Duino Elegies are the ten magnificent poems that defined the Austrian poet, Rainer Maria Rilke's artistic vision of life, death, eternity, and the human condition. Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe invited Rilke to stay at her castle in Duino, on the coast of the Adriatic Sea near Trieste. He stayed alone in the castle for about four months and, on a cold day in January, 1912, when he was contemplating how to answer a business letter that he received, he walked out into the freezing windy morning and, walking along a path by the bastions looking down at the violent waves of the Adriatic a couple of hundred feet below him, he heard someone speak, but when he turned around, he was alone and the voice that he heard spoke the famous opening lines of the First Elegy: “Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel/ Ordnungen?” (“Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the Angelic/ Orders?”). Dr. Gartner presents a new translation of Rilke's magnum opus as well as of a selection of ten famous poems from Rilke's collected works.

The acclaimed short stories of the master Japanese writer.

Liu Xiaobo died in 2017, the first Nobel Laureate to do so in detention since 1935. Liu was a pre-eminent Chinese literary critic, professor and humanitarian activist. After his hunger strike in Tiananmen Square in June 1989 he became a thorn in the side of the Chinese government, helping to write the Charter 08 manifesto calling for free speech, democratic elections and basic human rights. He was arrested and convicted on charges of 'incitement to subversion', and sentenced to eleven years in prison. The following year, 2010, during this fourth prison term, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 'his prolonged non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China'. Neither he nor his wife was allowed to travel to Oslo, and the Chinese government blocked all news stories of the prize and intimidated Liu's friends and family. June Fourth Elegies is a collection of the poems Liu Xiaobo wrote each year on the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. An extraordinarily moving testimony and an historical document of singular importance, it is dedicated to 'the Tiananmen Mothers and for those who can remember'. In this bilingual volume, Liu's poetry is for the first time published freely in both English translation and in the Chinese original.