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The Gorgeous Nothings - the first full-color facsimile edition of Emily Dickinson's manuscripts ever to appear - is a deluxe edition of her late writings, presenting this crucially important, experimental late work exactly as she wrote it on scraps of envelopes. A never-before-possible glimpse into the process of one of our most important poets.The book presents all the envelope writings - 52 - reproduced life-size in full color both front and back, with an accompanying transcription to aid in the reading, allowing us to enjoy this little-known but important body of Dickinson's writing. Envisioned by the artist Jen Bervin and made possible by the extensive research of the Dickinson scholar Marta L. Werner, this book offers a new understanding and appreciation of the genius of Emily Dickinson.

This selection has been the introduction for generations of American readers to the mesmerizing poems of Federico Garcia Lorca (1898-1937). Lorca is admired the world over for the lyricism, immediacy and clarity of his poetry, as well as for his ability to encompass techniques of the symbolist movement with deeper psychological shadings. Most of all, Lorca's poems are admired for their beauty. Undercurrents of his major influences - Spanish folk traditions of his native Andalusia and Granada, gypsy ballads, and surrealists Salvador Dali and Luis Buñuel - stream throughout Lorca's work.

"Not all things are blest, but the seeds of all things are blest." - Muriel Rukeyser, "Elegy in Joy"First published by New Directions in 1949, Muriel Rukeyser's Elegies were written over a seven years period the end of the Spanish Civil War, World War II, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the beginnings of the Cold War. Both and homage to Rilke's Duino Elegies and a spiritual reckoning that is particularly resonant today, these poems present no angelic orders, only the difficulties of living in the modern world, the depths of shipwreck, and "Love that gives us ourselves, in the world known to all."

Laziness in the Fertile Valley is Albert Cossery's biting social satire about a father, his three sons, and their uncle - slackers one and all. One brother has been sleeping for almost seven years, waking only to use the bathroom and eat a meal. Another savagely defends the household from women. Serag, the youngest, is the only member of the family interested in getting a job. But even he - try as he might - has a hard time resisting the call of laziness.

Nathaniel Mackey's sixth collection of poems, Blue Fasa, carries forward what the New Yorker has described as the "mythological conception" and "descriptive daring" of his two intertwined serial poems. A long song that's one and more than one, this collection takes its title from two related black musical traditions, a West African griot epic as told by the Fasa, a clan in ancient Ghana, and trumpeter Kenny Dorham's hard bop classic "Blue Bossa," influenced by the emergence of Brazilian bossa nova. The book opens with the catch of the heart and the call of romance, as it follows a band of travelers, refugees from history, on their incessant migrations through time, place, and polity toward a truer sense of being and belonging.

Basharat and his family are Indian Muslims who have relocated to Pakistan, but who remain deeply steeped in the nostalgia of pre-Partition life in India. Through Mirages of the Mind's absurd anecdotes and unforgettable biographical sketches-which hide the deeper unease and sorrow of the family's journey from Kanpur to Karachi-Basharet emerges as a wise fool, and the host of this unique sketch comedy. From humorous scenes in colonial north India, to the heartbreak and homesickness of post-colonial life in Pakistan, Mirages of the Mind forms an authentic portrait of life among South Asia's Urdu speakers, rendered beautifully into English by Matt Reeck and Aftab Ahmad.

Part novel and part memoir, Yoel Hoffmann's Moods is flooded with feelings, evoked by his family, losses, loves, the soul's hidden powers, old phone books, and life in the Galilee-with its every scent, breeze, notable dog, and odd neighbor. Carrying these shards is a general tenderness, accentuated by a new dimension brought along by "that great big pill of Prozac."Beautifully translated by Peter Cole, Moods is fiction for lovers of poetry and poetry for lovers of fiction-a small marvel of a book, and with its pockets of joy, a curiously cheerful book by an author who once compared himself to "a praying mantis inclined to melancholy."

