Fiction

Ovid devoted about half of his poetic career to the production of several collections of amatory verse, all composed in elegiac couplets. Indeed, his irrepressible interest in love, sex and elegiac poetry is one of the defining features of his entire output. Here Rebecca Armstrong offers a thematic examination of some important aspects of the Amores, Ars Amatoria and Remedia Amoris. Starting from an investigation of the narrator's self-creation and presentation of other characters within his amatory verse, she assesses the importance of mythical and contemporary reference, as well as the influence of the erotic on Ovid's later works. By looking at the Ars and Remedia alongside the Amores, the continuities and contradictions in the poet's elegiac outlook are revealed, and a complex picture is formed of the Ovidian world of love. Ovid's erotic works present the reader with a glimpse inside the minds of both poets and lovers, mediated through eyes which are frequently inclined to comedy and even cynicism, but always sharp, perceptive and above all fascinated by human behaviour.

Edited by Pulitzer Prize-winner and nineteenth US Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey, The Best American Poetry 2017 brings together the most notable poems of the year in the series that offers "a vivid snapshot of what a distinguished poet finds exciting, fresh, and memorable" (Robert Pinsky). Librarian of Congress James Billington says Natasha Trethewey "consistently and dramatically expanded the power" of the role of US Poet Laureate, holding office hours with the public, traveling the country, and reaching millions through her innovative PBS NewsHour segment "Where Poetry Lives." Marilyn Nelson says "the wide scope of Trethewey's interests and her adept handling of form have created an opus of classics both elegant and necessary." With her selections and introductory essay for The Best American Poetry 2017, Trethewey will be highlighting even more "elegant and necessary" poems and poets, adding to the national conversation of verse and its role in our culture.

Against the background of Socrates' insight that the unexamined life is not worth living, Reading Our Lives: The Poetics of Growing Old investigates the often overlooked inside dimensions of aging. Despite popular portrayals of mid- and later life as entailing inevitable decline, this book looks at aging as, potentially, a process of poiesis: a creative endeavor of fashioning meaning from the ever-accumulating texts - memories and reflections-that constitute our inner worlds. At its center is the conviction that although we are constantly reading our lives to some degree anyway, doing so in a mindful matter is critical to our development in the second half of life.

First published to wide critical acclaim in 1981, revised and expanded in 1998, and now re-issued as a corrected second edition (2014), this monumental anthology charts the ongoing American and international response to the legacy of the seminal poet Walt Whitman (1819-1892). Beginning with Ralph Waldo Emerson's famous 1855 letter ("I greet you at the beginning of a great career , this edition contains responses from Thoreau, Pound, Lawrence, Neruda, Borges, Ginsberg, Jordan, Duncan, Le Sueur, Rich, Snyder and Alexie, among many others

How is gender embodied in poetic forms? What kinds of habitation can dramatic verse create for the performing voice? Where in verse are the inflections of the voice's self found? Can the line of verse be 'landscaped' to communicate the modalities of natural perception? Where is the poetry of the prose poem, and how should it be translated? How much authority should the lay-out of a free-verse text have for its translator? Referring to authors ranging from Labe to Shakespeare to Auden and Jaccottet, Scott seeks to answer such questions and to re-set both the task of the translator and the ambitions of comaprative literature.

This first critical book of essays on the poetry of Peter Gizzi shows how his work extends the traditions of nineteenth- and twentieth-century modernism while also reclaiming the living presence of the "lyric" in its capacity to sing of the human predicament. Gizzi is author of seven critically acclaimed books of poetry, including most recently Threshold Songs and Archeophonics, a finalist for the National Book Award in 2016.

A lyrical extravaganza, evocative of personal experiences and unique insights, CAPITALS embodies a medley of harmonious notes struck across the globe, resulting in the confluence of poignant imagery and soulful verse. A remarkable anthology to acquaint you intimately with the Capital cities of the world, it describes in exquisite detail their undulating terrains and pulsating lifelines and their cities beckon even the most seasoned traveller with promises of discovery. Embark on a journey like never before, as Kwame Dawes in his poem Green Boy takes you to a night in Accra when the crescendo of drums finally overcomes the gunshots, or accompany Mark Mcwatt as he drifts down memory lane in the suburbs of Georgetown, and feel the raw emotion as Salah Al Hamdani laments of what has become of Baghdad.

IF more than once, as annals tell, Through blood without compunction spilt, An egotist arch rule has snatched, And stamped the seizure with his sabre's hilt, And, legalised by lawyers, stood ;

Fifteen-year-old Karen spends the summer with her unusual Aunt Augusta and learns many things about love, life, and the complexities of growing up.

Warbreaker is the story of two sisters, who happen to be princesses, the God King one of them has to marry, the lesser god who doesn't like his job, and the immortal who's still trying to undo the mistakes he made hundreds of years ago.

Michael Crichton, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Jurassic Park, returns to the world of paleontology in this recently discovered novel-a thrilling adventure set in the Wild West during the golden age of fossil hunting.

In A Particle of Dread, Sam Shepard takes one of the most famous plays in history-Oedipus Rex-and transforms it into a modern American classic.

From the critically acclaimed author of Be Safe I Love You comes a dark and breathtaking novel of love, friendship, and survival set in the red light district of Athens in the 1980s that Garth Greenwall calls "a ferocious, brilliant book."

A novel of Berlin, living with the Bomb, Punk, protest and alternatives, set in West Berlin in the 1980s, when the city was a focal point of the Cold War and surrounded by the Berlin Wall and Communist East Germany. The missiles are armed and waiting in their silos. If nuclear war breaks out there will be a four minute warning. There is no internet and perhaps NO FUTURE. Reality? Sur-reality? Or hyper-reality? In this punk-lit novel Kurtis Sunday provides an on-the-spot account.

One Family. Five generations. An epic story of love and loss.

This novel of intrigue, violence and betrayal in the land of our Stone Age forefathers is a magnificent successor to the author's The Stone Arrow. Here, spurring the Flint Lord's drive for conquest, is his passion for his beautiful, decadent sister, a drive and a passion which lead inexorably to catastrophic consequences.

A washed-up novelist navigates the dreamscape of a cataclysm-ravaged Los Angeles

Longman's new Cultural Editions Series, Hard Times, by Charles Dickens, edited by Jeff Nunokawa, includes Books 1-3 of Hard Times and contextual materials on the age of Dickens.

A profound mystery is at the heart of this magnificent new novel by Yiyun Li, "one of America's best young novelists" (Newsweek) and the celebrated author of The Vagrants, winner of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. Moving back and forth in time, between America today and China in the 1990s, Kinder Than Solitude is the story of three people whose lives are changed by a murder one of them may have committed. As one of the three observes, "Even the most innocent person, when cornered, is capable of a heartless crime."

When the men of Burh, settlers from continental Europe, fall upon the sleeping nomad tribe in the depths of the forest amid the Downs of southern England, Tagart is the only survivor, escaping by sheer chance after his wife and young son have been massacred. Twenty-five and heir to the chiefdom of the roving hunters, he sees his only inheritance now to be an overwhelming urge for merciless revenge - of his family, his tribe and indeed of a way of life which in the England of 5,000 years ago is steadily being eroded by these tillers of the soil.