The Metamorphosis and Other Stories, by Franz Kafka, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics: • New introductions commissioned from todays top writers and scholars • Biographies of the authors •...

Jelaluddin Rumi was born in the year 1207 and until the age of thirty-seven was a brilliant scholar and popular teacher. But his life changed forever when he met the powerful wandering dervish, Shams of Tabriz, of whom Rumi said, "What I had thought of before as God, I met today in a human being." From this mysterious and esoteric friendship came a new height of spiritual enlightenment. When Shams disappeared, Rumi began his transformation from scholar...

When La Maga, his mistress, disappears, Horacio Oliveira, an Argentinian writer living in Paris, decides to return home to Buenos Aires.

"[With] new translations of more than 50 haiku accompanied by sympathetic landscape photographs, woodcut prints and calligraphy ... [t]he book traces the evolution of haiku from courtly accomplishments in Kyoto during the Heian period (9th century to 12th centuries) to the work of the great haiku poets of the 17th and 19th centuries, Bashō, Buson, Issa and Shiki, whose life stories are briefly told. Also explored thoroughly in the book is the cultural...

The Flowers of Evil, which T.S. Eliot called the greatest example of modern poetry in any language, shocked the literary world of nineteenth century France with its outspoken portrayal of lesbian love, its linking sexuality and death, its unremitting irony, and its unflinching celebration of the seamy side of urban life. The volume was seized by the police, and Baudelaire and his published work were put on trial for offence to public decency. Six...

Overview: Husain Haddawy's rapturously received translation of The Arabian Nights is based on a landmark reconstruction of the earliest extant manuscript version. These stories (and stories within stories, and stories within stories within stories), told by the Princess Shahrazad under the threat of death if she ceases to amuse, first reached the West around 1700. They fired in the European imagination an appetite for the mysterious and exotic...

"The battle between the Soul Reaper captains and Aizen's Espadas continues with the fate of Karakura town hanging in the balance. And just as things take a turn for the worse, some surprising allies make their grand entrance."