Ezra Pound's book on the French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska was first published in 1916. An enlarged edition, including thirty pages of illustrations (sculpture and drawings) as well as Pound's later pieces on Gaudier, was brought out in 1970, and is now re-issued as an ND Paperbook. The memoir is valuable both for the history of modern art and for what it shows us of Pound himself, his ability to recognize genius in others and then to publicize it effectively. Would there today be a Salle Gaudier-Brzeska in the Musée de L'Art Moderne in Paris if Pound had not championed him? Gaudier's talent was impressive and his Vorticist aesthetic important as theory, but he was killed in World War I at the age of twenty-three, leaving only a small body of work. Pound knew Gaudier in London, where the young artist had come with his companion, the Polish-born Sophie Brzeska. whose name he added to his own. They were living in poverty when Pound bought Gaudier the stone from which the famous "hieratic head" of the poet was made. Pound arranged exhibitions and for the publication of Gaudier's manifestoes in Blast and The Egoist. And he wrote and sent packages to him in the trenches, where Gaudier--a sculptor to the last--carved a madonna and child from the butt of a captured German rifle, just two days before he died.

Brazilian poet Ledo Ivo's Snakes' Nest is a "tale badly told" in a most artful manner. Part political allegory, the novel explores the nature of good and evil in a provincial port in northeastern Brazil during World War II--all the ills of the repressive dictatorship then in power are reflected in the corrupt and violent society of Maceió. As Ivo says: "During a dictatorship, all narratives are poorly told, since a dictatorship is the Kingdom of Lies and cannot tolerate the truth." But to focus solely on the allegory would deny the richness of the book's many layers, the considerable skill with which the characters emerge from the narrator's false starts, the subtle and pervasive wit that skewers pomposity and pretension, the suspense created by the narrator's very unreliability, and the poetry with which the exotic setting is evoked. The last word in describing such a heady mixture belongs to the author, who calls it, "a story of terror and violence that is, surely, a sunny nightmare." Although Ledo Ivo is well known in his own country as a journalist and poetic spokesman of the "Generation of 1945," this edition of Snakes' Nest marks his first book-length appearance in English. Originally published in 1973 under the title Ninho de Cobras, Snakes' Nest won the prestigious Brazilian Walmap Prize for that year. The novel has been translated by Kern Krapohl who, for several years, lived in Brazil and worked closely with the author. Jon M. Tolman of the University of New Mexico has contributed an informative introduction which clearly places the story both historically and geographically.

Working from existing translations, Thomas Merton composed a series of his own versions of the classic sayings of Chuang Tzu, the most spiritual of Chinese philosophers. Chuang Tzu, who wrote in the fourth and third centuries B.C., is the chief authentic historical spokesperson for Taoism and its founder Lao Tzu (a legendary character known largely through Chuang Tzu's writings). Indeed it was because of Chuang Tzu and the other Taoist sages that Indian Buddhism was transformed, in China, into the unique vehicle we now call by its Japanese name-Zen.The Chinese sage abounds in wit and paradox and shattering insights into the true ground of being. Thomas Merton, no stranger to Asian thought, brings a vivid, modern idiom to the timeless wisdom of Tao.

This long-awaited memoir is a joy to read, an instrumental guide to translating, and a look at the life of one of its great practitioners.

In An Essay on French Verse-For Readers of English Poetry, Jacques Barzun addresses the baffling English prejudice against French poetry. Barzun's many-faceted and entertaining study muses on six hundred years of French verse, its rules and forms and how they evolved. It also has significant sections on the French language itself, its sounds and difficulties; on verse music in language generally; on the character and achievements of the greatest French poets; and finally, on the social and political conditions that encouraged successive innovations, including the prevailing wordwide practice of free verse. The Essay, moreover, draws not only on a lifetime's reading, but on personal reminiscences as well: of stuffy poetry lessons in the French lycée; of the poet Apollinaire expounding his views on language to amuse the child sitting on his knee; of the author's great-grandmother telling him about proper French pronunciation, as it was in her youth, eighty years earlier. In sum, Barzun's book goes a long way toward answering the question posed in 1917 by A. E. Housman to André Gide: How is it that every nation has produced poetry except France?

