Literary Collections

The Sword of Ambition belongs to a genre of religious polemic written for the rulers of Egypt and Syria between the twelfth and the fourteenth centuries. Unlike most medieval Muslim polemic, the concerns of this genre were more social and political than theological. Leaving no rhetorical stone unturned, the book’s author, an unemployed Egyptian scholar and former bureaucrat named 'Uthman ibn Ibrahim al-Nabulusi (d. 660/1262), poured his deep knowledge of history, law, and literature into the work. Now edited in full and translated for the first time, The Sword of Ambition opens a new window onto the fascinating culture of elite rivalry in the late-medieval Islamic Middle East. It contains a wealth of little-known historical anecdotes, unusual religious opinions, obscure and witty poetry, and humorous cultural satire. Above all, it reveals that much of the inter-communal animosity of the era was conditioned by fierce competition for scarce resources that were increasingly mediated by an ideologically committed Sunni Muslim state. This insight reminds us that seemingly timeless and inevitable “religious” conflict must be considered in its broader historical perspective.

The Sword of Ambition is both the earliest and most eclectic of several independent works composed in medieval Egypt against the employment of Coptic and Jewish officials, and is vivid testimony to the gradual integration of Islamic scholarship and state administration that was well underway in its day.

A bilingual Arabic-English edition.

Unique in pre-twentieth-century Arabic literature for taking the countryside as its central theme, Yūsuf al-Shirbīnī’s Brains Confounded combines a mordant satire on seventeenth-century Egyptian rural society with a hilarious parody of the verse-and-commentary genre so beloved by scholars of his day.

In Volume One, al-Shirbīnī describes the three rural “types”—peasant cultivator, village man-of-religion and rural dervish—offering numerous anecdotes testifying to the ignorance, dirtiness, illiteracy, lack of proper religious understanding, and criminality of each. He follows it in Volume Two with a 47-line poem supposedly written by a peasant named Abū Shādūf, who charts the rise and fall of his fortunes and bewails, above all, the lack of access to delicious foods to which his poverty has condemned him. Wielding the scholarly tools of elite literature, al-Shirbīnī responds to the poem with derision and ridicule, dotting his satire of the ignorant rustic with numerous digressions into love, food, and flatulence.

Witty, bawdy, and vicious, Brains Confounded belongs to an unrecognized genre from an understudied period in Egypt’s Ottoman history, and is a work of outstanding importance for the study of pre-modern colloquial Egyptian Arabic, pitting the “coarse” rural masses against the “refined” and urbane in a contest for cultural and religious primacy, with a heavy emphasis on the writing of verse as a yardstick of social acceptability.

A bilingual Arabic-English edition.

Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal (d. 241/855), renowned for his profound knowledge of hadith—the reports of the Prophet’s sayings and deeds—is a major figure in the history of Islam. Ibn Ḥanbal’s piety and austerity made him a folk hero, especially after his principled resistance to the attempts of two Abbasid caliphs to force him to accept rationalist doctrine. His subsequent imprisonment and flogging became one of the most dramatic episodes of medieval Islamic history. Ibn Ḥanbal’s resistance influenced the course of Islamic law, the rise of Sunnism, and the legislative authority of the caliphate.

Virtues of the Imam Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal is a translation of the biography of Ibn Ḥanbal penned by the Baghdad preacher, scholar, and storyteller, Ibn al-Jawzī (d. 597/1201). It includes insights into Ibn Ḥanbal’s childhood, travels, and teachings, as well as descriptions of his way of life. This second and final volume gives a vivid account of Ibn Ḥanbal’s legendary confrontation with the caliphal Inquisition, including his imprisonment, trial, and flogging. Ultimately, it recounts how the people of Baghdad came to admire him as a symbol of Sunni Islam.

A bilingual Arabic-English edition.

2024 International Impact Book Award Winner - Inspirational Category

Going For It is a collection of quotes, stories, and incredible insight from the biggest and best names in entertainment, sports, and pop culture – and beyond, as the author shows that anyone can truly succeed when they put their mind and heart into it.

The books proves the point with hundreds of shining examples from wide-ranging household names like Tom Cruise, Beyonce, Metallica, Garth Brooks, Tyler Perry, Larry King, Mike Tyson, and Sir Richard Branson – those that have won the top prizes in their fields from Oscars to Grammys to Emmys to Super Bowl rings and those that have graced the covers of top magazines, the front pages of newspapers, and a place in history books.

Here you can truly learn from the best of the best, no matter what you want to do in life.

Now in paperback, Pulitzer-winning novelist Jane Smiley's first nonfiction volume on writing since 2005’s best-selling Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel.

"Smiley gives educators, readers, and writers much to discuss. Highly recommended." —Library Journal, starred review

"Line for line, Smiley delivers such clear, vibrant, precise prose—handed forth as calmly and equitably as an ice cream cone, even when she’s incensed—that a reader feels smarter just taking it in." —The Boston Globe

Long acclaimed as one of America’s preeminent novelists, Jane Smiley is also an exquisite observer of the craft of writing. In The Questions That Matter Most this Pulitzer Prize–winning writer offers penetrating essays on some of the aesthetic and cultural issues that mark any serious engagement with reading and writing. Beginning with a personal introduction tracing Smiley's migration from Iowa to California, the author reflects on her findings in the varied literature of the Golden State, whose writers have for decades pondered the West's contested legacies of racism, class conflict, and sexual politics. As she considers the ambiguity of character and the weight of history, her essays provide fresh entry points into literature, and we lucky readers can see how Smiley draws inspiration from across the literary spectrum to invigorate her own writing. With enthusiasm and meticulous attention, Smiley dives beneath surface-level interpretations to examine the works of Marguerite de Navarre, Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, Mark Twain, Willa Cather, Franz Kafka, Halldór Laxness, and Jessica Mitford. Throughout, Smiley seeks to think harder and, in her words, with "more clarity and nuance" about the questions that matter most.

The pieces in this collection capture the feeling of being buffeted by great gusts of middle-aged longing.

What began as one woman’s quarrel with Buddhism, especially its doctrine of non-attachment, morphs into a larger question: What’s the right way to love a person or a thing? With voluptuous detail and rigorous self-interrogation, Jennifer Brice looks for answers in family lore, personal experience, conversations with friends, and beloved books. The result is a tender, moving, far-reaching—sometimes delightfully funny, sometimes achingly poignant—exploration of the powerful ties that bind us to one another and to the world around us.

At once a subversive autobiography of a mercurial woman and a mesmerizing history of the body as a site of resistance to power.

“I bite my friends to heal them.”—Diogenes the Cynic, c. 350 BCE

From a Roman amphitheater where 4th century martyrs are fed to wild beasts to the S&M leather bars of New York in the 1970s, this sinuous and illuminating book by novelist and cultural critic Fernanda Eberstadt explore the lives of uncommonly brave men and women—saints, philosophers, artists--who have used their own wounded or stigmatized bodies to challenge society’s mores and entrenched power structures.

The Greek Cynic philosopher Diogenes who lived “a dog’s life,” sleeping, teaching, having sex in the public square; Saints Perpetua and Felicitas, two early Christian martyrs; twentieth-century prophets of bodily freedom like filmmaker-poet Pier Paolo Pasolini and philosopher Michel Foucault; Russian punk feminist group Pussy Riot; the political artist Piotr Pavlensky, who nailed his scrotum to the pavement of Red Square to protest Vladimir Putin’s tyranny; these are the outrageous, uncommon, but deeply committed activists featured through original interviews and careful case studies in Eberstadt’s immensely readable book, which is part political treatise, part manifesto, part memoir.

Running through her narrative of the Body Militant is Eberstadt’s own story and the story of her mother, a New York writer and glamor figure of the 1960s, whose illness-scarred body first led Eberstadt to seek connections between beauty, belief, and the truths taught through the body.

Eberstadt asks crucial questions for our time: what drives certain individuals to risk pain, disgrace, even death, in the name of freedom? And, what can we learn from their example to become braver ourselves?

Something of a historical event, this book combines loosely "autobiographical" texts by two of the most influential French intellectuals of our time. "Savoir," by Hélène Cixous, is a brief but densely layered account of her experience of recovered sight after a lifetime of severe myopia, an experience that ends with the unexpected turn of grieving for what is lost. Her literary inventiveness mines the coincidence in French between the two verbs savoir (to know) and voir (to see). Jacques Derrida's "A Silkworm of One's Own" complexly muses on a host of autobiographical, philosophical, and religious motifs—including his varied responses to "Savoir." The two texts are accompanied by six beautiful and evocative drawings that play on the theme of drapery over portions of the body.

Veils suspends sexual difference between two homonyms: la voile (sail) and le voile (veil). A whole history of sexual difference is enveloped, sometimes dissimulated here—in the folds of sails and veils and in the turns, journeys, and returns of their metaphors and metonymies.

However foreign to each other they may appear, however autonomous they may be, the two texts participate in a common genre: autobiography, confession, memoirs. The future also enters in: by opening to each other, the two discourses confide what is about to happen, the imminence of an event lacking any common measure with them or with anything else, an operation that restores sight and plunges into mourning the knowledge of the previous night, a "verdict" whose threatening secret remains out of reach by our knowledge.

Keeping Quiet is a combination of the anthropologist’s keen eye and the language of a storyteller.

In Keeping Quiet, Páramo has collected essays addressing what it is like to live in a world of silence or the absence thereof. This collection covers a wide range of angles and experiences, from an exploration of IBM’s anechoic chamber—the world’s quietest place— to stories of incest, marriage, sexual harassment, social justice, and first-person accounts of life in the emirate of Qatar. Páramo crosses the borders between art (Mozart, Monet, Beethoven, Sheila Chandra, Neruda) and yoga, between research and drunkenness, between despair and triumph, weaving the intimate and personal with what is upsetting in women’s health industry. In “Belated Comebacks,” Páramo is full of righteous anger; in “Teaching Mom Long Division,” she explores the oceanic depths of longing; in “Writers of Color,” she examines the complexities of being brown and speaking accented English; in “Three Women,” she exposes the social underbelly of Qatar during the pandemic, then mixes it all with personal reckonings.

This volume brings together in convenient form a rich selection of Japanese prose dating from the ninth to the seventeenth centuries, a period during which the preeminent cultural and aesthetic values were those of the Heian court. It contains 22 works representing all the major indigenous literary forms, either complete or in generous excerpts, and is particularly rich in writing by women and in autobiographical writings.

