Love Letters

Author	Rudyard Kipling
ISBN	0307267113

Beloved for his fanciful and engrossing children’s literature, controversial for his enthusiasm for British imperialism, Rudyard Kipling remains one of the most widely read writers of Victorian and modern English literature. In addition to writing more than two dozen works of fiction, including...

Author	W.H. Auden
ISBN	0679443673

The Everyman's Library Pocket Poets hardcover series is popular for its compact size and reasonable price which does not compromise content. Poems: Auden is just another reminder of his exhilarating lyric power and his understanding of love and longing in all their sacred and profane guises. One...

Author	Percy Bysshe Shelley
ISBN	0679429093

Imagine this scene: Somewhere in the awesome surroundings of the French Alps, incessant summer rains covering the valleys with a moist, foggy veil. Inside a cottage, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and his wife, Mary, are discussing life, principle and the mysterious fears of human nature, which...

Author	Harold Schechter
ISBN	0307700933

Killer Verse: Poems of Murder and Mayhem is a spine-tingling collection of terrifically creepy poems about the deadly art of murder.

The villains and victims who populate these pages range from Cain and Abel and Bluebeard and his wives to Lizzie Borden, Jack the Ripper, and Mafia hit men. The...

Author	Elizabeth Schmidt
ISBN	0375415041

New York City has always been a larger-than-life, half-mythical place, and this collection offers an appropriately stunning mosaic of its many incarnations in poetry–ranging from Walt Whitman’s exuberant celebrations to contemporary poets’ moving responses to the September 11 attack...

Author	T.S. Eliot
ISBN	0375401857

T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) was the dominant force in twentieth-century British and American poetry. With poems such as "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, " he introduced an edgy, disenchanted, utterly contemporary version of French Symbolism to the English-speaking world. With his masterpiece...

Author	Alexander Pushkin
ISBN	0375406727

Eugene Onegin (1833) is a comedy of manners, written in exquisitely crafted verse, about two young members of the Russian gentry, the eponymous hero and the girl Tatyana, who don't quite connect. It is also the greatest masterpiece of Russian literature—the source of the human archetypes and the...

Author	Edgar Allan Poe
ISBN	0679445056

Poe wrote few poems, few of which are any good. His technical expertise is excellent but nearly all of his poems lack substance; they are like brass clockworks, shiny, complex, dazzling to look at, difficult to craft, but ultimately lifeless. I suspect Poe knew this too and that he was simply attempting...

Author

Rainer Maria Rilke

I fell in love with Rilke's poetry from quotes I found here and there. Now, after reading this collection, I fell in love with him fully and completely. Even though I wasn't really interested in all the subjects he talks about in his poems, I still found verses that touched me deeply - and I found that, taken...

Author	Langston Hughes
ISBN	0375405518

From the publication of his first book in 1926, Langston Hughes was hailed as the poet laureate of black America, the first to commemorate the experience of African Americans in a voice that no reader, black or white, could fail to hear. Lyrical and pungent, passionate and polemical, this volume is a...

Author	Joseph Westfall
ISBN	0812699041

Hannibal Lecter, the subject of best-selling novels, movies, and the acclaimed TV series Hannibal, is one of pop culture's most compelling characters. In Hannibal Lecter and Philosophy, 16 philosophers come at Hannibal the way he comes at his victims — from unexpected angles and with plenty of...

Author	Gerard Manley Hopkins
ISBN	0679444696

The poet feels nature, life, so deeply he is overwhelmed. He sometimes invents words and grammar to express his ecstasy. I just love Hopkins for this, for his passion.

Two of my favorite poems:


Pied Beauty

Glory be to G-d for dappled things-
For skies of couple-colour...

Author	John Hollander
ISBN	0679436316

An anonymous Anglo-Saxon poet praises the whale. Shakespeare sympathizes with the hunted hare. Marianne Moore tries to catch a jelly-fish. Virgil and Emily Dickinson contemplate Bees. Kipling lulls a baby seal to sleep. From East to West, from ancient times to modern, from Mei Yu Ch'en on swarming...

Author	J.D. McClatchy
ISBN	0375411704

From Sappho to Shakespeare to Cole Porter–a marvelous and wide-ranging collection of classic gay and lesbian love poetry.

The poets represented here include Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, Gertrude Stein, Federico García Lorca, Djuna Barnes, Constantine Cavafy, Elizabeth Bishop, W. H....

Author	Queen Victoria
ISBN	0750923490

This revealing selection from the Queen's papers provides essential clues to her character, tracing her development from shy princess to the formidable and uncompromising grande dame of Europe. How did she feel on hearing that she had become queen? How close was she to her eldest grandchild, who became...

Author	John Keats
ISBN	0312051050

These are the words John Keats chose to epitomize his short, frustrating, and tragic life. They appear as his epitaph in Rome's Protestant cemetery. Often called the greatest English poet after Shakespeare, Keats had a lifelong preoccupation with early death. This sense of mortality, along with...

Author	Rachel Kramer Bussel
ISBN	1573443379

Intelligent, upbeat, and sex-positive, the pieces in Best Sex Writing 2009 offer an in-depth look at sex the way it actually happens in America today. Gubernatorial sex scandals, rape fantasies, “Dear John” letters, teen sexuality, purity balls, the pregnant man, the science of screwing, bathroom...

Author	Quentin Crisp
ISBN	1555834663

Quentin Crisp (1908-1999) lived in a single room in a rooming house in England for over thirty years spending his time quite profitably by doing very little and living as modestly as possible, letting life pass him by to which he replied "Thank God I didn't get mixed up in the beastly thing." He was close...

Author

Robert Epstein

This groundbreaking book argues that adolescence is an unnecessary period of life that people are better off without. Robert Epstein, former editor-in-chief of "Psychology Today," shows that teen turmoil is caused by outmoded systems put into place a century ago which destroyed the continuum between...

Author	Emilie Barnes
ISBN	0736905790

This book is soooooo helpful. I saw it sitting on the shelf at the grocery store (late at night because my daily chores seemed to be taking over my day). And it was calling to me. So I didn't even puruse it, like I usually do. I just bought it and it is gold to me I'll tell you that. Barnes breaks down the house work,...

Author	Keri Smith
ISBN	0399165185

From the creator of Wreck This Journal, comes an imaginative new project: fifty postcards that send you on a quest to reanimate everyday life.

Leave notes in public for strangers, dream up a tiny imaginary world, summon magic powers, draw a portrait of yourself as a hero, create your own treasure...