Balthasar Gracián y Morales (1601-1658) assumed his final vows of the Jesuits in 1635, having been raised by his uncle, a priest, and studying theology in Zaragoza, Spain. Gracián became quite famous as a preacher, and wrote a number of literary works concerning politics, practical advice for life, and philosophy. Today he is known as the most representative writer of the Spanish baroque style called Conceptismo (Conceptism), a literary style characterized by succinct and subtle expressions of witty, significant ideas. "The Art of Worldly Wisdom" is a collection of about three hundred maxims and advice with commentary. His poetic use of rhetoric made Gracián appealing to readers, but because he published much of his work without the permission of his superiors, he was chastised by the church, and eventually sanctioned and exiled. This book was Gracián's most internationally popular work, and was translated into German by Schopenhauer, and into English by Joseph Jacobs in 1892.

This perenially popular book of advice on how to achieve personal and professional success is valued for its timeless insights on how to make one's way in the world. Written in the seventeenth century by a Spanish Jesuit scholar, the teachings are strikingly modern in tone and address universal concerns such as friendship, morality, effective leadership, and how to manage one's emotions. The Art of Worldly Wisdom is for anyone seeking to combine ethical behavior with worldly success.

The words of Jesus Christ are restored to their original poetic form ?in this extraordinary volume. Jesus Christ, whose teachings have been on the lips of millions for two millennia, is revealed here as one of the greatest poets of all time. What happened to deafen us to the poetic nature of his words? In migrating from Aramaic speech into written Greek translation, and later into English translation, the lyrics got locked up as prose. In The Poems of Jesus Christ Willis Barnstone unveils the essential poetry of the Gospels by taking the direct speech of Jesus from Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John, and lineating and titling Jesus’s words as individual poems. Jesus’s poems are wisdom lyrics and narrative parables, rich with garden, animal, and nature imagery. Austere and poignant, they carry the totality of the Gospels’ message through the intensity of a single voice––the Gospel of Jesus.

Mao Zedong, leader of the revolution and absolute chairman of the People's Republic of China, was also a calligrapher and a poet of extraordinary grace and eloquent simplicity. The poems in this beautiful edition (from the 1963 Beijing edition), translated and introduced by Willis Barnstone, are expressions of decades of struggle, the painful loss of his first wife, his hope for a new China, and his ultimate victory over the Nationalist forces. Willis Barnstone's introduction, his short biography of Mao and brief history of the revolution, and his notes on Chinese versification all combine to enrich the Western reader's understanding of Mao's poetry.

This graceful translation and bilingual edition is the first to bring English readers a representative sampling of the poetry Delmira Agustini published before her untimely death in 1914 at the age of twenty-seven. Translated by native Uruguayan Alejandro Cáceres and including work from each of Agustini’s four published books, Selected Poetry of Delmira Agustini: Poetics of Eros is a response to a resurgent interest not just in the poems but in the passionate and daring woman behind them and the social and political world she inhabited.  Delmira Agustini was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1886 to wealthy parents of German and Italian descent. She published her first volume of poetry when she was twenty-one and followed with two more in the next six years. But her life was cut short in 1914, when Enrique Job Reyes, her ex-husband of less than two months, shot her to death and then turned the gun on himself. Too sensual and explicit for a literate, but Catholic, Uruguay, Agustini’s work was neither accepted nor easily understood during her lifetime—but it is now being discovered and studied. Cáceres is at the forefront of a new critical approach to Agustini’s work. In synthesizing and reviewing both Spanish-language and English-language work on Agustini, he provides the definitive resource for future inquiry and research. Noted translator and poet Willis Barnstone provides the foreword to the volume.  Agustini’s poetry reflects the emotional world of a young woman in the early twentieth century. Rich with exotic and erotic imagery, the poems populate an intangible atmosphere vibrant with color and mythological symbols. Agustini celebrated sexuality in her work as part of the struggle to empower women and served as a forerunner of other feminist poets. Carefully selected for this bilingual, en face edition, the poems collected here track and highlight Agustini’s development and strengths as an artist—including her methods of experimentation, first relying on modernista forms and later abandoning them—and her focus on the figure of the male, which she portrays as the crux of devotion and attention but deems ultimately unreachable. Cáceres’s introduction presents biographical information and situates Agustini’s work and life in a larger political, historical, and literary context, particularly the modernismo movement, whose followers broke linguistic and political ties with the pathos and excesses of romanticism.

Spans four thousand years and the world's major civilizations to anthologize verses by women ranging from Enheduanna, a second millennium B.C. Sumerian princess, to the medieval poets Marie de France and Florencia de Pinar, to noteworthy poets of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

Presents a lively and deeply evocative translation of the work of the greatest of the Greek lyric poets, in a bilingual edition with the original Greek on facing pages and with a wealth of biographical, historical, and literary material for understanding her work. 15,000 first printing.

Presents a comprehensive overview of the ancient texts excluded from the official canon of the Bible and provides extensive introductions to such major writings as the Gnostic Gospels, the Dead Sea scrolls, the Kabbalah, wisdom texts, and the Apocrypha. Reprint.

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Informed by original Semitic sources, a new literary translation of the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John and of Revelation reexamines Christianity in terms of its Judaic roots, offering new perspective on the Bible and its teachings. Reprint. (view table of contents)

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