Alcimus Ecdicius Avitus, bishop of Vienne from c.494 to c.518, is known for his poetic works, but his Latin prose style has led to some neglect of his letters. This first complete translation of the letters into English gives access to an important source for the history of the Burgundian Kingdom in the early sixth century.

The first complete collection of the known artwork of Polish writer and artist Schulz (1892-1941). Drawing from the Viennese Expressionists and the Old Masters, Schultz portrays his sense of personal and cultural degradation through scenes of grotesque eroticism and masochism. About 200 bandw drawings and sketches are reproduced. No index. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

In this new selection and translation, Peter Wortsman mines Franz Kafka's entire opus of short prose--including works published in the author's brief lifetime, posthumously published stories, journals, and letters--for narratives that sound the imaginative depths of the great German-Jewish scribe from Prague. It is the first volume in English to consider his deeply strange, resonantly humane letters and journal entries alongside his classic short fiction and lyrical vignettes "Transformed" is a vivid retranslation of one of Kafka's signature stories, "Die Verwandlung," commonly rendered in English as "The Metamorphosis." Composed of short, black comic parables, fables, fairy tales, and reflections, Konundrums also includes classic stories like "In the Penal Colony," Kafka's prescient foreshadowing of the nightmare of the Twentieth Century, refreshing the writer's mythic storytelling powers for a new generation of readers. Contents: • Words are Miserable Miners of Meaning • Letter to Ernst Rowohlt • Reflections • Concerning Parables • Children on the Country Road • The Spinning Top • The Street-Side Window • At Night • Unhappiness • Clothes Make the Man • On the Inability to Write • From Somewhere in the Middle • I Can Also Laugh • The Need to Be Alone • So I Sat at My Stately Desk • A Writer's Quandary • Give it Up! • Eleven Sons • Paris Outing • The Bridge • The Trees • The Truth About Sancho Pansa • The Silence of the Sirens • Prometheus • Poseidon • The Municipal Coat of Arms • A Message from the Emperor • The Next Village Over • First Sorrow • The Hunger Artist • Josephine, Our Meistersinger, or the Music of Mice • Investigations of a Dog • A Report to an Academy • A Hybrid • Transformed • In the Penal Colony • From The Burrow • Selected Aphorisms • Selected Last Conversation Shreds • In the Caves of the Unconscious: K is for Kafka (An Afterword) • The Back of Words (A Post Script)

A selection of prose by “Portugal’s greatest writer of the twentieth century . . . as addictive, and endearing, as Borges and Calvino” (The Washington Post Book World). Building on the wonderful Fernando Pessoa & Co.: Selected Poems, which was acclaimed by Booklist as “a beautiful one-volume course in the soul of the twentieth century,” translator Richard Zenith has now edited and translated selections from Pessoa’s prose, offering a second volume of this forgotten master’s flights of imagination and melancholy wit. Though known primarily as a poet, Pessoa wrote prose in several languages and every genre—the novel, short stories, letters, and essays. The pieces collected here span intellectual inquiry, Platonic dialogue, and literary rivalries between Pessoa’s many alter egos—a diverse cast of literary voices he called ‘heteronyms’—who launch movements and write manifestos. There are appreciations of Shakespeare, Dickens, Wilde, and Joyce; critical essays in which one heteronym derides the work of another; experiments with automatic writing; and works that toy with the occult. Also included is a generous selection from Pessoa’s masterpiece, The Book of Disquiet, freshly translated by Richard Zenith from newly discovered materials. Fernando Pessoa was one of the greatest exponents of modernism. The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa is an important contribution to literature that brings back to life a forgotten but crucial part of the canon.

This first English-language edition of Federico Garcia Lorca's Selected Letters presents an intimate autobiographical record of the Spanish poet from the age of twenty to a month before his death at the hands of Franco's forces in 1936. "I was born for my friends," Lorca wrote to Melchor Fernández Almagro in 1926, and these letters reveal the personality his friends found so magical. ("A happiness, a brilliance..." Pablo Neruda called him.) Lorca was by turns sympathetic, generous, demanding, whimsical, insecure, and always lyrical. Over the nineteen years covered in this selection, he maintained a correspondence with his closest friends, particularly his childhood companion Melchor Fernández Almagro and his fellow poet Jorge Guillén, and wrote in concentrated bursts to many others. He could be playful with Salvador Dali's younger sister Ana Maria; deferential to composer Manuel de Falla; lively and descriptive with his family; and exasperating to Barcelona critic Sebastian Gasch as he poured out literary plans and solicited favors, ever impassioned but good-natured. With their frequent enclosures of poems and scenes from plays, the letters also chronicle Lorca's growth as an artist, from self-doubting romantic dilettante to confident, internationally respected playwright and poet. Begun at Columbia University under the aegis of Lorca's brother, Francisco Garcia Lorca, the translation and selection of these letters has been made by David Gershator, poet, teacher, and co-founder of the Downtown Poets Co-op. Dr. Gershator has also provided an informative biographical introduction.

The letters of John Keats are, T. S. Eliot remarked, "what letters ought to be; the fine things come in unexpectedly, neither introduced nor shown out, but between trifle and trifle." This new edition, which features four rediscovered letters, three of which are being published here for the first time, affords readers the pleasure of the poet's "trifles" as well as the surprise of his most famous ideas emerging unpredictably. Unlike other editions, this selection includes letters to Keats and among his friends, lending greater perspective to an epistolary portrait of the poet. It also offers a revealing look at his "posthumous existence," the period of Keats's illness in Italy, painstakingly recorded in a series of moving letters by Keats's deathbed companion, Joseph Severn. Other letters by Dr. James Clark, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Richard Woodhouse--omitted from other selections of Keats's letters--offer valuable additional testimony concerning Keats the man. Edited for greater readability, with annotations reduced and punctuation and spelling judiciously modernized, this selection recreates the spontaneity with which these letters were originally written.