A ground-breaking masterpiece of early European modernism originally published in 1910, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge unspools the vivid reflections of the titular young Danish nobleman and poet. From his Paris garret, Brigge records his encounters with the city and its outcasts, muses on his family history and lays bare his earliest experiences of fear, tenderness and desolation. With a poet's feel for language and a keen instinct for storytelling, Rainer Maria Rilke forges a dazzlingly fractured coming-of-age narrative, kaleidoscopic in its alternation of vivid present encounters and equally alive memories of childhood. Strikingly contemporary, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge reveals a writer metabolizing his own experiences to yield still-essential questions about fiction and reality, empathy and psychosis and-above all-life, love and death. In a fascinating introduction, award-winning translator Edward Snow explores the overlaps between Rilke's experiences and those of his protagonist, and shows with granular attention the novel's capacity for nuance and sympathy. Snow's exquisite translation captures as never before the astonishing cadences and musical clarity of the poet's prose. It reveals The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge as an urgent contemporary achievement, more than one hundred years after it was written.

You Know How a Cat

will bring a mouse it has

caught and lay it at your

feet so each morning I

bring you a poem that

I've written when I woke

up in the night as my tribute

to your beauty &

a promise of my love.

-James Laughlin

Across the ages, cats have provided their adopted humans with companionship, affection, mystery, and innumerable metaphors. Cats raise a mirror up to their beholders; cats endlessly captivate and hypnotise, frustrate and delight. To poets, in particular, these enigmatic creatures are the most delightful and beguiling of muses, as they purr, prowl, hunt, play, meow, and nap, often oblivious to their so-called masters. Cat Poems offers a litter of odes to our beloved felines by some of the greatest poets of all time.

'What matters is to live everything. Live the questions for now.' A hugely influential collection for writers and artists of all kinds, Rilke's profound and lyrical letters to a young friend advise on writing, love, sex, suffering and the nature of advice itself. One of 46 new books in the bestselling Little Black Classics series, to celebrate the first ever Penguin Classic in 1946. Each book gives readers a taste of the Classics' huge range and diversity, with works from around the world and across the centuries - including fables, decadence, heartbreak, tall tales, satire, ghosts, battles and elephants.

These letters from the poet and mystic Rainer Maria Rilke to a nineteen-year-old cadet and aspiring poet have inspired millions of readers since they were first published in English in 1934. The first and most popular translator of this work was Mary Dows Herter Norton—a polymath extraordinaire who played a crucial role in elevating Rilke’s global reputation. The Norton Centenary Edition commemorates this extraordinary woman, known as “Polly� to friends and colleagues, and celebrates the 100th anniversary of the publishing company she co-founded. With a foreword by Damion Searls and an afterword by Norton’s current president, Julia Reidhead, this handsome new edition brings Rilke’s enduring wisdom about life, love and art to a new generation.