This anthology contains longer selections than the only other available anthology, which was published in the 1950s, and each selection is preceded by an introduction reflecting the most recent scholarship. With three exceptions, all the translations are by the compilers, and almost all of them are published here for the first time.

Because of space limitations, the compiler has omitted the two long masterpieces of the age, The Tale of Genji and The Tale of Heike, which deserve to be read in their entirety, and which are available in paperback English translations. The book contains an extensive general introduction, thirteen illustrations, five maps, a glossary, and a selected bibliography of works in English translation.

Naráyana’s best-seller gives its reader much more than “Friendly Advice.” In one handy collection—closely related to the world-famous Pañcatantra or Five Discourses on Worldly Wisdom —numerous animal fables are interwoven with human stories, all designed to instruct wayward princes. Tales of canny procuresses compete with those of cunning crows and tigers. An intrusive ass is simply thrashed by his master, but the meddlesome monkey ends up with his testicles crushed. One prince manages to enjoy himself with a merchant’s wife with her husband’s consent, while another is kicked out of paradise by a painted image. This volume also contains the compact version of King Víkrama’s Adventures, thirty-two popular tales about a generous emperor, told by thirty-two statuettes adorning his lion-throne.
Co-published by New York University Press and the JJC Foundation
For more on this title and other titles in the Clay Sanskrit series, please visit http://www.claysanskritlibrary.org

Meng Haoran (689-740) was one of the most important poets of the "High Tang" period, the greatest age of Chinese poetry. In his own time he was famous for his poetry as well as for his distinctive personality. This is the first complete translation into any language of all his extant poetry. Includes original Chinese texts and English translation on facing pages.

A new edition of the Aeneid requires not only a systematic and reliable assessment of the text, but also a satisfactory and complete description of the manuscripts’ transmission. Here, the seven Late Antique codices were studied anew; the recensio also draws on sources from the Carolingian Age. To this end eight Carolingian testimonies never studied before were collated. The editio altera contains several corrections and additional conjectures.

In the late fourteenth century the complex Middle English word "trouthe," which had earlier meant something like "integrity" or "dependability," began to take on its modern sense of "conformity to fact." At the same time, the meaning of its antonym, "tresoun," began to move from "personal betrayal" to "a crime against the state." In A Crisis of Truth, Richard Firth Green contends that these alterations in meaning were closely linked to a growing emphasis on the written over the spoken and to the simultaneous reshaping of legal thought and practice.

According to Green, the rapid spread of vernacular literacy in the England of Richard II was driven in large part by the bureaucratic and legal demands of an increasingly authoritarian central government. The change brought with it a fundamental shift toward the attitudes we still hold about the nature of evidence and proof—a move from a truth that resides almost exclusively in people to one that relies heavily on documents.

Green's magisterial study presents law and literature as two parallel discourses that have, at times, converged and influenced each other. Ranging deeply and widely over a huge body of legal and literary materials, from Anglo-Saxon England to twentieth-century Africa, it will provide a rich source of information for literary, legal, and historical scholars.

The Trotula was the most influential compendium of women's medicine in medieval Europe. Scholarly debate has long focused on the traditional attribution of the work to the mysterious Trotula, said to have been the first female professor of medicine in eleventh- or twelfth-century Salerno, just south of Naples, then the leading center of medical learning in Europe. Yet as Monica H. Green reveals in her introduction to the first English translation ever based upon a medieval form of the text, the Trotula is not a single treatise but an ensemble of three independent works, each by a different author. To varying degrees, these three works reflect the synthesis of indigenous practices of southern Italians with the new theories, practices, and medicinal substances coming out of the Arabic world.

Green here presents a complete English translation of the so-called standardized Trotula ensemble, a composite form of the texts that was produced in the midthirteenth century and circulated widely in learned circles. The work is now accessible to a broad audience of readers interested in medieval history, women's studies, and premodern systems of medical thought and practice.

The Quartet of Causeries have been handed down as a collection of the most ancient monologue farces in classical Sanskrit. Though stylistically divergent, they share a common plot: the hero is an inept, bungling procurer, who mismanages his client's love-affairs to an unexpectedly successful completion. A wide spectrum of India's urban society is scandalized, from respected judges to clumsy poetasters, from hypocritical Buddhist monks to greedy madams, from spoiled scions of wealthy houses to criminal low-life.
Co-published by New York University Press and the JJC Foundation
For more on this title and other titles in the Clay Sanskrit series, please visit http://www.claysanskritlibrary.org

Volume Two continues this fast-paced tale of mystery and sorcery up to canto 28. Nara·váhana·datta's epic quest to become the human emperor of the sorcerers leads him and his companions to win yet more wives. Unfortunately, the surviving manuscripts of the text break off while he is in pursuit of his sixth wife. The primary narrative is punctuated by diverting subplots.
Co-published by New York University Press and the JJC Foundation
For more on this title and other titles in the Clay Sanskrit series, please visit http://www.claysanskritlibrary.org

The Epitome of Queen Lilávati tells the stories of the lives of a group of souls as they pass through a series of embodiments on their way to final liberation from the continual cycle of death and rebirth. Told as a means to promote the non-violent ethic of Jainism, it abounds in memorable incidents and characters, such as Dhana, the rich merchant who attempted to justify cheating in trade, Padmaratha, who while invisible attempted to seduce the ladies of the royal household, and Vasundhara, the bogus holy man who was caught in a compromising position with a female dog.
Written in 1297 CE by the Jain poet-monk Jina·ratna, The Epitome of Queen Lilávati is undeservedly almost unknown outside India. In the stories, embodied souls undergo all too human adventures in a succession of lives, as they advance to final release. The book abounds in memorable incidents and characters, related to Queen Lilávati and her husband, King Simha, by the teacher-monk Sámara·sena.
Co-published by New York University Press and the JJC Foundation
For more on this title and other titles in the Clay Sanskrit series, please visit http://www.claysanskritlibrary.org

Religion
A diverse set, the religion set includes works from the biographical narratives of Buddha and stories of his past rebirths, to the lyrical account of love affair between gods, to a play that satirized religions to make a laughingstock of their followers and their tenets.
Included in this set:
The Epitome of Queen Lilávati
By Jina·ratna. Edited and translated by Richard Fynes.
Volume 1
543 pages / 978-0-8147-2741-6
The Epitome of Queen Lilávati
Volume 2
By Jina·ratna. Edited and translated by Richard Fynes.
650 pages / 978-0-8147-2742-3
Garland of the Buddha’s Past Lives
Volume 1
By Arya·shura. Translated by Justin Meiland.
550 pages / 978-0-8147-9581-1
Garland of the Buddha’s Past Lives
Volume 2
By Arya·shura. Translated by Justin Meiland.
543 pages / 978-0-8147-9583-5
Gita·govínda: Love Songs of Radha and Krishna
By Jaya·deva. Translated by Lee Siegel.
200 pages / 978-0-8147-4078-1
Handsome Nanda
By Ashva·ghosha. Translated by Linda Covill.
392 pages / 978-0-8147-1683-0
Heavenly Exploits: Buddhist Biographies from the Dívyavadána
Edited and translated by Joel Tatelman.
444 pages / 978-0-8147-8288-0
“How the Nagas Were Pleased” & “The Shattered Thighs”
By Harsha and Bhasa. Translated by Andrew Skilton.
350 pages / 978-0-8147-4066-8
Life of the Buddha
By Ashva·ghosha. Translated by Patrick Olivelle
561 pages / 978-0-8147-6216-5
Much Ado about Religion
By Bhatta Jayánta. Edited and translated by Csaba Dezsö.
320 pages / 978-0-8147-1979-4

Rama Beyond Price, a dramatized remake of the Ramáyana, is one of the most challenging pieces of Sanskrit poetry to read. Because of its elegant style, learned allusions, and often striking imagery, the poem has been a favorite among pundits. The well-known epic story of Rama’s exploits is presented as a series of political intrigues and battles, and contrasted with lyrical passages of various kinds: on love and war, pride and honor, gods and demons, rites and myths, regions and cities of ancient India. This is the first English translation of the only surviving work by Murári, a brahmin court poet, who lived some time between the eighth and tenth century CE, perhaps in Orissa or in neighboring South India.
Co-published by New York University Press and the JJC Foundation
For more on this title and other titles in the Clay Sanskrit series, please visit http://www.claysanskritlibrary.org

The Book of Liberation is perhaps the most enigmatic philosophical text from ancient India. Presented as the teachings of Bhishma as he lies dying on the battlefield, after the epic war between the Pándavas and Káuravas, it was composed by unknown authors in the last centuries BCE, during the early period of world-renunciation, when peripatetic sages meditated under trees and practiced austerities in forest groves, and wandering sophists debated in the towns and cities. There has been no time like it before or since: such freedom of thought and expression is unparalleled in the history of the world. The freedom enjoyed by these ancient thinkers was not an end in itself. Above all this animated work is the record of philosophers seeking liberation (moksha) from a world they believed unsatisfactory. The speculation herein is but a means to an end, for its authors believed they could attain freedom from the world by knowing philosophical truths.

The “Little Clay Cart” is, for Sanskrit theatre, atypically romantic, funny, and thrilling. This most human of Sanskrit plays is Shakespearian in its skilful drawing of characters and in the plot’s direct clarity. One of the earliest Sanskrit dramas, “Little Clay Cart” was created in South India, perhaps in the seventh century CE. Set in the city of Ujjain, so secular and universal is the story that it can be situated in any society, and it has, including in Bollywood film and by the BBC. Charu•datta, a bankrupt married merchant, is extramaritally involved with a wealthy courtesan, Vasánta•sena. The king’s vile brother-in-law, unable to win Vasánta•sena’s love, strangles her, and accuses Charu•datta. The court decides the case hastily, condemning Charu•datta to death. Fortunately, our heroine rises from the dead to save her beloved, and all applaud their love. At this climax, the regime changes, and the rebel-turned-king makes Charu•datta lord of an adjacent city.

