Books by Anne Carson
Red Doc> (Vintage Contemporaries)
by Anne Carson
**New York Magazine's Top 10 Books of 2013**
**GoodReads Reader’s Choice Award Winner**
Some years ago I wrote a book about a boy named Geryon who was red and had wings and fell in love with Herakles. Recently I began to wonder what happened to them in later life. Red Doc> continues their adventures in a very different style and with changed names.
To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing.
Copies
No copies available.
Red Doc>
by Anne Carson
Some years ago I wrote a book about a boy named Geryon who was red and had wings and fell in love with Herakles. Recently I began to wonder what happened to them in later life. Red Doc> continues their adventures in a very different style and with changed names.
To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing.
Copies
No copies available.
Autobiography of Red
by Anne Carson
The award-winning poet reinvents a genre in a stunning work that is both a novel and a poem, both an unconventional re-creation of an ancient Greek myth and a wholly original coming-of-age story set in the present.
Geryon, a young boy who is also a winged red monster, reveals the volcanic terrain of his fragile, tormented soul in an autobiography he begins at the age of five. As he grows older, Geryon escapes his abusive brother and affectionate but ineffectual mother, finding solace behind the lens of his camera and in the arms of a young man named Herakles, a cavalier drifter who leaves him at the peak of infatuation. When Herakles reappears years later, Geryon confronts again the pain of his desire and embarks on a journey that will unleash his creative imagination to its fullest extent. By turns whimsical and haunting, erudite and accessible, richly layered and deceptively simple, Autobiography of Red is a profoundly moving portrait of an artist coming to terms with the fantastic accident of who he is.
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR
National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist
"Anne Carson is, for me, the most exciting poet writing in English today." --Michael Ondaatje
"This book is amazing--I haven't discovered any writing in years so marvelously disturbing." --Alice Munro
"A profound love story . . . sensuous and funny, poignant, musical and tender." --The New York Times Book Review
"A deeply odd and immensely engaging book. . . . [Carson] exposes with passionate force the mythic underlying the explosive everyday." --The Village Voice
Copies
-
$20.00
The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos
by Anne Carson
The Beauty Of The Husband is an essay on Keats’s idea that beauty is truth, and is also the story of a marriage. It is told in 29 tangos. A tango (like a marriage) is something you have to dance to the end.
This clear-eyed, brutal, moving, darkly funny book tells a single story in an immediate, accessible voice–29 “tangos” of narrative verse that take us vividly through erotic, painful, and heartbreaking scenes from a long-time marriage that falls apart. Only award-winning poet Anne Carson could create a work that takes on the oldest of lyrical subjects–love–and make it this powerful, this fresh, this devastating.
Copies
No copies available.
Men in the Off Hours
by Anne Carson
Anne Carson has been acclaimed by her peers as the most imaginative poet writing today. In a recent profile, The New York Times Magazine paid tribute to her amazing ability to combine the classical and the modern, the mundane and the surreal, in a body of work that is sure to endure.
In Men in the Off Hours, Carson offers further proof of her tantalizing gifts. Reinventing figures as diverse as Oedipus, Emily Dickinson, and Audubon, Carson sets up startling juxtapositions: Lazarus among video paraphernalia, Virginia Woolf and Thucydides discussing war, Edward Hopper paintings illuminated by St. Augustine. And in a final prose poem, she meditates movingly on the recent death of her mother. With its quiet, acute spirituality and its fearless wit and sensuality, Men in the Off Hours shows us a fiercely individual poet at her best.
Copies
No copies available.
Plainwater: Essays and Poetry
by Anne Carson
The poetry and prose collected in Plainwater are a testament to the extraordinary imagination of Anne Carson, a writer described by Michael Ondaatje as "the most exciting poet writing in English today." Succinct and astonishingly beautiful, these pieces stretch the boundaries of language and literary form, while juxtaposing classical and modern traditions.
