FSG Classics

Few American readers seem to be aware that Hermann Hesse, author of the epic novels Steppenwolf and Siddhartha, among many others, also wrote poetry, the best of which the poet James Wright has translated and included in this book. This is a special volume-filled with short, direct poems about love, death, loneliness, the seasons-that is imbued with some of the imagery and feeling of Hesse's novels but that has a clarity and resonance all its own, a sense of longing for love and for home that is both deceptively simple and deeply moving.

In A New Life, Bernard Malamud-generally thought of as a distinctly New York writer-took on the American myth of the West as a place of personal reinvention. When Sy Levin, a high school teacher beset by alcohol and bad decisions, leaves the city for the Pacific Northwest to start over, it's no surprise that he conjures a vision of the extraordinary new life awaiting him there: "He imagined the pioneers in covered wagons entering this valley for the first time. Although he had lived little in nature Levin had always loved it, and the sense of having done the right thing in leaving New York was renewed in him." Soon after his arrival at Cascadia College, however, Levin realizes he has been taken in by a mirage. The failures pile up anew, and Levin, fired from his post, finds himself back where he started and little the wiser for it. A New Life- as Jonathan Lethem's introduction makes clear- is Malamud at his best: with his belief in luck and new beginnings, Sy Levin embodies the thwarted yearning for transcendence that is at the heart of all Malamud's work.

Christopher and His Kind is an intriguing slice of autobiography. It covers ten years in the writer's life-from 1929, when Isherwood left England to spend a week in Berlin and decided to stay there indefinitely, to the beginning of 1939, when he arrived in New York to start a life in the States. The book revealingly contrasts fact with fiction-the real people Isherwood met in Germany with the portraits of them in his two Berlin novels, who then appeared again, fictionalized to an even greater degree, in I Am a Camera and Cabaret. But one does not need to be familiar with his body of work to appreciate the powerful and compelling story he tells here. Isherwood left Berlin in 1933, after Hitler came to power. For the next four years, he wandered around Europe-through Greece, Spain, Portugal, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, and France-with a German boy named Heinz. The characters in the book include W.H. Auden, Stephen Sper, and E.M. Forster as well as the literary circles of Somerset Maugham and Virginia Woolf. Chronicling German refugees and the British colony in Portugal, the Group Theatre company (which performed the three Auden-Isherwood plays) and the film studio where he worked and which he used as the setting for Prater Violet, Christopher and His Kind is an engrossing and powerfully rendered portrait of a decade in the life of a major writer.

A new edition of the Russian Nobelist's collection of novellas, short stories, and prose poems Stories and Prose Poems contains twenty-two works of widely varied style and character from the Nobel Prize winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. These shorter pieces demonstrate the extraordinary mastery of language that places Solzhenitsyn among the greatest Russian prose writers of the twentieth century. When the two superb stories "Matryona's House" and "An Incident at Krechetovka Station" were first published in Russia in 1963, the Moscow Literary Gazette, the mouthpiece of the Soviet literary establishment, wrote: "His talent is so individual and so striking that from now on nothing that comes from his pen can fail to excite the liveliest interest." For some readers the most exciting discovery will be the astonishing group of sixteen prose poems. In these works of varying lengths, Solzhenitsyn has distilled the joy and bitterness of Russia's fate into language of unrivaled lyrical purity.

Isherwood's final work of fiction-an epistolary novel that explores sexual identity and Eastern mysticism After a long separation, two English brothers meet in India. Oliver, the idealistic younger brother, prepares to take his final vows as a Hindu monk. Patrick, a successful publisher with a wife and children in London and a male lover in California, has publicly admired his brother's convictions while privately criticizing his choices. First published in 1967, A Meeting by the River delicately depicts the complexity of sibling relationships-the resentment and competitiveness as well as the love and respect. Ultimately, the brothers' exposure to each other's differences deepens their awareness of themselves. In A Meeting by the River, Christopher Isherwood dramatizes the conflict between sexuality and spirituality that inspired his late writings.

Introduction by Jhumpa Lahiri Bernard Malamud's first book of short stories, The Magic Barrel, has been recognized as a classic from the time it was published in 1959. The stories are set in New York and in Italy (where Malamud's alter ego, the struggleing New York Jewish Painter Arthur Fidelman, roams amid the ruins of old Europe in search of his artistic patrimony); they tell of egg candlers and shoemakers, matchmakers, and rabbis, in a voice that blends vigorous urban realism, Yiddish idiom, and a dash of artistic magic. The Magic Barrel is a book about New York and about the immigrant experience, and it is high point in the modern American short story. Few books of any kind have managed to depict struggle and frustration and heartbreak with such delight, or such artistry.

