A 59-year-old American acquires a new family on a tropical island, while looking back on his "naked history" with his old family and its talent for death

These poems show a progressive continuity and clarity of perception that apprehends both the hard reality and luminous irreality in everyday phenomena.

"Alison Mills Newman's innovative, genre-bending novel has long been out of print and impossible to find. A "fluently funky mix of standard and nonstandard English," as the poet and scholar Harryette Mullen once put it, Francisco is the first-person account of a young actress and musician and her growing disillusionment with her success in Hollywood. Her wildly original and vivid voice chronicles a free-spirited life with her filmmaker lover, visiting...

"In the seventy-three poems collected here Muriel Spark works in open forms as well as villanelles, rondels, epigrams, and even the tour de force of a twenty-one page ballad."--Jacket.

"First published in 1931, the spellbinding novel Unclay glows with an unworldly light. Death has come to the small village of Dodder to deliver a parchment with the names of two local mortals and the fatal word unclay upon it. When he loses the precious sheet, he is at a loss, and also free of his errand. Hungry to taste the sweet fruits of human life, Mr. John Death, as he is now known, takes a holiday in Dorsetshire and rests from his reaping. The...