Set in a modern, urban Paris, the prose pieces in this volume constitute a further exploration of the terrain Baudelaire had covered in his verse masterpiece, The Flowers of Evil the city and its squalor and inequalities, the pressures of time and mortality, and the liberation provided by the sensual delights of intoxication, art, and women. Published posthumously in 1869, Paris Spleen was a landmark publication in the development of the genre of prose poetry a format which Baudelaire saw as particularly suited for expressing the feelings of uncertainty, flux, and freedom of his age and one...

Blood Wedding. Concerned with love that cannot become marriage among the primitive hill people of Castile, this is a play of the workings of tremendous passions and tribal ritual toward an inescapable tragic end. Yerma. The whole tragic burden of Yerma is measured by the deepening of her struggle with the problem of frustrated motherhood. From Garcia Lorca, by Edwin Honig. The House of Bernarda Alba. Again about women whom love moves to tragedy, Bernarda Alba tells of the repression of five daughters by a domineering mother, of how their natural...

Big Sur is the portrait of a place one of the most colorful in the U.S. and of the extraordinary people Miller knew there: writers (& writers who didn't write), mystics seeking truth in meditation (& the not-so-saintly looking for sex-cults or celebrity), sophisticated children & adult innocents; geniuses, cranks & the unclassifiable. Henry Miller writes with a buoyancy & brimming energy that are infectious. He has a fine touch for comedy. But this is also a serious book the testament of a free spirit who has broken through the restraints & cliches of modern life to find within...

Some of the most rewarding pages in Henry Miller's books concern his self-education as a writer. He tells, as few great writers ever have, how he set his goals, how he discovered the excitement of using words, how the books he read influenced him, and how he learned to draw on his own experience.

Confessions of a Mask tells the story of Kochan, an adolescent boy tormented by his burgeoning attraction to men: he wants to be normal. Kochan is meek-bodied, and unable to participate in the more athletic activities of his classmates. He begins to notice his growing attraction to some of the boys in his class, particularly the pubescent body of his friend Omi. To hide his homosexuality, he courts a woman, Sonoko, but this exacerbates his feelings for men. As news of the War reaches Tokyo, Kochan considers the fate of Japan and his place within its deeply rooted propriety....

The Noh plays of Japan have been compared to the greatest of Greek tragedies for their evocative, powerful poetry and splendor of emotional intensity.

'The Wall', the lead story in this collection, introduces three political prisoners on the night prior to their execution. Through the gaze of an impartial doctor--seemingly there for the men's solace--their mental descent is charted in exquisite, often harrowing detail. And as the morning draws inexorably closer, the men cross the psychological wall between life and death, long before the first shot rings out. This brilliant snapshot of life in anguish is the perfect introduction to a collection of stories where the neurosis of the modern world is mirrored in the lives of the people that...

The larger part of this classic symposium on the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins was originally assembled as a special number of The Kenyon Review to celebrate in 1944 the centenary of the poet's birth, and then published in the New Directions 'Makers of Modern Literature' series.

Poems explore the murder of a young Chinese American, the author's experiences while traveling through Mexico, and the life of the mythological character, Perseus.