At last the full sequence of Herbert's brilliant Cogito poems are translated from the 1974 Polish edition, Pan Cogito. Herbert, who fought in the underground resistance against the Nazis and in the spiritual resistance to communism, speaks with a combination of innocence and irony to the condition of humankind at the end of the 20th century. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Baranczak--a poet, critic, translator, and Polish émigré--supplies politico-cultural context for Herbert while analyzing the texts and themes of his poems. Herbert's poetry, he shows, is based on permanent confrontation--of Western tradition with the experience of an Eastern European, of classicism with modernity, of cultural myth with empiricism.
From the Publisher: Every great poet lives between two worlds. One of these is the real, tangible world of history, private for some and public for others. The other world is a dense layer of dreams, imagination, fantasms. It sometimes happens-that this second world takes on gigantic proportions, that it becomes inhabited by numerous spirits, that it is haunted by Leo Africanus and other ancient magi.
Italo Calvino's last fictional work is a witty, elegant, fantastic rendering of the ultimate observer, whose name, Mr. Palomar, deliberately evokes the famous telescope. "Beautiful, nimble, solitary feats of imagination" (The New York Times Book Review). Calvino is the acclaimed author of Difficult Loves and Invisible Cities.
A new collection of twenty-three literary essays from the Nobel Prize–winning author. J. M. Coetzee’s latest novel, The Schooldays of Jesus, is now available from Viking. J. M. Coetzee is not only one of the most acclaimed fiction writers in the world, he is also an accomplished and insightful literary critic. In Late Essays: 2006–2016, a thought-provoking collection of twenty-three pieces, he examines the work of some of the world’s greatest writers, from Daniel Defoe in the early eighteenth century to Goethe and Irène Némirovsky to Coetzee’s contemporary Philip Roth. Challenging yet accessible, literary master Coetzee writes these essays with great clarity and precision, offering readers an illuminating and wise analysis of a remarkable list of works of international literature that span three centuries.
The past thirty years have witnessed some of the most traumatic and inspiring moments in Polish history. This turbulent period has also been a time of unprecedented achievement in all forms of Polish poetry--lyric, religious, political, meditative. This comprehensive volume includes work from virtually every major Polish poet active during these critical decades, drawing from both "official" and underground/émigré sources.
One of the most powerful poets of his generation consolidates his reputation as an exceptionally forthright and astringent critic in this book that analyzes the relationship between English-language literature, especially poetry, and nineteenth and twentieth-century politics. Tom Paulin's criticism stays on track, always responsive to a work's characteristic genius and sensitive to its social setting. Each of these essays--on poets ranging from Robert Southey and Christina Rossetti to Philip Larkin, from John Clare to Elizabeth Bishop and Ted Hughes, with a few excursions into the poetry of Eastern Europe for contrast--is informed by a love for poetry and a lively attention to detail. At every turn, Paulin demonstrates the intricate connection between the private imagination and society at large, simultaneously illuminating the kinship between the literature of the past and of the present. He also relates the poetry to themes of nationhood and to ideas about orality, speech rhythms, and vernacular background. Minotaur exemplifies the sort of general, accessible criticism of the arts that will interest a wide range of readers.
Learn from the world’s best education researchers, theorists, and staff developers as they present recommendations on effective instruction. The book provides a comprehensive view of instruction from a theoretical, systemic, and classroom perspective. The authors’ diverse expertise delivers a wide range of ideas and strategies.
Winner of the Man Booker Prize Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction Winner of the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature New York Times Bestseller Los Angeles Times Bestseller Named One of the 10 Best Books of the Year by The New York Times Book Review Named a Best Book of the Year by Newsweek, The Denver Post, BuzzFeed, Kirkus Reviews, and Publishers Weekly Named a "Must-Read" by Flavorwire and New York Magazine's "Vulture" Blog A biting satire about a young man's isolated upbringing and the race trial that sends him to the Supreme Court, Paul Beatty's The Sellout showcases a comic genius at the top of his game. It challenges the sacred tenets of the United States Constitution, urban life, the civil rights movement, the father-son relationship, and the holy grail of racial equality—the black Chinese restaurant. Born in the "agrarian ghetto" of Dickens—on the southern outskirts of Los Angeles—the narrator of The Sellout resigns himself to the fate of lower-middle-class Californians: "I'd die in the same bedroom I'd grown up in, looking up at the cracks in the stucco ceiling that've been there since '68 quake." Raised by a single father, a controversial sociologist, he spent his childhood as the subject in racially charged psychological studies. He is led to believe that his father's pioneering work will result in a memoir that will solve his family's financial woes. But when his father is killed in a police shoot-out, he realizes there never was a memoir. All that's left is the bill for a drive-thru funeral. Fueled by this deceit and the general disrepair of his hometown, the narrator sets out to right another wrong: Dickens has literally been removed from the map to save California from further embarrassment. Enlisting the help of the town's most famous resident—the last surviving Little Rascal, Hominy Jenkins—he initiates the most outrageous action conceivable: reinstating slavery and segregating the local high school, which lands him in the Supreme Court.
An illuminating new study of modern Polish verse in performance, offering a major reassessment of the roles of poets and poetry in twentieth-century Polish culture. What’s in a voice? Why record oneself reading a poem that also exists on paper? In recent decades, scholars have sought to answer these questions, giving due credit to the art of poetry performance in the anglophone world. Now Aleksandra Kremer trains a sharp ear on modern Polish poetry, assessing the rising importance of authorial sound recordings during the tumultuous twentieth century in Eastern Europe. Kremer traces the adoption by key Polish poets of performance practices intimately tied to new media. In Polish hands, tape recording became something different from what it had been in the West, shaped by its distinctive origins behind the Iron Curtain. The Sound of Modern Polish Poetry reconstructs the historical conditions, audio technologies, and personal motivations that informed poetic performances by such luminaries as Czesław Miłosz, Wisława Szymborska, Aleksander Wat, Zbigniew Herbert, Miron Białoszewski, Anna Swir, and Tadeusz Różewicz. Through performances both public and private, prepared and improvised, professional and amateur, these poets tested the possibilities of the physical voice and introduced new poetic practices, reading styles, and genres to the Polish literary scene. Recording became, for these artists, a means of announcing their ambiguous place between worlds. Kremer’s is a work of criticism as well as recovery, deploying speech-analysis software to shed light on forgotten audio experiments—from poetic “sound postcards,” to unusual home performances, to the final testaments of writer-performers. Collectively, their voices reveal new aesthetics of poetry reading and novel concepts of the poetic self.
