Guy Davenport

xxi, 262 pages ; 22 cm

Jesus was a street preacher who taught by way of sayings. The Logia of Yeshua reintroduces us to this teacher, whose succinct and powerful words ring anew in this fine new translation that draws from Greek texts. The term logion (plural logia) is from the Greek, for "saying." Each of the 105 logia that make up this collection is aphoristic, metaphoric, self-contained, memorable, and infinitely quotable. Antedating the Gospels, the logia were written down by Jesus' Followers while he was still lived or shortly after he died. At first glance, these sayings are simplicity itself, and yet they contain paradoxes, like Zen koans or Sufi stories. They startle us and shake our conception about who Jesus was and what he might have hoped to accomplish. The Logia of Yeshua is the Sayings Gospel: through the immediacy of direct quotation, we gain a clear idea of the living teacher.

Hardly the typical essay collection, The Hunter Gracchus is better described as a collage of ideas, commentary, and criticism from an eclectic stylist whose sentences ring with clarity and originality. Moving effortlessly from snake handling to Wallace Stevens, these essays take delight in an immense range of topics, including art and architecture, religion, and literature. In one essay, Davenport recalls a lunch with Thomas Merton at the Ramada Inn, where Merton, already the world's most famous Trappist monk, drank several martinis and held forth on the architecture of Buddhist temples. In another, Davenport finds in postwar modernism a catalogue of our lost innocence. In the stunning title essay, he maps out the world of a posthumously published story by Franz Kafka.

Guy Davenport's short stories are journeys through history and the imagination. Radically original and surprising, comic and sensuous, Davenport's virtuoso talent charms us into a world both familiar and strange. Whether in the timelessness of deep woods or fleeing the bloody dreamscape of battle, Davenport's characters embody life's contradictions.

A set of meditations, written over several years, concerning the painting of Balthus and "its kinship with the poetry of Rilke (Balthus's childhood mentor), with Picasso and others."--Jacket.

In the 40 essays that constitute this collection, Guy Davenport, one of America's major literary critics, elucidates a range of literary history, encompassing literature, art, philosophy and music, from the ancients to the grand old men of modernism.