Richard Siken’s Crush, selected as the 2004 winner of the Yale Younger Poets prize, is a powerful collection of poems driven by obsession and love. Siken writes with ferocity, and his reader hurtles unstoppably with him. His poetry is confessional, gay, savage, and charged with violent eroticism. In the world of American poetry, Siken's voice is striking. In her introduction to the book, competition judge Louise Glück hails the “cumulative, driving, apocalyptic power, [and] purgatorial recklessness” of Siken’s poems. She notes, “Books of this kind dream big. . . . They restore to poetry that sense of crucial moment and crucial utterance which may indeed be the great genius of the form.” Views: 409
Move over Buddha! Here comes Chiaia! The book of poems is broken into two parts. Part one is a travelogue told in a haiku-like style covering Malaysia to Korea. Part Two is a more aggressive mantra with terror-laden conversations between a Person and a Mushroom, Odes to things such as Kitsch Technology and For the Sake of It, and experimental poems filled with codes and HTML text.Ten Poems about East Asia and Kitsch Nebula Ampersands And by Ralph-Michael Chiaia has the simple charm of a haiku mixed with the rant of Ginsberg. In his first collection of poetry he has sat in with a string quartet and rocked it through stacked Bose speakers -- though the speakers may have been blown. The book of poems is broken into two parts. Part one is travelogue with a very simple elegant style looking at countries throughout Asia. Part Two is a more aggressive mantra with ideas such as a terror-laden conversation between a Person and a Mushroom and Odes to things such as Kitsch Technology and For the Sake of It. This collection is a must-read for any reader interested in experimental poetry.Ralph-Michael Chiaia was born in New York City in 1975.What others say about him and Ten Poems:"He is a trip-hoppy visionary of language." Lo Galluccio, Ibbetson Street Press"Chiaia’s formalistic experiments appeal to our curiosity, but his experiments in conjuring a familiar world in a personal language are compelling. We get both in this nicely produced book from Coatlism Press. The press and Ralph-Michael Chiaia are new to the small press world, and I look forward to more from both."Clarence Wolfshohl"The poems in this slim volume prove that the beat aesthetic is not dead, or a mere remnant of the dim past. I don't subscribe to the term 'experimental' because it implies that the work is an expedient means to an end and does not stand for itself, so to speak. That may be fine for the discipline of science, but it's antithetical when applied to poetry and art in general.With few words Ralph-Michael Chiaia avails essences of places, transforming cities into states of mind and being that manifest themselves in lightning flashes of revelation. Personal memory gives out to a broader, collective phenomenon of mutual recognition of places and things at once strange and eerily familiar. The images and syntax invoke deja vu-like sensations of what it might feel like to be remembering the memories of someone other than oneself.The poet is adept at mixing haiku with spontaneous bop prosody, stark visual illumination with a playful lyrical sense, resulting in effects that are the products of the paralogical discipline exemplary of all fine art. At times an otherworldly light shines through the lines and one can almost see the face of the poet caught in the mesh of time, unconscious of being glimpsed by a future self in anticipation of its emergence from the deep sleep of meditation upon its own reflection in the still waters of what Lorca called "dark sounds."The language in these poems is bold, striking at the core of awareness itself as the phenomenological world unveils its anatomical scaffolding in one sudden illumination after another. In the momentous process of this existential exposition the poet never loses the enthusiasm for sheer play characteristic of all beautiful art. Modernity, in the spectral manifestations of the high-tech trappings amidst which we find ourselves choicelessly embroiled, avails itself in the poems in its tenuous, hallucinatory charms and fragmented concentrations upon the intrepid details in which the daemons of its glory and inescapable doom are to be found, hidden in plain sight in the very places we always expected to find them."Joe La Rosa Views: 407
As part of the Louis L'Amour's Lost Treasures series, this edition contains exclusive bonus materials! "Over the years I have been proud to write about the men and women of the American frontier. But I have written many stories with entirely different settings which I have long wanted to share with my readers. "I have collected some of these in Yondering. They are glimpses of what my own life was like during the early years. Those were the rough years; often I was hungry, out of work and facing situations such as I have since written about. "Although these stories take place in a variety of locales, they are stories of people living under conditions similar to the way they might have lived on the frontier. I hope you'll enjoy Yondering." —Louis L'Amour Louis L'Amour's Lost Treasures is a project created to release some of the author's more unconventional manuscripts from the family archives. ...
"Over the years I have been proud to write about the men and women of the American frontier. But I have written many stories with entirely different settings which I have long wanted to share with my readers.
"I have collected some of these in *Yondering*. They are glimpses of what my own life was like during the early years. Those were the rough years; often I was hungry, out of work and facing situations such as I have since written about.
"Although these stories take place in a variety of locales, they are stories of people living under conditions similar to the way they might have lived on the frontier. I hope you'll enjoy *Yondering*."
