Robert Giroux and Lloyd Schwartz, editors James Merrill described Elizabeth Bishop's poems as "more wryly radiant, more touching, more unaffectedly intelligent than any written in our lifetime" and called her "our greatest national treasure." Robert Lowel
BERNARD MALAMUD (1914-86) is considered a modern master of the short story, ranked with Chekhov and Isaac Babel. The Complete Stories of Bernard Malamud brings together all of Malamud's published stories--from the classic early story "The Magic Barrel," i
How do great writers do it? From James M. Cain's hard-nosed observation that "writing a novel is like working on foreign policy. There are problems to be solved. It's not all inspirational," to Joan Didion's account of how she composes a book--"I constant
Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz is incontestably Latin America's foremost living poet. The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz is a landmark bilingual gathering of all the poetry he has published in book form since 1952, the year of his premier long poem, Sunstone
Octavio Paz, asserts Eliot Weinberger in his introduction to these Selected Poems, is among the last of the modernists "who drew their own maps of the world." For Latin America's foremost living poet, his native Mexico has been the center of a global man
Elizabeth Bishop was vehement about her art--a perfectionist who didn't want to be seen as a "woman poet." In 1977, two years before her death she wrote, "art is art and to separate writings, paintings, musical compositions, etc., into two sexes is to emp
Chosen by Garison Keillor for his readings on public radio's The Writer's Almanac, the 185 poems in this follow-up to his acclaimed anthology Good Poems are perfect for our troubled times. Here, readers will find solace in works that are bracing and coura
Geography III, Bishop's final book of poems, first appeared in 1976. It contains such masterpieces as "In the Waiting Room," "The Moose," and "One Art."
Since the series' inception in 1915, the annual volumes of The Best American Short Stories have launched literary careers, showcased the most compelling stories of each year, and confirmed for all time the significance of the short story in our national l