Richard Howard

"Here, in the first volume to draw together material from Richard Howard's twelve books of poems, readers can fully appreciate the erudite nuances of his lyric poetry and the human and historical bravura of his monologues and imagined conversations among famous figures."--Jacket.

"In a series of dramatic encounters, "each in two voices and each developing a single idea," as Grove's Dictionary of Music defines the form of his title, Richard Howard has exemplified something like the artistic conscience of a generation - from 1882 to 1912. The mission of an Edith Wharton bearing the ashes of her beloved to a cemetery in Versailles, the return of an Ibsen to Capri to find his last play and an early romance - such situations, reflective...

"Richard Howard's first new book of poems in five years features two long narrative poems plus an extraordinary group of dramatic meditations on a fascinating variety of subjects: Proust searching for his novel's title; Rodin evading the perverse importunities of his admirers; Loie Fuller trying to wheedle radium from Madame Curie; Fuseli, Wordsworth and Kafka obliquely evoked; Virginia Woolf plotting a novel about Byron--while other poems are lyric...

In his first novel, A Happy Death, written when he was in his early twenties and retrieved from his private papers following his death in I960, Albert Camus laid the foundation for The Stranger, focusing in both works on an Algerian clerk who kills a man in cold blood. But he also revealed himself to an extent that he never would in his later fiction. For if A Happy Death is the study of a rule-bound being shattering the fetters of his existence,...

The Charterhouse of Parma (1839) is a compelling novel of passion and daring, of prisons and heroic escape, of political chicanery and sublime personal courage. Set at the beginning of the nineteenth century, amidst the golden landscapes of northern Italy, it traces the joyous but ill-starred amorous exploits of a handsome young aristocrat called Fabrice del Dongo, and of his incomparable aunt Gina, her suitor Prime Minister Mosca, and Clelia, a heroine...

"It is 1949. A special agent of the French secret service, Henri Robin, is aboard a train to Berlin, on a special mission of an undisclosed nature. In what could be Graham Greene's The Third Man or a Hitchcock film, he crosses national borders and shuffles aliases with a false mustache and multiple sets of identity papers. Pulling into the station and preparing to meet his contact, Robin is alarmed by a disturbing glimpse of his own doppelganger....

Originally published in 1857, "Les Fleurs du Mal" (English: The Flowers of Evil) is a volume of modernist poetry by Charles Baudelaire. The subject matter of these poems deals with themes relating to decadence and eroticism.

In this appealing and luminous collection of essays, Roland Barthes examines the mundane and exposes hidden texts, causing the reader to look afresh at the famous landmark and symbol of Paris, and also at the Tour de France, the visit to Paris of Billy Graham, the flooding of the Seine--and other shared events and aspects of everyday experience.

"Olivier Bertin is at the height of his career as a painter. After making his name with his Cleopatra, he went on to establish himself as "the chosen painter of the Parisiennes, the most adroit and ingenious artist to reveal their grace, their figures, and their souls." And though his hair may be white, he remains a handsome, vigorous, and engaging bachelor, a prized guest at every table and salon. Anne, the comtesse de Guilleroy, is a youthful forty,...