“The Golls’ love poems of thier thirty year love affair, the “10,000 dawns” are little known even by those who know of the Goll’s poetry. But given these translations, this book might just take on new importance by seeing these as “mystical ecology” poems. They are about the act of loving within the context of the natural world, which in the end is about the only thing of real importance. The book is part of White Pine’s “Companions for the Journey” series, described as “designed to be carried along on your journey thorugh life.” And there couldn’t have been a better fit for this thought provoking series than this book.”

—Joe Napora - Asheville Poetry Review

"Unlike the Surrealists, Goll loved a real woman, who was an unchanging presence in his life. He and his wife Claire formed a turbulent love-world of which he wrote continuously. And it may be that Goll will be remembered finally for these poems. Their simple visionary grace, the ease with which they build a spiritual moment out of commonplace, almost conventional images, make the love poems unique in modern poetry." - Paul Zweig

"There are very few things like this in modern literature: Yvan and Claire Golls' Ten Thousand Dawns--Dix Mille Aubes--the very title of which has always brought tears to my eyes." -Kenneth Rexroth

A stunning story about a woman's return from the U.S. to a homeland that no longer exists.

Pushing forty and an oversized load of responsibility, a clash of cultures finally causes a Yugoslav-born woman to go to Yugoslavia to reclaim her father, her responsibility, her mooring. Bit by bit, she unearths the past, examining the emotions and conf licts of her immediate family and the motley, indomitable nation she stubbornly loves. Strong enough to cope with the conflicting demands of modern womanhood, she is undone by the slow, maddening disintegration of the old, disillusioned, card-carrying bu ilder of Yugoslav Socialism. As she watches him and everything he fought for crumble into dust, she loses her sense and measure of who she is.

“the horrors that have befallen the former Yugoslavia, it is not surprising that many would look back on the Communist era nostalgically. Franklin revisits the twilight years of the Tito era, a world full of eccentric family and friends. Serbs, Croats, and Muslims coexisting happily before being engulfed in civil war. In this semiautobiographical novel, an Americanized Yugoslav woman returns home for a visit and to check up on her aging father, a war hero and former dip lomat whose declining health mirrors the inevitable disintegration of the nation. The interpersonal dynamics between characters are reminiscent of Neil Simon's bittersweet comedies. Franklin's love for her country comes through in every sentence. Franklin has written the “perfect”expatriate novel for the end of the century.”Ted Leventhal

“you know nothing about Zen but wish to capture the spirit easily, this is the book for you. Simple elegance at its best.” -NAPRA Journal

Poems and prose by Latin America’s first Nobel Prize Laureate.

“This beautiful anthology holds the first English translation of Gabriela Mistral’s extraordinary prose and poetry . . . hidden to the mainstream no longer, here is the breathtaking lifework of a most gifted and enigmatic muse.” —NAPRA Journal

Jacqueline Joan Johnson has been awarded the Gregory Millard Fellowship for the New York Foundation for the Arts and Mid-Atlantic Writers Association Creative Writing Award in Poetry. Her poetry has appeared in numerous journals and magazines. She is th e author of Stokely Carmichael: The Story of Black Power for children and contributed to UpSouth: African American Migration and Streetlights: Illuminating Black Urban Tales.

"Carlota Caufield has given us a work of great sensuality and rare luminosity, suffused with an intelligence that is both playful and meditative. Her pleasures and discoveries become ours, her tender, often sly observations are crafted for inheritance. But it is Caulfield's devotion to the daily sacred that helps inspire our own. " --Cristina Garcia The poetry of Carlota Caulfield is characterized by journeys, by a wandering memory that seeks to travel all the world's roads, to sail to all its islands. The speakers in her poems are voyagers in perpetual transit, symbols of that wandering creature that human beings inevitably turn into when they are exiled from paradise, that is to say, from their mother's womb. The poet's eye yearns to see everything, take possession of everything, with never a pause to draw a breath. An eye that perceives all, including the fleeting passage of time and space. -Issac Goldemberg "Haunting incantatory poems by Carlota Caulfield, beautifully translated by Mary G. Berg. Writing about loss and memory and the redemption that comes of confronting the wound, Caulfield summons up the inner life in the dream music of the inexpressible." --Chana Bloch

“ In this volume Caulfield writes of lenses, mirrors, dictators, numberous writers, painters, and myths, frm all period of time, which have inspired her work. She is not a feminist nor a typical Latina poet. She does not write of her memories of Cuba, but not anguishing over its loss. Nor does she lament any descrimination, even about her background: “No one knows anything about me, only that I am a poet in transit/that I speak English with a certain indefinable accent/and that my nationality is cryptic”. She is a poet of the world, once exiled, but now she has matured, and she attempts to connect more with images her readers can comprehend.”

—Lou Pearson -  Chasqui

“Loynaz sees a shimmering world alive with emotion and high spirit. Even disappointment takes on a charged life, a flight, in her hands.” –The Small Press Book Review

“Hoping to widen the view of transnational art and break down the… barrier between so-called fine art and popular art forms, Agosin has placed fabric artists and dancers next to sculptors and painters… This collection of essays is a glorious celebration of unsung… women artists of Latin America.”

–Multicultural Review

The essence of Zen is contained in the phrases and poems presented here, along with an introduction by Gary Snyder. The sayings range from profound to mystifying to comical and appear in vivid, poetic English. First compiled in 15th century Japan, the book contains Zen phrases and verses taken from Zen classics, sutras, and the poetry of China.

“Zawacki deftly assembles a panorama of viewpoints that provide us with a portrait of a fragmented, troubled, but always dedicated populace… What strikes the reader is the refreshing lyrical moment, that transcendent wellspring of the poet who finds in the world the stuff of beauty and then creates a language to communicate it to us.”

–Multicultural Review

“A generous anthology of poetry, expository prose, and fiction… [with] uniformly intense fiction offerings… A very interesting collection.” –Kirkus Reviews

“Few works can compare with this anthology of Slovenian literature… this book exudes a gentle, civilized, almost Viennese sadness that contrasts with the often harsh subject matter.”

–Library Journal

Always Filling, Always Full is an exciting collection of tanka, the ancient Japanese five-line poem. Chula’s tanka are concise, moving, alive perceptions of the full range of human feelings. Working within the sinuous tradition of the Japanese tanka form, Chula has found a voice that bows both in the direction of earlier works and towards the unknown:the next poem, whose perception is always ungraspable until the words fall into place.

