"I Swear I Saw This" records visionary anthropologist Michael Taussig's reflections on the fieldwork notebooks he kept through forty years of travels in Colombia. Taking as a starting point a drawing he made in Medellin in 2006 – as well as its capti...

The adventures and challenges of Sir Gawain, King Arthur's nephew and a knight at the Round Table, including his duel with the mysterious Green Knight, are among the oldest and best known of Arthurian stories. Here the distinguished author and poet J...

In today's academe, the fields of science and literature are considered unconnected, one relying on raw data and fact, the other focusing on fiction. During the period between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, however, the two fields were not so...

Three decades of controversy in Shakespeare studies can be summed up in a single question: Was Shakespeare one of a kind? On one side of the debate are the Shakespeare lovers, the bardolatrists, who insist on Shakespeare's timeless preeminence as an...

Conservative thinkers of the early Middle Ages conceived of sensual gratification as a demonic snare contrived to debase the higher faculties of humanity, and they identified pagan writing as one of the primary conduits of decadence. Two aspects of t...

In his first book of poems since his highly acclaimed "June-tree", Peter Balakian continues to define himself as one of the most distinctive voices of his generation. Exploring history, self, and imagination, as well as his ongoing concerns with cata...

In a country where much of the prominent poetry seeks to affirm the fleeting present and its changing values, John Peck's poetry comes as an important, if unlikely, gift. Peck's verse deals the cards of the fragmentary, ideogramic, juxtapositional, a...

"Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus' son Achilleus / and its devastation". For sixty years, that's how Homer has begun the "Iliad" in English, in Richmond Lattimore's faithful translation – the gold standard for generations of students and general re...

Jennifer Clarvoe's second book, "Counter-Amores", wrestles with and against love. The poems in the title series talk back to Ovid's Amores, and, in talking back, take charge, take delight, and take revenge. They suggest that we discover what we love...

One of America's most eminent nature poets, Robert Pack has won the acclaim of writers, critics, and readers from Stephen Jay Gould to Mark Strand. In his latest collection, "Laughter Before Sleep", Pack carries on his themes of family and friends, r...