How to Write

Gertrude Stein

First published in 1931, How to Write contains Stein’s thoughts about the craft of writing—about words, sentences, paragraphs, grammar, and narrative.

Red Eye of Love

Arnold Weinstein

The tale of a bizarre yet familiar triangle involving a moneyed butcher who writes poetry, a poor but idealistic inventor who is interested in security and securities, and a girl forced to decide between love and money, this play is easily recognized as a good-humored allegory on the last several decades of American life presented in the rollicking style of music-hall comedy.

From the Other Side of the Century II: A New American Drama 1960-1995 - PART 1

— Anthology —

The Zoo Story, Edward Albee (1960)
Red Eye of Love, Arnold Weinstein (1961)
Gallows Humor, Jack Richardson (1961)
The Toilet, Amiri Baraka (1964)
The Gnadiges Fraiilein, Tennessee Williams (1966)
The Man Who Dug Fish, Ed Bullins (1967)
Softly and Consider the Nearness, Rosalyn Drexler (1967)
Muzeeka, John Guare (1968)
Boy on a Straight-Back Chair, Ronald Tavel (1969)
The B. Beaver Animation, Lee Breuer (1974)
Rhoda in Potatoland, Richard Foreman (1975)
Action, Sam Shepard (1975)
A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White, Adrienne Kennedy (1976)
Conjuring an Event, Richard Nelson (1976)
Night Coil, Jeffrey M. Jones (1979)

From the Other Side of the Century II: A New American Drama 1960-1995 - PART 2

— Anthology —

Reverse Psychology, Charles Ludlam (1980)
All Night Long, John O'Keefe (1980)
The Resurrection of Lady Lester, Oyam0 (1981)
Reckless, Craig Lucas (1983)
The Masses Are Asses, Pedro Pietri (1984)
Native Speech, Eric Overmyer (1985)
No Mercy, Constance Congdon (1986)
Dress Suits to Hire, Holly Hughes (1987)
Abingdon Square, Maria Irene Fornes (1987)
American Notes, Len Jenkin (1988)
Angel uh God, Erik Ehn (1988)

From the Other Side of the Century II: A New American Drama 1960-1995 - PART 3

— Anthology —

Standard of the Breed, John Steppling (1988)
The Imperialists at the Club Cave Canem, Charles L. Mee, Jr. (1989)
Rodents & Radios, Richard Caliban (1990)
Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom, Suzan-Lori Parks (1990)
One Shoe Off, Tina Howe (1993)
Son of an Engineer, David Greenspan (1994)
The Reincarnation of Jaimie Brown, Lynne Alvarez (1994)
Switchback, Murray Mednick (1994)
The Hyacinth Macaw, Mac Wellman (1994)
The Confirmation, Kier Peters (1994)
Tattoo Girl, Naomi Iizuka (1994)
Reverse Transcription, Tony Kushner (1995)

Love Trouble

Jeffrey M. Jones

Love Trouble is a darkly comic fairy tale about parenthood, love, and our fear of loss. Like the previous Jones/Schreier musical, Write If You Get Work, it features a stuffed animal protagonist--in this case a bear with the language and impulses of a two-year-old. The bear's miraculous delivery, courtesy of Pizza Queen (a faux-medieval fast-food chain), at first brings a bickering couple closer together. But the wife soon succumbs to a growing dread: that the creature will run away with the Pizza Queen the moment both humans fall asleep.

50: A Celebration of Sun & Moon Classics

— Anthology —

To celebrate the 50th book in the Sun & Moon Classics series, Publisher Douglas Messerli asked 50 major world authors and translators to submit work never before published in the United States. The result is a panoply of stunning writing from around the world and a celebration of language rarely seen.

At the Roots of the Stars: The Short Plays

Djuna Barnes

Although little has been written about Djuna Barnes’s drama, she wrote some 19 short and longer plays and was one of the early members of The Provincetown Players (which included Eugene O’Neill, Susan Glaspell, and Edna St. Vincent Millay).

Numbers and Tempers. Selected Early Poems 1966-1986

Ray DiPalma

The first comprehensive survey of DiPalma’s writing, Numbers and Tempers: Selected Early Poems 1966-1986 presents a selection of his best work, and shows the fascinating trajectory his poetics has followed over these two decades.

New York

Djuna Barnes

Like Barnes's magical Interviews, these unforgettable pieces were published in newspapers and magazines from 1911-1931. The exuberant works of this book all center upon New York City, including wonderful portraits of Brooklyn's Wallabout Market, the Hippodrome Circus, a Manhattan Boxing Club, the Italian theater in the Bowery, Coney Island, Printing House Square, and a tour of the city with World War I soldiers.