Poet, translator, essayist, and voracious reader--Kenneth Rexroth was an omnivore in the fields of literature. The brief, radiant essays of Classics Revisited discuss sixty key books that are, for Rexroth, "basic documents in the history of the imagination." Ranging from The Epic of Gilgamesh to Huckleberry Finn, these pieces (each about five pages long) originally appeared in the Saturday Review. Distinguished by Rexroth's plain, wide-awake style, Classics Revisited presents complex ideas in simple language, energized by the author's air of talking eye-to-eye with his reader. Elastic, at home in several languages, Rexroth is not bound by East or West; he leaps nimbly from Homer to The Mahabharata, from Lady Murasaki to Stendhal. It is only when we pause for breath that we notice his special affinities: for Casanova, lzaak Walton, Macbeth, Icelandic sagas, classical Japanese poetry. He has read everything. In Sterne, he sees traces of the Buddha; in Fielding, hints of Confucius. "Life may not be optimistic," Rexroth maintains in his introduction, "but it certainly is comic, and the greatest literature presents man wearing the two conventional masks; the grinning and the weeping faces that decorate theatre prosceniums. What is the face behind the mask? Just a human face--yours or mine. That is the irony of it all--the irony that distinguishes great literature--it is all so ordinary."

The Flower Show and The Toth Family, two novellas in one volume by István Örkény (1912-79), introduce to an English-speaking audience a Hungarian writer with a keen sense of the absurdities of modern life. In the '60s and '70s, Örkény's vein of black comedy earned him the epithet "master of the grotesque" for the popular dramatizations of these and other novels. The Flower Show (1977) is Örkény's last novel and his most widely translated work of fiction. With consummate irony, the author exploits our universal unease in the face of death, the desire to "star" taken to its ultimate absurdity by playing the lead in one's own demise, and the voyeurism of the modern media. In The Toth Family (1967) a mad army major on leave terrorizes a village fireman and his family, forcing them to cut and fold endless quantities of cardboard packing boxes every night until dawn. Originally written as a film script, the novel's scenes flicker past in lunatic array as Örkény satirizes Hungary of the early '40s and the acquiescence of a quasi-feudal, nationalistic, caste-ridden society to the authoritarian state of Nazi Germany. The impression is as if the Marx Brothers had been born out of Dr. Strangelove.

In "Structures of Rime," the open series begun in The Opening of the Field and continued in this volume, Duncan works with ideas, forces, and persons created in language itself--the life and identity of the poet in the poem. With the first thirty poems of "Passages," which form the structural base in Bending the Bow, he has begun a second open series--a multiphasic projection of movements in a field, an imagined universe of the poem that moves out to include all the terms of experience as meaning. Here Duncan draws upon and in turn contributes to a mode in American poetry where Pound's Cantos, Williams's Paterson, Zukofsky's "A," and Olson's Maximus Poems have led the way. The chronological composition of Bending the Bow emphasizes Duncan's belief that the significance of form is that of an event in process. Thus, the poems of the two open series belong ultimately to the configuration of a life in poetry in which there are forms moving within and interpenetrating forms. Versions of Verlaine's Saint Graal and Parsifal and a translation of Gérard de Nerval's Les Chimeres enter the picture; narrative bridges for the play Adam's Way have their place in the process; and three major individual poems--"My Mother Would Be a Falconress," "A Shrine to Ameinias," and "Epilogos"--among others make for an interplay of frames of reference and meaning in which even such resounding blasts of outrage at the War in Vietnam as "Up Rising" and "The Soldiers" are not for the poet things in themselves but happenings in a poetry that involve all other parts of his experience.

I go out of the darknessOnto a road of darknessLit only by the far offMoon on the edge of the mountains.-Izumi ShikobuOver the years, thousands of readers have discovered the beauty of classic Japanese poetry through the superb English versions by the great American poet Kenneth Rexroth. Mostly haiku, these poems range from the classical and medieval to modern poetry, with an emphasis on folk songs and love lyrics. Because women played such an outstanding role in Japanese literature, included here are selections from their work, including the contemporary, deeply sensuous Marichiko. This elegant, beautifully designed gift book of poems spanning many centuries presents the original texts in romanji, the transliteration into the Western alphabet.