The ancient Japanese form of tanka has been used since literature was first recorded in the Kojiki in 712. By the 1600s, however, tanka had fallen out of favor. The form was revived in the early 1900s, and has grown steadily since. "I do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the men of old; I seek the things they sought," said Basho, and the same could be said by Chula. This collection blends Japanese tradition with an American sensibility to produce poems concise, moving, and filled with vivid perception of the range of human feeling. Maggie Chula spent twelve years living and studying in Kyoto, Japan, and has published three collections of haiku. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

This major anthology presents one hundred poems drawn form a tradition spanning one thousand years of Korean poets writing in Classic Chinese. Kim Joh-gil captures the elegant simplicity and emotional complexity of the originals in three stunning translations. Up until the 17th century, the bulk of Korean poetry was written in Chinese, the language of poets, scholars, and monks. This work became an integral part of Korean literary tradition. Among the Flowering Reeds, which introduces this important poetic tradition to the English-speaking audience, includes 100 poems spanning more than 1,000 years. Lovers of Chinese and Japanese poetry will delight in these translations, which capture both the elegant simplicity and the emotional complexity of the originals.

Kim Jong-gilis a Professor Emeritus of English at Korea University in Seoul and is a member of the Korean Academy of Arts. His works of translation include The Snow Falling on Chagall’s Village: Poems of Kim Ch’un-Su. He is presently completing an anthology of modern Korean poetry.

“The poems are by turns personal, spontaneous, reflective, and occasionally dangerous—that is, politically suicidal—works penned by thoughtful Koreans from the ninth- through the early twentieth-centuries. Anyone interested in tasting classical Korean poetry… cannot do better than to start with this collection.”

– Multicultural Review

“Occasion of Sin is not to be missed.” -Small Press

“explores dark emotions and thoughts with wonderful subtlety; he has a deliciously wicked wit and great range.” -Publishers Weekly

“Those who cannot visit Fredonia… will be entertained and informed by this tour between book covers… [Reiff’s] exemplary study… records not only the architecture… but the history of the place itself.”

–Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians

This large, bilingual collection contains more than twenty years of poetry, including new work, arranged by themes fundamental to Agosin's artistic and critical oeuvre. Her rich Eastern European and Latin American heritage, her experiences in exile, and her profound humanistic vision all play a role as she writes about ancestors, women, children, the poor, and the disinherited. Despite the difficult material, Agosin expresses a need to rejoice in life and to believe in the possibility of change. Always searching for life's bare essentials, often in a spare language that reveals the common threads that unite us all, Agosin explores such diverse landscapes to "make beauty and order out of chaos and pain."

Marjorie Agosin is well-known as a poet, writer, critic, and human rights activist. She is editor of the critically acclaimed Secret Weavers Series of Latin American Women's writing published by White Pine Press. Agosin is a professor of Spanish at Wellesley College. Her published work includes: Ashes of Revolt, A Cross and a Star: Memoirs of a Jewish Girl in Chile, An Absense of Shadows, and Happiness.

“[An] accomplished and prolific poet offers old and new works… in [this] remarkable collection… Agosin… expresses a pan-Latin American and global sensitivity.”

– Multicultural Review

"Marjorie Agosin is one of the most lyrical and refined voices in Latin America."
-Claribel Alegria

"Agosin's poetic language engages the reader in a mesmerizing journey of inward reflection and exile."
-Isabel Allende

"Marjorie Agosin proves the power of the word to transport us to the center of her humane and human vision."
-Julia Alvarez

“The first volume of Zajc’s poems available in English, this comprehensive selection shows a maturation from early angry lament to love poems both lush and consuming. Although Zajc’s poetry invokes war and its aftermath, it is not reportage. Rather, it is witness of a sort, to an emotional life, resplendent with shadows and the relentless thrust of the earth to continue with its harvestings and sowings.”

– Forward Magazine

“Zajc… is… considered to be one of the greatest Slovenian poets and an important Central European modernist… Translator Erica Johnson Debeljak has done a smooth job of bringing Zajc’s poems into English.” – Rain Taxi

“For those who wish to delve more deeply into the long tradition of Ken poetry in Korea, White Pine Press has released Because of the Rain, the latest installemnt of their beautiful “Companions for the Journey” series. The collection spans over a thousand years, offering a distillation of zen doctrine and practise, glimpsed through a Korean lens. These are wonderful pure nuggets of Zen insight.”

—Dan Zigmond - Tricycle

Milton Rogovin’s photographs are in many major collections, and his archives were recently acquired by the Library of Congress. A true national treasure, Rogovin, now in his ninth decade, received the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Award in 1983.

“Rogovin’s work stands as one of the best examples of collaboration between the subject and the photographer, one based on mutual respect… Rogovin’s work stands at the frontier of history and contemporary photography, a place where the human subject remains enduringly powerful.”

–Afterimage

Winner of the 1993 Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets, Merrill’s previous work has received wide acclaim. A striking new collection by a poet W. S. Merwin calls "gifted, audacious, and accomplished." A prolific journalist, Merrill's most recent work, two non-fiction books on the crisis in the Balkans, have received tremendous critical acclaim. With this collection, he returns for the first time in seven years to the form closest to his heart: poetry.

"No anxiety of influence prevails here; nor is there evidence of a desire to follow any models too closely. Rather, there is a generosity that names names, offers praise, then contributes something new. Merrill lives in a landscape of names, surrounded by eloquent scraps of language allowing him to chant the senses' progress through the world.”
-John Elder, The Los Angeles Times

Christopher Merrill is Director of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa.

“Merrill renders the physicality of nature better than any other contemporary American poet. Take a look at the intense, precise verb here… and one can see that he is very careful about distributing their energy over the course of a stanza, channeling volts from line to line until it is felt viscerally and electrically.” –Verse

These poems, written during and following the Korean War, reflect the reality of living in a country torn in half by political ideologies. Comparable to the Civil War in that it pitted brother against brother, the partitioning of the country following the war carried the bitterness forward into the present and created a situation that has kept families from reuniting and left an entire generation longing to go home.

Twenty-one poets, male and female, North Korean and South Korean, well-known and long forgotten, appear in this collection, the first of its kind in English. The poems reflect the reality of living in a country torn in half by political ideologies. An introduction by translator Ji-moon Suh places the poems and the poets within a historical context that describes the suffering and despair of pitting brother against brother.

“These poems will wound you and haunt you, but the larger knowing they bring is crucial. Susan Rich is a caring citizen of every heartland.”
-Naomi Shihab Nye

Susan Rich gives us a collection of poems...generous in the range and power of their emotion.
-J. M. Coetzee

Maurice Kenny is professor at the State University of New York at Potsdam. He lives in Saranac Lake in New York State’s Adirondack Mountains. His most recent books, both from the University of Michigan Press, are Tortured Skins & Other Fictions and In the Time of the Present.

“Carving Hawk opens with ‘Truth: The Search,’ and, in a sense, the painfully honest searching continues throughout this excellent collection… Carving Hawk [is] beautifully rendered and memorably inspiring.”

–Multicultural Review

 “This collection represent five decades of work with poems that evoke strong connections to nature, history, love, and the human spirit. Carving Hawk opens with “Truth: The Search,” and, in a sense, the painful honesty searching continues throughout this excellent collection. Kenny’s exquistely crafted poems examine wide-ranging emotions, places, and relationships that yield compelling insights. “

—William Kelly - Multicultural Review

“...we meet an affronted gentleness...in the suburbs, Christ the fox cries, or dies, maimed in a snare. Deane's poems radiate the desire of the spirit to believe despite the harshness of our world.”