Selected Poems: 1963-1973

David Antin

One of the greatest performance poets of this century, David Antin is well known internationally for his “talk poems”— brilliantly spun improvisatory fables of contemporary society using all the traditional rhetorical and prosodic devices of poetry. But few readers have known his early work, and those seeking these books have found them nearly impossible to locate.

Childish Things

Valéry Larbaud

"Enfantines [Childish Things] is my favorite book.”
—Marcel Proust

Translated for the first time into English since it was published in 1918, this book tells eight stories about children at the threshold of adolescence. Observing marvelous complexities, Larbaud discovers the fullness of a child’s experience.

Description

Arkadii Dragomoschenko

The works in this first English-language publication by the Soviet poet are descriptions of his perceptions in words that have little relation to their affixed meanings. The poet believes that words ought not define "how our knowledge should exist" because language cannot tell the whole story--it is the silence, or emptiness, between words that represents the way we see the world.

The Cold of Poetry

Lyn Hejinian

Though comprised of 10 longish poems written over the last 20 years, this book is very much a whole, one that reflects Lyn Hejinian's characteristic interest in the consistency and inconsistency of memory and self, and the role that writing plays in preserving and transforming these.

Stories Out of Omarie

Wendy Walker

Wendy Walker retells eight of The Lais of Marie de France, a proto-feminist poem cycle written in England in the 12th century. Her style is as refined as Arthurian romance, yet as iconoclastic as Marie’s knights, whose adventures mainly serve to help ladies find lovers.

Babylon

René Crevel

Babylon is a landmark of Surrealist literature. A fiction of stylistic elegance and psychological depth, it probes the interplay between the rational and the subconscious.

My Horse and Other Stories

Stacey Levine

Stacey Levine's stories revolve around the impermeability of experience, of not knowing even our own bodies with any certainty. She conveys the unfathomable burden of existence in haunting metaphors and wickedly enthralling prose.

London

Fiona Templeton

Fiona Templeton is an experimental director, playwright, poet, and performer. Born in Scotland in 1951, she co-founded London's Theatre of Mistakes in the 1970s and lived for many years in the East Village of Manhattan.

Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom

Suzan-Lori Parks

Playwright Suzan-Lori Parks won one of her several Obie awards for this play, which premiered Off-Broadway in 1989. Written in the theater of the absurd style of playwrights like Eugene Ionesco and Samuel Beckett, the play explores African-American lives and the way their experiences during slavery echo and reverberate in the modern-day.

One Thousand and One-Second Stories

Inagaki Taruho

"Taruho is one of the few I can call a genius in Japanese literature.... He has a spot equivalent to the astronauts in history. There is Before Taruho & After Taruho."
--Yukio Mishima

The Merowingians or The Total Family

Heimito von Doderer

The Merowingians is a mad satire which gives further proof, if any were needed, of the greatness of von Doderer, whose works stand beside those of countrymen Robert Musil and Hermann Broch.

Pallaksch, Pallaksch

Liliane Giraudon

The words "Pallaksch, Pallaksch" are reportedly those spoken by the mad Hölderlin to mean both yes and no. No one could interpret those words precisely; one could not know whether he meant yes I'd like soup or no, I wouldn't until he took the soup or threw it in one's face.

The Bird Lovers

Jens Bjørneboe

The hunters of a small Italian town are being pressured by German tourists to stop shooting song birds. In the course of their negotiations, they recognize two of the Germans as former military officers. These officers conducted tortures, punishments and executions two decades previously when the Nazis controlled this part of Italy.

The Harbormaster of Hong Kong

David Bromige

Bromige’s 25 books have brought him international recognition and awards, including grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Canada Council.

From Pearl Harbor Day to FDR’s Birthday

Jackson Mac Low

Upon its original publication in 1982, From Pearl Harbor Day to FDR's Birthday, representing work written from the 7th of December 1981 to the 30th of January 1982, was recognized as a significant new direction in the writing of noted poet Jackson Mac Low.

Sea of Cortez and Other Plays

John Steppling

Face to face the figures almost scream out not only for communication, but for a simple caress, even a touch; but the dark surrounding silence serves as a kind of coitus interruptus, and the character are forced to sink back into their determined alienation. Desire is all they are left.

Charm

Sextus Propertius

Born near Assisi, Italy, around 50 B.C., Sextus Propertius was one of the great writers of love poetry in Roman literature. His first book of poems, published in Rome when he was about 20 years of age, made him an overnight sensation.

