The calamities that befall the hapless creatures of Aesop's Fables! The fox can't reach his grapes, then gets attacked by biting flies, and loses his tail in a trap. And things don't go much better for the hare, who is chased relentlessly by a hound, barely escaping with his life-only to be beaten in a race by a lowly tortoise. Misfortune turns to mayhem when a wolf is killed by his sweetheart's father, a sheepdog preys on his own flock, and the mouse...

Homer's Iliad describes the final year of the Trojan War, a legendary conflict between an alliance of Greek cities and the city of Troy in Anatolia. The greatest literary landmark of classical antiquity masterfully rendered by the most celebrated translator of our time. When Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey appeared in 2017 -- revealing the ancient poem in a contemporary idiom that "combines intellectual authority with addictive readability"...

"Yi Lei published her poem "A Single Woman's Bedroom" in 1987, when cohabitation before marriage was a punishable crime in China. She was met with major critical acclaim -- and with outrage -- for her frank embrace of women's erotic desire and her unabashed critique of oppressive law. Over the span of her revolutionary career, Yi Lei became one of the most influential figures in contemporary Chinese poetry. Passionate, rigorous, and inimitable, the...

Twenty-nine fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen.

A poet who hated an age of decadence, armed conflict, and departure from tradition, Aristophanes' comic genius influenced the political and social order of his own fifth-century Athens. But as Moses Hadas writes in his introduction to this volume, 'His true claim upon our attention is as the most brilliant and artistic and thoughtful wit our world has known.' Includes The Acharnians, The Birds, The Clouds, Ecclesiazusae, The Frogs, The Knights, Lysistrata,...

Among the great works of world literature, perhaps one of the least familiar to English readers is the Shahnameh, the national epic of Persia. This prodigious narrative, composed by the poet Ferdowsi between the years 980 and 1010, tells the story of pre-Islamic Iran, beginning in the mythic time of Creation and continuing forward to the Arab invasion in the seventh century. As a window on the world, Shahnameh belongs in the company of such literary...

Written by court princesses, exiled officials, Zen priests, and recluses, the one hundred and fifty poems translated here represent the rich diversity of Japan's poetic tradition. Varying in tone from the sensuous and erotic to the profoundly spiritual, each poem captures a sense of the poignant beauty and longing known only in the fleeting experience of the moment. The translator has selected these five-line tanka - one of the great traditional...

Contains Emerson's published poetry, plus selections of his unpublished poetry from journals and notebooks, and some of his translations of poetry from other languages, notably Dante's La vita nuova.