Carson envisions a present-day interview with a seventh-century BC poet, and offers miniature lectures on topics as varied as orchids and Ovid. She imagines the muse of a fifteenth-century painter attending a phenomenology conference in Italy. She constructs verbal photographs of a series of mysterious towns, and takes us on a pilgrimage in pursuit of the elusive and intimate anthropology of water. Blending the rhythm and vivid metaphor of poetry with the discursive nature of the essay, the writings in Plainwater dazzle us with their invention and enlighten us with their erudition.
Copies
No copies available.
Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay (Princeton Classics, 129)
by Anne Carson
Named one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all time by the Modern Library
Anne Carson’s remarkable first book about the paradoxical nature of romantic love
Since it was first published, Eros the Bittersweet, Anne Carson’s lyrical meditation on love in ancient Greek literature and philosophy, has established itself as a favorite among an unusually broad audience, including classicists, essayists, poets, and general readers. Beginning with the poet Sappho’s invention of the word “bittersweet” to describe Eros, Carson’s original and beautifully written book is a wide-ranging reflection on the conflicted nature of romantic love, which is both “miserable” and “one of the greatest pleasures we have.”
Copies
-
$16.95
H of H Playbook
by Anne Carson
A gorgeous facsimile edition (reminiscent of her classic book-in-a-box, Nox), H of H Playbook is a stunning re-creation of Euripides’s famous play, with illustrations by the author H of H Playbook is an explosion of thought, in drawings and language, about a Greek tragedy called Herakles by the 5th-century BC poet Euripides. In myth Herakles is an embodiment of manly violence who returns home after years of making war on enemies and monsters (his famous “Labors of Herakles”) to find he cannot adapt himself to a life of peacetime domesticity. He goes berserk and murders his whole family. Suicide is his next idea. Amazingly, this does not happen. Due to the intervention of his friend Theseus, Herakles comes to believe he is not, after all, indelibly stained by his own crimes, nor is his life without value. It remains for the reader to judge this redemptive outcome.
“I think there is no such thing as an innocent landscape,” said Anselm Kiefer, painter of forests grown tall on bones.
Copies
No copies available.
Wrong Norma
by Anne Carson
Anne Carson’s first original work since Float (Knopf, 2016) Published here in a stunning edition with images created by Carson, several of the twenty-five startling poetic prose pieces have appeared in magazines and journals like The New Yorker and The Paris Review. As Carson writes: “Wrong Norma is a collection of writings about different things, like Joseph Conrad, Guantánamo, Flaubert, snow, poverty, Roget's Thesaurus, my Dad, Saturday night. The pieces are not linked. That's why I've called them ‘wrong.’"
Copies
-
$17.95
The Trojan Women: A Comic
by Euripides, Anne Carson
A fantastic comic-book collaboration between the artist Rosanna Bruno and the poet Anne Carson, based on Euripides’s famous tragedy
A NEW YORK TIMES BEST GRAPHIC NOVEL OF 2021 Here is a new comic-book version of Euripides’s classic The Trojan Women, which follows the fates of Hekabe, Andromache, and Kassandra after Troy has been sacked and all its men killed. This collaboration between the visual artist Rosanna Bruno and the poet and classicist Anne Carson attempts to give a genuine representation of how human beings are affected by warfare. Therefore, all the characters take the form of animals (except Kassandra, whose mind is in another world).
Copies
No copies available.
Nox
by Anne Carson
Anne Carson’s haunting and beautiful Nox is her first book of poetry in five years―a unique, illustrated, accordion-fold-out “book in a box.” Nox is an epitaph in the form of a book, a facsimile of a handmade book Anne Carson wrote and created after the death of her brother. The poem describes coming to terms with his loss through the lens of her translation of Poem 101 by Catullus “for his brother who died in the Troad.” Nox is a work of poetry, but arrives as a fascinating and unique physical object. Carson pasted old letters, family photos, collages and sketches on pages. The poems, typed on a computer, were added to this illustrated “book” creating a visual and reading experience so amazing as to open up our concept of poetry. 50 color and black-and-white prints
Copies
No copies available.
