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Poet, translator, essayist, and voracious reader--Kenneth Rexroth was an omnivore in the fields of literature. The brief, radiant essays of Classics Revisited discuss sixty key books that are, for Rexroth, "basic documents in the history of the imagination." Ranging from The Epic of Gilgamesh to Huckleberry Finn, these pieces (each about five pages long) originally appeared in the Saturday Review. Distinguished by Rexroth's plain, wide-awake style, Classics Revisited presents complex ideas in simple language, energized by the author's air of talking eye-to-eye with his reader. Elastic, at home in several languages, Rexroth is not bound by East or West; he leaps nimbly from Homer to The Mahabharata, from Lady Murasaki to Stendhal. It is only when we pause for breath that we notice his special affinities: for Casanova, lzaak Walton, Macbeth, Icelandic sagas, classical Japanese poetry. He has read everything. In Sterne, he sees traces of the Buddha; in Fielding, hints of Confucius. "Life may not be optimistic," Rexroth maintains in his introduction, "but it certainly is comic, and the greatest literature presents man wearing the two conventional masks; the grinning and the weeping faces that decorate theatre prosceniums. What is the face behind the mask? Just a human face--yours or mine. That is the irony of it all--the irony that distinguishes great literature--it is all so ordinary."

The Flower Show and The Toth Family, two novellas in one volume by István Örkény (1912-79), introduce to an English-speaking audience a Hungarian writer with a keen sense of the absurdities of modern life. In the '60s and '70s, Örkény's vein of black comedy earned him the epithet "master of the grotesque" for the popular dramatizations of these and other novels. The Flower Show (1977) is Örkény's last novel and his most widely translated work of fiction. With consummate irony, the author exploits our universal unease in the face of death, the desire to "star" taken to its ultimate absurdity by playing the lead in one's own demise, and the voyeurism of the modern media. In The Toth Family (1967) a mad army major on leave terrorizes a village fireman and his family, forcing them to cut and fold endless quantities of cardboard packing boxes every night until dawn. Originally written as a film script, the novel's scenes flicker past in lunatic array as Örkény satirizes Hungary of the early '40s and the acquiescence of a quasi-feudal, nationalistic, caste-ridden society to the authoritarian state of Nazi Germany. The impression is as if the Marx Brothers had been born out of Dr. Strangelove.

In "Structures of Rime," the open series begun in The Opening of the Field and continued in this volume, Duncan works with ideas, forces, and persons created in language itself--the life and identity of the poet in the poem. With the first thirty poems of "Passages," which form the structural base in Bending the Bow, he has begun a second open series--a multiphasic projection of movements in a field, an imagined universe of the poem that moves out to include all the terms of experience as meaning. Here Duncan draws upon and in turn contributes to a mode in American poetry where Pound's Cantos, Williams's Paterson, Zukofsky's "A," and Olson's Maximus Poems have led the way. The chronological composition of Bending the Bow emphasizes Duncan's belief that the significance of form is that of an event in process. Thus, the poems of the two open series belong ultimately to the configuration of a life in poetry in which there are forms moving within and interpenetrating forms. Versions of Verlaine's Saint Graal and Parsifal and a translation of Gérard de Nerval's Les Chimeres enter the picture; narrative bridges for the play Adam's Way have their place in the process; and three major individual poems--"My Mother Would Be a Falconress," "A Shrine to Ameinias," and "Epilogos"--among others make for an interplay of frames of reference and meaning in which even such resounding blasts of outrage at the War in Vietnam as "Up Rising" and "The Soldiers" are not for the poet things in themselves but happenings in a poetry that involve all other parts of his experience.

I go out of the darknessOnto a road of darknessLit only by the far offMoon on the edge of the mountains.-Izumi ShikobuOver the years, thousands of readers have discovered the beauty of classic Japanese poetry through the superb English versions by the great American poet Kenneth Rexroth. Mostly haiku, these poems range from the classical and medieval to modern poetry, with an emphasis on folk songs and love lyrics. Because women played such an outstanding role in Japanese literature, included here are selections from their work, including the contemporary, deeply sensuous Marichiko. This elegant, beautifully designed gift book of poems spanning many centuries presents the original texts in romanji, the transliteration into the Western alphabet.

