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?[Bomarzo] is a novel that will make any reader happy.... [A] novel to be read aloud, with the whole family gathered around.? ?Roberto BolanoA lavishly written gothic historical fantasy novel that centers around Pier Francesco Orsini, the tortured duke of Bomarzo and creator of the Italian town?s famously bizarre ?Garden of the Monsters.?Pier Francesco Orsini, duke of Bomarzo, created a park of monsters in which the nightmares of the Renaissance are preserved, set in stone yet still writhingly alive. In Bomarzo, Manuel Mujica Lainez?one of the great Argentine novelists of the twentieth century?re-creates the dark and legendary duke as a brilliant memoirist recalling the trials and travails of his sixteenth-century life from a modern point of view (Freudian psychoanalysis and Lolita both put in an appearance) while ensconced in a city that sounds suspiciously like Mujica Lainez?s own Buenos Aires.Bomarzo is a historical novel in the grand manner, a first-person portrait of an aristocratic hunchback bullied by his family and determined to prove a villain (a portrait so convincing that Edmund Wilson assumed it to be fact). It is also, of course, a commentary on such historical fictions. But above all it?s an immersive story told in a sumptuous style?a bit as if Proust were rewriting one of Poe?s Italian tales?as Gregory Rabassa?s translation (out of print for many years) conveys beautifully.

A collection of dazzling, playful, and linguistically inventive poetry by one of Germany''s finest writers, in a classic translation that honors the author''s amazing verbal acrobatics.Christian Morgenstern?s The Gallows Songs are some of the most delightful and imaginative creations of twentieth-century German poetry. Composed originally after an outing Morgenstern took with his friends to Gallows Hill near Potsdam, these lively, puckish poems envision Gallows Hill as a fantastical world populated with fabulous animals, bizarre mechanisms, and some truly unruly punctuation.Morgenstern felt that people often used their familiar language unthinkingly, without ever pausing to marvel at the glorious arbitrariness of words. Through poems chock-full of irresistible wordplay and unabashedly exuberant rhymes, he invites us to meditate?but also to med-it-nine and med-i-ten?on all the incidents and accidents of language that make the world of words so vibrant.True to the spirit of Morgenstern?s linguistic mischief, Max Knight?s translation sparkles with uncommon wit as it reinvents in English Morgenstern?s daring verbal acrobatics, and is itself a feat of poetic genius.

Colonial history haunts this stunning, spectral-looking graphic novel, a spiritual sequel to the author?s Yellow Negroes and Other Imaginary Creatures.In Misery of Love, a spiritual sequel to the acclaimed Yellow Negroes and Other Imaginary Creatures, Yvan Alagbé continues his interrogation of race and family in modern France.The book focuses on the dream-like memories of a woman named Clare, who is spending time with her family for her grandfather?s funeral. Alagbé shifts between narratives of the family, all haunted by the legacy of France?s colonial subjugation of Africa.Alagbé works in stormy grayscale washes, using comics, as he puts it, as ?a sacred dimension which celebrates, questions and perpetuates life.... I believe that life is not damnation but grace.?This is another ambitious, devastating masterpiece from one of France?s best contemporary cartoonists.

A sweeping anthology of classical Japanese poetry, including poems about love, war, trees and mountains, everyday life, and so much more. One of the most important works of Japanese literature of all time, available here in an accessible translation.Winner of the 1982 American Book Award for TranslationThe first and greatest anthology of classical Japanese poetry, the Man''yoshu is considered, along with The Tale of Genji, to be one the most important works in classical Japanese literature. In Japanese the title means ?Anthology of Ten Thousand Leaves,? the ?anthology of anthologies? from the first flowering of an artistic and literary sensibility in Japan during the Asuka and Nara periods?the seventh and eighth centuries. Exhibiting an astonishing variety, the poems range from the grand animistic rhetoric of the laments for the imperial family to the stark and curiously modern ?Dialogue of the Destitute,? from the elegant banquet verse of aristocrats to the ?poems of the frontier guardsmen.? As its name suggests, The Ten Thousand Leaves represents a culling of what was considered the best from an epoch of cultural and literary innovation perhaps unparalleled in Japanese history.This edition incorporates books one through five of the twenty that make up the original Man''yoshu and includes an introduction by the translator, Ian Hideo Levy, that provides a general historical and cultural background for this monumental work.

