With this groundbreaking collection, translated and edited by the renowned poet and translator David Hinton, a new generation will be introduced to the work that riveted Ezra Pound and transformed modern poetry. The Chinese poetic tradition is the largest and longest continuous tradition in world literature, and this rich and far-reaching anthology of nearly five hundred poems provides a comprehensive account of its first three millennia (1500 BCE to 1200 CE), the period during which virtually all its landmark developments took place. Unlike earlier anthologies of Chinese poetry, Hinton's book focuses on a relatively small number of poets, providing selections that are large enough to re-create each as a fully realized and unique voice. New introductions to each poet's work provide a readable history, told for the first time as a series of poetic innovations forged by a series of master poeets. From the classic texts of Chinese philosophy to intensely personal lyrics, from love poems to startling and strange perspectives on nature, Hinton has collected an entire world of beauty and insight. And in his eye-opening translations, these ancient poems feel remarkably fresh and contemporary, presenting a literature both radically new and entirely resonant.

Formed in a time of great unrest in ancient China, The Analects is vital to an understanding of Chinese history and thought, and, 2,500 years on, it remains startlingly relevant to contemporary life. Complete and unabridged. Part of the Macmillan Collector's Library; a series of stunning, cloth-bound, pocket-sized classics with gold foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover. Highly regarded for the poetic fluency he brings to his award-winning work, David Hinton's translation is inviting and immensely readable. Confucius, the 'great sage' of China, believed that an ideal society is based on humanity, benevolence and goodness. His profoundly influential philosophy is encapsulated in The Analects, a collection of sayings which were written down by his followers. Confucius advocates an ethical social order, woven together by selfless and supportive relationships between friends, families and communities. He taught that living by a moral code based on education, ritual, respect and integrity will bring peace to human society.

Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching is the source of Zen Buddhism, and is probably the most broadly influential spiritual text in human history. Complete & Unabridged. Part of the Macmillan Collector's Library; a series of stunning, cloth-bound, pocket-sized classics with gold foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover. This edition is translated and introduced by David Hinton. Fluent in ancient Chinese and an acclaimed poet, he skilfully reveals how remarkably current and even innovative this text is after 2500 years. According to legend, Lao Tzu left China at the age of eighty, saddened that men would not follow the path to natural goodness. At the border with Tibet, a guard asked him to record his teachings and the Tao Te Ching is what he wrote down before leaving. Lao Tzu's spirituality describes the Cosmos as a harmonious and generative organism, and it shows how the human is an integral part of that cosmos.

Shale Boom describes how independent oilman George P. Mitchell developed technology that would unlock trillions of cubic feet of natural gas in the North Texas rock formation known as the Barnett Shale. When he succeeded, other oilmen used it to uncover vast reserves, prompting a gas boom extending through twenty-one North Texas counties including the Fort Worth metropolitan area. The boom created enormous wealth, but brought drilling rigs into urban neighborhoods and created safety and environmental concerns, especially with respect to the fracking technology necessary to produce gas. As the new technology was adapted to develop shale in other areas, controversy over it became national and global. Overall, however, what happened in the Barnett Shale meant profound changes for the future of petroleum at home and abroad.

Poetry. THE SELECTED POEMS OF TAO CHIN brings into English some of the most important poetry in all of Chinese literature. As David Hinton writes in his introduction, Tao Chien "stands at the head of the great Chinese tradition like a revered grandfather: profoundly wise, self-possessed, quiet, comforting." Tao was the first writer to make a poetry of his natural voice and immediate experience, thereby creating the personal lyricism which distinguishes ancient Chinese poetry and makes it seem so contemporary. While maintaining a scholar's attention to the complexities of the original, Hinton here recreates Tao Chien as a compelling poetic voice in English.

The books collected in this volume represent the first time since the mid-nineteenth century that the four seminal masterworks of ancient Chinese thought have been translated as a unified series by a single translator. Hinton's award-winning experience translating a wide range of ancient Chinese poets makes these books sing in English as never before. But these new versions are not only inviting and immensely readable, they also apply much-needed consistency to key philosophical terms in these texts, lending structural links and philosophical rigor heretofore unavailable in English. Breathing new life into these originary classics, Hinton's new translations will stand as the definitive texts for our era. Perhaps the most broadly influential spiritual text in human history, Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching is the source of Taoist philosophy, which eventually developed into Ch'an (Zen) Buddhism. Equally influential in the social sphere, Confucious' Analects is the source of social wisdom in China. The Chuang Tzu is the wild and wacky prose complement to the Tao Te Ching. And with its philosophical story-telling, the Menicius adds depth and complexity to Confucius' vision.