In Peter Cole's remarkable new book, the forces and sources that have long driven his work come together in singular fashion. Things on Which I've Stumbled rides a variable music that takes it from an archeology of mysterious poetic fragments unearthed in an ancient Egyptian synagogue to poignant political commentary on the blighted hills surrounding modern Jerusalem. Cole's vision of connectedness, his wit, and his grounded wisdom, along with his keen sense of literature's place in a meaningful life, render these poems at once fresh and abiding. Widely acclaimed for his translations from Hebrew and Arabic, Cole is also the author of two highly praised collections of poems. Writing in The New York Review of Books, Harold Bloom called Peter Cole "a major poet-translator." In Things on Which I've Stumbled, he turns to translating the world.

Written in 1950 (just before the fall of Perón's government), Final Exam is Julio Cortázar's bitter and melancholy allegorical farewell to an Argentina from which he would soon be permanently self-exiled.In a surreal Buenos Aires, a strange fog has enveloped the city to everyone's bewilderment. Juan and Clara, two students at a college called "The House," meet up with their friends, and, instead of preparing for their final exam, wander the city, encountering strange happenings and pondering life in cafés. All the while, they are trailed by the mysterious Abel.With its daring typography, shifts in rhythm, as well as wildly veering directions of thought and speech, Final Exam breaks new ground in the territory of stream-of-consciousness writing. Darkly funny-and riddled with unresolved ambiguities-Final Exam is one of Cortázar's best works.Author of Hopscotch and Blow-Up, Julio Cortázar's (1914-1984) was a novelist, poet, essayist, and short-story writer. He was born in Brussels, lived in Argentina, but moved permanently to France in 1951, where he became one of the twentieth century's major experimental writers.

A precocious Vietnamese high school student - known as the pupil with "the iron blouse"-in Ho Chi Minh City is invited to an International Youth Conference in East Berlin. But, in East Berlin, as she is preparing to present her paper in Russian on "Vietnam as a Victim of American Imperialism," she is abruptly kidnapped and taken to a small town in West Germany. After a strange spell of domestic-sexual boredom with her lover-abductor-and though "the Berlin Wall was said to be more difficult to break through than the Great Wall of China" - she escapes on a train to Moscow . . . but mistakenly arrives in Paris. Alone, broke, and in a completely foreign land, Anh (her false name) loses herself in the films of Catherine Deneuve as her real adventures begin.Dreamy, meditative, and filled with the gritty everyday perils of a person living somewhere without papers (at one point Anh is subjected to some vampire-like skin experiments), The Naked Eye is a novel that is as surprising as it is delightful-each of the thirteen chapters titled after and framed by one of Deneuve's films. "As far as I was concerned," the narrator says while watching Deneuve on the screen, "the only woman in the world was you, and so I did not exist." By the time 1989 comes along and the Iron Curtain falls, story and viewer have morphed into the dislocating beauty of both dancer and dance.

Life, death, karma-these interwoven themes form the heart of this lyrical novel in letters, Kinshu: Autumn Brocade, the first work to be published in the U.S. by Teru Miyamoto, one of Japan's most popular literary writers.The word kinshu has many connotations in Japanese-brocade, poetic writing, the brilliance of autumn leaves-and resonates here as a vibrant metaphor for the complex, intimate relationship between Aki and Yasuaki. Ten years after a dramatic divorce, they meet by chance at a mountain resort. Aki initiates a new correspondence, and letter by letter through the seasons, the secrets of the past unfold as they reflect on their present struggles. From a lover's suicide to a father's controlling demands, to Mozart's Thirty-Ninth Symphony ("a veritable marvel of sixteenth notes"), to the karmic consequences of their actions, the story glides through their deeply introspective and stirring exchanges. What begins as a series of accusations and apologies, questions and excuses, turns into a source of mutual support and healing. Chosen as an Outstanding Work of Japanese Literature by the Japanese Literature Publishing Project.

