A brilliant, elegant, and playful novella newly in English by “one of Denmark’s most honored poets” (Publishers Weekly)Known primarily for her poetry, Inger Christensen (1935-2009) remains one of Denmark’s most distinguished and original authors. Natalja’s Stories, modeled after Boccaccio’s Decameron, takes an usual approach to the theme of migration by focusing on the shifting ground of meaning itself. It is a tale told to the narrator b...

A captivating experimental novel about the Italian Renaissance by the Danish master, whose “sensuous language resonates with cosmic urgency” (Columbia Review).The Painted Room is a magnificent three-part short novel about the Italian Renaissance, and, specifically, the intrigue surrounding the frescoes that Mategna (1431-1506) made on the walls of a famous bridal chamber in the ducal palace of Lodovico III Gonzaga. Prince Lodovico of Mantua invite...

A startling and gorgeous work by Denmark's most admired poet finally available in English translation.Awarded the American-Scandinavian PEN Translation Prize by Michael Hamburger, Susanna Nied's translation of alphabet introduces Inger Christensen's poetry to US readers for the first time. Born in 1935, Inger Christensen is Denmark's best known poet. Her award-winning alphabet is based structurally on Fibonacci's sequence (a mathematical sequence ...

For the first time available in English, a selection of some of Inger Christensen’s most insightful essays and poetic prose piecesThe Condition of Secrecy is a poignant collection of essays by Inger Christensen, widely regarded as one of the most influential Scandinavian writers of the twentieth century. As The New York Times proclaimed, “Despite the rigorous structure that undergirds her work—or more likely, because of it—Ms. Christensen’s style is lyrica...

Inger Christensen (1935-2009) was both a virtuoso and a paradox. Her fiction, drama, essays and children’s books won her wide acclaim in Denmark and other European countries, but it is her poetry – spanning a forty-year period – that best reveals her versatility and depth. Her poetry reflects a complex philosophical background, yet her most complex poetic works have enjoyed wide public popularity. Many of her poems have a visionary quality, yet she is a paradoxically down-to-earth visionar...

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize“The book is a form of meditation, written with headlong urgency, about seeing. . . . There is an ambition about [Dillard's] book that I like. . . . It is the ambition to feel.” — Eudora Welty, New York Times Book ReviewPilgrim at Tinker Creek is the story of a dramatic year in Virginia's Roanoke Valley, where Annie Dillard set out to chronicle incidents of "beauty tangled in a rapture w...

Annie Dillard -- "one of the most distinctive voices in American letters today" (Boston Globe) -- collects her favorite selections from her own writings in this compact volume. A perfect introduction to one of America's most acclaimed and bestselling authors.

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • From one of today's best poets—a stunningly poignant sequence of poems that tells the story of a divorce, embracing strands of love, sex, sorrow, memory, and new freedom.In this wise and intimate telling—which carries us through the seasons when her marriage was ending—Sharon Olds opens her heart to the reader, sharing the feeling of invisibility that comes when we are no longer standing in love’s sight; the surprising physical bond that sti...

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 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...

The renowned poet and author of The Handmaid’s Tale “brings a swift, powerful energy” to this “intimate and immediate” poetry collection (Publishers Weekly).These beautifully crafted poems—by turns dark, playful, tender, and intensely moving—come together as Atwood's most accomplished and versatile gathering of poems to date, “setting foot on the middle ground/between body and word.” Some draw on history, and on myth, both classic...

Jamaica Kincaid's At the Bottom of the River... inspired, lyrical short storiesReading Jamaica Kincaid is to plunge, gently, into another way of seeing both the physical world and its elusive inhabitants. Her voice is, by turns, naively whimsical and biblical in its assurance, and it speaks of what is partially remembered partly divined. The memories often concern a childhood in the Caribbean--family, manners, and landscape--as distilled and transformed by Kincaid's special...