Michael Hofmann is renowned as one of our most brilliant critics and translators; that he is also regarded as among our most respected poets - 'one of the definitive bodies of work of the last half-century', TLS - is all the more impressive for his relatively concentrated output. One Lark, One Horse will be his fifth collection of poems since his debut in 1983, and his first since Approximately Nowhere in 1999. But it is also one of the most anticipated gatherings of new work in years. In style, it is as unmistakable as ever: sometimes funny, sometimes caustic; world-facing and yet intimate; and shows a bright mind burning fiercely over the European imagination. Approaching his sixtieth birthday, the poet explores where he finds himself, geographically and in life, treating with wit and compassion such universal themes as ageing and memory, place, and the difficulty for the individual to exist at all in an ever bigger and more bestial world. One...

Kully knows some things you don't learn at school. She knows the right way to roll a cigarette and pack a suitcase. She knows that cars are more dangerous than lions. She knows you can't enter a country without a passport or visa. And she knows that she and her parents can't go back to Germany again – her father's books are banned there. But there are also things she doesn't understand, like why there might be a war in Europe – just that there are men named Hitler, Mussolini and Chamberlain involved. Little Kully is far more interested where their next meal will come from and the ladies who seem to buzz around her father. Meanwhile she and her parents roam through Europe. Her mother would just like to settle down, but as her restless father struggles to find a new publisher, the three must escape from country to country as their visas expire, money runs out and hotel bills mount up.

The monumentality of this biographical work further establishes Joseph Roth—with Kafka, Mann, and Musil—in the twentieth-century literary canon.Who would have thought that seventy-three years after Joseph Roth's lonely death in Paris, new editions of his translations would be appearing regularly? Roth, a transcendent novelist who also produced some of the most breathtakingly lyrical journalism ever written, is now being discovered by a new generation. Nine years in the making, this life through letters provides us with our most extensive portrait of Roth's calamitous life—his father's madness, his wife's schizophrenia, his parade of mistresses (each more exotic than the next), and his classic westward journey from a virtual Hapsburg shtetl to Vienna, Berlin, Frankfurt, and finally Paris.Containing 457 newly translated letters, along with eloquent introductions that richly frame Roth's life, this book brilliantly evokes the crumbling specters of the...

An adventure with a roving genius of literary criticismMichael Hofmann—a poet, translator, and intellectual vagabond—has established himself as one of the keenest critics of contemporary literature. Safely nestled between the covers of Where Have You Been?, he offers a hand to guide us and an encouraging whisper in our ear, leading us on a trip through what to read, how to think, and why to like. And while these essays bear sharp insights that will help us revisit writers with a fresh eye, they are also a story of love between a reader and his treasured books. In these twenty-five essays, Hofmann brings his signature wit and sustained critical mastery to a poetic, penetrating, and candid discussion of the writers and artists of the last hundred years. Here are the indispensable poets without which contemporary poetry would be unimaginable—Elizabeth Bishop, "the poets' poets' poet," the "ghostly skill" of Robert Lowell, and the man he...