"Translated, edited, and with an Introduction by Stanley Corngold Featuring essays by Philip Roth, W. H Auden, and Walter Benjamin "When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin." With this startling, bizarre, yet surprisingly funny first sentence, Franz Kafka begins his masterpiece, The Metamorphosis. It is the story of a young man who, transformed overnight into a giant...

Presents the unabridged text of Shakespeare's classic tragedy in which Othello, a Moorish general, is led by a jealous and evil ensign to believe his wife, Desdemona, has been unfaithful.

When the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to Bob Dylan in 2016, a debate raged. Some celebrated, while many others questioned the choice. How could the world's most prestigious book prize be awarded to a famously cantankerous singer-songwriter who wouldn't even deign to attend the medal ceremony? In Why Bob Dylan Matters, Harvard Professor Richard F. Thomas answers this question with magisterial erudition. A world expert on Classical poetry,...

Poet Robert Bly stands out even among the celebrated, revolutionary generation of American artists who burst forth in the 1950s. ROBERT BLY: A THOUSAND YEARS OF JOY charts Bly’s singular path as a farmer’s son on a wintry Minnesota farm to a radical anti-Vietnam War activist to a wild man of the 1990’s men’s movement. The bespectacled, white-haired Bly is every inch the politically and spiritually engaged mystic, seeking each moment’s fervid...

The life and work of Sylvia Plath has taken on the proportions of legend. Educated at Smith, Plath had a conflicted relationship with her mother. She married the poet Ted Hughes and plunged into the sturm und drang of literary celebrity. Her poems were fought over, rejected--and ultimately embraced by readers everywhere. At age thirty she committed suicide. Ariel, a collection of poems she wrote at white-hot speed during her final months, became a...

Dylan: Disc by Disc features each of Bob Dylan's studio LPs--thirty-six releases in all. Rock 'n' roll musicians, songwriters, and critics sound off about each release, bringing from the shadows not only Dylan's extraordinary musical accomplishments but the factors in his life that influenced his musical expressions. From The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan to Blonde on Blonde, from Blood on the Tracks to Shadows in the Night, Dylan: Disc by Disc rouses generations...

One of the music world's preeminent critics takes a fresh and much-needed look at the day Dylan "went electric" at the Newport Folk Festival, timed to coincide with the event's fiftieth anniversary. On the evening of July 25, 1965, Bob Dylan took the stage at Newport Folk Festival, backed by an electric band, and roared into his new rock hit, Like a Rolling Stone. The audience of committed folk purists and political activists who had hailed him as...

Johannes Brahms was a man of contrasts. His serious Teutonic music was balanced by joyful dance music. His miserliness with himself by exceeding generosity with family and associates. His kindness to working people with a biting, malicious wit reserved for those he encountered in artistic and aristocratic circles. He was not an easy man to know, destroying a good deal of his own work and almost all of his lifetime's correspondence, in later years...

Ludwig van Beethoven is justifiably acclaimed as one of the most revered composers in the history of Western music-a genius once characterized as a "Titan, wrestling with the gods." There is no better way for you to understand the full impact of that description than to not only listen to all nine of his magnificent symphonies, but to do so with a full understanding of what this great composer was saying and the circumstances that drove him up to...

When it comes to creative longevity, brilliance across a range of styles, and near-universal fame, Igor Stravinsky (1882—1971) is nearly unrivaled among 20th-century artists. Stravinsky's career was a dizzying progression across the miles and the decades, from fin de siècle czarist Russia to Southern California in the 1960s. His career features styles ranging from nationalism and Impressionism to Fauvism, Neoclassicism, and the 12-tone ultra-serialism...