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Now back in print, a beautifully illustrated collection of twelve reimagined fairy tales, including classics like "Beauty and the Beast" and literary tales like Oscar Wilde's "The Happy Prince."Alice and Martin Provensen were one of the most talented husband-and-wife author-illustrator teams of the twentieth century. A long-out-of-print cult classic first published 50 years ago, The Provensen Book of Fairy Tales is a treasury of their illustrations accompanied by fairy tales from authors such as A. A. Milne, Hans Christian Andersen, and Oscar Wilde. Here too are clever retellings and newly imagined tales: refined old favorites like Arthur Rackham’s “Beauty and the Beast,” feminist revisions like Elinor Mordaunt’s “The Prince and the Goose Girl,” and sensitive stories by literary stylists like Henry Beston’s “The Lost Half-Hour” and Katharine Pyle’s “The Dreamer.” Full of magic, ingenuity, and humor, The Provensen Book of Fairy Tales is a witty modern descendant of Grimm’s Fairy Tales and a classic in its own right, sure to be beloved by a new generation.

An epic, single-poem tribute to the spirit of women, this is the first complete and final translation of the great Mexican poet's magnum opus.Forty-four years in the making, Migrations is considered by critics to be a masterpiece of modern Mexican literature. Gloria Gervitz's book is an epic journey in free verse through the individual and collective memories of Jewish women emigrants from Eastern Europe, a conversation that ranges across two thousand years of poetry, a bridge that spans the oracles of ancient Greece and the markets of modern Mexico, a prayer that blends the Jewish and Catholic liturgies, a Mexican woman's reclamation through poetry of her own voice and erotic power. In its reach, audacity, and astonishing vitality, Gervitz's extraordinary life's work bears comparison to the achievements of HD, Lorine Niedecker, Ezra Pound, and Walt Whitman.

A roman à clef about racism, identity, and bohemian living amidst the tensions and violence of Algerian War-era France, and one of the earliest published accounts of the Paris massacre of 1961.As a teenager, Simeon Brown lost an eye in a racist attack, and this young African American journalist has lived in his native Philadelphia in a state of agonizing tension ever since. After a violent encounter with white sailors, Simeon makes up his mind to move to Paris, known as a safe haven for black artists and intellectuals, and before long he is under the spell of the City of Light, where he can do as he likes and go where he pleases without fear. Through Babe, another black American émigré, he makes new friends, and soon he has fallen in love with a Polish actress who is a concentration camp survivor. At the same time, however, Simeon begins to suspect that Paris is hardly the racial wonderland he imagined: The French government is struggling to suppress the revolution in Algeria, and Algerians are regularly stopped and searched, beaten, and arrested by the French police, while much worse is to come, it will turn out, in response to the protest march of October 1961. Through his friendship with Hossein, an Algerian radical, Simeon realizes that he can no longer remain a passive spectator to French injustice. He must decide where his true loyalties lie.

Two novellas about friendship, romance, and family by one of the finest Italian writers of the twentieth century.Carmine, an architect, and Ida, a translator, lived together once, long ago, and even had a child, but the child died, and their relationship fell apart, and Carmine married Ninetta, and their child is Dodo, who Carmine feels is a little dull, and these days Carmine is still spending every evening with Ida, but about that Ninetta has nothing to say. Family, the first of these two novellas from the 1970s, is an examination, at first comic, progressively dark, about how time passes and life goes on and people circle round the opportunities they had but missed, missing more as they do, until finally time is up. Borghesia, about a widow who keeps acquiring and losing the Siamese cats she hopes will keep her company in her loneliness, explores similar ground, along with the confusions of feeling and domestic life that came with the loosening social strictures of the seventies. "She remembered saying that there were three things in life you should always refuse", thinks one of Ginzburg's characters, beginning to age out of youth, "Hypocrisy, resignation, and unhappiness. But it was impossible to shield yourself from those three things. Life was full of them and there was no holding them back."

