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Zuerst die gute Nachricht: Emmi und Leo sind wieder da! Und jetzt die schlechte Nachricht: Es sieht so aus, als wäre ihre zauberhafte Geschichte mit diesem Band zu einem endgültigen Ende gebracht. Obwohl — man weiß ja nie…

Aber der Reihe nach: 2006 veröffentlichte Daniel Glattauer jenen ungewöhnlichen Liebesroman Gut gegen Nordwind, der einschlug wie eine Bombe: Die Geschichte einer Liebe zwischen einem Mann und einer Frau, die in zufälligen E-Mail-Kontakt geraten und dann von dem, was der jeweils andere schreibt, so eingenommen sind, dass sie voneinander nicht mehr lassen können (und das, ohne sich je zu begegnen), wurde ein Sensationserfolg. Und die Leser, süchtig geworden nach Glattauers virtuosem E-Mail-Stakkato, konnten, als sie die letzte Seite des Buches umschlugen, kaum fassen, dass das Vergnügen schon vorbei sein sollte — und dass die Geschichte dieses unerwartete, einem Schlag in die Magengrube gleichkommende Ende nahm.

Tja, doch das Ende war kein Ende. Ein knappes Jahr nach dem furiosen Finale von Gut gegen Nordwind kehrt Leo aus Boston zurück, wohin er quasi geflohen war. Emmi hat in der Zwischenzeit immer wieder versucht, ihn zu kontaktieren, doch zu mehr als einem (köstlichen!) „Dialog“ mit den automatisch generierten Antwortmails des Systemadministrators war es nicht gekommen. Aber plötzlich ist Leo wieder da — und antwortet. Und obwohl sie es beide eigentlich nicht möchten (oder doch?), obwohl jeder in der Zwischenzeit sein Leben ohne den anderen einzurichten versucht hat (Leo hat sogar eine Freundin, allerdings in Boston…), sind sie sich so schnell wieder so nah, dass aus „Ich“ und „Du“ ein „Wir“ wird. Schon wieder. Und diesmal kommt es zur Begegnung. Mit turbulenten Folgen.

Can Alice escape Zombieland before the Dead Red Queen catches up to her?

When little Alice falls asleep, she finds herself in an undead nightmare of rotting flesh and insanity. Following a talking rat, she ventures further into this land of zombies and monsters.

There’s also something else troubling poor Alice: her skin is rotting and her hair is falling out. She’s cold and there’s the haunting feeling that if she remains in Zombieland any longer, she might never leave and forever be caught between life and death.

Have a seat at the table for the Tea Party of your life and explore the wondrous adventure that is Zombieland.

Short story from 'All the stories of Muriel Spark'

Lucía Etxbarría ha construido una novela sobre la difícil búsqueda de la identidad femenina al margen de convenciones absurdas y esterotipadas, con un estilo personalísimo, esculpido a golpe de guiños y ambivalencias en el lenguaje de lo cotidiano.

El libro reúne tres historias, donde cada una de ellas corresponde a una de las hermanas Gaena. Al principio nacieron como historias aisladas, pero luego quedaron fusionadas dando lugar a esta obra. Son tres historias de tres mujeres, tres hermanas, con personalidades muy diferentes, pero con un nexo de unión entre ellas. Cristina es politoxicómana, promiscua y a veces atenta contra su propia vida, pero desde que Lain le ha abandonado su vida ya no es la misma y se siente naufragar. No sabe dónde agarrarse. Su hermana Rosa, mayor que ella, le envidia porque su padre le prefería a ella, por eso se dedicó a hincar los brazos para ser una buena estudiante, conseguir una carrera y lograr el éxito, su única razón de ser. Es una alta ejecutiva cuya vida se cierne vacía más allá de su labor profesional. Su vida es gris y es adicta al Prozac. La mayor de todas, Ana, es una pija. Se casó con un buen marido y se dedicó siempre a tener una gran casa y una hermosa familia. No entiende a sus hermanas menores. Pero ha sufrido una pérdida y trata de comunicarse con sus hermanas, mientras tanto supera sus días con anfetaminas y somníferos.

From Publishers Weekly

Mayle's breezy, uncomplicated fifth novel (Chasing Cezanne, etc.) and ninth book follows 30-something Max Skinner from a sabotaged financial career in London to his adoption of the Provençal lifestyle on an inherited vineyard in France. Max spent holidays at his Uncle Henry's vineyard as a child, so when he inherits the place, the prospect of returning is tempting; a generous "bridging loan" from ex-brother-in-law Charlie seals the deal. The estate, Le Griffon, is in a dire state of disrepair and the wine cellar is filled with bottles of a dreadful-tasting swill, but it's nothing that vineyard caretaker Claude Roussel and prim housekeeper Madame Passepartout can't resolve. Max settles into his new life easily thanks to the attentions of local notary Nathalie Auzet and busty cafe owner Fanny. The arrival of young Californian "wine brat" Christie Roberts, Uncle Henry's long-lost daughter, complicates matters for Max, but her surprise offer and Charlie's arrival lessen the impact of a vicious vineyard scandal involving a delicious, high-priced, discreetly produced wine called Le Coin Perdu. Mayle's simple story provides lighthearted if unadventurous reading and a fond endorsement of the pleasures of viniculture.

From The Washington Post

Even a hyperactive terrier will sometimes melt to the floor, paws in the air and tongue alop, when he's approached by someone he trusts. But will he get a soul-satisfying belly rub this time or just a quick pat and tickle? The expectant pooch never knows.

So it is for fans of Peter Mayle, who became the adoptive bard of Provence with his phenomenally successful A Year in Provence. Will admirers open the ex-advertising man's ninth book and find the Mayle whose eye for detail and ear for language make for satisfying wallows in the south of France (the original Year, Hotel Pastis, Anything Considered) or the Mayle who sometimes slices the saucisson a bit thin in an effort to perpetuate his franchise (Toujours Provence, Encore Provence)?

The short answer is that A Good Year, Mayle's latest fictional confection, winds up slightly in the latter category. Once again we have the beleaguered Brit at an unhappy crossroad. In Hotel Pastis it was Simon Shaw being stripped bare by his newly minted ex-wife; in Anything Considered it was Bennett, the Brit on his uppers trying to score by flushing toilets in closed-up manor houses to keep an invented strain of dung beetles from invading the plumbing lines (that actually was funny). And once again the sunny south comes to the rescue, with the potential for making a living without losing one's soul, with a rasher of busty, leggy women and, of course, with good food and drink.

But, as the creators of television's "Law and Order" understand, why tamper with a winning formula? And thus are we launched into the marginal life of Max Skinner, a London investment banker suddenly deal-less and jobless on the streets of the City, where the day's weather forecast is for "scattered showers, followed by outbreaks of heavier rain, with a chance of hail."

And all this is followed, in Peter Mayle's classic caper formula, by timely good luck (inheritance, on the very day he loses his job, of a beloved uncle's big old house and vineyard in the hilly Luberon region of Provence), more good luck (dishy village maidens and a languid new lifestyle to explore), a halfway-engaging intrigue (an unknown American rival for the estate and the mysterious interest in vines that seem to produce nothing but pipi de chat – you know, cat pee) and then more good luck (they all drink happily every after). Coming soon to a movie theater near you, thanks to filmmaker Ridley Scott, whose "nose for a good story" got Mayle started on the rather thin plot and who already has "A Good Year" in production.

Are we just being cranky? Maybe. There really is a comfort factor that assures long, profitable lives to characters – fictional detectives, for instance – whose next formula book readers learn to anticipate. But when the formula is presented practically bare-bones, with only cursory attempts at embellishment, heretofore faithful readers may walk away feeling they've been snookered.

Mayle's deftness with detail – grace notes rather than entire imagery-laden passages – has been thoroughly catalogued. But there's detail that moves you right along: "He turned off the N7 toward Rognes and followed the narrow road that twisted through groves of pine and oak, warm air coming through the open window, the sound of Patrick Bruel whispering 'Parlez-moi d'amour' trickling like honey from the radio." (Okay, moves you along with a little huffing and puffing.) And then there's detail that stops you cold: " 'Air France to Marseille?' The girl at the desk didn't even bother to consult her computer. 'Out of luck there, sir. Air France doesn't fly direct to Marseille from London anymore. I could try British Airways.' "

Yes, by all means, please do.

The caper in A Good Year revolves around a mysterious small-batch cult wine that never makes it to the wine store and trades as an investment. But given that the bulk of Mayle's faithful are presumed Francophiles and therefore at least marginally interested in viticulture, the false note on page 90 is perplexing. As Max inspects his vineyard for the first time he finds a piece of his land that "sloped away gently down to the east… the surface appeared to consist entirely of jagged limestone pebbles, blinding white in the sun, warm to the touch, an immense natural radiator. It seemed unlikely that even the most undemanding of weeds could find sufficient nourishment to grow here. And yet the vines appeared to be healthy."

Perhaps Max has never read descriptions of the poor, gravelly soil in many of the finest districts of Bordeaux, source of some of the priciest wines in the world. But those who have done so are doomed to spend the next 197 pages wondering why Mayle would give the game away so early. Kindly interpretation: We're meant to read on, smiling slightly, feeling superior to poor Max. Or, darker thought: Mayle thinks we're clueless enough to fall for this.

Even as venerable a novelist as Graham Greene recognized that lighter fare – Our Man in Havana, Stamboul Train – had a role to play in his life as a writer and ours as readers. He nonetheless flinched slightly, labeling these works "entertainments." As entertaining as Peter Mayle can be, he might aim a bit higher – if not for his own entertainment, then for ours.

Wafer-thin saucisson, oui. Pipi de chat on the rocks? Non!

***

In A Good Year, Max Skinner's London career has just taken a nosedive when he suddenly inherits his uncle's vineyard in Provence. Leaving one life behind to start another, Max soon discovers that the wine made on his uncle's land is swill, but he's captivated by the village, landscape, weather, and the beautiful notaire. He can't understand why the caretaker is so eager to buy the land when the wine is so bad, and then a woman claiming to be his uncle's long-lost daughter arrives from California with her claim on the property. Max's new life threatens to fall out from under him before it can even take off. Peter Mayle (author of A Year in Provence) has written a light-hearted novel that has received positive reviews. BookPage says, "Brimming with colorful, eccentric characters, A Good Year offers both a behind-the-scenes peek at the high-stakes wine business and a voyeuristic portrait of Provencal village life. Richly evocative of the pleasures of both place and palate, Mayle's latest is sure to entertain and delight his many devotees."

Amazon.com Review

Who hasn't dreamed, on a mundane Monday or frowzy Friday, of chucking it all in and packing off to the south of France? Provençal cookbooks and guidebooks entice with provocatively fresh salads and azure skies, but is it really all Côtes-du-Rhône and fleur-de-lis? Author Peter Mayle answers that question with wit, warmth, and wicked candor in A Year in Provence, the chronicle of his own foray into Provençal domesticity.

Beginning, appropriately enough, on New Year's Day with a divine luncheon in a quaint restaurant, Mayle sets the scene and pits his British sensibilities against it. "We had talked about it during the long gray winters and the damp green summers," he writes, "looked with an addict's longing at photographs of village markets and vineyards, dreamed of being woken up by the sun slanting through the bedroom window." He describes in loving detail the charming, 200-year-old farmhouse at the base of the Lubéron Mountains, its thick stone walls and well-tended vines, its wine cave and wells, its shade trees and swimming pool-its lack of central heating. Indeed, not 10 pages into the book, reality comes crashing into conflict with the idyll when the Mistral, that frigid wind that ravages the Rhône valley in winter, cracks the pipes, rips tiles from the roof, and tears a window from its hinges. And that's just January.

In prose that skips along lightly, Mayle records the highlights of each month, from the aberration of snow in February and the algae-filled swimming pool of March through the tourist invasions and unpredictable renovations of the summer months to a quiet Christmas alone. Throughout the book, he paints colorful portraits of his neighbors, the Provençaux grocers and butchers and farmers who amuse, confuse, and befuddle him at every turn. A Year in Provence is part memoir, part homeowner's manual, part travelogue, and all charming fun. – L.A. Smith

From Publishers Weekly

An account of the author's first frustrating but enlightening year in Provence opens with a memorable New Year's lunch and closes with an impromptu Christmas dinner. "In nimble prose, Mayle… captures the humorous aspects of visits to markets, vineyards and goat races, and hunting for mushrooms," said PW.

***

One of my favorite books by one of my favorite authors, A Year in Provence is a light-hearted autobiography as well as a travel/restaurant guide and cultural study of the south of France. Peter Mayle, once a British businessman, has finally chucked it all and bought a house in Provence with his wife and two dogs. He recounts a year of their adventures living and working amid the French, including daily struggles with the strong Provençal accent, the nosiness of neighbors, and the self-proclaimed experts on everything from geophysics to truffle hunting. His humorous yet affectionate approach will make you long for France, particularly the south, whether or not you've ever been there.

You won't be able to stop laughing when you read about the author's discovery of French bureaucracy and the bone-chilling winter wind called the Mistral, his desperate tactical maneuvering to get his house remodeled, and the hordes of rude tourists. You'll be tickled by his observations of French greetings and body language. You'll love his French neighbors and hate his English friends. And you will be starving after reading his mouth-watering descriptions of dozens of restaurants and dinner parties.

Whether you are interested in learning more about French, "the Hexagon," or cuisine française, A Year in Provence is the book to get you started on your cultural discovery of the south of France. The best discovery of all is that Peter Mayle continues to write about Provence, both non-fiction and novels. You will definitely want to seek out all of his books and continue learning about the people, traditions, and food of southern France.

Laura K. Lawless

'Geoff Ryman's new novel is swift, smart and convincing. Air is a wonderful and frightening examination of old and new, and survival on the interface between'. – Greg Bear

'This is a liminal book: its characters are on the threshold of something new; their village is on the brink of change; the world is launching into a new way to connect; humanity, at the end of the novel, is on the cusp of evolution… its plot is exciting and suspenseful, its characters gripping, its wisdom lightly and gracefully offered, its language clear and beautiful. Like The Child Garden, Air is both humane and wise. This novel is such a village. I cannot recommend it highly enough. It becomes finer as I think back on it, and I look forward to rereading it. I only wish Ryman's work were more widely available and more widely read, as it deserves'.- Joan Gordon New York Review of Science Fiction

'Ryman renders the village and people of Kizuldah with such humane insight and sympathy that we experience the novel almost like the Air it describes: It's around us and in us, more real than real, and it leaves us changed as surely as Mae's contact with Air changes her. This amazing balance that Ryman maintains – mourning change while embracing it – renders Air not merely powerful, thought-provoking, and profoundly moving, but indispensable. It's a map of our world, written in the imaginary terrain of Karzistan. It's a guide for all of us, who will endure change, mourn our losses, and must find a way to love the new sea that swamps our houses, if we are not to grow bitter and small and afraid'. – Robert Killheffer, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction

'The wondrous art wrought in Ryman's Air shows some of its meaning plainly, calling forth grins, astonishment and tears. More of its meaning is tucked away inside, like the seven hidden curled-up dimensions of spacetime, like the final pages of the third book of Dante, beyond words or imagining high and low. Treasure this book'. – Damien Broderick, Locus

Atsevišķā realitāte Karloss Kastaņeda

Turpmākās sarunas ar donu Huanu

Bailēs no dona Huana pasaules maģiskā spēka, kas draud sagraut viņa ierastās realitātes uztveres sistēmu, Kastaņeda nolemj uz visiem laikiem atteikties no tālākiem zināšanu meklējumiem un pārtraukt savas mācības…

Taču pēc divu gadu ilga pārtraukuma viņš tomēr atgriežas, lai turpinātu apmācību ciklu.

ŽILS VERNS

ŽANGADA- ASTOŅSIMT JŪDŽU PA AMAZONI

izdevniecība «Liesma»RĪGA 1973

Romāns

No franču valodas tulkojusi Mirdza Ersa

Mākslinieks L. Benē V. Granta mākslinieciskā apdāre

This stunning new novel from Tatiana de Rosnay, author of the acclaimed New York Times bestseller Sarah's Key, plumbs the depths of complex family relationships and the power of a past secret to change everything in the present.

It all began with a simple seaside vacation, a brother and sister recapturing their childhood. Antoine Rey thought he had the perfect surprise for his sister Mélanie's birthday: a weekend by the sea at Noirmoutier Island, where the pair spent many happy childhood summers playing on the beach. It had been too long, Antoine thought, since they'd returned to the island-over thirty years, since their mother died and the family holidays ceased. But the island's haunting beauty triggers more than happy memories; it reminds Mélanie of something unexpected and deeply disturbing about their last island summer. When, on the drive home to Paris, she finally summons the courage to reveal what she knows to Antoine, her emotions overcome her and she loses control of the car.

Recovering from the accident in a nearby hospital, Mélanie tries to recall what caused her to crash. Antoine encounters an unexpected ally: sexy, streetwise Angèle, a mortician who will teach him new meanings for the words life, love and death. Suddenly, however, the past comes swinging back at both siblings, burdened with a dark truth about their mother, Clarisse.

Trapped in the wake of a shocking family secret shrouded by taboo, Antoine must confront his past and also his troubled relationships with his own children. How well does he really know his mother, his children, even himself? Suddenly fragile on all fronts as a son, a husband, a brother and a father, Antoine Rey will learn the truth about his family and himself the hard way. By turns thrilling, seductive and destructive, with a lingering effect that is bittersweet and redeeming, A Secret Kept is the story of a modern family, the invisible ties that hold it together, and the impact it has throughout life.

At the heart of this sprawling, dizzying debut from a quirky, assured Australian writer are two men: Jasper Dean, a judgmental but forgiving son, and Martin, his brilliant but dysfunctional father. Jasper, in an Australian prison in his early 20s, scribbles out the story of their picaresque adventures, noting cryptically early on that [m]y father's body will never be found. As he tells it, Jasper has been uneasily bonded to his father through thick and thin, which includes Martin's stint managing a squalid strip club during Jasper's adolescence; an Australian outback home literally hidden within impenetrable mazes; Martin's ill-fated scheme to make every Australian a millionaire; and a feverish odyssey through Thailand 's menacing jungles. Toltz's exuberant, looping narrative-thick with his characters' outsized longings and with their crazy arguments-sometimes blows past plot entirely, but comic drive and Toltz's far-out imagination carry the epic story, which puts the two (and Martin's own nemesis, his outlaw brother, Terry) on an irreverent roller-coaster ride from obscurity to infamy. Comparisons to Special Topics in Calamity Physics are likely, but this nutty tour de force has a more tender, more worldly spin.

It's difficult to imagine a harder first act to follow than The Kite Runner: a debut novel by an unknown writer about a country many readers knew little about that has gone on to have over four million copies in print worldwide. But when preview copies of Khaled Hosseini's second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, started circulating at Amazon.com, readers reacted with a unanimous enthusiasm that few of us could remember seeing before. As special as The Kite Runner was, those readers said, A Thousand Splendid Suns is more so, bringing Hosseini's compassionate storytelling and his sense of personal and national tragedy to a tale of two women that is weighted equally with despair and grave hope.

EDITORIAL REVIEW: Set in a beautiful but economically devastated Pennsylvania steel town, American Rust is a novel of the lost American dream and the desperation—as well as the acts of friendship, loyalty, and love—that arise from its loss. From local bars to trainyards to prison, it is the story of two young men, bound to the town by family, responsibility, inertia, and the beauty around them, who dream of a future beyond the factories and abandoned homes.

Left alone to care for his aging father after his mother commits suicide and his sister escapes to Yale, Isaac English longs for a life beyond his hometown. But when he finally sets out to leave for good, accompanied by his temperamental best friend, former high school football star Billy Poe, they are caught up in a terrible act of violence that changes their lives forever.

Evoking John Steinbeck’s novels of restless lives during the Great Depression, American Rust takes us into the contemporary American heartland at a moment of profound unrest and uncertainty about the future. It is a dark but lucid vision, a moving novel about the bleak realities that battle our desire for transcendence and the power of love and friendship to redeem us.

Newsweek’s list of “Best. Books. Ever”

Amazon Top 100 book of 2009

A Washington Post Top Ten Book of 2009

A New York Times Notable Book of 2009

An Economist Best Book of 2009

A Kansas City Star Top 100 book of 2009

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s Best Books of 2009

Idaho Statesman’s Best Books of 2009

The war is ending, but for the occupants of the castle, their troubles are just beginning. Armed gangs roam a lawless land, and the castle becomes the focus of a dangerous game of desire, deceit and death to one particular outlawed captain. From the author of WHIT, THE CROW ROAD and COMPLICITY.

Charlie Asher is a pretty normal guy. A little hapless, somewhat neurotic, sort of a hypochondriac. He's what's known as a Beta Male: the kind of fellow who makes his way through life by being careful and constant — you know, the one who's always there to pick up the pieces when the girl gets dumped by the bigger/taller/stronger Alpha Male.

But Charlie's been lucky. He owns a building in the heart of San Francisco, and runs a secondhand store with the help of a couple of loyal, if marginally insane, employees. He's married to a bright and pretty woman who actually loves him for his normalcy. And she, Rachel, is about to have their first child.

Yes, Charlie's doing okay for a Beta. That is, until the day his daughter, Sophie, is born. Just as Charlie — exhausted from the birth — turns to go home, he sees a strange man in mint-green golf wear at Rachel's hospital bedside, a man who claims that no one should be able to see him. But see him Charlie does, and from here on out, things get really weird...

People start dropping dead around him, giant ravens perch on his building, and it seems that everywhere he goes, a dark presence whispers to him from under the streets. Strange names start appearing on his nightstand notepad, and before he knows it, those people end up dead, too. Yup, it seems that Charlie Asher has been recruited for a new job, an unpleasant but utterly necessary one: Death. It's a dirty job. But hey, somebody's gotta do it.

Christopher Moore, the man whose Lamb served up Jesus' "missing years" (with the funny parts left in), and whose Fluke found the deep humor in whale researchers' lives, now shines his comic light on the undiscovered country we all eventually explore — death and dying — and the results are hilarious, heartwarming, and a hell of a lot of fun.

Machen's "A Double Return" was one of a number of pieces first published in the "St James Gazette», in the year 1890. This was the year in which he turned away from tales set in the past, and began to write more racy fiction set in his own time. «A Double Return» was the most successful of these pieces; Oscar Wilde, then at the height of his own success, predicted that it would «flutter the dovecotes». Even today readers may find this a very adult, perhaps a shocking, story.

Llevado al cine (como ATRAPADO SIN SALIDA en algunos países) por Milos Forman, protagonizada por Jack Nicholson en una de las actuaciones que lo convirtieron en una marca, con Louise Fletcher como la enfermera más repugnante de la historia del cine, y una reflexión temiblemente perdurable sobre las mecánicas del poder.

1975: 5 Oscar: mejor película, director, actor (Jack Nicholson), actriz (Louise Fletcher), guión adaptado / Drama.

Randle McMurphy cumple una larga condena en una granja-prisión y se las ingenia para ser trasladado a una institución psiquiátrica. Una vez allí, avisado por el resto de los pacientes sobre los tiránicos métodos de la enfermera jefe, Randle decide declarar la guerra a la señorita Ratchel. Tras una explosión de cólera de Randle, le aplican un tratamiento de electroshock. Pero para entonces ya se ha ganado a los internos…

El título `Alguien voló sobre el nido del cuco`, es una mala traducción del original en inglés. La frase viene de una rima que recuerda el Jefe Bromden en su estancia en el manicomio. Su abuela decía: `Uno voló hacia el este, uno voló hacia el oeste, y uno voló sobre el nido del cuco`, significando que cada cual es dueño de seguir su destino en diferente dirección que los demás.

"Naipaul has constructed a marvelous prose epic that matches the best nineteenth-century novels for richness of comic insight and final, tragic power." – Newsweek – Review

A gripping masterpiece, hailed as one of the 20th century's finest novels

A HOUSE FOR MR BISWAS is V.S. Naipaul's unforgettable third novel. Born the "wrong way" and thrust into a world that greeted him with little more than a bad omen, Mohun Biswas has spent his 46 years of life striving for independence. But his determined efforts have met only with calamity. Shuttled from one residence to another after the drowning of his father, Mr Biswas yearns for a place he can call home. He marries into the domineering Tulsi family, on whom he becomes indignantly dependent, but rebels and takes on a succession of occupations in an arduous struggle to weaken their hold over him and purchase a house of his own. Heartrending and darkly comic, A HOUSE FOR MR BISWAS masterfully evokes a man's quest for autonomy against the backdrop of post-colonial Trinidad.

From Publishers Weekly

Harsh, unflinching and powerful, Coetzee's (Waiting for the Barbarians) new novel is a cry of moral outrage at the legacy that apartheid has created in South Africa. In scenes of stunning ferocity, he depicts the unequal warfare waging between the two races, a conflict in which the balance of power is slowly shifting. An elderly woman's letters to her daughter in America make up the narrative. Near death from rapidly advancing cancer, Cape Town resident Mrs. Curren is a retired university professor and political liberal who has always considered herself a "good person" in deploring the government's obfuscatory and brutal policies, though she has been insulated from the barbarism they produce. When the teenage son of her housekeeper is murdered by the police and his activist friend is also shot by security forces, Mrs. Curren realizes that "now my eyes are open and I can never close them again." The only person to whom she can communicate her anguished feelings of futility and waste is an alcoholic derelict whom she prevails on to be her messenger after her death, by mailing the packet of her letters to her daughter. In them she records the rising tide of militancy among young blacks; brave, defiant and vengeful, they are a generation whose hearts have turned to iron. His metaphors in service to a story that moves with the implacability of a nightmare, Coetzee's own urgent message has never been so cogently delivered.

From Library Journal

This is the South African novelist's most direct indictment of apartheid yet. It takes the form of a letter-diary from Mrs. Curren, a former classics professor dying of cancer, to her daughter in America. She details a series of strange events that turn her protected middle-class life upside down. A homeless alcoholic appears at her door, eventually becoming her companion and confessor. Her liberal sentiments and her very humanity are tested as she experiences directly the horrors of apartheid. She comes to recognize South Africa as a country in which the rigidity of both sides has led to barbarism and to acknowledge her complicity in upholding the system. Less allegorical than Coetzee's previous novels, this is still richly metaphoric. A brilliant, chilling look at the spiritual costs of apartheid. Recommended.

A monument to sloth, rant and contempt, and suspicious of anything modern - this is Ignatius J. Reilly of New Orleans, crusader against dunces. In revolt against the 20th century, Ignatius propels his bulk among the flesh-pots of a fallen city, documenting life on his Big Chief tablets as he goes, until his mother decrees that Ignatius must work.

Set in Italy during the dramatic finale of World War II, this new novel is the first in seven years by the bestselling author of The Sparrow and Children of God.

It is September 8, 1943, and fourteen-year-old Claudette Blum is learning Italian with a suitcase in her hand. She and her father are among the thousands of Jewish refugees scrambling over the Alps toward Italy, where they hope to be safe at last, now that the Italians have broken with Germany and made a separate peace with the Allies. The Blums will soon discover that Italy is anything but peaceful, as it becomes overnight an open battleground among the Nazis, the Allies, resistance fighters, Jews in hiding, and ordinary Italian civilians trying to survive.

