The Delight and Distress of Chess The royal game has the power to make one feel elated or disconsolate. This is true whether one plays serious tournament chess or casual chess just for fun. In this collection of 34 short stories, author Alexis Levitin, travel set in hand, takes the reader on a journey across several continents – and even into space – exploring the joys of chess and its effect on the lives of those who play. As the author states in his Introduction, “...these tales represen...

W.H. Auden at Work: The Craft of Revision explores revision in the poetry of W.H. Auden, focusing on Auden’s early sonnet sequences, “A Voyage,” and “Sonnets from China.” It enumerates in great detail the substantial changes Auden made to those sequences over the course of thirty years. Auden’s observations are an amalgam of abstract philosophizing on the nature of humanity, its restlessness and tendency to create conflict, as well as a meticulous catalogue of sensory details garn...

The writing of Carlos De Oliviera is usually considered neorealist, but this selection of poems also shows the influence of symbolism, surrealism, and cubism. These poems reflect on the nature of writing in the actual process of its production, which lends this work great density and acuity.

**A New York Times Notable BookFinalist for the National Book Critics Circle AwardA personal, lyrical narrative about storytelling and empathy, from the author of Orwell's Roses**Apricots. Her mother's disintegrating memory. An invitation to Iceland. Illness. These are Rebecca Solnit's raw materials, but The Faraway Nearby goes beyond her own life, as she spirals out into the stories she heard and read—from fairy tales to Mary Shelley's

Lispector at her most philosophically radical.A meditation on the nature of life and time, Água Viva (1973) shows Lispector discovering a new means of writing about herself, more deeply transforming her individual experience into a universal poetry. In a body of work as emotionally powerful, formally innovative, and philosophically profound as Clarice Lispector’s, Água Viva stands out as a particular triumph.

A celebrated storyteller-poet-naturalist explores a year of dawns in her most personal book to date.In an eye-opening sequence of personal meditations through the cycle of seasons, Diane Ackerman awakens us to the world at dawn—drawing on sources as diverse as meteorology, world religion, etymology, art history, poetry, organic farming, and beekeeping. As a patient and learned observer of animal and human physiology and behavior, she introduces us to varieties of b...

Skin Divers is award-winning writer Anne Michaels’ dazzling third book of poems. These poems develop the concern with love, transience, and memory evident in her earlier work, and at the same time signal a definitive turning point towards a new thematic landscape.Michaels is a writer whose thoughts take shape in sensuous images, verbal music, and sinuous lines. Her short lyrics, like the longer monologues based on the lives of historical figures, explore an inner world flu...

The first authorized English translation of Nobel laureate Miguel Ángel Asturias' poetic cycle. The Nobel Committee took special note of Clarivigilia Primaveral, calling it an "impressive" work that "deals with the very genesis of the arts and of poetic creation, in a language which seems to have assumed the bright splendor of the magical queztal's feathers and the glimmering of phosphorescent insects."Professor Gerald M. Martin of the University of Pittsburgh, one of the world's to...

“Janice Lee is a genius.” – Eileen Myles, author of inferno ( a poet’s novel) THE STORY: In Daughter, a daughter/doctor encounters the dead body of an octopus in the desert, perhaps the corpse of a lost god, and through her study of his physical organs, sheds more light on her relationship with the world at large. What is it like to be a daughter? What is it like to be God?, the text asks, intuiting implications of the consciousness of God and of the hermetic vessel that is narrative itsel...

The ravaging effects of illness, the breakup of a relationship and the disturbing nature of relocation. These are the subjects under award-winning Luke Davies' meditative eye. Luke Davies' Totem was a grand love poem, a hymn to life; Interferon Psalms is a song of the brutality of time, a song of death, yet equally as beautiful.

However grand or short our tale, it is the moment we set sail, when all the former pale away, a fresh new wind come into play, that lets us see in grand array: it was the entire journey, that made our perfect day! Hurry, scurry, there now in summer's flurry come and walk with me, and on a mountain see, the view eclipse magically, the ardour of our century.

The French poet and author of Mount Analogue shares a satirical allegory of the absurdities of intellectual society.As in Rene Daumal's cult classic Mount Analogue, A Night of Serious Drinking concerns an autobiographical protagonist on a mind-expanding journey. But rather than seeking enlightenment, the anonymous narrator recounts an evening getting drunk with a group of friends. As the party becomes intoxicated and exuberant, the narrato...