This bold new collection by American Book Award winner Maurice Kenny explores the intersections between life and art. Part one explores the lives of well known gay artists; part two focuses on Kenny’s often difficult relationship with his father. 

This is the first new book by this major Native American poet since Carving Hawk: New and Selected Poems.

Maurice Kenny is one of the major voices of Native American letters. His books of poetry include BetweenTwo Rivers, Tekonwatonti: Molly Brant, Blackrobe, and Carving Hawk. He has also published books of fiction and essays.

 “The world Kenny opens for us is personal, yet never sentimental. It is a world in which long-dead relatives can appear when they are needed; in which the drum sounds in rituals of curing; a world vibrant with the natural landscape.”

        —Joseph Bruchac - Small Press Review

 “Maurice Kenny stands at the forefront of his generation. Few writers of any ethnicity are destined to be remembered in the mainstream of literary history; I believe that Kenny’s contributions as a poet are among those few. He writes from the center, as our Elders would say.”

                                                            —Wendy Rose

“A master lyricist.”                       

—Joseph Bruchac

“What distinguishes the best of Kenny’s work is the almost incantory language which works to blur the distinction between the human and the rest of the natural world”

-Barry Silesky - Another Chicago Magazine  

“Hamill reminds us that the pure hunger of solitude and the constant grace of the natural world are most powerfully experienced when touched by human empathy. In the zen blues of our time, Sam Hamill's poems echo like bare bone upon bone.”—St. John

“Hamill reminds us that the pure hunger of solitude and the constant grace of the natural world are most powerfully experienced when touched by human empathy. In the zen blues of our time, Sam Hamill's poems echo like bare bone upon bone.”—St. John

“ Each man’s work [Max Jacob, Francis Ponge, and Jean Follain] represents the fulfillment of some different potential of the prose poem… [Jacob is] closest to the explosive outlaw spirit of Baudelaire and Rimbaud… The return to print ot Beth Archer Brombert’s translations of the obsessive ‘object poem’ writer Francis Ponge would in itself make this volume a significant event… These translations [of Jean Follain] are a pure joy… Anyone wishing to experience the height of the prose poem’s peculiar genius should study these inexhaustible French masters.”

–Ruminator Review

“The book is well worth a read for anyone interested in the more innovative side of the last century’s poetry. The work collected here explores the boundaries of the genre… with vivacity and style.”

–Rain Taxi

“Since the prose poem began its life as an enfant terrible, founded in rebellion against bourgeois consciousness and rejection of literary parents, is there such a thing as the prose poem in its mature form?  For an answer, we must look to where the prose poem as a self-conscious literary form has been practiced longest.  

Dreaming the Miracle is an editorially unattributed reissue of substantial gatherings of three twentieth century French prose poets, Max Jacob, Francis Ponge, and Jean Follain.  Each poet's work represents the fulfillment of some different potential of the prose poem.  Closest to the explosive outlaw spirit of Baudelaire and Rimbaud is Max Jacob, whose poems capture something of Ernst's disturbing surreal collages:

Here darkness and silence! with cloud-shaped pools of blood.  The seven wives of Bluebeard no longer in the cupboard.  All that's left of them this organdy headdress.  But there! out on the ocean, seven galleys with ropes that hang down from topsail to sea like braids on women's shoulders.  Getting closer and closer!  They're here!

(“Metempsychosis,” trans. Kulik)

The return to print of Beth Archer Brombert's translations of the obsessive “object poem” writer Francis Ponge would in itself make this volume a significant event.  Part natural historian and part linguist, Ponge typically amplifies the qualities of an ordinary thing until we perceive it as a kind of existential hero.  His peculiar virtues are suggested in this passage from a 15-page poem on shrimp:

It lies in the midst of its heaped-up weapons, its head under a helmet soldered to its thorax, generously equipped with antennae and feelers of extravagant sensitivity.

Oh, translucent vessel, indifferent to lures, you have too many organs of circumspection:  you will be betrayed by them. . . .

Perhaps the greatest poet in Dreaming the Miracle is Jean Follain.  These translations by Mary Feeney, Louise Guiney, and William Matthews, also long unavailable, are a pure joy.  Follain's prose poems look back toward the turn-of-the-century France of his childhood, but they are not nostalgia pieces.  Like the photographs of Atget, they open unexpectedly deep vistas of past time in which we realize how many worlds have existed within this one:

On Easter Sunday the old man puts jewelry onto the wrists, ears, and neck of a long-haired woman.  Already hitched to the black and yellow carriage, the glistening bay mare whinnies.  A sailor sings by an engraving of the end of the world with Christ in the billowy heavens, the dead caught in their shrouds, leaving their graves.  Time fills up with a future that may be fearsome.  A child goes by on the road, wearing a motionless garter snake for a bracelet.  How hot this long day beginning a century will be!  Housebound, a deformed girl closes her blue eyes.

(Trans. Feeney and Matthews)

Anyone wishing to experience the height of the prose poem's peculiar genius should study these inexhaustible French masters.

—Thomas R. Smith  - Ruminator Review

Two thousand years have passed since the first of these poems were composed. A new introduction prefaces this expanded edition of Schelling’s remarkable translations.

Sample Poems

Her quick eyes

and animated mouth

unsettle me.

So, of course,

her lifted breasts,

full lips—

soft fruits of desire.

But why should a

single wisp of hair,

stroked beneath her

navel like

some unforgettable

line of poetry,

reduce me to such

anguish?

Bhartrihari

Friend,

the lamp flame was flaring

into night’s darkest

corners. My lover,

an adept in the flavors

of love,

made slow

very slow love

because the bed

grates like a talkative

neighbor.

Anonymous

No one visible up ahead,

no one approaches

from behind.

Not a footprint on the road.

Am I alone?

This much is clear—

the path the ancient

poets opened

is choked with brush,

and I’ve long since left

the public thoroughfare.

Dharmakirti

Once again

you mount this playful

woman’s breasts and touch

the tender region

along her thighs.

Closing one arm around you

she draws forth

your pleasure

with measured strokes

of her hand.

Some other lifetime

what austerities

did you practice, O sitar,

to win this reward?

Vacaspati

Between her little

son and her

husband

the lady sits—

      milk leaks

      from one breast

      teased by a fingernail

      the other one

      stiffens

Hala

Water and scraps of meat

she has trained

the dog carefully—

It receives her lover

but bays loudly

when her husband appears

on the road                                                           

anonymous           

“Refined, intense, wise, stiring, immediate, subtile, all the charmed qualities gather in Dropping the Bow. These translations are precious jewels. Like the erotic moods they investigate, these versions shimmer and startle with a palpable desire to be heard, and a mystical sense of impermanence. This is a transmission of a vital, extraordinary tradition.”