A selection of original translations of the great Persian poet by an up-and-coming American translator and musician.Up until the age of 40, the 13th century Persian sage Rumi was chiefly known as a preacher and a man of serious and sober views. At that point, however, an encounter with the poet Shams of Tabriz left him utterly transformed. Rumi became a poet himself, a poet in singleminded pursuit of ecstatic illumination and liberation whose poetry is meant to induce a similar revelation in his audience, bringing them to a condition of serenity, compassion, and oneness with the divine. Rumi's poetry is a masterpiece of world literature to which readers in many languages continue to return for inspiration and succour as well as aesthetic delight. This new translation preserves the radical intelligence and the ecstatic drama of poems that are as full of individual character as they are of visionary wisdom.Marilyn Hacker, one of America's finest contemporary poets, praises Haleh Liza Gafori's new translations of Rumi as "the work of someone who is at once an acute and enamored reader of the original Farsi text, a dedicated miner of context and backstory, and, best of all, a marvelous poet in English."

A thrilling, innovative novel about the interplay between nature and humankind by the author of Names on the Land.With Storm, first published in 1941, George R. Stewart invented a new genre of fiction: the eco-novel. California has been plunged into drought throughout the summer and fall when a ship reports an unusual barometric reading from the far western Pacific. In San Francisco, a junior meteorologist in the Weather Bureau takes note of the anomaly and plots “an incipient little whorl” on the weather map, a developing storm, he suspects, that he privately dubs Maria. Stewart’s novel tracks Maria’s progress to and beyond the shores of the United States through the eyes of meteorologists, linemen, snowplow operators, a general, a couple of decamping lovebirds, and an unlucky owl, and the storm, surging and ebbing, will bring long-needed rain, flooded roads, deep snows, accidents, and death. Storm is an epic account of humanity’s relationship to and dependence on the natural world.

The first English translation of an essential Austrian novel about life in early-twentieth-century Vienna, as seen through a wide and varied cast of characters.The Strudlhof Steps is an unsurpassed portrait of Vienna in the early twentieth century, a vast novel crowded with characters ranging from an elegant, alcoholic Prussian aristocrat to an innocent ingenue to “respectable” shopkeepers and tireless sexual adventurers, bohemians, grifters, and honest working-class folk. The greatest character in the book, however, is Vienna, which Heimito von Doderer renders as distinctly as James Joyce does Dublin or Alfred Döblin does Berlin. Interweaving two time periods, 1908 to 1911 and 1923 to 1925, the novel takes the monumental eponymous outdoor double staircase as a governing metaphor for its characters’ intersecting and diverging fates. The Strudlhof Steps is an experimental tour de force with the suspense and surprise of a soap opera. Here Doderer illuminates the darkness of passing years with the dazzling extravagance that is uniquely his.

A collection of previously unpublished short prose by one of the most influential figures of twentieth-century fiction.Little Snow Landscape opens in 1905 with an encomium to Robert Walser's homeland and concludes in 1933 with a meditation on his childhood in Biel, the town of his birth, published in the last of his four years in the cantonal mental hospital in Waldau outside Bern. Between these two poles, the book maps Walser's outer and inner wanderings in various narrative modes. Here you find him writing in the persona of a girl composing an essay on the seasons, of Don Juan at the moment he senses he's outplayed his role, and of Turkey's last sultan shortly after he's deposed. In other stories, a man falls in love with the heroine of the penny dreadful he's reading (and she with him?) and the lady of a house catches her servant spread out on the divan casually reading a classic. Three longer autobiographical stories--"Wenzel," "Würzburg," "Louise"--brace the whole. In addition to a representative offering of Walser's short prose, of which he was one of literature's most original, multifarious and lucid practitioners, Little Snow Landscape forms a kind of novel, however apparently plotless, from the vast unfinishable one he was constantly writing.

A new translation of the best and most provocative short stories by the author of Transit and The Seventh Cross.Best known for her anti-fascist novels such as The Seventh Cross and the existential thriller Transit, Anna Seghers was also a gifted storyteller. The short stories she wrote throughout her life portray her social and mythic vision, and constitute an important and fascinating element of her work. This selection of Seghers's best stories, written between 1925 and 1965, reflects the range of her creativity over the years and includes her most famous stories, such as the autobiographical "Dead Girls' Class Trip" (1946), as well as those translated into English for the first time, like "Jans Must Die" (1925). Here are psychologically penetrating stories about young men corrupted by desperation, women bound by circumstance, as well as enigmatic tales of bewilderment and enchantment, stories based on myths and legends like "The Best Tales of Woynok the Thief" (1938), "The Legends of Artemis" (1938), and "The Three Trees" (1940). Seghers used the German language in especially unconventional and challenging ways in her stories, and Margot Bettauer Dembo's sensitive and skilled translation preserves this distinction.