Two novels by one of the Soviet Union''s most inventive writers, written in the tradition of Gogol and Dostoyevsky but with a twentieth-century, modernist edge.Konstantin Vaginov was an early and exemplary figure of Soviet modernist writing in all its agonized and glorious contradictions. Born into an educated middle-class family at the turn of the century, Vaginov came of age with the Bolshevik revolution. His novels of the late 1920s and early 1930s are daringly experimental and tragically nostalgic, mourning the irrevocable loss of prerevolutionary intellectual culture with mercilessly ironic prose. Hopelessly adrift in the brave new Soviet world, Vaginov?s protagonists attempt to conjure the recent and distant past by stockpiling old books and songs, vulgar baubles and bad jokes, newspaper clippings, coins, and graffiti.This volume contains two novels. The first, Goat Song, is an ironically literal translation of the Greek word ?tragedy? (tragodia?goat song). It features thinly veiled portraits of Vaginov?s contemporaries, the luminaries and leftovers of the once-flourishing Petersburg, Petrograd, and Leningrad arts community, as they flounder and self-destruct in their new bracingly materialist circumstances. Echoing Gogol, Dostoyevsky, and Bely, Goat Song is both a classic Petersburg city text and its swan song: ?Now there is no Petersburg. There is Leningrad; but Leningrad has nothing to do with us?the author is a coffin-maker by trade, not a cradle expert.?The second novel, Works and Days of Wistlin, follows the nonchalant novelist Wistlin as he unscrupulously mines the lives of his friends and fellow citizens for literary material. Like the flea-market trinkets hunted by Goat Song?s marginal figures, Wistlin?s eccentric and frivolous victims are yesterday?s relics and nobody?s concern. His exploitation of human material is a wry commentary on the concurrent efforts to industrialize and collectivize the Soviet economy, at a horrific human cost.NYRB Classics will also publish Vaginov?s final novels, Bambocciata and Harpagoniana.

A landmark translation of passionate, fiercely intelligent poetry about coming of age by one of the most influential Italian writers of the twentieth century.Cesare Pavese?s 1936 collection of poems, Lavorare stanca, is increasingly regarded as one of the most astonishing and powerful books of twentieth-century poetry. William Arrowsmith?s translations capture the spirit and complex vitality of Pavese?s voice.This bilingual edition also contains a thorough introduction to Pavese?s work, notes to individual poems, and two critical essays that he wrote about Lavorare stanca, the book by which he hoped to be remembered. ?Lavorare stanca,? he once declared, ?is a book that might have saved a generation.?

Love, faith, and the political mingle in these two short novels by a Nobel Prize-winning Danish author. One about a young couple making a new life in Rome, the other about a priest who goes to live among native peoples in Greenland, both books explore the reaches of the human heart through their complex and unforgettable characters.The White Bear and The Rearguard are two of Nobel laureate Henrik Pontoppidan?s most acclaimed novellas: tales of personal, political, and religious strife, full of keen psychological insight, set amid the sweeping changes of late nineteenth-century Danish society. Pontoppidan?s prose is spellbinding in its taut, unvarnished grace, a quality translator Paul Larkin masterfully captures in this stunning new translation.The White Bear is the odyssey of the priest Thorkild Müller, who becomes minister to a remote Inuit tribe in Greenland and is slowly integrated within the community. After spending much of his adult life in Greenland, he returns to Denmark, where his popularity among his parishioners brings the ire of the Church upon his head.Newlyweds Jorgen Hallager and Ursula Branth are as different as night and day. The brash son of a poor village teacher, Jorgen is an avowed socialist whose revolutionary beliefs translate into his work as a painter of social realism. Ursula, on the other hand, comes from an upper-middle-class family and is politically conservative. Though each strives to change the other?s worldview as they start their new life in Rome, tensions rise, and misunderstandings abound. A searching examination of art and individuality, this version of The Rearguard is the never-before-translated 1905 edition, which elucidates with greater complexity Jorgen?s character as well as Ursula?s resolve to temper him with love.