                                                            —Anne Waldman

“These dear ancients deserve a translator like Andrew Schelling: with gentle authority, he helps them raise their hands to bid time halt for a moment in our heads. Their brief translucent poems demonstrate the co-existence of past, present, and future in the perennial vortices of human emotion, they are gists of the heart.”

                                                                        -Anselm Hollo

”Access to such unfamiliar texts - retaining freshness and grace - is only cause to thank Andrew Schelling for his generous effort. He opens us to these frank inspiriting poems without stint. Make us look forward to more such revelations. As Visvanatha says: ‘Language...baring...light’.”

                                                            -Cid Corman

These coyote tales by Native American writer Peter Blue Cloud are funny, profound, sometimes sad and always wise. Blue Cloud brings Native American literature into the twenty-first century with a style and power that have made this book a classic. The tales take coyotes from mythic time to the present in stories that show coyote's enduring vitality. Coyote is obscene, amoral, comic, wise. These Coyote tales are funny, profound, sometimes sad, and always wise.

Peter Blue Cloud is a Mohawk who now lives on the reserve in Kahnawake, Quebec. Winner of an American Book Award, he is the author of numerous collections, including Clans of Many Nations.

Danny Divan is a white teenager in South Africa under apartheid when he falls in love with the daughter of a black domestic servant. His family forces the two apart, and eventually his discomfort with the poisonous political atmosphere drives him from the country and to a new life in America. Within weeks of his arrival in Boston, Danny meets Tesseba, an offbeat but trusting artist who takes him in and marries him so he won’t be deported. Even as they live as a couple and build a life together, and as Danny prospers and his family joins him in exile, the memory of his forbidden first love does not fade. Twenty years later, when Danny returns to the "new" South Africa to salvage what he can of his family’s fortune, he sets out to discover what became of the girl he cannot forget. What he finds instead is the truest version of himself. This novel traces the ambiguities of love within a family and for another, and tests the shakiness of memory. Empire Settings reveals how love, and the memory of love, can be overwhelmed by changing assumptions about race and belonging.

David Schmahmann was born in Durban, South Africa, and is a graduate of Dartmouth College and the Cornell Law School. He has also studied in India and Israel, and his publications include a short story in The Yale Review and articles on legal issues. He lives in Brookline, Massachusetts and practices law in Boston. This is his first novel.

“The way the plot gradually reveals its truths is well done… Recommended.”

–Library Journal

“[A] thoughtful, affecting, and skillfully constructed first novel… Schmahmann’s portrayal of South Africa, past and present, is as poignant—and as nuanced—as his delineation of the characters and their relationships.”

–Los Angeles Times

“This artful, moving novel is told in several voices, male and female, black and white… Schmahmann… displays a sure touch with character, plot and atmosphere alike.”

–Reviews in Brief

“A powerful, engrossing story about a time and place that many would rather forget. Fortunately, authors like Schmahmann aren’t letting that happen.”

–Orlando Sentinel

“Haunting… In his artful battle against cultural and historical amnesia, Schmahmann elevates his novel above the realm of routine family and romantic melodrama… Empire Settings… takes on an unexpected, even unforgettable power.”

–The Washington Post

“Reading Magali García Ramis is always a treat. She knows how to tell a good story and keep you interested to the end. Happy Days, Uncle Sergio, a novel about growing up in Puerto Rico in the fifties, rings with the quiet power of real life recreated with warmth, tenderness, and simplicity.” —Ana Lydia Vega

First imprisioned in 1964, Chiha Kim was sentenced to death in 1974. His crime: writing poetry that provoked the military governmentof Chunghee Park. Worldwide efforts to save him were begun in Japan, and his sentence was commuted in 1980 following the assassination of Park. A legendary figure in SouthKorea, he won the Lotus Prize, generally regarded as the Third World's Nobel Prize, while imprisoned in 1975. Heart's Agony gathers peotry form all phases of his career, including poems that led to his imprisonment and torture and those written from prison.

“Often political poets seem long on politics but short on poetics. This is not the case with Chiha Kim.”

–Multicultural Review

“Kim Chiha is a virtuoso, entertaining as well as brilliant.”

–World Literature Today

The Hsin Hsin Ming, Verses on the Faith-Mind, by the third Chinese patriarch of Zen, Sengtsan, is considered to be the first Chinese Zen document and one of the most widely-admired and elegant Zen writings.

“The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences.” Seng-t’san

The Hsin Hsin Ming, Verses on the Faith-Mind by Seng-t’san, the third Chinese patriarch of Zen, is considered to be the first Chinese Zen document. Lucidly translated here by Richard B. Clark, it remains one of the most widely-admired and elegant of Zen writings, and is as relevant today as it was when it was written. In a world where stress seems unavoidable, Seng-t’san's words show us how to be fully aware of each moment.

The colorful characters who populate these stories live in Buffalo, NY but they will be readily recognizable to everyone.

Peter Johnson is the founder and editor of The Prose Poem: An International Journal. His books of prose poetry include Pretty Happy and Miracles & Mortifications, the latter of which won the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets.Born and raised in Buffalo, NY, he currently teaches at Providence College in Providence, Rhode Island.

“Johnson’s men lose jobs in the steel plants, get hit over the head with beer bottles, and see their half-articulated dreams thwarted… We know these men… and Johnson moves readers—both women and men—to admiration for their swagger and sympathy for their inept lives.”

–Bloomsbury Review

Selected by Pattiann Rogers as the winner of the Sixth Annual White Pine Press Poetry Prize, these lyric poems convey the emotional life of the artist and show him as deeply human: flawed, burdened, sympathetic, and desperately honest about himself and others. Stephen Frech has published widely in magazines and journals. He lives in Chicago.

Written as a series of montages, this novel, a rare and powerful tale set in the former Soviet republic of Lithuaniafirst Soviet-occupied state to demand and win its independence after a violent confrontation with the Red Army in 1991with imagination, intimacy, and insight of the human consequences of rapid change in the Baltic States. Mayo's American, Paul Rood, vows to bring Walt Whitman's Song of Myself to Lithuanians, yet when he sits with Vilma, his interpreter, on the bank of the Nemunas River to make the translation, the stories she tells him of Lithuania consume all their time and seem truer than any rendering of Whitman. What they finally translate are stories drawn from Lithuania's deep well of myth, folklore, and histories of the human heart. The keeper ironically laments the passing of the strict Societ order; an unemployed sculptor wonders what he will find when he scrubs off the Soviet whitewash covering religious frescoes; a gravedigger is frantic to find a plot for the town's mafioso mayor because everywhere he begins to dig in the cemetery he uncovers the scattered remains of Jews murdered by Hitlerites; a dissident physicist recently returned from “rehabilitation”ordered by the KGB resorts to picking pockets in the open market. Magical, stark, and prophetic, In Lithuanian Wood is a captivating and visionary portrait of a country, a peopleworldvital transition, truly stories of our time.

