Austerity is a self-defeating economic policy which has taken an ugly toll in Greece. The silver lining is that, along with the mass unemployment and the rise of Nazism that it engendered, austerity also occasioned a cultural renaissance. This volume of multilingual poetry is a splendid example: living proof that the Greek crisis is of global significance. It deserves aninternational audience. Now!

"Wherever I go, Greece wounds me," said George Seferis, the Nobel prize-winning poet born in 1900. There have been wonderful generations of Greek poets since his day. Ancient Greek poems, the Classics, are the basis of Western poetry. For Anglophone readers, they need re-voicing in every generation: brilliant English versions of Homer, from James Joyce to Derek Walcott and Alice Oswald, help us re-hear them. Today's Greek poets, however, have a special relationship, of a peculiarly charged and conflicted intimacy, with these founding texts. The light these poets work in, and the language they speak, are still the light and the language of Homer and the great tragedians. Austerity Measures, appearing as Greece faces new difficulties and suffering, offers a newly poignant, imaginative and resonant body of work. The wonderfully inventive translations reveal a different Greece to English readers: one that does not cancel the past but builds upon it

One of the few benefits of turbulent historical moments is that they tend to give rise to a new cultural efflorescence. Nowhere is this more obvious than in this fascinating anthology, which gathers together a remarkably rich, resourceful range of poetic idioms in response to a common sense of moral and political emergency

Karen Van Dyck has collected an extraordinary group of poets and translators who are bound to put Greek poetry on the map again. I've seen it happen twice in my life: with the Generation of the Thirties that included Cavafy, Seferis, Elytes and Ritsos, and that reached world recognition; and again, during the Dictatorship of the Colonels, when the group that appeared in the Harvard anthology Eighteen Texts (1972) and others living under censorship earned international recognition with the help of accomplished translators. Now, during another crisis in the country, we find exciting new voices emerging, and I am convinced that they are once again saying something no one else is saying. Call it the knowledge that emerges from the underside of devastation and the creative illumination that comes with tragedy, but something is going on in Greece that we aren't seeing in the news. I give this anthology my strongest support

Karen Van Dyck's Austerity Measures is a timely trove of new Greek voices that reverberates with urgency and authority, girded with hard-earned truth and a deep seeing necessary for our twenty-first century. Here's a language that goes for the gut and the heart, an earthy sonority. It holds us accountable for what we witness and feel in a time of globalism. This marvellous compendium of lived imagery speaks freely

Compelling . . . There's plenty in Moran's book to delight grammar and language nerds

Humane and witty . . . as a primer in generous and lively writing, First You Write a Sentence is blithe and convincing

Exquisite...Moran's own sentences are so deliciously epigrammatic that I considered giving up chocolate in favour of re-reading his book...He is more mentor than instructor

Writing about writing is hard; writing about Chinese writing in English is devilish. Strokes, logographs, ideographs - even the basic terminology can cloud the mind like a calligraphy brush loaded with too much ink. Jing Tsu's brilliant solution is to focus on characters - not the ones written from left to right, top to bottom, but the actual living, breathing, thinking individuals who, since the start of the twentieth century, did everything they could to adapt the Chinese language and writing system to the modern world. In Kingdom of Characters, Tsu introduces us to a cast of unforgettable figures: the wanted fugitive who pushes for Mandarin as China's national tongue; the engineer and bamboo expert who develops a Chinese typewriter; the railway administrator who tries to figure out how to send telegrams in a language without an alphabet. Along the way, Tsu tells an essential story of modern China: a country at once transformed and yet deeply traditional

Kingdom of Characters is an eye-opener. It approaches a central topic in modern and contemporary Chinese culture through a unique perspective, combining scholarship with vivid historical narrative. Jing Tsu wears her erudition lightly and gives us a fascinating and moving story. It shows the passionate struggle of generations of pioneers, who tried to find ways of reshaping and preserving the Chinese written script. It's a story of desperate strife, unflagging dedication, and ultimately, triumph

Kingdom of Characters is a deeply engaging and revealing narrative of the Chinese language in modern times: its graphic and phonetic transformations, conceptual debates, technological innovations, and political contentions. Jin Tsu has brought together a series of key moments concerning Chinese modernity, from the first Chinese typewriter to the digital Sinosphere, from the script reform to the voice revolution. Meticulously researched and beautifully written, this book is indispensable for anyone interested in the sound and script of modern China

Interesting and very readable