Part antiphonal rant, part rhythmic whisper, Nathaniel Mackey's new collection of poems, Splay Anthem, takes the reader to uncharted poetic spaces. Divided into three sections-"Braid," "Fray," and "Nub" (one referent Mackey notes in his stellar Introduction: "the imperial, flailing republic of Nub the United States has become, the shrunken place the earth has become, planet Nub")-Splay Anthem weaves together two ongoing serial poems Mackey has been writing for over twenty years, "Song of the Andoumboulou" and "Mu" (though "Mu no more itself / than Andoumboulou").In the cosmology of the Dogon of West Africa, the Andoumboulou are progenitor spirits, and the song of the Andoumboulou is a song addressed to the spirits, a funeral song, a song of rebirth. "Mu," too, splays with meaning: muni bird, Greek muthos, a Sun Ra tune, a continent once thought to have existed in the Pacific. With the vibrancy of a Mira painting, Mackey's poems trace the lost tribe of "we" through waking and dreamtime, through a multitude of geographies, cultures, histories, and musical traditions, as poetry here serves as the intersection of everything, myth's music, spirit lift.

The Nuremberg trials brought to public attention the worst of the Nazi atrocities. Judgment at Nuremberg brings those trials to life. Abby Mann's riveting drama Judgment at Nuremberg not only brought some of the worst Nazi atrocities to public attention, but has become, along with Elie Wiesel's Night and Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl, one of the twentieth century's most important records of the Holocaust. Originally written as a 1957 television play, later made into an Academy Award winning 1961 film, and available now for the first time in print (using the text of Mann's recent Broadway adaptation), Judgment at Nuremberg is as potent and relevant as ever. To this day the Nuremberg trials stand as a model for international criminal tribunals, due in large measure to the spotlight thrown on them by Mann's dramatic interpretation of the historic events. Mann's overwhelming compassion strikes at the heart of human suffering-his achievement has been to reaffirm humanity and justice in the wake of unspeakable evil.

This collection of recent poems is graced with a short introduction by the poet in which he says, "All I ever wanted to do was to paint light on the walls of life." For more than fifty years Ferlinghetti has been doing just thatilluminating both the everyday and the unusual, all the while keeping true to his original dictum of speaking in a way accessible to everyone. He has been, and remains, "One of our ageless radicals and true bards" (Booklist) and his voice is well-known in many places around the world. He was one of the two American poets (the other being John Ashbery) chosen to participate in the 2001 Celebration of UNESCO's World Poetry Day in Delphi, Greece, where he along with his international confreres each poetically addressed the Oracle.

Fresco: Selected Poetry of Luljeta Lleshanaku introduces to English-speaking readers the arresting work of Luljeta Lleshanaku, one of Albania's foremost younger poets. Born in Elbasan in 1968, she grew up under virtual house arrest because of her family's opposition to the Stalinist dictatorship of Enver Hoxha. She was not permitted to attend college or publish her poetry until the weakening and eventual collapse of the Communist regime in the early '90s. She is among the first generation of poets to emerge out of the cultural wasteland of enforced socialist realism in the arts, reinventing Albanian poetry almost entirely from scratch. In a voice at once firm yet quiet and spare, with haunting imagery that challenges the imagination, her highly charged poems carry the burden of her own and her country's past.For Fresco, editor Henry Israeli has gathered fifty-seven poems from Luljeta Lleshanaku's published books (The Sleepwalker's Eyes, 1992; Sunday Bells, 1994; Half-Cubism, 1996; Antipastoral, 1999) as well as some newer work. His Afterword places her writing within its personal and social context, while an Introduction by the award-winning translator Peter Constantine views the poet from the wider perspective of modern Albanian literature. The poems themselves are translated by Henry Israeli in collaboration with the author and Uk Zenel Bucpapa, Noci Deda, Joanna Goodman, Alban Kupi, Albana Lleshanaku, Lluka Qafoku, Shpresa Qatipi, Qazim Sheme, and Daniel Weissbort. Many of the translations have appeared in such magazines as Grand Street, Denver Quarterly, The Iowa Review, Seneca Review, and Quarterly West.