Mary Doria Russell sets her first historical novel against this dramatic background, tracing the lives of a handful of fascinating characters. Through them, she tells the little-known but true story of the network of Italian citizens who saved the lives of forty-three thousand Jews during the war's final phase. The result of five years of meticulous research, A Thread of Grace is an ambitious, engrossing novel of ideas, history, and marvelous characters that will please Russell's many fans and earn her even more.

Supportez d'être appelée une nerveuse. Vous appartenez à cette famille magnifique et lamentable qui est le sel de la terre. Tout ce que nous connaissons de grand nous vient des nerveux. Ce sont eux et non pas d'autres qui ont fondé les religions et composé les chefs-d' oeuvre. Jamais le monde ne saura tout ce qu'il leur doit et surtout ce qu'eux ont souffert pour le lui donner. Nous goûtons les fines musiques, les beaux tableaux, mille délicatesses, mais nous ne savons pas ce qu'elles ont coûté à ceux qui les inventèrent, d'insomnies, de pleurs, de rires spasmodiques, d'urticaires, d'asthmes, d'épilepsies, d'une angoisse de mourir qui est pire que tout cela et que vous connaissez peut-être, madame, ajouta-t-il en souriant à ma grand-mère, car, avouez-le, quand je suis venu, vous n'étiez pas très rassurée

Tal y como viene siendo habitual en la obra de Virginia Woolf, en?Al Faro? no se descubre nada nuevo para los incondicionales de la autora. Tanto en el argumento como en la técnica narrativa se pueden encontrar elementos comunes: personajes atormentados e insatisfechos consigo mismos y con la realidad que les ha tocado vivir, paisajes agrestes y desfavorables para la convivencia y habitabilidad humana, y la novedosa utilización de la tercera persona y del reproducción de los pensamientos de los protagonistas.

Este hecho puede dificultar la lectura a los no duchos en la materia, lo que no le quita un ápice a la tensión narrativa, al contrario, quizás se deba prestar más atención y leer con más tranquilidad. Apenas hay separación entre los participantes de un diálogo, sino que se reproducen literalmente lo que se les pasa por la cabeza, puede dar la sensación de que no hay contacto físico entre los individuos, lo que lleva al desconcierto y a darle a la incomunicación una importancia aún mayor.

La señora Ramsay planea hacer una excursión a un faro con sus ocho hijos y algunos amigos, pero el mal tiempo y la autoridad de un marido prepotente hará que sus planes se deshagan, lo que supone un enfrentamiento entre los miembros de la familia contra el señor Ramsay. La excursión podría interpretarse como una viaje?iniciático?, una válvula de escape ante la opresión, una huida en busca de la verdad por una mismo.

En cuanto a los personajes suelen repetirse los mismos roles que tanto obsesiona a la autora: la mujer,?realizada? como madre de familia numerosa, pero frustrada a nivel intelectual por la sociedad machista de la época victoriana, la estigmatización de la solterona,?obligada? a elegir entre la búsqueda de su felicidad, materializada en su cultivo profesional, pero casi siempre abandonada por?el qué dirán?, la figura del hombre, que aparece como una figura paternalista,?ejecutor? del carácter más rebelde y sublime de la mujer. Y, en cuanto los fenómenos atmosféricos, el mar, las tempestades, el viento… todos aliados en la eterna lucha de sexos, en la incompatibilidad, en la incomunicación…

Esposas rebeldes de pensamiento pero no de acción, mujeres que luchan por defender su valía, no sólo en el campo de la maternidad, individuos que oprimen, otros que son oprimidos…Todo tejido en todo a la complejidad del carácter de Virginia Wolf, que, o desconcierta y engancha, o harta.

Pero que, sobre todo, no pasa desapercibida…

From Publishers Weekly

Maqiao, a fictitious rural village lost in the vitals of Mao's Communist empire, is to Han's magical novel what Macondo is to One Hundred Years of Solitude-a place in which the various brutalities and advances of contemporary history are transformed within the "fossil seams" of popular myth. Han adopts the rules of the dictionary to the rules of fiction, distributing mini-sagas of rural bandits, Daoist madmen and mixed up Maoists across the definitions of terms with special meaning in Maqiao. Han, narrator as well as author, is sent to Maqiao as part of a cadre of "Educated Youth" during the Cultural Revolution. A sharp, sophisticated observer, he narrates these folkloric tales from the vantage point of contemporary China, situating them within a richly informative historical and philosophical framework. Among the stories that deserve mention are those of Wanyu, the village's best singer and reputed Don Juan, who is discovered to lack the male "dragon"; of "poisonous" Yanzao, so called both because his aged mother has a reputation as a poisoner and because he is assigned to spread pesticides (and in so doing absorbs such a quantity of toxins that mosquitoes die upon contact with him); and of Tiexiang, the adulterous wife of Party Secretary Benyi, who takes up with Three Ears, so called because of the rudimentary third ear that grows under one of his armpits. Flawlessly translated by Lovell, this novel should not be missed by lovers of literature.

Review

"The best novel of the year isn't that DeLillo-on-automatic-pilot thing that broke out, along with SARS, this spring; nor the smutty anti-Islamic screed by the super-annuated French juvenile delinquent; nor even Jane Smiley's excellent investigation of the unlikely souls of real estate agents. Rather, it is this 'dictionary' of the dialect of a fictitious village, Maqiao, lost in the squat hills of South China." – San Francisco Chronicle Book Review "[A] subtle and smashingly effective critique of the futility of totalitarian efforts to suppress language and thought – and, more to the point, a stunningly imaginative and absorbing work of fiction." – Kirkus Reviews "[A Dictionary of Maqiao] is a magnificent book, epic in its ambitions and sweep without any of the sentimental obfuscation on which that genre so often depends." – The Village Voice "[B]oth fascinating and masterful… Han paints a detailed, intriguing and amusing picture of what happens when Marxism collides with entrenched village beliefs, and how traditional China coexists with modernity. The book is filled with peculiar, beguiling, tragic characters and scenery so real you can touch it… This is an intelligent, amusing, clever, fascinating and well-written view of a China most of us never see, or don't recognize when we do." – Asian Review of Books "To enter [A Dictionary of Maqiao]'s pages is to cross into a world of bandits and ghosts, where 'rude' means 'pretty,' and homosexuals are 'Red Flower Daddies' and people don't die, they 'scatter.'" – The New York Times Book Review " Dictionary of Maqiao is a wonderful, many-layered novel written as a series of definitions which gains further depth from a good translation… Han Shaogong's novel [is] clever, sympathetic and amused… Julia Lovell's translation is an impressive achievement, a fine reflection of a complex book." – Times Literary Supplement "Han Shaogong's novel has won wide acclaim, and deservedly so; through his treatment of language, he not only vividly portrays village life in rural China, but also inspires readers to rethink what they are accustomed to taking for granted." – Persimmon "Sometimes humorous, but crude and grim at other times, the entries all intertwine to give readers a picture of life in this distant region." – Library Journal "The narrator's folkloric stereotypes the provincial simpletons and fools, the cuckolded husbands, the long-suffering wives resolve affectingly into distinct human beings. And the peasant vocabulary vulgar, quaint, superstitious which so perplexesthe earnest young outsider is also revealed to be cunningly subversive, an antidote to the totalitarian imposition of a "reality"irreconcilably at odds with the real thing." – Amanda Heller, The Boston Globe "This is a serious, ground-breaking and finally brilliant novel by one of China's leading authors… The translation is everywhere excellent – fluent, colloquial where appropriate, without being excessively so, learned in places, and without any hint anywhere of 'translationese'… surely destined for classic status." – Bradley Winterton, Taipei Times "In its formal inventiveness, its nuanced depiction of Chinese peasant life, and its speculative explorations into the Chinese cultural psyche, this is one of the finest novels of the post-Mao era to so far make its way into English." – Jeffrey Twitchell-Waas, Review of Contemporary Fiction "Worth reading…fascinating and surprisingly accessible." – Anton Graham, China Economic Review "Han is a good storyteller, ingeniously leading the reader into the heart of his stories… A Dictionary of Maqiao is readable and enjoyable." – Fatima Wu, World Literature Today

***

In a country where much can hinge on the written word, Chinese author Han Shaogong gives it the respect it deserves. In a beautiful afterword to his A Dictionary of Maqiao, he writes: “Words have lives of their own. They proliferate densely, endlessly transform, gather and scatter for short bursts, drift along without mooring, shift and intermingle, sicken and live on, have personalities and emotions, flourish, decline, even die out.”

Contrary to what the title suggests, A Dictionary of Maqiao is actually a novel, written in an interesting technique, almost through the point of view a spectator. Han spends much of the years of the Cultural Revolution in China, in a small village in the south called Maqiao. He spreads the words of the authority while staying useful and productive in the village. Han knows as well as anybody that the language of a region is an effective mirror of its culture. Through “dictionary entries,” explanations of region-specific terms, a picture of Maqiao (arguably even China) appears. The entries are fascinating some just a paragraph in length, others going for at least a few pages. A single entry can count for larger criticisms or appreciation of culture. For example, an examination of the word, “sweet,” indicates that the word can actually cover a wide spectrum of flavors in Maqiao. Han also makes a beautifully executed leap to generalizations peoples of the world make about each other: “Even today, the majority of Chinese people still have great difficulty in distinguishing the facial types of western, northern, and eastern Europeans, and in making out cultural differences between the British, the French, the Spanish, the Norwegians, the Poles etc. The names of each European people are no more than empty symbols in school textbooks, and many Chinese, when put on the spot, are still unable to make any link between them and corresponding characteristics in facial type, clothing, language and customs. This baffles Europeans, just as it baffles the Chinese that Europeans cannot differentiate clearly between people from Shanghai, Canton, and the Northeast.”

Another interesting “entry” is one on science where the residents consider science to be the product of “lazybones” and therefore deride its use. As with any culture, modern values soon make their appearance even in Maqiao. Towards the end, Han explains: “In Maqiao during the 1990s, a lot of new words came into fashion and passed into common usage: 'television,' 'paint,' 'diet,' 'operate,' Ni-Ping (a well-known television host), 'disco dancing,' 'Highway 107,' 'seafood,' 'lottery tickets,' 'build the Great Wall (play Mahjong),' 'bump-the-butt' (motorbike), 'hold the basket' (act as mediator) and so on.”

While these dictionary entries make for a fascinating glimpse into China, the book is not easy reading. For one, the very small print creates practical difficulties. This combined with the heft of the material can weigh the reader down significantly. Still, the end result is well worth the reader’s effort. A Dictionary of Maqiao (translated ably by Julia Lovell) emerges as a wonderful, if fractured, portrait of China. Han Shaogong, through his award-winning novel, provides not only a nuanced look into modern China, but also focuses on language as an instrument of keeping culture alive. “Strictly speaking, what we might term a 'common language' will forever remain a distant human objective,” he says, “providing we don’t intend exchange to become a process of mutual neutralization, of mutual attrition, then we must maintain vigilance and resistance toward exchange, preserving in this compromise our own, indomitable forms of expression.” A Dictionary of Maqiao establishes wonderfully, the vital link between language and culture. In a world of rapid globalization, the subtle warning about the increasing loss of languages is only too timely and important.

Reviewed by Poornima Apte

Basada en una novela de Chuck Palahniuk (El club de la lucha), "Asfixia" narra la historia de Victor (Sam Rockwell) que para sufragar el caro tratamiento médico en un hospital privado de su madre (Anjelica Huston), se dedica a timar a la gente. Su trabajo diario es representar el papel de un miserable campesino del siglo XVIII en un parque temático de carácter histórico, mientras está tratando de recuperarse de su adicción al sexo.

Pero cuando su cada vez más débil madre insinúa poder revelar la identidad secreta de su perdido padre, Victor recobra la esperanza de encontrar finalmente las respuestas que ha estado buscando. Victor hace amistad con la joven doctora de su madre (Kelly McDonald), quien le lleva a creer que sus orígenes quizás puedan ser mucho más sorprendentemente divinos de lo que jamás pudo nunca haber imaginado.

Así, ¿es todavía Victor Mancini el perdedor sin honor que siempre ha creído que iba a ser durante el resto de su vida o es posible que sea una especie de loco salvador?

Что может быть общего между Ветхим Заветом и нашей жизнью начала XXI века? Как могут пересечься пути Господни и, скажем, Главного разведывательного управления? Почему роман, написанный на русском, назван французским словом «Analyste» («Аналитик»)?

Во многом необычное произведение Андрея М. Мелехова — это путешествие туда, где редко бывают живые и откуда никогда не возвращаются умершие. Вернее, почти никогда. Действие романа начинается в африканской стране Ангола, в которой в наши дни мало что напоминает о временах холодной войны. Кроме разве что оружия советского производства, да теперь уже российских военных разведчиков. Но помимо Африки читателю предстоит побывать и в гораздо более далеких и загадочных местах…

Андрей М. Мелехов — литературный псевдоним человека, настоящее имя которого известно на просторах бывшего СССР скорее в сфере бизнеса. Он учился и работал в Англии и США, несколько лет прослужил в Советской Армии, выполняя интернациональный долг все в той же Анголе. «Analyste» — это не детектив, а попытка ответить на волнующие автора вопросы жизни, смерти и совести.

В сборник произведений выдающегося аргентинца Хорхе Луиса Борхеса включены избранные рассказы, стихотворения и эссе из различных книг, вышедших в свет на протяжении долгой жизни писателя.

В сборник произведений выдающегося аргентинца Хорхе Луиса Борхеса включены избранные рассказы, стихотворения и эссе из различных книг, вышедших в свет на протяжении долгой жизни писателя.

Adam Bede, the first novel written by George Eliot (the pen name of Mary Ann Evans), was published in 1859. It was published pseudonymously, even though Evans was a well-published and highly respected scholar of her time. The novel has remained in print ever since, and is used in university studies of 19th century English literature. The plot is founded on a story told to George Eliot by her aunt Elizabeth Evans, a Methodist preacher, and the original of Dinah Morris of the novel, of a confession of child-murder, made to her by a girl in prison. (Wikipedia)

«"Адама Бида" по праву считают одним из лучших пасторальных романов в английской литературе. Описывая сельскую Англию, Элиот не впадает в слащавую патетику, но рассказывает о ней честно, правдиво, со знанием дела и пониманием, продолжая вордсвортовскую традицию воспевания быта английской деревни». (И.И. Бурова, в кн. Сидорченко Л.В. и др. — История западноевропейской литературы XIX век Англия. Спб, 2004.)

Молодежный роман. Будни подмосковных тинейджеров: путь от легкого хулиганства до настоящего преступления.

Динамичное и яркое повествование, поднимающее «чернуху» до уровня трагедии. Две сюжетные линии, создающие полноценный стереоэффект. «Про мальчиков» и «про девочек», про жажду приключений и про поиски любви, про кражи в супермаркете и про свидания вслепую.

Ce volet du cycle de 'La recherche' plonge dans le monde des salons parisiens, et par l'intermédiaire d'un narrateur privilégié, Swann, Poust fait revivre son enfance, notamment avec le goût de la madeleine mouillée de thé qui ouvre les portes du souvenir.

Ład serca uważany jest za pierwszy polski utwór nawiązujący do rozwijającego się w Europie nurtu humanizmu katolickiego i porównywany do powieści Georges’a Bernanosa i François Mauriaca. Akcja powieści rozgrywa się w ciągu jednej nocy w białoruskiej wiosce, w której splatają się losy kilkorga osób, stających przed odwiecznym wyborem pomiędzy dobrem a złem. Główny bohater, rozdarty wewnętrznie katolicki ksiądz, szukający drogi do ładu serca, stara się zachować wierność swojemu powołaniu, mimo własnych wątpliwości, otaczającego go zła, ludzkich słabości i zbrodni popełnianych w jego parafii.

Wydaje się że narracja powieści bardziej eksponuje zło, które nieubłaganie musi zwyciężyć… Bohater, choć czasami jest bezsilny i niepojmujący działań Opatrzności, za wszelką cenę próbuje jednak ocalić swoją wiarę: Panie! Daj mi siłę, pozwól, bym był od siebie mocniejszy i żebym ponad siebie wyrósł, pozwól memu sercu przejrzeć Twój ład…

Co można zrobić z siedzącą w waszej szafie nieznajomą kobietą? Poprosić, żeby sobie poszła? Ale to nie takie proste, zwłaszcza dla przystojnego architekta, Arthura. Bo, po pierwsze, ta kobieta jest młoda i czarująca, po drugie, twierdzi, że jej ciało znajduje się zupełnie gdzie indziej – leży pogrążone w głębokiej śpiączce w szpitalu. Lauren uważa, że tylko Arthur może jej pomóc, jako jedyna osoba, która ją słyszy i widzi w cielesnej postaci. Chociaż zaintrygowany mężczyzna ma mnóstwo podejrzeń i wątpliwości, ostatecznie poddaje się urokowi ślicznego "ducha" i przyjmuje wyzwanie. Tymczasem lekarze, zniechęceni długą, daremną walką o życie pacjentki, planują eutanazję. Przerażony Arthur wykrada ze szpitala ciało ukochanej. Następuje seria nieoczekiwanych zdarzeń…

Miles Ryan's life seemed to end the day his wife was killed in a hit-and-run accident two years ago. Missy had been his first love, and Miles fervently believes she will be his last. As a deputy sheriff in the North Carolina town of New Bern, he not only grieves for Missy, but longs to bring the unknown driver to justice.

Then Miles meets Sarah Andrew. The second-grade teacher of his son, Jonah, Sarah had left Baltimore after a difficult divorce to start over in the gentler surroundings of New Bern. Perhaps it is her own emotional wounds that make her sensitive to the hurt she sees first in Jonah's eyes, and then in his father's. Tentatively, Sarah and Miles reach out to each other. Soon they are both laughing for the first time in years.and falling in love.

Neither will be able to guess how closely linked they are to a shocking secret – one that will force them to question everything they ever believed in. and make a heartbreaking choice that will change their lives for ever.

In A Bend In The Road, Nicholas Sparks writes with a luminous intensity about life's bitter turns and incomparable sweetness. His affirming message carries a powerful lesson about the imperfections of being human, the mistakes we all make, and the joy that comes when we give ourselves to love.

A young television executive takes to the road in the 1960s with a movie camera to capture his own past in a "cinema verite" documentary. Within this framework, he delivers his observations on the influence of film, modern corporate life, young marriage, New York City and hipness.

APKAUNOTAIS

DŽEKS LONDONS

KOPOTI RAKSTI 5.SĒJUMS

APKAUNOTAIS

sastādījusi Tamara Zālīte

NO ANGĻU VALODAS TULKOJUSI ANNA BAUGA, ILGA MELNBARDE un OJĀRS SARMA MĀKSLINIEKS ĀDOLFS LIELAIS

Tulkojums latviešu valodā, «Liesma», 1975

Review

“Eloquent… An aggressively written account of frontline combat, with plenty of action.”

KIRKUS REVIEWS

“Reads like a first-person thriller narrated by a sniper. The bare-bones facts are stunning. …A first-rate military memoir.”

BOOKLIST

“American Sniper is the inside story of what it’s like to be in war. A brave warrior and patriot, Chris Kyle writes frankly about the missions, personal challenges, and hard choices that are part of daily life of an elite SEAL Sniper. It’s a classic!”

RICHARD MARCINKO (USN, Ret.), First Commanding Officer of SEAL Team Six and #1 bestselling author of Rogue Warrior

“In the community of elite warriors, one man has risen above our ranks and distinguished himself as unique. Chris Kyle is that man. A master sniper, Chris has done and seen things that will be talked about for generations to come.”

MARCUS LUTTRELL, former USN SEAL, recipient of the Navy Cross for extraordinary heroism under fire, #1 bestselling author of Lone Survivor

“The raw and unforgettable narrative of the making of our country’s record-holding sniper, Chris Kyle’s memoir is a powerful book, both in terms of combat action and human drama. Chief Kyle is a true American warrior down to the bone, the Carlos Hathcock of a new generation.”

CHARLES W. SASSER, Green Beret (US Army Ret.) and author of One Shot, One Kill

From the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature and author of the Cairo trilogy, comes Akhenaten, a fascinating work of fiction about the most infamous pharaoh of ancient Egypt.

In this beguiling new novel, originally published in 1985 and now appearing for the first time in the United States, Mahfouz tells with extraordinary insight the story of the "heretic pharaoh," or "sun king,"-and the first known monotheistic ruler-whose iconoclastic and controversial reign during the 18th Dynasty (1540-1307 B.C.) has uncanny resonance with modern sensibilities. Narrating the novel is a young man with a passion for the truth, who questions the pharaoh's contemporaries after his horrible death-including Akhenaten's closest friends, his most bitter enemies, and finally his enigmatic wife, Nefertiti-in an effort to discover what really happened in those strange, dark days at Akhenaten's court. As our narrator and each of the subjects he interviews contribute their version of Akhenaten, "the truth" becomes increasingly evanescent. Akhenaten encompasses all of the contradictions his subjects see in him: at once cruel and empathic, feminine and barbaric, mad and divinely inspired, his character, as Mahfouz imagines him, is eerily modern, and fascinatingly ethereal. An ambitious and exceptionally lucid and accessible book, Akhenaten is a work only Mahfouz could render so elegantly, so irresistibly.

Senhor José is a low-grade clerk in the city's Central Registry, where the living and the dead share the same shelf space. A middle-aged bachelor, he has no interest in anything beyond the certificates of birth, marriage, divorce, and death that are his daily preoccupations. In the evenings, and on weekends, he works on bringing up to date his clipping file of the famous, the rising stars, the notorious. But when one day he comes across the birth certificate of an anonymous young woman, he decides that this cannot have been mere chance, he has to discover more about her. After all, to know a name is not to know the person.

Under the increasingly mystified eye of the Registrar, a godlike figure whose name is spoken only in whispers, the now obsessed Senhor José sets off, in every moment he can steal from work, to follow the thread that leads him to the woman's school, to her godmother, to her father and mother-but as he gets closer to a meeting with the unknown woman, he discovers more about her, and about himself, than he would have wished....

The loneliness of people's lives, the effects of chance and moments of recognition, the discovery of love, however tentative...once again José Saramago has written a timeless story.

In All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy begins his Border Trilogy with a coming of age tale that is a departure from the bizarre richness and mysterious violence of his early novels, yet in many ways preserves the mystery and the richness in a more understated form. Like Blood Meridian, this novel follows a young man's journey to the regions of the unknown. John Grady Cole, more heroic than the protagonists of McCarthy's earlier novels, confronts the evil that is an inescapable part of the universe as well as the evil that grows out of his own ignorance and pride. His story is told in a style often restrained and simple, embedded with lyrical passages that echo his dreams and memory.

In the spring of 1948 on a small Texas ranch, sixteen year old John Grady Cole attends the funeral of his grandfather, with whom he has lived since his parents' separation. The grandfather's ranch has been left to John Grady's mother, a small-time actress who has no interest in it and will sell it. John Grady's father, psychologically damaged by World War II and now physically ill as well, tells his son goodbye. With no apparent future in Texas, and sensing the threat of the new era to the traditional life he values, John Grady urges his old friend Rawlins to accompany him to Mexico. There, John Grady will find that his innocence, or ignorance, will ultimately lead him close to destruction.

Before reaching the border they meet Jimmy Blevins, a dangerous young boy on a magnificent horse. Even though Cole and Rawlins do not trust Blevins and are sure his horse is stolen, they allow him to join them despite their doubts. As they ride into Mexico, they realize that they are no longer in a world that they can understand. When Blevins' clothes and horse disappear during a thunderstorm, they search a nearby Mexican town, where they find the clothes and finally the horse. In spite of Rawlins' voiced forebodings, Blevins steals the horse back, and as John Grady and Rawlins flee the town Blevins gallops past them, pursued by armed men.

John Grady and Rawlins ride south, coming at last to a ranch, the Hacienda de Nuestra Senora de la Purisima Conception. As they talk with the vaqueros about the possibility of employment, John Grady sees a beautiful girl on a black horse, Alejandra, the daughter of hacendado Don Hector Rocha y Villareal. The heir of an aristocratic family, Don Hector is avidly interested in breeding wild mountain horses with his own stock, so John Grady and Rawlins join the vaqueros; John Grady amazes everyone with his ability to break the wild horses quickly and gently.

When Don Hector questions Cole about his past, he omits the episode with Blevins and the fact that he and Rawlins may now be wanted as accomplices in Blevins's horse theft. Concerned about his blossoming relationship with Alejandra, Duena Alfonsa, Don Hector's aunt and Alejandra's godmother, warns John Grady away from the rebellious girl, and informs him that Don Hector will never allow her to marry an American, especially a poor one. But Alejandra comes to him one night and they become lovers.

A few days later John Grady and Rawlins are arrested and taken to a jail in Encantada, where Blevins is already imprisoned for the murder of three men. While the three Americans are transported to the state prison at Saltillo, Blevins is taken from the group and shot. At the prison, they are questioned and beaten, and Rawlins is injured seriously. John Grady, attacked by another prisoner, whom he must kill, learns that evil exists not only in the world but in himself. When he and Rawlins are suddenly released as mysteriously as they were arrested, Rawlins returns to Texas.

But John Grady goes back to La Purisima to search for Alejandra, who is not there. Once again Duena Alfonsa makes clear to him the impossibility of the match. She tells her own story of the power of ignorance and evil (her love for a man who was killed by a mob after helping depose the dictator Diaz) and of her determination to protect Alejandra. Although John Grady does meet Alejandra one last time at a hotel in Zacatecas, it is only as a farewell: she chooses her family's approval (and perhaps their money). In pain, Cole returns to Encantada where he finds Blevins's horse, innocent like all animals and yet the cause of much death and loss. John Grady captures both the horse and the brutal police captain who shot Blevins, and heads homeward. En route, the captain is seized by brigands with a score to settle with him, and John Grady finally returns to Texas.

He finds even less there than before: his father and his childhood nurse are both dead. He rides on with the stolen horse, seeking to restore it to its rightful owner. John Grady has learned, but not yet enough; he has left home and returned a changed man, but there is no home to receive him. All the Pretty Horses is a hero's quest without a neat resolution, a book in which the strange light of mythic struggles shines through the quick-paced adventure.

The Border Trilogy continues with Volume Two, The Crossing, and concludes with the third volume, Cities of the Plain.

Anno Domini 999…

Год девятьсот девяносто девятый от Рождества Христова.

Мир, затаившись, ждет - Апокалипсиса.

Мир замков и королей, рыцарей и астрологов, колдунов и чернокнижников ждет КОНЦА СВЕТА.

НАШ мир - или мир, ПОХОЖИЙ на наш? Прочитайте - и узнаете сами!

All the King's Men portrays the dramatic political ascent and governorship of Willie Stark, a driven, cynical populist in the American South  during the 1930s. The novel is narrated by Jack Burden, a political reporter who comes to work as Governor Stark's right-hand man. The trajectory of Stark's career is interwoven with Jack Burden's life story and philosophical reflections: "the story of Willie Stark and the story of Jack Burden are, in one sense, one story."

While browsing in an Austin shop, Nicola James finds a blank vintage journal hidden among a set of Jane Austen novels. Even though Nic is a straight-laced engineer, she's still a sucker for anything Austen-esque. But her enthusiasm turns to disbelief once she starts writing in the journal - because somehow, it's writing her back...Itching for a bit of excitement, Nic decides to follow her "Fairy Jane's" advice. The result: a red-hot romance with a sexy Scottish musician who charms his way into Nic's heart in about five seconds flat. But a guy like Sean doesn't exactly fit into her Life Plan. With no one but Fairy Jane to guide her, Nic must choose between the life she thought she wanted - and the kind of happy ending she never saw coming...

