A New Directions classic

Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935) a three-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, was the first of the great American modernist poets. "No poet ever understood loneliness and separateness better than Robinson," James Dickey has observed. Robinson's lyric poems illuminate the hearts and minds of the most unlikely subjects--the downtrodden, the bereft, and the misunderstood. Even while writing in meter and rhyme, he used everyday language with unprecedented power, wit, and sensitivity. With his keen understanding of ordinary people and a gift for harnessing the rhythms of conversational speech, Robinson created the vivid character portraits for which he is best known, among them "Aunt Imogen," "Isaac and Archibald," "Miniver Cheevy," and "Richard Cory." Most of his poems are set in the fictive Tilbury Town--based on his boyhood home of Gardiner, Maine--but his work reaches far beyond its particular locality in its focus on struggle and redemption in human experience.

Caught somewhere between the clear-eyed rhapsodies of James Fenimore Cooper and Mao Tse Tung's own Address to the Yenan Forum on Art and Literature, Tuten's The Adventures of Mao on the Long March is a wildly inventive, triumphant novel of great wit and subversion. Out of a revolutionary montage of literary pastiche, comic strips, political rhetoric, film culture, and pop iconography, Tuten has fashioned a funny, caustic and tender romance.

Set in 1954, this is a tale narrated by one Mrs Agnes Hawkins, a plump, forthright and no-nonsense young war widow. Nancy (as she is called) is the calm at the center of the perennial storm in the offices of a struggling London publishing house in the difficult years after WWII. At work and at her seedy boarding house she is involved with a cast of characters ranging from the charmingly useless to the downright unhinged; included an author she rejects and who tries to revenge himself through a quack science known as "radionics" (use of radio waves to influence health).

"This book is not a systematic treatise, but only a collection of personal notes on the Psalter. They are the notes of a monk, written in the monastic tradition, and one supposes that they might appeal above all to monks. But in this mysterious age, there is no telling whom the book may reach--although no one expects it to reach everybody. As for those readers who can only regard the Psalms as "literature" ... this book will at least offer them some of the reasons why the Psalter seems to be more than literature to those of us who have made it our bread in the wilderness." [Prologue].