Rough Trades

Charles Bernstein

Charles Bernstein is, simply put, one of the most influential and widely read poets of our age. One of the true masters of irony in poetry, Bernstein manages to also infuse each poem with an affirmative vision which verges on the utopian. Bernstein is a poet of language, in the fullest sense of that word, a poet who "want[s] no paradise, only to be / drenched in downpour of words..."

Pieces O' Six

Jackson Mac Low

Beginning in 1983 the great American experimentalist Jackson Mac Low wrote a poem in prose in longhand on the first six pages of a school composition book; another poem of equal length followed. So was born PIECES O' SIX, thirty-three prose pieces of six pages each, leaving his 200 page composition book with two blank pages for preface and postface. The results of this filled notebook are some of Mac Low's most brilliant and lucid writings, pieces of various kinds; many paratactic, though often quasi-narrative; some seemingly out-and-out stories; others much like essays, but deceptively so; a few of them collages drawing from various sources by chance-selection or other chance-generated systems.

Switchback

Murray Mednick

In a neutral area of the Terror Zone, two women wait to cross the range of gunfire, one with a baby carriage, the other on bicycle. Both have faced death many times, and the discussion they have which makes up the content of Mednick's "jazz operetta" reveals a horrifying world in which there is little hope for a future - much like the inner-city ghettos of today. Yet these women are proud, stubborn, insistent in their intent to live more normal lives and to resume their movement up the switchback.

Scenes from the Life of Cleopatra

Mary Butts

Mary Butts presents the reader with a figure of a great ruler, who had to choose her lovers in order that her kingdom could survive, but who recognized throughout the danger and potential of those choices.

luce a cavallo

Therese Bachand

Exploring films produced by studios throughout the 1960s, Therese Bachand creates a lyrical and dynamic collection of short poetry, her first published collection. This book was chosen as a Gertrude Stein Award selection by Luigi Ballerini.

The Position of Things: Collected Poems 1961-1992

Adriano Spatola

Adriano Spatola (1941–1988) was one of the most important poets of the Italian neo-avant-garde.

Tristia

Osip Mandelshtam

Tristia was Mandelshtam's second book. Along with his first collection, Kamen (Stones) and Stikhotvorenia (Verses), Tristia established his reputation as one of the greatest Russian poets of the 20th century.

From the Lightning: Selected Poems

Gonzalo Rojas

One of the greatest contemporary Chilean poets, Gonzalo Rojas has received most of the major prizes of the Spanish-speaking literary world, including the Premio Reina Sofia, and has been nominated for a Nobel Prize. This new volume brings to the English-language audience a large selection of Rojas's poetry.

The Great American Novel

William Carlos Williams

First published in 1923 in Paris in an edition of 300 copies, this novel by the great American poet is "a satire on the novel form in which a little (female) Ford car falls more or less in love with a Mack truck."

Representing Absence

Deborah Meadows

Deborah Meadows draws on a practice of poetry composition as palimpsest: writing on top, or through, other writing, evoking writers such as Charles Baudelaire, Herman Melville, Dante, and video artist, Bill Viola. She teaches at California Polytechnic State University, Pomona, and has been part of writers' and scholars' exchanges with Havana, Cuba.

readiness / enough / depends / on

Larry Eigner

A few months before the death of the noted American poet Larry Eigner in February 1996, Green Integer editor Douglas Messerli contracted with him to publish a new collection of his work. Now, edited by Eigner's long-time friend Robert Grenier, this new book has been long awaited by the growing readership of Eigner's poetry. It is a work that gracefully accepts death and, by virtue of its very testament to the life around, reiterates Eigner's continual engagement with the world—despite a lifetime spent in a wheel chair.

The Confirmation

Kier Peters

Mother is planning a surprise birthday party for Grandma, who claims to have been born more than a hundred years ago. But Grandma doesn’t like parties any more than she likes the daughters who pop up at various moments in this hilarious play.

PIP Anthology of World Poetry of the 20th Century: v. 03, Nothing the Sun Could Not Explain—20 Contemporary Brazilian Poets

— Anthology —

This collection presents the exciting works of younger Brazilian poets in the context of the immense influence of and reaction to the Modernist and experimental traditions of Brazilian literature.

Amour Amour

Andreas Embiricos

In this book of twenty-four stories, or "personal mythologies," Greek novelist and poet Andreas Embiricos combines history, myth, poetry, and psychology to create a sensual, original and fabulous universe.

