A collection of vital autobiographical pre-WWI prose from the great German-Jewish writer Never before translated into English, this trio of works finds one of the greatest German writers of the 20th century mythologizing her own pursuit of freedom in captivatingly original fiction. In The Peter Hille Book (1906), Else Lasker-Schüler offers an elegy for her arch-bohemian mentor. But this hypnotic blend of Nietzsche, fairy tale and paganism also celebrates the one Hille called 'Tino'--the author herself--and the electrifying uncertainties of the creative life. In the 1907 text The Nights of Tino of Baghdad she sends her alter ego on a heady voyage through an imagined 'Orient'. From the banks of the Nile the narrative advances across a wide emotional landscape, using Muslim and Jewish motifs to explore the commonalities of Semitic identity. Finally, Lasker-Schüler's avatar encounters dervishes, biblical figures and a 20-year-old foetus in The Prince of Thebes. Issued on the eve of World War One, this sequence of dark fables seethes with violence and eroticism, culminating in a great clash of civilizations in which Tino leads the charge. An insightful afterword details the genesis of these Three Prose Works in the context of the author's tumultuous life. Fiction.

Thanks to her acclaimed volume of poetry and prose published in France in 1555, Louise Labé (1522-66) remains one of the most important and influential women writers of the Continental Renaissance. Best known for her exquisite collection of love sonnets, Labé played off the Petrarchan male tradition with wit and irony, and her elegies respond with lyric skill to predecessors such as Sappho and Ovid. The first complete bilingual edition of this singular and broad-ranging female author, Complete Poetry and Prose also features the only translations of Labé's sonnets to follow the exacting rhyme patterns of the originals and the first rhymed translation of Labé's elegies in their entirety.