Focuses on postwar approaches to the past, the nature of collective memory, and issues of cultural memory in a transnational age. This title includes essays that probe points of contact between memories and legacies of genocide, colonialism, and slav...

One hundred years after his death, Tolstoy still inspires controversy with his notoriously complex narrative strategies. This book explores how and why Tolstoy has mystified interpreters and offers a look at his most famous works of fiction.

Poems vivifying nature have gripped people for centuries. From ancient Biblical times through to the present day, poetry has continuously drawn us to the natural world. In this thought-provoking book, John Felstiner explores the rich legacy of poems...

Many famous antique texts are misunderstood and many others have been completely dismissed, all because the literary style in which they were written is unfamiliar today. So argues Mary Douglas in this controversial study of ring composition, a techn...

Ken Chen is the 2009 winner of the annual Yale Younger Poets competition. These poems of maturation chronicle the poet's relationship with his immigrant family and his unknowing attempt to recapture the unity of youth through comically doomed love af...

Set at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when idleness was still looked upon by Russia's serf-owning rural gentry as a plausible and worthy goal, Ivan Goncharov's "Oblomov" follows the travails of an unlikely hero, a young aristocrat incapable...

"Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics" explores the intersection of poetry, national life, and national identity in Poland and Russia, from 1917 to the present. As a corrective to recent trends in criticism, acclaimed translator and critic Clare Cavanagh...

Poetry doesn't matter to most people, observes Jay Parini at the opening of this book. Undeterred, he commences a deeply felt meditation on poetry, its language and meaning, and its power to open minds and transform lives. By the end of the book, Par...

What does a library say about the mind of its owner? How do books map the intellectual interests, curiosities, tastes, and personalities of their readers? What does the collecting of books have in common with the practice of architecture? "Unpacking...

"White Guard", Mikhail Bulgakov's semi-autobiographical first novel, revolves around a Russian family in their home city of Kiev in 1918. Alexei, Elena, and Nikolka Turbin, adult siblings who have just lost their mother, find themselves plunged into...