In Peter Cole's remarkable new book, the forces and sources that have long driven his work come together in singular fashion. Things on Which I've Stumbled rides a variable music that takes it from an archeology of mysterious poetic fragments unearthed in an ancient Egyptian synagogue to poignant political commentary on the blighted hills surrounding modern Jerusalem. Cole's vision of connectedness, his wit, and his grounded wisdom, along with his keen sense of literature's place in a meaningful life, render these poems at once fresh and abiding. Widely acclaimed for his translations from Hebrew and Arabic, Cole is also the author of two highly praised collections of poems. Writing in The New York Review of Books, Harold Bloom called Peter Cole "a major poet-translator." In Things on Which I've Stumbled, he turns to translating the world.

Written in 1950 (just before the fall of Perón's government), Final Exam is Julio Cortázar's bitter and melancholy allegorical farewell to an Argentina from which he would soon be permanently self-exiled.In a surreal Buenos Aires, a strange fog has enveloped the city to everyone's bewilderment. Juan and Clara, two students at a college called "The House," meet up with their friends, and, instead of preparing for their final exam, wander the city, encountering strange happenings and pondering life in cafés. All the while, they are trailed by the mysterious Abel.With its daring typography, shifts in rhythm, as well as wildly veering directions of thought and speech, Final Exam breaks new ground in the territory of stream-of-consciousness writing. Darkly funny-and riddled with unresolved ambiguities-Final Exam is one of Cortázar's best works.Author of Hopscotch and Blow-Up, Julio Cortázar's (1914-1984) was a novelist, poet, essayist, and short-story writer. He was born in Brussels, lived in Argentina, but moved permanently to France in 1951, where he became one of the twentieth century's major experimental writers.

A precocious Vietnamese high school student - known as the pupil with "the iron blouse"-in Ho Chi Minh City is invited to an International Youth Conference in East Berlin. But, in East Berlin, as she is preparing to present her paper in Russian on "Vietnam as a Victim of American Imperialism," she is abruptly kidnapped and taken to a small town in West Germany. After a strange spell of domestic-sexual boredom with her lover-abductor-and though "the Berlin Wall was said to be more difficult to break through than the Great Wall of China" - she escapes on a train to Moscow . . . but mistakenly arrives in Paris. Alone, broke, and in a completely foreign land, Anh (her false name) loses herself in the films of Catherine Deneuve as her real adventures begin.Dreamy, meditative, and filled with the gritty everyday perils of a person living somewhere without papers (at one point Anh is subjected to some vampire-like skin experiments), The Naked Eye is a novel that is as surprising as it is delightful-each of the thirteen chapters titled after and framed by one of Deneuve's films. "As far as I was concerned," the narrator says while watching Deneuve on the screen, "the only woman in the world was you, and so I did not exist." By the time 1989 comes along and the Iron Curtain falls, story and viewer have morphed into the dislocating beauty of both dancer and dance.

Life, death, karma-these interwoven themes form the heart of this lyrical novel in letters, Kinshu: Autumn Brocade, the first work to be published in the U.S. by Teru Miyamoto, one of Japan's most popular literary writers.The word kinshu has many connotations in Japanese-brocade, poetic writing, the brilliance of autumn leaves-and resonates here as a vibrant metaphor for the complex, intimate relationship between Aki and Yasuaki. Ten years after a dramatic divorce, they meet by chance at a mountain resort. Aki initiates a new correspondence, and letter by letter through the seasons, the secrets of the past unfold as they reflect on their present struggles. From a lover's suicide to a father's controlling demands, to Mozart's Thirty-Ninth Symphony ("a veritable marvel of sixteenth notes"), to the karmic consequences of their actions, the story glides through their deeply introspective and stirring exchanges. What begins as a series of accusations and apologies, questions and excuses, turns into a source of mutual support and healing. Chosen as an Outstanding Work of Japanese Literature by the Japanese Literature Publishing Project.

