'It was customary, it seems, for an author to begin with excuses, explanations and snivels about their work. Which is quite peculiar since the author is usually the last person to know what their book is about...' Right from the wickedly funny table of contents, which belongs not to this collection but an imagined one, this remarkable genre-defying volume is guaranteed to delight the reader in the mood for something original and different. In the title story, 'The Inconceivable Idea of the Sun', a couple finds that reorganizing their home library has an unexpected consequence on their shared reality; 'The Robots of Eden' is set in a world where stories are no longer essential to be human, because civilized people have developed better technology to mediate their emotions; in 'Into the Night', an old Brahmin leans into the comforts of an ancient language when the future renders him obsolete; and 'How Not to Tell The Ramayana' is a Borgesian journey into a Ramayana retelling unlike any other. This stellar collection of short fiction, as poignant as it is playful, blurs the distinction between what lies inside a story and what lies outside it. It demonstrates yet again why Anil Menon is one of the most formidable names in contemporary Indian writing.

In Poetry and Apocalypse, Franke seeks to find the premises for dialogue between cultures, especially religious fundamentalisms—including Islamic fundamentalism—and modern Western secularism. He argues that in order to be genuinely open, dialogue needs to accept possibilities such as religious apocalypse in ways that can be best understood through the experience of poetry. Franke reads Christian epic and prophetic tradition as a secularization of religious revelation that preserves an understanding of the essentially apocalyptic character of truth and its disclosure in history. The usually neglected negative theology that undergirds this apocalyptic tradition provides the key to a radically new view of apocalypse as at once religious and poetic.

A case for literary critics and other humanists to stop wallowing in their aestheticized helplessness and instead turn to poetry, comedy, and love. Literary criticism is an agent of despair, and its poster child is Walter Benjamin. Critics have spent decades stewing in his melancholy. What if instead we dared to love poetry? To choose comedy over Hamlet’s tragedy, romance over Benjamin’s suicide on the edge of France, of Europe, of civilization? Paul Bové challenges young lit critters to throw away their shades and let the sun shine in. Love’s Shadow is his three-step manifesto for a new literary criticism that risks sentimentality and melodrama and eschews self-consciousness. The first step is to choose poetry. There has been since the time of Plato a battle between philosophy and poetry. Philosophy has championed misogyny, while poetry has championed women, like Shakespeare’s Rosalind. Philosophy is ever so stringent; try instead the sober cheerfulness of Wallace Stevens. Bové’s second step is to choose the essay. He praises Benjamin’s great friend and sometime antagonist Theodor Adorno, who gloried in the writing of essays, not dissertations and treatises. The third step is to choose love. If you want a Baroque hero, make it Rembrandt, who brought lovers to life in his paintings. Putting aside passivity and cynicism would amount to a revolution in literary studies. Bové seeks nothing less, and he has a program for achieving it.

An essential book for all readers of poetry, and the definitive collection from the man Harold Bloom has called “the best and most representative American poet." Originally published in 1954 to honor Stevens’s seventy-fifth birthday, the book was rushed into print for the occasion and contained scores of errors. These have now been corrected in one place for the first time by Stevens scholars John N. Serio and Christopher Beyers, based on original editions and manuscripts. The Collected Poems is the one volume that Stevens intended to contain all the poems he wished to preserve, presented in the way he wanted. It is an enduring monument to his dazzling achievement.

In his long-awaited first book of prose, poet and essayist Sherod Santos takes a compelling look into some of poetry’s deepest secrets, an investigation that leads him to the surprising conclusion that poems have minds of their own, minds often inaccessible even to the one who composed them. In these essays, Santos explores not only what he thinks about poetry but also what and how poetry thinks about itself. His writings range across the history of Western poetry, from formative classical myths to modern experimental forms, and touch on subjects as diverse as the rhetorical history of cannibalism, the political and cultural uses of translation, and the current state of American poetry. Along the way, he calls on past poets like Ovid, Baudelaire, and Phyllis Wheatley, on twentieth-century poets like Wallace Stevens, H. D., and Rainer Maria Rilke, and on writers and thinkers like Montaigne, Walter Benjamin, Simone Weil, and Paul de Man. These essays explore facets of poetry known best to one who has practiced the art for years. From the methods of poetic attention to the processes by which perception is transformed into language and from the illusive relationship between poetry and “meaning” to the integral relationship between poetry and memory, this collection delves into what it means to be a poet and how being a poet is intimately tied to one’s social and cultural moment. With Santos’s trademark flair for seeking out the overlooked and unforeseeable, A Poetry of Two Minds is an extraordinary collection that testifies to its author’s far-reaching intellectual curiosity. Readers who have delighted in his insights over the years can now have the satisfaction of having them caught between the covers of this provocative book.

Changing Subjects contends that major American poets-such as Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery, and Lyn Hejinian-transformed verse and even changed conceptions of modern subjectivity by exploiting an ordinary rhetorical device, ubiquitous in spoken language: the digression.