Jayadeva’s Gitagovínda is a lyrical account of the illicit springtime love affair of Krishna and Radha, a god and goddess manifesting on earth as a cowherd and milkmaid for the sake of relishing the sweet miseries and rapturous delights of erotic love. The narrative framing their bucolic songs was composed under royal patronage in northeastern India in the twelfth century. It was to be performed for connoisseurs of poetry and the erotic arts, for aesthetes and voluptuaries who, while sensually engaged, were at the same time devoted to Krishna as Lord of the Universe. The text at once celebrates the vicissitudes of carnal love and the transports of religious devotion, merging and reconciling those realms of emotion and experience. Erotic and religious sensibilities serve, and are served by, the pleasures of poetry. In the centuries following its composition, the courtly text became a vastly popular inspirational hymnal. Jayadeva's songs continue to be sung throughout India in fervent devotional adoration of Krishna.

The king despairs of his idle sons, so he hires a learned brahmin who promises to make their lessons in statecraft unmissable. The lessons are disguised as short stories, featuring mainly animal protagonists. Many of these narratives have traveled across the world, and are known in the West as Aesop’s fables.
Co-published by New York University Press and the JJC Foundation
For more on this title and other titles in the Clay Sanskrit series, please visit http://www.claysanskritlibrary.org

Two tragic plays that break the rules: both show the hero dying on stage, a scenario forbidden in Sanskrit dramaturgy. King Harsha's play, composed in the seventh century, re-examines the Buddhist tale of a magician prince who makes the ultimate sacrifice to save a hostage snake (naga). The Shattered Thighs, attributed to Bhasa, the illustrious predecessor to ancient Kali·dasa, transforms a crucial episode of the Maha·bhárata war. As he dies from a foul blow to the legs delivered in his duel with Bhima, Duryódhana's character is inverted, depicted as a noble and gracious exemplar amidst the wreckage of the fearsome battle scene.

“Rama’s Last Act” by Bhava·bhuti is counted among the greatest Sanskrit dramas. The work at once dramatizes the “Ramáyana”—it is one of the earliest theatrical adaptations of Valmíki’s epic masterpiece—and revises its most intractable episode, the hero’s rejection of his beloved wife. Human agency in the face of destiny, the power of love, and the capacity of art to make sense of such mysteries are the themes explored in this singular literary achievement of the Indian stage.
Co-published by New York University Press and the JJC Foundation
For more on this title and other titles in the Clay Sanskrit series, please visit http://www.claysanskritlibrary.org

Until now, the study of American Indian literature has tended to concentrate on contemporary writing. Although the field has grown rapidly, early works—especially poetry—remain mostly unknown and inaccessible. Changing Is Not Vanishing simultaneously reinvents the early history of American Indian literature and the history of American poetry by presenting a vast but forgotten archive of American Indian poems. Through extensive archival research in small-circulation newspapers and magazines, manuscripts, pamphlets, rare books, and scrapbooks, Robert Dale Parker has uncovered the work of more than 140 early Indian poets who wrote before 1930.

Changing Is Not Vanishing includes poems by 82 writers and provides a full bibliography of all the poets Parker has identified—most of them unknown even to specialists in Indian literature. In a wide range of approaches and styles, the poems in this collection address such topics as colonialism and the federal government, land, politics, nature, love, war, Christianity, and racism. With a richly informative introduction and extensive annotation, Changing Is Not Vanishing opens the door to a trove of fascinating, powerful poems that will be required reading for all scholars and readers of American poetry and American Indian literature.

General Series Editors: Gay Wilson Allen and Sculley Bradley
Originally published between 1961 and 1984, and now available in paperback for the first time, the critically acclaimed Collected Writings of Walt Whitman captures every facet of one of America's most important poets.
The two-volume set of Prose Works 1892 proves that Whitman’s prose has a quality no less original and distinctive than his poetry.
Volume II of Prose Works 1892 contains three of Whitman’s prose collections, Collect, November Boughs, and Good-Bye My Fancy. Whitman’s thoughts on a wide variety of topics are laid out in such essays as “Death of Abraham Lincoln,” “Some War Memoranda,” and “American National Literature.” Seven pieces not included in the original 1892 edition of the Complete Prose Works are also presented here, including “A Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads.“ In his preface, Stovall describes why the pieces were not part of Whitman’s printing and lays out his reasons for including them in this volume.

Throughout his life, Walt Whitman continually revised and re-released Leaves of Grass. He added and deleted words, emended lines, divided poems, dropped and created titles, and shifted the order of poems. Leaves of Grass: A Textual Variorum of the Printed Poems includes all the variants that Whitman ever published, from the collection’s first appearance in 1855 through the posthumous “Old Age Echoes” annex printed in 1897. Each edition was unique, with its own character and emphasis, and the Textual Variorum enables scholars to follow the development of both the individual poems and the work as a whole.
Volume I contains introductory material, including a chronology of the poems and a summary of all the editions and annexes, along with the poems from 1855 and 1856. Volume II includes the poems from 1860 through 1867, including the first appearance of “When Lilacs Last in the Door-Yard Bloom’d” and “O Captain! my Captain!” Volume III features the poems 1870–1891, plus the “Old Ages Annex” and an index to the three-volume set.

Charles Robert Darwin (1809–1882) has been widely recognized since his own time as one of the most influential writers in the history of Western thought. His books were widely read by specialists and the general public, and his influence had been extended by almost continuous public debate over the past 150 years. New York University Press's new paperback edition makes it possible to review Darwin's public literary output as a whole, plus his scientific journal articles, his private notebooks, and his correspondence.
This is complete edition contains all of Darwin's published books, featuring definitive texts recording original pagination with Darwin's indexes retained. The set also features a general introduction and index, and introductions to each volume.

Charles Robert Darwin (1809–1882) has been widely recognized since his own time as one of the most influential writers in the history of Western thought. His books were widely read by specialists and the general public, and his influence had been extended by almost continuous public debate over the past 150 years. New York University Press's new paperback edition makes it possible to review Darwin's public literary output as a whole, plus his scientific journal articles, his private notebooks, and his correspondence.
This is complete edition contains all of Darwin's published books, featuring definitive texts recording original pagination with Darwin's indexes retained. The set also features a general introduction and index, and introductions to each volume.

A literary tour of Christian monasteries of the medieval Middle East

The Book of Monasteries takes readers on a tour of the monasteries of the Middle East by presenting the rich variety of poetry and prose associated with each monastery. Starting with Baghdad, readers are taken up the Tigris into the mountains of south-eastern Anatolia before moving to Palestine and Syria, along the Euphrates down to the old Christian center of Ḥīrah and onward to Egypt. For the literary anthologist al-Shābushtī, who was Muslim, monasteries were important sites of interactions with Christian communities that made up about half the population of the Abbasid Empire at the time.

Each section in this anthology covers a specific monastery, beginning with a discussion of its location and the reason for its name. Al-Shābushtī presents poems, anecdotes, and historical reports related to each. He selects heroic and spectacular incidents, illustrations of caliphal extravagance, and events that gave rise to memorable verse. Important political personalities and events that were indirectly linked with monasteries also appear in the collection, as do scenes of festive court life and gruesome murders. Al-Shābushtī uses these accounts not to teach history but to offer a meditation on the splendor of Abbasid culture as well as moral and philosophical lessons: the ephemerality of power; the virtues of generosity and tolerance; the effectiveness of eloquence in prose and poetry; the fleeting nature of pleasure and beauty. Translated into English for the first time, The Book of Monasteries offers an entertaining panorama of religious, political, and literary life during the Abbasid era.

An English-only edition.

This lively volume collects poems by Hmedan al-Shwe'ir, who lived in Najd in the Arabian Peninsula shortly before the hegemony of the Wahhabi movement in the early eighteenth century.

A master of satire known for his ribald humor, self-deprecation, and invective verse (hija'), Hmedan was acerbic in his criticisms of society and its morals, voiced in in a poetic idiom that is widely referred to as “Nabati,” here a mix of Najdi vernacular and archaic vocabulary and images dating back to the origins of Arabic poetry. In Arabian Satire, Hmedan is mostly concerned with worldly matters, and addresses these in different guises: as the patriarch at the helm of the family boat and its unruly crew; as a picaresque anti-hero who revels in taking potshots at the established order, its hypocrisy, and its moral failings; as a peasant who labors over his palm trees, often to no avail and with no guarantee of success; and as a poet recording in verse how he thinks things ought to be.

The poems in Arabian Satire reveal a plucky, headstrong, yet intensely socially committed figure—representative of the traditional Najdi ethos—who infuses his verse with proverbs, maxims, and words of wisdom expressed plainly and conversationally. Hmedan is accordingly quoted by historians of the Gulf region and in anthologies of popular sayings. This is the first full translation of this remarkable poet.

A bilingual Arabic-English edition.

Written in mid-seventeenth-century Egypt, Risible Rhymes is in part a short, comic disquisition on “rural” verse, mocking the pretensions and absurdities of uneducated poets from Egypt’s countryside.

The interest in the countryside as a cultural, social, economic, and religious locus in its own right that is hinted at in this work may be unique in pre-twentieth-century Arabic literature. As such, the work provides a companion piece to its slightly younger contemporary, Yūsuf al-Shirbīnī’s Brains Confounded by the Ode of Abū Shādūf Expounded, which also takes examples of mock-rural poems and subjects them to grammatical analysis. The overlap between the two texts may indicate that they both emanate from a common corpus of pseudo-rural verse that circulated in Ottoman Egypt. Risible Rhymes also examines various kinds of puzzle poems—another popular genre of the day—and presents a debate between scholars over a line of verse by the fourth/tenth-century poet al-Mutanabbī.

Taken as a whole, Risible Rhymes offers intriguing insight into the critical concerns of mid-Ottoman Egypt, showcasing the intense preoccupation with wordplay, grammar, and stylistics that dominated discussions of poetry in al-Sanhūrī's day and shedding light on the literature of this understudied era.

A bilingual Arabic-English edition.

With What ʿĪsā ibn Hishām Told Us, the Library of Arabic Literature brings readers an acknowledged masterpiece of early twentieth-century Arabic prose. Penned by the Egyptian journalist Muḥammad al-Muwayliḥī, this exceptional title was first introduced in serialized form in his family’s pioneering newspaper Miṣbāḥ al-Sharq (Light of the East), on which this edition is based, and later published in book form in 1907. Widely hailed for its erudition and its mordant wit, What ʿĪsā ibn Hishām Told Us was embraced by Egypt’s burgeoning reading public and soon became required reading for generations of Egyptian school students.

