Harrower deftly enables the stage to transform into a moving poem. This is a not only a beautiful play but a stunning piece of literature. A recommended read for anyone who appreciates a finely crafted play.

Scottish dramatist David Harrower's KNIVES IN HENS is an eerie and startling play that explores with conviction and an almost off-hand surrealism the connection between language and the world one inhabits through it.

Focusing on a trio of characters in a God-fearing rural community, Harrower paints a stark and coarsely poetic portrait of what happens when one begins to question the very ground on which one walks. Specifically, Harrower centers his attention on a character simply named Young Woman, whose naive sense of the world and her own impulses is eroded throughout the progression of the play, as she discovers the power of language. her own sexuality and the strength of her imagination.

A blindly devoted wife living in a private linguistic and metaphorical world informed by a sheltered upbringing in a pre-industrial village in an unidentified country (although the rhythms of rural Scottish speech color the text), Young Woman ventures outside her field one day to! have her grain milled by a local hated figure of the Miller Gilbert Horn while her husband Pony William tends to a pregnant horse.

Young Woman's encounter with Gilbert Horn serves as the catalyst for her awakening. He provokes her and stirs in her a desire to give expression to her thoughts through the act of writing them down, something she fears to do because she believes writing is sinful. To write, she believes, is to defy God, since God is the one who gives an individual her thoughts and to claim such thoughts as one's own, to voice them, is blasphemy.

As the Young Woman's relationship with her husband becomes more and more strained, Gilbert Horn begins to enter her sexual dreams until she feels she must act upon them. Although it may seem beyond cliche at this point to once again have a woman discover the power of her sexuality, of her body, through a man, Harrower manages to make the Young Woman's transformation seem novel and surprising.

By bringing in an elemen! t of the supernatural, Harrower removes the play from its s! ecular framework and places it in a curiously pagan, ritualized world where Gilbert Horb can indeed be a ghost and sorceror as well as a miller straight out of Eliot's MILL ON THE FLOSS.

A bleak, abrupt soundscape of words hurled, then barely uttered for fear of what they would do, KNIVES IN HENS is a powerful play built on a fragile, but elegant collage of 24 scenes that examine the disjunctive relationship between language and identity, creation and authorship, and the manner in which inexpressible feelings can sometimes conjure a reality more profoundly disturbing than the quotidian world will allow.

A wonderful book I enjoyed it very much I thought it was a happy spin on such a trajic life. Much better than the movie.

This book is perfect! I wouldn't change a thing about it. Find a copy and by it!

Without the brilliance of David Hinton and Yanbing Chen we wouldn't know, we couldn't know how great Bei Dao is. Bei Tao may be China's first Noble Laureate in Literature. If so he'll have these fine translators to thank for making his work so convincingly available in a major Western language.

Bei Dao's poems gleam like white dwarfs. Each poem bears the intense pressure of its own inner light. They are compressed songs, wrestling with terror and beauty, politics, metaphor, home, exile. The poems exist in that moment of being on the verge, an expectancy. They exist in that moment of waiting that can only be human hope, ready to glow despite the forces that try to thwart it.

This is a gorgeous anthology, with dazzling color plates (Martin, Gainsborough, Wright, Turnery, Blake, etc.) that are wonderful to look at and even better to teach with. The selections are all you could want for a survey of the romantics, and the organization of the materials--especially the cultural/contextual sections--is extremely helpful both for students of romantic literature and for the teacher designing a course. The notes are consistently illuminating without being obtrusive. This is an edition to trust. I'll never go Norton again!

For the purpose of teaching British Lit to undergraduates, this is the best anthology. In addition to the wonderful array of texts, there are full-color plates and black and white drawings and significant discussions of cultural movements and conditions. This anthology has helped to bring non-canonical texts to the fore, especially with respect to abolition and slavery. Prior to the publication of the first edition of this anthology, British abolitionist texts were not widely included in anthologies.

I love this anthology and am firmly committed to it. This is a book students will hold on to and it's a great book from which to teach.

First saw this magnificent volume at a collector's home, and had to acquire a copy for my library as inspiration for my own artistic endeavors with majolica.

People all over the world treat this as the "Bible" of Victorian Majolica. It is the best.

