordain's work has stood the test of time well, and he continues to engage today's Irish readers and writers. This...

French literature underwent radical changes in the sixteenth century. Edwin (Ned) M. Duval's scholarship focuses on teasing out hidden structures and symmetries in French Renaissance poetry and prose. In honor of Duval's literary "sleuthing", the con...

Spain's greatest living poet, Pere Gimferrer (b.1945) has written more than thirty books spanning verse, fiction, essay, and criticism. Though his earliest writings appeared in Spanish, in 1970 he began publishing in Catalan, and has alternated betwe...

In "Discipline", her third collection, Jane Yeh depicts a haunting and hilarious variety of lives, from an endangered young rhinoceros to the denizens of the 1980s New York club scene. These multifaceted poems explore what identity isn't and is, as p...

Literature has, from the start of the nineteenth century, cast the suburbs as dull, vulgar, and unimaginative margins where, by definition, nothing important takes place. Sarah Bilston argues that such attitudes were forged to undermine the cultural...

This generous new volume is a sequel to "Essays on Departure" (Carcanet, 2006) collecting a quarter century's work by one of the most elegant and pertinent poets working in English. She brings together material from eight books, including a generous...

Just as a traveler crossing a continent won't sense the curvature of the earth, one lifetime of reading can't grasp the largest patterns organizing literary history. This is the guiding premise behind "Distant Horizons", which uses the scope of data...

Not for sale in the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic! Much of what we now consider the canon of twentieth-century Czech literature – the work of authors like Bohumil Hrabal, Ludvik Vaculik, and Jachym Topol, among many others – has, in fact,...

Victor Hugo spent years in political exile off the coast of Normandy. While there, he produced his masterpiece, "Les Miserables" – but that wasn't all: he also wrote a book-length poem, "La Fin de Satan", left unfinished and not published until after...

Imagine trying to tell someone something about yourself and your desires for which there are no words. What if the mere attempt at expression was bound to misfire, to efface the truth of that ineluctable something? In "Someone", Michael Lucey conside...