Generally acclaimed as one of China's greatest poets, Po Chu?-i (772-846 C.E.) practiced a poetry of everyday human concerns and clear plain-spoken language. In spite of his preeminent stature, this is the first edition of Po Chu?-i's poetry to appear in the West. It encompasses the full range of his work, from the early poems of social protest to the later recluse poems, whose spiritual depths reflect both his life-long devotion to Taoist and Ch'an (Zen) Buddhist practice. David Hinton's translations of ancient Chinese poetry have earned wide acclaim for creating compelling English texts that have altered our conception of Chinese poetry. Among his books published by New Directions are The Selected Poems of Tu Fu, and The Selected Poems of Li Po. His work has been supported by fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts and The National Endowment for the Humanities.

Tu Fu (712-770 C.E.) has for a millennium been widely considered the greatest poet in the Chinese tradition, and Hinton's original translation played a key role in developing that reputation in America. Most of Tu Fu's best poems were written in the last decade of his life, as an impoverished refugee fleeing the devastation of civil war. In the midst of these challenges, his always personal poems manage to combine a remarkable range of possibilities: elegant simplicity and great complexity, everyday life and grand historical drama, private philosophical depth and social engagement in a world consumed by war. Through it all, his is a wisdom that can only be called elemental, and his poems sound remarkably contemporary.

*David Hinton's account of a series of walks up and around a mountain near his home in Vermont is nature writing of a profound sort: as we accompany him with his observations of the terrain, vegetation, and wildlife, we gain access to the view of someone who has, through his translation work, become intimate with the mind of the ancient Chinese sages. Taking on the mind of the sages ourselves, we begin to get a clear vision of our place in the landscape, the planet, and ultimately the cosmos.

Late in life, Meng Chiao (A.D. 751--814) developed an experimental poetry of virtuosic beauty, a poetry that anticipated landmark developments in the modern Western tradition by a millennium. With the T'ang Dynasty crumbling, Meng's later work employed surrealist and symbolist techniques as it turned to a deep introspection. This is truly major work-- work that may be the most radical in the Chinese tradition. And though written more than a thousand years ago, it is remarkably fresh and contemporary. But, in spite of Meng's significance, this is the first volume of his poetry to appear in English.

Until the age of forty, Meng Chiao lived as a poet-recluse associated with Ch'an (Zen) poet-monks in south China. He then embarked on a rather unsuccessful career as a government official. Throughout this time, his poetry was decidedly mediocre, conventional verse inevitably undone by his penchant for the strange and surprising. After his retirement, Meng developed the innovative poetry translated in this book. His late work is singular not only for its bleak introspection and "avant-garde" methods, but also for its dimensions: in a tradition typified by the short lyric poem, this work is made up entirely of large poetic sequences.

This ancient text records the teachings of Mencius (4th c. B.C.E.), the second originary sage in the Confucian tradition which has shaped Chinese civilization for over two thousand years. In a culture that makes no distinction between those realms we call the heart and the mind, Mencius was the great thinker of the heart, and it was he who added the profound inner dimensions to the Confucian vision. Given his emphasis on the heart, it isn't surprising that his philosophical method is very literary in nature: story and anecdote full of human drama and poetic turns of thought. Indeed, the text is considered a paragon of literary eloquence and style.Mencius' strikingly contemporary empiricism represented a complete secularization of the spiritualist concepts of governance that had dominated China for over a millenia. He invested the humanist Confucian vision with its inner dimensions by recognizing that the individual is an integral part of a self-generating and harmonious cosmos. He saw all the spiritual depths of that cosmology inside us, and this led to a mystical faith in the inherent nobility of human beings. In his chaotic and war-ravaged times, he was therefore passionate in his defense of the people. Indeed, he advocated a virtual democracy in which a government's legitimacy depended upon the assent of the people. Such is the enduring magic of the Mencian heart full of compassionate and practical concern for the human condition, and yet so empty that it contains the ten thousand transformations of the entire cosmos.

