"Nana is probably the most famous character in Les Rougon-Macquart. The novel that bears her name, published in 1880, is the ninth volume in the series. It consists of a number of episodes, or tableaux, in the short but spectacular life of Ana Coupeau, the fourth child of Gervaise Macquart. We first saw her as a young girl in L'Assommoir (1877), her father an abusive alcoholic, her mother Gervaise reduced to a similar degraded state. She works as...

Since 1988, The Best American Poetry series has been "one of the mainstays of the poetry publication world" (Academy of American Poets). Each volume presents a choice of the year's most memorable poems, with comments from the poets themselves lending insight into their work.

A unique work of metafiction follows Benson Yu, a writer, who loses control of his own narrative when he attempts to write the story of his fraught upbringing in 1980s Chinatown. In a Chinatown housing project lives twelve-year-old Benny, his ailing grandmother, and his strange neighbor Constantine, a man who believes he's a reincarnated medieval samurai. When his grandmother is hospitalized, Benny manages to survive on his own until a social worker...