In his new translation of The Five Books of Moses---the first books of the Old Testament, including Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy---Robert Alter set out to recreate the poetry of the Hebrew Bible and highlight its literary structure while producing a readable and accurate English text. The result of a career of critical scholarship and lifelong study of the Bible, Alter's translation is accompanied by a general introduction and detailed notes on every page, explaining word choice, syntax, and history, and calling attention to significant cross-references, repetitions and variations. Alter introduces each book with a discussion of its literary structure and its predominant theme. He describes his mission as follows: "The present translation is an experiment in re-presenting the Bible---and, above all, biblical narrative prose---in a language that conveys with some precision the semantic nuances and the lively orchestration of literary effects of the Hebrew and at the same time has stylistic and rhythmic integrity as literary English." Alter's translation has been hailed as "a masterpiece, a cause for celebration" (Robert Fagles) and "an achievement that will win the admiration of all who understand the problems of translating an ancient into a modern language" (Frank Kermode). Alter received a BABRA award in 1996 for his translation of Genesis.

Considered one of Spain's greatest twentieth-century poets, Antonio Machado is known for his quiet, reflective verse. His poems capture the passage of time, the landscape, the essence of life in his native Spain, in a voice that is nuanced, spare, and luminous. In the foreword to this volume, John Don Passos wrote that "some stanzas seem almost more pictures than poems." Translator Willis Barnstone suggests that Machado "was a philosopher who spoofed, who was grave, who laughed at the failure of his speech." Barnstone prefaces the work with an introduction that provides new biographical material derived in part from interviews with people who knew Machado. This book marks the culmination of more than forty years of Barnstone's work on Machado's poetry, and is the most comprehensive volume of Machado's work available in the English language. Barnstone's translation captures the author's voice in verses that are at once austere and musical, accurate and artful. In The New York Times, Jim Harrison wrote, "We've been slow to understand that likely the best work in poetry in the last century has been written in the Spanish language….I [have] used the new Antonio Machado as an overpowering morning devotional. Poetry doesn't care about nationalities."

A leading poet among Spain's fabled Generation of 1927 (whose more familiar members included Federico García Lorca, Pedro Salinas, Rafael Alberti, and Jorge Guillén), Luis Cernuda spent much of his life in exile. In his prose poems, Cernuda explicitly delves into his biography, exploring what translator Stephen Kessler describes as a "divided life, caught between the passion of erotic longing and the constraints of social convention---and later between the longing for home and the bitter fact of uprootedness." The poems visit various scenes in his life, from memories of his childhood in Seville to his experience of exile during the Spanish Civil War and to his attraction to Mexico, his adopted home. This translation combines the works Ocnos and Variations on a Mexican Theme into a single volume, as the author had always intended, creating the largest collection of Cernuda's work available in English. Kessler's translations capture what Octavio Paz described as "the elegant simplicity, the melancholy with ironic traces" of Cernuda's prose poems. The Bloomsbury Review wrote, "Stephen Kessler's brilliant translation has to be one of the best books of Spanish poetry to appear in English this year." Kessler has translated numerous authors from Spain and Latin America, including Vallejo, Neruda, Borges, and Cortázar.

The bestselling work of French philosopher, journalist and historian Didier Eribon, Insult and the Making of the Gay Self is a remarkable set of reflections on the evolution of gay identity and discourse. Through his survey of the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, Pierre Bourdieu, Judith Butler and Erving Goffman, Eribon arrives at his assertion that insult---implicit, explicit, feared, expected, actually experienced, denied, protested against---is a constant phenomenon in gay consciousness. "Gay lives often begin in a state of deferral," Eribon writes. "They only really begin when someone reinvents himself, when he makes choices instead of merely putting up with things." Eribon then traces the evolution of gay identity from Oscar Wilde to André Gide and Marcel Proust, and finally to Michel Foucault, placing the philosopher in a long line of authors who have tried to carve out spaces in which they can explore gay subjectivity. Foucault's work is often cited among translators of contemporary philosophy as evidence of the challenge that this genre poses: every word makes a difference. In translating Eribon's work, Michael Lucey had to cope with many different philosophical voices, and the result is a sensitive and precise translation, even when there is discussion of very subtle, even delicate distinctions in psychology and philosophy.

French writer Colette (Sidonia-Gabrielle Colette) authored more than fifty short stories and novels (of which Gigi is perhaps the best known) and is widely regarded as one of the finest novelists of the twentieth century. A fascinating and colorful figure, Colette was the first woman admitted to the prestigious Goncourt Academy and became a grand officer of the Legion of Honour. Originally published in 1923, Green Wheat was the first of her works to be signed simply "Colette." "Of her more than twenty books," translator Zack Rogow suggests, "Green Wheat is perhaps Colette's most polished, most perfect. [she is] ahead of her time and amazingly realistic in showing the extremes of adolescence." In this novella, fifteen-year-old Vinca and her young friend Phil confront their budding sexual urges during their summer vacation together in a villa in Brittany. Colette explores the struggle adolescents face in the transition from childhood to sexual awakening. In this translation, Rogow surpasses his goal "to do justice to Colette's enormous talent for portraying the actual speech of young people." The result is a novel that reads naturally, that paints the landscape of Brittany so clearly you can smell the sea, that brings the voices of teenage confusion to life. Rogow was the winner of a BABRA award for translation in 1995, for his collaborative work on André Breton's Earthlight.

Lyrical, tragic and funny, My Tender Matador is the first novel by Chilean author Pedro Lemebel, whom Isabel Allende dubs "a brilliant new voice in Chile." Amidst the violent battlegrounds of mid-1980s Chile, with the paramilitary fighting to eradicate the popular opposition to Pinochet's brutal dictatorship, a love story unfolds. Carlos, a Marxist revolutionary, meets the Queen of the Corner, an aging transvestite whose complacency is disrupted by her attraction and the middle-of-the-night "study sessions" held at her house. Lemebel alternates between the story of this romantic mismatch and the private world of Augusto Pinochet, offering a view into Pinochet's lonely childhood and disappointing marriage as well as his political struggles and troubled inner life. The novel has been described as explosive, controversial, suspenseful, funny, provocative, deeply moving, artful, astonishingly fresh and irreverent, a poignant intersection of politics and sexual politics. The prose is gritty and whimsical, colorful and fast-paced, and this excellent translation by Katherine Silver (who has translated Elena Poswiatowska and other Latin American writers) beautifully captures the vernacular of the characters and maintains the grace of Lemebel's double entendres.