"The first great adventure story in the Western canon, The Odyssey is a poem about violence and the aftermath of war; about wealth, poverty, and power; about marriage and family; about travelers, hospitality, and the yearning for home. In this fresh, authoritative version--the first English translation of The Odyssey by a woman--this stirring tale of shipwrecks, monsters, and magic comes alive in an entirely new way. Written in iambic pentameter verse...

The last surviving victim of an experiment that implanted the subjects' heads with electrodes that decipher coded messages is the unnamed narrator. Half the chapters are set in Tokyo, where the narrator negotiates underground worlds populated by INKlings, dodges opponents of both sides of a raging high-tech infowar, and engages in an affair with a beautiful librarian with a gargantuan appetite. In alternating chapters he tries to reunite with his...

More than any other Persian poet, it is perhaps Hafiz who accesses the mystical, healing dimensions of poetry. With this collection of 250 of Hafiz's most intimate poems, translator Ladinsky has succeeded in capturing the essence of one of Islam's greatest poetic and religious voices. Each line imparts the qualities of this spiritual teacher: an audacious love that empowers lives, profound knowledge, wild generosity, and a sweet, playful genius unparalleled...

"A swashbuckling tale set in the Caribbean world at the time of the French revolution, Explosion in a Cathedral focuses on Victor Hugues, a historical figure who led the naval assault to take back the island of Guadeloupe from the English at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In Carpentier's telling, this piratical figure walks into the lives of the wealthy orphans Esteban and Sofia and casts them abruptly into the midst of the immense changes...

"Whether romantic, realistic, surreal, mocking or blackly comic, poetry has been at the heart of Russian life and culture for centuries. This new anthology presents the best of Russian verse, from the 'Golden Age' of Pushkin and his contemporaries, through the symbolist Alexander Blok and twentieth-century masters such as Osip Mandelstam and Marina Tsvetaeva, and on to lesser-known and modern works."--Back cover.

"When you live in an adopted country, when you're an exile in your own body, names are simply lists that dull the reality of death." Cars on Fire, Mónica Ramón Ríos's electric, uncompromising English-language debut, unfolds through a series of female characters-the writer, the patient, the immigrant, the professor, the student-whose identities are messy and ever-shifting. A speechwriter is employed writing for would-be dictators, but plays in a...

A collection of stories and poems by contemporary writers from Iran, Iraq, North Korea, and other countries the United States considers enemies that have been translated into English.

This translation of Tagore's "song offerings" makes the complete collection of 157 inspiring mystical texts available to a broad audience for the first time. Tagore, considered by some as one of the ten most overlooked spiritual writers of our time, wrote in a universal manner that appeals to a variety of religious perspectives, both Eastern and Western. Often quoted by contemporary spiritual writers, his poetry has a simplicity and depth that remains...