Max Jacob, central figure of early 20th-century Parisian bohemia along with Picasso and Apollinaire, was active at the emergence of Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism, Dada and Surrealism. But in spite of his close connections with modernism - epitomized by his seminal book of prose poems Le Cornet a des (1916) - Jacob remains a marginal figure. His Breton-Jewish otherness, conversion to Catholicism, and death under the Nazis in 1944 adds to the enigma and shifts the critical focus further still. But Jacobs poetic playfulness - his many-faceted irony, wordplay, narrative heterogeneity, tragi-comedy, self- reflexivity and polyphony - may begin to offer insights into his esprit createur, which, true to the (post)modernist vision, is not to be found in the usual ways. For the aim of Max Jacob, connoisseur of traditional storytelling as well as spearhead of the literary vanguard, is to jolt the unconscious, the energetic kernel of creativity.

Max Jacob was born on July 12, 1876, at Quimper, Brittany, to Alsatian-Jewish parents of modest means, his father being a tailor and part-time antique dealer. Although Jacob proved at first to be a mediocre student, he displayed a lightning-like intelligence from an early age. He was also beset by numerous manias. Inordinately sensitive, he accused his schoolmates of persecuting him and complained that his brothers beat him and that his authoritarian mother mistreated him at home. -- Pg. XI.

Fables of the Self traces ideas of imagined selfhood through the lyric poetry of classical Greece and Rome, the modernist poetry of France, and modern and contemporary English and American lyrics. Rosanna Warren's work emerges from the tradition of British and American poet-critics such as William Empson, Donald Davie, and Randall Jarrell. Her readings of Sappho, Virgil, Baudelaire, Melville, Rimbaud, Mark Strand, and Louise Glück, among others, combine Helen Vendler's passionate attention to detail and something of Harold Bloom's panoramic view. Warren opposes both the literalizing, autobiographical approach to self in so-called confessional poetry and the other extreme of avant-garde erasures of self. Framing her critical studies between a memoir of childhood and a concluding journal entry, Warren has composed an occult autobiography, showing the imagination as a transfiguring and potentially moral force.

"One can only marvel at the instinct of Parisian painters to keep their art in the hands of poets."-Robert Motherwell. At the height of the Cubist movement in Paris, no fewer than fifteen significant poets kept company with the painters. "Every writer had his painter, " said Blaise Cendrars. "I myself had Delaunay and Liger, Max Jacob had Picasso, Reverdy Braque, and Apollinaire had everybody." The painters illustrated the poets' poems and painted their portraits; the poets wrote the painters' praise and defended them in journalistic wars. They loaned each other money, gave shelter to each other in times of need, inspired each other, and fortified each other's resolve through thick and thin. The Cubist Poets in Paris evokes the capital city of Cubism in all its flamboyant bustle. It includes groups of poems by Guillaume Apollinaire, Pierre Albert-Birot, Blaise Cendrars, Jean Cocteau, Sonia Delaunay, Paul Dermie, Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, Charlotte Gardelle, Vicente Huidobro, Max Jacob, Marie Laurencin, Hilhne Baronne d'Oettingen, Raymond Radiguet, Pierre Reverdy, and Andri Salmon. Each poem is presented in French and in English translation. Fifteen illustrations suggest the painters' close ties with the poets, including works by Juan Gris, Giorgio de Chirico, and Liopold Suvage. LeRoy C. Breunig has taught at Cornell University, Harvard, Columbia University, and at Barnard College, where he was Dean of Faculty and interim president. He has edited Guillaume Apollinaire's Chroniques d'art and Apollinaire on Art. His articles have appeared in Mercure de France, Comparative Literature, and Yale French Studies.

Now available in paperback for the first time, Jewish Writers of the Twentieth Century is both a comprehensive reference resource and a springboard for further study. This volume: examines canonical Jewish writers, less well-known authors of Yiddish and Hebrew, and emerging Israeli writers includes entries on figures as diverse as Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Tristan Tzara, Eugene Ionesco, Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, Arthur Miller, Saul Bellow, Nadine Gordimer, and Woody Allen contains introductory essays on Jewish-American writing, Holocaust literature and memoirs, Yiddish writing, and Anglo-Jewish literature provides a chronology of twentieth-century Jewish writers. Compiled by expert contributors, this book contains over 330 entries on individual authors, each consisting of a biography, a list of selected publications, a scholarly essay on their work and suggestions for further reading.

"Imbued with Caws's personal observations of the relationship between translators and the authors they translate, Surprised in Translation engages with central questions of language and meaning while extolling the virtues of translation and the joys of reading translations critically."--BOOK JACKET.