This selection includes the original poems in German with their translations and commentary. Contents: I live my life -- I have many brothers -- We don't dare -- I love the dark hours -- You darkness, that I come from -- I have faith -- I am too alone -- You see, I want a lot -- Because One Man -- My life is not -- I find you -- And then that girl -- I can hardly believe -- This is my labor -- All of you undisturbed cities -- How many thousands -- Just as the watchman -- In this town -- Sometimes a man stands up -- The king of the world -- Already the ripening barberries -- It's possible -- And the great cities -- And where is he -- THe Way In -- Childhood -- From Childhood -- Sense of Something Coming -- Loneliness -- Human Being at Night -- Sunset -- The Solitary Person -- Autumn -- Storm -- The Neighbor -- Pont du Carrousel -- The Ashantis -- Evening in Skane -- Moving Forward -- October Day -- The Man Watching -- Title Poem -- The Song the Beggar Sings -- THe Songs the Blind Man Sings -- The Song the Drunkard Sings -- The songs the Widow Sings -- The Songs the Idiot Sings -- The Songs the Orphan Sings -- The Songs the Leper Sings -- The Panther -- The Swan -- Roman Countryside -- Leda -- Archaic Torso of Apollo -- The Solitary Man -- Buddha In side the Night -- "We Must Die Because We Have Known Them" -- Mourning -- Left Out to Die -- Again, Again -- On Music -- Imaginary Biography -- Fox Fire -- Just as the Winged Energy of Delight -- A Walk -- Palm -- For Erika -- A tree rising -- It was girl, really -- A god can do it -- O you lovers that are so gentle -- Don't bother about a stone -- Is he from our world -- To praise is the whole thing -- Where praise already is -- Only the man who has raised his strings -- You stone coffins of the ancient world.

One of the literary masterpieces of the century, this translation is now presented with facing-page German. To Rilke himself the Sonnets to Orpheus were "perhaps the most mysterious in the way they came up and entrusted themselves to me, the most enigmatic dictation I have ever held through and achieved; the whole first part was written down in a single breathless act of obedience, between the 2nd and 5th of February, without one word being doubtful or having to be changed." With facing-page German.

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angelic orders? and even if one of them pressed me suddenly to his I'd be consumed in that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we can just barely endure, and we stand in awe of it as it coolly disdains to destroy us. Every angel is terrifying. -from "The First Elegy" Over the last fifteen years, in his two volumes of New Poems as well as in The Book of Images and Uncollected Poems , Edward Snow has emerged as one of Rainer Maria Rilke's most able English-language interpreters. In his translations, Snow adheres faithfully to the intent of Rilke's German while constructing nuanced, colloquial poems in English. Written in a period of spiritual crisis between 1912 and 1922, the poems that compose the Duino Elegies are the ones most frequently identified with the Rilkean sensibility. With their symbolic landscapes, prophetic proclamations, and unsettling intensity, these complex and haunting poems rank among the outstanding visionary works of the century.

Hauntingly beautiful and heartbreaking, Colm Tóibín's sixth novel, Brooklyn, is set in Brooklyn and Ireland in the early 1950s, when one young woman crosses the ocean to make a new life for herself. Eilis Lacey has come of age in small-town Ireland in the years following World War Two. Though skilled at bookkeeping, she cannot find a job in the miserable Irish economy. When an Irish priest from Brooklyn offers to sponsor Eilis in America--to live and work in a Brooklyn neighborhood "just like Ireland"--she decides she must go, leaving her fragile mother and her charismatic sister behind. Eilis finds work in a department store on Fulton Street, and when she least expects it, finds love. Tony, a blond Italian from a big family, slowly wins her over with patient charm. He takes Eilis to Coney Island and Ebbets Field, and home to dinner in the two-room apartment he shares with his brothers and parents. He talks of having children who are Dodgers fans. But just as Eilis begins to fall in love with Tony, devastating news from Ireland threatens the promise of her future.

Everyone in Shaker Heights was talking about it that summer: how Isabelle, the last of the Richardson children, had finally gone around the bend and burned the house down. In Shaker Heights, a placid, progressive suburb of Cleveland, everything is meticulously planned – from the layout of the winding roads, to the colours of the houses, to the successful lives its residents will go on to lead. And no one embodies this spirit more than Elena Richardson, whose guiding principle is playing by the rules. Enter Mia Warren – an enigmatic artist and single mother – who arrives in this idyllic bubble with her teenage daughter Pearl, and rents a house from the Richardsons. Soon Mia and Pearl become more than just tenants: all four Richardson children are drawn to the mother–daughter pair. But Mia carries with her a mysterious past, and a disregard for the rules that threatens to upend this carefully ordered community. When old family friends attempt to adopt a Chinese-American baby, a custody battle erupts that dramatically divides the town – and puts Mia and Elena on opposing sides. Suspicious of Mia and her motives, Elena is determined to uncover the secrets in Mia's past. But her obsession will come at an unexpected and devastating cost . . .