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Regarded by many as the most important Austrian novel of its era, Heimito von Doderer's The Demons is a sweeping portrayal of Viennese society on the cusp of catastrophic and irrevocable change. Narrated by retired civil servant Georg von Geyrenhoff, this monumental work takes readers on an intimate, multi-layered tour through Vienna's cafés and kitchens, bedrooms and back alleys, modest apartments and artist's ateliers, palatial parlors an...

Regarded by many as the most important Austrian novel of its era, Heimito von Doderer's The Demons is a sweeping portrayal of Viennese society on the cusp of catastrophic and irrevocable change. Narrated by retired civil servant Georg von Geyrenhoff, this monumental work takes readers on an intimate, multi-layered tour through Vienna's cafés and kitchens, bedrooms and back alleys, modest apartments and artist's ateliers, palatial parlors an...

In Utopia of Usurers G.K. Chesterton takes to task the theoretical and practical fallout of laissez-faire capitalism. The book invites all comers to reconsider their ideological prejudices concerning "conservative" love of the free market. As Chesterton argues in "The Superstition of Divorce": "Capitalism, of course, is at war with the family. It desires its victims to be individuals, or (in other words) to be atoms. For the word atom, in its ...

In these stories, characters' bodies trouble their souls, stirring questions about why we are here and how we are to live. Confronted by their own vulnerabilities, they must also contend with the weaknesses of those they want to love. Will they find their trust well placed, will they rise to moments of grace-or will their lives crack under pressure? These stories seek to do justice in art to the human condition's real, though fleeting, gifts-t...

Francini Bruni, friend to Joyce in Trieste, wrote that 'he only completely admires the unchangeable: the mystery of Christ and the mute drama that surrounds it.' Colum Power, in a study of remarkable patience and rigour, traces Joyce's deep engagement with the more articulate forms which that necessarily mute, often mystical drama has sometimes taken when reduced to the humiliations of language . . . " -From the Introduction by Declan Kiberd, ...

Known as the "Phoenix of the Americas" and "The Tenth Muse, " Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz was a scholar, poet, and cloistered nun. Her poetry, like her singular life, is fired with intensity and intelligence. Neither life in a convent nor the strictures of time and place could bind Sor Juana's thirst for knowledge or her creativity. As Sally Read notes in her introduction, when reading about Sor Juana and her work "one has the sense of a woman w...

Seneca was not only Rome's major Stoic philosopher. He was its great tragic playwright. Classics of Latin literature, Seneca's dramas also inspired the revival of tragic theater in the Renaissance. They served as models for Shakespeare, Kyd, Racine, Corneille, and Calderon. Dana Gioia's new book provides two ways of approaching Seneca-the critical and the creative. The book begins with a compelling account of Seneca's remarkable life in Imperi...

The title of Andrew Frisardi's The Moon on Elba comes from one of its poems, a beautiful ghazal, striking in its graceful blend of form and intelligent feeling. The book's opening poems include the Audenesque meditation "Word" and a character poem, "The Jeweler, " in which marvels are found, ironically, in the mundane. Frisardi writes of bedtime when we "undress-rehearse for death." He offers a Covid poem in Sapphics and a lovely ballade for "...

Regarded by many as one of the finest Spanish poets, the 16th century mystic St. John of the Cross wrote sublime poems that chronicle the soul's purificatory pilgrimage through the dark night of the soul to the joy of mystical union with the Creator. To translate such works, with their passionate, intimate intensity, requires both boldness and delicacy. The translator of poetry faces many challenges. As the late poet Timothy Murphy notes in hi...

Seneca was not only Rome's major Stoic philosopher. He was its great tragic playwright. Classics of Latin literature, Seneca's dramas also inspired the revival of tragic theater in the Renaissance. They served as models for Shakespeare, Kyd, Racine, Corneille, and Calderon. Dana Gioia's new book provides two ways of approaching Seneca-the critical and the creative. The book begins with a compelling account of Seneca's remarkable life in Imperi...

