Jean-Luc Persecuted follows the ill-fated life of an unhappily married man. When Jean-Luc’s wife pursues an affair and leaves him with their child, Jean-Luc’s behavior becomes more and more erratic. He falls to drinking, behaving recklessly, and squandering his money. The narrative follows the explosive downfall of a lone man and his unstoppable mental collapse, surrounded by villagers unable to effect real change. This novel, never before translated, exemplifies the earthy, realistic, oft...

Into the Sun—a radically strange and frighteningly prescient climate-disaster novel written a century ago by C. F. Ramuz, the great and eccentric Swiss-French novelist—is a book to boil youIt’s been a hot summer for a Swiss lakeside town—both bucolic and citylike, old-fashioned and up-to-date—when a "great message," telegraphed from one continent to another, announces an "accident in the gravitational system." Something has gone wrong with the axis of the Earth tha...

Widely regarded as the "rock star" of American poetry, Mary Oliver is a writer whose words have long had the power to move countless readers. Regularly topping the national poetry best-seller list and drawing thousands to her sold-out readings across the coutnry, Oliver is unparalleled in her impact. As noted in the Los Angeles Times, so many "go to her for solace, regeneration and inspiration" that it is not surprising Vice President Joe Biden chose to read one of her poems durin...

Continuing the subversive self-revelation begun in Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn, Henry Miller takes readers along a mad, free-associating journey from the damp grime of his Brooklyn youth to the sun-splashed cafes and squalid flats of Paris. With incomparable glee, Miller shifts effortlessly from Virgil to venereal disease, from Rabelais to Roquefort. In this seductive technicolor swirl of Paris and New York, he captures like no one else the blending of people and the cities th...

**Finalist for the 2016 National Book AwardFinalist for the 2017 NAACP Image AwardThree decades of powerful lyric poetry from a virtuoso of the English language in one unabridged volume.**Rita Dove’s Collected Poems 1974–2004 showcases the wide-ranging diversity that earned her a Pulitzer Prize, the position of U.S. poet laureate, a National Humanities Medal, and a National Medal of Art. Gathering thirty years and seven books, this volume compiles Dove’s fre...

“These molten poems radiate with the ferocity of desire, and in them Erdrich does not spin verse so much as tell tales—of betrayal and revenge, of hunting and being hunted.” —Minneapolis Star TribuneA passionate book of poetry from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Louise Erdrich.In this important collection, Erdrich has selected the best poems from her two previous books of poetry, Jacklight and Baptism of Desire, an...

The essential collection by the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winner who was " one of the true master poets of his generation" ( The New York Times).In the words of Galway Kinnell, it is "the poet's job to figure out what's happening within oneself, to figure out the connection between the self and the world, and to get it down in words that have a lasting shape, that have a chance of lasting." With this deeply probing and restles...

Selected Poems 2 is an essential collection from the critically acclaimed, bestselling author Margaret Atwood, tracing her work from 1976-1986.Celebrated as a major novelist throughout the English-speaking world, Margaret Atwood is also one of our most significant contemporary poets.Selected Poems 2 presents her work in the decade following 1976—important years of change and new themes in her poetry. It includes selections from Two-Headed Poem...

A career-spanning collection of poetry from the Russian American author and winner of the 1987 Nobel Prize for Literature.Joseph Brodsky spent his life advocating for the place of the poet in society. As Derek Walcott said of him, "Joseph was somebody who lived poetry . . . He saw being a poet as being a sacred calling." The poems in this volume span Brodsky's career, which was marked by his expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1972. Together, they represent the proje...

Winner of the Nobel Prize in LiteratureThe First Four Books of Poems collects the early work that established Louise Gluck as one of America's most original and important poets.Honored with the Pulitzer Prize for The Wild Iris, Gluck was celebrated early in her career for her fierce, austerely beautiful voice. In Firstborn, The House on Marshland, Descending Figure, and The Triumph of Achilles, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, we see the consciou...

Seemingly the simplest of stories—a passing anecdote of village life— Rock Crystal opens up into a tale of almost unendurable suspense. This jewel-like novella by the writer that Thomas Mann praised as "one of the most extraordinary, the most enigmatic, the most secretly daring and the most strangely gripping narrators in world literature" is among the most unusual, moving, and memorable of Christmas stories. Two children—Conrad and his little sister, Sanna—set out from their village high ...

Diane Ackerman's poems reveal her intense response to the several worlds of nature, science, and society. Her lyricism fuses wit and sobriety, meditation and activism, and she confronts us with figures both real and fantastic.As always, her strong connection with the natural world, the realms of language and literature, myth and imagination, combines with her deep understanding of the sciences to offer her readers a singular American voice. This is not a voice crying in the wildern...