For years, Nadezhda and Vera, two Ukrainian sisters, raised in England by their refugee parents, have had as little as possible to do with each other-and they have their reasons. But now they find they’d better learn how to get along, because since their mother’s death their aging father has been sliding into his second childhood, and an alarming new woman has just entered his life. Valentina, a bosomy young synthetic blonde from the Ukraine, seems to think their father is much richer than he is, and she is keen that he leave this world with as little money to his name as possible. If Nadazhda and Vera don’t stop her, no one will. But separating their addled and annoyingly lecherous dad from his new love will prove to be no easy feat-Valentina is a ruthless pro and the two sisters swiftly realize that they are mere amateurs when it comes to ruthlessness. As Hurricane Valentina turns the family house upside down, old secrets come falling out, including the most deeply buried one of them all, from the War, the one that explains much about why Nadazhda and Vera are so different. In the meantime, oblivious to it all, their father carries on with the great work of his dotage, a grand history of the tractor.

No novelist alive knows the human heart better than Scott Spencer does. No one tells stories about human passion with greater urgency, insight, or sympathy. In A Ship Made of Paper, this artist of desire paints his most profound and compelling canvas yet.

Daniel Emerson lives with Kate Ellis and is like a father to her daughter, Ruby. But he cannot control his desire for Iris Davenport, the African-American woman whose son is Ruby's best friend. During a freak October blizzard, Daniel is stranded at Iris's house and they begin a sexual liaison that eventually imperils all their relationships, Daniel's profession, their children's well-being, their own race- blindness, and their view of themselves as essentially good people.

A Ship Made of Paper captures all the drama, nuance, and helpless intensity of sexual and romantic yearning, and it bears witness to the age-old conflict between the order of the human community and the disorder of desire.

Harriet Purcell tiene veintiún años y acaba de diplomarse como técnica en radiología. Con un sueldo más propio de un hombre en el Sidney de los años sesenta, desoye los consejos de su padre, quien le advierte que «sólo los locos, los bohemios y las prostitutas se atreven a vivir en Kings Cross». Así, decide independizarse y se muda a la casa de huéspedes de la señora Delvecchio, situada en ese barrio de mala nota. Allí descubre que su casera, a parte de los alquileres de sus extraños inquilinos, cuenta con otra fuente de ingresos mucho más provechosa: lee las cartas, el horóscopo y escruta las profundidades de su preiada bola de cristal…

Pero es la pequeña Flo, hija de la señora Delvecchio y médium en las sesiones que esta organiza, quien definitivamente roba el corazón de Harriet. A medida que la jóven se adentra en los secretos de los hombres, el amor y las cartas del tarot, va descubriendo también que seguir los dictados del corazón no siempre resulta fácil, y que proteger a quienes más amamos puede convertirse en la tarea más ardua.

Angel es el luminoso relato del despertar de una joven a la vida adulta. Una tierna y deliciosa historia de amor con los más divertidos y bohemios personajes…

La culminación de la Saga de Roma, que ha entusiasmado a millones de lectores.

Roma, año 41 d. J. C. Tras la muerte del César, Octavio y Marco Antonio se ponen de acuerdo para administrar juntos el imperio: Marco Antonio gobernará en las provincias del Este y Octavio en las del Oeste, donde está Roma, el corazón del imperio. Marco Antonio buscará la ayuda de Cleopatra para perpetrar sus planes de conquista y ésta intentará seducirlo para conseguir que su hijo Cesarión, hijo de Julio César, gobierne en Roma. Mientras Octavio asegura su posición en Roma e Italia con la ayuda de su esposa y de Marcus Agrippa, Antonio reúne a sus fuerzas en Grecia para invadir Italia… Las tensiones entre ellos harán estallar una guerra entre ambas facciones y pondrán en peligro la unidad del imperio.

Con gran precisión y maestría, Colleen McCullough nos transporta a los escenarios de la Roma clásica y nos ofrece un verdadero episodio épico en el que el poder, el escándalo, la guerra y la pasión son el telón de fondo para un impresionante reparto de personajes brillantemente construidos.

"Will rock readers witha stunning new world, a hot-blooded hero, and a strong, kick-ass heroine!" – Larissa Ione

FIRST IN A NEW SERIES! CAN TRUE LOVE SURVIVE A WAR BETWEEN ANGELS, VAMPIRES, AND LYCANS?

Adrian Mitchell is a powerful angel leading an elite Special Ops unit of Seraphim. His task is to punish the Fallen-angels who have become vampires-and command a restless pack of indentured lycans. But Adrian has suffered his own punishment for becoming involved with mortals-losing the woman he loves again and again. Now, after nearly two hundred years, he has found her-Shadoe-her soul once more inhabiting a new body, with no memory of him. And this time, he won't let her go…

Bei Kriegsende 1945 verschlägt es die Kurowskis nach der Flucht aus Ostpreußen in den» westlichen Teil<. Man hat alles zurücklassen müssen: die Heimat, den gesamten Besitz, die Familie mußte sich eine neue Existenz schaffen, die Schuhwerkstatt hatte zu Hause die Familie gut ernährt. Vater Kurowski ist noch vermißt, die Mutter hat drei Kinder zu versorgen. Man hält zusammen: der Schwager Paskuleit, der Großvater, der Geselle Busko und auch der Pfarrer des Heimatdorfes sind mit von der Partie. So ist da, in der neuen Welt, noch eine kleine Gemeinschaft von Freunden, auf die man sich verlassen kann. Menschen, mit denen man ein gemeinsames Schicksal hat.»Organisieren hieß die Devise damals. Man organisierte das Notwendigste. Das hält fürs erste die Familie über Wasser. Schließlich, ein paar Jahre später, floriert die neue Werkstatt und das Schuhgeschäft. Endlich kommt der Vater aus russischer Gefangenschaft zurück und packt mit an. Politische Schwierigkeiten stellen sich in den Weg und sind mit List und Schläue zu meistern. Busko zieht sogar in den Bundestag ein. Die Kurowskis klettern die Erfolgsleiter empor, bringen es mit Ausdauer und Fleiß zu Haus und Geschäft und schließlich wächst das Familienunternehmen zu einem Schuhkonzern. Fast könnte man sagen, Kurowskis sind des Wirtschaftswunders liebste Kinder. Der Reichtum zeigt freilich auch seine Kehrseite: am Ende erfüllen nicht alle Kinder die hochfliegenden Pläne ihrer Eltern.

Professor Pearson ist der am meisten bewachte Mann in Amerika. Denn ausländische Agenten wollen ihm seine Erfindung, eine neue Waffe mit bisher unvorstellbarer Zerstörungskraft, abjagen.

Als es ihnen nicht gelingt, Professor Pearson selbst in die Hände zu bekommen, schrecken die Agenten auch nicht davor zurück, seine Tochter und seinen Assistenten zu entführen. Mit der Drohung, die beiden Geiseln zu töten, wird der Professor erpreßt. Doch neben der Angst um das Leben der geliebten Tochter quält den Gelehrten noch das Wissen, daß seine Erfindung großes Leid über die Menschheit bringen kann. Professor Pearson entschließt sich zu einem verzweifelten Schritt.

 Наши дни. Семьдесят километров от Москвы, Сергиев Посад, Троице-Сергиева Лавра, Московская духовная семинария – древнейшее учебное заведение России. Закрытый вуз, готовящий будущих священников Церкви. Замкнутый мир богословия, жесткой дисциплины и послушаний.

Семинарская молодежь, стремящаяся вытащить православие из его музейного прошлого, пытается преодолеть в себе навязываемый администрацией типаж смиренного пастыря и бросает вызов проректору по воспитательной работе игумену Траяну Введенскому.

Гений своего дела и живая легенда, отец Траян принимается за любимую работу по отчислению недовольных.

From New York Times bestselling author Barbara Taylor Bradford comes a triumphant novel of an unforgettable woman

Determined to rise above all that she has ever known, a young and impoverished Emma Harte embarks on a journey first of survival, then of unimaginable achievement. Driven to succeed, the iron-willed Emma parlays a small shop into the world's greatest department store and an international business empire: Harte Enterprises.

Unhappily married twice, loving only the one man she can never marry, personal happiness eludes her. Harte Enterprises, the realization of her grand dreams, is her all: her heart, her soul, her life. When those closest to her threaten to destroy her empire through their greed and envy, Emma brilliantly outwits her enemies. She wreaks her devastating revenge on those who would betray her in a way only she knows how.

Drawing us into the mesmerizing life of a remarkable woman who dared to seize a dream and was willing to pay any price to make it come true, Barbara Taylor Bradford's deeply involving novel is a celebration of an indomitable spirit.

Just as the Iron Curtain fell on Eastern Europe, Steinbeck and Capa began a remarkable journey through the Soviet Union. Their travels took them to Moscow and Stalingrad. What they saw and recorded was what Steinbeck called the "great other side", the ordinary lives of Russian men and women. Combining Steinbeck's compassion, humour and eye for detail with Capa's photographic studies, this text is a unique potrait of Russia and its people as they emerged from the ravages of war. Here too is an intimate glimpse of two great artists at work.

There are certain dates in the history of warfare that mark real turning points…. Now there is a new date on the calendar: June 3, 1999, when the capitulation of President Milosevic proved that a war can be won by airpower alone.

—John Keegan, London’s Daily Telegraph

Colonels Haave and Haun organized the firsthand accounts of members of the 40th Expeditionary Operations Group into this book. Their descriptions of the application of airpower—a new wingman’s first combat sortie, a support officer’s view of an FS relocation during combat, and Sandy pilot’s efforts to find and rescue a downed F-177 pilot—provide the reader with a legitimate insight into an air war at the tactical level and the airpower that helped convince Milosevic to capitulate.

Disclaimer

Opinions, conclusions, and recommendations expressed or implied within are solely those of the editors and do not necessarily represent the views of Air University, the United States Air Force, the Department of Defense, or any other US government agency. Cleared for public release: distribution unlimited.

Best viewed with CoolReader v. 2 or 3.

Спустя 20 лет после убийства брата, молодой человек приезжает на место его гибели. Он узнает о любовном романе брата и профессора Веденмеера. И в поисках убийцы решается на путешествие в Израиль, где обезумевший от горя ученый ждет смерти, как избавления.

"Arboretum" Марина Козлова написала в 1994 году. Впервые повесть была напечатана в литературно-публицистическом альманахе «РИСК» Дмитрия Кузьмина(1995). Позже — в литературном сборнике "Антология странного рассказа" (Донецк, 1998). Это издание принимало участие в книжной ярмарке во Франкфурте-на-Майне.

В 2001 году «Арборетум» вышел отдельной книгой на итальянском языке. Переводчик — Паоло Гальвани, издательство «Stampalternativa» (Италия). И только в 2005 году состоялось полное русское издание.

Rand's most notable novel asks the question: What happens to the world when the prime movers [inventors and scientists] go on strike? Narrator Scott Brick takes listeners on a journey so extraordinary they'll hardly notice the book's length. While his performance offers little in the way of theatrics, Brick is capable of garnering sympathy and, perhaps most importantly, devout attention for Rand's plot and characters. On the surface, Brick's voice is a cool, unrelenting force determined to capture every facet of Rand's complex story. But amid his calm and collected delivery, he taps into a more colorful emotional palette that will keep listeners involved. Brick's subtle delivery holds far more than meets the ear. L.B. © AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.

P.B. Jones discovers that bed-hopping rather than literary ability is the way to get published. Living by his wits and his charm, Jones makes his way through the exotic boudoirs of the glitterati — only to discover that the prayers that are answered cause more pain than those that remain ignored.

When a young Chinese woman, newly arrived in London, moves in with her English boyfriend, she decides it's time to write a Chinese-English dictionary for lovers. Xiaolu's first novel in English is an utterly original journey of self-discovery.

***

“By turns hilarious and poignant. Xiaolu Guo has given us a fresh and bittersweet addition to the literature of cultural displacement.” – The Oregonian

“Funny and charming…more than a love story; its psychology is politically acute, and things noted lightly in it linger in the mind.” – The Guardian (London)

“Xiaolu Guo has written an inventive, often humorous and poignant story of a woman’s journey over cultural and emotional borders.” – Gail Tsukiyama, Ms. Magazine

“Xiaolu Guo’s novel, her first in English, is smartly absorbing. Grade: A” – Entertainment Weekly

“A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers cleverly courts our assumptions about the chasm between Chinese and Western cultures, only to upend them. It is an utterly captivating, and disorientating, journey both through language and through love.” – The Independent (London)

“As absorbing as a peek into a diary.” – The San Diego Union-Tribune

“It is impossible not to be charmed by Xiaolu Guo’s matter-of-factness… It is equally hard not to be impressed by Guo’s vivacious talent.” – The Sunday Times (London)

“A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers is original, humorous, and wise. Within imperfect language one can find many perfect truths of the human condition. The misunderstandings are really the understandings of the differences of the heart between men and women.” – Amy Tan, author of The Joy Luck Club

“Xiaolu Guo is a fabulous writer, fresh, witty, and intelligent. She handles language in an astonishing way. I don’t think I have enjoyed a book as much in the last twelve months.” – Joanne Harris, author of Chocolat

THE TRUSTEES OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK

To all persons to whom these presents may come greeting be it known that JAMES AGEE has been awarded THE PULITZER PRIZE IN LETTERS FICTION for A DEATH IN THE FAMILY in accordance with the provisions of the statutes of the University governing such award.

In witness whereof we have caused this certificate to be signed by the President of the University and our corporate seal to be hereto affixed in the City of New York on the fifth day of May in the year of our Lord one thousand nine hundred and fifty eight.

Grayson Kirk

PRESIDENT

James Agee’s novel A Death in the Family is a classic American story, chronicling just a few days in 1915 during which a husband and father is called out of town to be with his own father, who has had a heart attack, and while returning is killed in a car accident. Agee patterned the story closely after his own life, focusing on a boy who is the same age that he was when his father died. The narrative shifts from one perspective to another, including the young widow and her two children and her atheistic father and the dead man’s alcoholic brother, to name just a few, in an attempt to capture the ways in which one person’s loss immediately and powerfully affects everyone around.

The book was published in 1957 by McDowell, Obolensky, two years after Agee’s death from heart failure at the age of 46, and was awarded the 1958 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Although Agee had worked on it for almost a decade, he had not produced a definitive final draft, and so his publishers had to put the book together in a way that they believed would make the most sense. They have indicated places where they added materials that come from outside of the flow of the story, such as the opening section “ Knoxville: Summer, 1915,” which was first published in the 1940s. Critics agree that the end product is a consistent novel, one of the most moving works ever written about one of the most traumatic experiences a child could ever face.

Las memorias de Ernesto Sabato, es un libro único que constituye su testamento espiritual. Es la historia de un joven nacido en La pampa, que emprende con éxito una carrera altamente especializada en el mundo científico y llega incluso a trabajar en el centro Curie de París, para luego, en contacto con los surrealistas, abandonar la ciencia por la literatura y el arte, en un gesto valeroso y retador, y con su primera novela, rechazada por multitud de editores, obtener el reconocimiento de Albert Camus y Thomas Mann. Es también, por otra parte, la historia de un hombre rebelde, afín desde muy pronto al anarquismo y a la izquierda revolucionaria, que descubre y denuncia las máscaras del totalitarismo soviético para luego, ya en su vejez, presidir con extraordinario coraje personal la comisión que investiga el horror de los desaparecidos en Argentina y desvelar la magnitud del genocidio. La alianza de rigor ético, acento lírico y firme voluntad solidaria con los desposeídos confiere a Antes del fin el carácter de un libro único: constituye, como pocas obras de hoy en día, el legado esencial de un gran escritor para las generaciones que lo suceden.

Abba Abba is about two poets who may or may not have met in Rome in 1820-1821. One was John Keats, who was dying in a house on the Spanish Steps. The other was Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli a great poet, though little known outside Rome. The first part of the book is about Keats and Belli. The second part presents Belli himself as poet, translated by Mr. Burgess.

In Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, Burgess creates a gloomy future full of violence, rape and destruction. In this dystopian novel, Burgess does a fantastic job of constantly changing the readers’ allegiance toward the books narrator and main character, Alex. Writing in a foreign language, Burgess makes the reader feel like an outsider. As the novel begins, the reader has no emotional connection to Alex. This non-emotional state comes to a sudden halt when Alex and his droogs begin a series of merciless acts of violence. The reader rapidly begins to form what seems to be an irreversible hatred toward the books narrator. However, as time progresses, Burgess cleverly changes the tone of his novel. Once wishing only the harshest punishments be bestowed upon him, it is these same punishments that begin to change how the reader feels. In fact, by the end of the book, one almost begins to have pity for Alex. The same character that was once hated soon emerges as one of many victims taken throughout the course of the book. Throughout Alex’s narration, Burgess manages to change the readers’ allegiance toward a once seemingly evil character.

Alex is the type of character one loves to hate; he makes it all too easy to dislike him. He is a brutal, violent, teenage criminal with no place in society. His one and only role is to create chaos, which he does too well. Alex’s violent nature is first witnessed during the first chapter, and is soon seen again when Alex and his gang chose to brutally beat an innocent drunkard. This beating off the homeless man serves no purpose other then to amuse Alex’s gang. The acts committed were not performed for revenge, the one reason given was that Alex did not enjoy seeing a homeless drunk, “I could never stand to see a moodge all filthy and rolling and burping and drunk, whatever his age might be, but more especially when he was real starry like this one was”. Alex continues to explain his reason for dislike, “his platties were a disgrace, all creased and untidy and covered in cal”, from this explanation one realizes his reasons for nearly killing a man are simply based on pleasure, desire, and a dislike toward the untidy. By the end of the second chapter Burgess’s inventive usage of a different language to keep the reader alienated from forming opinions about Alex ceases to work. At this point in time Alex’s true nature is revealed, and not even his unfamiliar Nadsat language can save him from being strongly disliked by the reader.

The more the reader learns of Alex, the more and more he is disliked; Alex’s relationship with his parents only builds on ones already negative opinions toward Alex. Coming from a normal family and a sturdy household free of domestic violence, there is no excuse for Alex’s violent nature. In fact, Alex’s loving parents are just as baffled by his immoral personality as the reader, although because of their naivete, they know much less of what he does. This leaves the reader uninformed and wondering: why is Alex the way he is? Fortunately, just as one begins to question Alex’s motives, Alex gives an answer, “badness is of the self, the one…is not our modern history, my brothers the story of brave malenky selves fighting these big machines? I am serious with you, brothers, over this. But what I do I do because I like to do”. He could not have explained it more clearly. While from one point of view Alex visions himself as a revolutionary, even simpler then that, he is basically admitting he commits violent acts because he enjoys doing so. Later in the book Alex offers another solution for his violent nature, “Being young is like being one of these malenky machines…and so it would itty on to like the end of the world”. These malenky machines he is referring to are very similar to the clockwork orange Burgess talks to in his introduction. Whatever reasons he gives, none of them are valid enough to prevent the reader from hating Alex.

In spite of all the hatred aimed toward Alex at this point, seemingly it is not enough to prevent the pity one begins to feel when Alex is abandoned by his “droogs”. Knowing he is the leader of his group, Alex constantly gives orders to his gang. Unfortunately it is due to his tendency to need leadership that a quarrel begins with his gang. After settling the original dispute that arises, Alex and his “droogs” are not so successful at ending their second squabble. Framed by his friends, Alex is arrested while they run away. Furthermore, he is beaten by the police, and sentenced to fourteen years of jail. It only takes two of them for the reader to realize the difficulties that Alex is living through. Throughout the first part of the book, there is in fact only one sign that Alex is not utterly evil, that being his music. Along with his abandonment from friends, it is the music that Burgess uses to help change the readers opinion, and eventually to have pity toward his young antagonist.

As the reader continues to pry deeper into Alex’s life it is shocking to learn of the music he listens to, it is because of this music and the actions taken against him that one truly begins to feel sorry for Burgess’s little Alex. The music that Alex chooses to listen is very ironic. While it causes him to do evil things, the fact remains that he listens to normal music, one of the first things he is not disliked for, “lying there on my bed with glazzies tight shut and rookers behind my gulliver, I broke and spattered and cried aaaaaaah with the bliss of it". His particular interest in Ludwig Van arises during one of his sessions while undergoing Ludivico’s Technique. Upon hearing what he perceives to be heavenly music Alex cry’s out about the injustice in the procedure, “I don’t mind about the ultra-violence and all that cal. I can put up with that. But it’s not fair on the music”. It is during this same treatment that the reader really begins to feel sympathy toward him. Striped of his ability to choose right from wrong, and now the same clockwork orange that F. Alexander earlier told him about, Alex becomes one of the governments’ machines. Forced to do exactly what they want him to, become their “true Christian”, Alex poses the question to his doctors, “How about me? Where do I come into all this? Am I like just some animal or dog…am I to be just like a clockwork orange?” Alex is all alone in the world, no longer capable of performing cruel deeds, he is denied by all whom he once knew. The same character one used to wish the harshest punishment upon received it, and when he got it, it becomes strikingly evident that it was much more then even the worst person would ever deserve.

Burgess does a magical job at making the reader quickly forget the horrible deeds Alex once committed. Instead by making powerful moral statements, Burgess goes so far that the reader not only turns the other cheek toward Alex’s crimes, but also feels genuinely sorry for him. Alex may not be completely cured, but that is not the issue at hand. Through means of pity and by playing with the readers’ emotions throughout the book, during A Clockwork Orange, Burgess is constantly playing with the reader’s allegiances.

Todos hemos querido cambiar de vida, todos hemos querido huir alguna vez.

Cuando el joven Jacob pierde todo, su familia y su futuro, y el mundo entero parece al borde del abismo en los difíciles años treinta, se aventura en un circo ambulante para trabajar como veterinario. Transcurren años de penuria y crueldad, pero también de ensueño y plenitud, pues Jacob encuentra en el deslumbrante espectáculo de los hermanos Banzini la amistad, al amor de su vida y a la traviesa elefanta Rosie.

Han transcurrido ya muchos años, pero Jacob no se resigna a la postración que el destino le depara. Con renovada valentía nos revelará un secreto impactante y decidirá emprender nuevas andanzas, cueste lo que cueste.

Sara Gruen, con un estilo apasionado y vibrante, ha escrito una novela aclamada por millones de libreros y lectores. Romance, lucha, asesinato, tragedia y humor integran el cartel de esta gran función que conmueve y asombra por igual.

«Кто бы мог подумать, что из нитей современности можно сплетать такие изящные кружевные фестоны. Эта книга влюбляет. Нежно, чувственно, телесно», – написал Герман Садулаев о прозе Евгении Добровой. Дилогия «Двойное дно», включающая повести «Маленький Моцарт» и «А под ним я голая» (напечатанная в журнале «Новый мир» под названием «Розовые дома, она вошла в шорт лист Бунинской премии), поражает отточенной женской иронией и неподдельным детским трагизмом, выверенностью стиля и яркостью образов, интимностью переживаний и страстью, которая прельщает и захватывает читателя. В заключительной части, «У небожителей», добавляется исторический фон, наложенный на личную историю, – действие происходит в знаменитой высотке на Котельниках, с ее флером легенд и неповторимой атмосферой.

New Year’s Eve at Toppers’ House, North London’s most popular suicide spot. And four strangers are about to discover that doing away with yourself isn’t quite the private act they’d each expected.

Perma-tanned Martin Sharp’s a disgraced breakfast TV presenter who had it all—the family, the pad, the great career—and wasted it away. Killing himself is Martin’s logical response to an unlivable life.

Maureen has to do it tonight, because of Matty being in the home. He was never able to do any of the normal things kids do—like walk or talk—and his loving mum can’t cope any more.

Half-crazed with heartbreak, loneliness, adolescent angst, seven Bacardi Breezers and two Special Brews, Jess’s ready to jump, to fly off the roof.

Finally, there’s JJ—tall, cool, American, looks like a rock-star—who’s weighed down with a heap of problems, and pizza.

Four strangers, who moments before were convinced that they were alone and going to end it all that way, share out the pizza and begin to talk… only to find that they have even less in common than first suspected.

Funny, sad and deeply moving, Nick Hornby’s A Long Way down is a novel that asks some of the big questions: about life and death, strangers and friendship, love and pain, and whether a group of losers, and pizza, can really see you through a long, dark night of the soul.

Имя Адольфо Биой Касареса (1914 – 1999) в аргентинской – и в мировой! – литературе стоит рядом с именами Борхеса и Кортасара. «Борхес завораживает, Кортасар убеждает, Биой Касарес тревожит» – это краткая и точная характеристика, данная французским критиком Юбером Жюэном наиболее значительным прозаикам современной Аргентины. Действительнось, окружавшая Биой Касареса, вызывала у писателя тревогу. И эта тревога явственно звучит в психолого-фантастических романах «План побега», «Сон о героях», «Спящие на солнце», упрочивших всемирную известность автора «Изобретения Мореля».

Помимо романов, в настоящее издание включены избранные рассказы разных лет. Все произведения публикуются на русском языке впервые.

Also sprach Zarathustra

Friedrich Nietzsche

Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen

Текст взят с сайта Ильи Франка (http://www.frank.deutschesprache.ru)

A Room with a View is a novel about a young woman in the repressed culture of Edwardian England. Set in Italy and England, the story is both a romance and a critique of English society at the beginning of the 20th century. A Room with a View was filmed by Merchant-Ivory in 1985.

The novel takes as its subject the relationship between East and West, seen through the lens of India in the later days of the British Raj. Forster connects personal relationships with the politics of colonialism through the story of the Englishwoman Adela Quested, the Indian Dr. Aziz, and the question of what did or did not happen between them in the Marabar Caves.

AKTE

Aleksandrs Dimā (tēvs)

Kopoti raksti piecpadsmit sējumos

Vienpadsmitais sējums

Izdevumu sagatavojusi SIA .IMPAKS" Rīgā 1994

Redaktors A.Mukāns

Ofseta papīrs. Formāts 60x90 1/16 Tirāža 5 000 eks. Līgumcena. Izdevējdarbības licence Nr.

Aleksandrs Dimā

ASKĀNIO

jeb karaļa zeltkalis

Romāns

IZDEVNIECĪBA «LIESMA» RlGA 1978

No franču valodas tulkojis ĒVALDS JUHŅEVICS Mākslinieks VIESTURS GRANTS

© Tulkojums atviešu valodā,

«Liesma», 1978

[1] 70304 4_______

^ M801(ll)-78 lu

MARKS TVENS

Žanna d'Arka

romāns

Viņas ieroču nesēja un sekretāra seniora LUIJA de KONTA personīgās atminas

No angļu valodas tulkojis Sigurds Melnalksnis

XIX GADSIMTA KLASIKI

Amerikāņu rakstnieks Marks TVENS Latvijā ir populārs ar romāniem "Toma Sojera piedzīvojumi" un "Haklberija Fina piedzīvojumi", kā arī ar stāstiem "Princis un ubaga zēns" un "Konektikutas jeņķis karaļa Artura galmā".

