In works of Western literature ranging from Homer's "Odyssey" to Albee's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" The giving and taking of hospitality are sometimes pleasurable, but more often perilous. Heffernan traces this leitmotiv through the history of...

For about three thousand years comedy has applied a welcome humanist perspective to the world's religious beliefs and practices. From the ancient Greek comedies of Aristophanes, the famous poem by Lucretius and dialogues of Cicero to early modern and...

In Carlos Rojas' imaginative novel, the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca, murdered by Francoist rebels in August 1936, finds himself in an inferno that somehow resembles Breughel's Tower of Babel. He sits alone in a small theatre in this private he...

Set in the darkest years of the Pinochet dictatorship, "La Vida Doble" is the story of Lorena, a leftist militant who arrives at a merciless turning point when every choice she confronts is impossible. Captured by agents of the Chilean repression, wi...

This groundbreaking collection presents for the first time in English a substantial body of poetry from the world of Jewish mysticism. Taking up Gershom Scholem's call to plumb the "tremendous poetic potential concealed" in the Kabbalistic tradition,...

"Right from the start I picked her for a thief, although that day she didn't take anything...I knew she'd be back", the narrator/bookseller of "Severina" recalls in this novel's opening pages. Imagine a dark-haired book thief as alluring as she is da...

Eryn Green's "Eruv" is the latest winner of the oldest annual literary award in the United States, which originated in 1919 to showcase the works of exceptional American poets under the age of forty. Green joins an esteemed roster of past winners tha...

James Boswell (1740-1795), best known as the biographer of Samuel Johnson, was also a lawyer, journalist, diarist and an insightful chronicler of a pivotal epoch in Western history. This fascinating collection, edited by Paul Tankard, presents a gene...

Kiki Dimoula's poetry – the most praised and prized in contemporary Greek literature – is a paradox, both mysteriously intricate and widely popular. Her magic lens defamiliarizes all that is familiar, compressing distances between far-flung realms, c...

Considered by many to be among the greatest writers of the past hundred years, Polish novelist Witold Gombrowicz explores the modern predicament of exile and displacement in a disintegrating world in his acclaimed classic Trans-Atlantyk. Gombrowicz's...