Alan Shapiro

The author of the National Book Critics Award finalist Old War presents a latest collection of poetry in which he uses surreal, dreamlike language to meditate on the nighttime realities of such public areas as a gas station restroom, a shoe store and a racetrack, in a volume that also explores the historical and personal events that marked his childhood.

Night of the Republic

Peter Burian

This volume collects Euripides' Electra, an exciting story of vengeance that counterposes suspense and horror with comic realism; Orestes, the tragedy of a young man who kills his mother to avenge her murder of his father; Iphigenia in Tauris, a delicately written and beautifully contrived Euripidean "romance"; and Iphigeneia at Aulis, a compelling look at the devastating consequence of "man's inhumanity to man." This volume reprints the informative introductions and notes of the original editions, and adds a single combined glossary and Greek line numbers.

The Complete Euripides Volume II Electra and Other Plays

Aeschylus

Peter Burian and Alan Shapiro's masterful translation of The Oresteia, originally published in 2003, is being repackaged for the collected volumes in the Greek Tragedy in New Translations series. Burian will add Greek line numbers and update the introduction and bibliography.

Volume I: The Oresteia

The Complete Aeschylus

Based on the conviction that only translators who write poetry themselves can best re-create the celebrated and timeless tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, the Greek Tragedy in New Translations series offers new translations that go beyond the literal meaning of the Greek in order to evoke the poetry of the originals. The tragedies collected here were originally available as single volumes. This new collection retains the informative introductions and explanatory notes of the original editions, with Greek line numbers and a single combined glossary added for easy reference. This volume collects for the first time three of Sophocles most moving tragedies, all set in mythical Thebes: Oedipus the King, perhaps the most powerful of all Greek tragedies; Oedipus at Colonus, a story that reveals the reversals and paradoxes that define moral life; and Antigone, a touchstone of thinking about human conflict and human tragedy, the role of the divine in human life, and the degree to which men and women are the creators of their own destiny.

Volume I: The Theban Plays

The Complete Sophocles

A collection of poems centered around the dissolution of a marriage probes the territory of recovery, loss, and healing in the aftermath of failed relationships, probing jealousy, romance, and lust, among other pertinent topics.

Tantalus in Love

Based on the conviction that only translators who write poetry themselves can best re-create the celebrated and timeless tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, the Greek Tragedy in New Translations series offers new translations that go beyond the literal meaning of the Greek in order to evoke the poetry of the originals. The tragedies collected here were originally available as single volumes. This new collection retains the informative introductions and explanatory notes of the original editions, with Greek line numbers and a single combined glossary added for easy reference. The volume collects Euripides' Electra, an exciting story of vengence that counterposes suspense and horror with comic realism; Orestes, the tragedy of a young man who kills his mother to avenge her murder of his father; Iphigenia in Tauris, a delicately written and beautifully contrived Euripidean "romance"; and Iphigenia at Aulis, a compelling look at the devastating consequence of "man's inhumanity to man."

Volume II: Iphigenia in Tauris and Other Plays

The Complete Euripides

A nominee for the 1987 National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry, this new collection contains poems that use their calm surfaces to restrain difficult and unshapely material. The longer poems, narratives of considerable power, display a generosity of detail and insight and seem more like versified short stories than poems. The character studies like "Extra," "Anatomy Lesson," and the title poem recall the bitterness in similar poems by Randall Jarrell or Anthony Hecht. The chilling poem "Neighbors" tells the story of a young couple, whose downstairs neighbor, a crone who sings old love songs, becomes a crazed menace.

Happy Hour

Tells the story of the author's sister, Beth, and her last four weeks of life, struggling with breast cancer, and the impact it had on the author and his family

Vigil

Jim Carlson’s most vivid memories of childhood are of his estranged father’s obsession with parring the Savage. Located on the island of Caramus, the 458-yard, par 4, 16th hole at Wild Links has presumably never been parred. At age twenty-five, Jim sets off to Caramus. Over the course of this golfing weekend, his life is forever transformed. There is the beautiful Tina, who presents Jim with a challenge to rival his own dream of parring the Savage. And there is John; a handsome, solidly built enigma of a young man who can knock the cover off a golf ball and plans to make his own run at the Savage—by using a gold ball, a 9-iron, and a little bit of magic. Nine-Iron John is a tale about reconciling a painful past with the hope for the future. It’s about fathers and sons, the fertile territory of the male ego, about coming to terms with the pursuit of athletic and sexual conquests. It’s about the search for dignity and self-respect, the desire to love and to be loved. It is the story of the journey that all men begin… that only a select few ever manage to successfully complete.

Nine-Iron John

A coming-of-age story of an American Jew and aspiring writer in the '60s and '70s. In this memoir in six movements, Alan Shapiro recalls how poetry helped him make sense of his own and other people's lives.

The Last Happy Occasion

Based on the conviction that only translators who write poetry themselves can best re-create the celebrated and timeless tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, the Greek Tragedy in New Translations series offers new translations that go beyond the literal meaning of the Greek in order to evoke the poetry of the originals. The tragedies collected here were originally available as single volumes. This new collection retains the informative introductions and explanatory notes of the original editions, with Greek line numbers and a single combined glossary added for easy reference. This volume collects Euripides' Andromache, a play that challenges the concept of tragic character and transforms expectations of tragic structure; Hecuba, a powerful story of the unjustifiable sacrifice of Hecuba's daughter and the consequent destruction of Hecuba's character; Trojan Women, a particularly intense account of human suffering and uncertainty; and Rhesos, the story of a futile quest for knowledge.