The new book spanning the genres of poetry, fiction, and theater, by the highly-acclaimed Thalia Field. The wonderful writings in Thalia Field's long-awaited new book Point and Line deny categorization, they are "nicheless." Perhaps describable as "epic poetries," these riveting pieces represent a confluence of genres in which Thalia Field has been involved over the course of her career: fiction, theater, and poetry. Written from a constructivist, post-genre sensibility, they elude classification, and present the author's concern with clarity in a world that resists it. For instance, in "Hours" and "Setting, the Table," Field uses indeterminate performance techniques to emphasize the categorical/conceptual nature of thought. Other pieces use generative schemes, portraits of mental shapes, which create meaning out of noise. Visually, each chapter is captivating, showing the author's need for shapes and colors in her work, her fascination with the contours of speech.

In kaleidoscopic fragments, Hoffmann refracts Jewish popular lore and folk wisdom through a postmodernist prism, brightening his prose with snatches of verse, songs, diary excerpts, letters, ominous dreams, lush erotic passages and Yiddish sayings. "The Book of Joseph" tells the tragic story of a widowed Jewish tailor and his son in 1930s Berlin. "Katschen" gives an astounding child's-eye view of a boy orphaned in the new state of Israel. The novellas radiate the original poetry of Hoffmann's atomized hypnotic language, which Rosmarie Waldrop has called "utterly enchanting-it's like nothing else."

Even theAmerican Heritage Dictionary acknowledges that F. Scott Fitzgerald "epitomized the Jazz Age." And nowhere among his writings are the gin, pith, and morning-after squint of that era better illuminated than in these short essays. Selected in celebration of the 100th anniversary of Fitzgerald's birth, these candid personal memoirs--one written with his wife, Zelda--furnish nothing less than the autobiography of "the lost generation" of the 1920s. "He lacked armor," EL. Doctorow, author of The Waterworks, Ragtime, and Billy Bathgates, notes in his introduction. "He did not live in protective seclusion, as Faulkner. He was not carapaced in self-presentation, as Hemingway. He jumped right into the foolish heart of everything, as he had into the Plaza fountain." The Jazz Age is a celebration of one of the twentieth century's most vital writers.

The midnight sun illumines more than fishing and fjords in this remote northern Norwegian village. In fact, half-baked schemes and hilarity abound. Big Ove Rolandsen, telegraph operator, mad scientist, and local Casanova, trades wits, fists, and kisses with a host of quirky neighbors. He serenades the curate's wife and fights a drunken giant, but taking on Trader Mack, the town's fish-glue magnate, is a more difficult matter. Knut Hamsun, author of the acclaimed Hunger and winner of the 1920 Nobel Prize for Literature, renders the dreams and dramas of these townsfolk with a delightfully light touch. Robert Bly has written that Hamsun "has a magnifying glass on his eye, like a jeweler's," and Dreamers gleams like a perfect, semi-precious stone.

In 1956, Time magazine called Tennessee Williams' Baby Doll "just possibly the dirtiest American-made motion picture that has ever been legally exhibited." The taut, vivid drama of a voluptuous child-bridge, who refuses to consummate her marriage to an older, down-on-his-luck cotton-gin owner in Tiger Tail County, Mississippi until she is "ready," has gained in humor and pathos over the years as society has caught up with the author's savagely honest view of bigotry and lust in the rural South. But Tennessee Williams was first and foremost a writer for the stage, and this reissue of his original screenplay for the Elia Kazan movie of Baby Doll is now accompanied by the script of the full-length stage play, Tiger Tail, developed from that screenplay during the '70s. The text, which incorporates the author's final revisions, records the play as it was produced at the Hippodrome Theatre Workshop in Gainesville, Florida, in 1979.

"The menace of surrealism was so frequently advertised that any reader of this book should be allowed the impudence of demanding my credentials." So opens Wayne Andrews's The Surrealist Parade, a portrait of the movement in literature and art by a man who, at the age of nineteen, began to correspond with its major figures and afterward came to know them well. Under the name of Montagu O'Reilly, Andrews wrote the surrealist fiction Pianos of Sympathy (1936), the very first New Directions book. In later years, Andrews became a social historian, art archivist, and scholar of architectural history, publishing no less than sixteen books, among them his well-known study of the cultural roots of Nazism, Siegfried's Curse, and a pungent biography of Voltaire (meanwhile, Montagu O'Reilly had made a reappearance on the ND list in 1948 with Who Has Been Tampering with These Pianos?). When Andrews died in 1987, he had completed all but the last chapter of The Surrealist Parade, his portrait of a movement in art and literature that took in such disparate temperaments as André Breton, Paul Éluard, and Salvador Dalí. The book is, in the words of his lifelong friend and publisher, James Laughlin, a "little insider's history... Montagu is very much behind Wayne in these caustic yet admiring sketches."

