Since his death almost seventy years ago, C. P. Cavafy has come to be recognized as one of the greatest poets of modern times. Elegiac, deeply sensual, and able to plumb the heart with language of immense richness, Cavafy evokes the great lost classical world of the Mediterranean with unparalleled beauty. Much of his poetry deals with love, specifically homosexual love. It speaks of human passions, the experience common to all mankind of love offered, sought, and lost. His verse is beautiful and embracing, and remains as alive and sensuous as it was when he wrote it. Theoharis Constantine Theoharis offers a new translation, one that presents Cavafy's work in the thematic order Cavafy wanted it published and emphasizes the tenderness and intensity of the love poems. Gore Vidal's foreword offers an explication of Cavafy's world, a valuable map for readers of what will be embraced as a signal volume of world poetry.

During his sojourn in England during the 1870s, a young Cavafy found himself enthralled by the aesthetic movement of cosmopolitan London. It was during these years that he encountered the canvases and personalities of Pre-Raphaelite painters, including Burne-Jones and Whistler, as well as works of aesthetic writers who were effecting a revolution in British literary culture and channeling influences from France that would gradually coalesce into an international decadent movement. In Reframing Decadence Peter Jeffreys returns us to this critical period of Cavafy's life, showing the poet's creative indebtedness to British and French avant-garde aesthetes whose collective impact on his poetry proved to be profound. In the process, Jeffreys offers a critical reappraisal of Cavafy’s relation to Victorian aestheticism and French literary decadence.Foremost among the tropes of decadence that captivated Cavafy were the decline of imperial Rome, the rise of Christianity, and the lingering twilight of Byzantium. The influence of Walter Pater on Cavafy’s view of classical and late-antique history was immense, inflected as it was with an unapologetic homoerotic aesthetic that Cavafy would adopt as his own, making Pater’s imaginary portraits an important touchstone for his own historicizing poetry. Cavafy would move beyond Pater to explore a more openly homoerotic sensuality but he never quite abandoned this rich Victorian legacy, one that contributed greatly to his emergence as a global poet. Jeffreys concludes by considering Cavafy’s current popularity as a gay poet and his curious relation to kitsch as manifest in his ongoing popularity via translation and visual media.

An extraordinary literary event: Daniel Mendelsohn’s acclaimed two-volume translation of the complete poems of C. P. Cavafy—including the first English translation of the poet’s final Unfinished Poems—now published in one handsome edition and featuring the fullest literary commentaries available in English, by the renowned critic, scholar, and international best-selling author of The Lost. No modern poet so vividly brought to life the history and culture of Mediterranean antiquity; no writer dared break, with such taut energy, the early-twentieth-century taboos surrounding homoerotic desire; no poet before or since has so gracefully melded elegy and irony as the Alexandrian Greek poet Constantine Cavafy (1863–1933). Whether advising Odysseus on his return to Ithaca or confronting the poet with the ghosts of his youth, these verses brilliantly make the historical personal—and vice versa. To his profound exploration of longing and loneliness, fate and loss, memory and identity, Cavafy brings the historian’s assessing eye along with the poet’s compassionate heart. After more than a decade of work and study, Mendelsohn—a classicist who alone among Cavafy’s translators shares the poet’s deep intimacy with the ancient world—gives readers full access to the genius of Cavafy’s verse: the sensuous rhymes, rich assonances, and strong rhythms of the original Greek that have eluded previous translators. Complete with the Unfinished Poems that Cavafy left in drafts when he died—a remarkable, hitherto unknown discovery that remained in the Cavafy Archive in Athens for decades—and with an in-depth introduction and a helpful commentary that situates each work in a rich historical, literary, and biographical context, this revelatory translation is a cause for celebration: the definitive presentation of Cavafy in English.

In his introduction to a revolutionary theory of the cosmos, Martin Bojowald shows how the big bang theory may give way to the big bounce theory, which describes our universe as an eternal series of expansions and contractions, with no beginning and no end. In 2000, Bojowald, then a twenty-seven-year-old postdoctoral student at Pennsylvania State University, used a relatively new theory called loop quantum gravity—a cunning combination of Einstein’s theory of gravity with quantum mechanics—to create a simple model of the universe. Loop quantum cosmology, or LQC, was born, and with it, a theory that managed to do something even Einstein’s general theory of relativity had failed to do—illuminate the very birth of the universe.

On Earth, 99% of species are extinct. Extinctus is a world where all vanished species live and die as they did when they inhabited Earth. The battle for survival occurs daily, as it did for millennium, in these hostile and violent epochs. Journey back in time to a world, one filled with fierce predators and harsh climates. Can modern humans survive in these inimical yet magnificent worlds? In Extinctus, the reader travels to three different time periods in the evolution of planet Earth. It takes the reader to the Paleocene Epoch (65-55 million years ago), the Miocene Epoch (23-5 million years ago) and the Pleistocene Epoch (2 million years ago-10,000 years ago). Based off the fossil record, each Epoch in Extinctus is a snapshot in time, a snapshot that reconstructs the emergence of the mammals, the insects, the climate, and the environmental changes over millions of years. How would modern humans fit into these violent worlds? During these expansive periods in geological time, Earth was full of monstrous predatory creatures. For millions of years, the planet stayed an extremely dangerous place for early humans. Extinctus brings to life the evolutionary plight of the mammals as they re-populate the Earth after the disappearance of the dinosaurs. Six humans must survive continual predation by an endless array of creatures as they try to survive in their new surroundings. Extinctus recounts the story of the youngest of three generations of humans to enter Extinctus. Can the youngest member of the family help save the human species? Or will Homo sapiens disappear from the record? With the help of magnificent creatures, with mysterious capabilities, known as Light Extinctos, can the humans thwart the sinister plan of Thylac, the Dark Extincto, who with the help of his delusional army seeks to destroy humanity?

The author, a computer science professor diagnosed with terminal cancer, explores his life, the lessons that he has learned, how he has worked to achieve his childhood dreams, and the effect of his diagnosis on him and his family.

A remarkable discovery, an extraordinary literary event: the never-before translated Unfinished Poems of the great Alexandrian Greek poet Constantine Cavafy, published for the first time in English alongside a revelatory new rendering of the Collected Poems—translated and annotated by the renowned critic, classicist, and award-winning author of The Lost. When he died in 1933 at the age of seventy, C. P. Cavafy left the drafts of thirty poems among his papers—some of them masterly, nearly completed verses, others less finished texts, all accompanied by notes and variants that offer tantalizing glimpses of the poet’s sometimes years-long method of rewriting and revision. These remarkable poems, each meticulously filed in its own dossier by the poet, remained in the Cavafy Archive in Athens for decades before being published in a definitive scholarly edition in Greek in 1994. Now, with the cooperation and support of the Archive, Daniel Mendelsohn brings this hitherto unknown creative outpouring to English readers for the first time. Beautiful works in their own right—from a six-line verse on the “birth of a poem” to a longer work that brilliantly paints the autumn of Byzantium in unexpectedly erotic colors—these unfinished poems provide a thrilling window into Cavafy’s writing process during the last decade of his life, the years of his greatest production. They brilliantly explore, often in new ways, the poet’s well-established themes: identity and time, the agonies of desire and the ironies of history, cultural decline and reappropriation of the past. And, like the Collected Poems, the Unfinished Poems offers a substantial introduction and notes that provide helpful historical, textual, and literary background for each poem. This splendid translation, together with the Collected Poems, is a cause for celebration—the definitive presentation of Cavafy in English.