Part antiphonal rant, part rhythmic whisper, Nathaniel Mackey's new collection of poems, Splay Anthem, takes the reader to uncharted poetic spaces. Divided into three sections-"Braid," "Fray," and "Nub" (one referent Mackey notes in his stellar Introduction: "the imperial, flailing republic of Nub the United States has become, the shrunken place the earth has become, planet Nub")-Splay Anthem weaves together two ongoing serial poems Mackey has been writing for over twenty years, "Song of the Andoumboulou" and "Mu" (though "Mu no more itself / than Andoumboulou").In the cosmology of the Dogon of West Africa, the Andoumboulou are progenitor spirits, and the song of the Andoumboulou is a song addressed to the spirits, a funeral song, a song of rebirth. "Mu," too, splays with meaning: muni bird, Greek muthos, a Sun Ra tune, a continent once thought to have existed in the Pacific. With the vibrancy of a Mira painting, Mackey's poems trace the lost tribe of "we" through waking and dreamtime, through a multitude of geographies, cultures, histories, and musical traditions, as poetry here serves as the intersection of everything, myth's music, spirit lift.

The Nuremberg trials brought to public attention the worst of the Nazi atrocities. Judgment at Nuremberg brings those trials to life. Abby Mann's riveting drama Judgment at Nuremberg not only brought some of the worst Nazi atrocities to public attention, but has become, along with Elie Wiesel's Night and Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl, one of the twentieth century's most important records of the Holocaust. Originally written as a 1957 television play, later made into an Academy Award winning 1961 film, and available now for the first time in print (using the text of Mann's recent Broadway adaptation), Judgment at Nuremberg is as potent and relevant as ever. To this day the Nuremberg trials stand as a model for international criminal tribunals, due in large measure to the spotlight thrown on them by Mann's dramatic interpretation of the historic events. Mann's overwhelming compassion strikes at the heart of human suffering-his achievement has been to reaffirm humanity and justice in the wake of unspeakable evil.

This collection of recent poems is graced with a short introduction by the poet in which he says, "All I ever wanted to do was to paint light on the walls of life." For more than fifty years Ferlinghetti has been doing just thatilluminating both the everyday and the unusual, all the while keeping true to his original dictum of speaking in a way accessible to everyone. He has been, and remains, "One of our ageless radicals and true bards" (Booklist) and his voice is well-known in many places around the world. He was one of the two American poets (the other being John Ashbery) chosen to participate in the 2001 Celebration of UNESCO's World Poetry Day in Delphi, Greece, where he along with his international confreres each poetically addressed the Oracle.

Fresco: Selected Poetry of Luljeta Lleshanaku introduces to English-speaking readers the arresting work of Luljeta Lleshanaku, one of Albania's foremost younger poets. Born in Elbasan in 1968, she grew up under virtual house arrest because of her family's opposition to the Stalinist dictatorship of Enver Hoxha. She was not permitted to attend college or publish her poetry until the weakening and eventual collapse of the Communist regime in the early '90s. She is among the first generation of poets to emerge out of the cultural wasteland of enforced socialist realism in the arts, reinventing Albanian poetry almost entirely from scratch. In a voice at once firm yet quiet and spare, with haunting imagery that challenges the imagination, her highly charged poems carry the burden of her own and her country's past.For Fresco, editor Henry Israeli has gathered fifty-seven poems from Luljeta Lleshanaku's published books (The Sleepwalker's Eyes, 1992; Sunday Bells, 1994; Half-Cubism, 1996; Antipastoral, 1999) as well as some newer work. His Afterword places her writing within its personal and social context, while an Introduction by the award-winning translator Peter Constantine views the poet from the wider perspective of modern Albanian literature. The poems themselves are translated by Henry Israeli in collaboration with the author and Uk Zenel Bucpapa, Noci Deda, Joanna Goodman, Alban Kupi, Albana Lleshanaku, Lluka Qafoku, Shpresa Qatipi, Qazim Sheme, and Daniel Weissbort. Many of the translations have appeared in such magazines as Grand Street, Denver Quarterly, The Iowa Review, Seneca Review, and Quarterly West.

The new book spanning the genres of poetry, fiction, and theater, by the highly-acclaimed Thalia Field. The wonderful writings in Thalia Field's long-awaited new book Point and Line deny categorization, they are "nicheless." Perhaps describable as "epic poetries," these riveting pieces represent a confluence of genres in which Thalia Field has been involved over the course of her career: fiction, theater, and poetry. Written from a constructivist, post-genre sensibility, they elude classification, and present the author's concern with clarity in a world that resists it. For instance, in "Hours" and "Setting, the Table," Field uses indeterminate performance techniques to emphasize the categorical/conceptual nature of thought. Other pieces use generative schemes, portraits of mental shapes, which create meaning out of noise. Visually, each chapter is captivating, showing the author's need for shapes and colors in her work, her fascination with the contours of speech.