Volume I: Trojan Women and Other Plays

In his sixth book of poems, Alan Shapiro once again shows that he is a master at articulating the secrets of the heart. The Dead Alive and Busy deals with issues of personal identity as revealed through examining the intimate bonds of family life. The poems explore these familial relations in terms of the religious, social, and literary contexts that inform them, delving into such universal themes as human frailty, illness and death, bereavement, and thwarted desires. By turns lyrical and narrative, slangy and elevated, analytical and visionary, this collection showcases one of America's most important poets in his top form. Praise for Alan Shapiro: "Shapiro is a shrewd and sympathetic moralist. He never trivializes his subjects with high-minded flourishes or stylistic gimmicks."—J. D. McClatchy, New York Times Book Review

The Dead Alive and Busy

Euripides,

This volume collects for the first time four plays of Euripides in the acclaimed Greek Tragedy in New Translations series, each previously published individually: Alcestis, Medea, Helen, and Cyclops.

Medea and Other Plays

The Complete Euripides Volume V

This novel of a mom who always dreamed of stardom is “an endearing, witty, and heart-warming take on family life” (Library Journal). As a little girl in Boston, Miriam Bluestein fantasized about a life lived on stage, specifically in a musical. Get married, have a family—sure, maybe she’d do those things, too, but first and foremost there was her future career as a beloved Broadway star. Now grown and living with a short-tempered husband, a cranky mother, and three demanding children, she finds herself playing a different role than those she dreamed about. But one of her kids, Ethan, shows real talent for the stage. As she pushes him to make the most of his promise, the rest of her life gradually comes undone, with her marriage strained and her other two children—Sam, a mass of quirks and idiosyncrasies, and Julie, hostile and bitter—withdrawing into their own worlds. Still Miriam dreams, praying for that big finale, but when it comes, it won’t be the one she imagined. “This novel has something to say to everyone who has ever had a goal and failed to reach it.” —Booklist “How do you put into words thunderous applause, curtain calls, and a standing ovation? That’s what I send out to Alan Shaprio’s remarkable debut novel . . . a beautifully written, often hilarious, memorably moving account of the one and only Miriam Bluestein’s greatest performance: her life.” —Jill McCorkle, New York Times–bestselling author

A Novel

Broadway Baby

More than a gathering of essays, That Self-Forgetful Perfectly Useless Concentration is part memoir, part literary criticism, and a thorough and artful fusion of the two. It is an intimate portrait of a life in poetry that few other than Shapiro could have written. In this book, Shapiro brings his characteristic warmth, humor, and many years as both poet and teacher to bear on questions that revolve around the paradox that self-expression depends on impersonal conventions, inert public signs that, somehow, under the pressure of the imagination, personalize the conventional and socialize the personal. Through his now signature storytelling, and close readings ranging from Mungo Jerry to T. S. Eliot, from Lawrence Ferlinghetti to Emily Dickinson, from William Carlos Williams and Bob Dylan to Mark Twain, from Thomas Hardy to Philip Larkin, Donald Davie, Thom Gunn and many moreShapiro shows just how interdependent innovation and tradition truly are. He shows that many of the dichotomies that dominate discussions of poetry and art (e.g., openness and closure, form and individuality, feeling and thought, reason and imagination) are mutually entailing, not mutually exclusive. These larger, public issues themselves are filtered through Shapiro s personal experience of growing up and coming of age as a poet in the 1960s and 70s and the poetry scenes in Boston and San Francisco. The book includes touching and instructive essays on art, writing, mental illness, and the death of friends, along with astute readings of poems we all thought we knew well. Poignant, astute, and often very funny, Shapiro has created something unique, in the words of one reader, a memoir about poetry itself. "

That Self-Forgetful Perfectly Useless Concentration

In a poignant collection of poetry, the award-winning author of The Dead Alive and Busy shares his emotional upheaval through the last month's of his terminally ill brother's life with songs of celebration, lament, grief, and love. Reprint.

Song and Dance

Euripides

The Greek Tragedy in New Translations series is based on the conviction that only translators who write poetry themselves, or who work in collaboration with poets, can properly re-create the celebrated and timeless tragedies of the great Greek writers. These new translations are more than faithful to the original text, going beyond the literal meaning in order to evoke the poetic intensity and rich metaphorical texture of the Greek language. The Trojan Women describes with unparalleledintensity the horrific brutality that both women and children undergo at the end of the Trojan War, but in the end it is a play that insists on the victory of spirit amid the horrors created by gods and men. Poet and English professor Alan Shapiro, together with noted Greek scholar, translator, and Classics professor Peter Burian, bring into their own words the Aeschylean vision of a world fraught with spiritual and political tensions, disordered by an irrational war.

Trojan Women

Based on the conviction that only translators who write poetry themselves can properly re-create the celebrated and timeless tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, the Greek Tragedy in New Translations series offers new translations that go beyond the literal meaning of the Greek in order to evoke the poetry of the originals. This volume collects Euripides' Andromache (translated by Susan Stewart and Wesley D. Smith), a play that challenges the concept of tragic character and transforms expectations of tragic structure; Hecuba (Janet Lembke and Kenneth J. Reckford), a powerful story of the unjustifiable sacrifice of Hecuba's daughter and the consequent destruction of Hecuba's character; Trojan Women (Peter Burian and Alan Shapiro), a particularly intense account of human suffering and uncertainty; and Rhesos (Richard Emil Braun), the story of a futile quest for knowledge. This volume retains the informative introductions and explanatory notes of the original editions and adds a single combined glossary and Greek line numbers.

Alan Shapiro

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