Antigonick
by Anne Carson
An illustrated new translation of Sophokles’ Antigone.
With text blocks hand-inked on the page by Anne Carson and her collaborator Robert Currie, Antigonick features translucent vellum pages with stunning drawings by Bianca Stone that overlay the text.
Anne Carson has published translations of the ancient Greek poets Sappho, Simonides, Aiskhylos, Sophokles and Euripides. Antigonick is her first attempt at making translation into a combined visual and textual experience. Sophokles’ luminous and disturbing tragedy is here given an entirely fresh language and presentation. Thoroughly delightful.
Copies
No copies available.
The Albertine Workout (Poetry Pamphlets, 13)
by Anne Carson
Anne Carson's take on Albertine, Marcel Proust's famous love interest The Albertine Workout contains fifty-nine paragraphs, with appendices, summarizing Anne Carson’s research on Albertine, the principal love interest of Marcel in Proust’s Á la recherche du temps perdu.
Copies
No copies available.
Antigonick (New Directions Paperbook)
by Anne Carson
An illustrated new translation of Sophokles’ Antigone. Anne Carson has published translations of the ancient Greek poets Sappho, Simonides, Aiskhylos, Sophokles and Euripides. Antigonick is her seminal work. Sophokles’ luminous and disturbing tragedy is here given an entirely fresh language and presentation. This paperback edition includes a new preface by the author, “Dear Antigone.”
Copies
No copies available.
Bakkhai
by Euripides, Anne Carson
A stunning, new translation by the poet and classicist Anne Carson, first performed in 2015 at the Almeida Theatre in London Anne Carson writes, “Euripides was a playwright of the fifth century BC who reinvented Greek tragedy, setting it on a path that leads straight to reality TV. His plays broke all the rules, upended convention and outraged conservative critics. The Bakkhai is his most subversive play, telling the story of a man who cannot admit he would rather live in the skin of a woman, and a god who seems to combine all sexualities into a single ruinous demand for adoration. Dionysos is the god of intoxication. Once you fall under his influence, there is no telling where you will end up.”
Copies
No copies available.
Bakkhai
by Euripides, Anne Carson
A powerful new translation of the Greek classic by award-winning Classics scholar, poet, and writer Anne Carson. Pentheus has banned the wild, ritualistic worship of the god Dionysos. A stranger arrives to persuade him to change his mind. Euripides's electrifying tragedy is a struggle to the death between freedom and restraint, the rational and the irrational, man and god.
Copies
No copies available.
Glass, Irony and God (New Directions Paperbook)
by Anne Carson
Anne Carson's poetry―characterized by various reviewers as "short talks," "essays," or "verse narratives"―combines the confessional and the critical in a voice all her own. Known as a remarkable classicist, Anne Carson weaves contemporary and ancient poetic strands with stunning style in Glass, Irony and God. This collection includes: "The Glass Essay," a powerful poem about the end of a love affair, told in the context of Carson's reading of the Brontë sisters; "Book of Isaiah," a poem evoking the deeply primitive feel of ancient Judaism; and "The Fall of Rome," about her trip to "find" Rome and her struggle to overcome feelings of a terrible alienation there.
Copies
No copies available.
Float
From the renowned classicist and MacArthur Prize winner: a new collection that explores myth and memory, beauty and loss, all the while playing with--and pushing--the limits of language and form.
Anne Carson consistently dazzles with her inventive, shape-shifting work and the vividness of her imagination. Float reaches an even greater level of brilliance and surprise. Presented in an arrestingly original format--individual chapbooks that can be read in any order, and that float inside a transparent case--this collection conjures a mix of voices, time periods, and structures to explore what makes people, memories, and stories "maddeningly attractive" when observed in spaces that are suggestively in-between.
