Elias Petropoulos was the most controversial Greek writer of the twentieth century. Imprisoned three times during the Junta (1967-1974) and persecuted by Greek judges as late as the 1980s, this poet and "urban folklorist" produced a vast and groundbreaking oeuvre that continues to provoke extreme reactions from readers. Wielding his precise and provocative style on subject matter ranging from prison life, rebetika music, gay slang, traditional food and public hygiene, to the sociology of brothels, newspaper stands, moustaches, canes and gravestones, Petropoulos aggressively and rigorously challenged the narrow ways in which Greek culture was perceived.After arriving in Paris from the island of Samos in 1977, the American writer, critic and translator John Taylor tacked up a want ad in a Greek bookshop because he was seeking a collaborator for a translation project. Petropoulos, who emigrated to France in 1975, answered the want ad, and thus began a close working relationship that lasted until the author's death in 2003. This insider's portrait features translated excerpts of Petropoulos's writings, and discusses his ideas and methodology, woven together with touching reminiscences and observations about the man behind the sulphurous reputation. It is the first book to appear in English that deals so thoroughly and poetically with this enfant terrible of Modern Greek letters.

John Taylor's brilliant new book examines the work of many of the major poets who have deeply marked modern and contemporary European literature. Venturing far and wide from the France in which he has lived since the late 1970s, the polyglot writer-critic not only delves into the more widely translated literatures of Italy, Greece, Germany, and Austria, but also discovers impressive and overlooked work in Slovenia, Bosnia, Hungary, Finland, Norway, and the Netherlands in this book that ranges over nearly all of Europe, including Russia.While providing this stimulating and far-ranging critical panorama, Taylor brings to light key themes of European writing: the depth of everyday life, the quest of the thing-in-itself, metaphysical aspiration and anxiety, the dialectics of negativity and affirmation, subjectivity and self-effacement, and uprootedness as a category that is as ontological as it is geographical, historical, political, or cultural. The book pays careful attention to the intersection of writing and history (or politics), as several poets featured here have faced the Second World War, the Holocaust, Communism, the fall of Communism, or the war in the former Yugoslavia.Taylor gives the work of renowned, upcoming, and still little-known poets a thorough look, all the while scrutinizing recent translations of their verse. He highlights several poets who are also masters of the prose poem. He includes a few novelists who have fashioned a particularly original kind of poetic prose, that stylistic category that has proved so difficult for critics to define. Into the Heart of European Poetry should be of immediate interest to any reader curious about the aesthetic and philosophical ideas underlying major trends of contemporary European writing. In a day and age when much too little is translated and thus known about foreign literature, and when Europeans themselves are pondering the common denominators of their own culture, this book is a

When her teenage son disappears in the aftermath of a brutal murder, a determined mother sets out from her snow-covered nineteenth-century settlement to find him, an effort that is hampered by vigilante groups and the harrowing forces of nature. A first novel.

Everything this poet touches is volatile—the poet himself, the people and world around him, ideas and mythologies, the ghosts of memory and the dream of possible futures, all seem to burst into fragments. Mark Turcotte uses poetry to gather up the pieces—the shards of joy and grief, peace and doubt, strength and temptation, questions and answers—as he tries to define and rediscover what is lost when everyday life becomes explosive.

The Leave-Takers is a twenty-first-century American love story and a tale of internal migration to the Great Plains.