Žanna d'Arka, Orleānas jaunava, Marka Tvena mīļākais vēsturiskais tēls. Zannas tēlojumā Tvens slavina cilvēka garīgos spēkus, aktivitāti, patriotismu un mērķa apziņu. Materiālus romānam par Francijas simbolu Zannu d'Arku Tvens vācis 12 gadus, romānu rakstījis 2 gadus. Viņš šo romānu uzskatījis par vienu no saviem izcilākajiem darbiem.

Apgāds DAUGAVA

Mark Twain JOAN OF ARC

No angļu valodas tulkojis SIGURDS MELNALKSNIS

Mākslinieks KASPARS REKMANIS

© Sigurds Melnalksnis, tulkojums, 1939 © Renāte Abeltiņa, pēcvārds, 1999 © Kaspars Rekmanis, mākslinieciskā apdare, 1999 © Apgāds „Daugava", izdevums, 1999

Angļu tulkotājā ievads

Lai gūtu pareizu priekšstatu par kādu izcilu vēsturisku personību, tā aplūkojama sava laikmeta plāksnē, nevis no mūsu modernā laika viedokļa, jo citādi ari dižākie iepriekšējo laikmetu raksturi mūsu acis zaudē labu tiesu savas diženības; ar mūsu moderno atzinu pieejot, ja paraugāmies piecus vai sešus gadsimtus atpakaļ, gan nebūs nevienas slavenības, kas viscaur izturētu mūsu kritiku. Zanna d'Arka tomēr šai zinā ir izņēmums. Vienalga, no kāda laik­meta viedokļa viņu aplūkotu, viņas diženība no tā nekā nezaudē. Lai kādu mērauklu ari viņai piemērotu, viņa ir un paliek pati pilnība savā raksturā.

Kad padomājam, ka viņas gadsimts bijis pats mežonīgākais, ļaunākais un netiklākais laikmets, kāds jebkad senatnē pieredzēts, mums tiešām jābrīnās, kā tādā nelaikā varējis rasties šāds izņē­mums. Salīdzināt viņu un viņas gadsimtu būtu tikpat kā salīdzināt dienu ar nakti. Viņa bija patiesīga, kad visapkārt valdīja meli; viņa bija godprātīga, kad godprātība jau bija aizmirsts tikums; viņa turēja vārdu, kad neviens vairs nepaļāvās uz goda vārdu; ar visu sev piemītošo sirsnību nodevās lielām domām un lieliem darbiem, kad citi lielie gari stiga veltīgos sīkumos un gara nabadzībā; bija kautrīga un liega, kad pasaulē valdīja skaļums un bravūra; viņa bija līdzcietīga, kad visur redzēja mežonīgu cietsirdību; bija pastā­vīga, kad nepazina pastāvību, un cienīga tai laikmetā, kad cienība nekur vairs nebija cienā; bija pārliecībā līdzīga klintij, kad cilvēks nekam neticēja un ņirgājās par visu; bija uzticīga tais laikos, kad pazina tikai viltu; bija bez liekulības,.kad visi liekuļoja un centās cits citam glaimot; bija bezgalīgas drosmes iemiesojums, kad tautas sirdī sen jau bija zudusi cerība un drosme; bija skaidra miesā un garā, kad augstākā sabiedrība kalpoja netikumam; — bija visu labo tikumu pilnība, kad lordi un prinči sacentās ar vienkāršiem laupītājiem un slepkavām un kad kristīgie augstmaņi radīja izbrīnu pat šai nešķistajā laikmetā un iedvesa šausmas ar savu nežēlību, viltu, varasdarbiem un lopiskajām izpriecām.

Viņa varbūt bija vienīgā pilnīgi nesavtīgā personība pasaulīgajā vēsturē. Ne viņas vārdos, ne darbos nav atrodama ne mazākā savtī­bas vai pašlabuma pazīme. Kad viņa paglāba savu karali trimdā un atguva viņam karaltroni, viņai piedāvāja lielu godu un atlīdzību, bet viņa visu noraidīja un negribēja nekā pieņemt. Viss, ko viņa sev vēlējas—ja karalis to atļautu, — bija tas, lai viņai atļauj atgriezties dzimtajā ciemā un atkal ganīt avis, apkampt mīļo māmiņu, to aptecēt un rūpēties par viņu. Tā bija visa viņas savtība, un viņa bija uzvarām vainagotas armijas virspavēlniece, prinču līdzgaitniece un pateicīgās tautas elku dievs.

Žannas d'Arkas veiktais brīnumdarbs nav ne ar ko citu vēsturē salīdzināms, ja atceramies tos apstākļus, kādos viņai bija jācīnās, to pretestību, ar kādu viņa sastapās, un tos līdzekļus, kas bija viņas rīcībā. Cēzars iekaroja puspasaules, bet izdarīja to ar rūdītiem un uzticīgiem Romas veterāniem un arī pats bija pieredzējis karavīrs; Napoleons satrieca disciplinētās Eiropas armijas, bet arī viņš bija rūdīts karavīrs un iesāka ar patriotu bataljoniem, kurus vadīja un iedvesmoja jaunā Brīvības dvesma, ko viņiem bija atnesusi līdzi Revolūcija, un tie bija spara pilni jaunieši, nevis veci, satriekti karavīri, izmisuma laikmeta atliekas, kad zaudējums sekoja zaudē­jumam; bet Žanna d'Arka, būdama gados vēl bērns, nekā nezinā­dama, bez jebkādas skolas izglītības, nepazīstama un neviena neat­balstīta, atrada sev priekšā lielu važās saistītu nāciju, bez cerībām un bez palīdzības svešā jūgā, bez graša naudas, bez kareivjiem, kas bija izklīduši kur kurais, un sastapa arī gara kūtrību; ilgus gadus gan svešinieku, gan pašu laužu izmocītās tautas sirdī jau sen bija zudusi drosme, bet karalis bija nobijies, samierinājies ar savu likteni un nodomājis bēgt, pametot savu zemi ienaidniekam; un viņa uzsauca šim mironim: „Celies!"— un tas cēlās un sekoja viņai. Un viņa vadīja to no uzvaras uz uzvaru, apturēja vareno simtgadu kara paisumu, neglābjami salauza angļu pārspēku un mira ar godam pelnītu Francijas Glābējas vārdu, kā viņu vēl šobrīd dēvē.

Un par atmaksu — Francijas karalis, ko viņa bija kronējusi, vien­aldzīgi un nevērīgi pameta viņu franču baznīckalpu varā, kas sagrāba nabaga bērnu — visnevainīgāko, liegāko un cēlāko radī­jumu, kāds jebkad vēsturē pazīstams —, un to dzīvu sadedzināja uz moku sārta.

Zannas d'Arkas dzīves aprakstā vērā paturamais

Žannas d'Arkas dzīves apraksts ievērojams ar to, ka tas ir vienīgais biogrāfiskais tēlojums, kam pamatā ir ar zvērestu tiesā dotas liecības. 1431. gada tiesas sēžu protokoli, kā arī pēc ceturtdaļgadsimta notu­rētās attaisnošanas tiesas dokumenti, līdz šai baltai dienai uzglabāti Francijas valsts arhīvā un visā pilnībā mums sniedz ziņas par Žannas d'Arkas dzīvi un likteni. Ne par vienu citu tālaika personību nav līdz mūsu dienām saglabājusies tik patiesīga un ar aprakstāmās personas dziļu izpratni apdvesta biogrāfija kā šis ..Francijas glābējas" dzīves apraksts.

Seniors Luijs de Konts savās ..Personīgajās atminās" stingri turas pie šās vēsturiskās patiesības, un tiktāl viņa stāsts nav apšaubāms, bet, kas attiecas uz daudzajiem blakusapstākliem, tad atliek vienīgi paļauties uz viņa goda vārdu.

Redakcijas piezīme

Seniors Luijs de Konts saviem mazbērnu mazbērniem

Tagad ir 1492. gads. Man jau ir astoņdesmit divi gadi aiz muguras. Tas, ko jums stāstu, notika priekš daudziem gadiem; es to pieredzēju, vēl bērns un vēlāk jauneklis būdams.

Visās teikās, dziesmās un stāstos par Žannu d'Arku, ko apraksta un apdzied visā plašajā pasaulē, kā arī grāmatās, kas izdotas, kopš izgudrota grāmatu iespiešana, līdzās minēts ari seniora Luija de Konta, viņas ieroču nesēja un sekretāra vārds. Es biju ar viņu kopā no paša sākuma līdz beidzamajam mirklim.

Mēs abi augām kopā vienā ciemā; ar viņu kopā rotaļā­jāmies, kad vēl bijām bērni, gluži kā jūs tagad rotaļājaties ar sava vecuma biedriem. Tagad, kad visi apzināmies viņas diženibu, kad viņas vārds aplidojis visu pasauli, varētu domāt, ka es tikai dižojos. Līdzīgi būtu, ja vienkārša tauku svece, runājot par spožo sauli pie debesīm, teiktu, ka „tā ar mani bija labos draugos, kad mēs abas vēl bijām sveces".

Bet tas, ko es stāstu, tomēr ir skaidra patiesība: es rotaļājos kopā ar viņu un kopīgi cīnījos karalaukā. Vēl šobrīd atceros viņas skaisto sejiņu. Skaidri redzu viņu savā acu priekšā, kā viņa, zirga kaklam pieplakusi, vēja plandītām matu cirtām, spožās bruņās trauc franču karapulku priekšgalā, arvien dzijāk niknā kaujas vērpetē, kur vīri cīnās uz dzīvību un nāvi;

lāgiem viņa pazūd manam skatienam, jo viņu redzei aizsedz kaujas rumaki, kas cīnā slejas pakaļkājās, aizsedz šķēpu un spalvām rotātu brunucepuru un sablīvētu vairogu jūklis. Es biju kopā ar vinu no sākuma līdz galam! Un, kad pienāca liktenīgā sēru diena, kuras kauna traips uz mūžiem apzīmo­gos tos ar mitrām kronētos frančus, kas, Anglijai vergodami, vinu nobendēja, kā arī pašu Franciju, kas vienaldzībā pat nemēģināja viņai sniegt palīdzību, — es atkal biju beidza­mais, kura rokai viņa pieskārās savā nāves brīdī.

Tad pagāja daudzi gadi. Brīnišķīgās jaunavas tēls, kas kā spožs meteors uzliesmoja pie Francijas karapulku debesīm un izgaisa moku sārta dūmakā, pamazām izplēnēja pagātnē, bet līdz ar to kļuva vēl tuvāks sirdij un jau atstarojās dievišķā spožumā. Un tikai tad es sapratu un apzinājos viņas īsto būtību: viņā bija iemiesota skaidrākā, cēlākā un dižākā dvēsele, kāda vispār šajā saulē sastapta.

Jeff Noon's previous novels, Vurt and Pollen, have attracted a cult following with their psychedelic science fiction creation of the realm of "Vurt"--a region defined by illusion, dream and drug-induced fantasy. Noon has now decided to link up with an imaginative precursor by introducing Lewis Carroll's Alice as the protagonist in a new adventure that draws on Carroll's through-the-looking-glass inversions of reality, and adds a Jeff Noon menace and edginess absent from Carroll's Wonderland. Alice finds herself in 1998 Manchester when she enters an old grandfather clock, and soon becomes the prime suspect in the puzzling "Jigsaw Murders." Noon emulates Carroll's crazy wordplay throughout, and even adds his own illustrations inspired by those of John Tenniel, the famous interpreter of Alice.

En el otoño de 1979, un joven que sueña con ser escritor se incorpora por reclutamiento obligatorio al Ejército Español. Su destino es el País Vasco. Su viaje, que atraviesa la península de sur a norte, es el preludio de una pesadilla. En las paredes de los cuarteles estaban todavía los retratos de Franco y su mensaje póstumo. Es una historia biográfica donde el autor nos cuenta cómo fue su servicio militar.

Some people say Anna Karenina is the single greatest novel ever written, which makes about as much sense to me as trying to determine the world's greatest color. But there is no doubt that Anna Karenina, generally considered Tolstoy's best book, is definitely one ripping great read. Anna, miserable in her loveless marriage, does the barely thinkable and succumbs to her desires for the dashing Vronsky. I don't want to give away the ending, but I will say that 19th-century Russia doesn't take well to that sort of thing.

The greatest American novel to emerge from World War I, A Farewell to Arms cemented Ernest Hemingway’s reputation as one of the most important novelists of the twentieth century. Drawn largely from Hemingway’s own experiences, it is the story of a volunteer ambulance driver wounded on the Italian front, the beautiful British nurse with whom he falls in love, and their journey to find some small sanctuary in a world gone mad with war. By turns beautiful and tragic, tender and harshly realistic, A Farewell to Arms is one of the supreme literary achievements of our time.

Ingeniero agrónomo reconvertido en informático especializado en exportaciones agrícolas, Michel Houellebecq (Reunión, 1958) sorprendió en 1994 con ésta su primera novela, preámbulo de la muy ensalzada Las partículas elementales (1998, en Anagrama en español). Sabiendo esto, no resulta muy aventurado hablar de elementos autobiográficos en Ampliación del campo de batalla. Un informático recién entrado en la treintena y recién salido de una relación sentimental altamente destructiva comienza a trabajar como asesor técnico para el Ministerio de Agricultura. Acompañado por el feísimo Tisserand en su gira por media Francia, el protagonista cae sumido en una profunda depresión existencial, marcada por la abstinencia forzosa, la monotonía, la falta de metas espirituales y un profundo desgano vital. La desidia con que acomete sus relaciones humanas, tan próxima al nihilismo como al existencialismo, deviene en una profunda y tristísima reflexión acerca de la incomunicación y la soledad, subrayada por unos párrafos tremendos y tremendistas en los que el protagonista, cada vez más próximo al delirio, expone sus pensamientos en forma de fábulas animales. La animalidad como sinónimo de despersonalización es sólo el primer paso para una carga de profundidad contra la sociedad del bienestar y el liberalismo económico imperante, con la asexuada castidad de los personajes de la novela como máximo exponente de la decadencia de civilización materialista contemporánea. Valga como ejemplo el siguiente párrafo:

`Definitivamente, me decía, no hay duda de que en nuestra sociedad el sexo representa un segundo sistema de diferenciación, con completa independencia del dinero, y se comporta como un sistema de diferenciación tan implacable, al menos, como éste. Por otra parte, los efectos de ambos sistemas son estrictamente equivalentes. Igual que el liberalismo económico desenfrenado, y por motivos análogos, el liberalismo sexual produce fenómenos de empobrecimiento absoluto. Algunos hacen el amor todos los días, otros cinco o seis veces en su vida, o nunca. Algunos hacen el amor con docenas de mujeres, otros con ninguna. Es lo que se llama la `ley del mercado`. En un sistema económico que prohibe el despido libre, cada cual consigue, más o menos, encontrar su hueco. En un sistema sexual que prohibe el adulterio, cada cual se las arregla, más o menos, para encontrar su compañero de cama. En un sistema económico perfectamente liberal, algunos acumulan considerables fortunas, otros se hunden en el paro y la miseria. En un sistema sexual perfectamente liberal, algunos tienen una vida erótica variada y excitante, otros se ven reducidos a la masturbación y a la soledad. El liberalismo económico es la ampliación del campo de batalla, su extensión a todas las edades de la vida y a todas las clases de la sociedad. A nivel económico, Raphaël Tisserand está en el campo de los vencedores, a nivel sexual, en el de los vencidos. Algunos ganan en ambos tableros, otros pierden en los dos. Las empresas se pelean por algunos jóvenes diplomados, las mujeres se pelean por algunos jóvenes, los hombres se pelean por algunas jóvenes, hay mucha confusión, mucha agitación.`

Perfecto resumen, pues, de toda una crisis de vivencias, de toda una generación sin metas personales, una especie de actualización del legado existencialista de un Camus especialmente sardónico pero pasado por el tamiz de una literatura yuppie del descontento. Allí donde las novelas para la Generación X suelen ofrecer una descripción demasiado simplista de la realidad urbana y de sus consecuencias, Ampliación del campo de batalla incide con singular éxito en las causas de esta realidad, de este estado de cosas contra el que, concluye Houellebecq, no parece que ninguna rebelión pueda tener garantías de éxito. Sin ser ni por asomo una obra cyberpunk, esta novela nos muestra los devastadores restos del campo de batalla en el que a diario se debaten miles de treintañeros dedicados a la profesión informática (y ahí tenemos el elemento `ciber`), sabedores de la veracidad de una tan genuinamente `punk` como la conocida `No hay futuro`.

Juan Manuel Santiago

Hija de un hacendado argentino y una católica irlandesa, Sofía jamás pensó en que habría un momento que tendría que abandonar los campos de Santa Catalina. O quizás, simplemente, ante tanta ilusión y belleza, nunca pudo imaginar que su fuerte carácter la llevaría a cometer los errores más grandes de su vida y que esos errores la alejarían para siempre de su tierra.

Pero ahora Sofía ha vuelto y, con su regreso, el pasado parece cobrar vida. Pero ¿podrá ser hoy lo que no pudo ser tantos años atrás? Quizás sólo con ese viaje podrá Sofía recuperar la paz y cerrar el círculo de su existencia.

Publisher Comments:

Re-creating the lives of two of the most intriguing rulers in history, Shan Sa brings us a novel filled with the sound of hooves, the whistle of arrows, blood, passion, and betrayal. The familiar figure of Alexander the Great comes to new life in this richly imagined tale, which entwines his historical legacy with a fantastic love affair set in a wartime between Western and Eastern civilizations.

Abused by his father, King Philip, who loved and hated his beauty; shadowed by his mother, the mystical and overbearing Queen Olympias; educated by Aristotle who wanted him to be a wise philosopher of Macedonia, Alexander develops a complex character. He becomes a brutal warrior, a pitiless strategist, and a poet longing for the world's wonders. Meanwhile, in the remote steppes of Siberia, an abandoned girl grows up among the wild mares, then adopted by the queen of the Amazons – the tribe of female warriors who dominates a wild world of snow and volcano. As a future queen, the young girl is trained to hate men and to fight against all invaders.

In the course of his great conquest of Asia, Alexander first meets the stunning Alestria on the battlefield. Surprised to find that his adversary is a woman, he is instantly smitten by the fierce queen. Dazzled by his strength, she decides to kidnap him and make him her "wife." At last, this legendary king – renowned for his beauty and love of men – has found his equal. And at last, this indomitable young woman has found a reason to leave her tribe. Their love, deeply passionate and problematic, evolves against an exotic backdrop of warfare and political turmoil, sweeps from antique Greece to Egypt, across the ancient Iraq and Iran, unto the mysterious kingdoms of India.

Review:

"An epic fictional romance between Alexander the Great and an Amazon queen drives the latest from Shan Sa (Empress). As a boy, Sa's Alexander is abused by his father, King Philip of Macedonia. Alexander grows into a cruel and narcissistic youth with an unquenchable thirst for revenge. His political ambitions blossom under the tutelage of Aristotle, and after his father's assassination, Alexander sets off to conquer Greece, Persia and Egypt. When he meets Alestria, the young queen of the Amazons (a mythical tribe of nomadic, male-spurning female warriors from the eastern steppes), he has perhaps met his match in love and war. Told in the extravagant voices of Alexander and Alestria, and of Alestria's protector and confidante, Ania, there's little subtlety in this sweeping, heroic romance. But strewn amid the pageantry and clamor are fascinating details about Alexander's world and about the legendary Amazons, who, if they existed at all, might have been his contemporaries – and equals. (July)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Review:

"Romance, action, and intrigue combine to set the stage for a page-turning romp through alternate history." Booklist

W mroźny lutowy dzień dwaj starzy przyjaciele spotykają się w tłumie żałobników, by towarzyszyć zmarłej Molly Lane w ostatniej drodze. Clive Linley i Vernon Halliday byli kochankami Molly, zanim osiągnęli sukces zawodowy – pierwszy jako najbardziej wzięty brytyjski kompozytor muzyki współczesnej, drugi jako redaktor naczelny poważnego dziennika. Cudowna, kapryśna Molly miała jeszcze innych kochanków, wśród nich ministra spraw zagranicznych Juliana Garmony'ego, okrytego złą sławą prawicowca, typowanego na kolejnego premiera rządu Wielkiej Brytanii.

Tuż po pogrzebie Clive i Vernon zawrą umowę, której następstw żaden z nich nie przewidywał. Obaj dokonają katastrofalnych wyborów moralnych, ich przyjaźń zostanie poddana ciężkiej próbie, a Julian Garmony stanie w obliczu śmierci politycznej.

"Amsterdam" – poważny i dowcipny zarazem współczesny moralitet – jest równie wyborną lekturą, jak poprzednie dzieła prozatorskie Iana McEwana. A dlaczego Amsterdam? W tej powieści obfitującej w niespodzianki najbardziej zaskoczy czytelnika to, co czeka Clive'a i Vernona właśnie w tym mieście.

La acción narrada en Aura (1962), la novela de Carlos Fuentes a que me deseo referir (5), constituye aparentemente un proceso de reencuentro con la historia. El protagonista, Felipe Montero, un historiador de 27 años, se desplaza desde un espacio exterior y periférico, en el que prevalecen las apariencias superficiales y las máscaras -el de la moderna Ciudad de México, cotidiana, alienante- hacia otro espacio interior y central, en el que supuestamente descubre una realidad esencial- la Ciudad de México colonial, histórica, representada por la calle Donceles, en la que se encuentra la casa de la anciana Consuelo, con el número 815.(6) Sin embargo, si se lee la novela atendiendo a su elaboración simbólica, el mencionado reencuentro se traduce en una efectiva regresión en la que el pasado, del que es portadora la anciana Consuelo, se apodera del presente, representado por el joven historiador. Ni las hechicerías de aquélla ni la juventud de Felipe, son suficientes para revitalizar a una situación de encierro estéril, en la que el pasado, convocado por el presente, termina por apoderarse de éste último hasta identificarse con él.

La imagen de la bruja metaforiza en Aura las contradicciones de la memoria histórica latinoamericana, especialmente el anquilosamiento que le produce su incapacidad de introspección.

La historia que se relata en Aura, aunque vincula los poderes de la bruja con el conocimiento de la naturaleza y la búsqueda del amor eterno, conduce a los protagonistas a un estado de encierro, asfixia y esterilidad.

La historia que conduce a esta situación es de amor: en ella dos amantes se vuelven a unir, superando las barreras del tiempo y de la muerte.

Se la ha interpretado como la narración de una aventura interior, que puede ocurrir tanto en la imaginación de Felipe como en la de Consuelo. Quien propone que la historia no es otra cosa que un sueño de Consuelo, interpreta a este personaje como a una anciana demente a causa de su propia esterilidad y temor a la senectud, que en su delirio recuperaría a su amado por medio de la imaginación. Las dos interpretaciones se fundamentan en marcas textuales muy precisas que permiten atribuir el relato a uno u otro de los dos personajes.

El epígrafe, tomado de La sorciére de Michelet, es uno de los elementos que inducen a afirmar que la historia narrada es producto de la imaginación de la anciana Consuelo:

El hombre caza y lucha. La mujer intriga y sueña, es la madre de la fantasía, de los dioses. Posee la segunda visión, las alas que le permiten volar hacia el infinito del deseo y de la imaginación… Los dioses son como los hombres: nacen y mueren sobre el pecho de una mujer…

Bajo el título de `Amarse con los Ojos Abiertos` (2000) editorial Del Nuevo Extremo presenta una novela original y atrapante. Jorge Bucay y Silvia Salinas narran la experiencia de un hombre y una mujer que se enredan a través del correo electrónico, dando comienzo al mismo tiempo a una fascinante historia y a un libro de reflexión sobre el sentido de la pareja.

The Booker Prize (nominee)

The Richard and Judy Best Read of the Year (nominee)

Arthur and George grow up worlds and miles apart in late 19th century Britain: Arthur in shabby-genteel Catholic Edinburgh, George in the vicarage of a small Staffordshire village. Arthur is to become one of the most famous men of his age, George a Birmingham solicitor, is happy in hardworking obscurity. But as the new century begins, they are brought together by a sequence of events that made sensational headlines at the time as The Great Wyrley Outrages. With a mixture of intense research and vivid imagination, Julian Barnes brings into sharp focus not just this long-forgotten case but the inner workings of the two men and the wider psychology of the age. Arthur George is a novel in which the events of a hundred years ago constantly set off contemporary echoes. It is a novel about low crime and high spirituality; guilt and innocence; identity, nationality and race; and thwarted passion. Arthur George explores what we think, what we believe, and what we know.

«Post coitum omne animal triste» — «После соития всякая тварь тоскует». Словами из этого латинского изречения названа книга известной немецкой писательницы, лауреата многих престижных литературных премий Моники Марон. «Animal triste» признана «лучшим романом года» и «глубоко эротичной книгой».

Сумасшедшая любовь.

Слепая любовь.

Любовь до гроба.

Это, как выясняется, не метафоры.

Перед вами самое пронзительное и достоверное любовное свидетельство из всех обнародованных за последние гады.

Сойти с ума от любви…

Ослепнуть от любви…

Умереть от любви…

И несмотря на это: «В жизни можно пропустить все, кроме любви».

Título original "Acts of Love" traducción de Montserrat Solanas

Premio Nadal 1994

Azul es la relación de una intensa pasión amorosa entre una mujer, Andrea periodista, casada y con una complicada vida social y un muchacho más joven, Martín Ures, que llega del interior de la península para descubrir un variado mundo de gentes y trabajos y, sobre todo, esa capacidad alquímica del amor que lo convierte en algo tan mutable y tan definitivamente peligroso.

Este relato no es exactamente una biografía de Jesús Aguirre, sino un retablo ibérico donde este personaje se refleja en los espejos deformantes del callejón del Gato, como una figura de la corte de los milagros de Valle-Inclán. Medio siglo de la historia de España forma parte de este esperpento literario.

Esta travesía escrita en primera persona es también un trayecto de mi propia memoria y en ella aparece el protagonista Jesús Aguirre, el magnífico, rodeado de teólogos alemanes, escritores, políticos y aristócratas de una época, de sucesos, pasiones, éxitos y fracasos de una generación que desde la alcantarilla de la clandestinidad ascendió a los palacios. Un perro dálmata se pasea entre los libros de ensayo de la Escuela de Fráncfort como un rasgo intelectual de suprema elegancia.

Jesús Aguirre, decimoctavo duque de Alba por propios méritos de una gran escalada, sintetiza esta crónica, que va desde la postguerra hasta el inicio de este siglo. Su vida fantasmagórica, pese a ser tan real, no puede distinguirse de la ficción literaria.

Cuando Catalina conoce al general Andrés Asensio, todavía es una muchacha que lo ignora todo de la vida. Él, en cambio, es candidato a Gobernador del Estado de Puebla, y sabe muy bien cuáles son sus objetivos de cacique. A las pocas semanas se casan. Pero Catalina, mujer apasionada e imaginativa, descubre muy pronto que no puede aceptar el modo de vida que le impone la nueva situación y no acepta vivir sin amor.