Bridging classical genres and the emerging tradition of modern Arabic fiction, What ʿĪsā ibn Hishām Told Us is divided into two parts, the second of which was only added to the text with the fourth edition of 1927. Sarcastic in tone and critical in outlook, the book relates the excursions of its narrator ʿĪsā ibn Hishām
and his companion, the Pasha, through a rapidly Westernized Cairo at the height of British occupation, providing vivid commentary of a society negotiating—however imperfectly—the clash of imported cultural values and traditional norms of conduct, law, and education. The “Second Journey” takes the narrator to Paris to visit the Exposition Universelle of 1900, where al-Muwayliḥī casts the same relentlessly critical eye on European society, modernity, and the role of Western imperialism as it ripples across the globe.

Paving the way for the modern Arabic novel, What ʿĪsā ibn Hishām Told Us is invaluable both for its sociological insight into colonial Egypt and its pioneering role in Arabic literary history.

A bilingual Arabic-English edition.

Selection of Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe’s letters from prison in opposition to South African apartheid

This book collates nearly 300 prison letters to and from Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe, inspirational political leader and first President of the Pan-Africanist Congress. These letters are testimony to the desolate conditions of his imprisonment and to his unbending commitment to the cause of African liberation.

The memory of Sobukwe has been sadly neglected in post- apartheid South Africa. With the changing political climate, the decline of the African National Congress’s power, the re- emergence of Black Consciousness, and the growth of student protests, Sobukwe is being looked to once again.

General Series Editors Gay Wilson Allen and Sculley Bradley
Originally published between 1961 and 1984, and now available in paperback for the first time, the critically acclaimed Collected Writings of Walt Whitman captures every facet of one of America's most important poets.
In discussing letter-writing, Whitman made his own views clear. Simplicity and naturalness were his guidelines. “I like my letters to be personal—very personal—and then stop.“ The six volumes in The Correspondence comprise nearly 3,000 letters written over a half century, revealing Whitman the person as no other documents can.
Volume II presents the poet during the years he was developing an international reputation. As they came to understand one of the most important American voices of the century, European writers such as Edward Dowden and John Addington Symonds began to correspond with Whitman. English author Anne Gilchrist wrote her first impassioned love letter to the American poet in 1871. Whitman characteristically waited six weeks before he replied, and his subsequent handling of the unwanted ardor proves a fascinating study of a lover who feared to be loved.

General Series Editors: Gay Wilson Allen and Sculley Bradley
Originally published between 1961 and 1984, and now available in paperback for the first time, the critically acclaimed Collected Writings of Walt Whitman captures every facet of one of America's most important poets.
In discussing letter-writing, Whitman made his own views clear. Simplicity and naturalness were his guidelines. “I like my letters to be personal—very personal—and then stop.” The six volumes in The Correspondence comprise nearly 3,000 letters written over a half century, revealing Whitman the person as no other documents can.
Volume III covers the years in which Whitman radiated a personal and artistic magnetism, despite the paralysis that struck him in 1873. This period was full of important events, including the attempted censoring of Leaves of Grass, Whitman's renewed friendship with William D. O'Connor, and the arrival in America of Whitman's unrequited lover, Anne Gilchrist. During this period, Whitman also met Harry Stafford, the eighteen-year-old son of a New Jersey farming family. Despite his international fame, Whitman preferred to spend much of his time with the Staffords, particularly Harry, with whom he had a close but uncertain bond.

As the study of literature has extended to cultural contexts, critics have developed a language all their own. Yet, argues Mark Bauerlein, scholars of literature today are so unskilled in pertinent sociohistorical methods that they compensate by adopting cliches and catchphrases that serve as substitutes for information and logic. Thus by labeling a set of ideas an "ideology" they avoid specifying those ideas, or by saying that someone "essentializes" a concept they convey the air of decisive refutation. As long as a paper is generously sprinkled with the right words, clarification is deemed superfluous.

Bauerlein contends that such usages only serve to signal political commitments, prove membership in subgroups, or appeal to editors and tenure committees, and that current textual practices are inadequate to the study of culture and politics they presume to undertake. His book discusses 23 commonly encountered terms—from "deconstruction" and "gender" to "problematize" and "rethink"—and offers a diagnosis of contemporary criticism through their analysis. He examines the motives behind their usage and the circumstances under which they arose and tells why they continue to flourish.

A self-styled "handbook of counterdisciplinary usage," Literary Criticism: An Autopsy shows how the use of illogical, unsound, or inconsistent terms has brought about a breakdown in disciplinary focus. It is an insightful and entertaining work that challenges scholars to reconsider their choice of words—and to eliminate many from critical inquiry altogether.

This anthology aims to challenge stereotypes of women travellers. Rather than simply presenting writings by Victorian women who travelled bravely around the world disregarding social convention and danger, the editors present a range of writing and possible ways of being a woman traveller.

As well as the ‘eccentric’ woman traveller, the editors have included writings by those who might be seen as failed travellers, cautious and conventional travellers and those who did not conform to the adventurous heroine stereotype. Because travelling as a woman and writing as a woman presents the author with a number of textual problems which must be negotiated, Foster and Mills have chosen to include writings which confronted these problems and which resolved them (or did not resolve them) in different ways.

These textual problems include the depiction of other women, the representation of spatial relations, the negotiations undertaken in relation to the adventure heroine narrative and character and the position taken by the author in relation to the representation of knowledge. These issues are all crucial in relation to travel writing by women , and the women, whose writing has been collected together in this anthology have made bold decisions in relation to them.

The essence of Americana, Route 66 is called the Mother Road but it’s America’s Main Street, embodying small-town values with its local stores, vintage service stations, neon signs, ghost towns, roadside attractions, motels and diners.

 Stretching from Chicago to Santa Monica over 2,400 miles and crossing three time zones, it’s the road for pioneering Americans migrating West for a more prosperous life, and thus represents freedom, possibility, new horizons and the intrepid American spirit. The best road trip of them all, Route 66 is all about the journey, not the destination.

Fully-illustrated, The Passenger collects the best new writing, photography, art and reportage from around the world.

IN THIS VOLUME: When the Circus Came to Town: The Resurrection of Potsdamer Platz by Peter Schneider・Berlin Suite by Cees Nooteboom・Tempelhof: A Field of Dreams by Vincenzo Latronico・plus: the controversial reconstruction of a Prussian castle, Berlin’s most transgressive sex club and its disappearing traditional pubs, a green urban oasis, suburban neo-Nazis, North Vietnamese in the East, South Vietnamese in the West, techno everywhere and much more...

“Berlin is too big for Berlin” is the curious title of a book by the flaneur Hanns Zischler, who joked about the low population density of a city so spread-out and polycentric—one of the reasons why it still inspires feelings of freedom and space. But the phrase also carries a symbolic, broader meaning: how can a single city encompass and sustain such a weighty mythology as that of contemporary Berlin, “the capital of cool”?

In order to find out, it is necessary to travel to the 1990s, the origins of today’s Berlin, when time seemed to have stopped. The scars of a century of war were still visible everywhere: coal stoves, crumbling buildings, desolate minimarts, not a working buzzer or elevator. To visit the city then was a hallucinatory experience, a simultaneous journey into the past and into the future. The city’s youth seemed to have appropriated—and turned into a positive—the famous phrase pronounced by Karl Scheffler at the beginning of the 20th century: “Berlin is a place doomed to always become, never be.”

The abandoned ruins, the hidden gems found at the flea market, the illegal basement raves are a thing of the past. The era of Berlin as a site of urban archeology is over. Almost all the damaged buildings have been repaired, squatters have been removed, the shops selling East German furniture have closed down. Without its wounds, the landscape of the city is perhaps less striking but more solid, stronger. Even the city’s inhabitants have lost some of their melancholia, their romantic and self-destructive streak: today you can even find people who come to Berlin to actually work, not just to “create” or idle their days away. Yet, Berlin remains a youthful city that doesn’t cling to its “poor but sexy” past, whose only sacrosanct principles are an uncompromising multiculturalism and the belief that its future is yet to be written. To quote someone who knows the city well, Berlin is and always will be “pure potential.”

Winner of the 2023 Autumn House Nonfiction Prize, the essays in Laura Jackson's debut, Deep & Wild, chronicle the beauty and awe of Appalachia through the eyes of a lifelong West Virginian.

Jackson employs her knowledge of and curiosity for the region to describe life in West Virginia as it actually is while dismantling stereotypes portrayed in popular media with humor and tenderness. Jackson works to describe what is special about her home, looking head-on at all the ways life in West Virginia may be wonderful and terrible, beautiful and ugly. Moving beyond all-too-common Appalachian stories of hardship and poverty, Jackson’s collection revels in joy, family, and nature.

Through her essays, Jackson invites readers to peer under creek rocks for crawfish, look a little more fondly at opossums, a road trip to an annual ramp festival, and learn why not to trust a GPS along West Virginia’s rugged roads. From her living room to Appalachian hollows, Jackson approaches the sublime, seeking truths in the removal of a stump from her backyard and in John Denver’s famous song, “Take Me Home, Country Roads.”

Long before the Romantics embraced nature, people in the West saw the human and nonhuman worlds as both intimately interdependent and violently antagonistic. With its peerless selection of ninety-eight original sources concerned with the natural world and humankind's place within it, The Marvels of the World offers a corrective to the still-prevalent tendency to dismiss premodern attitudes toward nature as simple or univocal.

Gathering together medical texts, herbals, and how-to books, as well as scientific, religious, philosophical, and poetic works dating from antiquity to the dawn of the Enlightenment, the anthology explores both mainstream and unconventional thinking about the natural world. Its seven parts focus on philosophy and science; plants; animals; weather and climate; ways of inhabiting the land; gardens and gardening; and European encounters with the wider world. Each section and each of the book's selections is prefaced with a helpful introduction by volume editor Rebecca Bushnell that weaves connections among these compelling pieces of the past. The early writers collected here wrote with extraordinary openness about ways of coexisting with the nonhuman forces that shaped them, Bushnell demonstrates, even as they sought to control and exploit their environment. Taken as a whole, The Marvels of the World reveals how many of these early writers cared as much about the natural world as we do today.

To be seen and not heard was never going to happen for Barbara Worton, a.k.a. Chatterbox.

