The late poet, Nina Cassian, knew the avant-garde’s joyful flights and chivalrous desperation. In this collection, she brings poetry to a higher level by inventing a new language that is funny and challenging, imaginative and unique in force and grace.  Framed from within by Nina’s delightfully witty drawings, this book collects her most famous avant-garde poems, written over six decades. Cassian's decades of song set bodies and hearts in the enchanted state that flourishes above and  below the edicts of dullness and the precincts of censure. Her glossolalic ease and ecstatic insouciance are among the finest arrows in poetry's quiver. – Andrei Codrescu Nina Cassian was a fierce and highly determined poet. Her work is so witty and clever, so mordantly funny and skillfully made, that it is impossible to underestimate her driving passions, her wild-eyed fevers, her ferocious presence. Her sense of wonder was intense. – Edward Hirsch  Her previous books of poems were published by Norton.

The Avant Garde Doesn't Die and Never Surrenders

Literature & Fiction

Cassian, Nina.

Poetry

New Meridian Arts

The Breath Capital records points of bodily contact in urban environments where eye contact is tacitly forbidden, but where we breathe each other's molecules in and out. The collection is haunted by 20th-century Europe, but it exists in the Unites States in the 21st century, amid the current drama of late-capitalist class struggle tied to the past and present racial and gender politics.

The Breath Capital

Zabic, Snezana

As the twentieth century begins, in a small Transylvanian city Julius Matthias light-heartedly declares that he is ready to make a pact with the devil to fulfill his dream: becoming a doctor. An arranged marriage with an heiress neither young nor pleasant will make it possible. But it comes at a price. From Vienna in Austria to Budapest and Paris, the handsome doctor will know love and tragedies as two world wars tear Europe apart.

Julius Matthias:: A Pact With The Devil

Mazel, Michelle

World Literature

The book explores diverse themes, from the role of institutions to personal purpose, from religion and spirituality to self-exploration. The reader can discover inner resources and paths to spiritual growth, which in turn can serve as catalysts for self-advancement, experimenting the challenge stated in the book: “Let us choose a dream we‘ve always had and transform it into reality.”

Searching for the White Magician: Spiritual Psychology and the Manifestation of Destiny

Self-Help

Magidson, Stefania

Motivational

In Anna Halberstadt’s second full-length collection in English, Green in a Landscape with Ashes, the poet’s brushstrokes are those of a muralist and miniaturist. Halberstadt brings in themes of love, loss, and life’s abundance informed by her post-Holocaust childhood in Vilnius amidst a country’s amnesia and silence about its murdered Jews. An immigrant with aging parents and a young son, she leaves a broken marriage, a floundering Soviet state, and a career in psychology for the unknown. There is a god who won’t forgive present in Halberstadt’s work. ‘Where are you/ the beautiful shining angel/to stop Abraham’s knife?’ We follow her pilgrimage through Europe’s cities, the poet marking the continent with her wry, penetrating meditations. Elegant, crafted, and having the authority of Akhmatova, Halberstadt’s virtuosity enables her to embrace life’s suffering as well as its bawdy side with the directness of a Mae West. ‘You can love a man/ who can’t make you come.’ These juxtapositions and discontinuities work brilliantly.

Green in a Landscape with Ashes

Halberstadt, Anna

Andrey Gritsman is a poet as well as a physician, whose work with the written word is morally continuous with the practice of medicine. He has championed the cause of "intercultural poetics" -- the idea that, for example, American and Russian poetry can enrich one another.

Stranger at Home: Short Prose, Essays, and Poems

Gritsman, Andrey

History & Criticism

What does it mean to belong? In a place? With a person? To a family? Where do our senses of security and survival lie? I Don't Belong Here ruthlessly investigates alienation during moments of transit and dislocation and their impact on women’s identity. These twenty essays—ranging from conventional to lyrical to experimental in form and structure—delve into the root causes of personal uncertainty and the aftershock effects of being a woman in an unsafe world. Provocative, authentic, intimate, and uncompromising, Melissa Grunow casts light on the unspeakable: sexuality, death, mental illness, trauma, estrangement, and disillusionment with precision and fortitude.

I Don't Belong Here

Humor & Entertainment

Grunow, Ms Melissa

Humor

A fascinating ride through Fidel’s Cuba as seen through the eyes of a survivor of Ceausescu’s Romania. A personal narrative filled with memories of the Communist past, as well as a lively, colorful and detailed travelogue set against a background of music, dancing and mojitos. Intimate conversations with a former engineer who rents rooms in her home, a Santeria priest who describes its African origins, ladies of the night, intellectuals, young cab drivers and others, all converge to give us a look into the lives of ordinary Cubans today and perhaps the changes to come.

Between Ceausescu and Fidel

Polizu, Radu

Travel

Set in San Jacinto, a rural town in the Philippines, the story traces the return from Los Angeles of Benjamin, the son of an indigent farm worker, who realized his dream of gaining an education and escaping the poverty of his hometown. He is drawn back to his roots by the sudden death of his brother, Omar, and the unanswered questions that emerge from that tragedy. Over one week, the story focuses on the revelations that follow one after the other about how his future was actually secured and the deal his father made with the seemingly benevolent figure of Don Rafael. Overtaken by feelings of guilt and questioning all that his education had helped him achieve, Benjamin finds himself led down a deadly path in search of redemption.

The Unfolding

Quijano, Jeehan

Contemporary

In Stories for People Who Watch TV, from start to finish, Timmy Waldron deals deftly with the characters of his generation: the mischief they get up to, their jobs, their coworkers, their new suits, the bars, their parents, their husbands and wives, their dependence on technology and the credit-card grifters, the physical and spiritual fights with one another and themselves. Waldron’s fictional portrait—as befits a master craftsman—is so impeccable one begins to fear that it is real, and maybe it is—regardless, the reader will continue breathlessly turning pages. Stories for People Who Watch TV is not to be missed. Waldron is a writer who delivers!

Stories for People who Watch TV

Waldron, Timmy

Short Stories & Anthologies

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Books by New Meridian Arts