Out of print for decades, this is the legendary American poet's tribute to Federico García Lorca, including translations of the great Spanish poet's work."Frankly I was quite surprised when Mr. Spicer asked me to write the introduction to this volume," writes the long-dead Spanish poet at the start of Jack Spicer's After Lorca, Spicer's first book and one that, since it first appeared in 1957, has continued to exert an an immense influence on poetry in America and in the world. "It must be made clear at the start that these poem are not translations," Lorca continues. "In even the most literal of them, Mr. Spicer seems to derive pleasure in inserting or substituting one or two words which completely change the mood and often the meaning of the poem as I have written it. More often he takes one of my poems and adjoins to half of it another of his own, giving an effect rather like an unwillling centaur. (Modesty forbids me to speculate which end of the animal is mine.) Finally there are an almost equal number of poems that I did not write at all (one supposes that they must be his)."The riddling, ghostly, funny, philosophical, and haunting poetry of After Lorca, interspered with Spicer's letters to Lorca ("A really perfect poem has an infinitely small vocabulary"; "Some poems are easily laid. They will give themselves to anybody") appears here with an introduction by Peter Gizzi, the executor of the Spicer estate and one of America's finest contemporary poets, in an edition that is printed in conformity with the poet's original intentions.

A nomad and a swindler embark on an eccentric road trip in this picaresque, philosophical novel by the author of The Man Who Planted Trees.South of France, 1950: A solitary vagabond walks through the villages, towns, valleys, and foothills of the region between northern Provence and the Alps. He picks up casual work along the way, and spends the winter as the custodian of a walnut oil mill. He also picks up a problematic companion: a card sharp and con man, whom he calls "the Artist." The action moves from place to place, and episode to episode, in truly picaresque fashion. Everything is told in the first person, present tense, by the vagabond Narrator, who goes unnamed. He himself is a curious combination of qualities--poetic, resentful, cynical, compassionate, flirtatious, and self-absorbed.While The Open Road can be read as loosely strung entertainment, interspersed with caustic reflections, it can also be interpreted as a projection of the relationship between author, art, and audience. But it is ultimately an exploration of the tensions and boundaries between affection and commitment, and of the competing needs for solitude, independence, and human bonds. As always in Giono, the language is rich in natural imagery. Colourful idiomatic expressions--many of them unfamiliar even in France today--pepper every page."Eh, mister, a novel is a mirror, out strolling along the open road. Sometimes it reflects the azure of the heavens, sometimes the muck of the potholes." Whether Giono took his title and inspiration from this passage in Stendhal's Scarlet and Black, or from Whitman's "Song of the Open Road," both these sources course powerfully along The Open Road.

A story of displacement and resistance during the early days of the Nazi occupation of France.Last Times, Victor Serge’s epic novel of the fall of France, is based—like much of his fiction—on firsthand experience. The author was an eyewitness to the last days of Paris in June 1940 and joined the chaotic mass exodus south to the unoccupied zone on foot with nothing but his manuscripts. He found himself trapped in Marseille under the Vichy government, a persecuted, stateless Russian, and participated in the early French Resistance before escaping on the last ship to the Americas in 1941.Exiled in Mexico City, Serge poured his recent experience into a fast-moving, gripping novel aimed at an American audience. The book begins in a near-deserted Paris abandoned by the government, the suburbs already noisy with gunfire. Serge’s anti-fascist protagonists join the flood of refugees fleeing south on foot, in cars loaded with household goods, on bikes, pushing carts and prams under the strafing Stukas, and finally make their way to wartime Marseille. Last Times offers a vivid eyewitness account of the city’s criminal underground and no less criminal Vichy authorities, of collaborators and of the growing resistance, of crowds of desperate refugees competing for the last visa and the last berth on the last—hoped-for—ship to the New World.