Halfway into Michael Ondaatje's new novel, Anil's Ghost, there is a scene so quietly devastating that it alone makes the novel worth reading. It is the mid-1980s, and a civil war is raging on the tiny island nation of Sri Lanka. Each day, fresh corpses inundate emergency medical clinics-many of them so mutilated that they are unidentifiable and can only be classified as "disappearances." Anil Tissera, a 33-year-old forensic anthropologist born in Sri Lanka and educated abroad, returns to the island as part of a United Nations human rights campaign to prove that mass murders are taking place. In the hope of identifying the corpses, she takes the unusual step of hiring a local "face painter" named Ananda, who, with mud, soot, paint, and sheer instinct, reconstructs the ghostly visage of one suspiciously disinterred body. Anil then shows the image around the local villages, hoping that it will be recognized. This grisly mask becomes Anil's Ghost, and she raises it high to reveal to the world, and the government of Sri Lanka, that she knows what has been going on.

In addition to being his best story yet, Ondaatje's tale is a similarly brave and grisly act of reanimation: It conjures a dark period in Sri Lankan history and reveals how the atrocities directly affect the three main characters. The novel begins with Anil's arrival on the island and builds outward from there. Forty-nine-year-old archaeologist Sarath Diaysena is assigned by the Sri Lankan government to be Anil's official guide, but in spite of his expertise, he never really warms to the role. Sarath wants nothing to do with stirring up trouble. Since his wife's suicide, he has withdrawn into his work, attempting to buffer himself against the horrors being perpetrated all around him. His brother Gamini, a doctor who works in the field clinics, cannot afford the luxury of denial; the grim casualties of war are wheeled into his clinic by the hour. Unlike Sarath, he knows that one day soon he will recognize one of the victims.

When Sarath and Anil leave the city for the remote villages where Ministry of Health officials rarely, if ever, go, it becomes all but impossible for Sarath to remain uninvolved. Severed heads are staked out along the roads as a warning to anyone thinking of joining the resistance. Even the reticent Sarath admits that small guerrilla groups can hardly be the cause of such widespread brutality. Gamini, meanwhile, is so overwhelmed with triage and autopsies that he turns to his own supply of pharmaceuticals in order to stay awake. Despite the obvious signs of mass murder, Sarath begs Anil not to continue her investigation. He knows how the government will respond to an outsider who tries to exhume its dirty secrets. But Anil knows that it is this very fear that must be overcome if the murders are to be stopped. When she and Sarath find a person who can help them confirm the age of a body interred in a government-controlled cave, there is no turning back.

The remainder of the novel chronicles Anil and Sarath's quest to learn the origins of this body and its identity. Even in the last 20 pages, the novel's crucial questions remain artfully suspended: How much safety is Sarath willing to sacrifice in order to bring these atrocities to light? Will the body be recognized? Will Sarath ever open up to Anil? Will either of them back down when their snooping comes to light? Anil's Ghost is the closest Ondaatje is likely to come to writing a page-turner; many readers will likely devour it in one sitting.

But what makes this more than just a thrilling tale, and invites rereadings, is the way Ondaatje textures his characters' interior lives. And this is where we get vintage Ondaatje. Using flashbacks and brilliant set pieces, Ondaatje spreads out their histories before us like a cartographer, and through this careful mapping we feel his characters' pain and disillusionment. There is Anil's growing guilt over having left Sri Lanka before the disappearances began, and her attempt to expiate that guilt by working to bring these events to light. There is Gamini's struggle to keep hope alive after so many bodies have died in his arms. And finally, there is Sarath's judicious approach to each new atrocity, an attitude that mirrors his technique of keeping a close lid on his heart.

In Ondaatje's literary universe, it is through loving that we define ourselves, and his characters reveal their essential natures by how they do and do not love. Anil has recently run out on her boyfriend after stabbing him in the arm with a small knife. The face painter Ananda's own wife is numbered among the disappearances. When reconstructing the faces of the missing, he gives each of them a serene portrayal, in the hope that his wife, too, will find peace. Sarath's wife, who killed herself at the height of the disappearances, is a more indirect casualty. At the nexus of these three characters is Gamini. Like Anil, he is living on the edge-giving his life to the cause of helping others-but unlike Sarath, he is willing to risk his heart by trying to find true love.

In Ondaatje's previous books, his characters transcended their war-ravaged condition through sexual connection. Here, however, sex is the ground upon which the political battles raging around the characters turn personal, where people learn their fates. Ultimately, what brings home the crushing truth of the atrocities is the extent to which each character gives up on romantic love. Yet in the midst of such emotional decimation, Anil never abandons her struggle to bring the murders to light. Matters of the heart are defined by what we sacrifice. And by risking everything for truth, Anil delivers her most profound expression of love to her reclaimed country.

– John Freeman

Les Rougon-Macquart: histoire naturelle et sociale d'une famille sous le second Empire. XI (1883)

Denise arrive à Paris avec ses deux frères, Jean et Pépé. Un grand magasin Au bonheur des dames s'installe en face de la boutique de leur oncle. L'état empirant des affaires de l'oncle contraint Denise à travailler au bonheur des dames. Ses collègues de travail et les clientes ne sont pas tendres envers la pauvre provinciale…

Un compte rendu fascinant du phénomène des grands magasins et des terribles conditions de travail de l'époque…

The heroes are eager to sail to Troy for war, but the wind is still. To fill their sails and set out, they must sacrifice Agamemnon's daughter Iphigenia-and how does a human girl become the wind? The starkness and psychological insight of Rachel Swirsky's Tor.com story earned it a place among the finalists for the 2010 Nebula Award. Rachel Swirsky's short fiction has appeared in Weird Tales, Fantasy Magazine, and Subterranean Magazine, among others, and has been collected in Year's Best anthologies edited by Rich Horton, Jonathan Strahan, and the VanderMeers. She is also the submissions editor of Podcastle, an audio fantasy magazine.

Es una mañana como otra cualquiera. Jonas despierta. Desayuna un café. El periódico no está delante de la puerta de su casa. Cuando no logra sintonizar la radio, ni la televisión, ni puede entrar en Internet, comienza a enfadarse. Su novia no contesta al teléfono. Jonas sale a la calle. No hay nadie. ¿Puede vivir una persona cuando todas las demás han desaparecido? Han quedado el mundo y las cosas: carreteras, supermercados, estaciones de tren, pero todo está vacío. Jonas vaga por Viena, por las calles de siempre, por las viviendas que conoce, pero nada responde a sus preguntas. ¿Es el único superviviente de una catástrofe? ¿Se han ido todos a otra ciudad? ¿Hay otros, o son sólo imaginaciones suyas?

From Publishers Weekly

"Sexuality has never been a problem with me. My problem is different. I am a fragment in a fragmented age." Despite this claim, the protagonist of Ran's unusual coming-of-age novel is defined by her precocious beauty and her struggle to define her sexual identity. Ran, one of China's most acclaimed contemporary women writers, tells how lovely Ni Niuniu is seduced before she enters puberty by an older woman, the sly, wise Widow Ho, then falls into an unwanted affair with her male teacher, Ti. In college, she meets the love of her life, a fellow student named Yin Nan, but their brief, passionate affair ends abruptly when Yin Nan becomes involved in the student protests in Tiananmen Square. Traumatized by the loss of Yin Nan and the deaths of her mother and Widow Ho, Niuniu retreats into her own mind, becoming Miss Nothing ("I no longer exist… I have disappeared…"). Niuniu's flaws, foibles and idiosyncrasies represent fertile ground for Chen's wide-ranging psychological character study. Even the more conventional scenes are narrated with lyrical intensity, and hallucinatory dream sequences and passages describing Niuniu's alienation range from the revelatory to the overwrought. The result is an uneven but intriguing novel that captures the heightened sensibility of a woman who flees the bustling contemporary world for the sensual pleasures of inner space.

From Booklist

The turbulent decades spanning the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the deadly demonstrations at Tiananmen Square provide the backdrop for this sensuous coming-of-age tale by Chinese essayist and short-story writer Chen. As a child, sensitive and gawky Ni Niuniu never quite fit in. Teased by her classmates and neglected by her cold, distant father, she engaged in quiet forms of rebellion (she once stole her father's woolen trousers and cut them off at the knees). While her father scarcely acknowledged her, other adults paid Ni Niuniu too much mind: her middle-school teacher, Ti, and an eccentric widower who lived next door each took sexual advantage of the impressionable young girl. Haunted by the past and despondent over the recent death of her mother and departure of her first love, Ni Niuniu retreats from the realities of politically charged Beijing, writing and drawing and endlessly soaking in her tub. Chen's first work to be translated into English provides an eloquent examination of the quest for calm in a chaotic world.

***

"Chen Ran's strikingly introspective, subjective, and individualized writing sets her work distinctively apart for the traditional and mainstream realism of the majority of contemporary Chinese writers… In his translation, Howard-Gibbon adeptly conveys the exquisiteness, richness, and slight eccentricity of Chen's prose." – China Daily

"The turbulent decades spanning the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the deadly demonstrations at Tiananmen Square provide the backdrop for this sensuous, coming-of-age tale by Chinese essayist and short-story writer Chen… Chen's first work to be translated into English provides an eloquent examination of the quest for calm in a chaotic world." – Booklist

"An intriguing exploration of the contemporary consciousness of an alienated, urban Chinese woman for whom current history matters less than the reliable comforts of love, nature, and solitude." – Kirkus Reviews

"Niuniu's flaws, foibles, and idiosyncrasies represent fertile ground for Chen's wide-ranging psychological character study… [an] intriguing novel that captures the heightened sensibility of a woman who flees the bustling contemporary world for the sensual pleasures of inner space." – Publishers Weekly

"In the novel A Private Life, Ran Chen immerses us in the troubled life of Ni Niuniu… Chen weaves together these evaluations with Niuniu's manic writings in order to create an ultra postmodern tale of a young woman's psychosocial evolution… an important portrait of a young woman trying to survive in a complicated world." – Bust Magazine

"A Private Life is not an overtly political book; rather, it has the timeless quality of most dreams. Still, [narrator] Ni Niuniu's refusal to connect with the world outside her door becomes a kind of political statement." – Elizabeth Gold, Washington Post

"An atmospheric story of sexual awakening and ennui that enlarges our understanding of modern China." – Vancouver Sun

"Niuniu's hatred of the few powerful males in her life and her sexual confusion and manipulations are clearly depicted." – Sofia A. Tangalos, Library Journal

"This polished and readable translation of the inaugural novel of Chen Ran stands as an example of the quasi-autobiographical Sino-Japanese shishosetsu" – Choice

"A riveting tale… a lyrical meditation on memory, sexuality, femininity, and the often arbitrary distinctions between madness and sanity." – Translation Review

"A Private Life shows Chen Ran at her best: weaving together the female bildungsroman and social and political satire, she effortlessly flits from outbursts of rage to ecstasy to rarefied emotions. Her philosophical musings on the difficulty of achieving individual freedom are as critical of the collective pursuit of wealth and sensorial pleasures in China after socialism as of the authoritarianism and ideological conformity during the heyday of the Cultural Revolution. The poignant, tragic-comic tale is ultimately about bondage and transcendence." – Tze-Lan D. Sang, author of The Emerging Lesbian: Female Same-Sex Desire in Modern China

"The novel daringly depicts a woman's emotional journey towards the maturation of her sexuality. It is a provocative reflection of the new sensibility of a young generation of Chinese women in the post-Deng era. Chen Ran's sensuous style easily breathes through the translator's English rendition of her language." – Lingchei Letty Chen, Washington University, St. Louis

"One of the most acclaimed women writers in contemporary China, Chen Ran in this novel explores the complex emotional territory of the female body, sexuality, homoeroticism, and fantasy. The author’s personal voice triumphs in the novel as a most conscious presence, dissolving the public and collective model of socialist literature. Daringly written and excellently translated, A Private Life not only entertains, but also leaves the reader pondering Chen’s disturbing and deeply personal message." – Lingzhen Wang, Brown University

From Publishers Weekly

Ha Jin, who emigrated from China in the aftermath of Tiananmen Square, had only been writing in English for 12 years when he won the National Book Award for Waiting in 1999. His latest novel sheds light on an émigré writer's woodshedding period. It follows the fortunes of Nan Wu, who drops out of a U.S. grad school after the repression of the democracy movement in China, hoping to find his voice as a poet while supporting his wife, Pingping, and son, Taotao. After several years of spartan living, Nan and Pingping save enough to buy a Chinese restaurant in suburban Atlanta, setting up double tensions: between Nan's literary hopes and his career, and between Nan and Pingping, who, at the novel's opening, are staying together for the sake of their young boy. While Pingping grows more independent, Nan -amid the dulling minutiae of running a restaurant and worries about mortgage payments, insurance and schooling-slowly snuffs the torch he carries for his first love. That Nan at one point reads Dr. Zhivago isn't coincidental: while Ha Jin's novel lacks Zhivago's epic grandeur, his biggest feat may be making the reader wonder whether the trivialities of American life are not, in some ways, as strange and barbaric as the upheavals of revolution.

***

From the award-winning author of Waiting, a new novel about a family's struggle for the American Dream.

Meet the Wu family-father Nan, mother Pingping, and son Taotao. They are arranging to fully sever ties with China in the aftermath of the 1989 massacre at Tiananmen Square, and to begin a new, free life in the United States. At first, their future seems well-assured. But after the fallout from Tiananmen, Nan 's disillusionment turns him toward his first love, poetry. Leaving his studies, he takes on a variety of menial jobs as Pingping works for a wealthy widow as a cook and housekeeper. As Pingping and Taotao slowly adjust to American life, Nan still feels a strange attachment to his homeland, though he violently disagrees with Communist policy. But severing all ties-including his love for a woman who rejected him in his youth-proves to be more difficult than he could have ever imagined.

From Publishers Weekly

"Sexuality has never been a problem with me. My problem is different. I am a fragment in a fragmented age." Despite this claim, the protagonist of Ran's unusual coming-of-age novel is defined by her precocious beauty and her struggle to define her sexual identity. Ran, one of China's most acclaimed contemporary women writers, tells how lovely Ni Niuniu is seduced before she enters puberty by an older woman, the sly, wise Widow Ho, then falls into an unwanted affair with her male teacher, Ti. In college, she meets the love of her life, a fellow student named Yin Nan, but their brief, passionate affair ends abruptly when Yin Nan becomes involved in the student protests in Tiananmen Square. Traumatized by the loss of Yin Nan and the deaths of her mother and Widow Ho, Niuniu retreats into her own mind, becoming Miss Nothing ("I no longer exist… I have disappeared…"). Niuniu's flaws, foibles and idiosyncrasies represent fertile ground for Chen's wide-ranging psychological character study. Even the more conventional scenes are narrated with lyrical intensity, and hallucinatory dream sequences and passages describing Niuniu's alienation range from the revelatory to the overwrought. The result is an uneven but intriguing novel that captures the heightened sensibility of a woman who flees the bustling contemporary world for the sensual pleasures of inner space.

From Booklist

The turbulent decades spanning the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the deadly demonstrations at Tiananmen Square provide the backdrop for this sensuous coming-of-age tale by Chinese essayist and short-story writer Chen. As a child, sensitive and gawky Ni Niuniu never quite fit in. Teased by her classmates and neglected by her cold, distant father, she engaged in quiet forms of rebellion (she once stole her father's woolen trousers and cut them off at the knees). While her father scarcely acknowledged her, other adults paid Ni Niuniu too much mind: her middle-school teacher, Ti, and an eccentric widower who lived next door each took sexual advantage of the impressionable young girl. Haunted by the past and despondent over the recent death of her mother and departure of her first love, Ni Niuniu retreats from the realities of politically charged Beijing, writing and drawing and endlessly soaking in her tub. Chen's first work to be translated into English provides an eloquent examination of the quest for calm in a chaotic world.

***

"Chen Ran's strikingly introspective, subjective, and individualized writing sets her work distinctively apart for the traditional and mainstream realism of the majority of contemporary Chinese writers… In his translation, Howard-Gibbon adeptly conveys the exquisiteness, richness, and slight eccentricity of Chen's prose." – China Daily

"The turbulent decades spanning the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the deadly demonstrations at Tiananmen Square provide the backdrop for this sensuous, coming-of-age tale by Chinese essayist and short-story writer Chen… Chen's first work to be translated into English provides an eloquent examination of the quest for calm in a chaotic world." – Booklist

"An intriguing exploration of the contemporary consciousness of an alienated, urban Chinese woman for whom current history matters less than the reliable comforts of love, nature, and solitude." – Kirkus Reviews

"Niuniu's flaws, foibles, and idiosyncrasies represent fertile ground for Chen's wide-ranging psychological character study… [an] intriguing novel that captures the heightened sensibility of a woman who flees the bustling contemporary world for the sensual pleasures of inner space." – Publishers Weekly

"In the novel A Private Life, Ran Chen immerses us in the troubled life of Ni Niuniu… Chen weaves together these evaluations with Niuniu's manic writings in order to create an ultra postmodern tale of a young woman's psychosocial evolution… an important portrait of a young woman trying to survive in a complicated world." – Bust Magazine

"A Private Life is not an overtly political book; rather, it has the timeless quality of most dreams. Still, [narrator] Ni Niuniu's refusal to connect with the world outside her door becomes a kind of political statement." – Elizabeth Gold, Washington Post

"An atmospheric story of sexual awakening and ennui that enlarges our understanding of modern China." – Vancouver Sun

"Niuniu's hatred of the few powerful males in her life and her sexual confusion and manipulations are clearly depicted." – Sofia A. Tangalos, Library Journal

"This polished and readable translation of the inaugural novel of Chen Ran stands as an example of the quasi-autobiographical Sino-Japanese shishosetsu" – Choice

"A riveting tale… a lyrical meditation on memory, sexuality, femininity, and the often arbitrary distinctions between madness and sanity." – Translation Review

"A Private Life shows Chen Ran at her best: weaving together the female bildungsroman and social and political satire, she effortlessly flits from outbursts of rage to ecstasy to rarefied emotions. Her philosophical musings on the difficulty of achieving individual freedom are as critical of the collective pursuit of wealth and sensorial pleasures in China after socialism as of the authoritarianism and ideological conformity during the heyday of the Cultural Revolution. The poignant, tragic-comic tale is ultimately about bondage and transcendence." – Tze-Lan D. Sang, author of The Emerging Lesbian: Female Same-Sex Desire in Modern China

"The novel daringly depicts a woman's emotional journey towards the maturation of her sexuality. It is a provocative reflection of the new sensibility of a young generation of Chinese women in the post-Deng era. Chen Ran's sensuous style easily breathes through the translator's English rendition of her language." – Lingchei Letty Chen, Washington University, St. Louis

"One of the most acclaimed women writers in contemporary China, Chen Ran in this novel explores the complex emotional territory of the female body, sexuality, homoeroticism, and fantasy. The author’s personal voice triumphs in the novel as a most conscious presence, dissolving the public and collective model of socialist literature. Daringly written and excellently translated, A Private Life not only entertains, but also leaves the reader pondering Chen’s disturbing and deeply personal message." – Lingzhen Wang, Brown University

Early works of an author who has hit the big-time are often reissued for reasons more venal than literary. None of the pre- and post- publications of Tracy Chevalier come anywhere near the standard of The Girl with the Pearl Earring, but that didn't stop them being rushed into instant print once best-sellerdom was declared and the film came out.

Andrei Makine gained international recognition only when his fourth novel, Le Testament Francais, won two prestigious prizes. Famously, the refugee from the Soviet Union who wrote in French hadn't been able to get his first novel published until he pretended it was translated from "the original Russian" by the mythical "Francoise Bour".

It's a cute story, but why has that one, A Hero's Daughter, suddenly come out in English 14 years after publication? Are the translator and/or publishers jumping on a bandwagon in the light of later prizes awarded to them both?

At 163 elegant pages, and featuring only two central characters – that is, "without the bewildering patronymics or the excessive length" of most Russian novels (a grab on the back cover) – A Hero's Daughter lightly realises huge moments in recent Russian history.

Starting with the atrocious encounters between Germany and Russia in World War II, when existence was a frozen trench and the lads are kept going with vodka and blind loyalty ("For Stalin's sake it all made sense…"), it skips over 40 pretty good years to bring the eponymous hero into the '80s, the era of Gorbachev and perestroika.

Life starts changing in ways incomprehensible to an old soldier, if 53 can be called old. Ivan feels old because he is a veteran, and because, by great good luck, he was made a Hero of the Soviet Union for simply surviving the Battle of Stalingrad. The real act of heroism that he did commit, no one ever saw. But Ivan has a precious Gold Star to prove the benevolent idiocy of the authorities, and he will never sell it, not even to numb his misery with vodka after his wife dies in their backwoods village, when life holds nothing for him.

Well, not nothing. Although their son died, Ivan and Tatyana had a daughter, Olya, a model child who studied hard and went away to Moscow to become a translator. By now, Western snouts are poking greedily into Russian troughs and there is plenty of work for a girl who knows a language or two. And who is prepared to go the extra mile – the businessmen staying in the huge hotels expect more than mere translation. The valuta they pay for services rendered means that Olya can shop at the Beriozki shops for luxury goods only available in Western currency.

Deep down she doesn't approve of this lifestyle, although perhaps it is justified by the small-time espionage she can engage in while her drugged clients are snoring. It all makes sense for the New Russia's sake. Though it would kill her father if he were to find out. She'd drop it all anyway, the moment she found a nice boy to marry.

While Olya is ambivalent about her compromises, Ivan gets some real shocks. For the first time he is no longer trotted out to speak to local schoolchildren about his role in the great battle; and in Moscow one of his old mates spills the beans on what translators really do. Ivan gets drunk and goes berserk. The damage he does in a Beriozka becomes a radio news item, and grounds for Olya's rich Russian "fiance" to give her the flick, even though she's just survived an abortion with complications. All she wants to do is to shuck off her sordid life and take her father back to the village, where she can look after them both. Unfortunately, he dies suddenly of a heart attack. Olya sleeps with a man one last time, in order to raise the money for the coffin – flogging the Gold Star doesn't do it.

The stories of Ivan and Olya are truly tough, but strangely uplifting. Life in the Soviet Union was never easy, and whatever benefits rampant capitalism might be about to provide lie outside the novel's time-frame.

Meanwhile, the penury, shortages and brutal hardship that drive ordinary citizens to alcoholism and prostitution are countered by some kind of irreducible humanity. Olya emerges as an innately good girl who will one day find her proper level; Ivan is moved by an untutored morality based on vague but sound instincts. Their friends are all pals to them and to each other.

The human face of Soviet society may have been covered with warts, but virtue of a sort shone out of it, as it also does from this deceptively slight, excellently translated, and deeply involving first novel.

La pratique professionnelle du piano suppose une discipline stricte. Elle exclut tout divertissement susceptible d'éloigner l'artiste de son clavier. Pourtant il aimerait, lui aussi, jouir de la lumière du monde, de la douceur de vivre, de la tiédeur de l'air et de l'amour des femmes. Eh bien non! Mort ou vif, le pianiste se doit d'abord à son public.

Dans les allées du parc Monceau à Paris, Max a peur. «Max va mourir violemment dans vingt-deux jours mais, comme il l’ignore, ce n’est pas de cela qu’il a peur». Il a peur de son piano, peur de lui-même, surtout. Mais n’a-t-il pas raison puisqu’un soir, après un concert de gala, il est agressé et meurt au coin d’une rue? Fin de la première partie.

On range le piano. On arrête l’alcool. On bascule, dans une clinique bizarre, le Centre, une version moderne du purgatoire qui recycle «des personnalités pour faire partie du personnel». Max fera partie du personnel, aux côtés de Dean Martin et de Doris Day. Il attend son verdict, le Parc (paradis) ou la Section urbaine (enfer). On tranche pour la Section urbaine et Max revient sur terre, avec l'interdiction formelle de retrouver quiconque a fait partie de son passé.

Troisième volet, il y aura l’Amérique du Sud. Mais Max cherche désespérément sa Rose, une femme à qui il n'a jamais avoué son amour et qu'il a perdu de vue depuis ses années d'étude.

Jouant avec l'éternité et le salut, Jean Echenoz nous prend à témoin, nous précisant avec humour que c’est une fiction qu'il invente pour nous. Je vous laisse le plaisir de découvrir le dénouement fantastique de cette parodie loufoque jusqu’à l’absurde, où il est question de partir vers l’obscur objet de son désir. C'est en tout cas un magnifique roman sur la peur de vivre.

Jean Echenoz a reçu en 2006 le Grand Prix de littérature Paul Morand pour l'ensemble de son oeuvre.

A tour de force, Amulet is a highly charged first-person, semi-hallucinatory novel that embodies in one woman's voice the melancholy and violent recent history of Latin America.

It is September 1968 and the Mexican student movement is about to run head-on into the repressive right-wing government of Mexico: hundreds of young people will soon die.

When the army invades the university, one woman hides in a fourth-floor ladies' room and for twelve days she is the only person left on campus. Staring at the floor, she recounts her bohemian life among the young poets of Mexico City -inventing and reinventing freely-and along the way she creates a cosmology of literature. She is Auxilio Lacouture, the Mother of Mexican Poetry.

Auxilio speaks of her passionate attachment to young poets as well as to two beloved aged poets, to a woman who once slept with Che Guevera, and to the painter Remedios Varo, recalling visits which never occured. And as they grow ever more hallucinatory, her "memories" become mythologies before completely transforming into riveting dark prophecies.

Hair-raising and enthralling, Amuletis a heart-breaking novel and another brilliant example of the art of Roberto Bolaño, "the most admired novelist," as Susan Sontag noted, "in the Spanish-speaking world."

" Ce matin, je me lève décidé à ne pas prendre une cigarette après mon café, comme je l'ai fait depuis une trentaine d'années. Si l'envie est trop forte, je pourrai toujours me recoucher. " Fumer tue, paraît-il. Mais vivre aussi, alors pourquoi s'en faire ? C'est que l'esprit du temps est à l'hygiène de soi, au corps immaculé, à l'extermination des mauvaises habitudes. Le narrateur se donne donc trois jours pour arrêter de fumer. Niais on ne se défait pas facilement d'une pratique devenue une seconde nature : et voilà notre anti-héros contemporain arrêté, rêveur, au milieu des volutes de fumée. Plusieurs fois par jour, il prend une dernière cigarette en se posant la question obsédante : pourquoi fume-t-on ? La réponse, enfin, est au cœur de cette fiction théorique, élégante et burlesque loin, très loin des méthodes soporifiques supposées nous délivrer de la nicotine.

Действие романа «Anno domini» основано на реальных событиях в Украине, охваченной так называемой «оранжевой» революцией.

Роман изобилует острыми поворотами сюжета, эпизодами приключенческого характера, способными заинтересовать читателя любого возраста и пола. В то же время главный герой находится в поисках философского смысла жизни, своего места в ней.

Захватывающее повествование читается на одном дыхании, привлекает своей чистотой, искренностью, узнаваемостью нашей с вами действительности, и в то же время не содержит сцен насилия и жестокости.

В целом роман пробуждает добрые чувства, светлую печаль и сочувствие к героям.

De la noche a la mañana, Violeta Dasinski se vuelve noticia a causa de una tragedia tan inevitable como providencial, y su amiga Josefa Ferrer -con los diarios de Violeta en la mano- empieza a contar su historia… es decir la de ambas.

Aunque Josefa, una exitosa y angustiada cantante chilena, es la narradora, a su voz y la de Violeta se agrega la de `nosotras, las otras` (madres, abuelas, bisabuelas), suerte de coro griego y testigo de la experiencia femenina a través de las generaciones.