This book collects poems previously published in limited edition chapbooks and uncollected work. Spanning twenty-five years in St. John's career, the work reflects the progression of a major voice in American letters in poems that pre-date his first collection, Hush, to those that follow the publication of his selected poems in 1994. In earlier poems reflecting the decadence of their times to recent work that embodies the world in which we presently live, St. John's fresh imagery draws the reader into elegant poems that resonate with the mysteries of life.

“Wonderful wit, humor, lyricism, and brightness… Exhibiting harmony of form, excellence of craftsmanship and originality, In the Pines is in every way a beautiful body of work.”

–Poetry Flash

"Inserted within a specific temporal and spatial framework: Santiago, Chile, September 1973, this novel is without a doubt, one of our most significant portrayals of the convulsive environment that is
today's Latin America. Its appearance enriches the already existent saga achieved by such works as
Portable Country (González León), A Manual for Manuel (Cortázar) and Conversation in the Cathedral (Vargas Llosa), to name just a few." -Ariel Muniz - Plural, Mexico

We needed this novel. The brutal fascist assault against the Chilean people has provoked an endless
array of studies, essays and even defenses of such behavior. But we really needed to have in our hands this fresh, ironic narrative text filled with more comprehension than hatred and resentment towards a sector of Santiago's politicized middle class which, with its romantic escapades, its problems, its confidence in the future, had to confront a reality that was deteriorating day by day before its very eyes.
-Fausto Castillo - El Día, Mexico

“Through a superimposition of characters and chronological and spatial levels, Delano creates an intriguing and pungent political novel… This novel is a must read, engaging the reader throughout.” – Multicultural Review

Spanning the years since the 1995 publication of Heartbeat Geography: New & Selected Poems, these poems traverse distant lands, as well as, the continent of
the heart. In travels that take him through North America, Southeast Asia, the Himalayas, Viet Nam, India, and Mexico, Brandi engages the world with open eyes, ears, and heart.

John Brandi was born in Los Angeles in 1943. Since 1973, he has been awarded residencies by the state arts councils of Alaska, Arkansas, California, Montana, Nevada, New York and New Mexico to teach in schools, prisons, and homes for the physically and mentally disabled. Author of more than thirty books of poetry, essays and modern American haiku, he has
received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Witter Bynner Foundation, and the Djerassi Foundation. His poems have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies and have been translated into Spanish and Italian. As a visual artist he has exhibited his paintings and collages worldwide. He lives in El Rito, New Mexico, with his wife Renée Gregorio and is a member of the summer
poetry faculty at Idyllwild Arts, California.

"Brandi has been an open roader for much of his life and like his two great forbearers, Whitman and Neruda, has named the minute particulars, the details of his soujournings ... infusing them with a whole gamut of feelings --compassionate, mischievous, loving and righteous. It's what's made his poetry one of the solid bodies of work that's emerged from the North American West since the 60's." -Jack Hirschman

"Delicate, gracious, and eloquent, John Brandi's moving new collection of poems, In What Disappears, reveals that he remains an extraordinarily profound poet of prayer and praise. His tradition is that of the spiritual mendicant, the perpetual wanderer, the seeker who travels the raw paths of experience in search of the world's wisdoms. His is the most honorable and heroic of ambitions - to dress our broken world in the clothes of language, trust, and hope." -David St. John

“It’s been far too long a wait for this stunning new collection by New Mexico poet/artist/traveler John Brandi… Each poem in In What Disappears is fully realized, each moment carefully wrought, each line a treasure.”

–Southwest Book Views

“Brandi’s vision continues to grow—a healing vision of connection and unity.”

–The New Mexican

“Zeiger’s poems, so earthy and moist with family, love, and everyday things and so gently passionate about finding your own territory, and so full of memory, both tragic and unchanging-these strong and delicate poems offer a way home for us all.”-Thomas Moore

“Maureen Gibbon’s Magdalena offers a fresh and profound voice to Americna poetry. Comparisons are impossible because ths book doesn’t remind me of anything I’ve read in years. I loved it.”

-Jim Harrison

“Gibbon delivers a strong, sensual, shimmering, elegant work of  a woman happily alive in her own skin. She welcomes nature — dolphins, birds and “Trees and flowers that give off their smells in the heat, like women.” Magdalena is honest and alive with erotic poems that began to simmer when the poet “was 16 and hungry all the time.”

—Carol Conolly - Minneapolis Star Tribune

These intriguing travel journalists unite and reveal the voices of women who traveled in Latin America during the 19th century. From French nuns early in the century, whose unpublished journals Agosífound in convent libraries, to well-bred English women, these travelers discovered a world beyond anything they had known or expected and recorded it in great detail. Although men discovered the land, these women discovered the heart and soul of the new world and its indigenous peoples. Destinations include Guatemala, Chile, Bolivia, Argentina, Peru, Mexico, Cuba, Venezuela, the Andes, and Nicaragua. Included among the writers are coffee heiress Helena Sanborn, who acted as translator for her father on his trip to inspect coffee plantations, and early feminist Flora Tristán.

How do Bengali women love in times of social transition and political upheaval?  These poems look at how Bengali women tell their truths of the heart and mind through the prism of their struggles for equality, opportunity, and recognition in a changing society.  The poems follow a subtle trajectory through the stages of love-First Love, Marriage, Separation, Aging and Death, and the ultimate Supreme, Universal Love of which romantic love is an imperfect reflection--not unlike the stages of life through the human psyche moves, from beginning to end and back to the starting anew of the cycle.  

This collection includes work from a range of Bengali women poets, the eldest ones born in the women's quarters of purdah-observing, high-caste families in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.and the youngest poet included is Taslima Nasrin.

Long neglected or scoffed at by poetry purists, the prose poem is now taking its rightful place as a distinct and accepted genre in American letters. Johnson’s work as editor of The Prose Poem: An International Journal, did much to legitimatize this genre. This book, his second collection of prose poetry, is filled with the mystery, humor, and pathos that make this form so appealing and so accessible.

Peter Johnson lives in Providence, Rhode Island, with his wife and son. He teaches at Providence College.

“As one of the most dynamic writers of prose poetry, Peter Johnson has given the form a future direction and a will to survive. Each of these poems is a world unto itself.”

–Bloomsbury Review

“Here, for the hip, disaffected early twenty-first century reader, is a book that rollicks and romps, a book that rocks… Even readers convinced that poetry is meant to be written only in rhythmic lines will find Miracles & Mortifications to be a fall through the rabbit hole into a weird and amusing alternative universe.” –American Poet

A selection of one-hundred and ten poems, sixty-three of which are new, from the man Alan Cheuse called “a marvelous godfather” to the prose poem.