The Masses Are Asses

Pedro Pietri

Performed in 1974 at Miriam Colon's Puerto Rican Travelling Theatre in Manhattan, The Masses Are Asses reminds one, at times, of a work of the Theater of Cruelty wedded to a Punch and Judy show--all whipped up in the frenzy of a campy parody of American social aspirations.

Defoe

Leslie Scalapino

The Review of Contemporary Fiction wrote of this book: “As a literary work, Defoe most closely resembles the sort of automatic writing pioneered by Breton and Soupault; as a political and philosophical critique of contemporary discourse, Defoe reveals a deep affinity with the works of Heidegger and Derrida. But ultimately—perhaps most controversially—it is a call to writers to liberate themselves from the limits of narrative and embrace a new kind of writing.”

The Disparities

Rodrigo Toscano

In this, Rodrigo Toscano's first full-length collection of poetry, the author explores "how things wouldn’t happen." The Disparities brings together official and unofficial histories that vie with one another to expose new meanings created between "the gaps."

Suites

Federico García Lorca

Suites is one of the most charming and melodious of all of García Lorca's poem series. Written early in his career, most of these poems remained unpublished during his lifetime and were later reassembled from notebooks. This is the first complete single-volume edition of this great work.

Suicide Circus: Selected Poems

Alexei Kruchenykh

With Velimir Khlebnikov and Vladimir Mayakovsky, Alexei Kruchenykh was one of the central figures of Russian Futurism, and the leading practitioner of zaum poetry.

Across the Darkness of the River

Hsi Muren

Poet, painter, and essayist Hsi Muren is perhaps the most widely read woman poet in Taiwan. Ever since her first two collections of poetry, Seven Miles of Fragrance (1981) and Youth of No Regret (1983), she has attracted readers for her themes of undying love and a melancholic sense of the lost past. As a poet of Mongolian descent, moreover, Hsi presents in her poetry a diasporic nostalgia for a lost world from a perspective that is imaginary but insistently poignant.

The Mysterious Hualien

Chen I-chih

Born in 1953 in Hualien, Taiwan, Chen I-chih's work, which has garnered numerous awards in Taiwan, combines elements of classical Chinese poetry with modern images and subjects.

Antilyrik & Other Poems

Vítêzslav Nezval

Vítêzslav Nezval (1900-1958) was an active participant in the European avant-garde between the two world wars. In the 1920s, he was the founding figure of "poetism," a movement of poets and artists centered in Prague.

Operratics

Michel Leiris

This book is a study of opera by the great French poet, art critic, and anthropologist Michel Leiris.

Aurélia

Gérard de Nerval

Gérard de Nerval's greatest subject was himself. Throughout his tempestuous life that ended with suicide by hanging, this French Romantic poet journeyed to distant parts of the globe in order to comprehend and articulate the demons that assailed his inner-most being.

Displeasures of the Table

Martha Ronk

Poet Martha Ronk notes that it is not so much that she finds food displeasurable, but that she finds the sitting at the table unpleasant. Food, moreover, is associated with roles that many woman question. Accordingly, the very process of writing about it becomes a sort of dialogue between society and between eating and reading, "a wrestling with dough or syntax, being at the table or under it."

Drifting

Dominic Cheung

Drifting consists of translations from Cheung's Drifters, first published in Taipei in 1986. This collection centers upon the metaphors of drifting, in which language and meaning wander between two worlds, and East and the West, between the private home and a shared country. the metaphor, of course, also brings up the disillusionments of contemporary Taiwanese culture and the seemingly impossible dream of the shared homeland with China.

Manifestos Manifest

Vicente Huidobro

Vicente Huidobro was born in Chile in 1893. As a youth he traveled to Paris where he lived for many years, befriending both French and Spanish poets such a Guillaume Apollinaire, Pierre Reverdy, Juan Larrea and Jorge Luis Borges. His manifestos, which crystallized his poetics of Creationism, were published in French in 1925, the year in which he returned to Chile, where he ran for president.

Mexico: A Play

Gertrude Stein

Stein wrote Mexico in 1916, upon her and Alice Toklas's return from the Mallorcan countryside where they had gone to escape the War. And as critic Cyrena N. Pondrom has pointed out, this work marks a less disjunctive and less repetitive style than her pieces before her stay in The Palma de Mallorca.

The Resurrection of Lady Lester

OyamO

This play is, in part, a retelling of the life of Lester Young, the great jazz saxophonist of the late 1930s and early 1940s.

In the Mirror of the Eighth King

Christopher Middleton

In this new book of essays, the noted British poet and translator explores a world in which all things are marvelous—and slightly awry.