El relato, en un vívido contrapunto, irá trazando las búsquedas a un tiempo paralelas y divergentes de Violeta y Josefa, desde la infancia común en el Santiago clasista y turbulento de los años sesenta hasta el `viaje terapéutico` a la ciudad de Antigua.

El amor y la traición, la sexualidad y el dolor, la utopía y la muerte, las perversiones de la modernidad y la tensión entre lo privado y lo público: las vidas de Josefa y Violeta dibujan, como en un huipil multicolor, los anhelos y conflictos de la mujer contemporánea.

Schon drei Tage tobte ein alles verheerender Schneesturm über dem amerikanischen Mittelwesten. Noch war es den vereinten Anstrengungen des Personals von Lincoln International Airport gelungen, den Flughafen offen und betriebsbereit zu halten. Aber jetzt stehen mit der kommenden Nacht die entscheidenden Stunden bevor. Im Mittelpunkt eines dramatischen Kampfes gegen überwältigende Naturgewalten und widrige Umstände steht Mel Bakersfeld, der Direktor von Lincoln International Airport. In ihm laufen die Fäden einer vielschichtigen, aber festverzahnten Handlung zusammen, die sich um eine Gruppe von Männern und Frauen, ihre Leidenschaften und Ängste, ihre Wünsche und Hoffnungen schlingt. Der Autor hat seine Gestalten vor den faszinierenden Hintergrund eines internationalen Großflughafens mit seinen komplexen Anlagen und Einrichtungen gestellt, die einem normalen Fluggast immer verborgen und unsichtbar bleiben. Aber hier werden ihm zugleich mit einer packenden Schilderung menschlicher Schicksale und Konflikte aufklärende Einblicke in die Organisation und das Funktionieren eines Großflughafens geboten, die diesem Roman seinen eigenen Reiz verleihen und ihm in aller Welt zu seinem großen Erfolg verhalfen

1982 yilda Coelho hech bir taʼsirga ega boʻlmagan oʻzining birinchi asari, «Hell Archives»'ni («Doʻzax arxivlari») yaratdi. 1985 yilda u keyinchalik «yomon sifati» uchun ommadan qaytarib olishga harakat qilgan «Practical Manual of Vampirism»'ga («Vampirizm boʻyicha amaliy qoʻllanma») hissa qoʻshdi. 1988 yilda Coelho Borges’ning «Ikki hayolparast ertagi»(«Tale of Two Dreamers»)ga asoslangan «Alchemist» asarini nashrdan chiqardi. Dastlabki sekin sur’atlardagi asar sotuvi nashriyotni asarni qaytarishiga olib keldi, lekin aynan ushbu asar Braziliyaning eng koʻp sotilgan asari boʻldi. U 11 milliondan ortiq nusxada sotilib, dunyoning 41 tiliga tarjima qilindi. Ushbu asar asosida Coelho asarlarini sevuvchi Laurens Fishburn kino yaratmoqda. Coelho 150dan ortiq mamlakatda 86 milliondan ortiq asarlari nusxasini sotib, uning asarlari 56 tilga tarjima qilingan. U turli xil adabiyot mukofotlariga, shu jumladan La Legion d’Honneur(Fransiya), Grinzane Cavour (Italiya) mukofotlariga sazovor boʻlgan.Yana Braziliya gazetasi Folha San Pauloda nashr etgan satrlari toplanmasi boʻlgan Maktub asari, «Sat down and wept», «The Valkyries» ni ham yozgan. Koel’o asarlarining Eronda mashhurligiga qaramay, uning 2005 yilda nashr etilgan «The Zahir» asari taʼqiqlanib, 1000ta nusxasi konfiskatsiya qilingan, lekin 1 hafta oʻtmay, ular yana kitob doʻkonlarida paydo boʻlgan. Uning asarlari bestsellerlar qatoridan nafaqat Braziliyada balki AQSh, Birlashgan Qirollik, Fransiya, Germaniya, Eron, Kanada, Italiya, Isroil, Finlandiya, Serbiya, Gretsiya,Ruminiya, Bolgariya, Rossiya, Polsha va Litvalarda ham oʻrin olgan. U har vaqtning eng koʻp sotilgan Portugal tilli muallif hisoblanadi. U yana Sovgʻa(The Gift/Henry Drummond) va Paygʻambarning Sevgi maktublari (Love letters of a Prophet/Kalil Gibran) ham moslashtirgan. Coelho 45 dan ortiq davlatda haftalilik sahifalar uchun yozadi. Ushbular qatorida Turkiyaning Aksam va Austrian Kurier’ning Freizeitʼi ham oʻrin olgan.

En la memoria de Mario Conde todavía brilla el recuerdo de su visita a Cojímar de la mano de su abuelo. Aquella tarde de 1960, en el pequeño pueblo de pescadores, el niño tuvo la ocasión de ver a Hemingway en persona y, movido por una extraña fascinación, se atrevió a saludarlo.

Cuarenta años más tarde, abandonado su cargo de teniente investigador en la policía de La Habana y dedicado a vender libros de segunda mano, Mario Conde se ve empujado a regresar a Finca Vigía, la casa museo de Hemingway en las afueras de La Habana, para enfrentarse a un extraño caso: en el jardín de la propiedad han sido descubiertos los restos de un hombre que, según la autopsia, murió hace cuarenta años de dos tiros en el pecho. Junto al cadáver aparecerá también una placa del FBI.

Mientras Conde trata de desentrañar lo que sucedió allí la noche del 2 al 3 de octubre de 1958, la novela nos permite asistir a los últimos años del escritor norteamericano, a sus obsesiones, miedos y a su entorno habanero, desde donde refulgen algunos objetos inquietantes, como ese revólver del calibre 22 que el escritor guarda envuelto en una prenda íntima de Ava Gardner.

Con el mismo tono crepuscular y melancólico de La neblina del ayer, y la misma eficacia envolvente de sus novelas anteriores, Adiós, Hemingway es un ajuste de cuentas de Mario Conde con su vida y con sus ídolos literarios, pero también una punzante e inolvidable recreación del Hemingway ególatra y contradictorio, acorralado por sus recuerdos y remordimientos, en los días previos a su suicidio

Estamos ante una novela sobre el poder, pero un poder con minúsculas, cotidiano y perfectamente reconocible: el que ejercen las empresas, el que sufren los asalariados, un poder risible que se mide en metros de despacho o en el número de veces que el jefe se ha parado a hablar contigo. César Miranda, protagonista de esta historia, es un hombre en crisis que intenta sobrevivir a las tormentas y tormentos de una competitividad desenfrenada. Y su peripecia nos va dibujando el implacable pero divertidísimo retrato de la disparatada sociedad en que vivimos.

Todos los textos tratan sobre ese oscuro lugar de placer y dolor que es la pareja, esto es, tratan del amor y del desamor, de la necesidad y la invención del otro. Son historias que hablan del deseo carnal y la pasión, de la costumbre y la desesperación, de la felicidad y del infierno. Estos relatos, a menudo inquietantes, agridulces, llenos de sentido del humor y de la melancolía del amor, componen un sugestivo espejo de nuestra intimidad más turbia y más profunda, de ese territorio abisal e incandescente que siempre se resiste a ser nombrado.

Él es Gaspar Medina, un millonario colombiano (setentón desengañado y cínico), que al parecer ha alcanzado la divina indiferencia. Ella es su joven secretaria, Cunegunda Bonaventura, cuyas mayores virtudes son unos senos perfectos y un no menos perfecto mutismo.

El septuagenario, en tono hosco y sentencioso, con un humor entre grotesco y amargo, va haciendo un recuento en voz alta de curiosos episodios. Trata de desenmarañar, ante la muda Cunegunda, el enredo de su larga vida.

Las memorias del viejo pretenden resolver, mediante un delirio lúcido de recuerdos desordenados, una íntima contradicción: el personaje es, a la vez, hidalgo y disoluto. Bien educado, bondadoso, ascético, pero también abyecto, promiscuo, insensible. Alguien que no siente apetito, ni deseo, ni odio, ni amor, y que sin embargo ha amado a Ángela Pietragrúa hasta perder la cordura. Sus asuntos suceden en Italia y Colombia, e incluyen el adulterio, la seducción, la política, la religión y la familia.

En el quinto centenario de la primera publicación del Quijote una obra en torno a la universal novela de Cervantes ha ganado el premio de la Fundación José Manuel Lara, un galardón que entregan las once editoriales españolas más importantes. `Al morir Don Quijote`, de Andrés Trapiello, recrea la vida de los personajes del libro tras la muerte del hidalgo Alonso Quijano.

Trapiello (gran conocedor de la obra de Cervantes) recibió el premio de mano de la ministra de Cultura, Carmen Calvo, y de José Manuel Lara, presidente de la editorial Planeta, que afirma que este galardón apuesta por la literatura de calidad.

Hace cuatrocientos años empezó una historia que no ha terminado aún. Es la que cuenta en este libro. La de los personajes que Miguel de Cervantes dejó sin novela y que quedaron eclipsados por la fantástica peripecia del hidalgo caballero pero que, a pesar de su condición de secundarios, fueron protagonistas de su propia vida, de su propia novela.

Amigos, ama, sobrina, enemigos y escudero son algunos de los personajes que permanecieron a la muerte de don Quijote y con los que Andrés Trapiello construye una apasionante novela que conjuga intriga, ironía y peripecia literaria y consigue una narración ágil y deslumbrante.

Al morir don Quijote es una novela amena y fascinante que toma como punto de partida el mayor clásico español de todos los tiempos y que está llamada a ser un hito de la literatura contemporánea.

A Hero of Our Time, by Mikhail Yurievich Lermontov[1] (1814-1841), 1840[2], 1841. fiction. russian novel. romanticism. Realism. Title Geroy nashego vremeni[3] in russian; this is the second edition (1841), including the author's preface. This complete HTML e-text is based on the translation from the Russian into English by Martin Parker, published by Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1947, 1951, in the public domain in the United States of America. (A translation that has also been reprinted by but not copyrighted by the Everyman Library, 1995, revised and edited by Neil Cornwell, University of Bristol, ISBN 0-660-87566-3.) Illustrations are from the Moscow edition. We have extensively modified the Parker translation here, mostly by attempting to render it into modern American English and at the same time to restore what we consider the most likely original meaning.

* * *

Another online edition of this work can be found at the University of Virginia Library Electronic Text Center . That English translation, entitled "The Heart of a Russian," by J. H. Wisdom Marr Murray, N.Y.: Knopf, 1916, has a different order to the chapters and has heavy Victorian prose and sketchy footnotes. However, the edition, by Judy Boss, Carolyn Fay, and David Seaman, does have page numbers and a few color illustrations. We did not refer to it when doing this edition. A text-only version of that translation was released in Project Gutenberg in May, 1997.

For further references, please see the books by Cornwell and Nabokov[4] previously cited, as they contain notes, a map, chronologies, excerpts from critical material, and everything you need.

A Hero of Our Time, by Mikhail Yurievich Lermontov[1] (1814-1841), 1840[2], 1841. fiction. russian novel. romanticism. Realism. Title Geroy nashego vremeni[3] in russian; this is the second edition (1841), including the author's preface. This complete HTML e-text is based on the translation from the Russian into English by Martin Parker, published by Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1947, 1951, in the public domain in the United States of America. (A translation that has also been reprinted by but not copyrighted by the Everyman Library, 1995, revised and edited by Neil Cornwell, University of Bristol, ISBN 0-660-87566-3.) Illustrations are from the Moscow edition. We have extensively modified the Parker translation here, mostly by attempting to render it into modern American English and at the same time to restore what we consider the most likely original meaning.

* * *

Another online edition of this work can be found at the University of Virginia Library Electronic Text Center . That English translation, entitled "The Heart of a Russian," by J. H. Wisdom Marr Murray, N.Y.: Knopf, 1916, has a different order to the chapters and has heavy Victorian prose and sketchy footnotes. However, the edition, by Judy Boss, Carolyn Fay, and David Seaman, does have page numbers and a few color illustrations. We did not refer to it when doing this edition. A text-only version of that translation was released in Project Gutenberg in May, 1997.

For further references, please see the books by Cornwell and Nabokov[4] previously cited, as they contain notes, a map, chronologies, excerpts from critical material, and everything you need.

Completando una especie de tríptico ¿involuntario? junto con La torre vigía (1971, disponible en la actualidad en Lumen) y la magistral e incomprendida en el fandom Olvidado rey Gudú (1997, Espasa), esta Aranmanoth es, más que una novela, una suerte de cuento largo, en el sentido en que a Matute le encantaría que hablásemos de lo que es un cuento. Asumiendo todas las coordenadas del cuento de hadas (la maldición nacida de lo prohibido, la fuga y la persecución, la presencia de la infancia incomprendida, la búsqueda del amor imposible, la aparición de seres de leyenda y los hijos habidos entre éstos y los hombres, la guerra y la crueldad, el paisaje indómito y la ambientación de época medieval), Matute nos cuenta la historia de Aranmanoth, hijo natural del Señor de Lines y de un hada del agua, que recibe un encargo que contiene la semilla de la pérdida de su inocencia: proteger y custodiar a la mujer de su padre, una niña como él. Entre ellos fragua una amistad, camaradería más bien, que no es sino el trasunto de todos los cuentos que en el mundo han sido: el cambio, la pérdida de referentes para una infancia atrapada en un mundo adulto -violento y corruptor- que no está hecho a su medida y al cual acabarán enfrentándose tarde o temprano.

Y de ahí deriva la hermosura de este cuento. Orso, señor de Lines, pierde la inocencia conforme se va haciendo adulto y participa en las campañas bélicas del Conde al cual debe vasallaje, en un proceso de envilecimiento que incluso se traduce en la pérdida de sus agraciadas facciones. La madre de Aranmanoth, la más joven de las hadas del bosque, cae en desgracia ante su especie por culpa de los amores prohibidos con un ser humano. Windumanoth, Mes de las Vendimias, ha perdido el Sur, la cualidad que la distinguía de los rudos moradores de su nuevo hogar, y se encuentra sola en el mundo, sin otra compañía que Aranmanoth, Mes de las Espigas, que no es ni humano ni otra cosa, pero a quien la edad y el devenir inexorable de los acontecimientos obligan a acercarse a su condición menos favorecedora: la de ser humano. Aranmanoth y Windumanoth huyen del mundo adulto y frío buscando el Sur, el mítico Sur que simboliza la infancia perdida y el calor y el sol. En el camino perderán las ilusiones y adquirirán el conocimiento de un hecho: el Sur es una condición, no un lugar. Un paisaje interior inmune al externo.

Amarga y hermosa, Aranmanoth pudiera parecer un inocente cuentito en comparación con la más ambiciosa Olvidado rey Gudú o la decididamente pretenciosa La torre vigía, pero no hace sino plasmar con más crudeza que en ninguna de las obras de Ana María Matute el eterno conflicto entre los deseos y la realidad, entre la voluntad y la renuncia. Obra menor si se quiere, pero no por ello menos recomendable, nos devuelve el placer por la lectura de los cuentos infantiles y al mismo tiempo se erige en uno de los libros fantásticos españoles más bonitos de los últimos años. Plenamente recomendable.

Cuando Catalina conoce al general Andrés Ascensio, todavía es una muchacha que lo ignora todo de la vida. Él, en cambio, es candidato a Gobernador del Estado de Puebla, y sabe muy bien cuáles son sus objetivos de cacique. A las pocas semanas se casan. Pero Catalina, mujer apasionada e imaginativa, descubre muy pronto que no puede aceptar el modo de vida que le impone la nueva situación y no acepta vivir sin amor. Luego ocurre lo inevitable y Catalina vuelve a amar y ante ello quizá no le quede otra alternativa que reclamar, como en la canción popular que da título a la novela: Arráncame la vida.

First published in 1938 in Story magazine as a wake-up call warning Americans of the true nature of the Nazi menace, this punchy epistolary tale enacts a stunning drama of friendship, betrayal and vengeance.

In 1932, San Francisco art-gallery owner Max Eisenstein, a Jew who grew up in pre-Nazi Germany, bids farewell to his longtime friend and business partner Martin Schulse, who returns with his family to Munich, where he becomes a Nazi. Through their letters to one another, which quickly move from warmth to a chilling disregard, we watch as the once-liberal Martin, seduced by grandiose visions of German destiny and by the rantings of "our Glorious Leader," vents an anti-Semitism that he tortuously rationalizes. Max, alarmed by reports of anti-Jewish persecution in Germany, asks Martin to look after his actress sister, Griselle, who is performing in Berlin. When she is murdered by Nazi storm troopers after being refused refuge at the Schulse house, Max takes revenge through a clever epistolary ploy that provides a satisfying surprise ending.

Nearly 60 years after its initial publication, Kressman's story serves not only as a reminder of Nazi horrors but as a cautionary tale in light of current racial, ethnic and nationalist intolerance.

Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

It is a very short list of 20th-century American plays that continue to have the same power and impact as when they first appeared—57 years after its Broadway premiere, Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire is one of those plays. The story famously recounts how the faded and promiscuous Blanche DuBois is pushed over the edge by her sexy and brutal brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski. Streetcar launched the careers of Marlon Brando, Jessica Tandy, Kim Hunter and Karl Malden, and solidified the position of Tennessee Williams as one of the most important young playwrights of his generation, as well as that of Elia Kazan as the greatest American stage director of the '40s and '50s.

Who better than America's elder statesman of the theater, Williams' contemporary Arthur Miller, to write as a witness to the lightning that struck American culture in the form of A Streetcar Named Desire? Miller's rich perspective on Williams' singular style of poetic dialogue, sensitive characters, and dramatic violence makes this a unique and valuable new edition of A Streetcar Named Desire. This definitive new edition will also include Williams' essay "The World I Live In," and a brief chronology of the author's life.

In A Little Love Story, Roland Merullo – winner of the Massachusetts Book Award and the Maria Thomas Fiction Award – has created a sometimes poignant, sometimes hilarious tale of attraction and loyalty, jealousy and grief. It is a classic love story – with some modern twists.

Janet Rossi is very smart and unusually attractive, an aide to the governor of Massachusetts, but she suffers from an illness that makes her, as she puts it, 'not exactly a good long-term investment.' Jake Entwhistle is a few years older, a carpenter and portrait painter, smart and good-looking too, but with a shadow over his romantic history. After meeting by accident – literally – when Janet backs into Jake's antique truck, they begin a love affair marked by courage, humor, a deep and erotic intimacy… and modern complications.

Working with the basic architecture of the love story genre, Merullo – a former carpenter known for his novels about family life – breaks new ground with a fresh look at modern romance, taking liberties with the classic design, adding original lines of friendship, spirituality, and laughter, and, of course, probing the mystery of love.

Joan is a smart and independent woman working as a journalist in London. She has grand plans for her future, dreaming of the day when she publishes her novel. However, when the war comes, she decides to go for the adventure of it. When she's there, she realizes that war is not all the romantics say it is.

Un Famoso Fotógrafo Bélico Intenta Descubrir Las Claves De Una Gigantesca Conspiración A Escala Internacional.

Ce roman réunit au début tous les clichés du polar. De nos jours, dans une grande ville plutôt glauque et violente, «malade de ses cracks boursiers, de ses délocalisations sauvages, des affrontements sociaux et ethniques qui la harcèlent, des guérilleras urbaines qui se multiplient?», un homme et une femme mènent une enquête autour du meurtre de Jennifer Brennen.

L'homme, Nathan (40 ans), est un flic ordinaire marié à Chris. Il est en pleine déprime. Sa femme vient de le quitter pour rejoindre la maison communautaire de Wolf (professeur d'économie politique à Berlin) et de ses amis, tous des militants anti-mondialistes très actifs, branchés sexe et bio. Wolf, homosexuel notoire, est donc l'amant de Chris. Cependant, Nathan installe chez lui Paula Consuelo-Acari (28 ans), un top-model très en vue qu'il s'abstient de «baiser» car sa libido le porte toujours vers sa femme Chris.

Marie-Jo, la coéquipière de Nathan, 32 ans, est une grosse fille aux yeux verts, qui se bourre d'amphétamines et qui pèse autour de 90 à 100 kilos. Elle partage son existence avec Franck, écrivain et professeur de «creative writing» à l'université. Au retour de ses longues courses à pied, Marie-Jo se laisse prendre violemment par Ramon, un petit mâle de vingt-cinq ans son voisin d'en dessous qui couche également avec Franck son mari. Nathan et Marie-Jo couchent aussi régulièrement ensemble au cours de l'enquête qu'ils poursuivent. A l'issue de leurs investigations, on comprend que la victime Jennifer Brennen, retrouvée étranglée, les dents fracassées, adhérait à la mouvance anti-mondialiste afin de se venger de son père, un redoutable homme d'affaire maffieux et criminel. Brennen le père sera d'ailleurs liquidé à la fin du roman par Nathan. Pour vivre, Jennifer déguisée en infirmière faisait la pute dans un hôpital. Elle a également joué dans quelques films pornos amateurs. Nathan et Marie-Jo sont sans cesse rattrapés par leurs problèmes psychologiques, sentimentaux, sexuels et professionnels. L'imbroglio est complet.

Après avoir investi le roman porno (Vers chez les blancs), Philippe Djian s'introduit cette fois dans l'univers du polar, ou plus exactement feint de s'y introduire. Dans les plis du récit, qui est plus qu'un pur exercice de style, il propose toutes sortes de digressions, de notations, de variantes comme la démonstration de sa liberté face à tous les genres. Il néglige les figures imposées au polar car l'enquête n'aboutira jamais. Certes le paysage est délétère et violent, les relations entre les êtres sont distendues, crapuleuses, perverses et sadiques et il n'y a donc ni fin, ni conclusion, ni morale.

El peligro de un baño de sangre amenaza Roma desde que Publio Clodio, político de antigua estirpe pero alma traidora, y Tito Mito, su mayor enemigo, han comenzado una terrible lucha por controlar las elecciones consulares. Cuando el cadáver de Clodio aparece en plena Vía Apia y Milón es acusado del crimen, la capital del Imperio estalla en cientos de revueltas callejeras. Así pues, el cónsul Pompeyo el Grande recurre una vez más al inefable Gordiano el Sabueso para que resuelva el caso.

¿Qué ocurrió realmente la noche del 18 de enero del año 52 antes de Cristo? ¿Quién empuñó el arma que acabo con la vida de Publio Clodio? ¿Fue un vil asesinato o un intento desesperado de proteger la República? Mientras Gordiano intenta destejer la trama que envuelve la oscura muerte de Clodio, el caos se apodera de Roma.

Steven Saylor, autor de El brazo de la justicia, Sangre romana, El enigma de Catilina y La suerte de Venus, nos presenta un Gordiano más sabio y perspicaz que nunca en otra intrigante novela de misterio.

«Saylor combina con pulso firme escándalos amorosos, asuntos politicos y asesinatos sin desperdicio en una novela muy dialogada, correctamente escrita, de habilidosa trama, que afirma un humor directo y que se lee con gusto.» – Ramón Freixas, La Vanguardia

«La erudición de Saylor se subordina siempre a la, lineas maestras de la trama, prestándole rigor, credibilidad y verosimilitud. Gordiano el Sabueso y su familia se encuentran entre los seres de ficción más entrañables y mejor diseñados que me he topado últimamente. Vale la pena conocerlos.» – Luis Alberto de Cuenca, ABC

FINALISTA DEL PREMIO PLANETA 1973

La gangrena es más fruto del oficio que de la brillantez, este Adagio confidencial habla del reencuentro, veinte años después, entre Marina y Germán. Abundante diálogo, ambiente burgués, ciertos golpes de efecto que la acercan al folletín y también fácil y amena lectura son las señas de identidad que siguen fieles muchos lectores.

El sexo que conocemos es un "discurso normativo sobre el sexo". Este discurso, este manual para “todos los públicos”, está escrito siempre desde la moral (científica, religiosa, ecologista, económica o la que sea), nunca desde la voz del propio sexo. El objetivo de esta inmensa arquitectura de palabras es dar justificación a un modelo de sexualidad, nunca a la sexualidad en sí.

Partiendo de esta premisa Valérie Tasso busca los puntos de anclaje de ese vastísimo y homogeneizador discurso interesado que llamamos sexualidad humana y lo encuentra en el “tópico”. Las expresiones y valoraciones que sólo por fuerza de repetir y no por su veracidad, nos acabamos creyendo todos. De manera inteligente, amena, asequible y tremendamente descarada, Valérie Tasso va desarmando uno a uno una selección de esos “lugares comunes” no con intención de generar otro discurso sino con intención de cuestionar el existente.

Desde la exposición vital de su propia sexualidad, Valérie confecciona este “Antimanual de Sexo” destinado no a disfrutar de trucos y recetas para mejorar nuestras aptitudes y rendimientos en esta sexualidad que nos hacen vivir sino para cuestionar el propio manual de uso.

Quien cree, entre otras muchas cosas, que los preliminares anticipan el coito, que la prostituta vende su cuerpo, que el sexo está para pasárselo bien, que la relación sexual concluye en el orgasmo, que con la edad se pierden las ganas, que los afrodisíacos existen, que sabemos de sexo más que antes, que el sexo entraña muchos peligros, que existe algo no natural en el sexo, que la eyaculación precoz es cosa de hombres o que la religión y el sexo nunca se han llevado bien, o quien quiera saber porqué Valérie admira la glicinia debería acercarse a las páginas de esta sofisticada revolución que es Valérie Tasso.

“No son temibles las normas, sólo aquellos que se las creen…” En definitiva un libro de Valérie Tasso

The Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea gives us a brilliant, profoundly moving new novel about an actor in the twilight of his life and his career: a meditation on love and loss, and on the inscrutable immediacy of the past in our present lives.Is there any difference between memory and invention? That is the question that fuels this stunning novel, written with the depth of character, the clarifying lyricism, and the heart-wrenching humor that have marked all of John Banville’s extraordinary works. And it is the question that haunts Alexander Cleave as he plumbs the memories of his first—and perhaps only—love (he, just fifteen, the woman more than twice his age, the mother of his best friend; the situation impossible, thrilling, devouring, and finally devastating)… and of his daughter, lost to a kind of madness of mind and heart that Cleave can only fail to understand. When his stunted acting career is suddenly, inexplicably revived with a movie role portraying a man who may not be who he says he is, his young leading lady—famous and fragile—unwittingly gives him the opportunity to see with aching clarity the “chasm that yawns between the doing of a thing and the recollection of what was done.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tq-oMYIS44o

A Hindi film star… an American missionary… twins separated at birth… a dwarf chauffeur… a serial killer… all are on a collision course. In the tradition of A Prayer for Owen Meany, Irving’s characters transcend nationality. They are misfits—coming from everywhere, belonging nowhere. Set almost entirely in India, this is John Irving’s most ambitious novel and a major publishing event.

Рассказ вошёл в сборник:

Quicker Than The Eye (В мгновение ока)

Рассказ вошёл в сборники:

The Machineries of Joy (Механизмы радости)

Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales (Сборник ста лучших рассказов)

Рассказ вошёл в сборники:

Quicker Than The Eye (В мгновение ока)

Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales (Сборник ста лучших рассказов)

Рассказ вошёл в сборники:

Quicker Than The Eye (В мгновение ока)

Рассказ вошёл в сборники:

A Medicine For Melancholy (Лекарство от меланхолии)

The Stories of Ray Bradbury (И грянул гром: 100 рассказов)

Рассказ вошёл в сборники:

The Golden Apples of the Sun (Золотые яблоки солнца)

R Is For Rocket (Р — значит ракета)

The Stories of Ray Bradbury (И грянул гром: 100 рассказов)

Рассказ вошёл в сборники:

Long After Midnight (Далеко за полночь)

The Stories of Ray Bradbury (И грянул гром: 100 рассказов)

Summer Morning, Summer Night (Летнее утро, летняя ночь)

Новый роман одного из самых талантливых писателей поколения 35-летних, финалиста премий «Русский Букер»-2008 и «Национальный бестселлер»-2009.

