This fast-moving, tightly-wound, and gleefully dark novella contains an entire universe in miniatureConversation of the Three Wayfarers is a tale overheard, rather than told directly. Abel, Babel, and Cabel, the wayfarers, carry on a three-sided monologue, each reporting curious incidents—the effect is of three capers rolled into one: a steeplechase performed on a floating pontoon. But are they really three distinct individuals? Why do their lives blend in...

One of NPR's Best Books of 2016 and a Hugo, Nebula, John W. Campbell, and Locus Award finalist for Best NovellaProfessor Vellitt Boe teaches at the prestigious Ulthar Women’s College. When one of her most gifted students elopes with a dreamer from the waking world, Vellitt must retrieve her."Kij Johnson's haunting novella The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe is both a commentary on a classic H.P. Lovecraft tale and a profound reflection on a wom...

“[Hock] knows he is ensorcelled by exoticism, but he can’t help himself. And, as things go from bad to worse and the pages start to turn faster, neither can we. A.”—Entertainment WeeklyWhen he was a young man, Ellis Hock spent four of the best years of his life with the Peace Corps in Malawi. So when his wife of forty-two years leaves him, he decides to return to the village where he was stationed in search of the happiness he’d been missing since he left....

A Child's Christmas in Wales is a prose work by the Welsh writer Dylan Thomas. Originally emerging from a piece written for radio, the poem was recorded by Thomas in 1952. The story is an anecdotal retelling of a Christmas from the view of a young child and is a romanticised version of Christmases past, portraying a nostalgic and simpler time. It is one of Thomas' most popular works.

Auguries of Innocence is the first book of poetry from Patti Smith in more than a decade. It marks a major accomplishment from a poet and performer who has inscribed her vision of our world in powerful anthems, ballads, and lyrics. In this intimate and searing collection of poems, Smith joins in that great tradition of troubadours, journeymen, wordsmiths, and artists who respond to the world around them in fresh and original language. Her influences are eclectic and strik...

The Colossus and Other Poems is a collection of 44 poems written by American poet Sylvia Plath. Plath wrote confessional poetry that deals with personal subjects that are considered taboo like sexuality and depression. Sylvia Plath struggled with mental illness and eventually committed suicide.

In Good Bones, first published in 1992, Margaret Atwood has fashioned an enthralling collection of parable, monologue, mini-romance and mini-biography, speculative fiction, prose lyric, outrageous recipe and reconfigured fairy tale, demonstrating yet again the play of an unerring wit overseen by a panoramic intelligence. Good Bones is a cornucopia of good things—precise, witty, wise, and sometimes offbeat Atwood writing, with the funny and the sidelong view of the world w...

The best-loved poems from one of American literature's most towering figures No poet is more emblematically American than Robert Frost. From "The Road Not Taken" to "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," he refined and even defined our sense of what poetry is and what it can do.In this volume the folowing poems are selected;Out, Out.A Girl’s Garden.After Apple Picking.Birches.Dust of Snow.Fire and Ice.For Once, Then Something.

This acclaimed twenty-first–century Russian novel is "a Dantean descent" into the abandoned Soviet gulags, written "with a clear poetic sensibility" ( The Wall Street Journal).In Sergei Lebedev's debut novel, an unnamed young man travels to the vast wastelands of the Far North to uncover the truth about a mysterious neighbor who once saved his life, and whom he knows only as Grandfather II. What he finds among the forgotten mines and decrepit barracks of f...

John Ashbery writes like no one else among contemporary American poets. In the construction of his intricate patterns, he uses words much as the contemporary painter uses form and color- words painstakingly chosen as conveyors of precise meaning, not as representations of sound. These linked in unexpected juxtapositions, at first glance unrelated and even anarchic, in the end create by their clashing interplay a structure of dazzling brilliance and strong emotional impact. From this preocc...

An odyssey through the mind and memory of a washed-up writer, from one of Europe's most provocative novelists, Nobel Prize winner Peter HandkeMysteriously summoned to a houseboat on the Morava River, a few friends, associates, and collaborators of an old writer listen as he tells a story that will last until dawn: the tale of the once well-known writer's recent odyssey across Europe. As his story unfolds, it visits places that represent stages of the narrator's and...

The world he woke up in is long dead, dusted in ashen powder, and yet Keisuke still sees splashes of color as he travels through it. For the longest time, he’s wandered alone across the deserted landscape, clinging to the hope that something—or someone—might be out there in the emptiness. When he finally stumbles across that someone, even more threads of color start to seep into the ashen world around them.This time, when Keisuke sets off down the road, someone sits beside him in t...