The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead

Beat movement icon and visionary poet, Allen Ginsberg broke boundaries with his fearless, pyrotechnic verse. This new collection brings together the famous poems that made his name as a defining figure of the counterculture. They include the apocalyptic "Howl", which became the subject of an obscenity trial when it was first published in 1956; the moving lament for his dead mother, "Kaddish"; the ...

Julian Green was born to American parents in Paris in 1900, and spent most of his life in the French capital. Paris is an extraordinary, lyrical love letter to the city, taking the reader on an imaginative journey around its secret stairways, courtyards, alleys and hidden places. Whether evoking the cool of a deserted church on a hot summer's day, remembering Notre Dame in a winter storm in 1...

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In this richly diverse collection of essays, Joseph Brodsky casts a reflective eye on his experiences of early life in Russia and exile in America. With dazzling erudition, he explores subjects as varied as the dynamic of poetry, the nature of history and the plight of the emigre writer. There is also the humorous tale of a disastrous trip to Brazil, advice to students, an homage to Marcus Aureliu...

Dean Corde is a man of position and authority at a Chicago university. He accompanies his wife to Bucharest where her mother, a celebrated figure, lies dying in a state hospital. As he tries to help her grapple with an unfeeling bureaucracy, news filters through to him of problems left behind in Chicago. A student had been been murdered and Corde had directed that charges be pressed against two bl...

A classic armchair mystery, THE RIVERSIDE VILLAS MURDER has for its hero a 14-year-old boy, Peter Furneaux. Like all 14 year olds he is hovering hopefully on the brink between sexual inexperience and initiation, and in this book, under our very eyes, Peter suddenly becomes an adult! A crime, truly murderous, is committed by an unknown and almost unidentifiable assailant. Only Peter begins to g...

Finding the theatre of the 1920s lacking in bite and conviction, Thornton Wilder set out to bring back realism and to celebrate the innocent, simple and religious. Yet he also tried to endow individual experience with cosmic significance and "Our Town" is both an affectionate portrait of American life and 'an attempt to find a value above all price for the smallest events in our daily life�...

Kenneth Trachtenberg, the witty and eccentric narrator of "More Die of Heartbreak", has left his native Paris for the Midwest. He has come to be near his beloved uncle, the world-renowned botanist Benn Crader, self-described "plant visionary". While his studies take him around the world, Benn, a restless spirit, has not been able to satisfy his longings after his first marriage and lives from affa...

Miss Amelia Evans, tall, strong and nobody's fool runs a small-town store. Except for a disastrous marriage that lasted just ten days, she has always lived alone. The Cousin Lymon appears from nowhere, a strutting hunchback who steals Miss Amelia's heart. Together they transform the store into a lively, popular cafe where the locals come to drink and gossip. But when her rejected and...