In this amazingly diverse new anthology, the eternal cat is captured in the prose and poetry of the world's finest writers from Aesop to Zola. Here are stories by European masters of the form - Balzac, Chekhov, Wodehouse, Saki, and Colette - along with such American masters as Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, Damon Runyon, and Ernest Hemingway. The best in contemporary writing is well represented, too, by Joyce Carol Oates, James Herriot, Alice Adams, Angela Carter, and Ursula K. Le Guin, to name just a few. And the poets - from Keats and Emily Dickinson to Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop and, of course, Old Possum himself, T. S. Eliot. Finally, a wonderful group of pieces called "The Truth About Cats" collects the wisdom of the ages ranging from Herodotus to Benjamin Franklin to William Faulkner, with many a delightful digression along the way. Utterly irresistible, The Sophisticated Cat is rich, eclectic, and universal in its appeal, the perfect anthology to dip into or to read from cover to cover for all of us who feel the affinity, unbroken for thousands of years, between the soul of that magnificent creature, the cat, and our own. And the perfect gift for cosmopolitan cat-lovers of every literary stripe.