All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems by Bernstein, Charles A new retrospective of one of America's most innovative poets. All the Whiskey in Heaven brings together Charles Bernstein's best work from the past thirty years, an astonishing assortment of different types of poems. Yet despite the distinctive differences from poem to poem, Bernstein's characteristic explorations of how language both limits and liberates thought are present throughout. Modulating the comic and the dark structural invention with buoyant soundplay, these challenging works give way to poems of lyric excess and striking emotional range. This is poetry for poetry's sake, as formally radical as it is socially engaged, providing equal measures of aesthetic pleasure, hilarity, and philosophical reflection. Long considered one of America's most inventive and influential contemporary poets, Bernstein reveals himself to be both trickster and charmer. Charles Bernstein is Donald T. Regan Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania.

The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them by Batuman, Elif The Possessed draws on Elif Batuman's articles in The New Yorker, Harper's, and n+1 to tell the true story of one woman's intellectual and sentimental education and her many strange encounters with fellow scholars devoted - absurdly! melancholically! beautifully! - to the Russian classics. If you're going to read just one book about conference planning, Isaac Babel, Leo Tolstoy, boys' leg contests, giant apes, Uzbek poetry, the life of the mind, and the resignation of the soul - seek no farther: this is the book for you! "One of the funniest books ever written about Russian literature or grad school." - Benjamin Kunkel