Paul Zweig

A Study of Subversive Individualism

The Heresy of Self-love

These meditative, emotional poems courageously confront the fear and longing that surrounded Zweig's own death, the death of family members, and a dying love, with a postscript that includes several unfinished poems

Eternity's Woods

Paul Zweig grew up in Brooklyn, but left New York to explore Paris in the 1950s. After a decade in France, he returned to America and became a respected, well-known man of letters, who, at the age of forty-three, discovered he had cancer. This brilliant memoir tells of his passionate life and his dignified response to the approach of his death.

Memoirs

Departures

Presents works selected from four previous collections of verse, including "Against Emptiness," "Eternity's Woods," "The Dark Side of the Earth," and "Last Poems"

Selected and Last Poems

Swami Muktananda

Responding to his students' wishes, Swami Muktananda's series of talks and informal dialogues on spiritual practices and truths includes many of his favorite teaching stories.

Selected Essays

Lautréamont: the Violent Narcissus

The Dark Side of the Earth

Departures is Paul Zweig’s celebration of life and love. Zweig thought of himself as a sojourner, a contemporary Wandering Jew, a man with “a loose wire in his genes.” He led a number of distinct lives: as a Jewish child in Brooklyn and on a farm in the Catskills; as a literature student at Columbia; as a young exile who spent a decade in Paris transforming himself into a French intellectual, absorbing the language, sex, culture, and leftist politics; and as an American man-of-letters who produced a steady stream of poems, essays, and wide-ranging works of literary scholarship and criticism. In 1978, at the age of forty-three, he abruptly entered a new life—”the life of the dying”—which he inhabited for the next six years. His writing was guided by a steely determination to hold the more pressing and distorting sentiments—self-pity, regret, anger, fear—at bay for the sake of his lucidity, which became his way through the world of cancer. This memoir stands as a testament to the passion and spirit with which Zweig lived and to the dignity that he brought to his final years.

Paul Zweig

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