Fiction

A splendid new translation of an extraordinary work of modern literature--featuring facing-page commentary by Kafka's acclaimed biographer

In 1917 and 1918, Franz Kafka wrote a set of more than 100 aphorisms, known as the Zürau aphorisms, after the Bohemian village in which he composed them. Among the most mysterious of Kafka's writings, they explore philosophical questions about truth, good and evil, and the spiritual and sensory world. This is the first annotated, bilingual volume of these extraordinary writings, which provide great insight into Kafka's mind. Edited, introduced, and with commentaries by preeminent Kafka biographer and authority Reiner Stach, and freshly translated by Shelley Frisch, this beautiful volume presents each aphorism on its own page in English and the original German, with accessible and enlightening notes on facing pages.

The most complex of Kafka's writings, the aphorisms merge literary and analytical thinking and are radical in their ideas, original in their images and metaphors, and exceptionally condensed in their language. Offering up Kafka's characteristically unsettling charms, the aphorisms at times put readers in unfamiliar, even inhospitable territory, which can then turn luminous: "I have never been in this place before: breathing works differently, and a star shines next to the sun, more dazzlingly still."

Above all, this volume reveals that these multifaceted gems aren't far removed from Kafka's novels and stories but are instead situated squarely within his cosmos--arguably at its very core. Long neglected by Kafka readers and scholars, his aphorisms have finally been given their full due here.

The heroic deeds and words of a warrior poet of northern Arabia

An epic hero and a poet, the semi-legendary Shāyiʿ al-Amsaḥ was a prominent ancestor of the Shammar tribal confederation that stretches across the Great Nafūd desert in the northern Arabian Peninsula. Shāyiʿ's corpus of extant poems are preserved in narratives about his chivalrous exploits transmitted orally for centuries. In this volume, Marcel Kurpershoek vividly translates the deeds and verses of this compelling poet, based on recordings of late-twentieth century reciters, a testament to Shāyiʿ's prominence as an embodiment of Bedouin virtue, courage, wiliness, and generosity.

Born with one eye, Shāyiʿ presents himself as unattractive and unassuming, only to reveal a hero's strength, sagacity, and wiliness. In a number of stories, he is shown hiding his identity, whether in disguise as an impoverished Bedouin or on a camel deliberately made to look mangy and weak. In the oral culture of the Bedouin, the epic cycle of Shāyiʿ al-Amsaḥ delights and instructs listeners through its unmasking of false appearances and its revelation of the hero's true character.

Translated into English for the first time, these engaging tales and poems tell of dangerous desert travel, warlike exploits, chivalrous conduct and its opposite, feats of hospitality that defy belief, and convey nuggets of wisdom from the Bedouin manual of survival, making this collection a colorful compendium of the manners and customs of the tribes of northern Arabia.

A bilingual Arabic-English edition.

An intrepid voyage out to the frontiers of the latest thinking about love, language, and family

Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts is a genre-bending memoir, a work of "autotheory" offering fresh, fierce, and timely thinking about desire, identity, and the limitations and possibilities of love and language. It binds an account of Nelson's relationship with her partner and a journey to and through a pregnancy to a rigorous exploration of sexuality, gender, and "family." An insistence on radical individual freedom and the value of caretaking becomes the rallying cry for this thoughtful, unabashed, uncompromising book.

"Sylvia Plath's last poems have impressed themselves on many readers with the force of myth. They are among the handful of writings by which future generations will seek to know us and give us a name." -- The Critical Quarterly

Sylvia Plath's celebrated collection.

When Sylvia Plath died, she not only left behind a prolific oeuvre but also her unpublished literary masterpiece, Ariel. Ted Hughes helped bring the collection to life in 1966, and its publication garnered worldwide acclaim. This collection showcases the beloved poet's brilliant, provoking, and always moving poems, including "Ariel," "The Applicant," "Lady Lazarus," and "Edge", and once again shows why readers have fallen in love with her work over generations.

Armand is a diplomat rising through the ranks of the Norwegian foreign office, but he's caught between his public duty to support foreign wars in the Middle East and his private disdain for Western intervention. He hides behind knowing, ironic statements, which no one grasps and which change nothing. Armand's son joins the Norwegian SAS to fight in the Middle East, despite being specifically warned against such a move by his father, and this leads to catastrophic, heartbreaking consequences.

Told exclusively in footnotes to an unwritten book, this is Solstad's radically unconventional novel about how we experience the passing of time: how it fragments, drifts, quickens, and how single moments can define a life.

An elegant medieval guide to verse composition and rhetoric, presented in a new authoritative edition and English translation.

The Art of Making Verses, Ars versificatoria, was composed by the thirteenth-century English poet and teacher Gervase of Melkley, who studied under John de Hauville. He belongs to a select company of French and English scholastic poets including not only de Hauville but also Alan of Lille and Bernardus Silvestris. The educational treatise was probably begun around 1200 and completed in 1220.