Загадочное убийство на новогоднем корпоративе. Убит председатель совета директоров холдинга «А.Д.». Расследование поручают следователю по особо важным делам Главного следственного управления по Северо-Западному округу П.Б.Катаеву.

Опрос свидетелей, поиск улик, оперативные мероприятия… Однако рутинная следственная работа приведет Катаева к удивительному открытию: не каждый подозреваемый виновен, но кто убийца, а кто жертва решает далеко не милиция…

Dentro de la Hermandad, Rhage es el vampiro más voraz, el mejor luchador, actuando siempre a través de sus instintos más primarios… y el amante más salvaje -porque en su interior arde una feroz maldición lanzada por la Virgen Escriba. Poseído por este lado oscuro, Rhage teme el momento en que el dragón que lleva dentro sea liberado, convirtiéndole en un peligro para quienes le rodean.

Mary Luce, una mujer que ha conseguido sobrevivir a una vida llena de penurias, es introducida de manera involuntaria al mundo de los vampiros. Ahora, toda su existencia depende de la protección de Rhage. Con una maldición que amenaza su propia vida, Mary no está buscando el amor. Hace mucho tiempo que dejó de creer en los milagros. Pero cuando la intensa atracción animal de Rhage se convierte en algo más emocional, él sabe que debe hacerla suya. Y, mientras los enemigos les pisan los talones, Mary luchará desesperadamente por conseguir una vida eterna junto al hombre al que ama…

En las sombras de la noche en Caldwell, Nueva York, se libra una guerra letal entre los vampiros y sus asesinos. Pero también existe una Hermandad secreta que no se puede comparar a ninguna otra que haya existido -seis guerreros vampiros, protegiendo a su raza. De todos ellos, Zsadist es el miembro más atemorizante de la Hermandad de la Daga Negra.

Zsadist, que durante siglos fue un esclavo de sangre, aún porta las cicatrices de un pasado forjado a base de sufrimiento y humillaciones. Célebre por su insaciable furia y siniestras hazañas, es un salvaje temido por igual entre humanos y vampiros. La ira es su única compañera y el terror su única pasión… hasta que rescata a una bella aristócrata de la malvada Sociedad de los Lessers.

Bella se siente hechizada de inmediato por el ardiente poder que emana Zsadist. Pero, cuando el mutuo deseo que ambos sienten comienza a consumirlos, la irrefrenable sed de venganza que Zsadist siente por los torturadores de Bella le lleva al límite de la locura. Ahora, Bella debe ayudar a su amante a superar las heridas de su atormentado pasado y a encontrar un futuro junto a ella…

Mildred L. Batchelder Award

Torn from their homeland, two Jewish sisters find refuge in Sweden.

It's the summer of 1939. Two Jewish sisters from Vienna -12-year-old Stephie Steiner and 8-year-old Nellie-are sent to Sweden to escape the Nazis. They expect to stay there six months, until their parents can flee to Amsterdam; then all four will go to America. But as the world war intensifies, the girls remain, each with her own host family, on a rugged island off the western coast of Sweden.

Nellie quickly settles in to her new surroundings. She’s happy with her foster family and soon favors the Swedish language over her native German. Not so for Stephie, who finds it hard to adapt; she feels stranded at the end of the world, with a foster mother who’s as cold and unforgiving as the island itself. Her main worry, though, is her parents-and whether she will ever see them again.

Christopher Isherwood was born in Cheshire in 1904. He began to write at university and later moved to Berlin, where he gave English lessons to support himself. He witnessed first hand the rise to power of Hitler and the Nazi party in Germany and some of his best works, such as Mr Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin, draw on these experiences. He created the character of Sally Bowles, later made famous as the heroine of the musical Cabaret. Isherwood travelled with W.H. Auden to China in the late 1930s before going with him to America, which became his home for the rest of his life. He died on 4 January 1986.

‘The best prose writer in English’

Gore Vidal

Celebrated as a masterpiece from its first publication, A Single Man is the story of George Falconer, an English professor in suburban California left heartbroken after the sudden death of his lover, Jim. With devastating clarity and humour, Christopher Isherwood shows George’s determination to carry on, evoking the unexpected pleasures of life, as well as the soul’s ability to triumph over loss and alienation.‘A virtuoso piece of work…courageous… powerful’

The Sunday Times

A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains" by Isabella L Bird (1831 — 1904) represents a series of the author’s letters to her sister, written during her journey to Colorado. In a six-month period of time she covered over a thousand miles alone, riding a horse, often without any appointed destination. The book is actually a detailed record of this fascinating experience filled with beautiful, vivid descriptions of the scenery, the people she met, their way of life. Among others was "Rocky Mountain Jim" Nugent, a rough man, whom she portrayed as an "awful looking a ruffian as one could see”, but who became her guide and companion, and appears in the book in a romantic outlook. A well brought-up young lady, she rode through the American West, wearing Hawaiian riding dress, climbed mountains and helped with grazing.

Publisher's Weekly

This sequel to Liss's Edgar Award-winning A Conspiracy of Paper (2000) brings back ex-pugilist Benjamin Weaver and his 18th-century London environs in all their squalid glory. Benjamin has become a "thieftaker," a sort of bounty hunter/private eye, and is investigating the simple case of a threatening letter when he is caught up in a riot, accused of murder and sentenced to hang. After a gutsy escape, he sets about unraveling the mystery of who framed him and why. Donning the disguise of a wealthy coffee planter from Jamaica, Benjamin infiltrates the upper classes, where he encounters a plot centering on a hotly contested House of Commons election. There is much explanation (perhaps too much) of the history and philosophies of the Whig, Tory and Jacobite parties, but this is nicely balanced with Benjamin's forays into London's underbelly, where he has his way with the ladies and dodges dangerous louts looking to kill him. The real fun is the re-creation of the streets of London ("He fell into the alley's filth-the kennel of emptied chamber pots, bits of dead dogs gnawed on by hungry rats, apple cores and oyster shells") and the colorful denizens thereof. Many hours are spent in innumerable coffeehouses, with Benjamin and company imbibing coffee, chocolate, ale, wine and that great destroyer of the poor, rotgut gin, and employing such useful swear words as "shitten stick," "arse pot" and "bum firking." Mystery and mainstream readers with a taste for gritty historical fiction will relish Liss's glorious dialogue, lively rogues, fascinating setting and indomitable hero. (Mar.) Forecast: The many readers who loved Liss's first book have been eagerly awaiting a sequel. Booksellers can recommend both of the Benjamin Weaver books to those who enjoy Bruce Alexander's Sir John Fielding mystery series. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Having survived the dangerous intrigues and nefarious plots surrounding his father's death and the business of the South Sea Company (A Conspiracy of Paper), Benjamin Weaver, former pugilist and thief taker extraordinaire, is once again plunged into the world of electioneering and political corruption in Georgian London. This time, he seeks to clear his name and save his own life after being wrongly accused of killing a dock worker. Forced to assume the disguise of a Jamaican tobacco plantation owner, he moves from the drawing rooms of Westminster to the hovels of Wapping in search of the true murderer, uncovering corruption at all levels, from perjured witnesses to bribed judges to treasonous Jacobites. While it does not resonate as richly as A Conspiracy of Paper, this novel will still delight readers with its picture of a London familiar to fans of Boswell and Defoe. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 11/1/03.]-Cynthia Johnson, Cary Memorial Lib., Lexington, MA Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

With eloquent wit, Liss manipulates the concepts of misdirection and probability theory in his serpentine third novel (after The Coffee Trader, 2003). Once again, we meet the unconventional protagonist of the author's Edgar-winning debut A Conspiracy of Paper (2000). "Thief-taker," retired prizefighter, and Jew Benjamin Weaver, as resourceful a former rogue as ever, is in peril again-falsely convicted and sentenced to hang for the murder of a dockworker and labor leader whom he barely knew. The year is 1722, and London is abuzz over England's first General Election, vigorously contested by conservative Tories who support Hanoverian King George I and antiroyalist Whigs, who may or may not be in league with Jacobites plotting the restoration of deposed "Pretender" James II of Scotland. Weaver escapes from Newgate Prison (in a marvelously detailed sequence), and, while laboring to clear his name, assumes multiple disguises and forms affiliations with several members of London's political, ecclesiastical, and criminal elites. These include the woman he loves unrequitedly, his cousin's widow Miriam, and her husband, Whig Parliamentary candidate Griffin Melbury; duplicitous parish priest Christopher Ufford (in whose service suspicion for murder had fallen on Weaver); brutal tobacco merchant Dennis Dogsmill and his fetching sister Grace, and numerous other power brokers and ruffians whose allegiances and very identities are seldom what they seem. The dazzling plot, which grows steadily more intricate and circuitous, turns on the allegation that "there [is] a Tory spy among the Whigs," and the likelihood that Weaver's victimization is connected to the election that the charismatic Melburyblithely characterizes as "a spectacle of corruption." Liss's impressive research provides a wealth of information about 18th-century politics, emergent labor organizations, and gradations of etiquette and malfeasance among contrasting social levels. And Weaver's somber, wry, knowing narrator's voice is a deadpan delight. Furthermore, it all ends with yet another twist that seems to promise we'll hear more from-and of-the indefatigable Benjamin Weaver. Let's hope so.

A sus 16 años, Tessa sabe que le queda poco de vida, por eso elabora una lista con diez cosas que hacer antes de morir, como probar el sexo, las drogas, conducir un coche… y la más desgarradora de todas, enamorarse…

Un día como cualquier otro te enteras de que te quedan unos pocos meses de vida. Un golpe difícil de asimilar, sin duda, pues ¿cómo afrontas semejante realidad? ¿Qué mecanismos psicológicos se desatan ante la certeza de lo inevitable?

La historia de Tessa ofrece una mirada mucho más amplia que el dudoso espectáculo de compartir un trance doloroso. Una nueva percepción del tiempo, la redefinición de las relaciones con los padres y amigos, las primeras aventuras amorosas; en suma, un proceso de madurez acelerado que, narrado con inolvidables momentos de ironía y humor, destila una vitalidad sorprendente al tiempo que invita a la reflexión sobre el verdadero valor de las cosas.

Amélie jako mała dziewczynka mieszkała w Japonii. Teraz, gdy jest dorosła, postanawia odwiedzić kraj Kwitnącej Wiśni. Udzielając Japończykom korepetycji z francuskiego, chce przyswoić ich język. Choć w czasie pierwszych lekcji z Rinrim, studentem romanistyki, rozmowę zakłócają ciągłe lapsusy i niezrozumiała wymowa, Belgijka i Japończyk zaprzyjaźniają się. Amélie poznając fascynujący i egzotyczny świat, zakochuje się w Rinrim. Obserwuje, jak we współczesnej Japonii nowoczesność miesza się z tradycyjną kulturą. Zauroczona odmiennością przyjaciela i jego kraju, delektuje się pobytem do czasu, aż chłopak poprosi ją o rękę.

Handler proves the adage that just because one can, doesn't mean one should. This applies to both her role as a writer and a narrator. In this disjointed collection of memories and experiences, even her overenthusiastic voice cannot compensate for the irrelevance and frivolousness that is this book. Her anecdotes cover a range of topics from sex to sibling rivalry to parental humiliation, all showcasing how smart and witty she can be-in hindsight. Whether rambling about how she's freaked out by red-headed men or bemoaning her arrest and short stint in prison, her attempts to be funny fall flat and her valley-girl persona wears quickly on listeners. Her lively voice has the potential to do well with audiobooks, but the overall tone and ecstatic energy she emits only emphasizes the inconsequential prose. Listeners might find themselves asking for Vodka to help reach the end of this production.

Bestselling author Nikki Grimes, author of Dark Sons, Barak Obama: Son of Promise, Child of Hope, and Voices of Christmas, presents the story of Mister, a teenage girl who honestly and poignantly tells her story of temptation and teenage pregnancy through free verse, and who finds support and forgiveness from God through a book of poetry presented from the virgin Mary's perspective.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a nearly complete rewrite of the abandoned Stephen Hero novel, the original manuscript of which was partially destroyed in a fit of rage during an argument with Nora. A kunstlerroman, or story of the development of an artist (a type of bildungsroman, or coming of age novel), it is largely autobiographical, showing the process of attaining maturity and self-consciousness by a gifted young man. The main character is Stephen Dedalus, Joyce's representation of himself. In this novel, some glimpses of Joyce's later techniques are evident, in the use of interior monologue and in the concern with the psychic rather than external reality.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Joyce

When Maud Marsh flings herself into George Benson’s cab in Piccadilly, he starts believing in damsels in distress. But when George traces his mysterious traveling companion to Belpher Castle, home of Lord Marshmoreton, things become severely muddled—the scene for the perfect Wodehouse comedy of errors.

Las historias de Agua pesada son mundos en miniatura que contienen, en dosis altamente concentradas, la acidez, el cinismo y el profundo cuestionamiento de las bases de nuestra sociedad que caracterizan las grandes novelas de Martin Amis. Así, en uno de los cuentos, la sociedad es mayoritariamente gay, y los heterosexuales son una minoría perseguida, en otro, un sarcástico robot marciano nos trae extrañas noticias sobre la vida en el sistema solar, y en el relato ‘Agua pesada’, Amis retrata sin piedad el malestar y la fatiga de la cultura de la clase trabajadora.

Fifteen-year-old Alex and his three friends start an evening’s mayhem by hitting an old man, tearing up his books and stripping him of money and clothes.

Or rather Alex and his three droogs tolchock an old veck, razrez his books, pull off his outer platties and take a malenky bit of cutter.

For Alex’s confessions are written in ‘nadsat’—the teenage argot of a not-too-distant future.

Because of his delinquent excesses, Alex is jailed and made subject to “Ludovico’s Technique,” a chilling experiment in Reclamation Treatment…

Horror farce? Social prophecy? Penetrating study of human choice between good and evil? A “Clockwork Orange” is all three, dazzling proof of Anthony Burgess’s vast talents.

My friend, lawyer, and fellow writer Gary Delafield handed me a great—and true—premise for a short-short about an old woman and the unusual advice she gets from her lawyer. Hijinks ensue.

Never reviewed, so you'll have to make up your own mind.

Laurence Sterne

A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy

A HANDFUL OF DUST is Evelyn Waugh's scathing commentary on the well-mannered death struggles of the upper classes — an irrepressibly amusing picture of society politely blowing its own brains out, with a defiant smile.

It tells of Brenda, Tony and their friends — a wonderfully congenial group who live by a unique set of social standards. According to their rules, any sin is acceptable provided it is carried off in good taste.

“Literary hybrids of Jane Austen novels and zombie stories? That’s so last year. Quirk Books, which released the best‐selling novels Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, has seen the future of the mashup novel, and it is Leo Tolstoy and robots.” -New York Times

“Anna’s nightmare, one of the most famous passages in Anna Karenina, clearly anticipates the “steampunk‐inspired” atmosphere of Android Karenina… Tolstoy didn’t know about steampunk or cyborgs, but he did know about the nightmarishness of steam power, unruly machines, and the creepy half‐human status of the Russian peasant classes.” -Elif Batuman, author of The Possessed, via The New Yorker

“Whenever a truly pulpy trend reaches its apotheosis like this, I can’t help but wonder if we’ll get a new classic out of it.” -io9

“No word on whether she’ll [Anna] be bionically rebuilt following the ending, though. It’s good that this series is branching out to other authors…” -Entertainment Weekly

***

Android Karenina – Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters co-author Ben H. Winters is back with an all-new collaborator, legendary Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, and the result is Android Karenina-an enhanced edition of the classic love story set in a dystopian world of robots, cyborgs, and interstellar space travel.

As in the original novel, our story follows two relationships: the tragic adulterous romance of Anna Karenina and Count Alexei Vronsky, and the much more hopeful marriage of Konstantin Levin and Kitty Shcherbatskaya.These four, yearning for true love, live in a steampunk-inspired 19th century of mechanical butlers, extraterrestrial-worshiping cults, and airborne debutante balls. Their passions alone would be enough to consume them-but when a secret cabal of radical scientific revolutionaries launches an attack on Russian high society's high-tech lifestyle, our heroes must fight back with all their courage, all their gadgets, and all the power of a sleek new cyborg model like nothing the world has ever seen.

Filled with the same blend of romance, drama, and fantasy that made the first two Quirk Classics New York Times best sellers, Android Karenina brings this celebrated series into the exciting world of science fiction.

Leo Tolstoy wrote two of the greatest novels in world literature: War and Peace and Anna Karenina.

Ben H. Winters is coauthor of Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, which was hailed by The Onion A.V. Club as a "sheer delight" and by Library Journal as "strangely entertaining, like a Weird Al version of an opera aria." Mr. Winters lives in Brooklyn.

Um livro de Alberto Moravia, escrito durante a Segunda Grande Guerra, que se centra na vida simples e aparentemente desinteressante de Adriana, uma jovem habitante de Roma. Traída pelo seu primeiro amor, a romana entrega-se à prostituição como quem se entrega a uma vocação. Numa trajetória de inúmeros amantes, três homens se destacam: um jovem revolucionário, um criminoso foragido e um alto funcionário do governo facista, a romana interliga o destino desses homens, quem têm um final dramático e inesperado. No romance de Moravia o sexo tem um valor sobretudo simbólico.

Russie, 1880. Anna Karénine, est une jeune femme de la haute société de Saint-Pétersbourg. Elle est mariée à Alexis Karénine un haut fonctionnaire de l'administration impériale, un personnage austère et orgueilleux. Ils ont un garçon de huit ans, Serge. Anna se rend à Moscou chez son frère Stiva Oblonski. En descendant du train, elle croise le comte Vronski, venu à la rencontre de sa mère. Elle tombe amoureuse de Vronski, cet officier brillant, mais frivole. Ce n'est tout d'abord qu'un éclair, et la joie de retrouver son mari et son fils lui font croire que ce sera un vertige sans lendemain. Mais lors d'un voyage en train, quand Vronski la rejoint et lui déclare son amour, Anna réalise que la frayeur mêlée de bonheur qu'elle ressent à cet instant va changer son existence. Anna lutte contre cette passion. Elle finit pourtant par s'abandonner avec un bonheur coupable au courant qui la porte vers ce jeune officier. Puis Anna tombe enceinte. Se sentant coupable et profondément déprimée par sa faute, elle décide d'avouer son infidélité à son mari…

Cette magnifique et tragique histoire d'amour s'inscrit dans un vaste tableau de la société russe contemporaine. En parallèle, Tolstoï brosse le portrait de deux autres couples: Kitty et Lévine, Daria et Oblonski. Il y évoque les différentes facettes de l'émancipation de la femme, et dresse un tableau critique de la Russie de la fin du XIXe siècle.

Russie, 1880. Anna Karénine, est une jeune femme de la haute société de Saint-Pétersbourg. Elle est mariée à Alexis Karénine un haut fonctionnaire de l'administration impériale, un personnage austère et orgueilleux. Ils ont un garçon de huit ans, Serge. Anna se rend à Moscou chez son frère Stiva Oblonski. En descendant du train, elle croise le comte Vronski, venu à la rencontre de sa mère. Elle tombe amoureuse de Vronski, cet officier brillant, mais frivole. Ce n'est tout d'abord qu'un éclair, et la joie de retrouver son mari et son fils lui font croire que ce sera un vertige sans lendemain. Mais lors d'un voyage en train, quand Vronski la rejoint et lui déclare son amour, Anna réalise que la frayeur mêlée de bonheur qu'elle ressent à cet instant va changer son existence. Anna lutte contre cette passion. Elle finit pourtant par s'abandonner avec un bonheur coupable au courant qui la porte vers ce jeune officier. Puis Anna tombe enceinte. Se sentant coupable et profondément déprimée par sa faute, elle décide d'avouer son infidélité à son mari…

Cette magnifique et tragique histoire d'amour s'inscrit dans un vaste tableau de la société russe contemporaine. En parallèle, Tolstoï brosse le portrait de deux autres couples: Kitty et Lévine, Daria et Oblonski. Il y évoque les différentes facettes de l'émancipation de la femme, et dresse un tableau critique de la Russie de la fin du XIXe siècle.

Twelve-year-old Sunny lives in Nigeria, but she was born American. Her features are African, but she's albino. She's a terrific athlete, but can't go out into the sun to play soccer. There seems to be no place where she fits. And then she discovers something amazing – she is a "free agent," with latent magical power. Soon she's part of a quartet of magic students, studying the visible and invisible, learning to change reality. But will it be enough to help them when they are asked to catch a career criminal who knows magic too?

Utkana z niedomówień i nastrojów poetycka opowieść, która zaczyna się pod koniec drugiej wojny światowej, w zrujnowanym pałacu na południu Włoch. Kanadyjska pielęgniarka, Hana, opiekuje się bezimiennym pacjentem, którego płonący samolot rozbił się na Saharze. Ciężko poparzonego uratowali Beduini i przetransportowali do szpitala. Hana otacza go troskliwą opieką, czyta mu książkę, która może być kluczem do poznania jego przeszłości. Pamięć niezwykłego pacjenta stopniowo powraca i odkrywa jego mroczną tajemnicę. Hana towarzyszy mu w ostatnich dniach próbując zapomnieć o swoich bolesnych przeżyciach. "Angielski pacjent" jest historią miłości uwikłanej w okrucieństwa wojny, uczucia niespełnionego, z góry skazanego na przegraną.

From Michael Cunningham, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hours, comes this widely praised novel of two boyhood friends: Jonathan, lonely, introspective, and unsure of himself; and Bobby, hip, dark, and inarticulate. In New York after college, Bobby moves in with Jonathan and his roommate, Clare, a veteran of the city's erotic wars. Bobby and Clare fall in love, scuttling the plans of Jonathan, who is gay, to father Clare's child. Then, when Clare and Bobby have a baby, the three move to a small house upstate to raise “their” child together and, with an odd friend, Alice, create a new kind of family. A Home at the End of the World masterfully depicts the charged, fragile relationships of urban life today.

Graham Joyce lo ha vuelto a hacer. Nos brinda uno de esos libros que no sabes bien cómo, pero que no puedes dejar de leer, pues te engancha desde la primera página. Con una prosa engañosamente sencilla, aunque mucho más elaborada de lo que parece a simple vista y una estructura de capítulos cortos que invitan a ir avanzando con celeridad, Joyce te envuelve en su particular universo de manera eficaz.

En esta ocasión, el protagonista es un chico -Sam Southall- y sus amigos de pandilla que viven en Coventry, escenario habitual del autor. Lo que inicialmente parece un simple relato de aventurillas juveniles, empieza a adquirir rápidamente tintes un tanto oscuros (el incidente del lucio, la masacre de los padres de uno de los protagonistas) y sobre todo, la aparición del primer y único elemento fantástico de la narración: una especie de duende perverso que sólo puede ser visto por el protagonista.

Es evidente que el libro admite varias lecturas. Una más superficial que nos presentaría las aventuras y desventuras de un joven acosado por un personaje sobrenatural que destruye todo lo que tiene cerca y que no deja de fastidiar terriblemente a la única persona que, en condiciones normales puede verlo.

Pero esa sería una lectura demasiado superficial. Es evidente que las intenciones del autor son otras. La narración es una alegoría del paso de la infancia a la madurez a través de una problemática adolescencia, con los clásicos miedos y temores que comporta, la explosión de sentimientos, la confusión, la necesidad de rebelarse contra lo establecido y el descubrimiento del sexo.

La novela, que en otras manos podría haberse convertido en una novela de terror, no produce miedo en ningún momento, como mucho una cierta inquietud ante lo desconocido. Especialmente ante los capítulos en que otras personas pueden percibir en cierta manera al duende, cuya naturaleza no queda clara en ningún momento, cosa que potencia el elemento mistérico de la narración.

En definitiva, otra excelente novela de Joyce que nos tiene malacostumbrados a estas pequeñas joyas que de tanto en cuanto los editores nos ofrecen traducidas. Espero que dicha tendencia se mantenga en el futuro y podamos disfrutar de más obras de este peculiar autor.

With an keen eye for the dark side of human nature, an amazing ear for dialogue, and a necessary sense of irony, Flannery O’Conner exposes the underside of life in the rural south of the United States. One of the powers in her writing lies in her ability to make the vulnerability of one into that of many; another is her mastery of shifting “control” from character to character, making the outcome uncertain. Sexual and racial attitudes, poverty and riches, adolescence, old age, and being thirty-four which “wasn’t any age at all” are only some of the issues touched on in this collection. When Ruby has to walk up the “steeple steps… [that] …reared up” as she climbed to her fourth floor apartment, we feel her pain as she “gripped the banister rail fiercely and heaved herself up another step…”

Flannery O’Conner, a 1972 National Book Award winner, reminds us that none of the roles in our lives is stagnant and that wearing blinders takes away more than just a view. Through her stories we see that what we blind ourselves to is bound to appear again and again.

Andreï Makine ouvre son roman sur une scène rêvée de notre Occident. Un fantasme qui nous fera mesurer l'étendue de notre dépaysement. Les personnages appartiennent à un autre monde: le pays du grand blanc, au bord du fleuve Amour. Dans ces lieux de silence, la vie pourrait se confondre avec de simples battements de coeur si chaque mouvement de l'âme n'apportait sa révélation. Alors, le désir naît, de la sensualité des corps comme de la communion avec la nature offerte. L'amour a l'odeur des neiges vierges dans la profondeur de la taïga. Soudain, tout est bouleversé. L'Occident fait signe. D'abord un train qui passe, le mythique Transsibérien. Puis un film français, vision d'une existence éblouissante, appel peuplé de grandes actions et de créatures sublimes. Le vertige d'une autre histoire née sur les rives du fleuve Amour, aux berges de l'adolescence.

OVER the course of her five previous novels, Alice McDermott has staked an impressive claim on a subject matter and a turf – Irish-American Catholic families congregated, for the most part, in New York City and its suburbs on Long Island. The Irish have, of course, long been a significant presence in American fiction, appearing well before the mass immigration of the late 19th century (think of "Huckleberry Finn"), and the novels, notably, of William Kennedy attest to the subject's continuing strength. McDermott adds her own luster to this seemingly familiar community through her skill at evoking small, memorable incidents and her willingness to ignore certain narrative conventions.

Most fictional family sagas contain a lot of what could be called plain reporting: answers to the questions (who? what? when? where? why?) that are the basic stuff of journalism. But in her family dramas, McDermott has largely refused to provide a helpful framework of dates, genealogies or factual background. Instead, she has focused on the shifting inner lives of her characters, confident that God – or the larger picture – will be found in the details.

