Dante: Poet of the Secular World

Author	Aesop
ISBN	0192840509

Aesop's Fables or Aesopica refers to a collection of fables credited to Aesop (620-560 BC), a slave and story-teller who lived in Ancient Greece. Aesop's Fables have become a blanket term for collections of brief fables, usually involving anthropomorphic animals. Many stories included in Aesop's...

Author	T.S. Eliot
ISBN	0393974995

The text of Eliot's 1922 masterpiece is accompanied by thorough explanatory annotations as well as by Eliot's own knotty notes, some of which require annotation themselves.

For ease of reading, this Norton Critical Edition presents The Waste Land as it first appeared in the American edition...

Author	T.S. Eliot
ISBN	0151686564

T.S. Eliot is known for masterworks of poetry like The Waste Land, but somehow also the author of this delightful collection of cat poems. The full book consists of 15 very short poems, most of which describe a distinct personality of cat. There's the cat who can never be pleased, for example, the thieving...

Author	Dante Alighieri
ISBN	0192839357

Vita Nuova (1292-94) is regarded as one of Dante's most profound creations. The thirty-one poems in the first of his major writings are linked by a lyrical prose narrative celebrating and debating the subject of love. Composed upon Dante's meeting with Beatrice and the "Lord of Love," it is a love story...

Author	Seamus Heaney
ISBN	0571202403

Some books are thin and light, yet they carry so much weight, like Heaney's Death of a Naturalist. Each poem in this collection is a work of art, a masterpiece. There is neither pretentiousness nor symbolism here. The collection is one of his most accessible and the best place to start with his work. Each...

Author	Dante Alighieri
ISBN	0140441050

Dorothy L. Sayers's landmark translation follows Dante's terza rima stanza's and brings his poetry vividly to life. Her work was completed after her death by Barbara Reynolds, who provides a foreword on the importance of the translation and an introduction on Dante's view of Heaven. This edition...

Author	Virgil
ISBN	0374104190

A masterpiece from one of the greatest poets of the century

In a momentous publication, Seamus Heaney's translation of Book VI of the Aeneid, Virgil's epic poem composed sometime between 29 and 19 BC, follows the hero, Aeneas, on his descent into the underworld. In Stepping Stones, a book of...

Author	Søren Kierkegaard
ISBN	0940322137

Translated from the Danish by Walter Lowrie, David Swenson, and Alexander Dru

The Danish philosopher Kierkegaard is one of the master thinkers of the modern age, a defining influence on existentialism and on twentieth-century theology, and this brilliantly tailored selection from his...

Author	Dante Alighieri
ISBN	0195087453

This is a great book, but does require the notes to make any sense of it. Hundreds of characters from Danté's Italy not to mention host of mythological and Biblical ones tended to distract me just reading the poetry and appreciating Dante's wonderful descriptions. I have to stop at the end of each chapter...

Author

Eugène Ionesco

MARGUERITE, se dirigeant vers le Roi : Sire, je dois vous mettre au courant.
MARIE : Non, taisez-vous.
MARGUERITE, à Marie : Taisez-vous.
MARIE, au Roi : Ce n'est pas vrai ce qu'elle dit.
LE ROI : Au courant de quoi ? Qu'est-ce qui n'est pas vrai ? Marie, pourquoi cet air désolé ? Que...

Author

Ignatius of Loyola

The Good: offers some background and insight into Ignatius's life

The Bad: densely put together as it skims many events in Ignatius's life

The book starts out with Ignatius being characterized as a military man who is "enthralled by the vanities of the world." However, he becomes...