--Louis L'Amour Views: 407
Louis L'Amour was the most decorated author in the history of American letters and a recipient of the Medal of Freedom.Now collected here in a single book are several of Louis L'Amour's finest Western stories the way Mr. L'Amour wrote them. At the time Louis L'Amour was writing, it was common practice for editors to rewrite the manuscript to fit certain publishing criteria. The text of The Strong Land has been restored, and the stories within it appear as Mr. L'Amour intended for them to be read.Whether you're new to the thrilling frontier fiction of Louis L'Amour or one of his legions of fans, these six short stories will assure you that you are in the hands of a master storyteller.Included here are:"The One for the Mohave Kid,""His Brother's Debt,""A Strong Land Growing,""Lit a Shuck for Texas,""The Nester and the Paiute," and"Barney Takes a Hand." Views: 407
A collection of haunting, mystical poems of the night by the great Rainer Maria Rilke - most of which have never before been translated into EnglishOne night I held between my handsyour face. The moon fell upon it.In 1916, Rainer Maria Rilke presented the writer Rudolf Kassner with a notebook, containing twenty-two poems, meticulously copied out in his own hand, which bore the title "Poems to Night." This cycle of poems which came about in an almost clandestine manner, are now thought to represent one of the key stages of this master poet's development.Never before translated into English, this collection brings together all Rilke's significant night poems in one volume. Views: 407
Denis Johnson's The Laughing Monsters is a high-suspense tale of kaleidoscoping loyalties in the post-9/11 world that shows one of our great novelists at the top of his game.
Roland Nair calls himself Scandinavian but travels on a U.S. passport. After ten years' absence, he returns to Freetown, Sierra Leone, to reunite with his friend Michael Adriko. They once made a lot of money here during the country's civil war, and, curious to see whether good luck will strike twice in the same place, Nair has allowed himself to be drawn back to a region he considers hopeless.
Adriko is an African who styles himself a soldier of fortune and who claims to have served, at various times, the Ghanaian army, the Kuwaiti Emiri Guard, and the American Green Berets. He's probably broke now, but he remains, at thirty-six, as stirred by his own doubtful schemes as he was a decade ago.
Although Nair believes some kind of money-making plan lies at the back of it all, Adriko's stated reason for inviting his friend to Freetown is for Nair to meet Adriko's fiancée, a grad student from Colorado named Davidia. Together the three set out to visit Adriko's clan in the Uganda-Congo borderland—but each of these travelers is keeping secrets from the others. Their journey through a land abandoned by the future leads Nair, Adriko, and Davidia to meet themselves not in a new light, but rather in a new darkness. Views: 406
A literary sensation and bestseller both in England and America, The Swimming-Pool Library is an enthralling, darkly erotic novel of homosexuality before the scourge of AIDS; an elegy, possessed of chilling clarity, for ways of life that can no longer be lived with impunity. "Impeccably composed and meticulously particular in its observation of everything" (Harpers & Queen), it focuses on the friendship of two men: William Beckwith, a young gay aristocrat who leads a life of privilege and promiscuity, and the elderly Lord Nantwich, an old Africa hand, searching for someone to write his biography and inherit his traditions.
From the Trade Paperback edition. Views: 406
On vacation from school, Denis goes to stay at Crome, an English country house inhabitated by several of Huxley’s most outlandish characters–from Mr. Barbecue-Smith, who writes 1,500 publishable words an hour by “getting in touch” with his “subconscious,” to Henry Wimbush, who is obsessed with writing the definitive History of Crome. Denis’s stay proves to be a disaster amid his weak attempts to attract the girl of his dreams and the ridicule he endures regarding his plan to write a novel about love and art. Aldous Huxley’s first novel, Crome Yellow, was published in 1921, and, as a comedy of manners and ideas, its relatively realistic setting and format may come as a surprise to fans of his later works such as Point Counter Point and Brave New World. Some who know only Brave New World may not know that as a 16-year-old planning to enter medicine, Aldous Huxley was stricken by a serious eye disease which left him temporarily blind, and which derailed what certainly would have been a prominent career as a physician or scientist. Crome Yellow has often been called “witty,” as well as “talky,” and it certainly owes as much to Vanity Fair as it may, surprisingly to some, owe to Tristram Shandy, although one might think that characters such as Mr. Barbecue-Smith and his remarkable writing theories could have some literary antecedents in Lawrence Sterne. Lambasting the post-Victorian standards of morality, Crome Yellow is a witty masterpiece that, in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s words, “is too irnonic to be called satire and too scornful to be called irony.”Aldous Huxley was an English writer and one of the most prominent members of the famous Huxley family. He spent the later part of his life in the United States, living in Los Angeles from 1937 until his death in 1963. Best known for his novels and wide-ranging output of essays, he also published short stories, poetry, travel writing, and film stories and scripts. Huxley was a humanist and pacifist, but was also latterly interested in spiritual subjects such as parapsychology and philosophical mysticism. He was also well known for advocating and taking psychedelics. By the end of his life Huxley was considered, in some academic circles, a leader of modern thought and an intellectual of the highest rank. Views: 405
