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The Inquisitors' Manual by Antonio Lobo Antunes, Translated by Richard Zenith (Grove Press) In his eleventh novel, Antonio Lobo Antunes, one of the great European literary masters, chronicles the decadence not just of a family but of an entire society -- a society morally and spiritually vitiated by four decades of totalitarian rule. Senhor Francisco, a once powerful state minister and a personal friend of the Portuguese dictator Salazar, is incapacitated by a stroke, and as he spends his last days in a nursing home in Lisbon , he reviews his life and his loves. More

American Literature, Volume II by William E. Cain (Penguin Academics Series: Pearson Longman) is a concise but complete introduction to American literature, with brief introductions, headnotes, and a wide range of selections provide a compact yet affordable text, that offers a wide array of authors and genres. It includes many classic and canonical writers, such as Mark Twain, Henry James, Willa Lather, Robert Frost, William Faulkner, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, and Ralph Ellison, as well as a highly diverse group of contemporary writers, such as John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates, Paula Gunn Allen, Yusef Komunyaaka, Joy Harjo, Rita Dove, Alberto Rios, David Mura, Aurora Levins Morales, Cathy Song, Li-Young Lee, and Sherman Alexie.   More

Subjecting Verses: Latin Love Elegy and the Emergence of the Real by Paul Allen Miller (Princeton University Press) It's always time for someone to discuss the context from which the genre of love elegy emerged. Paul Allen Miller shares his fascination with this poetry that emerged suddenly, sparked, and then disappeared all within a period of fifty years or so. His interpretations and methods of reading elegy are generally smart, though I remain disappointed that some of the uncertainty concerning love elegy finds a kind of analytical resolution in the clarity of psychoanalytic discourse. More

The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Swift edited by Christopher Fox (Cambridge Companions to Literature: Cambridge University Press) (HARDCOVER) explores crucial dimensions of Swift's life and works. As well as ensuring a broad coverage of Swift's writing--including early and later works as well as the better known and the lesser known - the Companion also offers a way into current critical and theoretical issues surrounding the author. Special emphasis is placed on Swift's vexed relationship with the land of his birth, Ireland ; and on his place as a political writer in a highly politicized age. More

The Library and Reading of Jonathan Swift: A Bio-Bibliographical Handbook, Part I Swift's Library in Four Volumes by Heinz J. Vienken Dirk F. Passmann (Peter Lang) The library of Jonathan Swift was sold by auction after his death in 1745. Fortunately, there was a catalogue of the auction, printed in 1746, so we know most of the books Swift owned at the time of his death. The catalogue lists a total of 657 lots. Long before that, Swift had formed a habit of drawing up lists of the books he had read or owned. The first extant, of his reading, dates from 1697/1698, when he was employed by his mentor Sir William Temple. Another inventory, of books he owned, Swift compiled in 1715. The Library and Reading of Jonathan Swift identifies the individual works and lists all authors represented in them in detail. More

The Continuum Encyclopedia of American Literature edited by Steven R. Serafin, Alfred Bendixen (Continuum) The history of American literature is what Van Wyck Brooks terms the story of its "makers and finders," those responsible for creating an "American" literature and those who provide meaning and understanding to the creative process. It is the story of a literature coming of age in search of definition and affirmation, extending many centuries from Native American oral and pictorial tradition to the literary expression of a new millennium. It is both reflection and representation of past and present: from exploration and discovery to settlement and colonization; from rebellion and independence to growth and maturity; from slavery and abolitionism to civil war and restoration; from expansion and industrial­ization to immigration and naturalization; from world war and recovery to nuclear capabil­ity and global diplomacy. Most importantly, it is the story of the American author shaping the scope and perception of American presence, purpose, and identity. More

Essays on Poetry by Ralph J. Mills (Dalkey Archive) Taken from throughout Mills's career, the essays collected in this volume delve into the work of such influential writers as Wallace Stevens, Denise Levertov, Samuel Beckett, Galway Kinnell, Edith Sitwell, Theodore Roethke, Karl Shapiro, Richard Wilbur, Isabella Gardner, James Wright, David Ignatow, Donald Hall, Robert Bly, Philip Levine, and Stanley Kunitz. Mills examines how the personal element informs the works of these writers and enables them "to speak to us, without impediment, from the deep center of a personal engagement with existence."

Ralph J. Mills, Jr. is a significant figure in contemporary poetry for his work as a poet, critic, and professor. His poetry collections include Living with Distance, A Window in Air, and March Light, which received the Carl Sandburg Award. He also edited the selected prose and letters of Theodore Roethke. From 1962 to 1965 he served as Assistant Professor and Associate Chairman of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago . He is professor emeritus of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago .

"Ralph Mills has the clearest of clear eyes, and knows exactly how to translate what is seen into what can be heard, so that we can share to an almost uncanny degree that crystalline vision."--Denise Levertov

How to Write Poetry: And Get It Published by Fred Sedgwick (Continuum) Plenty of people want to write poetry - yet while it is not difficult to write poetry badly, it is harder to write it well. In this guide Fred Sedgwick explains, with numerous examples from successful poets, how the creative process works, from the initial impulse to write all the way through to crafted and expressive poetry at the end.

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