The first complete English translation of the nineteenth-century Austrian innovator''s evocative, elemental cycle of novellas.For Kafka he was “my fat brother”; Thomas Mann called him “one of the most peculiar, enigmatic, secretly audacious and strangely gripping storytellers in world literature.” Often misunderstood as an idyllic poet of “beetles and buttercups,” the nineteenth-century Austrian writer Adalbert Stifter can now be seen as a radical experimenter with narrative and a forerunner of nature writing’s darker currents. One of his best-known works, the novella cycle Motley Stones now appears in its first complete English translation, a rendition that respects the bracing strangeness of the original. In six thematically linked novellas, including the beloved classic “Rock Crystal,” human dramas play out amid the natural cycles of the Alps or the urban rhythms of Vienna—environments so keenly observed that they emerge as the tales’ most indomitable protagonists. Stifter’s human characters are equally haunting—children braving perils, eccentrics and loners harboring enigmatic torments. “We seek to glimpse the gentle law that guides the human race,” Stifter famously wrote. What he glimpsed, more often than not, was the abyss that lies behind the idyll. The tension between his humane sensitivity and his dark visions is what lends his writing its heartbreaking power.

Selected as a Caldecott Honor Book in 1977, this is a charming picture book about a grandmother and her simple, idyllic daily routine, now back in print for the first time in a decade.Fish for Supper is M. B. Goffstein's Caldecott Honor story of a grandmother and her regular routine in summer: waking at five o'clock in the morning to make the most of a day on the lake, "with cans of worms and minnows, some fruit for lunch, bobbers, lines, hooks, and sinkers." Delightfully and wittily, Goffstein departs from the usual fisherman's tale to give us a day in the life of this no-nonsense, patient fisherwoman who catches "sunfish, crapper, perch, and sometimes a big northern pike," who capably cleans her catch, and who can bake to boot. She relishes every bite of her well-earned supper, and the pleasure she takes in her self-sufficiency and graceful work becomes the reader's as well. Based on Goffstein's own childhood summers at her grandparents' house on Lake Minnetonka, Minnesota, Fish for Supper transforms the author and illustrator's indelible memories into a story that is as honed and gratifying as its heroine's days.

A personal and critical work that celebrates the pleasure of books and reading.Largely unknown to readers today, Sir Philip Sidney's sixteenth-century pastoral romance Arcadia was long considered one of the finest works of prose fiction in the English language. Shakespeare borrowed an episode from it for King Lear; Virginia Woolf saw it as "some luminous globe" wherein "all the seeds of English fiction lie latent." In Gallery of Clouds, Renaissance scholar Rachel Eisendrath has written an extraordinary homage to Arcadia in the form of a book-length essay divided into passing clouds: "The clouds in my Arcadia, the one I found and the one I made, hold light and color. They take on the forms of other things: a cat, the sea, my grandmother, the gesture of a teacher I loved, a friend, a girlfriend, a ship at proud sail, my mother. These clouds stay still only as long as I look at them, and then they change."Gallery of Clouds opens in New York City with a dream, or a vision, of meeting Virginia Woolf in the afterlife. She holds out her manuscript to her--an infinite moment passes--and Woolf takes it and begins to read. From here, in this act of magical reading, the book scrolls out in a series of reflective pieces connected through an association of metaphors and ideas. Golden threadlines tie each part to the next: a rupture of time in a Pisanello painting; Montaigne's practice of revision in his essays; a segue through Vivian Gordon Harsh, the first African-American librarian in the Chicago public library system; a fragment of Spenser; a brief history of prose style; a meditation on the active versus the contemplative life; the story of Sarapion, a fifth-century monk; the persistence of the pastoral; image-making and thought; reading Willa Cather to her grandmother in her Chicago apartment; the deviations of Benjamin's "scholarly romance" The Arcades. Eisendrath's wondrously woven hybrid work extols the materiality of reading, its pleasures and delights, with wild leaps and bounding grace.

Explore the tradition of the political essay with this brilliant anthology.David Bromwich is one of the most well-informed, cogent, and morally uncompromising political writers on the left today. He is also one of our finest intellectual historians and literary critics. In Writing Politics, Bromwich presents twenty-seven essays by different writers from the beginning of the modern political world in the seventeenth century until recent times, essays that grapple with issues that continue to shape history-revolution and war, racism, women's rights, the status of the worker, the nature of citizenship, imperialism, violence and nonviolence, among them-and essays that have also been chosen as superlative examples of the power of written English to reshape our thoughts and the world. Jonathan Swift, Edmund Burke, Henry David Thoreau, Harriet Taylor, Abraham Lincoln, George Eliot, W. E. B. Du Bois, Mohandas Gandhi, Virginia Woolf, Martin Luther King, and Hannah Arendt are here, among others, along with a wide-ranging introduction.

