Eric Chevillard’s visionary play of word and thought has been compared to the work of Beckett, Michaux, and Pinget, yet the universe he spins is utterly his own. Palafox (Editions de Minuit, 1990), Chevillard’s third novel of eleven, explores the ecosystem of an unclassifiable yet enchanting protean creature, Palafox. A team of experts armed with degrees of higher learning is determined to label, train, baptize, and realize the elusive creature, while Palafox effortlessly and wordlessly de...

The daring, mischievous micro-essays of award-winning French humorist Éric Chevillard, published in English for the first timeÉric Chevillard is one of France’s leading stylists and thinkers, an endlessly inventive observer of the everyday whose erudition and imagination honor the legacy of Swift and Voltaire—with some good-natured postmodern twists.This ensemble of comic miniatures compiles reflections on chairs, stairs, stones, goldfish, objects found, st...

The classic Grimms' fairy tale of the valiant little tailor, as you’ve never heard it beforeOnce upon a time, there lived a valiant little tailor who killed seven flies with one blow—but who is this narrator who has abruptly inserted himself into the story, claiming authorship? He’s indignant: the fairy tale, borne carelessly along by the popular imagination, subjected to the transformations of oral tradition, was collected in a lamentable state by the Bro...

The narrator of Prehistoric Times might easily be taken for an inhabitant of Beckett’s world: a dreamer who in his savage and deductive folly tries to modify reality. The writing, with its burlesque variations, accelerations, and ruptures, takes us into a frightening and jubilant delirium, where the message is in the medium and digression gets straight to the point. In an entirely original voice, Eric Chevillard asks looming and luminous questions about who we are, the paths we’ve...

In The Book of Marvels, award-winning poet Lorna Crozier offers a delightful series of prose meditations on household objects: everything from doorknobs, washing machines, rakes, and zippers to the kitchen sink. Operating as a kind of a literary detective, Crozier brings her rapt attention to the everyday things she explores, uncovering the mystery that lies at their essence. She offers tantalizing glimpses of the household's inhabitants, too, probing hearts, brains, noses, and na...

“No practicing poet has more talent than Robert Hass.”—Atlantic MonthlyThe National Book Award-winning author of Time and Materials, Robert Hass is one of the most revered of all living poets. With The Apple Trees at Olema, the former Poet Laureate and winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize offers twenty new and selected poems grounded in the beauty of the physical world. As with all of the collections of this great artist’s work, published far too infrequently, The Apple Trees ...

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE FOR LITERATUREA remarkable, graceful collection from one of Europe’s most prominent and celebrated poets.In these 100 poems, Wislawa Szymborska portrays a world of astonishing diversity and richness, in which nature is wise and prodigal and fate unpredictable, if not mischievous. With acute irony tempered by a generous curiosity, she documents life's improbability as well as its transient beauty."Wislawa Szymborska is not only one of the fi...

John Ashbery's wild, deliriously inventive book-length poem, inspired by the adventures of Henry Darger's Vivian GirlsHenry Darger, the prolific American outsider artist who died in 1973, leaving behind over twenty thousand pages of manuscripts and hundreds of artworks, is famous for the elaborate alternate universe he both constructed and inhabited, a "realm of the unreal" where a plucky band of young girls, the Vivians, helps lead an epic rebellion against dark fo...

A quintessentially American epic poem that rewrites all the rules of epic poetry—starting with the one that says epic poetry can't be about the writing of epic poetry itselfThe appearance of Flow Chart in 1991 marked the kickoff of a remarkably prolific period in John Ashbery's long career, a decade during which he published seven all-new books of poetry as well as a collected series of lectures on poetic form and practice. So it comes as no surprise that t...

In John Ashbery's haunting 1992 collection, just as in the traveler's experience of a hotel, we recognize everything, and yet nothing is familiar—not even ourselvesHotel Lautréamont invites readers to reimagine a book of poems as a collection of hotel rooms: each one empty until we enter it, and yet in truth abundantly furnished with associations, necessities, and echoes of both the known and the alien. The collection's title poem is itself an evocative ech...

Witty yet heartbreaking, conversational yet richly lyrical, John Ashbery's sixteenth poetry collection showcases a mastery uniquely his ownAnd the Stars Were Shining originally appeared in 1994, toward the midpoint of a startlingly creative period in Ashbery's long career, during which the great American poet published no fewer than nine books in ten years. The collection brings together more than fifty compact, jewellike, intensely felt poems, including th...

A 1995 collection of poems that finds John Ashbery at his most conversational, funny, and surprisingIn Can You Hear, Bird, John Ashbery's seventeenth collection, language is both a plaything and a sandbox. The poems are arranged not in the order of their composition but alphabetically, by the first letter in their titles, like the neatly arrayed keys of some fabulous Seussical instrument. In line after line, Ashbery demonstrates his alertness to language as...