Philippe Cabassac has fly-truffled the art of stalking the flies that lay their eggs directly over the truffles every winter since childhood on his family estate in Provence. Since the death of his young wife, Julieta, the truffles have come to represent something far more than a delicacy for Cabassac's palate: they trigger an evocative sequence of dream visions in which he and his lost wife enter, on winter nights, a state of intimate and prolonged communion. As Cabassac becomes increasingly involved in his dream life with Julieta, he loses his hold on his teaching obligations, on managing...

Dying scriptwriter Philip Nilson spends his last days writing about a forgotten but critical moment in the life of Greta Garbo. He tracks that most elusive of film stars to an episode in Constantinople in 1924, where, under the tutelage of impresario Mauritz Stiller, Garbo emerges as one of the dominant icons of the twentieth century. Enthralled by the story, Nilson awakens to the memory of a long-forgotten first love that, he discovers, has held him in its grip for the better part of his life. This glowing novel is both a contemporary narrative celebrating a glorious moment in the history of...

Interpreting vestige with the eloquence of a poet and the knowledge of a field archaeologist, Gustaf Sobin explores his elected terrain: the landscapes of Provence and Languedoc. Drawing on prehistory, protohistory, and Gallo-Roman antiquity, the twenty-six essays in this book focus on a particular place or artifact for the relevance inherent in each. A Bronze Age earring or the rippling wave pattern in Massiolite ceramic are more than archival curiosities for Sobin. Instead they invite inquiry and speculation on existence itself: Artifacts are read as realia, and history as an uninterrupted...

Previously available only as a limited editon, Henri Michaux'sIdeograms in Chinais now available as a New Directions paperback. Peerlessly translated by the American poet Gustaf Sobin, this long, beautifully illustrated and annotated prose poem was originally written as an introduction to Leon Chang'sLa calligraphie chinoise(1971), a work that now stands as an important complement to Pound and Ernest Fenollosa's classic study, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry."

Bits of late Roman coinage, the mutilated torso of a marble Venus, blue debris from an early medieval glassworks, and the powder rasped from the reputed tomb of Mary Magdalenethese tantalizing mementos of human history found scattered throughout the landscape of southeastern France are the points of departure for Gustaf Sobin's lyrical narrative. A companion volume to his acclaimed Luminous Debris, Ladder of Shadows picks up where the former left off: with late antiquity, covering a period from roughly the third to the thirteenth century. Here Sobin offers brilliant readings of late...