Talking, which she started doing in full sentences at fourteen months, is in her DNA. Her Italian American mother was a champion talker. Her German Dutch father had to be a listener. Her mother’s parents and ten brothers and sisters all talked at once. Music, both recorded and live, played constantly. Life was noisy, and Barbara watched and cataloged what she saw and heard—then and all through her life.

As only a true chatterbox knows how, Barbara winds and weaves through stories from her Long Island childhood to life in the present. Each of her forty-three mini-memoirs paints a portrait of what makes the everyday beautiful, giving readers a wonderfully detailed glimpse into memories like being in her grandmother’s kitchen (where making pasta sauce was almost a “military maneuver”). With wit and poignancy, she wrestles with the world’s paradoxes and recalls moments that show just how much we all have in common.

Life spills onto the page in all its noisy, glorious, and messy detail. In Barbara’s both intimate and chatty voice, her stories take us from Buster Browns and Tonette Permanents to supermarket lines, John Travolta, the Tappan Zee Bridge, and the sleepless nights of adulthood. You can see and hear the characters in these stories. Anyone who has a family will see something of themselves in this book. Anyone who loves spaghetti and meatballs will need to go out for Italian food after reading Worton’s ode to both. Each story in Chatterbox: Stories from a Noisy Life is the perfect pause, a moment to refresh and presents a mirror for readers to reflect on their own pasts, presents, and futures.

Just as Odin’s ravens, named Huginn and Muninn (translated to Thought and Memory), would whisper everything he couldn’t see, so too do these and other mythical ravens—of Athena, the Biblical Eve and Noah, Coronis, and others—function in Jamison’s essay collection: they are tools to interpret and make meaning of their world, rent as it is between the rural and urban, the romantic and abusive, where language is both surfeit and dearth. This collection sees mythical ravens murmur alongside the actual bone and viscera of crows, starlings, and pigeons in disarming explorations of desire and destruction, the body and creation. Carrion is an ambitiously structured collection that honors the literary forebears at its center while lamenting our inability to communicate anything—love, need, hope—except in metaphors.

Winner of the Southern Book Prize
Winner of the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay

From the author of the bestselling #ReadWithJenna/TODAY Show book club pick Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss

For the past four years, Margaret Renkl’s columns have offered readers of The New York Times a weekly dose of natural beauty, human decency, and persistent hope from her home in Nashville. Now more than sixty of those pieces have been brought together in this sparkling new collection.

“People have often asked me how it feels to be the ‘voice of the South,’” writes Renkl in her introduction. “But I’m not the voice of the South, and no one else is, either.” There are many Souths—red and blue, rural and urban, mountain and coast, Black and white and brown—and no one writer could possibly represent all of them. In Graceland, At Last, Renkl writes instead from her own experience about the complexities of her homeland, demonstrating along the way how much more there is to this tangled region than many people understand.

In a patchwork quilt of personal and reported essays, Renkl also highlights some other voices of the South, people who are fighting for a better future for the region. A group of teenagers who organized a youth march for Black Lives Matter. An urban shepherd whose sheep remove invasive vegetation. Church parishioners sheltering the homeless. Throughout, readers will find the generosity of spirit and deep attention to the world, human and nonhuman, that keep readers returning to her columns each Monday morning.

From a writer who “makes one of all the world’s beings” (NPR), Graceland, At Last is a book full of gifts for Southerners and non-Southerners alike.

Despite Freud's enormous influence on twentieth-century interpretations of the humanities, there has never before been in English a complete collection of his writings on art and literature. These fourteen essays cover the entire range of his work on these subjects, in chronological order beginning with his first published analysis of a work of literature, the 1907 "Delusion and Dreams in Jensen's Gradiva" and concluding with the 1940 posthumous publication of "Medusa's Head." Many of the essays included in this collection have been crucial in contemporary literary and art criticism and theory.

Among the subjects Freud engages are Shakespeare's Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice, King Lear, and Macbeth, Goethe's Dichtung und Wahrheit, Michelangelo's Moses, E. T. A. Hoffman's "The Sand Man," Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, fairy tales, the effect of and the meaning of beauty, mythology, and the games of aestheticization. All texts are drawn from The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited by James Strachey. The volume includes the notes prepared for that edition by the editor.

In addition to the writings on Jensen's Gradiva and Medusa, the essays are: "Psychopathic Characters on the Stage," "The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words," "The Occurrence in Dreams of Material from Fairy Tales," "The Theme of the Three Caskets," "The Moses of Michelangelo," "Some Character Types Met with in Psycho-analytic Work," "On Transience," "A Mythological Parallel to a Visual Obsession," "A Childhood Recollection from Dichtung und Wahrheit," "The Uncanny," "Dostoevsky and Parricide," and "The Goethe Prize."

This book has two main subjects which are interwoven: the attitudes of selected poets (including Neruda, Rilke, Breton, Celan, and Artaud) to the "primitive" and the “archaic,” studied from an anthropologist's viewpoint; and a model of the processes whereby poetry is produced and received, built on the author’s successful careers as both poet and anthropologist. The book includes detailed biographical information about how Tarn went from being a French to an English to an American poet. It also reveals the effect of a double career and of these moves on a unique body of poetry and theoretical work. An extremely substantial interview, serving also as an introduction to, and discussion of, the essays, demonstrates that there is nothing like this work to be found elsewhere.

A collection of insightful and personal essays on the role of food in our lives

In an age of mass factory farming, processed and pre-packaged meals, and unprecedented food waste, how does one eat ethically?

Featuring a highly diverse ensemble of award-winning writers, chefs, farmers, activists, educators, and journalists, Good Eats invites readers to think about what it means to eat according to individual and collective values. These essays are not lectures about what you should eat, nor an advertisement for the latest diet. Instead, the contributors tell stories of real people—real bellies, real bodies—including the writers themselves, who seek to understand the experiences, cultures, histories, and systems that have shaped their eating and their ethics.

A wide array of themes, topics, and perspectives inform the selections within Good Eats, contributing to an enhanced understanding of how we eat as individuals and in groups. From factory farming and the exploitative labor practices surrounding chocolate production, to Indigenous foodways and home and community gardens, the topics featured in this collection describe the wider context of sustenance and ethical choices.

Good Eats will encourage you to become more mindful of what and how you eat—and to consider the larger systems and cultures that shape that eating. These essays turn mundane meals into remarkable symbols of how we live, encouraging each of us to find food that is both sustaining and sustainable.

Contributors include Ross Gay, DeLyssa Begay, Lynn Z. Bloom, Michael P. Branch, Nikky Finney, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Barbara J. King, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Leah Penniman, Adrienne Su, Ira Sukrungruang, Tina Vasquez, Nicole Walker, Thérèse Nelson, Lisa Knopp, Jane Brox, Maureen Stanton, Taté Walker, and many others.

Fully-illustrated, The Passenger collects the best new writing, photography, art and reportage from around the world.

IN THIS VOLUME: The mass is ended by Catherine Dunne and Caelainn Hogan・ The Way Back by Colum McCann・A Trip to Westeros by Mark O’Connell・plus: life on the margins of two unions and right in the middle of Brexit, making war on each other for 30 years while playing on the same national rugby team, emigrating to the great enemy or transforming the country one referendum at a time, digging peat bogs and building cottages, talking of the sea in Gaelic, and much more….. 

The Passenger sets off to discover a land full of charm and conflict, a country that in just a few decades has gone from being a poor, semi-theocratic society to a thriving economy free from the influence of the Catholic Church. 

With the 1998 peace agreements, the conflict between nationalists and unionists seemed, if not resolved, at least dormant.  But Brexit—with the ambiguous position it leaves Northern Ireland in—caused old tensions to resurface. The Passenger explores their ramifications in politics, society, culture, and sport.   

Meanwhile, south of the border, epochal transformation has seen a deeply patriarchal, conservative society give space to diversity, the only country in the world to enshrine gay marriage in law through a referendum.  And there’s a whole other Ireland abroad, an Irish diaspora that looks to the old country with new-found pride but doesn’t forget the ugliness it fled from.   

Memory and identity intertwine with the transformations—from globalisation to climate change—that are remodelling the Irish landscape, from the coastal communities under threat of disappearing together with the Irish language fishermen use to talk about the sea, while inland the peat bogs, until recently important sources of energy and jobs, are being abandoned. From Catherine Dunne to Colum McCann, Mark O’Connell and Sara Baume, Irish (but not only) writers and journalists tell of a country striving to stay a step ahead of time. 

A new series from Europa Editions, The Passenger collects the best new writing, photography, art and reportage from around the world.

IN THIS VOLUME: Order and Progress? by Jon Lee Anderson・Funk, Pride and Prejudice by Alberto Riva・On the River, I Was King by Eliane Brum・Also: the road that dissects the Amazon; the TV tycoon who shaped Brazilian history; the neo-Pentecostal community that is winning the hearts (and wallets) of Brazilians; politicised samba dancers, idealist gangsters and much more ...

In the second half of the 20th century Brazil made extraordinary contributions to music, sport, architecture. From “bossa nova,” to acrobatic soccer, to the daring architecture of Oscar Niemeyer and Lúcio Costa, the country seemed to embody a new, original vision of modernity, at once “fluid, agile, and complex.”

Seen from abroad, the victory of the far right in the 2018 elections was a rude awakening that suddenly turned the Brazilian dream into a nightmare. For locals, however, illusions had started fading long ago, amid paralyzing corruption, environmental degradation, racial discrimination, and escalating violence. Luckily Brazilians have not lost their desire to fight, minorities are still determined to assert their rights and, now that the glorious past is dead and buried, a desire to rebuild for the future is emerging. Today the challenge of telling the story of this extraordinary country consists in finding its enduring vitality amid the apparent melancholy.

“How can we define the indefinable? Is it possible to pin a single label on a country so multi-faceted that it appears almost schizophrenic?”―From “In Defense Of Fragmentation,” Michel Laub

• The original cover
• High-quality reproductions of the interior layout

• Structures the story in nine parts around the Greek Muses
• Deploys a variety of texts, documents, images, and forms of address and inquiry
• Links the women’s stories to explore the trauma of dislocation and the fragmentation of memory it causes

Shackleton Bailey’s Horatius text is a university set text used world-wide; in the US American market in particular, it became standard reading for students of Latin. From the first edition in 1985, Shackleton Bailey improved and updated his work with each new edition, especially with the 4th revised edition in 2001. Thus the editor has put his Horatius text on course to continue being used and disseminated in the coming decades.