One can begin with Carson contemplating Proust on a frozen Icelandic plain, or on the art-saturated streets of downtown New York City. Or journey to the peak of Mount Olympus, where Zeus ponders his own afterlife. Or find a chorus of Gertrude Steins performing an essay about falling--a piece that also unearths poignant memories of Carson's own father and great-uncle in rural Canada. And a poem called "Wildly Constant" piercingly explores the highs and lows of marriage and monogamy, distilled in a wife's waking up her husband from the darkness of night, and asking him to make them eggs for breakfast.
Exquisite, heartbreaking, disarmingly funny, Float kaleidoscopically illuminates the uncanny magic that comes with letting go of expectations and boundaries. It is Carson's most intellectually electrifying, emotionally engaging book to date.
Copies
No copies available.
Float
Now a major motion picture starring Andrea Bang and Robbie Amell!
A heartfelt summer read for fans of Sarah Dessen and Jenny Han about holding on and letting go.
Waverly Lyons has been caught in the middle of her parents’ divorce for as long as she can remember. This summer, the battle rages over who she’ll spend her vacation with, and when Waverly’s options are shot down, it’s bye-bye Fairbanks, Alaska and hello Holden, Florida to stay with her aunt.
Coming from the tundra of the north, the beach culture isn’t exactly Waverly’s forte. The sun may just be her mortal enemy, and her vibe is decidedly not chill. To top it off? Her ability to swim? Nonexistent.
Enter Blake, the (superhot) boy next door. Charming and sweet, he welcomes Waverly into his circle. For the first time in her life, Waverly has friends, a social life, and soon enough, feelings . . . for Blake. As the two grow closer, Waverly’s fortunes begin to look up. But every summer must come to an end, and letting go is hardest when you’ve finally found where you belong.
Copies
No copies available.
Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera
by Anne Carson
In her first collection in five years, Anne Carson contemplates “decreation”–an activity described by Simone Weil as “undoing the creature in us”–an undoing of self. But how can we undo self without moving through self, to the very inside of its definition? Where else can we start?
Anne Carson’s Decreation starts with form–the undoing of form. Form is various here: opera libretto, screenplay, poem, oratorio, essay, shot list, rapture. The undoing is tender, but tenderness can change everything, or so the author appears to believe.
Copies
No copies available.
Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera
by Anne Carson
"One of the most interesting gatherings of material that any poet has published within living memory." --The Economist
Simone Weil described “decreation” as “undoing the creature in us” -- an undoing of self. In her first collection in five years, Anne Carson explores this idea with characteristic brilliance and a tantalizing range of reference, moving from Aphrodite to Antonioni, Demosthenes to Annie Dillard, Telemachos to Trotsky, and writing in forms as varied as opera libretto, screenplay, poem, oratorio, essay, shot list, and rapture. As she makes her way through these forms she slowly dismantles them, and in doing so seeks to move through the self, to its undoing.
"Cool, resolute, smart, and lovely.... Carson has emerged in the last two decades as a kind of prophet of the unknowable." --The Village Voice
Copies
-
$19.00
Eros the Bittersweet (Dalkey Archive Essentials)
by Anne Carson
Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all time
A book about romantic love, Eros the Bittersweet is Anne Carson's exploration of the concept of "eros" in both classical philosophy and literature. Beginning with, "It was Sappho who first called eros 'bittersweet.' No one who has been in love disputes her," Carson examines her subject from numerous points of view, creating a lyrical meditation in the tradition of William Carlos Williams's Spring and All and William H. Gass's On Being Blue.
Epigrammatic, witty, ironic, and endlessly entertaining, Eros is an utterly original book.
Copies
-
$15.95
Norma Jeane Baker of Troy
by Anne Carson
Anne Carson’s new work that reconsiders the stories of two iconic women―Marilyn Monroe and Helen of Troy―from their point of view
Winner of the Governor General Award in Poetry Norma Jeane Baker of Troy is a meditation on the destabilizing and destructive power of beauty, drawing together Helen of Troy and Marilyn Monroe, twin avatars of female fascination separated by millennia but united in mythopoeic force. Norma Jeane Baker was staged in the spring of 2019 at The Shed’s Griffin Theater in New York, starring actor Ben Whishaw and soprano Renée Fleming and directed by Katie Mitchell.