“Mort Marcus one of America’s hidden literary treasures, has become a suberb master of the prose poem...Often, it’s the situation, the little storyline that captivates...At other times its is language...that sends a shiver up the spine. I couldn’t get enough of this delectable stuff, and there is nothing else like it anywhere.”
--Al Young

Sixty-five new poems take their place beside forty-five poems published in Marcus’s previous two books. Employing and many times parodying the structures of discourse by which we have communicated our sense of the world through the ages, Marcus re-examines the notions on which the human species has understood its place in the universe. In the process, he has created his own cosmology, a cosmology by turns humorous, satirical, poignant, and always compassionate in revealing our beliefs, foibles, hopes, and contradictory actions. Morton Marcus is the author of seven books of poetry and one novel, The Brezhvev Memo. A film historian and critic as well as a poet, Marcus taught film and literature at Cabrillo College in Aptos, California, until his retirement.

“Mort Marcus one of America’s hidden literary treasures, has become a suberb master of the prose poem...Often, it’s the situation, the little storyline that captivates...At other times its is language...that sends a shiver up the spine. I couldn’t get enough of this delectable stuff, and there is nothing else like it anywhere.”
--Al Young

“...the landscape of loss and gain we call exile, seen through the poet’s sharp eye and described in a voice that never wavers from the truth. I felt I was re-encountering Cuba in the light of new imagining, freed of ideology and therefore resplendent and complete.” --Pablo Medina

Selected by This remarkable first book begins with Castillo’s Cuban childhood, and follows her family as they "start over without a language" on one of the last Freedom Flights to Miami. The poems chronicle the visit of a Cuban uncle, who’s surrounded by relatives that "twenty years and English have turned into strangers," and Castillo’s bittersweet return to her homeland: "Even a map cannot show you the way back to a place that no longer exists."

“Peter Conner’s poems in “Of Whiskey and Winter” have a wonderful way of communicating strangeness, displacement, through precise yet unorthodox choice and placing of words within each poem. His poems often have a remarkable stillness to them, giving the reader time to look around once inside their world, and really breathe the poems in. He has a way in finding beauty in struggle, and at the same time celebrating being in the moment, whether in trying to survive a northern winter, or coming to terms with our own mortality. In “Certified Alive” he combines the two, and writes of a year’s passing “each spring I emerge thicker with bear weight. My hair grows, my waist, my growl a truer lament.” Here, as elsewhere in “Of Whiskey and Winter,” he writes of our direct, oft-unrealized connection to the natural world, to being something that like everything else we come in contact with, is terribly impermanent. And he approaches it all with a sense of wonder, of delight. This is reflected both in his language, with its lovely mis-directions, questions becoming answers and then turning back on themselves, and even in celebrating the clarity of madness, of absolutely not having yourself grounded, prepared for what’s next. Peter has a way of placing us immediately in the moment, and then being perfectly willing to disorient us, to explode the familiar, to use the strangeness and odd juxtapositions within these poems to alter our sense of where we are. “Of Whiskey and Winter” grapples with the distance between our reach--our dreams--and our grasp--our hard realities. Like the title of the poem “The Thing Behind the Other Thing,” Peter’s poems invite us to look a little deeper, consider a little more, identify that which is not readily apparent, but requires our utmost involvement. Both is these poems, and in our lives.”

-Glenn Raucher - The Writer’s Voice - New York City

"For a book of prose poetry, Conner's Of Whiskey & Winter is amazingly lithe, almost nimble. Peter Conners has offered a wonderful cycle and proof, for those of us who may need it, that prose poetry requires no more validation: it has arrived."

-Weston Cutter - Mid American Review

“Peter Conners' stunning prose poems are packed with keen sensitivity, dreaminess, and wit. I love his time travels, the vibrant layering of image and detail. Try taking walks as you are reading this book— the dazzle of landscapes, inner and outer, feel replenished and rich. This is language and vision I want to come home to again and again.”

—Naomi Shihab Nye 

“I don’t know what’s more remarkable about the poems in Of Whiskey and Winter, their exquisite music or their startling, acrobatic leaps. In these new poems Peter Conners peels away the fragile membrane that separates imagination from reality, the suppositional from the actual. Lyrical, intelligent and passionate, Conners writes with the suppleness and the grace of a dancer. By turns manic and contemplative, zany and wise, his rollicking poems have the power to simultaneously challenge, illuminate and praise the illusive character of the world. With a blend of irony and affection typical of this collection, Conners insists that “if we are to dream ourselves away, let us dream of this . . .”

—Gary Young

“This book is not a party favor. Not a fairy tale. It is not an escape from life or an alternative to reality. It is, alas, a map of the mind, of its winter landscapes, of the psyche of fatherhood, of marriage, and of the daily drudgery of life. How odd that it is also comic, surprising, magical, even illuminating. I am both enchanted and baffled by this poet. What a completely unique voice, what a bold new collection.”

—Nin Andrews

“These stories offer a glimpse of Cuba that is unique: This is not the exotic island, this is not an island of rebels and caudillos. This is an island peopled with women who are trying to make it from day to day; but to do so successfully, now and then they must take a flight of fancy.”

– Multicultural Review

“With this volume, Chaves makes an outstanding contribution to the books that present classical Chinese poetry in both accurate and enjoyable English translation.” -Choice

“This re-issue of Chaves’ Pilgrim of the Clouds is welcome news. In its handy size, it is the perfect companion for trekkers who feel like taking a break in a tea-house or cafe, or, for those bound to the classroom, an affordable additional text that students in an undergraduate course will find both entertainig and instructive.”

—Ihor Pidhany - Education About Asia

“An important chorus of our south of the border sisters for us Latinas to hear...Here we have much knowing and glorying from Argentina to Brazil to my own Dominican Republic—toes to waist to breasts of the hemisphere!” —Julia Alvarez

Immigrant writer Novakovich records his journeys to
find his roots, some to his native Croatia, some no
farther than Cleveland, where he searches for the
grave of a grandmother, who refused to return to Croatia with the rest of the family. This collection reflects the joys and difficulties in returning to a homeland left behind.

There are, according to Novakovich, "four and a half million Croats in Croatia and an equal number in diaspora around the world." Although he emigrated to the U.S. at the age of twenty, Novakkovich frequently returns to Croatia, which he calls the strongest source for his writing. These essays document journeys he and his family have taken back to his homeland throughout the years, Immigrant writer Novakovich records his journeys to find his roots, some to his native Croatia, some no farther than Cleveland, where he searches for the grave of his grandmother, who refused to return to Croatia with the rest of her family. This moving collection reflects the joys and the difficulties in returning to a homeland left behind.

Josip Novakovich is the author of Yolk, Apricots from Chernobyl, and Salvation and Other
Disasters.

"Novakovich is a strong, original writer. His subtle prose makes me beam with pleasure, and break into an anxious sweat at the same time. He has mastered the tone of bearing witness as a principle of moral literature."
-Philip Lopate, The Art of the Personal Essay

“Plum Brandy: Croatian Journeys mixes autobiographical writing, biographical sketches, travelogue, and journalism as it attempts to give a more personal insight into the past and present realities of that country, It is a rewarding read.”