A Dickensian tale of ambition, family, and financial ruin by the most important Spanish novelist after Cervantes, this tragicomic novel about a patriarch struggling to keep his ungrateful family from ruin is at turns scathing and hilarious.Ramón Villaamil has been a loyal civil servant his whole life, but a change in government leaves him out of a job and still two months short of qualifying for his pension. Initially optimistic that he?ll be able to find work and pull his family out of their financial straits, he spends his days visiting the Administration, pestering his ex-colleagues to put in a good word for him, and begging his friends in high places for money. At home, Villaamil?s wife, daughter, and sister-in-law?whose feline appearances earn them the nickname ?the Miaows??are unimpressed by Villaamil?s failures, and the only joy left in Villaamil?s life is his young grandson Luis. When Luis?s disgraced father, the handsome and dastardly Víctor Cadalso reappears in their lives with promises of easing their financial burdens, Villaamil has no choice but to allow him back into their midst, even as he knows there is nothing pure about Víctor?s intentions, and that his return could bring them all to ruin.Comparable to the best of Balzac and Dickens, Benito Pérez Galdós?s satire of lower middle-class life offers a scathing critique of the hypocrisy and corruption within nineteenth-century Spanish society as well as a potent exploration of the value of human life outside of work. Margaret Jull Costa?s inimitable translation captures all the tragicomic vitality of Pérez Galdós?s prose, and proves that he is indeed ?the best Spanish writer of the nineteenth century? (Mario Vargas Llosa).

A chatty rabbit dares you to solve how he keeps escaping his hutch in this whimsical detective story perfect for reading aloud with animal lovers ages 5 to 9. When Joa~ozinho the rabbit scrunches his nose 15,000 times, he finally comes up with an escape plan!Joaozinho is an ordinary rabbit, happy and hungry. Ideas come to rabbits when they scrunch and unscrunch their noses, but as anyone who has seen a rabbit knows, they do this nonstop. In order to sniff out one single idea, they have to scrunch their noses 15,000 times. Joaozinho comes up with an idea as good as the smell of a fresh carrot. He''s finally figured out how to escape from his rabbit hutch in order to find more food. Joaozinho soon becomes an escape artist?but how does he do it? That''s a mystery he dares you to solve.Clarice Lispector, one of the foremost writers of the twentieth century, wrote this story for her son Paulo, a lover of rabbits when he was small and, as she writes in her introductory note, ?had yet to discover stronger affections.?

In this enthralling re-creation of American novelist Henry James'' famous ten-month trip around the United States, lauded critic Peter Brooks brings to life both the literary giant and America in its Gilded Age.In 1904, after two decades of living and travelling abroad, Henry James returned to the United States to discover a world drastically different from the one he had left behind. Suddenly, the future of the world seemed to be in his native land, which he had once considered provincial, lacking in nourishment for the novelist. James thus set forth to refamiliarize himself with the United States, travelling the breadth of the land and exercising his acute powers of observation to document all that he saw. James''s ten-month journey across America and its product, the ethnographic work The American Scene, are the focus of Henry James Comes Home, scholar and literary critic Peter Brooks?s dazzling follow-up to his book Henry James Goes to Paris. Brooks combines biography and criticism to recreate James''s American journey, tracing his travels around New England, down south to Florida, across the Midwest, up the coast of California, and eventually to Seattle and Portland. For James, being American was "a complex fate," and Brooks shows how James''s keen remarks on rampant materialism and the challenges at the heart of democracy are still of enduring relevance to us in this day.

