'Reading Brodsky's essays is like a conversation with an immensely erudite, hugely entertaining and witty (and often very funny) interlocutor' Wall Street Journal Watermark is Joseph Brodsky's witty, intelligent, moving and elegant portrait of Venice. Looking at every aspect of the city, from its waterways, streets and architecture to its food, politics and people, Brodsky captures its magnificence and beauty, and recalls his own memories of the place he called home for many winters, as he remembers friends, lovers and enemies he has encountered. Above all, he reflects with great poetic force on how the rising tide of time affects city and inhabitants alike. Watermark is an unforgettable piece of writing, and a wonderful evocation of a remarkable, unique city. Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature

Grantland Book of the Year Vol. 1 Brooklyn, A Year of Favorites, Jason Diamond Book Riot, 2014’s Must-Read Books from Indie Presses "Valeria Luiselli is a writer of formidable talent, destined to be an important voice in Latin American letters. Her vision and language are precise, and the power of her intellect is in evidence on every page."—Daniel Alarcón "I'm completely captivated by the beauty of the paragraphs, the elegance of the prose, the joy in the written word, and the literary sense of this author."—Enrique Vilas-Matas Valeria Luiselli is an evening cyclist; a literary tourist in Venice, searching for Joseph Brodsky's tomb; an excavator of her own artifacts, unpacking from a move. In essays that are as companionable as they are ambitious, she uses the city to exercise a roving, meandering intelligence, seeking out the questions embedded in our human landscapes. Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City in 1983 and grew up in South Africa. Her novel and essays have been translated into many languages and her work has appeared in publications including the New York Times, Granta, and McSweeney's. Some of her recent projects include a ballet performed by the New York City Ballet in Lincoln Center; a pedestrian sound installation for the Serpentine Gallery in London; and a novella in installments for workers in a juice factory in Mexico. She lives in New York City.

"On Grief and Reason c"ollects the essays Joseph Brodsky wrote between his reception of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1987 and his death in January 1996. The volume includes his Nobel lecture; essays on the condition of exile, the nature of history, the art of reading, and the notion of the poet as an inveterate DonGiovanni; his "Immodest Proposal" for the future of poetry, written when he was serving as Poet Laureate of the United States; a consideration of the poetry of Robert Frost; Brodsky's searching estimations of Hardy, Horace, and Rilke; and an affecting memoir of Stephen Spender.

Christmas poems by the Nobel Laureate To Him, all things seemed enormous: His mother's breast, the steam out of the ox's nostrils, Caspar, Balthazar, Melchior, the team of Magi, the presents heaped by the door, ajar. He was but a dot, and a dot was the star. --from "Star of the Nativity" Joseph Brodsky, who jokingly referred to himself as "a Christian by correspondence," endeavored from the time he "first took to writing poems seriously," to write a poem for every Christmas. He said in an interview: "What is remarkable about Christmas? The fact that what we're dealing with here is the calculation of life--or, at the very least, existence--in the consciousness of an individual, a specific individual." He continued, "I liked that concentration of everything in one place--which is what you have in that cave scene." There resulted a remarkable sequence of poems about time, eternity, and love, spanning a lifetime of metaphysical reflection and formal invention. In Nativity Poems six superb poets in English have come together to translate the ten as yet untranslated poems from this sequence, and the poems are presented in English in their entirety in a beautiful, pocket-sized edition illustrated with Mikhail Lemkhin's photographs of winter-time St. Petersburg.

From the myth of Arcadia through to the twenty-first century, ideas about sustainability – how we imagine better urban environments – remain persistently relevant, and raise recurring questions. How do cities evolve as complex spaces nurturing both urban creativity and the fortuitous art of discovery, and by which mechanisms do they foster imagination and innovation? While past utopias were conceived in terms of an ideal geometry, contemporary exemplary models of urban design seek technological solutions of optimal organisation. The Venice Variations explores Venice as a prototypical city that may hold unique answers to the ancient narrative of utopia. Venice was not the result of a preconceived ideal but the pragmatic outcome of social and economic networks of communication. Its urban creativity, though, came to represent the quintessential combination of place and institutions of its time. Through a discussion of Venice and two other works owing their inspiration to this city – Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Le Corbusier’s Venice Hospital – Sophia Psarra describes Venice as a system that starts to resemble a highly probabilistic ‘algorithm’, that is, a structure with a small number of rules capable of producing a large number of variations. The rapidly escalating processes of urban development around our big cities share many of the motivations for survival, shelter and trade that brought Venice into existence. Rather than seeing these places as problems to be solved, we need to understand how urban complexity can evolve, as happened from its unprepossessing origins in the marshes of the Venetian lagoon to the ‘model city’ that endured a thousand years. This book frees Venice from stereotypical representations, revealing its generative capacity to inform potential other ‘Venices’ for the future.

Includes essays on Russian writers, Western poets, politics, and the author's native city, Leningrad.

With nearly 200 poems, several of them never before published in book form, this is the essential volume of the Nobel Laureate's work.