—Gordana Crnkovic - Slavic and East European Journal

“Novakovitch… is the insider/outsider looking in, and what he provides is… the best portrait of contemporary life in the new Croatian nation… To read this volume is to understand something of the mystery of the Balkans that has always intrigued the West.”

– Multicultural Review

“Novakovitch is a collector, with his ear to the ground. He misses nothing, and these essays are, line by line, so rich with dialogue and description, with perceptiveness and character, you can only wonder how he will ever manage to tell all the stories. It is a kind of genius, this gift for gathering, this ability to grasp the essential elements of situation, story and person.”

–Chicago Tribune

Points of Departures explores the world of male identity, specifically the notions of masculinity, sexual identity, romantic love, and family, in the context of the feminist critiques of culture and identity and the redefinition of the masculinity of the past 40 years. The poems grapple with issues of gender and personal identity surrounding his wife coming out as a lesbian after 14 years together and how those notions must be opened and challenged.

Paul Hogan received an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Buffalo and held the Grey Chair fellowship under Robert Creeley. He served as the director of the Writers-in-Education Program for Just Buffalo Literary Center and has worked for many years in the nonprofit sector and is currently Vice President of the John R. Oishei Foundation. 

“cast of characters...are family members. What we remember of our childhoods are seemingly magical acts by our parents and siblings, acts that do not explain themselves and belong to the realm of myth. Johnson‘prose poems return us to that world where our imagination was the hero setting out almost daily on a series of fabulous adventures under the dining room table, which, we might say, rests on the shaky legs of common sense.”- Charles Simic

“A newly translated collection of flash fiction from Argentine writer Ana María Shua reveals to the English-speaking world that she is a major figure in this contemporary mode of writing.

Shua’s book Quick Fix is actually a collection of her best microfiction from four volumes she has written in this genre. Expertly selected, introduced, and translated by Rhonda Dahl Buchanan, these stories draw on fairy tales, sexual fantasies, and dreams. What is most charming about Shua’s short shorts is that she presents situations that are completely fantastical, absurd, or paradoxical in a perfectly deadpan tone. Here is the entire text of a story called “For Lack of

Proof”:

“Enormous leaps, sixty or ninety feet high, in which I soar above the tree tops, and yet that’s all they are, leaps: the devastating proof that I can’t fly.”

In just one sentence, the mood swings from elation to deflation, but with a gentle, self-mocking humor that is one of Shua’s best qualities as a writer. Her work reminds me of the paintings of René Magritte,where absurdity is presented as a fact of life, but a hilarious one.

The four collections that the translator distilled to compile this book all have different themes. Dream Catcher, Shua’s first collection of sudden fiction, centers around sleeping and waking, though those are by no means the only topics. But Shua uses sleeping and dreaming as ways of

teasing out the paradoxes of the human condition. One very remarkable quality that emerges in this section of the book is Shua’s ability to step away from the earth, like an astronaut walking in space: “There exists in the world a man who is God, although he doesn’t realize it.…His desires, his fantasies, his most abstract intentions are carried out in a seemingly random manner that is subject to mysterious, albeit natural laws. For example, his gastric secretions provoke rivers of lava somewhere on the planet and his bad moods unleash wars.” As comical as this passage sounds, it is not that different from the idea of a god or a messiah walking on earth, an idea that many have faith in. There are certainly satirical edges to Shua’s Fabergé eggs of fantasy.

The second section of the book, “Geisha House,” focuses on sexual fantasy and obsession. With surprising humor, Shua shows the Möbius striptease that sometimes results from following desires to their logical, absurd conclusion: “Many prefer to be bound, and naturally, the kind of  bondage varies depending on the resources of the aroused victim: from silk ties to blood ties.” This section also contains variations on fairy tales and Jewish folklore about the golem, and these

are some of the funniest and most pointed of the sudden fictions.

The third section, “Botany of Chaos,” contains little meditations, one paragraph long, Shua’s favorite length for her short short fictions. They are more general than some of the others, but no less resonant.

The last section, “Ghost Season,” contains somewhat more elaborate fictions, some of which are laugh-out-loud funny, and other of which seem slightly off the mark. And that is one of the rewards and pitfalls of this genre—like a joke, the punch line of a nanofiction either works or it doesn’t. When it doesn’t, the whole exercise seems a bit flat, but when it hits home, it just sparkles. In the hands of a lesser translator, this collection could have lacked the pizzazz of the

Spanish, but in the English version of Rhonda Dahl Buchanan, the translator preserves the wry humor that is Shua’s ace.

The book has both the Spanish and the English, for which I bow down to the publisher of White Pine Press, Dennis Maloney, who has included this volume in his excellent Secret Weavers Series of Latin American women writers. 

The book is profusely illustrated with line drawings by the artist LuciMistratov. The decision to include many drawings is wise, particularly since these pieces take some thinking, and breaking up the text with illustrations allows the reader time to contemplate each short short before moving on to the next. 

All in all, Quick Fix establishes Ana María Shua as a major figure for English-language readers to follow in Latin American literature. The book makes me hope that many more of Shua’s fifty volumes of novels, short stories, poetry, theater, children’s fiction, humor, and folklore will soon appear in translation.”

—  Zack Rogow - Words Without Borders 

“Flash fiction, sudden fiction, microfiction, blasters or, in Spanish, brevísimos: no matter what name one calls it, short short stories are an increasingly popular—and increasingly vital—literary

form.Despite their brevity, these stories require not only focus and agility on the part of the

reader, but also an author with a comedian’s sense of timing and a surgeon’s precision.  As the author of four collections of short short stories, La sueñera (Dream Catcher), Casa de geishas (Geisha House), Botánica del caos (Botany of Chaos) and Temporada de fantasmasGhost Season), Shua has had much practice in honing her art. And the punches she throws in Quick

Fix are deft, decisive and, presumably, the hardest in her oeuvre. The stories Shua tells are funny, whimsical, terrifying, off-beat and illustrative of the often complex and contradictory human condition. An equally strong complement to Shua’s prose (faithfully translated by Buchanan) is Luci Mistratov’s whimsically surreal llustrations, which accompany a surprisingly large number of the stories in Quick Fix. Equal parts cartoonish and spooky, Mistratov flawlessly captures the spirit of Shua’s writing, and her illustrations add depth and wonder to an already deep and wonderful book.

Quick Fix is an excellent primer to Shua’s work that will hopefully convince the uninitiated author to locate and read all of her short short story collections. It is highly recommended not only to aficionados of Argentine literature and readers with little time on their hands, but to readers who enjoy the strange and the silly. And, of course, readers curious to see how the precision of poetry can be translated into prose.”

