E. B. Ashton

Complete Stories is an enchanting compilation marked by Lispector’s sharp and stylistically playful use of language.

A giant of Latin American writers, well served by this absorbing translation of some of his most acclaimed works … luminous.

The Invention of Influence retains tangible traces of [Cole’s] work as a translator of the poetry of Hebrew mystics. These poems extend the mystics’ project, seeking the spiritual self and finding it, quite often, in the threshold between ‘world’ and ‘word.’

At once as intimate as Creeley and as visionary as Duncan … Levertov has always written a poetry that ranges from the specifically personal to the searchingly mystical.

Beckett-like emptiness that gnaws at the conscience … Ridgway has clearly arrived to trouble our sleep with wit and violence.

This literary joyride is thoroughly appealing.

Bird … captures a realm full of unexplained wonders, tenacious love, and tragedies for which there is no prevention and only limited recovery.

… the novel is compulsively readable. We are fascinated even as we are repelled by these characters’ moral corruption and their slow, inevitable decline.

By turns (and twists) comic, whimsical and sinister (but always sparkingly sharp), this latest collection of short stories … nicely reflects her marvelously varied career.

Endo’s sentences are as ephemeral (and as beautiful) as mist, yet they evoke sights, sounds, tastes and smells to make the ordinary exquisite. Like a mouthwatering appetizer, this small sampler will stimulate a hunger for more of Endo’s work.

Steiner’s brilliance is revealed in every one of these essays, showcasing his vast topical knowledge alongside his deft ability to pin down the significance of history’s most important people, events and ideas.

Almeida’s refreshing voice and playful irony ring clearly in this translation from the Portuguese by Sheila Glaser.

… this retrospective collection … should remind them [US readers] of Déry’s central place in modern Hungarian literature.

In this enigmatic collection, she writes in the artless prose of fairy tales and employs a curious dreamlike logic in her narratives.

Blisteringly intelligent.

It seems clear that Williams is the twentieth-century poet who has done most to influence our very conception of what poetry should do, and how much it does not need to.

Many other versions of this story exist. But what makes Ohannessian’s account, at once tragic and beautiful, stand out is that it has been carefully but unaffectedly sketched by an author who understands that much of life is beyond understanding.

Maso is not content to muse on the relationship between life and art; she brings to life a ‘bombardment of images and sounds,’ fashioning a pattern of astonishing complexity and beauty. The tough-mindedness, originality and wit of her perceptions are intoxicating.

Clearly evident is Green’s peculiar, wayward genius.

Spare, wry and sometimes biting, the 12 stories in this accomplished debut are narrated from perspectives that, no matter how knowledgeable or observant, remain those of the outsider.

This anthology impressively represents the ways New Directions has blurred the boundaries between one poet’s–and perhaps one nation’s–concerns and those of another, offering a fresh look at the international poetry scene.

Levertov and Williams began corresponding when Levertov was still in her 20s and Williams already a sixtyish veteran of the modernist scene, yet it was clear who was teaching whom: a woman of powerful certainties, Levertov soon had Williams altering lines in his published plays.

This early novel by a writer who has since become to be viewed as a master has moments of sparkling intelligence and clarity.

Scenarios for a Mixed Landscape: …the lyric mode proves him to be a poet of rare expansiveness and imaginative gifts.

…Meticulously crafted stories marked by wit, emotion, memory, and lost grandeur.

Paz’s poetry is a seismograph of our century’s turbulence, a crossroads where East meets West.

The cream of the legendary wordsmith’s stories, in a low-priced edition.

Bertholf’s selections are so attuned to the essentials of Duncan’s writing… that even those familiar with the whole body of Duncan’s work will become more sensitized to his recurring imagery and consistency of thought pattern through this collection.

Mishima is like Stendhal in his precise psychological analyses, like Dostoevsky in his explorations of darkly destructive personalities.