In her opening remarks to a class of five Harvard students, Elizabeth Bishop warned: “I’m not a very good teacher. So to make sure you learn something in this class I am going to ask each of you to memorize at least ten lines a week... Read More

This anthology is the life work of a single translator inspired by a harper’s song carved in hieroglyphics in a tomb more than three thousand years ago: “I have heard the words of Imhotep, and Hordjedef, too, / retold time and again... Read More

Selected from Gowanus, the web magazine devoted to the contemporary writings of third-world authors, this anthology enlightens its audience with a thought-provoking mélange of essays and short stories. The reader is constantly... Read More

As a genre, creative nonfiction is not only teasingly resistant to easy definition, but provocatively open-ended in its scope and sweep. With twenty-five short essays, Saltzman displays a deft touch at eliciting the revelations that can... Read More

The night was dark, the village small. The young men jostled each other as they made their way into the Shinto shrine, pressing together so tightly that the entire mass of humanity hovered a few feet above the ground. The Festival of... Read More

“Those who return from these darkling territories bring with them messages. These messages are poetry. Let the interpretation begin.” With these words O’Grady suggests that the “vision of the inaccessible” is a sacred and... Read More

Primo Levi, who died in 1987 in what is believed to be a suicide, was a survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp and one of the most profound writers to emerge from the Holocaust. Levi’s testimony to the horrors he suffered can be... Read More

This author was once the wise-fool of poetry criticism. His “Reaper Essays,” taken from the journal he co-edited with Rodney McDowell, was filled with an equal amount of hubris and whimsy. Years later Jarman’s newest collection of... Read More