Gervase departs from established critical texts on poetry by Matthew of Vendôme and Geoffrey of Vinsauf; instead, he seeks to teach the art of verse in an entirely new way. The method outlined in Ars versificatoria instructs elementary students how to compose in three progressively more difficult modes: literal but still artful language, metaphor, and irony or paradox.

This edition presents a new and improved Latin edition based on the manuscripts, a new translation into English, and thorough annotation of the most original of the medieval Latin treatises on poetry.

Readers and audiences have long greeted As You Like It with delight. Its characters are brilliant conversationalists, including the princesses Rosalind and Celia and their Fool, Touchstone. Soon after Rosalind and Orlando meet and fall in love, the princesses and Touchstone go into exile in the Forest of Arden, where they find new conversational partners. Duke Frederick, younger brother to Duke Senior, has overthrown his brother and forced him to live homeless in the forest with his courtiers, including the cynical Jaques. Orlando, whose older brother Oliver plotted his death, has fled there, too.

The authoritative edition of As You Like It from The Folger Shakespeare Library, the trusted and widely used Shakespeare series for students and general readers, includes:

-The exact text of the printed book for easy cross-reference
-Hundreds of hypertext links for instant navigation
-Freshly edited text based on the best early printed version of the play
-Full explanatory notes conveniently linked to the text of the play
-Scene-by-scene plot summaries
-A key to the play's famous lines and phrases
-An introduction to reading Shakespeare's language
-An essay by a leading Shakespeare scholar providing a modern perspective on the play
-Fresh images from the Folger Shakespeare Library's vast holdings of rare books
-An annotated guide to further reading
-An essay by a leading Shakespeare expert

Sarah Vowell exposes the glorious conundrums of American history and culture with wit, probity, and an irreverent sense of humor. With Assassination Vacation, she takes us on a road trip like no other--a journey to the pit stops of American political murder and through the myriad ways they have been used for fun and profit, for political and cultural advantage.

From Buffalo to Alaska, Washington to the Dry Tortugas, Vowell visits locations immortalized and influenced by the spilling of politically important blood, reporting as she goes with her trademark blend of wisecracking humor, remarkable honesty, and thought-provoking criticism. We learn about the jinx that was Robert Todd Lincoln (present at the assassinations of Presidents Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley) and witness the politicking that went into the making of the Lincoln Memorial. The resulting narrative is much more than an entertaining and informative travelogue--it is the disturbing and fascinating story of how American death has been manipulated by popular culture, including literature, architecture, sculpture, and--the author's favorite--historical tourism. Though the themes of loss and violence are explored and we make detours to see how the Republican Party became the Republican Party, there are all kinds of lighter diversions along the way into the lives of the three presidents and their assassins, including mummies, show tunes, mean-spirited totem poles, and a nineteenth-century biblical sex cult.

Long acknowledged as a master of nightmarish visions, H. P. Lovecraft established the genuineness and dignity of his own pioneering fiction in 1931 with his quintessential work of supernatural horror, At the Mountains of Madness. The deliberately told and increasingly chilling recollection of an Antarctic expedition's uncanny discoveries-and their encounter with untold menace in the ruins of a lost civilization-is a milestone of macabre literature.

This exclusive new edition, presents Lovecraft's masterpiece in fully restored form, and includes his acclaimed scholarly essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature." This is essential reading for every devotee of classic terror.

"A raw and compelling portrait of 411 BC Greece in which women must fight for justice and democracy" by the Strega Prize-winning Italian novelist (La Stampa).

Athens, 411 BC. As the Peloponnesian War draws to a close, a political coup begins to take shape in Athens. Veterans of the infamous battle of Mantinea, Thrasyllus, and Polemon now live as humble farmers in the countryside. They are determined to find influential husbands for their daughters, Glycera and Charis, but first they must defend Athens from the oligarchs plotting to reinstate tyrannical rule. Young and impatient, Glycera and Charis soon become infatuated with their neighbor's rich and arrogant son, Cimon. When their fathers travel to Athens to see Aristophanes's latest comedy, the girls use the chance to accept an invitation to Cimon's house . . . with no notion of what awaits them on their visit.
Alternating between the secret drama playing out in the countryside and the public one playing out onstage in Athens, Alessandro Barbero weaves "a compelling story of women's valiant struggles to maintain their dignity in a misogynistic society" (Historical Novel Society).

Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe's spellbinding debut poetry collection explores love and the wounds it makes. Its first half is composed of five sections, corresponding to the five arrows of Kama, the Hindu God of Love, Desire and Memory. Each arrow has its own effect on some body - a very real, contemporary body - and its particular journey of love. The second is a long narrative poem, 'A is for [Arabs]', which follows a different kind of journey: a family of refugees who have fled to the West from conflict in an unspecified Middle Eastern country. With an extraordinary structure, yoking abecedarian and Fibonacci sequences, it is a skillful and intimate account of migration and exile, of home and belonging.