Wagner, an all-efficient German engineer, takes in hand the job of rescuing a floundering construction project in the South American rain forest. But before he even reaches the site, his car runs over an emerald-green Acaray snake--marking him, according to local beliefs, for death. Things go from bad to worse. Wagner's slowly degenerating colleagues are useless; his attempts to help the workers bring on a strike that the military regime suppresses; and he botches up the Company's delicate system of bribery. The building is sinking into the red mud faster than it is being built. Losing ground, Wagner tensely observes himself losing balance and events take an ugly turn.

Wild Dreams of a New Beginning brings together two acclaimed poetry volumes by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, one of our "ageless radicals and true bards" (Booklist).Who Are We Now? (1976), the first half of Wild Dreams, takes a long poetic look at the cultural fallout of a more radical time. This probing of the changes in the American psyche through the 1970s is carried forward in the second part, Landscapes of Living & Dying (1979)-a work originally hailed by Library Journal as "Ferlinghetti's strongest work since his 1957 A Coney Island of the Mind. . . . [He] pursues his disheveled muse with the innocent passion of a young beatnik, hiding his authentic erudition behind a comfortable guise of spontaneous composition."

Edouard Roditi's critical study of Oscar Wilde, originally published in 1947 in New Directions' Makers of Modern Literature Series, was a pioneering attempt to evaluate a literary reputation long distorted by the journalistic appetite for scandal. Relegating biography to a back seat, Roditi addressed the important of Wilde's ingenious, imaginative, and dialectical thought in his own time and showed how his poetry, novels, plays, and critical writings were a key influence in the shift of English and American literature away from established and aging Romanticism toward Modernism. For this first paperbound edition of his perceptive and erudite study of Wilde, Roditi has added three additional chapters touching on new material about Wilde as well as the new public attitudes about homosexuality that have evolved since the book was first published.An American long resident in Paris, Edouard Roditi is an internationally known linguist, scholar, art critic, and author and translator of a considerable number of works of fiction and poetry, criticism and biography. A collection of his witty and exotic short stories, The Delights of Turkey, is available under the New Directions imprint.

Written at various times over the last twenty-five years but never produced, the four scripts included in Tennessee Williams's Stopped Rocking and Other Screenplays encompass both the realistic style of "the early Williams" (the author's quotes) and the more experimental dramatic devices of many of his "later" plays. Two screenplays from the fifties, All Gaul Is Divided and The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond, remained in the files of Williams's New Orleans apartment until a thorough cleaning uncovered them in the mid-seventies. Thus, All Gaul, an expanded version of the story of a St. Louis teacher's dreams of love told in A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur (1978) actually predates that play. A companion piece in mood and style, The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond lyrically evokes the late twenties debutante society of Memphis and the Delta plantations. Adapted from the graphic short story of the same name, One Arm concerns a young male hustler awaiting execution for murder. Because much of the visual action is combined with a voice-over narration, Williams considered the form of this "film-play" from the late sixties somewhat experimental. In Stopped Rocking (1977), Williams returns to a familiar theme, the institution as the last haven of those who cannot cope with daily conflict and have "resigned from life." He was confident that this play, like so many of his others, would eventually find its audience: "I know that the 'dark' of the work is more than balanced by its humanity, and that this light of humanity will tip the balance favorably, as a natural act of grace."