David Naggar give you a very straight forward break down of the music industry. IF you are an artist, manager, producer, promoter or anything that has to do with the record business you need to read this book. Even if you think you got it all covered this little handbook might open your eyes to something that you might not have encountered yet. Similar to Kashif's 'Everything you'd better know' Naggar gives a very readable explanation to a lot of issues that plague artists and managers such as royalties and ownership and control rights.

If you are serious about being sucessful in the music business then I suggest you begin by reading this book, you will find that many music books sort of repeat themselves and it's almost like you are reading the same thing over and over but if you do not lose interest each book has something different that can be of a good reference.

I love this book because it's 1)not boring 2)easy to read 3)and very resourceful. After reading this you know that you do have a chance in the "business" without getting ripped-off if you follow the guidelines - research and have people working for that are "for you". So If you don't want to get ripped-off you better read this book or else "Show them the money!"

If you enjoy French literature in translation, you should already be familiar with the name of Norman Shapiro--one of our pre-eminent French-to-English translators. Quite simply, whatever Mr. Shapiro chooses to translate results in a highly enjoyable, entertaining addition to my French lit. bookshelf! If you find pleasure in Richard Wilbur's Moliere, Donald Frame's Montaigne and Rabelais, Richard Howard's Stendhal and Baudelaire, Burton Raffel's Chretien, or Merwin's Song of Roland--then you owe it to yourself to investigate Shapiro's La Fontaine translations--four volumes to date: "Fifty Fables" and "Fifty More Fables" published by Illinois, "La Fontaine's Bawdy" published by Princeton, and the present book, "Once Again, La Fontaine" published by Wesleyan. These books are--alas!--one of the best-kept secrets of High French Literature to Read for Pleasure.

Also, Shapiro has translated volumes of Verlaine and Baudelaire for the University of Chicago press (two very handsome paperback editions), and do be on the lookout for his edition of Ronsard/Marot/Bellay from Yale University Press!

The publisher's annotation fails to mention *anywhere* that the CD included with the disc features 26 fables read by actor Douglas Sills, of Broadway's The Scarlet Pimpernel fame. He does a delightful job of interpreting various characters.

This is an excellent collection of gay short fiction, many from the pre-Stonewall period of obscurity. With the current explosion of GLTB literature, a sequel is in order:)

The anthology is an excellent book. The stories were not written exclusively by gay authors, and surprises are waiting for the readers (e.g. Noel Coward's beautiful story). The 39 stories are offered by well-known authors (e.g. Forster, Isherwood), known young authors (Leavitt, Kramer) and by those less known. In so introducing new and promising authors to the readers, Leavitt and Mitchell prove yet again that the distinguished house of Penguin made the right choice in selecting them as editors. RUN TO BUY!

Finally in paperback, "The Perfect Murder" will provide intriguing delight for both newcomers and accomplished literary detectives. With this new twenty-first-century insight into the murder mystery, Lehman has now made the study of the Detective Novel as morally and historically important as any in literature today, "not only" in Lehman's words "because of the detective novel's debt to human nature but because of the possibly larger debt that human behavior owes to detective novels."

His books covers it all: history, stories, the idea of doubles and masks, the resolution of good and evil after World Wars through the detective who resolves to bring order out of chaos. David Lehman talks about the detective novel as one genre that crosses all classes. Given this election and all the open questions, let's delight in some sleuthing. We are asking Whowonit in America. His book is a Whodunit. This book is fun and includes many of David's Favorites throughout history, including Poe's Murder of the Rue Morgue and even spy novels such as LaCarre's The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. If you delight in detective novels, you'll savor this read.

I've read all the English translations (and even some of these poems in the original Greek). This collection, while small, is the best English "Greek Anthology" going. Quick check: in "The Norton Book of Classical Literature" the Rexroth excerpts shine compared to the other (highly respected) translators.

In terms of directness and emotional resonance Rexroth, "the father of the beats," triumphs again and again. For those who want to explore one of the world's greatest collections of poetry, this is a good place to start. For those interested in translation, there is much to learn from this volume.

The real Greek Anthology is massive and not all the poems are winners. Rexroth has boiled it down to his favorites and in so doing created perhaps the best poems he ever wrote. Those who want a deeper exploration should go to the library. To those who want to add to the bookshelf, this is the essential volume.

Kenneth Rexroth is the best translator of the Greek Anthology since the Renaissance. The Greek Anthology has suffered big ups and downs in reputation, depending on whether the sensibility is available in one time or another to approach it. Rexroth gets it right on. For further information, you may take a look at the online review in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review.