The title of "Silver and Information" comes from a photographer's statement, "My work is becoming more and more and more silver and less and less information". This book swings between the poles of aboriginal working-class Philadelphia, where a fathe...

A controversial figure of the postwar French literary and cultural scene, Marguerite Duras has exerted a powerful hold on readers around the world. This volume of interviews – hailed on its French publication as Duras's "secret confession" – offers r...

August 6, 1943. Chaim Soutine, a Jewish painter from Belorussia and a contemporary of Chagall, Modigliani, and Picasso, is hidden in a hearse that's traveling from a small town on the Loire towards Nazi-occupied Paris. Suffering from a stomach ulcer,...

Comparing him to T. S. Eliot, Stephanie Burt writes that Ashbery is "the last figure whom half of the English-language poets alive thought a great model, and the other half thought incomprehensible". After the publication of "Some Trees", selecting j...

Not for sale in the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic! Written by a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, "The Shop on Main Street" is the story that inspired the highly successful Academy Award-winning Czechoslovak film of the same title. Looking...

These are the people we are. Saint Friend, carry me when I am tired and carry yourself. Let's keep singing the songs we don't live by let's meet tomorrow. "Saint Friend" is a book of empathy. Its ten lyric poems are troubled with the prospect of sat...

Carol Rumens has been contributing "Poem of the Week" to the Guardian for more than a dozen years. Do the maths: that's more than 624 blogs! No wonder she has a large and devoted following. She's a poet reader, not an academic. She is in love with th...

This beautiful collection brings together passages from the renowned stories, poems, dramas, and myths of South Asian literature, including the Mahabharata and the Ramaya?a. Drawing on the translations published by the Clay Sanskrit Library, the pass...

The poet – a man of the world in the widest sense – reflects and in reflection relives the intense experiences that shaped him and that have shaped our modern world. Salvage at Twilight ends with "Deposition", a harrowing elegy in five parts: the bel...