In the delightfully small Pocket Poets format, a selection of the poems of Langston Hughes -- one of America's greatest popular poets since Walt Whitman. From the publication of his first book in 1926, Hughes was hailed as the poet laureate of black America, the first to commemorate the experience of African-Americans in a voice that no reader, black or white, could fail to hear. Lyrical and pungent, passionate and polemical, this volume is a treasure -- an essential collection of the work of a poet whose words have entered our common language.

In Byron's Shadow examines the history of how and why English and American authors projected their own concerns and consciousness onto modern Greece, tracing how the conception of the country evolved from a politicised, feminised, Apollonian space during the Roman era to a carefree Dionysian lotus land in the last decade of Modernism. Author David Roessel draws on a wide range of sources to create a model for literary history that synthesises literary investigation and cultural studies to develop a fuller understanding of the historical forces influencing the Anglo-American conception of modern Greece.

Modern Greece constructed by the early nineteenth-century ideals and ideas associated with Byron, has been 'haunted, holy ground' in English and American literature for almost two centuries. In Byron's Shadow analyses how authors employ ideas about romantic nationalism, gender politics, shifts in cultural constructions, and literary experimentation to create variations of Greece to suit changing eras. Complementing and complicating Edward Said's view of relations between East and West, Roessel discusses the way perceptions of modern Greece have been shaped by historical events, arguing that the Greek struggle for independence became a touchstone in the English and American imagination of the nineteenth century, and that twentieth-century Greece became a symbol of the attitudes and ideals that many believed caused the Great War.