After 1939, William Carlos Williams had embarked on the great original experiment that led to his magnificent, faulted master-work "Paterson", and the work in the second volume of "The Complete Poems" provides a luminous record of his developing stra...

There are few forms in which so much authority has been invested with so little reflection as the sentence. Though a fundamental unit of discourse, it has rarely been an explicit object of inquiry, often taking a back seat to concepts such as the wor...

French literature underwent radical changes in the sixteenth century. Edwin (Ned) M. Duval's scholarship focuses on teasing out hidden structures and symmetries in French Renaissance poetry and prose. In honor of Duval's literary "sleuthing", the con...

Spain's greatest living poet, Pere Gimferrer (b.1945) has written more than thirty books spanning verse, fiction, essay, and criticism. Though his earliest writings appeared in Spanish, in 1970 he began publishing in Catalan, and has alternated betwe...

When we catastrophize, we think the worst. We make too much of too little, or something of nothing.  Yet what looks simply like a bad habit, Gerard Passannante argues, was also a spur to some of the daring conceptual innovations and feats of imaginat...

A revolutionary take on the classic dystopian science fiction novel, "The Clone" inaugurates a new kind of writing in India. Priya Sarukkai Chabria weaves the tale of a fourteenth-generation clone in twenty-fourth-century India who struggles against...

Stella Vinitchi Radulescu's poetry dwells in spaces of paradox, seeking out the words, metaphors, and images that capture both the peaceful stillness of snow and the desperate cry of human experience. "A Cry in the Snow" often draws on these two fert...

Two decades ago a critic characterised Marius Kociejowski as a poet `whose imagination prowls the geographical boundaries of western culture'. He has a Polish name, was born in Canada, and lives in London where he collects other exiles, listens to th...

Not for sale in Estonia! Mr. Gica is the world's greatest barber. He holds the world record for sculptural hairstyling and has won three Olympic golds in neck massage. But his specialty is the shave. Mr. Gica's shop has six mirrors on the walls, si...

Not for sale in the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic! From "Howard's End" to "Brideshead Revisited", this book explores the leitmotif of the English country house in twentieth- and twenty-first-century fiction, with a focus on the works of E....