A broken marriage sends a father and son on two different paths in life, only for both to realise an Angel is working to reunite them. Phillip Overton's writing has been compared to Nicholas Sparks, and some readers hold The Long Way Home in the same elite company as New York Times Bestseller, The Shack.Doug Small was always destined to be a good father. However, the 1980's would be a decade of rebuilding his life after his marriage to Rowena ends in failure. For their son Simon, the decade would be one of survival, living with his mother in their home in Gosford, north of Sydney, Australia. Forced to watch helplessly as his mother's life spirals downward into a cycle of depression and violence, Simon becomes aware of a guiding presence in his life. Is this same presence also at work in his father's life, and could it in fact be an Angel guiding both of them towards their destiny? The Long Way Home tackles the question of why bad things sometimes happen to good people. It gives us the answer in an endearing way, reassuring the reader that better days are just around the next corner. A fine mix of life inspiring drama with a touch of supernatural gentleness, it is a reminder of how life is a journey leading into a future blinded by endless possibilities, and how sometimes it is waiting to lead us the long way home. Views: 404
This story tells of brave Dickie Harding, the engaging little lame boy who lived at New Cross and spent a year with a tramp, besides having many other wonderful adventures. It tells, too, how Dickie nearly was made to be a burglar, of his great moon-flower, and the magic of its seeds, and how he slipped back in history five hundred years and became Master Richard Arden, who was not lame and poor, and how and why he came back again; of the Mouldiwarp, the Mouldierwarp, and the great Mouldiestwarp and what they did; of the buried treasure and how Dick and his friends found it, and so on to the end of the book. Edith Nesbit (1858–1924) was an English author and poet; she published her books for children under the name of E. Nesbit. She wrote or collaborated on more than 60 books of fiction for children. She was also a political activist and co-founded the Fabian Society, a socialist organisation later affiliated to the Labour Party. Views: 404
In print for fifty years, this gem of lyric prose has enchanted both young and old from its very first edition.Dylan Thomas, one of the greatest poets and storytellers of the twentieth century, captures a child's-eye view, and an adult's fond memories, of a magical time of presents, aunts and uncles, the frozen sea, and in the best of circumstances, newly fallen snow. Views: 403
The Poems of T. S. Eliot is the authoritative edition of one of our greatest poets, scrupulously edited by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue. It provides, for the first time, a fully scrutinized text of Eliot's poems, carefully restoring accidental omissions and removing textual errors that have crept in over the full century in which Eliot has been so frequently printed and reprinted. The edition also presents many poems from Eliot's youth which were published only decades later, as well as others that saw only private circulation in his lifetime, of which dozens are collected for the first time. To accompany Eliot's poems, Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue have provided a commentary that illuminates the creative activity that came to constitute each poem, calling upon drafts, correspondence and other original materials to provide a vivid account of the poet's working processes, his reading, his influences and his revisions. The first volume respects Eliot's... Views: 403
"Chamber Music" is a collection of poems by James Joyce, originally composed of thirty-four love poems. Although it is widely reported that the title refers to the sound of urine tinkling in a chamber pot, this is a later Joycean embellishment, lending an earthiness to a title first suggested by his brother Stanislaus and which Joyce had come to dislike: "The reason I dislike Chamber Music as a title is that it is too complacent." "Pomes Penyeach" is a collection of thirteen short poems written by James Joyce. It was written over a twenty-year period from 1904 to 1924. Although paid scant attention on its initial publication, this slender volume has proven surprisingly durable, and a number of its poems continue to appear in anthologies to this day. James Joyce (1882-1941) was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century. Content: Chamber Music Pomes Penyeach Hue's Hue? or Dalton's Dilemma Buy a book in brown paper As I was going to Joyce Saint James' Father O'Ford Humptydump Dublin squeaks through his norse Pennipomes Twoguineaseach Pour la rîme seulement A Portrait of the Artist as an Ancient Mariner Have you heard of one Humpty Dumpty Goodbye Zürich, I must leave you O, it is cold and still—alas! She is at peace where she is sleeping There was a kind lady called Gregory There was a young priest named Delaney There is a weird poet called Russell Have you heard of the admiral There once was a Celtic librarian I said: I will go down to where Though we are leaving youth behind The flower I gave rejected lies O, there are two brothers, the Fays C'era una volta, una bella bambina Dear, I am asking a favour The Holy Office Gas from a Burner There is a young gallant named Sax Claude Sykes Solomon Now let awhile my messmates be... Views: 402
The acclaimed author and illustrator of SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT return with an exhilarating edition of Britain's oldest epic.
Long ago there was a Scandinavian warrior who fought three evils so powerful they could destroy whole kingdoms. Standing head and shoulders above his comrades, Beowulf single-handedly saves the land of the Danes from a merciless ogre named Grendel and then from his sea-hag mother. But it is his third terrible battle, with the death-dragon of the deep, in which he truly meets his match. Lovers of heroes, monsters, and the drama of battle will find this retelling as enthralling as it is tragic. Views: 402
