Macmillan Publishers USA

Wine merchant Tony Beach has expertly catered his latest society soiree, but the fun's over when a team of hit men crash the party... literally. The event leaves Tony with a bitter aftertaste of suspicion — and sets off a mystery that's an intoxicating blend of deception, intrigue, and murder.

»A Part of Speech» contains poems from the years 1965-1978, translated by various hands.

In the eleventh century, in Persia, there lived a mathematician named Ghiyathuddin Abulfath Omar bin Ibrahim al-Khayyami--or, Omar, son of Abraham, the tent-maker. Omar wrote poetry, and while his rhymes received little attention in their day, they were rediscovered and translated into beautiful English — more than seven centuries later — by a gentleman and scholar named Edward FitzGerald. It was a meeting of minds, a great collaboration of the past and the present, and FitzGerald's rendition of those passionate verses has become one of the best loved poem cycles in the English language. With their concern for the here and now, as opposed to the hereafter, Omar Khayyam's quatrains are as romantic today as they were hundreds of years ago; they are a tribute to the power of one moment's pleasure over a lifetime of sorrow, of desire over the vicissitudes of time. «Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam», presented here with Edward FitzGerald's original preface, is truly a classic, and it will stand forever as one of our finest monuments to love.