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 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 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...

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...

"One of the distinguished gardening books of our time," from the #1 New York Times–bestselling author of The Omnivore's Dilemma ( USA Today).Chosen by the American Horticultural Society as one of the 75 greatest books ever written about gardeningAfter Michael Pollan bought an old Connecticut dairy farm, he planted a garden and attempted to follow Thoreau's example: do not impose your will upon the wilder...

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...

A treasure trove of collected works from the legendary author of The Handmaid's Tale and Alias GraceQueen Gertrude gives Hamlet a piece of her mind.An ugly sister and a wicked stepmother put in a good word for themselves.A reincarnated bat explains how Bram Stoker got Dracula hopelessly wrong.Bones and Murder is a bewitching cocktail of prose and poetry, fiction and fairytales, as well as some of Atwood's own illustr...

Playfulness, spare elegance, and wit epitomize the poetry of Billy Collins.With his distinct voice and accessible language, America’s two-term Poet Laureate has opened the door to poetry for countless people for whom it might otherwise remain closed.Like the present book’s title, Collins’s poems are filled with mischief, humor, and irony, “Poetry speaks to all people, it is said, but here I would like to address / only those in my own time zone”–but also with quiet observation, int...

The poems in Robert Hass's new collection—his first to appear in a decade—are grounded in the beauty and energy of the physical world, and in the bafflement of the present moment in American culture. This work is breathtakingly immediate, stylistically varied, redemptive, and wise.His familiar landscapes are here—San Francisco, the Northern California coast, the Sierra high country—in addition to some of his oft-explored themes: art; the natural world; the nature of desire; the vio...

A book of fifty lucid, urgent poems from internationally acclaimed, award-winning, bestselling author Margaret Atwood.In The Door, Margaret Atwood investigates the mysterious writing of poetry itself as well as the passage of time and our shared sense of mortality. The Door ranges in tone from lyric to ironic to meditative to prophetic, and touches on subjects both personal and political. Brave and compassionate, this collection of reflective poet...

Here is the definitive collection of poetry from one of America’s best-loved writers-now available in paperback. With the publication of this book, eight volumes of poetry were brought back into print, including the early nature-based lyrics of Plain Song, the explosive Outlyer & Ghazals, and the startling "correspondence" with a dead Russian poet in Letters to Yesenin. Also included is an introduction by Harrison, several previously uncollected poems, and "Geo-B...

Like Solomon with his magic ring, famed Austrian ethologist Konrad Lorenz was a gifted student of the animal world. King Solomon's Ring, the book which brought him worldwide recognition, is a delightful collection of observations and insights into the lives of our furry and feathered friends, from the familiar cats and dogs to jackdaws. A must read for any animal lover.