Kenneth Rexroth

Kenneth Rexroth's sequence of four short plays, Beyond the Mountains, was first brought out by New Directions in 1951, then reprinted in 1966 by City Lights Books.

This is a collection of translations from Chinese done down the years solely to please myself. It is offered with no pretense to scholarship or to mastery of that complex subject, Sinology.

This book brings together twenty-seven essays written over a period of more than forty years by the man one of his publishers called 'an American cultural monument.'

These essays probe the labyrinth as a metaphor for the acute sense of loss, disorientation, and alienation in a selection of 20th century writers such as James, Joyce, and Lawrence.

The radicals and liberals of the 1960s expressed ideas that continue to both attract and repel people decades later. Nostalgia books relive the Woodstock festival and the protests; past Presidents Bush and Reagan remember the era with unease; and scholars skirmish over the meaning of the period. DeLeon is the first to provide information on activists of the period and their continued activities into the 1990s. With major sections on racial democracy, peace and freedom, sexuality and gender, the environment, radical culture, and visions of alternative societies, the book includes entries on a wide selection of nationally prominent personalities of the 1960s. In addition to those who dominated those years, the volume includes earlier activists who came into prominence in the 1960s and those who have come into the limelight since the 1960s. Each entry provides a biographical sketch, but the focus is on the person's basic concepts or the essence of his or her work and the public response it generated. The volume also includes extensive bibliographies on the individuals and the period.

It is commonly assumed that the United States and Latin America, culturally so different, move artistically to very different rhythms. Also common is the assumption that, with rare exception, the literary figures on one side of the global North/ South divide have had little interest in the work of their counterparts. With Mutual Impressions Ilan Stavans dispels these notions by showing how solid the bridges between writers and across borders have been -- at least since the early days of this century -- and how crucial they are likely to become as we enter the next millennium.

Divided into symmetrical halves -- South reading North and North reading South -- the book presents essays by leading novelists, poets, and other writers that focus on the work of another literary figure from across the divide. Borges, for example, finds in Hawthorne the perfect precursor to his own interest in allegories; Katherine Anne Porter examines Jose Joaquin Fernandez de Lizardi as a rascal whose picaresque views of life in The Itching Parrot served to launch the Latin American novel; Cortazar's study of the plots and style of Poe show an affinity that left an indelible mark on the Argentine's short fiction; Susan Sontag views Machado de Assis as the ultimate mirror, a proto-postmodernist.

With other essays by Thomas Pynchon, William H. Gass, John Updike, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Alejo Carpentier, John Barth, Robert Coover, Pedro Henriquez Urena, Grace Paley, Juan Carlos Onetti, and Mark Strand, among others, Mutual Impressions offers a remarkable view of the connections that comprise a literary tradition of the Americas. It is a book that will surprise and enliven its readers as it informs and awakensin them a sense of wonder.

The first and only comprehensive work of its kind, The Companion to Twentieth Century Poety in English charts the development of poetry from 1900 to the present, across the whole of the English-speaking world, from the United States, Great Britain, and Ireland to New Zealand, Pakistan, Singapore, Trinidad and Zimbabwe--anywhere where poets write in English. Alphabetically arranged for ease of reference, it offers biographical entries on some 1,500 individual poets, as well as over one hundred entries covering important magazines, movements, literary terms and concepts. As readable as it is comprehensive, the Companion offers a fascinating survey of this century's shift from 'poetry' to 'poetries,' as American and British traditions of poetry have made way for a growing diversity of voices, and as the burgeoning poetries of Australia, Canada, and other English-speaking countries assert their own identities. The range of poets represented in this Companion is extraordinary. Here are in-depth discussions of Yeats, Eliot, Pound, and Joyce alongside provocative assessments of W.H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Wallace Stevens, and Marianne Moore. John Ashbery, Margaret Atwood, Maya Angelou, and Mary Oliver are accounted for, as well as Carolyn Forche, David Bottoms, Jorie Graham, and many other younger poets just coming into prominence. Chinua Achebee, Jack Mapanje, Femi Oyebode and other important African poets writing in English are here, as well as poets from the Caribbean, India, and even Russia. Readers will relish this Companion's many insightful contributions from celebrated poet-critics, writing on other poets in intriguing author-subject combinations. For example, Seamus Heaney writes on Robert Lowell ("Lowell had invented a way of getting at life, of making poetry kick and freak at the edge of contemporary reality"), Ann Stevenson discusses Sylvia Plath ("In the quarter-century following her suicide, Sylvia Plath has become a heroine and martyr of the feminist movement. In fact, she was a martyr mainly to the recurrent psychodrama that staged itself within the bell jar of her tragically wounded personality"), and Tom Paulin weighs in on Ted Hughes ("His appointment as Poet Laureate in 1984 sealed his essentially shaman-like conception of his poetic mission and enabled him to speak out on environmental issues while celebrating royal weddings and babies"). Other pairings include Jay Parini on Wallace Stevens, Jon Stallworthy on Wilfred Owen and Rupert Brook, and William H. Pritchard on Robert Frost and Randall Jarrell. Each entry includes a wealth of biographical and bibliographical information, and a select bibliography at the end of the book supplies a handy source of information on poets whose work is not otherwise in print, or readily available to readers. From Abse and Auden to Zaturenska and Zukofsky, The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry in English is an essential reference for students, lovers of poetry, and for poets themselves.