No existing edition of the Odyssey provides users with adequate information about the readings of the best manuscripts or about the indirect tradition. This new one, designed to stand beside the author’s existing edition of the Iliad (BT 1998-2000), aims to meet the need. The Prolegomena include a comprehensive survey of doubtful points of Homeric orthography in the light of modern linguistic knowledge. The text is based on fresh collations of selected medieval manuscripts and makes use of over 500 papyrus fragments (more than half of them unpublished), with a careful reappraisal of all questions arising. Below the text there appear an extensive register of testimonia and a detailed critical apparatus. The volume is completed by an index of names. This is likely to be the standard edition of reference for decades to come.

Eine Neuedition der augustinischen Frühdialoge ist ein Desiderat für alle Forscher/innen, die sich mit der Fortwirkung der paganen literarischen und philosophischen Tradition in der christlichen Spätantike bzw. ihrer Rezeption durch die frühchristlichen Autoren befassen.

Innerhalb des umfangreichen Gesamtwerks Augustins sind die drei ersten erhaltenen Schriften Contra Academicos, De beata vita und De ordine von besonderem Interesse, weil hier deutlich wird, wie stark der spätere Bischof und katholische Dogmatiker in der Zeit unmittelbar nach seiner ‚Bekehrung‘ im Jahre 386 antiken Traditionen verpflichtet war. In der abendländischen Literatur- und Geistesgeschichte sind die Dialoge ein Zeugnis für die Transformation der von Cicero geprägten literarischen Formen und der Fragestellungen der hellenistischen Philosophie sowie die Möglichkeiten einer Integration von christlicher und platonischer Lehre.

Die Dialoge sind deshalb ein zentraler Gegenstand von Forschung und Lehre der Klassischen Philologie, Philosophie und (Kirchen-)Geschichte. Die Edition bietet erstmals einen nach streng wissenschaftlichen Kriterien und unter angemessener Berücksichtigung des gesamten Handschriftenbestands edierten Text.

The two volumes offer the first critical edition of the entire letter-collection of Michael Psellos; a total of 563 texts, including spuria, rewritings, and excerpts. Psellos (11th c., Constantinople) is a well-known figure among students of Byzantine culture and arguably the most prolific and influential middle Byzantine learned author. His letter-collection, preserved in 53 Byzantine and post-Byzantine manuscripts, grants us glimpses into the lives of well-known but also everyday Byzantines, sheding light upon Constantinopolitan networks of friendship and power and, more importantly, upon habits of rhetorical craftsmanship, literary imagination, and typologies of self.

Die nur fragmentarisch erhaltenen Historien Sallusts waren bisher ein Stiefkind der Forschung. Von diesem Werk existieren ca. 500 Bruchstücke, die teils in Handschriften, teils auf Papyri überliefert sind. Wie alle Geschichtswerke dieser Untergattung, deren erster bedeutender römischer Repräsentant Sallust ist, behandeln die Historien Zeitgeschichte. Im erhaltenen Teil werden die Ereignisse des Zeitraums von 78-67 v. Chr. beschrieben, eine Abfolge innenpolitischer Krisen, die letztlich zum Untergang der Republik und zur Etablierung des Prinzipats unter Augustus führten: Dazu gehören die Aufstände des Konsuls Lepidus in Italien und des Sertorius in Spanien sowie der noch berühmtere Sklavenaufstand unter der Führung des Spartacus. Sallust beschreibt diese Krisen und analysiert ihre Ursachen, welche er (in der für ihn typischen tief pessimistischen Sichtweise) im persönlichen und moralischen Bereich zu finden meint. Ferner erfährt der Leser vom erfolgreichen Kampf des Pompeius gegen die Piraten, welche im ersten Jahrhundert v. Chr. fast den gesamten Bereich des östlichen Mittelmeers unsicher machten, sowie vom Krieg gegen den König Mithridates von Pontos, einen der letzten hellenistischen Potentaten, dessen Reich die Römer eroberten.

To the Reader:
This little book, reader, that we give you now has at once the taste of gall and honey mixed with salt. If it pleases your palate, come as a guest. This feast has been prepared for you. If not, please go away. I did not mean to invite you to the feast.

Joachim du Bellay (1522-60) was one of the most important poets of the Renaissance and remains a cornerstone of the French literary tradition. In this monumental bilingual edition Richard Helgerson collects The Regrets and The Antiquities of Rome, two sonnet sequences du Bellay wrote during the more than four years he spent in Rome and that he published immediately on his return to France in 1558, along with three Latin elegies he also wrote in Rome and The Defense and Enrichment of the French Language, his earlier manifesto for the new poetry he and his friend Pierre de Ronsard were then about to launch. The Regrets is a vibrant, often moving, and by turns nostalgic and satiric account of du Bellay's stay at the papal court. The Antiquities is also concerned with Rome, but in a very different way: not as a quotidian record of the poet's experience of the modern city but as a profound meditation on the ruin of an ancient empire.

In imitation of Petrarch, sonnet sequences were a prime marker of the new poetry all over Europe. But there are no other sequences like du Bellay's, none that leave love aside and express such a varied range of emotions and ideas. And du Bellay's Defense is in its own way no less remarkable and no less preoccupied with the classical heritage and its Rome: a bold call for a new French poetry that would rival and even surpass that of antiquity.

Publius Vergilius Maro (70-19 B.C.), known in English as Virgil, was perhaps the single greatest poet of the Roman empire—a friend to the emperor Augustus and the beneficiary of wealthy and powerful patrons. Most famous for his epic of the founding of Rome, the Aeneid, he wrote two other collections of poems: the Georgics and the Bucolics, or Eclogues.

The Eclogues were Virgil's first published poems. Ancient sources say that he spent three years composing and revising them at about the age of thirty. Though these poems begin a sequence that continues with the Georgics and culminates in the Aeneid, they are no less elegant in style or less profound in insight than the later, more extensive works. These intricate and highly polished variations on the idea of the pastoral poem, as practiced by earlier Greek poets, mix political, social, historical, artistic, and moral commentary in musical Latin that exerted a profound influence on subsequent Western poetry.

Poet Len Krisak's vibrant metric translation captures the music of Virgil's richly textured verse by employing rhyme and other sonic devices. The result is English poetry rather than translated prose. Presenting the English on facing pages with the original Latin, Virgil's Eclogues also features an introduction by scholar Gregson Davis that situates the poems in the time in which they were created.

The great poetic tradition of pre-Christian Scandinavia is known to us almost exclusively though the Poetic Edda. The poems originated in Iceland, Norway, and Greenland between the ninth and thirteenth centuries, when they were compiled in a unique manuscript known as the Codex Regius.

The poems are primarily lyrical rather than narrative. Terry's readable translation includes the magnificent cosmological poem Völuspá ("The Sibyl's Prophecy"), didactic poems concerned with mythology and the everyday conduct of life, and heroic poems, of which an important group is concerned with the story of Sigurd and Brynhild.

Poems of the Elder Edda will appeal to students of Old Norse, Icelandic, and Medieval literature, as well as to general readers of poetry.

The Penn Greek Drama Series presents original literary translations of the entire corpus of classical Greek drama: tragedies, comedies, and satyr plays. It is the only contemporary series of all the surviving work of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, and Menander.

Aristophanes wrote most of his comedic masterpieces during the Peloponnesian War, parodying the tumultuous politics and society of that time with trademark innuendoes and bawdy stagings and dialogue. In these plays, Aristophanes brings every rhetorical strategem into play to treat the reader to stories of one man's attempt to create a "war-free zone," the rescue of the imprisoned Peace on the back of a giant dung beetle, a satire of Euripides's sympathies for women, and the hustling and healing of a blind and destitute Wealth in order to redistribute the world's riches.

Translations are by Jack Flavin (Acharnians), Fred Beake (Peace), David Slavitt (Celebrating Ladies), and Palmer Bovie (Wealth). The volume includes an introduction by Ralph Rosen, Professor of Classics at the University of Pennsylvania.

This play was one of the first examples of Indian literature to be seen in Europe; it attracted considerable attention (among others, from Goethe), and indeed pained surprise that such a sophisticated art-form could have developed without the rest of the world noticing. A good deal of that surprise will be revived by the hitherto untranslated Kashmirian recension.
Kali·dasa's The Recognition of Shakúntala is a play that scarcely needs introduction. Among the first works of Sanskrit literature translated into European languages, its skilful plot of thwarted love and eventual redemption has long charmed audiences around the world. Shakúntala's story is a leitmotiv that recurs in many works of Indian literature and culminates in the master Kali·dasa's drama for the stage.
Co-published by New York University Press and the JJC Foundation
For more on this title and other titles in the Clay Sanskrit series, please visit http://www.claysanskritlibrary.org

The second volume of Jina·ratna's thirteenth-century The Epitome of Queen Lilávati completes his story. Embodied souls undergo all too human adventures in a succession of lives, as they advance to final release. The primary purpose of Jain narrative literature was to edify lay people through amusement; consequently the stories are racy, and in some cases the moralizing element is rather tenuous.
Co-published by New York University Press and the JJC Foundation
For more on this title and other titles in the Clay Sanskrit series, please visit http://www.claysanskritlibrary.org

Budha·svamin tells the epic tale of the youthful exploits of prince Naravahanadatta. The reader is taken from royal palaces to flying sorcerers' mountain fastnesses via courtesans' bedrooms and merchant ships. A fast and witty narrative which provides a fascinating insight into ancient India.
Budha·svamin's The Emperor of the Sorcerers is a racy telling of the celebrated lost Indian narrative cycle The Long Story, framed by Nara·váhana·datta's magical adventures on his quest to become Emperor of the Sorcerers. It is indeed a great story, as its Sanskrit title declares. Epic in scope and scale, it has everything that a great story should: adventure, romance, suspense, intrigue, tragedy and comedy.
Co-published by New York University Press and the JJC Foundation
For more on this title and other titles in the Clay Sanskrit series, please visit http://www.claysanskritlibrary.org