A deeply introspective book about war, religion, and sexuality Against the backdrop of World War II, The World in the Evening charts the emotional development of Stephen Monk, an aimless Englishman living in California. After his second marriage suddenly ends, Stephen finds himself living with a relative in a small Pennsylvania Quaker town, haunted by memories of his prewar affair with a younger man during a visit to the Canary Islands. The world traveler comes to a gradual understanding of himself and of his newly adopted homeland. When first published in 1953, The World in the Evening was notable for its clear-eyed depiction of European and American mores, sexuality, and religion. Today, readers herald Christopher Isherwood's frank portrayal of bisexuality and his early appreciation of low and high camp.

Consisting of four accounts of encounters with four male characters, each of them visited by a different Christopher Isherwood, and each set in a different time and place, Berlin in the 1920s (overlapping the time period of the Berlin Stories), the Greek Isles in the early 1930s, London in the late 1930s and California in 1940, this acclaimed novel explores Isherwood's fundamental concerns with the choice of a way of life, and its implications for love, sex, spirituality and self-fulfillment. Published in 1959, when Isherwood had already become something of a literary rock star, Down There on a Visit is a very funny but also sad and deeply personal book that charts Isherwood's life of carnal indulgence and his first interlude with what would become a serious involvement with Eastern mysticism.

God's Grace (1982), Bernard Malamud's last novel, is a modern-day dystopian fantasy, set in a time after a thermonuclear war prompts a second flood, a radical departure from Malamud's previous fiction. The novel's protagonist is paleolosist Calvin Cohn, who had been attending to his work at the bottom of the ocean when the Devastation struck, and who alone survived. This rabbi's son, a "marginal error", finds himself shipwrecked with an experimental chimpanzee capable of speech, to whom he gives the name Buz. Soon other creatures appear on their island-baboons, chimps, five apes, and a lone gorilla. Cohn works hard to make it possible for God to love His creation again, and his hopes increase as he encounters the unknown and the unforeseen in this strange new world. With God's Grace, Malamud took a great risk, and it paid off. The novel's fresh and pervasive humor, narrative ingenuity, and tragic sense of the human condition make it one of Malamud's most extraordinary books.

Whether writing about waiting as a child in a dentist's office, viewing a city from a plane high above, or losing items ranging from door keys to one's lover in the masterfully restrained "One Art," Elizabeth Bishop somehow conveyed both large and small emotional truths in language of stunning exactitude and even more astonishing resonance.

The Assistant, Bernard Malamud's second novel, originally published in 1957, is the story of Morris Bober, a grocer in postwar Brooklyn, who "wants better" for himself and his family. First two robbers appear and hold him up; then things take a turn for the better when broken-nosed Frank Alpine becomes his assistant. But there are complications: Frank, whose reaction to Jews is ambivalent, falls in love with Helen Bober; at the same time he begins to steal from the store. Like Malamud's best stories, this novel unerringly evokes an immigrant world of cramped circumstances and great expectations. Malamud defined the immigrant experience in a way that has proven vital for several generations of writers.

Written while Federico García Lorca was a student at Columbia University in 1929-30, Poet in New York is one of the most important books he produced, and certainly one of the most important books ever published about New York City. Indeed, it is a book that changed the direction of poetry in both Spain and the Americas, a pathbreaking and defining work of modern literature. Timed to coincide with the citywide celebration of García Lorca in New York planned for 2013, this edition, which has been revised once again by the renowned García Lorca scholar Christopher Maurer, includes thrilling material-new photographs, new and emended letters-that has only recently come to light. Complementing these additions are García Lorca's witty and insightful letters to his family describing his feelings about America and his temporary home there (a dorm room in Columbia's John Jay Hall), the annotated photographs that accompany those letters, a prose poem, extensive notes, and an interpretive lecture by García Lorca himself. An excellent introduction to the work of a key figure of modern poetry, this bilingual edition of Poet in New York, a strange, timeless, vital book of verse, is also an exposition of the American city in the twentieth century.

The first of Nobel Prize winner Peter Handke's novels to be published in English, The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick is a true modern classic that "portrays the...breakdown of a murderer in ways that recall Camus's The Stranger" (The New York Times). The self-destruction of a soccer goalie turned construction worker who wanders aimlessly around a stifling Austrian border town after pursuing and then murdering, almost unthinkingly, a female movie cashier is mirrored by Handke's use of direct, sometimes fractured prose that conveys "at its best a seamless blend of lyricism and horror seen in the runes of a disintegrating world" (Boston Sunday Globe).