A classic, secular history of the prophet Muhammad that vividly recreates the fascinating time in which Islam was born.Maxime Rodinson, both a maverick Marxist and a distinguished professor at the Sorbonne, first published his biography of Muhammad in 1960, and in the last half century the book has been widely read and established as a classic in its field. Rodinson, deeply familiar with the historical record and scholarly research into the Prophet's life, did not seek to add to it here but to introduce Muhammad, first of all, as "a man of flesh and blood" who led a life of extraordinary drama and shaped history as few others have. Equally, he sought to lay out an understanding of Muhammad's legacy and Islam as what he called an ideological movement, similar to the universalist religions of Christianity and Buddhism as well as the secular movement of Marxism, but possessing a singular commitment to "the deeply ingrained idea that Islam offers not only a path to salvation but (for many, above all) the ideal of a just society to be realized on earth." Rodinson's book begins by introducing the specific land and the larger world into which Muhammad was born and the development of his prophetic calling. It then follows the steps of his career and the way his leadership gave birth to a religion and a state. A final chapter considers the world as Islam has transformed. The book as a whole offers a vivid and indispensable account of an extraordinary man and his achievement.

A bilingual collection of poetry, from elegies to poem memoirs, by a revered French master.For more than four decades Claire Malroux has forged a unique path in contemporary French poetry, informed by the French tradition, by poets such as Yves Bonnefoy and Mallarmé, and, more unusually, by the Anglophone tradition, especially Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop, and Derek Walcott. A preeminent translator of English poetry into French, Malroux claims as a signal event in her literary life her discovery in 1983 of Dickinson's poetry, which she describes as "an encounter with the uncanny" and the awakening of a "personal affinity." Malroux is one of those rare poets whose work is informed by a day-to-day intimacy with a second language in its greatest variations and subtleties. Her poems move between an intense but philosophical and abstract interiority and an acute engagement with the material world. In almost every poem there is a characteristic and unsettling amalgam of past and present that collapses distance and incarnates through metaphor. This bilingual selection by the award-winning poet and translator Marilyn Hacker presents Malroux's oeuvre, from her early lyric poems to an excerpt from A Long-Gone Sun--a poem-memoir of life in southern France before and during World War II--to new and uncollected poems from two sequences of elegies written after the death of her life partner, the writer Pierre Sylvain.

A stunning novel about childhood, marriage, and divorce by one of the most interesting minds of the 20th century, now back in print for the first time since 1969.Dream and reality overlap in Divorcing, a book in which divorcing is not just a matter of marital collapse but names a rift that runs right through the inner and outer worlds of Sophie Blind, its brilliant but desperate protagonist. Can the rift be mended? Perhaps in the form of a novel, one that goes back from present-day New York to Sophie's childhood in pre-World War II Budapest, that revisits the divorce between her Freudian father and her fickle mother, and finds a place for a host of further tensions and contradictions of her life now. The question that haunts Divorcing, however, is whether any novel can be fleet and bitter and true and light enough to gather up all the darkness of a given life. Susan Taubes's startlingly original novel was published in 1969 but largely ignored; after the author's tragic early death, it was forgotten. Its republication presents a chance to rediscover a dazzlingly intense and inventive writer whose work in many ways anticipates the fragmentary, glancing, lyrical novels that Renata Adler and Elizabeth Hardwick would write in the 1970s.

A fantastic and philosophical vision of the apocalypse by one of the most striking Italian novelists of the twentieth century.From his solitary buen retiro in the mountains, the last man on earth drives to the capital Chrysopolis to see if anyone else has survived the Vanishing. But there's no one else, living or dead, in that city of "holy plutocracy," with its fifty-six banks and as many churches. He'd left the metropolis to escape his fellow humans and their striving, but to find that the entire human race has evaporated in an instant is more than he had bargained for.Guido Morselli's arresting post-apocalyptic novel, written just before he died, a suicide, in 1973, depicts a man much like the author himself-lonely, brilliant, difficult-and a world much like our own, mesmerized by money, speed, and machines. He travels around searching for signs of life at the US army base-palm trees, convertibles, and missile bays under the roadway-and scouts the well-appointed kitchens of his alpine valley's grand hotels for provisions, all the while brooding on the limits of human vision: his own, but also that of humankind. Meanwhile, life itself-the rest of nature-is just beginning to flourish now that human beings are gone.A precocious portrait of our Anthropocene world and a philosophical last will and testament from a great Italian outsider.