Umberto Eco

Geoffrey Brock

In this fascinating, abundant new novel from the incomparable Eco, Yambo, a rare-book dealer, has suffered a bizarre form of memory loss. He can remember every book he ever read but nothing about his own life. In an effort to retrieve his past, he withdraws into his old family home and searches through boxes of old newspapers, comics, records, photo albums and diaries kept in the attic. And so Yambo relives his youth: Mussolini, Catholic education, Josephine Baker, Flash Gordon, Fred Astaire. His memories run wild, and life racing before his eyes takes the form of a graphic novel. Yambo struggles through the flames to capture one simple, innocent image, that of his first love.

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana

Marion Fayolle

Tenderness of Stones

Italo Calvino

Six Memos for the Next Millenium

Voices Bright Flags is a series of experiments in what is sometimes called public poetry, where the author's relationship with his country provides the main theme. The poems approach America from a range of perspectives - political, historical, and personal - and in a range of styles and voices, with each voice planting its own flag, as it were, implying its own America. Together the poems form a partial mosaic, a discordant chorus, a succession of conversations and quarrels between the author and the motley citizens of his imagination.

Voices Bright Flags

Marian Schwartz

Featuring: Marina Tsvetaeva, Yahya Kemal, Gonzalo Rojas, H©di Kaddour

Power

Two Lines

The fifth winner of the annual New Criterion Poetry Prize. From the glinting scales in a painting by Vermeer to the white lines that disappear beneath a headlight's beam, Mr. Brock's poems measure out the often elusive weights and distances of the known world, confronting the unruly powers that threaten his burnished surfaces. Once read, his keen perceptions--all the more striking for the expertly cadenced music of his language and his supple use of poetic form--will be long remembered.

Poems

Weighing Light

More than a century has now passed since F.T. Marinetti's famous "Futurist Manifesto" slammed the door on the nineteenth century and trumpeted the arrival of modernity in Europe and beyond. Since then, against the backdrop of two world wars and several radical social upheavals whose effects continue to be felt, Italian poets have explored the possibilities of verse in a modern age, creating in the process one of the great bodies of twentieth-century poetry. Even before Marinetti, poets such as Giovanni Pascoli had begun to clear the weedy rhetoric and withered diction from the once-glorious but by then decadent grounds of Italian poetry. And their winter labors led to an extraordinary spring: Giuseppe Ungaretti's wartime distillations and Eugenio Montale's "astringent music"; Umberto Saba's song of himself and Salvatore Quasimodo's hermetic involutions. After World War II, new generations--including such marvelously diverse poets as Sandro Penna, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Amelia Rosselli, Vittorio Sereni, and Raffaello Baldini--extended the enormous promise of the prewar era into our time. A surprising and illuminating collection, The FSG Book of 20th-Century Italian Poetry invites the reader to examine the works of these and other poets--seventy-five in all--in context and conversation with one another. Edited by the poet and translator Geoffrey Brock, these poems have been beautifully rendered into English by some of our finest English-language poets, including Seamus Heaney, Robert Lowell, Ezra Pound, Paul Muldoon, and many exciting younger voices.

Geoffrey Brock

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