The Sonatas are the memoirs of the Marquis o f Bradomin, a Galician Don Juan. Where the Spring and Summer Sonatas showed Bradomin at the height of his powers, we now find him in the autumn and winter of his life '

In 1934, with World War II on the horizon, writer Jacob Glatstein (1896–1971) traveled from his home in America to his native Poland to visit his dying mother. One of the foremost Yiddish poets of the day, he used his journey as the basis for two highly autobiographical novellas (translated as The Glatstein Chronicles) in which he intertwines childhood memories with observations of growing anti-Semitism in Europe. Glatstein’s accounts “stretch like a tightrope across a chasm,” writes preeminent Yiddish scholar Ruth Wisse in the Introduction. In Book One, Homeward Bound, the narrator, Yash, recounts his voyage to his birthplace in Poland and the array of international travelers he meets along the way. Book Two, Homecoming at Twilight, resumes after his mother’s funeral and ends with Yash’s impending return to the United States, a Jew with an American passport who recognizes the ominous history he is traversing. The Glatstein Chronicles is at once insightful reportage of the year after Hitler came to power, a reflection by a leading intellectual on contemporary culture and events, and the closest thing we have to a memoir by the boy from Lublin, Poland, who became one of the finest poets of the twentieth century.

During the final decades of the nineteenth century, a common mind-set emerged among many intellectuals--"la decadence." Many novels and novellas of the period were populated with protagonists who were fragile, refined, self-absorbed, and preoccupied with a trivially exquisite aesthetic. A Baedeker of Decadence presents thirty-two international works of literary decadence written between 1884 and 1927. George C. Schoolfield, a world authority on the decadent novel, offers an entertaining and wide-ranging commentary on this highly significant literary and cultural phenomenon. Schoolfield tracks down the symptoms of decadence in narrative works written in more than a dozen languages, providing synopses and passages in English translation to give a sense of each author's style and tone. Schoolfield throws new light on the close intellectual kinship of authors from August Strindberg to Bram Stoker to Thomas Mann, and on the ingredients, themes, motifs, and preconceptions that characterized decadent literature.

The Mousetales are a group of whimsical, playful episodes that tell of children who are aided in nighttime distress by dedicated mouses of the Children?s Mouse Brigade. Henry and Ginger and their fellow Brigade members are involved in adventure after adventure as they ensure that children not suffer sleepless nights or fear of the dark. The Brigade accomplishes its missions through inventive approaches, prompted by unique mousevision and mousememory that calm the children, thereby making them feel safe. They are ably assisted in their efforts by a mousenet piggybacked to the humans? net; by their comprehension of English and, for some members, of French (although they cannot speak either language, only their native mousespeak); and, for travel, by the US Postal Service, on whose trucks the mouses hitch rides. Mousetale 1 relates the history of the Brigade and introduces Henry, the principal male mouse, and his training and first mission. Mousetale 2 recounts Henry?s introduction to Ginger, the principal female mouse, a connection that unfortunately gets off on the wrong paw for them but ends well for several children. Mousetale 3 tells of Henry and Ginger?s engagement and marriage and the children saved owing to Ginger?s intervention. Mousetale 4 introduces us to a little girl who is in distress on account of her father (and 4 is significant because we make the acquaintance of four identical baby mouses, all girls). Mousetale 5 and Mousetale 6 take us to the next generation as Henry and Ginger?s daughters also become members in good standing of the Children?s Mouse Brigade.

Take Six is a celebration of six remarkable Portuguese women writers: Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, Agustina Bessa-Luís, Maria Judite de Carvalho, Hélia Correia, Teolinda Gersão and Lídia Jorge. They are all past mistresses of the short story form, and their subject matter ranges from finding one’s inner fox to a failed suicide attempt to a grandmother and grandson battling the wind on a beach. Stories and styles are all very different, but what the writers have in common is their ability to take everyday life and look at it afresh, so that even a trip on a ferry or an encounter with a stranger or a child’s attempt to please her father become imbued with mystery and humour and sometimes tragedy. Relatively few women writers are translated into English, and this anthology is an attempt to rectify that imbalance and to introduce readers to some truly captivating tales from Portugal.

The Decadent Movement which flourished in the 1890s produced some of Europe’s most striking and exotic works of literature. The Decadents, convinced that civilisation was in a state of terminal decline, refused to rebel as the Romantics had, but set forth instead to cultivate the pleasures of calculated perversity and to seek the artificial paradise of drug-induced hallucination. J.-K. Huysmans described Decadence as a ‘black feast’ and The Second Dedalus Book of Decadence offers a veritable banquet, with offerings from the major practitioners in France and England. It completes Brian Stableford seminal two-volume study of the decadent movement.