Eugenio de Andrade is the author of twenty-nine volumes of poetry as well as numerous children's books, collections of prose writings, and translations into Portuguese of Sappho, Federico Garcia Lorca, and Yannis Ritsos. Forbidden Words: Selected Poetry of Eugenio de Andrade, is based on the poet's own retrospective Antologia Breve ("Brief Anthology") of 1998, expanded and edited for English-speaking readers by his longtime translator, Alexis Levitin. Marguerite Yourcenar spoke of "the well-tempered clavier" of Andrade's poems, Gregory Rabassa of his "succinct lyricism...summing things up in a moment, much like haiku." His verse, deeply rooted in the rural landscapes of his childhood and in the ancient Greek lyric, have the clarity of light on sand, radiating pagan intimations of immortality.

Stories within stories, a few contemporary fables, a hint of the narrative complexity of Borges, a whiff of the gritty realism of pre- and post-communist life in Eastern Europe - these are the elements that come together in a unique and surprising way in the wildly imaginative and endlessly engaging short stories of Georgi Gospodinov. Whether a tongue-in-cheek crime/horror story or the Christmas story of a pig, a language game leading to an unexpected epiphany or an inward-looking tale built on the complexity of a puzzle box, the work in this collection offers a kaleidoscopic experience of a writer whose style has been described as ""anarchic, experimental"" (""New Yorker"") and ""compulsively readable"" (""New York Times""). Gospodinov's debut prose work ""Natural Novel"" was hailed as a ""go-for-broke postmodern construction - a devilish jam of jump-cut narration, pop culture riffs, wholesale quotation, and Chinese-box authorship"" (""Village Voice""). At once familiar and fantastic, his writing is high comedy, high seriousness, and of very high order.

Stories within stories, a few contemporary fables, a hint of the narrative complexity of Borges, a whiff of the gritty realism of pre- and post-communist life in Eastern Europe - these are the elements that come together in a unique and surprising way in the wildly imaginative and endlessly engaging short stories of Georgi Gospodinov. Whether a tongue-in-cheek crime/horror story or the Christmas story of a pig, a language game leading to an unexpected epiphany or an inward-looking tale built on the complexity of a puzzle box, the work in this collection offers a kaleidoscopic experience of a writer whose style has been described as ""anarchic, experimental"" (""New Yorker"") and ""compulsively readable"" (""New York Times""). Gospodinov's debut prose work ""Natural Novel"" was hailed as a ""go-for-broke postmodern construction - a devilish jam of jump-cut narration, pop culture riffs, wholesale quotation, and Chinese-box authorship"" (""Village Voice""). At once familiar and fantastic, his writing is high comedy, high seriousness, and of very high order.