Mario, a 35-year-old gay actor, knows that he doesn't have long to live. For five years, he has been surviving himself. For five years, the virus has schooled him in fear. Mario lies in the prison of his room and gives himself failing grades for his life-an F for his lack of success, and F for his pathological need for intimacy, and F for his neurotic lack of independence. Locked within him is resentment toward his mother, the lifelong yearning for a father, and a pimply-faced kid who cowers and refuses to grow up. Mario stumbles through the wilderness of men and waits for the call. He's learned his les

Mario Wirz is wrestling with a problem of major proportions--the constant threat of death hanging over his shoulder. Death is his muse. It is a shadow that hangs over all of us, but it is the fate of some to feel it more keenly, to live with it minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour, and day-by-day. These poems hone in relentlessly on this topic, until one is inexorably affected by their stark, existential reality. Wirz's poems have been published in French, Italian, Ukrainian, Polish, Finnish, Greek, Hungarian, and Chinese, but it took ten years for his first novel to be published in English, and now the publication of this companion volume of poems is made possible only by recent changes in the publishing world--the rise of e-books and desktop publishing-that have made it far easier and more cost--effective to publish literature in a minor key. But this volume, though small, is not minor. It is poetry that speaks to all of us.

Toward the end of a distinguished scholarly career in the field of political science, Alfred G. Meyer wrote two books that were never published. The first was a biography of Friedrich Engels and the second was a memoir that looked back on his life and career. Both manuscripts were lively and entertaining, full of sharply drawn, humorous observations of the people he met during his life, and dominated by his intellectual curiosity. This volume merges the two manuscripts, by taking the chapters of his memoir that focused on his career as a political scientist and juxtaposing them with the Engels biography. The result is a radically new experiment in portraiture-an intellectual self-portrait of a scholar rendered by means of the picture he drew of his historical subject.

..". a warm, interesting, intellectual biography... " -- GermanStudies Review

..". thoughtful analysis... fine book..." -- Slavic Review

The remarkable life of the maverick Germansocialist feminist Lily Braun (1865--1916) and the relevance of her ideas to thewomen's movement of our own day emerge with strength and sensitivity.