In the 1970s and 1980s the Texas wildcatter was a recognizable figure in popular culture. Since then, the wildcatter's role is less celebrated but still important, as shown in the new introduction to this edition of a book originally published in 1984 by Texas Monthly Press. Drawing heavily on oral histories, this book tells the story of the West Texas independents as a group, looking at their business strategies in the context of their national, regional, and local conditions. The focus is on the Permian Basin and southeastern New Mexico over the sixty-year period in which the region rose to prominence on the American oil scene, producing about one-fifth of the nation's output. It is a story that covers vast technological change, governmental regulation, and economic fluctuation with profound implications for the oil and gas community. The new introduction brings the story up-to-date by addressing not only the subsequent careers of the wildcatters described in the book but also the role of independents in the current economy. ROGER M. OLIEN, who holds a Ph.D. from Brown University, lives in Austin and is a member of the TSHA Speakers Bureau.DIANA DAVIDS HINTON holds the J. Conrad Dunagan Chair in regional and business history at the University of Texas-Permian Basin. Her Ph.D. is from Yale University.

During the great oil speculations in the 1920s, both promoters and investors became victims of their common greed. Outlining the activities of several different promoters and drawing on business papers, federal court records, and local land records, the Oliens describe the legal and regulatory responses to fraud. Their fascinating story breaks new ground in American social and business history and offers new insight into the culture of American capitalism.

As the twentieth century began, oil in Texas was easy to find, but the quantities were too small to attract industrial capital and production. Then, on January 10, 1901, the Spindletop gusher blew in. Over the next fifty years, oil transformed Texas, creating a booming economy that built cities, attracted out-of-state workers and companies, funded schools and universities, and generated wealth that raised the overall standard of living-even for blue-collar workers. No other twentieth-century development had a more profound effect upon the state. In this book, Roger M. Olien and Diana Davids Hinton chronicle the explosive growth of the Texas oil industry from the first commercial production at Corsicana in the 1890s through the vital role of Texas oil in World War II. Using both archival records and oral histories, they follow the wildcatters and the gushers as the oil industry spread into almost every region of the state. The authors trace the development of many branches of the petroleum industry-pipelines, refining, petrochemicals, and natural gas. They also explore how overproduction and volatile prices led to increasing regulation and gave broad regulatory powers to the Texas Railroad Commission.

Meng Hao-jan (689740 C.E.) is generally considered to be one of China's most important poets, but there has never been an edition of his work in English. Ch'an (Zen) Buddhism was coming to maturity and becoming widely practiced among the intelligentsia of China. Ch'an not only clarified anew the spiritual ecology of early Taoist thought, it also emphasized the old Taoist idea that deep understanding lies beyond words. In poetry, this gave rise to a much more distilled language, especially in its concise imagism, which opened new inner depths, nonverbal insights, and outright enigma. It was in the work of Meng Hao-jan that this poetic revolution began, a revolution that marked the beginning of Chinese poetry's first great flowering. He opened the poetic ground that would be cultivated so productively by the great poets that followed, and he was revered by those poets as their esteemed elder, first master of the short imagistic landscape poem.

David Hinton's (Translator) many translations of ancient Chinese poetry have earned wide acclaim for creating compelling contemporary poetry. He is also the first translator in over a century to translate the four original masterworks of Chinese philosophy: "Tao Te Ching," "Chuang Tzu," "Analects," and "Mencius." He has held numerous fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts and The -National Endowment for the Humanities. And in 1997, his work was awarded the Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets. He lives in East Calais, Vermont.

"Hinton's music is subtle, modulated, and does not slacken with either contemporary or classic. He has listened to the individual tone of each poet, and his craft is equal to his perception. . . . He continues to enlarge our literary horizon. And the 'range of pleasure' his translations afford 'as sight, sound, and intellection, ' proves them true poems. Poems that breathe another culture into our English."-The Academy of American Poets

Modern American poets translate classical Chinese poetry. The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry is a rich compendium of translations like no other. It is the first to look at Chinese poetry through its enormous influence on American poetry, starting with Ezra Pound's Cathay (1915), and including translations by three other major U.S. poets (William Carlos Williams, Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder) and an important poet-translator-scholar (David Hinton), all of whom have long been associated with New Directions. Moreover, it is the first general anthology ever to consider the process of translation by presenting different versions of the same poem by various translators, as well as examples of the translators rewriting themselves. The collection, at once playful and instructive, serves as an excellent introduction to the art and tradition of Chinese poetry, gathering some 250 poems by nearly 40 poets, from the anonymous early poetry through the great masters of the Tang and Sung dynasties. The anthology also includes previously uncollected translations by Pound, a selection of essays on Chinese poetry by all five translators, some never published before in book form, and biographical notes that are a collage of poems and comments by both the American translators and the Chinese poets themselves. Translator, and essayist, Eliot Weinberger's first study of multiple Chinese translations was the perennially popular 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei. New Directions publishes three collections of his inventive essays and among his many translations are works by Octavio Paz, Bei Dao, and Jorge Luis Borges