—JoSelle Vanderhooft  - Pedestal Magazine

“The wink of an eye and we are transported to an unexpected realm. In very few impeccable lines, Ana María Shua's micro short stories open new vistas to our peception of dreams, myths, fairy tales, even of our everyday life. To read her is to discover another dimension in fiction: small is absolutely beautiful, and thrilling, and often disquieting. Rhonda Dahl Buchanan's translations open Shua's world to readers of English. ” -Luisa Valenzuela “These memorable pieces by Ana María Shua are here brought into English by way of Rhonda Dahl Buchanan's excellent translations, and enhanced by the line drawings of Luci Mistratov. Shua's devotion to the short short is amply illustrated in QUICK FIX. Sensual, pithy, instructive, thought-provoking, these shorts evoke the fluidity of poetry and the density of longer narrative forms. A toast to this international effort!” -- Margaret Sayers Peden “Ana Maria Shua is one of Argentina most gifted writers.This new collection beautifully translated by Rhonda Buchanan allows us to read Shua with elegance and enter into her whismical magical and marvelous world of imagination and Laughter. An essential contribution to Latin American letters.” -Marjorie Agosin

“The translations...are beautifully done. The stories...encompass a range of styles and subject matter. This unique collection is highly recommended.” —Library Journal

“Endearingly poetic… Muratore makes for an intriguing feminist heroine.”

–Publishers Weekly

[An] engaging narrative… [Demitropulos] captures well the historical, cultural, and geographical idiosyncrasies of… the earliest Spanish settlements [in Argentina].

–Multicultural Review

“Libertad Demitropulos’s novel of romance, jealousy, and unrequited love, set in sixteenth-century Argentina, is… a brilliant exploration of the emergence of a new Latin American identity in the early colonial period… River of Sorrows… is an original and engaging work, an historical novel that gives voice to the voiceless men and women who helped found a new people.”

–Américas 

Hardie St. Martin is a well-known editor and translator of Spanish poetry and prose. His works of translation include Meniors by Pablo Neruda, the Garden Next Door byJose Denoso, and Tierra del Fuego :An Historical Novel by Sylvia Iparraguirre.

Employing a thematic framework, this book not only celebrates the tenth anniversary of the series, edited by Marjorie Agosín, but is designed to provide the teacher of multiethnic literature with a diverse range of Latin American women's voices addres sing a wide variety of topics. Suggesting both the plurality and universality of the responses that these authors have articulated, both to the postitions of women and to their societies in general, the book includes work form the earliest writers to tho se who have recently established themselves as major voices in Latin American letters.

This collection of stories by noted contemporary Korean writer Dong-ha Lee reflect the ordinary lives of people who have lived through the extraordinary struggles brought about by the Korean War and its aftermath. Exquisitely translated by Hyun-jae Yee Sallee, these stories by one of Korea’s most revered storytellers reflect poignantly on the lives of ordinary people in the midst of the economic miracle that has been taking place in Korea since the end of the Korean War. Having seen their homeland split in two, they cannot cope with the progress that is inexorably wiping out the last vestiges of the Korea they loved and knew. Lost and confused, they experience not only an identity crisis but question the entire meaning of life.

“This volume makes a poignant contribution to the literature of war.”

–World Literature Today

“Stark, challenging, memorable: the work of a superb literary talent.”

–Kirkus Reviews

“The essence of life is here — the mundane actions of the everyday; the sublimity if love distilled into the greif of parting; and two gently but inextricably linked by the ambiguity of “pat pat” and the simutaneous reaching actions of the sounds and a hand. The seeming simplicity, repetition and rhythm of these poems will simmer away in the reader’s unconscious like a gentle breeze, and whip up like a sudden gust of wind to shake the willow branches of your heart.”

—Richard Donovan - Japan Visitor

“The selections from A Sketch of the Fading Sun… work to entertain and to provide glimpses into Korean history and culture… All the stories focus on the plight of women in a male-dominated society… but there is hope. We perceive a glimmer of spirit in these women.”

–World Literature Today

“[Park’s] female characters are independent, resistant to subjugation, and colorful… Readers are treated to a view of the world, as seen by learning how to be strong.”

–Korean Quarterly

“[A] gritty, elegiac collection… Park masterfully explains life in a society in which oppression is never far from hand.”

–Choice

“‘Momma’s Stake’… is a minor masterpiece of contemporary literature… Park… has delicately calibrated both the potentiality and the price of modernizations in the lives of her tragic heroines through her beautifully crafted literary vignettes. Hyun-jae Sallee’s translation from Korean to English is just about flawless.”

–Multicultural Review

In September, 1944, near the village of Hortiati in Macedonian Greece the death of one German soldier in an ambush by a guerrilla unit brought on a Wehrmacht retaliation that resulted in the massacre of one hundred and forty-six villagers, sixty-nine of whom were burned to death in the sealed village bakery, and the total destruction of the village. In this fictionalized account of the atrocity, an American journalist seeks to explore whether a now prominent Austrian statesman played any part in what happened. In September, 1944, near the village of Hortiati in Macedonian Greece the death of a German soldier in an ambush by a guerrilla unit brought on a Wehrmacht retaliation that resulted in the massacre of one hundred and forty-six villagers, sixty-nine of whom were burned to death in the sealed village bakery, and the total destruction of the village. In this fictionalized account of the atrocity, an American journalist seeking to explore whether a now-prominent Austrian statesman played any part in what happened, records the testimony of five witnesses to the act: two villagers and three Wehrmacht officers. Edmund
Keeley is well-known as both a novelist and as a translator. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

“[A] gripping historical detective novel… Edmund Keeley knows Greece with the intimacy of lifelong commitment, and there are no expedient simplifications or evasions in his novel… Keeley’s compassionate and thrilling book ultimately takes on one of history’s hardest questions: Is forgiveness possible without forgetting?”

–Times Literary Supplement

“How well Keeley has listened to Greeks, how well he catches their speech, how fully he loves Greek people and their culture… This sympathetic but unsentimental act of listening to other people strikes me as one of the finest things any writer can do. Keeley’s novel is rare in its compassion and accuracy.”

–The Hudson Review

“The best fiction Keeley has ever written… [the characters’] cumulative testimony builds up a kaleidoscope of hopes, fears, lies, self-deceptions, passionate emotions, vileness and decency, public gestures and private beliefs, all intermingled. This, surely, is how it was: Keeley has achieved an extraordinary dramatic retrieval.”

–Los Angeles Times

“The details of individual stories are gripping and real.”

–Kirkus Reviews

“In his tradition of supporting an mentoring other indigenous writer, Kenny brings together a superb collection of indigenous storytellers from Canada, the United States, and Mexico.”

–World Literature Today

“In this collection of 37 short stories, Kenny has used his perceptive ear and his experience to assemble a terrific offering from a wide variety of writers. The volume emphasizes the brevity of short narrative and the stories are arranged  from the retelling of very traditional tales to more contemporary settings, while remaining timeless.”

—P. Jane Hafen - Multicultural Review