Reality and fantasy are interwoven with terrifying power as two actors on tour-brother and sister-find themselves deserted by the trope in a decrepit "state theatre in an unknown state." Faced (perhaps) by an audience expecting a performance, they enact "The Two-Character Play"-an illusions within an illusion, and "out cry" from isolation, panic and fear. "I think it is my most beautiful play since Streetcar," Tennessee Williams said, "and I've never stopped working on it....It is a cri de coeur, but then all creative work,all life, in a sense is a cri de coeur."In the course of its evolution, several earlier versions of The Two-Character Play have been produced. The first of them was presented in 1967 in London and Chicago and brought out in 1969 by New Directions in a signed limited edition. The next, staged in 1973 in New York under the title Out Cry, was published by New Directions in 1973 The third version (New York, 1975), again titled The Two-Character Play, is the one Tennessee Williams wished to include in New Directions' The Theatre of Tennessee Williams series. It is this version which is presented in this ND paperback.

Originally published in 1928 by Macaulay.

The Secret Meaning of Things has all the elements of his earlier poetry: lyrical intensity, wit, social concern, satirical bite, and above all a classical claritas. But it goes much further: there is a deepening of vision and a darker understanding of "our clay condition." The six long poems in The Secret Meaning of Things show a progressive continuity and clarity of perception that apprehends both the hard reality and luminous irreality in everyday phenomena. In "Assassination Raga"--on the death of Robert Kennedy--the glass through which the poet sees darkly is the television screen; the poem was first read on the night of RFK's funeral at a mass memorial in San Francisco. "Bickford's Buddha" is a meditation on "Observation Fever" in Harvard Square, while "All Too Clearly" finds a "touch of old surrealism/at a stoplight in La Jolla." "Through the Looking Glass" begins with an actual flight aboard a commercial airliner and moves through a psychedelic vision to a final flash of the Dance of Shiva, which in turn opens out into the worldview of "After the Cries of Birds." "Moscow in the Wilderness, Segovia in the Snow" comes out of Ferlinghetti's travels to Moscow and across the steppes in the winter of 1967.

When Guillaume Apollinaire died in 1918 at the age of thirty-eight, as the result of a war wound, he was already known as one of the most original and important poets of his time. He had led the migration of Bohemian Paris across the city from Montmartre to Montparnasse; he had helped formulate the principles of Cubism, having written one of the first books on the subject, and coined the word "Surrealist"; and he had demonstrated in his own work those innovations we have come to associate with the most vital investigations of the avant-garde. This bilingual, illustrated edition of The Selected Writings of Apollinaire, the only representative collection in English translation, begins with a comprehensive critical Introduction by the translator, Roger Shattuck. The next section is devoted to poetry. Included here are almost half of Apollinaire's two best-known volumes, Alcools and Calligrammes, as well as a selection from five other books, and the long love poem La Chanson du Mal-Aimé in its entirety. The prose section leads off with "L'Esprit Nouveau et les Poetes", a seminal discussion of modern poetry that anticipates such movements as Dada and Futurism. This is followed by Apollinaire's almost unobtainable "Introduction to Baudelaire and Oneirocriticism", an early experimental work composed in a style prophetic of Surrealist automatic writing. There are, in addition, two stories, a passage from Anecdotiques, and a section from the novel Le Poete Assassiné.

A biography on the writer and playwright Heinrich von Kleist

For the past twenty years, Eliot Weinberger has been taking the essay far beyond the borders of literary criticism or personal journalism and into the realm of poetry and narrative. Full of stories, yet written in a condensed, imagistic language, his essays are works of the imagination where all the facts are verifiable. As entertaining as fiction and as vivid as poems, making unexpected stops in odd corners of the globe or forgotten moments in human history, erudite, politically engaged, and acerbically witty, there is nothing quite like his work in contemporary writing. In Karmic Traces, his third collection with New Directions, twenty-four essays take the reader along on the author's personal travels from the Atacama Desert to Iceland to Hong Kong on the verge of the hand-over to China, as well as on imagined voyages on a 17th-century Danish ship bound for India and among strange religious cults or even stranger small animals. One never knows what will appear next: Viking dreams, Aztec rituals, Hindu memory, laughing fish, or prophetic dogs. And in "The Falls," the long tour-de-force that closes the book, Weinberger recapitulates 3,000 years of history in a cascade of telling facts to uncovering the deep roots of contemporary racism and violence.