A thrilling, inventive, playful, and unorthodox detective and caper novel, the latest work by a French master.?Fans of Jean-Patrick Manchette''s deadpan irony will appreciate Command Performance, Echenoz''s vibrant, playful homage to the hard-boiled genre, which plays like The Big Lebowski on the Seine.? ?Publishers WeeklyGerard Fulmard is a loser. A disgraced former flight attendant, he attempts the métier of private detective, with spectacularly disastrous results, then begins working for an obscure political groupuscule beset by an outsized share of infighting and backroom maneuvering. At first employed as an enforcer, Fulmard is then co-opted by one of the party?s less savory factions, sinking in deeper and deeper until he finds himself the reluctant assassin of the party?s own leader?and that?s when things really start going downhill. Meanwhile, projectiles crash down from the sky, corpses turn up in perfect health, main characters suffer sudden death, and nothing is as it seems. In Command Performance, Jean Echenoz, one of France?s most respected contemporary writers, toys with the tropes of genre fiction and high literature, displaying the twists of plot and turns of phrase that have become his signature, and that have made him, in the words of The Washington Post, ?the most distinctive voice of his generation and the master magician of the contemporary French novel.?

In a small town in Switzerland, Franz?ex-clergyman, ex-husband, current counselor of locals at loose ends? is being haunted by his recently deceased father, Klement. In life, Franz was caught cheating on his wife and defrocked, after which Klement never spoke to him again. In death, Klement visits his son in the form of a frog in the throat, choking him, yes, but also giving voice to an old dairy farmer devoted to the old ways, forever railing against his son and the whole modern mess he represents.The same can be said of this novel, in which these two voices clash, harmonize, and ultimately offer up all the mutual recognition and incomprehension that is family life. A miniature tragicomic masterpiece, Markus Werner?s second novel is as bursting with life as a Dickens novel: not only Franz?s high-strung shenanigans and the father?s settled life among the cattle, but the lives of his sister and brother and the land all around.As in all of Werner?s work, the world looks grim (?I sit around, I drink, I brood, I pat myself down for flaws and find many and each evening I say: Starting tomorrowI?m going to get a grip on myself?) but never less than comic?a view captured marvelously in Michael Hofmann?s vivid translation.

A reporter embarks on an investigation of a string of unconnected suicides?which then leads into an exploration of the phenomenon of suicide itself?in this elegant existential novel, the third and final volume of Antonio Di Benedetto?s Trilogy of Expectation. A stymied reporter in his early thirties embarks on an investigation of three unconnected suicides. All he has to go on are photos of the faces of the dead. Other suicides begin to proliferate, while a colleague in the archives sends him historical justifications of self-murder by thinkers of all sorts: Diogenes, David Hume, Emile Durkheim, Margaret Mead. His investigation becomes an obsession, and he finds himself ever more attracted to its subject as it proceeds. The Suicides is the third volume of Antonio Di Benedetto?s Trilogy of Expectation, a touchstone for Roberto Bolano and deemed ?one of the culminating moments of twentieth-century fiction? by Juan José Saer. Following Zama (set during the eighteenth century) and The Silentiary (set during the 1950s), this final work takes place in a provincial city in the late 1960s, as Argentina plummets toward the ?Dirty War.?

Poe and Kafka meet The Twilight Zone in this anthology of fifty fantastical tales, many of them reflecting the political and social energies of the time, by an Italian master of the short story.Dino Buzzati was a prolific writer of stories, publishing several hundred over the course of forty years. Many of them are fantastic?reminiscent of Kafka and Poe in their mixture of horror and absurdity, and at the same time anticipating the alternate realities of The Twilight Zone or Black Mirror in their chilling commentary on the barbarities, catastrophes, and fanaticisms of the twentieth century.In The Bewitched Bourgeois, Lawrence Venuti has put together an anthology that showcases Buzzati?s short fiction from his earliest stories to the ones he wrote in the last months of his life. Some appear in English for the first time, while others are reappearing in Venuti?s crisp new versions, such as the much-anthologized ?Seven Floors,? an absurdist tale of a patient fatally caught in hospital bureaucracy; ?Panic at La Scala,? in which the Milanese bourgeoisie, fearing a left-wing revolution, find themselves imprisoned in the opera house; and ?Appointment with Einstein,? where the physicist, stopping at a filling station in Princeton, New Jersey, encounters a gas station attendant who turns out to be the Angel of Death.