"Bergeners" is a love letter to a writer's hometown. The book opens in New York City at the swanky Standard Hotel and closes in Berlin at Askanischer Hof, a hotel that has seen better days. But between these two global metropolises we find Bergen, No...

Since his first collection of poetry appeared in 1953, Philippe Jaccottet has sought to express the ineffable that lies at the heart of our material world in his essential, elemental poetry. As one of Switzerland's most prominent and prolific men of...

Beloved Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989) began his career in the early 1950s as a poet. Over the next decade, Bernhard wrote thousands of poems and published four volumes of intensely wrought and increasingly personal verse, with such titl...

"I wrote a poem this morning, and one of the themes of the poem is that languages are not equivalent, that each language is a new way of feeling the world" – Jorge Luis Borges Recorded during Borges' final years, this third volume of his conversatio...

Our taste buds are a powerful way for humans to know beauty and experience beautiful things. In Taste, Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben takes a close look at why the sense of taste has not historically been appreciated as a means to know and exper...

The international community of letters mourned the recent death of Yves Bonnefoy, universally acclaimed as one of France's greatest poets of the last half century. A prolific author, he was often considered a candidate for the Nobel Prize and publish...

We are surrounded by images, fairly drowning in them. From our cell phones to our computers, from our televisions at home to the screens that light up while we wait in the grocery store checkout line, images of all kinds are seducing us, commanding u...

Chandrasekhar Kambar is one of the most accomplished Indian writers working today. In each of Kambar's novels, the archetypical Mother, Karimayi, is at the center. The narrative of "Karimayi" moves through an astounding time span, beginning with the...

Aesop's ancient Greek fables, short tales with simple morals, often featuring talking animals, are deeply embedded in Western culture. This 1916 translation by V. S. Vernon Jones was furnished with beautiful illustrations by Arthur Rackham – reproduc...

First published in England by Griffith and Farran in 1871, this edition is not a translation at all but a complete re-write of the novel, with portions added and omitted, and names changed. A better translation is "A Journey into the Interior of the...