Including poetry whose masterful artistry addresses themes such as love, Indian epic and religion with as much aesthetic appeal as thematic, the poetry included in this set contains the poetry of well-known poets such as Vedánta Déshika while giving a voice to the work of other important writers such as Bhanu·datta who have been given less modern attention.
Included in this set:
Bhatti’s Poem: The Death of Rávana
By Bhatti. Translated by Oliver Fallon.
550 pages / 978-0-8147-2778-2
The Birth of Kumára
By Kali·dasa. Translated by David Smith.
360 pages / 978-0-8147-4008-8
“Bouquet of Rasa” & “River of Rasa”
By Bhanu·datta. Translated by Sheldon I. Pollock.
475 pages / 978-0-8147-6755-9
Love Lyrics
By Ámaru and Bhartri·hari. Translated by Greg Bailey. By Bílhana. Edited and translated by Richard F. Gombrich.
327 pages / 978-0-8147-9938-3
Messenger Poems
By Kali·dasa, Dhoyi, and Rupa Go·svamin. Edited and translated by Sir James Mallinson.
293 pages / 978-0-8147-5714-7
Princess Kadámbari
Volume 1
By Bana. Translated by David Smith.
490 pages / 978-0-8147-4080-4
The Rise of Wisdom Moon
Krishna·mishra. Translated by Matthew Kapstein. With a foreword by J. N. Mohanty.
350 pages / 978-0-8147-4838-1
“Self-Surrender,” “Peace,” “Compassion,” and “The Mission of the Goose”: Poems and Prayers from South India
Appayya Díkshita, Nilakantha Díkshita, and Vedánta Déshika. Translated by Yigal Bronner and David Shulman. With a foreword by Gieve Patel.
316 pages / 978-0-8147-4110-8
Seven Hundred Elegant Verses
By Go·várdhana. Translated by Friedhelm Hardy.
360 pages / 978-0-8147-3687-6

Rama goes to the monkey capital of Kishkíndha to seek help in finding Sita, and meets Hánuman, the greatest of the monkey heroes. There are two claimants for the monkey throne, Valin and Sugríva; Rama helps Sugríva win the throne, and in return Sugríva promises to help in the search for Sita. The monkey hordes set out in every direction to scour the world, but without success until an old vulture tells them she is in Lanka. Hánuman promises to leap over the ocean to Lanka to pursue the search.
Co-published by New York University Press and the JJC Foundation
For more on this title and other titles in the Clay Sanskrit series, please visit http://www.claysanskritlibrary.org

The aristocrat who wrote this vigorous political play eschewed sentimentality in favor of realistic characterization and forceful action. It is 316 BCE, one year after Chandra·gupta Maurya, aided by his subtle minister Chánakya, has seized the kingdom of Mágadha from the last king of the Nanda dynasty. Rákshasa, Nanda’s incorruptible minister, flees abroad and plots his vengeance, while Chánakya seeks to win him over to honor Chandra·gupta Maurya as his new king.
The aristocrat who wrote this vigorous political play eschewed sentimentality in favor of realistic characterization and forceful action. It is 316 BCE, one year after Chandra·gupta Maurya, aided by his subtle minister Chanákya, has seized the kingdom of Mágadha from the last king of the Nanda dynasty. Rákshasa, Nanda's incorruptible minister, flees abroad and plots his vengeance, while Chanákya seeks to win him over to honor Chandra·gupta Maurya as his new king.
Co-published by New York University Press and the JJC Foundation
For more on this title and other titles in the Clay Sanskrit series, please visit http://www.claysanskritlibrary.org

This play satirizes various religions in Kashmir and their place in the politics of King Shankaravarman (883–902). The leading character is a young and dynamic orthodox graduate, whose career starts as a glorious campaign against the heretic Buddhists, Jains, and other antisocial sects. By the end of the play he realizes that the interests of the monarch do not encourage such inquisitional rigor.
Unique in Sanskrit literature, Jayánta Bhatta's play, Much Ado About Religion, is a curious mixture of fiction and history, of scathing satire and intriguing philosophical argumentation. The play satirizes various religions in Kashmir and their place in the politics of King Shánkara·varman (883-902 CE). The leading character, Sankárshana, is a young and dynamic orthodox graduate of Vedic studies, whose career starts as a glorious campaign against the heretic Buddhists, Jains and other antisocial sects.
Co-published by New York University Press and the JJC Foundation
For more on this title and other titles in the Clay Sanskrit series, please visit http://www.claysanskritlibrary.org

Its frivolous subject may have been the reason why Malavika and Agni mitra is sometimes considered to be the least significant of the three dramas of Kali dasa, the poet laureate of Indian antiquity who probably lived in the fifth century CE. Yet the play’s lively and playful plot more than makes up for its lack of deities, heroic prowess and pathos. The machinations of King Agni mitra’s jester to help him add a dancing girl to his harem in spite of the subtle intrigues of the two jealous queens carry the gallant hero through hope and despair to the happy ending.

In India's great epic Maha·bhárata, the eighth book, “Karna,”; recounts the events that occurred during the mighty hero Karna’s two days as general of the Káurava army. This second volume resumes on the war's seventeenth and penultimate day. This will be a momentous day for the Bhárata clans and especially for a number of their most distinguished heroes, with some of the epic’s most telegraphed events reaching their climax. Not only will the epic's most anticipated duel between its greatest champions Árjuna and Karna be played out to its cruel and tragic end, but one of the more gruesome episodes in the epic will also take place with Duhshásana meeting the fate that has long awaited him since his brazen mistreatment of Dráupadi in the assembly hall.
Co-published by New York University Press and the JJC Foundation
For more on this title and other titles in the Clay Sanskrit series, please visit http://www.claysanskritlibrary.org

“Bhishma,” the sixth book of the eighteen-book epic The Maha•bhárata, narrates the first ten days of the great war between the Káuravas and the Pándavas. This first volume covers four days from the beginning of the great battle and includes the famous “Bhágavad•gita (“The Song of the Lord”), presented here within its original epic context. In this “bible” of Indian civilization the charioteer Krishna empowers his disciple Árjuna to resolve his personal dilemma: whether to follow his righteous duty as a warrior and slay his opponent relatives in the just battle, or to abstain from fighting and renounce the warrior code to which he is born.

The Pándavas believe they have completed the terms of their exile, though Duryódhana claims that they did not live unknown for the full thirteenth year, since Árjuna was recognized in the battle at the end of the preceding book, Viráta. While the Pándavas and Kurus make their preparations for war they organize a series of embassies to negotiate peace. This volume constantly highlights the inevitability of conflict and the futility of negotiation. Most characters are concerned that war between family cannot fail to be sinful. Contained herein is the “Sanat·sujatíya,” a philosophical passage to rival the “Bhagavad·gita.” Like the “Bhagavad·gita,” the “Sanat·sujatíya” tells that karma will not chain one in the cycle of rebirth, if one refrains from desire. Through understanding the truth of non-duality, that the world is mere illusion, one is subsumed into eternal existence with Brahman.
Co-published by New York University Press and the JJC Foundation
For more on this title and other titles in the Clay Sanskrit series, please visit http://www.claysanskritlibrary.org

This second half of Bhishma describes the events from the beginning of the fifth day till the end of the tenth of the great battle between the Káuravas and the Pándavas. Despite grandfather Bhishma’s appeal to conclude peace with the Pándavas, Duryódhana continues the bloody battle. The key strategist is general Bhishma, commander of the Káurava forces. Even though he is compelled to fight on the side of the Káuravas, Bhishma’s sympathies are with the Pándavas. After the ninth day of war, when Bhishma has wreaked havoc with their troops, the Pándavas realise that they will be unable to win as long as invincible Bhishma is alive. Bhishma willingly reveals to them how he can be destroyed. Strictly observing the warrior code, he will never fight with Shikhándin, because he was originally born a woman. Bhishma advises the Pándava brothers that Árjuna should strike him from behind Shikhándin’s back, and they follow the grandfather’s advice.

Dreiser's careful preservation of his papers bears new fruit with the publication of his personal diaries for the years 1902-26. This volume presents all seven of Dreiser's hitherto unpublished American diaries, the intermittent journals he kept during the most productive years of his literary career. Together they constitute a revealing self-portrait as well as a valuable commentary on the American scene during the first quarter of the twentieth century. They offer reflections on turn-of-the-century Philadelphia, the American South and Mid-West, Greenwich Village of the nineteen-teens, and Hollywood of the twenties. The diaries begin in 1902, when Dreiser was at a low point after the "suppression" of Sister Carrie, and continue until 1926, when he was enjoying the greatest success of his career with An American Tragedy.

This publication constitutes in its entirety a new source for biographical and critical study. This is particularly true of the diaries covering Dreiser's experience in Philadelphia, Greenwich Village, and with Helen Richardson—all of which were not available to previous biographers. The present Introduction by Professor Riggio is the first biographical narrative to make use of these materials. Future biographers will now be able to speak with more assurance of Dreiser's whereabouts, the people he knew, what he was reading, which writings were in progress, and of his fascinating private affairs in general. In addition, these diaries will be of interest to students of Dreiser's literary art, as they reveal subtle aspects of how Dreiser viewed the external world and transmuted it in his daily creative efforts.

PHILADELPHIA, the 1840s: a corrupt banker disowns his dissolute son, who then reappears as a hardened smuggler in the contraband slave trade. Another son, hidden from his father since birth and condemned as a former felon, falls in with a ferocious street gang led by his elder brother and his revenge-hungry comrade from Cuba. His adopted sister, a beautiful actress, is kidnapped, and her remorseful black captor becomes her savior as his tavern is engulfed in flames. Vendetta, gang violence, racial tensions, and international intrigue collide in an explosive novella based on the events leading up to an infamous 1849 Philadelphia race riot. The Killers takes the reader on a fast-paced journey from the hallowed halls of academia at Yale College to the dismal solitary cells of Eastern State Penitentiary and through southwest Philadelphia's community of free African Americans. Though the book's violence was ignited by the particulars of Philadelphia life and politics, the flames were fanned by nationwide anxieties about race, labor, immigration, and sexuality that emerged in the young republic.

Penned by fiery novelist, labor activist, and reformer George Lippard (1822-1854) and first serialized in 1849, The Killers was the work of a wildly popular writer who outsold Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne in his lifetime. Long out of print, the novella now appears in an edition supplemented with a brief biography of the author, an untangling of the book's complex textual history, and excerpts from related contemporaneous publications. Editors Matt Cohen and Edlie L. Wong set the scene of an antebellum Philadelphia rife with racial and class divisions, implicated in the international slave trade, and immersed in Cuban annexation schemes to frame this compact and compelling tale.