When Tennessee Williams read Spring Storm aloud to his playwriting class at the University of Iowa in 1938, he was met with silence and embarrassment. His professor, the renowned E. C. Mabie, remarked as he got up and dismissed the seminar, "Well, we all have to paint our nudes!" Tom's earlier comment in his journal that the play "is well-constructed, no social propaganda, and is suitable for the commercial stage" seems accurate enough in 1999, but woefully naive deep in the Depression when the play's sexual explicitness-particularly its matter-of-fact acceptance of a woman's right to her own sexuality-would have been seen as not only shocking but also politically radical. Spring Storm would later be disavowed by the author as "simply a study of Sex-a blind animal urge or force (like the regenerative force of April) gripping four lives and leading them into a tangle of cruel and ugly relations."But the solid and deft characterizations of the four young people whose lives intertwine-the sexually alive Heavenly Critchfield, her earthy lover Dick Miles, Heavenly's wealthy but tongue-tied admirer Arthur Shannon, and the repressed librarian Hertha Nielson who loves Arthur-are archetypes of characters we will meet again and again in the Williams canon. Epic in scope, a bit melodramatic in execution, tragic in outcome, Spring Storm created a wave of excitement among theatre insiders when it was given a staged reading at The Ensemble Studio Theatre's Octoberfest '96. This edition has been prepared, with an illuminating introduction, by Dan Isaac, who initiated the Octoberfest production.

In kaleidoscopic fragments, Hoffmann refracts Jewish popular lore and folk wisdom through a postmodernist prism, brightening his prose with snatches of verse, songs, diary excerpts, letters, ominous dreams, lush erotic passages and Yiddish sayings. "The Book of Joseph" tells the tragic story of a widowed Jewish tailor and his son in 1930s Berlin. "Katschen" gives an astounding child's-eye view of a boy orphaned in the new state of Israel. The novellas radiate the original poetry of Hoffmann's atomized hypnotic language, which Rosmarie Waldrop has called "utterly enchanting-it's like nothing else."

The midnight sun illumines more than fishing and fjords in this remote northern Norwegian village. In fact, half-baked schemes and hilarity abound. Big Ove Rolandsen, telegraph operator, mad scientist, and local Casanova, trades wits, fists, and kisses with a host of quirky neighbors. He serenades the curate's wife and fights a drunken giant, but taking on Trader Mack, the town's fish-glue magnate, is a more difficult matter. Knut Hamsun, author of the acclaimed Hunger and winner of the 1920 Nobel Prize for Literature, renders the dreams and dramas of these townsfolk with a delightfully light touch. Robert Bly has written that Hamsun "has a magnifying glass on his eye, like a jeweler's," and Dreamers gleams like a perfect, semi-precious stone.

"The menace of surrealism was so frequently advertised that any reader of this book should be allowed the impudence of demanding my credentials." So opens Wayne Andrews's The Surrealist Parade, a portrait of the movement in literature and art by a man who, at the age of nineteen, began to correspond with its major figures and afterward came to know them well. Under the name of Montagu O'Reilly, Andrews wrote the surrealist fiction Pianos of Sympathy (1936), the very first New Directions book. In later years, Andrews became a social historian, art archivist, and scholar of architectural history, publishing no less than sixteen books, among them his well-known study of the cultural roots of Nazism, Siegfried's Curse, and a pungent biography of Voltaire (meanwhile, Montagu O'Reilly had made a reappearance on the ND list in 1948 with Who Has Been Tampering with These Pianos?). When Andrews died in 1987, he had completed all but the last chapter of The Surrealist Parade, his portrait of a movement in art and literature that took in such disparate temperaments as André Breton, Paul Éluard, and Salvador Dalí. The book is, in the words of his lifelong friend and publisher, James Laughlin, a "little insider's history... Montagu is very much behind Wayne in these caustic yet admiring sketches."