A diverse display of formal dexterity, narrative power, and lyrical resonance, Peter Filkins's latest collection of poems explores the fraught relationship between the natural world and the human. Exploring the space between nature and culture, the poems of Water / Music anchor themselves in the timely and the timeless. Rich and diverse in their formal intricacy, they move with ease from narrative to meditation, from close physical observation to the haunts of memory, and from lyric sorrow to the pleasure of living in the world. Water / Music embraces and celebrates life's mystery and the soul's repose amid "talismans at twilight, the whir of birds."

In the pivotal poem "Marking Time," which appears almost exactly halfway through Peter Filkins's fourth collection of poetry, the speaker reflects on the death of a sibling and how time is marked by our memories. These memories, these moments--whether spent contemplating a painting by Vermeer or the simple toss of a bean bag--ultimately shape who we are. "Yet you are with me here, with me here again, / where neither that moon nor you exist, but live / tethered to this memory composed of words."

These are poems unafraid to be graceful and engaging. They attain an assurance and stability rare in contemporary poetry, while their careful balance of sadness and joy reminds the reader of the difficult negotiations we make in life.

In 1937, Elias Canetti began collecting notes for the project that 'by definition, [he] could never live to complete', as translator Peter Filkins writes in his afterword. The Book Against Death is the work of a lifetime: a collection of Canetti’s aphorisms, diatribes, musings and commentaries on and against death – published in English for the first time since his death in 1994 – interposed with material from philosophers and writers including Goethe, Walter Benjamin and Robert Walser. This major work by the 1981 Nobel Prize in Literature Laureate is a reckoning with the inevitability of death and with its politicization, evoking despair at the loss of loved ones and the impossibility of facing one’s own death, while fiercely protesting the mass deaths incurred during war and the willingness of the despot to wield death as power. Infused with fervour and vitality, The Book Against Death ultimately forms a moving affirmation of the value of life itself.

Arthur Conan Doyle is best known as the author of the Sherlock Holmes stories. However, his works are far more extensive than these familiar works. They include historical novels, political pamphlets, historical studies, science fiction novels and, last but not least, numerous publications on spiritualism. Photography plays a central role in his work and gives rise to a highly peculiar world of imagination. The photographs allow us to take a look at the world in around 1900 with all its oddities. For Conan Doyle's contemporaries, Sherlock Holmes was a real figure. To Conan Doyle, photographs of elves, the dead and ghosts testified to their existence. This book collects these images, along with the imaginarium that surrounds them.

By turns discursive, dramatic, and lyrical, AUGUSTINE'S VISION presents a startlingly good poet who courageously interrogates ideas of evil, sin, and death while celebrating the goodness of creation, including both nature and the creations of humankind. Indeed, many of the poems are inspired responses to other artists: Vermeer, Monet, Wilfred Owen, Polanski's Chinatown. The poet's own work bids fair to inspire others, as beautiful phrases such as "flowers / afloat on the air" or "a stillness loud with geese" float to the surface of the page. In particular, his poem "Waterlilies," consisting of a single sentence that runs for twenty-one lines, is a marvelous summation of the contrary elements that art makes cohere. You won't want to miss this ambitious collection that possesses poise, grace, and intellectual fearlessness. - KELLY CHERRY

The biography of H.G. Adler (1910-88) is the story of a survivor of Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, and two other concentration camps who not only lived through the greatest cataclysm of the 20th century, but someone who also devoted his literary and scholarly career to telling the story of those who perished in over two dozen books of fiction, poetry, history, sociology, and religion. And yet for much of his life he remained almost entirely unknown. A writer's writer, a scholar of seminal, pioneering works on the Holocaust, a renowned radio essayist in postwar Germany, a last representative of the Prague Circle of literature headed by Kafka, a key contributor to the prosecution in the trial of Adolf Eichmann, Adler was a man of his time whose times lived through him. His is the story of many others, but also one that is singularly his own. And at its heart lies a profound story of love and perseverance amid the loss of his first wife, Gertrud Klepetar, who accompanied her mother to the gas chamber in Auschwitz, and the courtship and extended correspondence with Bettina Gross, a Prague artist who escaped to the Britain, only to later learn that her mother had also been in Theresienstadt with Adler before her eventual death in Auschwitz. His delivery of a lecture in Theresienstadt commemorating Kafka's sixtieth birthday, and with Kafka's favorite sister present; the nurturing of a younger generation of artists and intellectuals, including the Israeli artist Jehuda Bacon and the Serbian novelist Ivan Ivanji; the preservation of Viktor Ullmann's compositions and his opera The Emperor of Atlantis, only to see them premiered decades later to world acclaim; and the penury of postwar life while churning out the novels, poetry, and scholarship that would make his reputation - all of these are part of a life survived in the moment, but dedicated to the future, and that of a man committed to helping human dignity survive in his time and that to come.

A major literary event: the first-ever English translation of a lost masterpiece of Holocaust literature by acclaimed author and survivor H. G. Adler
The story behind the story of "The Journey" is remarkable in itself: Award-winning translator Peter Filkins discovered an obscure German novel in a Harvard Square bookstore and, reading it, realized that it was a treasure unavailable to English speakers. It was the most powerful book by the late H. G. Adler, a survivor of Theresienstadt and Auschwitz, a writer whose work had been praised by authors from Elias Canetti to Heinrich Boll and yet remained unknown to international audiences.
Written in 1950 after Adler's emigration to England, "The Journey" was not released in Germany until 1962. After the war, larger publishing houses stayed away from novels about the Holocaust, feeling that the tragedy could not be fictionalized and that any metaphorical interpretation was obscene. Only a small publisher was in those days willing to take on "The Journey."
Yet Filkins found that Adler had depicted the event in a unique, truly modern, and deeply moving way. Avoiding specific mention of country or camps-even of Nazis and Jews-"The Journey" is a lyrical nightmare of a family's ordeal and one member's survival. Led by the doctor patriarch Leopold, the Lustig family finds itself "forbidden" to live, uprooted into a surreal and incomprehensible circumstance of deprivation and death. This cataclysm destroys father, daughter, sister, and wife and leaves only Paul, the son, to live again among those who saved or sacrificed him. "The Journey "reveals a world beset by an "epidemic of mental illness . . . As a result of the epidemic, everyone was crazy, and once they finally recognized what was happening it was too late."
Linked by its innovative style to the work of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, "The Journey" is as much a revelation as other recent discoveries on the subject as the works of W. G. Sebald and Irene Nemirovsky's "Suite Francaise." It is a book proving that art can portray the unimaginable and expand people's perceptions of it, a work anyone interested in recent history and modern literature must read.

"From the Hardcover edition."

Only recently available for the first time in English, "Panorama" is the newly rediscovered first novel of H. G. Adler, a modernist master whose work has been compared to that of Kafka, Joyce, and Solzhenitsyn. A brilliant epic told in ten distinct vignettes, "Panorama" is a portrait of a place and people soon to be destroyed, as seen through the eyes of the young Josef Kramer. It moves from the pastoral World War I-era Bohemia of Josef's youth, to a German boarding school full of creeping prejudice, through an infamous extermination camp, and finally to Josef's self-imposed exile abroad, achieving veracity and power through a stream-of-consciousness style reminiscent of our greatest modern masters. The author of six novels as well as the monumental account of his experiences in a Nazi labor camp, "Theresienstadt 1941-1945, " H. G. Adler is an essential author with unique historical importance. "Panorama" is lasting evidence of both the torment of his life and the triumph of his gifts.