Copies
No copies available.
Eros the Bittersweet (Canadian Literature)
by Anne Carson
Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all time
A book about romantic love, Eros the Bittersweet is Anne Carson's exploration of the concept of "eros" in both classical philosophy and literature. Beginning with, "It was Sappho who first called eros 'bittersweet.' No one who has been in love disputes her," Carson examines her subject from numerous points of view, creating a lyrical meditation in the tradition of William Carlos Williams's Spring and All and William H. Gass's On Being Blue.
Copies
No copies available.
Economy of the Unlost: (Reading Simonides of Keos with Paul Celan) (Martin Classical Lectures, 14)
by Anne Carson
The ancient Greek lyric poet Simonides of Keos was the first poet in the Western tradition to take money for poetic composition. From this starting point, Anne Carson launches an exploration, poetic in its own right, of the idea of poetic economy. She offers a reading of certain of Simonides' texts and aligns these with writings of the modern Romanian poet Paul Celan, a Jew and survivor of the Holocaust, whose "economies" of language are notorious. Asking such questions as, What is lost when words are wasted? and Who profits when words are saved? Carson reveals the two poets' striking commonalities.
In Carson's view Simonides and Celan share a similar mentality or disposition toward the world, language and the work of the poet. Economy of the Unlost begins by showing how each of the two poets stands in a state of alienation between two worlds. In Simonides' case, the gift economy of fifth-century b.c. Greece was giving way to one based on money and commodities, while Celan's life spanned pre- and post-Holocaust worlds, and he himself, writing in German, became estranged from his native language. Carson goes on to consider various aspects of the two poets' techniques for coming to grips with the invisible through the visible world. A focus on the genre of the epitaph grants insights into the kinds of exchange the poets envision between the living and the dead. Assessing the impact on Simonidean composition of the material fact of inscription on stone, Carson suggests that a need for brevity influenced the exactitude and clarity of Simonides' style, and proposes a comparison with Celan's interest in the "negative design" of printmaking: both poets, though in different ways, employ a kind of negative image making, cutting away all that is superfluous. This book's juxtaposition of the two poets illuminates their differences--Simonides' fundamental faith in the power of the word, Celan's ultimate despair--as well as their similarities; it provides fertile ground for the virtuosic interplay of Carson's scholarship and her poetic sensibility.
Copies
No copies available.
Norma Jeane Baker of Troy A Version of Euripides' Helen
by Anne Carson
"It is 1964. An office manager has hired one of his stenos to come in at night and type out his translation of Euripides's Helen, but his obsession with the recently dead Marilyn Monroe kidnaps the translation. Norma Jeane Baker of Troy is a spoken and sung new work by poet, essayist, and scholar Anne Carson that reconsiders the stories of two iconic women - Marilyn Monroe and Helen of Troy - from their point of view. Starring actor Ben Whishaw and soprano Renée Fleming, and intimately and powerfully staged by director Katie Mitchell in The Shed's 500-seat Griffin Theater, Norma Jeane Baker of Troy explores who has the right to tell a woman's story, and how those stories reverberate through our culture. "The #MeToo movement has given us new ways to think about female icons like Helen or Marilyn Monroe, new ways to revolve the traditional male version of such events 360 degrees and find different, deeper sorrows there," writer Anne Carson says." -- www.theshed.org.
Copies
No copies available.
Poetry Pamphlets 13-16 (New Directions Poetry Pamphlets)
by Anne Carson, Osip Mandelshtam, Li Shangyin, Sakutaro Hagiwara
New Directions Poetry Pamphlets 13-16
A four-pack of our Spring 2014 Poetry Pamphlets, featuring:
The Albertine Workout, by Anne Carson
Derangements of my Contemporaries, by Li Shangyin
The Iceland, by Sakutaro Hagiwara
The Poems of Osip Mandelstam
Copies
No copies available.