Now available. Here are the early poems which first brought Denise Levertov's work to prominence -- from early uncollected poems, selections from The Double Image (London, 1946), and her three books Here and Now (1957), Overland to the Islands (1958) and With Eyes at the Back of Our Heads (1960), which established her as one of the more lyrical and most influential poets of the "New American" poetry.

It is a warm June morning in the West End of St. Louis in the mid-thirties -- a lovely Sunday for a picnic at Creve Coeur Lake. But Dorothea, one of the author's most engaging "marginally youthful," forever hopeful Southern belles, is home waiting for a phone call from the principal of the high school where she teaches civics -- the man she expects to fulfill her deferred dreams of romance and matrimony.

In the 17th Century, a Japanese trade delegation travels to Mexico accompanied by Father Velasco, a Franciscan missionary acting as interpreter. On the way he converts them, using the argument that this will assure the success of their mission. It doesn't and on their return to Japan they are persecuted for their new faith.

In William Herrick's Kill Memory, erasing the past is just what seventy-one-year-old Elizabeth cannot do. A woman who has had many lovers, a ruthless revolutionary, a courageous underground courier during World War II, and now a disengaged exile waiting out a solitary existence in Paris, Boishke (as Elizabeth has always been called) gives her primary attention the the rituals of living-- eating, dressing, walking, realistically facing up to old age,...

A visiting professor of Swedish named Lars Gustafsson finds himself involved in "a sudden series of bizarre events" in Austin, Texas, in 1974.

" ... Hawkes's own selection from his novels, stories, and his current novel-in-progress, Adventures in the Alaskan Skin Trade. In autobiographical commentaries, Hawkes provides a context for each of the selections and discusses the genesis and the writing of his work. As a novelist whose creative life has depended largely on travel, he evokes the actual places that have inspired his imaginary worlds: the Alaska of his boyhood; the Caribbean island...