Serving up in a short form the same heady mix of sensational narrative, local color, and impassioned politics found in Lippard's sprawling The Quaker City, or The Monks of Monks Hall, The Killers is here brought back to lurid life.

A compelling set of short stories from the author of World War I classic, All Quiet on the Western Front

German-American novelist Erich Maria Remarque captured the emotional anguish of a generation in his World War I masterpiece, All Quiet on the Western Front, as well as in an impressive selection of novels, plays, and short stories. This exquisite collection revives Remarque’s unforgettable voice, presenting a series of short stories that have long ago faded from public memory.

From the haunting description of an abandoned battlefield to the pain of losing a loved one in the war to soldiers’ struggles with what we now recognize as PTSD, the stories offer an unflinching glimpse into the physical, emotional, and even spiritual implications of World War I. In this collection, we follow the trials of naïve war widow Annette Stoll, reflect on the power of small acts of kindness toward a dying soldier, and join Johann Bartok, a weary prisoner of war, in his struggle to reunite with his wife.

Although a century has passed since the end of the Great War, Remarque’s writing offers a timeless reflection on the many costs of war. Eight Stories offers a beautiful tribute to the pain that war inflicts on soldiers and civilians alike, and resurrects the work of a master author whose legacy – like the war itself – will endure for generations to come.

Collected stories from renowned and emerging voices writing fiction, poetry, and dramatic prose in the aftermath of 9/11

New York is a city of writers. And when the city was attacked on 9/11, its writers began to do what writers do, they began to look and feel and think and write, began to struggle to process an event unimaginable before, and even after, it happened. The work of journalists appeared immediately, in news reports, commentaries, and personal essays. But no single collection has yet recorded how New York writers of fiction, poetry, and dramatic prose have responded to 9/11.

Now, in 110 Stories, Ulrich Baer has gathered a multi-hued range of voices that convey, with vivid immediacy and heightened imagination, the shock and loss suffered in September. From a stunning lineup of 110 renowned and emerging writers-including Paul Auster, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Edwidge Danticat, Vivian Gornick, Phillip Lopate, Dennis Nurkse, Melvin Bukiet, Susan Wheeler-these stories give readers not so much an analysis of what happened as the very shape and texture of a city in crisis, what it felt like to be here, the external and internal damage that the city and its inhabitants absorbed in the space and the aftermath of a few unforgettable hours. As A.M. Homes says in one of the book's eyewitness accounts, "There is no place to put this experience, no folder in the mental hard drive that says, 'catastrophe.' It is not something that you want to remember, not something that you want to forget." This collection testifies to the power of poetry and storytelling to preserve and give meaning to what seems overwhelming. It showcases the literary imagination in its capacity to gauge the impact of 9/11 on how we view the world.

Just as the stories of the World Trade towers were filled with people from all walks of life, the stories collected here reflect New York's true diversity, its boundless complexity and polyglot energy, its regenerative imagination, and its spirit of solidarity and endurance.

The editor’s proceeds will be donated to charity. Cover art donated by Art Spiegelman.
List of Contributors: Humera Afridi, Ammiel Alcalay, Elena Alexander, Meena Alexander, Jeffery Renard Allen, Roberta Allen, Jonathan Ames, Darren Aronofsky, Paul Auster, Jennifer Belle, Jenifer Berman, Charles Bernstein, Star Black, Breyten Breytenbach, Melvin Jules Bukiet, Peter Carey, Lawrence Chua, Ira Cohen, Imraan Coovadia, Edwidge Danticat, Alice Elliot, Eric Darton, Lydia Davis, Samuel R. Delany, Maggie Dubris, Rinde Eckert, Janice Eidus, Masood Farivar, Carolyn Ferrell, Richard Foreman, Deborah Garrison, Amitav Ghosh, James Gibbons, Carol Gilligan, Thea Goodman, Vivian Gornick, Tim Griffin, Lev Grossman, John Guare, Sean Gullette, Jessica Hagedorn, Kimiko Hahn, Nathalie Handal, Carey Harrison, Joshua Henkin, Tony Hiss, David Hollander, A.M. Homes, Richard Howard, Laird Hunt, Siri Hustvedt, John Keene, John Kelly, Wayne Koestenbaum, Richard Kostelanetz, Guy Lesser, Jonathan Lethem, Jocelyn Lieu, Tan Lin, Sam Lipsyte, Phillip Lopate, Karen Malpede, Charles McNulty, Pablo Medina, Ellen Miller, Paul D. Miller/DJ Spooky, Mark Jay, Tova Mirvis, Albert Mobilio, Alex Molot, Mary Morris, Tracie Morris, Anna Moschovakis, Richard Eoin Nash, Josip Novakovich, Dennis Nurkse, Geoffrey O'Brien, Larry O'Connor, Robert Polito, Nelly Reifler, Rose-Myriam Réjouis, Roxana Robinson, Avital Ronell, Daniel Asa Rose, Joe Salvatore, Grace Schulman, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Dani Shapiro, Akhil Sharma, Suzan Sherman, Jenefer Shute, Hal Sirowitz, Pamela Sneed, Chris Spain, Art Spiegelman, Catharine R. Stimpson, Liz Swados, Lynne Tillman, Mike Topp, David Trinidad, Val Vinokurov, Chuck Wachtel, Mac Wellman, Owen West, Rachel Wetzsteon, Susan Wheeler, Peter Wortsman, John Yau, Christopher Yu.

General Series Editors: Gay Wilson Allen and Sculley Bradley
Originally published between 1961 and 1984, and now available in paperback for the first time, the critically acclaimed Collected Writings of Walt Whitman captures every facet of one of America's most important poets.
The two-volume set of Prose Works 1892 proves that Whitman's prose has a quality no less original and distinctive than his poetry.
Originally written and published as newspaper dispatches, Specimen Days is a collection of Whitman’s on-the-spot notes of his experiences as a volunteer nurse in the hospitals in and around Washington during the Civil War. It contains, too, his nature studies, jotted down at the Stafford Farm near Camden during the years of convalescence after his paralysis in 1873. In these records of his observations, Whitman’s love and devoted care of the individual soldiers overshadow his concern for the course of the war itself and his interest in its major personalities. He sees, above all else, the wounded men in front of him, and these he describes in the simple, direct language that unmistakably marks his poetry as well.

General Series Editors: Gay Wilson Allen and Sculley Bradley
Originally published between 1961 and 1984, and now available in paperback for the first time, the critically acclaimed Collected Writings of Walt Whitman captures every facet of one of America's most important poets.
Daybooks and Notebooks is an invaluable source for reference on Whitman's daily activities. This sixteen-year record supplements the biographical information provided in the six volumes of Whitman’s Correspondence, functioning as an account book, diary, journal, commonplace book, and notebook all in one.
When Whitman began to keep them, the Daybooks were a personal record of predominantly business matters. As William White wrote in the introduction, “He was not only the author but the publisher of his works: he was likewise his own business manager, ship, and promoter. Whatever records he kept, of his sales and distribution, of printing and binding figures, of poetry and prose he sent to newspapers and magazines . . . he entered on the right-hand pages.” Volume I thus offers a rare look at Whitman as a businessman, tending as much to practical matters as to art.

General Series Editors: Gay Wilson Allen and Sculley Bradley
Originally published between 1961 and 1984, and now available in paperback for the first time, the critically acclaimed Collected Writings of Walt Whitman captures every facet of one of America’s most important poets.
Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts gathers Whitman’s autobiographical notes, his views on contemporary politics, and the writings he made as he educated himself in ancient history, religion and mythology, health (including phrenology), and word-study. Included is material on his Civil War experiences, his love of Abraham Lincoln, his descriptions of various trips to the West and South and of the cities in which he resided, his generally pessimistic view of America’s prospects in the Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, and his reminiscences during his final years and his preoccupation with the increasing ailments that came with old age. Many of these notes served as sources for his poetry—first drafts of some of the poems are included as they appear in the notes—and as the basis for his lectures.

General Series Editors: Gay Wilson Allen and Sculley Bradley
Originally published between 1961 and 1984, and now available in paperback for the first time, the critically acclaimed Collected Writings of Walt Whitman captures every facet of one of America’s most important poets.
Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts gathers Whitman’s autobiographical notes, his views on contemporary politics, and the writings he made as he educated himself in ancient history, religion and mythology, health (including phrenology), and word-study. Included is material on his Civil War experiences, his love of Abraham Lincoln, his descriptions of various trips to the West and South and of the cities in which he resided, his generally pessimistic view of America’s prospects in the Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, and his reminiscences during his final years and his preoccupation with the increasing ailments that came with old age. Many of these notes served as sources for his poetry—first drafts of some of the poems are included as they appear in the notes—and as the basis for his lectures.

Throughout his life, Walt Whitman continually revised and re-released Leaves of Grass. He added and deleted words, emended lines, divided poems, dropped and created titles, and shifted the order of poems. Leaves of Grass: A Textual Variorum of the Printed Poems includes all the variants that Whitman ever published, from the collection’s first appearance in 1855 through the posthumous “Old Age Echoes” annex printed in 1897. Each edition was unique, with its own character and emphasis, and the Textual Variorum enables scholars to follow the development of both the individual poems and the work as a whole.
Volume I contains introductory material, including a chronology of the poems and a summary of all the editions and annexes, along with the poems from 1855 and 1856. Volume II includes the poems from 1860 through 1867, including the first appearance of “When Lilacs Last in the Door-Yard Bloom’d” and “O Captain! my Captain!” Volume III features the poems 1870–1891, plus the “Old Ages Annex” and an index to the three-volume set.

General Series Editors: Gay Wilson Allen and Sculley Bradley
Originally published between 1961 and 1984, and now available in paperback for the first time, the critically acclaimed Collected Writings of Walt Whitman captures every facet of one of America’s most important poets.
Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts gathers Whitman’s autobiographical notes, his views on contemporary politics, and the writings he made as he educated himself in ancient history, religion and mythology, health (including phrenology), and word-study. Included is material on his Civil War experiences, his love of Abraham Lincoln, his descriptions of various trips to the West and South and of the cities in which he resided, his generally pessimistic view of America’s prospects in the Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, and his reminiscences during his final years and his preoccupation with the increasing ailments that came with old age. Many of these notes served as sources for his poetry—first drafts of some of the poems are included as they appear in the notes—and as the basis for his lectures.