In Kassandra greift Christa Wolf auf einen Mythos des abendländischen Patriarchats zurück, den Trojanischen Krieg. Während Kassandra, die Seherin, auf dem Beutewagen des Agamemnon sitzt, überdenkt sie noch einmal ihr Leben. Mit ihrem Ringen um Autonomie legt sie Zeugnis ab von weiblicher Erfahrung in der Geschichte.

Sor Juana (1651–1695) was a fiery feminist and a woman ahead of her time. Like Simone de Beauvoir, she was very much a public intellectual. Her contemporaries called her "the Tenth Muse" and "the Phoenix of Mexico," names that continue to resonate. An illegitimate child, self-taught intellectual, and court favorite, she rose to the height of fame as a writer in Mexico City during the Spanish Golden Age. This volume includes Sor Juana's best-known works: "First Dream," her longest poem and the one that showcases her prodigious intellect and range, and "Response of the Poet to the Very Eminent Sor Filotea de la Cruz," her epistolary feminist defense—evocative of Mary Wollstonecraft and Emily Dickinson—of a woman's right to study and to write. Thirty other works—playful ballads, extraordinary sonnets, intimate poems of love, and a selection from an allegorical play with a distinctive New World flavor—are also included.

In Kassandra greift Christa Wolf auf einen Mythos des abendländischen Patriarchats zurück, den Trojanischen Krieg. Während Kassandra, die Seherin, auf dem Beutewagen des Agamemnon sitzt, überdenkt sie noch einmal ihr Leben. Mit ihrem Ringen um Autonomie legt sie Zeugnis ab von weiblicher Erfahrung in der Geschichte.

With this edition of Requiem and Poem without a Hero, Swallow Press presents two of Anna Akhmatova's best-known works, ones that represent the poet at full maturity, and that most trenchantly process the trauma she and others experienced living under Stalin's regime.Akhmatova began the three-decade process of writing Requiem in 1935 after the arrests of her son, Lev Gumilev, and her third husband. The autobiographical fifteen-poem cycle primarily chronicles a mother's wait-lining up outside Leningrad Prison every day for seventeen months-for news of her son's fate. But from this limbo, Akhmatova expresses and elevates the collective grief for all the thousands vanished under the regime, and for those left behind to speculate about their loved ones' fates. Poem without a Hero was similarly written over a long period. It takes as its focus the transformation of Akhmatova's beloved city of St. Petersburg-historically a seat of art and culture-into Leningrad. Taken together, these works plumb the foremost themes for which Akhmatova is known and revered. When Ohio University Press published D. M. Thomas's translations in 1976, it was the first time they had appeared in English. Under Thomas's stewardship, Akhmatova's words ring clear as a bell.

With this edition of Requiem and Poem without a Hero, Swallow Press presents two of Anna Akhmatova's best-known works, ones that represent the poet at full maturity, and that most trenchantly process the trauma she and others experienced living under Stalin's regime.Akhmatova began the three-decade process of writing Requiem in 1935 after the arrests of her son, Lev Gumilev, and her third husband. The autobiographical fifteen-poem cycle primarily chronicles a mother's wait-lining up outside Leningrad Prison every day for seventeen months-for news of her son's fate. But from this limbo, Akhmatova expresses and elevates the collective grief for all the thousands vanished under the regime, and for those left behind to speculate about their loved ones' fates. Poem without a Hero was similarly written over a long period. It takes as its focus the transformation of Akhmatova's beloved city of St. Petersburg-historically a seat of art and culture-into Leningrad. Taken together, these works plumb the foremost themes for which Akhmatova is known and revered. When Ohio University Press published D. M. Thomas's translations in 1976, it was the first time they had appeared in English. Under Thomas's stewardship, Akhmatova's words ring clear as a bell.

Tatyana Tolstaya's short stories — with their unpredictable fairy-tale plots, appealingly eccentric characters, and stylistic abundance and flair — established her in the 1980s as one of modern Russia's finest writers. Since then her work has been translated throughout the world. Edna O'Brien has called Tolstaya "an enchantress." Anita Desai has spoken of her work's "richness and ardent life." Mixing heartbreak and humor, dizzying flights of fantasy and plunging descents to earth, Tolstaya is the natural successor in a great Russian literary lineage that includes Gogol, Yuri Olesha, Bulgakov, and Nabokov. White Walls is the most comprehensive collection of Tolstaya's short fiction to be published in English so far. It presents the contents of her two previous collections, On the Golden Porch and Sleepwalker in a Fog, along with several previously uncollected stories. Tolstaya writes of lonely children and lost love, of philosophers of the absurd and poets working as janitors, of angels and halfwits. She shows how the extraordinary will suddenly erupt in the midst of ordinary life, as she explores the human condition with a matchless combination of unbound imagination and unapologetic sympathy. A New York Review Books Original "Tolstaya carves indelible people who roam the imagination long after the book is put down." --Time