One Mardi Gras night in 1520s Paris, college students Jean Calvin (founder of Calvinism and autocratic ruler of Geneva), Ignatius of Loyola (founder of the Counter-Reformation Catholic religious order, the Jesuits), and their bawdy friend François Rabelais (the humanist novelist) find themselves mixed up in a gruesome murder-and any one of them might be guilty. The ensuing investigation sparks a battle of wits and weapons, plunging them into q...

This brilliant new book powerfully demonstrates how the evolution of Modern and Post-Modern criticism and theory, free verse, and political ideology have greatly diminished contemporary poetry. The final chapter is a tour de force that compellingly argues for meter as the catalyst that joins syllables, accents, and (often) rhyme to create the deeply subtle artistry of our language's poetry. "What is poetry and what is poetry for? To ask the ...

In this Second Edition, Revised and Expanded, Wilson has completely revised the poems to attain a more classical perfection and restored their original published ordering as four sequences, beginning with "The Violent and the Fallen, " "Four Verse Letters, " and "La Rochefoucauld's Ghost, " and culminating in the new poems collected as "The Christmas Preface." ¿¿¿¿"In James Matthew Wilson's newest collection of poems he continues to show his...

The "One Hundred Visions of War" of Julien Vocance (1878-1954) comprise some of the first haiku written in the West. Where classical Japanese haiku traditionally speaks of the beauty of Nature, Vocance uses the form to a very different purpose, depicting the horror and brutality of armed conflict, as seen from the trenches during the First World War. Readers get a ground-level view of unimaginable slaughter. The value of Vocance's poetry lies ...

The author of this small but superbly crafted book of lyrics, epigrams, and translations, J.V. Cunningham (1911-1985), is almost totally unknown outside a small literary coterie. His controversial contemporary Yvor Winters thought Cunningham was one of the greatest of the poets in our language, and, despite their complicated personal relationship, vigorously promoted his work. First issued in 1960, The Exclusions of a Rhyme brings together Cun...

Should writers aim to comfort their readers or to shock them out of comfort? Georges Bernanos (1888-1948), one of the great Catholic authors of the twentieth century, argues for the latter. In this incisive series of letters and essays, collected here for the first time in English, Bernanos rails against the propagation of unreflective piety and simplistic views of the divine. In "Christianity and the Writer's Task, " Bernanos lambasts the med...

These two essays by Raïssa Maritain-"Sense and Non-Sense in Poetry" and "Magic, Poetry, and Mysticism"-comprise an often forgotten but significant contribution to Catholic letters. Maritain considers the way true poetry always transcends its "logical sense" in order to convey a "poetic sense." Poetry is a human thing, but it stirs the human beyond mere "logic" in the direction of the divine. In his introduction, James Matthew Wilson explains t...

Catholic novelists enjoy greater visibility in American letters today than they did almost a decade ago, when Dana Gioia offered a sobering diagnosis of decline in "The Catholic Writer Today." Major contemporary authors have invoked Bernanos, Waugh, and other legends as their literary ancestors, and a small but active cohort of Catholic writers has answered Gioia's call to renew their tradition. This flourishing has coincided, however, with ag...

Adrien Sixte is a reclusive intellectual known for his theories on psychological materialism. Sixte's orderly, self-enclosed world is violently interrupted when a desperate mother petitions his help and a judge summons him to a criminal trial. The young defendant, Robert Greslou-a student and self-styled disciple of Sixte-has sent his master a confidential memoir written in jail. Greslou's psychological self-analysis traces the nexus of causes...

When Dylan Fielding, celebrated contemporary visual artist, becomes Br. Thomas Augustine, novice at Our Lady of the Pines monastery, he finds delight not only in the shock his choice causes everyone around him but--to his own surprise--in the rhythms of the life itself. Shortly before he solidifies a lifelong commitment to the community, a traumatic encounter with an abusive priest plunges Thomas Augustine into terror and doubt. Reeling and un...