The opening of her latest novel, "After This," demonstrates McDermott's technique at its most elliptical and effective. On a blustery April day in Midtown Manhattan, Mary (no last name given) leaves a church (almost certainly St. Patrick's Cathedral) after lighting a candle, as she has done throughout the war, even though the fighting is over. (Since the war in question is clearly World War II, the action must take place, at the earliest, in the spring of 1946). Mary has also prayed: "She was 30, with no husband in sight. A good job, an aging father, a bachelor brother, a few nice friends. At least, she had asked – so humbly, so earnestly, so seriously – let me be content." Outside the church, squinting in the sunlight, Mary meets a friend of her brother's, who unexpectedly asks her to dinner. "At a restaurant," he explains, when she seems confused. "The two of us." Mary agrees, they part, and she goes into Schrafft's for what's left of her lunch hour.

At the counter she exchanges small talk about the weather with a man seated next to her. "Reminds me of some days we had overseas," he says, standing up to pay his bill. Mary watches him walk away: "And here, of all things, was desire again. (She could have put the palm of her hand to the front of his white shirt.)" Mary returns to her office and later goes home to a walk-up apartment in an unnamed borough to prepare lamb chops for her father and brother before her dinner date, which passes pleasantly and ends with a chaste kiss. The next day, when she returns to Schrafft's, the man she met the day before is waiting outside. Reader, she marries him.

This sequence could stand alone as a classic short story in the Joycean, epiphanic mode: an accretion of humdrum moments that gather force and blossom into the transfiguration of a life. Yet such stories seldom cry out for a sequel – does anyone want to know what Gabriel and Gretta Conroy said to each other the morning after "The Dead" concludes? – and McDermott's deft, delicate beginning is a hard act to follow. Mary, so vivid in her first appearance, rapidly fades into careworn motherhood. Fewer than a dozen pages later, she and her husband, John Keane, are taking a rare break from Sunday Mass at a Long Island beach, deserted after the Labor Day weekend, with their three children. John seems stunned by his responsibilities; Mary's pregnancy will only add to them. A hurricane is beginning to churn up the Eastern Seaboard, and the stinging, wind-borne sand drives the family back home. That night, a tree in the Keanes' yard is blown over. The next morning, a neighbor with a chain saw, who also happens to be a registered nurse, appears just in time to help Mary deliver her baby.

Once this hectic episode concludes, McDermott's narrative turns episodic and digressive, and "After This" begins to resemble a photo album with many missing snapshots and pages. Here is John serving on the building committee of St. Gabriel's Parish, helping raise money for a new church and gym. Over there are Mary and her daughter standing in line to see Michelangelo's Pietà in the Vatican pavillion at the 1964 World's Fair. (McDermott, characteristically, omits the 1964 part, leaving that for her readers to deduce.) Here we see the neighbor's teenage daughter going into Manhattan for an abortion, accompanied by the older of the two Keane daughters, who reads "A Farewell to Arms" in the waiting room. And up ahead, Pauline, Mary's old friend from her office days and the Keane family's honorary spinster aunt, is injured in a fall. Strangely, Pauline's mishap and its aftereffects receive far more attention than the major tragedy that befalls Mary and John, registered almost subliminally and barely referred to again.

Each of the Keane children shines briefly before disappearing. Shy, awkward Jacob drops out of St. John's after a year of poor grades and draws an unlucky lottery number for the Vietnam draft. Michael, charming and irreverent, spends most of his time at his upstate college in a seedy saloon. Annie, the bookish child (inspired by one of Pauline's visits to escape into a Faulkner novel while thinking about "the odor of aging female flesh"), goes to study in England and changes her plans because of a young man she meets on a bus. Clare, devoted youngest child and just as devoted Catholic, nonetheless finds a way to break her parents' hearts.

This assembly of splintered stories suggests that McDermott, like Virginia Woolf in "The Waves," has come to care less about her individual characters than about the unseen forces – fate, the zeitgeist, the inexorable progress of time – that shape and trace the patterns of their lives. With no warning or explanation, she provides capsule previews of the deaths of two family members that are jarring not just because they deflate suspense but because they suggest that it's futile to invest much interest in these characters.

Late in the novel, Clare Keane, having finally found a boyfriend during the long summer vacation, returns to her Catholic high school displaying new aplomb and self-confidence: "Of course of course, the teachers, even the nuns told each other, indulgent and naïve. Those who had been at the school when Annie was a student said, with a shrug, Life goes on." And that seems to be the burden and the message of "After This." Life does, irrefutably, go on. But if that's all there is to say about the matter, why bother with art and stories, which defy the limits of birth and death by trying to immortalize the interesting things that happen in between? For all its page-by-page brilliance, "After This" leaves that question hanging.

As he demonstrated in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, a canine murder mystery from the point of view of an autistic boy, former children's book author and illustrator Mark Haddon has a gift for reaching inside the inner world of characters whose minds should prove difficult to penetrate.

A Spot of Bother is Haddon's second novel aimed at adults, and again he writes his characters with great affection despite the fact that they're deeply flawed. Or, in the case of Bother's protagonist, George Hall, deeply insane.

The Halls are a family of people preoccupied with their own problems, largely centred around preparations for a backyard wedding. His daughter, Katie, is marrying a man no one, including Katie, thinks is good enough for her. Wife Jean is having an affair with one of George's former colleagues and struggling to plan the on-again, off-again wedding of her stubborn daughter. Son Jamie's reluctance to invite his boyfriend to Katie's wedding destroys that seemingly stable relationship.

Poor George finds his family falling apart and lacks the emotional tools to deal with the chaos head on. "Talking was, in George's opinion, overrated… The secret of contentment, George felt, lay in ignoring many things completely."

Newly retired George's own issues are an extreme example of the fretting the rest of his family – in fact, the rest of the world – exhibits. When he discovers a lesion on his hip, he leaps to the conclusion of cancer, and contemplates suicide. He gets caught up in the details of the how, discarding each method, including getting blind drunk and crashing the car – because what if he encountered another car?

"What if he killed them, paralyzed himself, and died of cancer in a wheelchair in prison?" George wonders.

The whimsical humour of the escalating hyperbole reveals a man who ponders the worst case scenario to an amusingly absurd degree. As the novel progresses, however, it becomes clear that this is no momentary flight of imagination or coping mechanism. George's insanity often escalates his worries beyond the point of reason.

The novel follows George's almost-logical reasoning. The spot could be more than eczema. The doctor didn't express himself with perfect certainty. He'd misdiagnosed Katie once. But George takes it several steps beyond reason.

Haddon doesn't inflict George with the cute insanity some fiction falls into, but the true-to-life confusion of being and dealing with someone who can seem no more odd than the average person on occasion, then lapses into genuine, over-the-top insanity.

A Spot of Bother is an often sweet, often heartbreaking story of a family falling apart and coming together. It's a deceptively funny, easy read with genuine poignancy. These compelling characters fumble their way through mental illness in the family the same way they fumble through their romantic relationships – sincerely, humorously, and ineptly.

Los cuentos de Alicia, que han hecho célebre el nombre de Lewis Carroll en todo el mundo y han sido traducidos a numerosas lenguas, fueron escritos originalmente en 1862 para Alice Liddell, hija de Henry George Liddell, deán de Christ Church. Tras su publicación, los relatos, ilustrados por el dibujante inglés sir John Tenniel, se hicieron famosos de inmediato como libros infantiles.

En una época de implacable didacticismo de los libros infantiles, Alicia fue el primer personaje de la literatura infantil que entrevió la hipocresía y la presuntuosidad didáctica del mundo de los adultos. El atractivo de estos relatos para los mayores reside en la ingeniosa mezcla de fantasía y realidad, suave sátira, absurdidad y lógica. Los nombres y las expresiones de los personajes la Liebre de Marzo, El sombrerero, El gato de Cheshire o la Reina de Corazones han entrado a formar parte de personajes clásicos de la literatura.

"Animals dream about the things they do in the day time just like people do. If you want sweet dreams, you've got to live a sweet life." So says Loyd Peregrina, a handsome Apache trainman and latter-day philosopher. But when Codi Noline returns to her hometown, Loyd's advice is painfully out of her reach. Dreamless and at the end of her rope, Codi comes back to Grace, Arizona to confront her past and face her ailing, distant father. What the finds is a town threatened by a silent environmental catastrophe, some startling clues to her own identity, and a man whose view of the world could change the course of her life. Blending flashbacks, dreams, and Native American legends, Animal Dreams is a suspenseful love story and a moving exploration of life's largest commitments. With this work, the acclaimed author of The Bean Trees and Homeland and Other Stories sustains her familiar voice while giving readers her most remarkable book yet.

***

“Kingsolver is giving a new voice to our literature. Animal Dreams solidly establishes Kingsolver as someone who will give her public more than one great book.”-Los Angeles Times Book Review

“An emotional masterpiece…A novel in which humor, passion, and superb prose conspire to seize a reader by the heart and by the soul.”-New York Daily News

“A well-nigh perfect novel, masterfully written, brimming with insight, humor, and compassion. Kingsolver’s clear, purposeful prose spins the narrative like a spider’s web, its interconnected strands gossamer-thin but tensile, strong. This richly satisfying novel should firmly establish Kingsolver among the pantheon of talented writers.”-Publishers Weekly

“One of the year’s best works of fiction.”-Detroit News and Free Press

“A glorious tapestry… Animal Dreams is rich fodder for our own sweet, satisfying dreams.”-Denver Post

“A fascinating world of myth, memory, and dreams. Following Codi Noline home is definitely a worthwhile journey.”-Dallas Morning News

“Barbara Kingsolver gives us the gift of a trip to forgiveness and love through lovingly sensual detail, characters we all know and yet wish we knew better, through evocations of an Arizona landscape both nurturing and mysterious.”-Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Kingsolver achieves a fully realized and profoundly moral vision, one that is rooted in the land and our relationship to it.”-San Francisco Chronicle

“You’ll treasure Animal Dreams. A beautiful, memorable novel full of scenes and images that linger in the mind.”-TONY HILLERMAN, author of Talking God and Thief of Time

“Barbara Kingsolver demonstrates a special gift for the vivid evocation of landscape and of her characters’ state of mind.”-New York Times Book Review

“A novel full of aching sadness-as well as joy, humor, insight, and wonderful writing.”-Arizona Daily Star

“Animal Dreams literally bursts with life. Its description of how one woman finds her way back from the edge of despair seems absolutely perfect… Animal Dreams leaves the reader filled with wonder and hope.”-Houston Post

La marshal Mackenzie Stewart estaba pasando un tranquilo fin de semana en New Hampshire, en la casa de su amiga la jueza federal Bernadette Peacham, cuando fue atacada. Ella pudo repeler el ataque, pero el agresor consiguió escapar. Todo sugería que se trataba de un loco violento… hasta que llegó el agente del FBI Andrew Rook.

Mackenzie había roto con él su norma de no salir con agentes del orden, pero sabía que él no se había desplazado desde Washington para verla, sino porque trabajaba en su caso. A medida que continuaba la caza del misterioso atacante, el caso dio un giro inesperado cuando Mackenzie siguió a Rook a Washington y descubrió que un antiguo juez amigo de Bernadette, ahora caído en desgracia y convertido en informador de Rook, había desaparecido.

Mackenzie y Rook comprenderían entonces que había más en juego de lo que pensaban y que se enfrentaban a una mente criminal que no tenía nada que perder y estaba dispuesta a jugárselo todo.

A laugh-out-loud account of an outrageously rugged hike-by the beloved comic author of Lost Continent and Notes from a Small Island. Published on the 75th anniversary year of the Appalachian Trail.

When Stan Wilson joined the R.A.F. he wanted action—and certainly he got what he wanted. The dogged, grim fighting men who made up Red Flight sometimes almost forgot what rest and sleep felt like.

Stan had no quarrel with the incessant pursuit of Messerschmitts; the touch and go dogfights; the whistling scream of anti-aircraft fire and the whining drone of the bombers. It was when very funny things began to happen, as his gas tank being drained and his flying orders crossed-up so that he headed off the Glory Trail in the wrong direction, that Stan knew something was wrong.

How Stan does some ground sleuthing and uncovers an ugly plot makes one of the most thrilling of the Air Combat stories.

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The thrust into Italy was about to begin—and Stan Wilson, and his flying pals, March Allison and Bill O’Malley, wanted to be in on the big show. The picked the wrong moment, however, to get into trouble with Colonel Benson. By way of punishment, and much to their disgust, the tames job in the air force was assigned to them—ferrying P-38’s from Bizerte to Malta.

But no assignment this crack fighting team was on could remain tame very long—and this one was no exception. Led off their course by a clever enemy trick, the three pilots ended up in Italy. The story of how they stole a Fiat bomber, were shot down by their own air force and captured by the Nazis, and how they finally got away to join the fight in the air over Italy is one of timely, hair-raising adventure.

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net

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Those two daring young fighter pilots, Lieutenant Stan Wilson and the wild Irishman O’Malley who proved their courage and skill first during the Battle of Britain, and later in the South Pacific and Africa, are now attached to the Eighth Air Force in England.

Detailed for special duty, their job is to skip-bomb underground hangars housing German fighter planes which have been intercepting Fortresses and Liberators on their daily mission of raining bombs on Berlin.

With the crash of their planes in Germany, Stan and O’Malley are hurled into a series of breathtaking adventures; among them their daring escape from a Nazi prison camp, Stan’s close brush with death in Holland and his spectacular flight to England capped by a gripping climax.

Readers who thrilled to the audacious exploits of these intrepid young airmen in previous books will follow as breathlessly this thrilling new story that is as up-to-date as today’s headlines.

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Sara Gruen's Water for Elephants has become one of the most beloved and bestselling novels of our time. Now Gruen has moved from a circus elephant to family of bonobo apes. When the apes are kidnapped from a language laboratory, their mysterious appearance on a reality TV show calls into question our assumptions about these animals who share 99.4% of our DNA.

A devoted animal lover, Gruen has had a life-long fascination with human-ape discourse, and a particular interest in Bonobo apes, who share 99.4% of our DNA. She has studied linguistics and a system of lexigrams in order to communicate with apes, and is one of the few visitors who has been allowed access to the Great Ape Trust in Des Moines, Iowa, where the apes have come to love her. In bringing her experience and research to bear on this novel, she opens the animal world to us as few novelists have done.

Ape House is a riveting, funny, compassionate, and, finally, deeply moving new novel that secures Sara Gruen's place as a master storyteller who allows us to see ourselves as we never have before.

Über das Buch

San Francisco, O'Hara und seine Zeitschrift, für die er Erzählungen in wöchentlichen Fortsetzungen schrieb, die Redaktion, die Klubs, in denen er verkehrte, all die Nichtigkeiten jener tatenlosen Tage scheinen einer unbeschreiblich fernen Vergangenheit anzugehören. Nur mit Schaudern denkt Kid Bellew daran, wie er einst Zeit und Kraft in dem Bohèmeleben der großen Stadt vergeudet hat, ohne zu wissen, was Nahrung, Schlaf und Gesundheit in Wirklichkeit bedeuten. Aus einer Laune heraus hat er sich Goldgräbern auf dem Wege nach Alaska angeschlossen, hat ungeheure körperliche Strapazen auf sich genommen und schließlich Gefallen am harten Leben in den endlosen Wäldern, den unnahbaren, zerklüfteten Gebirgen und den wild schäumenden Wassern gefunden. Gemeinsam mit Jack Kurz, einem prächtigen Kameraden, schlägt er sich quer durch Alaska, zu Fuß, im Boot, auf Schneeschuhen und mit dem Hundeschlitten. Aus dem ehemaligen Chechaquo, dem Grünschnabel, wird der erfahrene Waldläufer, Hundeführer und Goldsucher Alaska-Kid.

Über den Autor

Jack London (eig. John Griffith, später J. G. London nach seinem Stiefvater) wurde am 12.01.1876 in San Francisco geboren und wuchs in ärmlichen Verhältnissen auf. Er schlägt sich als Fabrikarbeiter, Austernpirat, Landstreicher und Seemann durch, holt das Abitur nach, beginnt zu studieren, geht dann als Goldsucher nach Alaska, lebt monatelang im Elendsviertel von London, gerät als Korrespondent im russisch-japanischen Krieg in Gefangenschaft und bereist die ganze Welt. Am 22.11.1916 setzt der berühmte Schriftsteller auf seiner Farm in Kalifornien seinem zuletzt von Alkohol, Erfolg und Extravaganz geprägten Leben ein Ende.

Lana Spiggs is fed up with everyone telling her what to do. If it isn’t her mother nagging and shouting, it’s her teachers nagging and shouting. What Lana wants is to be grown-up. She wants her own flat, her own husband and her own children – and then no one will be able to boss her around any more. When Lana meets Les on her fifteenth birthday, she knows he is The One. And when she gets pregnant without even trying, she knows it’s her ticket to freedom – even though everyone else calls it a prison sentence. But can her dream of Happy Families stand up to reality?

Two short stories, from the English novelist and short story writer, whose writings can be seen as critiques of Victorian era attitudes, particularly those toward women, with complex narratives and dynamic women characters.

The six stories in Haruki Murakami’s mesmerizing collection are set at the time of the catastrophic 1995 Kobe earthquake, when Japan became brutally aware of the fragility of its daily existence. But the upheavals that afflict Murakami’s characters are even deeper and more mysterious, emanating from a place where the human meets the inhuman.

An electronics salesman who has been abruptly deserted by his wife agrees to deliver an enigmatic package—and is rewarded with a glimpse of his true nature. A man who has been raised to view himself as the son of God pursues a stranger who may or may not be his human father. A mild-mannered collection agent receives a visit from a giant talking frog who enlists his help in saving Tokyo from destruction. As haunting as dreams, as potent as oracles, the stories in After the Quake are further proof that Murakami is one of the most visionary writers at work today.

Amazon.com Review

Haruki Murakami, a writer both mystical and hip, is the West’s favorite Japanese novelist. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Murakami lived abroad until 1995. That year, two disasters struck Japan: the lethal earthquake in Kobe and the deadly poison gas attacks in the Tokyo subway. Spurred by these tragic events, Murakami returned home. The stories in After the Quake are set in the months that fell between the earthquake and the subway attack, presenting a world marked by despair, hope, and a kind of human instinct for transformation. A teenage girl and a middle-aged man share a hobby of making beach bonfires; a businesswoman travels to Thailand and, quietly, confronts her own death; three friends act out a modern-day Tokyo version of Jules and Jim. There’s a surreal element running through the collection in the form of unlikely frogs turning up in unlikely places. News of the earthquake hums throughout. The book opens with the dull buzz of disaster-watching: “Five straight days she spent in front of the television, staring at the crumbled banks and hospitals, whole blocks of stores in flames, severed rail lines and expressways.” With language that’s never self-consciously lyrical or show-offy, Murakami constructs stories as tight and beautiful as poems. There’s no turning back for his people; there’s only before and after the quake.

—Claire Dederer

From Publishers Weekly

These six stories, all loosely connected to the disastrous 1995 earthquake in Kobe, are Murakami (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle; Norwegian Wood) at his best. The writer, who returned to live in Japan after the Kobe earthquake, measures his country’s suffering and finds reassurance in the inevitability that love will surmount tragedy, mustering his casually elegant prose and keen sense of the absurd in the service of healing. In “Honey Pie,” Junpei, a gentle, caring man, loses his would-be sweetheart, Sayoko, when his aggressive best friend, Takatsuki, marries her. They have a child, Sala. He remains close friends with them and becomes even closer after they divorce, but still cannot bring himself to declare his love for Sayoko. Sala is traumatized by the quake and Junpei concocts a wonderful allegorical tale to ease her hurt and give himself the courage to reveal his love for Sayoko. In “UFO in Kushiro” the horrors of the quake inspire a woman to leave her perfectly respectable and loving husband, Komura, because “you have nothing inside you that you can give me.” Komura then has a surreal experience that more or less confirms his wife’s assessment. The theme of nothingness is revisited in the powerful “Thailand,” in which a female doctor who is on vacation in Thailand and very bitter after a divorce, encounters a mysterious old woman who tells her “There is a stone inside your body…. You must get rid of the stone. Otherwise, after you die and are cremated, only the stone will remain.” The remaining stories are of equal quality, the characters fully developed and memorable. Murakami has created a series of small masterpieces.

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A SANGRE Y FUEGO es el título de la serie de nueve relatos que Manuel Chaves Nogales (Sevilla, 1897-Londres, 1944) escribió sobre la Guerra Civil española. Periodista vocacional y paradigma del intelectual comprometido con su tiempo, el autor se aleja de la demagogia y del fácil maniqueísmo con que suele tratarse esta terrible época de nuestra historia, preocupándose más por el perfil humano de quienes sufrieron dicha contienda que por su faceta política. Es el deseo de imparcialidad el que provoca el estremecimiento en el lector: ni buenos ni malos, ni verdugos ni mártires; tan sólo hay crueldad, absurdo, desorientación y obcecación de unos y otros. Manuel Chaves Nogales escribió A SANGRE Y FUEGO en 1937 en Francia, desde el exilio, y constituye una muestra certera de lo que significa la agilidad del periodista al servicio de la realidad y el uso de la literatura como medio de denuncia: son reales las anécdotas y reales los lugares donde ocurren, y es la magnífica prosa del autor un medio más para transmitir esa realidad a veces irónica, otras desoladora. Tal vez por todo esto son muchos los que consideran que A SANGRE Y FUEGO es, posiblemente, uno de los mejores libros de ficción que se han escrito jamás sobre la Guerra Civil española.

Reminiscent of Aimee Bender and Karen Russell—an enthralling new collection that uses the world of the imagination to explore the heart of the human condition.

Major new literary talent Ramona Ausubel combines the otherworldly wisdom of her much-loved debut novel, No One Is Here Except All of Us, with the precision of the short-story form. A Guide toBeing Born is organized around the stages of life—love, conception, gestation, birth—and the transformations that happen as people experience deeply altering life events, falling in love, becoming parents, looking toward the end of life. In each of these eleven stories Ausubel’s stunning imagination and humor are moving, entertaining, and provocative, leading readers to see the familiar world in a new way.

In “Atria” a pregnant teenager believes she will give birth to any number of strange animals rather than a human baby; in “Catch and Release” a girl discovers the ghost of a Civil War hero living in the woods behind her house; and in “Tributaries” people grow a new arm each time they fall in love. Funny, surprising, and delightfully strange—all the stories have a strong emotional core; Ausubel’s primary concern is always love, in all its manifestations.

An award-winning debut novel about a quirky immigrant’s journey through a multicultural, post-nationalist landscape

Set in Frankfurt, All Russians Love Birch Trees follows a young immigrant named Masha. Fluent in five languages and able to get by in several others, Masha lives with her boyfriend, Elias. Her best friends are Muslims struggling to obtain residence permits, and her parents rarely leave the house except to compare gas prices. Masha has nearly completed her studies to become an interpreter, when suddenly Elias is hospitalized after a serious soccer injury and dies, forcing her to question a past that has haunted her for years.

Olga Grjasnowa has a unique gift for seeing the funny side of even the most tragic situations. With cool irony, her debut novel tells the story of a headstrong young woman for whom the issue of origin and nationality is immaterial—her Jewish background has taught her she can survive anywhere. Yet Masha isn’t equipped to deal with grief, and this all-too-normal shortcoming gives a particularly bittersweet quality to her adventures.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTqTHwiNPmc

Jerry Delfont leads an aimless life in Calcutta, struggling in vain against his writer's block, or 'dead hand,' and flitting around the edges of a half-hearted romance. Then he receives a mysterious letter asking for his help. The story it tells is disturbing: A dead boy found on the floor of a cheap hotel, a seemingly innocent man in flight and fearing for reputation as well as his life.

Before long, Delfont finds himself lured into the company of the letter's author, the wealthy and charming Merrill Unger, and is intrigued enough to pursue both the mystery and the woman. A devotee of the goddess Kali, Unger introduces Delfont to a strange underworld where tantric sex and religious fervor lead to obsession, philanthropy and exploitation walk hand in hand, and, unless he can act in time, violence against the most vulnerable in society goes unnoticed and unpunished.

An atmospheric and masterful thriller from "the most gifted, the most prodigal writer of his generation"-Jonathan Raban.

Brilliant and original, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers introduces a remarkable new writer whose breathtaking stories are set in China and among Chinese Americans in the United States. In this rich, astonishing collection, Yiyun Li illuminates how mythology, politics, history, and culture intersect with personality to create fate. From the bustling heart of Beijing, to a fast-food restaurant in Chicago, to the barren expanse of Inner Mongolia, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers reveals worlds both foreign and familiar, with heartbreaking honesty and in beautiful prose.

“Immortality,” winner of The Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize for new writers, tells the story of a young man who bears a striking resemblance to a dictator and so finds a calling to immortality. In “The Princess of Nebraska,” a man and a woman who were both in love with a young actor in China meet again in America and try to reconcile the lost love with their new lives.

“After a Life” illuminates the vagaries of marriage, parenthood, and gender, unfolding the story of a couple who keep a daughter hidden from the world. And in “A Thousand Years of Good Prayers,” in which a man visits America for the first time to see his recently divorced daughter, only to discover that all is not as it seems, Li boldly explores the effects of communism on language, faith, and an entire people, underlining transformation in its many meanings and incarnations.

These and other daring stories form a mesmerizing tapestry of revelatory fiction by an unforgettable writer.

If anything's going to save the characters in Amelia Gray's debut from their troubled romances, their social improprieties, or their hands turning into claws, it's a John Mayer concert tee. In AM/PM, impish humor and cutting insight are on full display. Readers tour the lives of 23 characters across 120 stories full of lizard tails, Schrödinger boxes, and volcano love. June wakes up one morning covered in seeds; Leonard falls in love with a chaise lounge; Betty insists everything except flowers are a symbol of her love for her husband; Andrew talks to his house in times of crisis. Written every morning and night for two months, these brief vignettes (50 to 100 words) recall Donald Barthelme in their whimsy and subtle yet powerful emotions. An intermittent love story as seen through a darkly comic lens, AM/PM mixes poetry and prose, humor and hubris to create a truly original work of fiction.

Handsome Eddie Hartley was once a golden boy poised for the kind of success promised by good looks and a modicum of talent. Now thirty-three, he has abandoned his dream of an acting career and accepted the reality of life as a drama teacher at the boys' prep school he once attended. But when Eddie and his wife, Susan, discover they cannot have children, it's one disappointment too many.

Weighted down with debt, Susan's mounting unhappiness, and his own deepening sense of failure, Eddie is confronted with an alluring solution when an old friend-turned-Web-impresario suggests Eddie sell a sex tape he made with an ex-girlfriend, now a wildly popular television star. In an era when any publicity is good publicity, Eddie imagines that the tape won't cause any harm — a mistake that will have disastrous consequences and propel him straight into the glaring spotlight he once thought he craved.

A hilariously biting and incisive takedown of our culture's monstrous obsession with fame, Arts & Entertainments is also a poignant and humane portrait of a young man's belated coming-of-age, the complications of love, and the surprising ways in which the most meaningful lives often turn out to be the ones we least expected to lead.

Lynne Tillman’s previous novels have won her both popular approval and critical praise from such literary heavyweights as Edmund White and Colm Tóibín. With American Genius, her first novel since 1998's No Lease on Life, she shows what might happen if Jane Austen were writing in 21st-century America. Employing her trademark crystalline prose and intricate, hypnotic sentences, Tillman fashions a microcosm of American democracy: a scholarly colony functioning like Melville’s Pequod. In this otherworld, competing values — rationality and irrationality, generosity and selfishness, love and lust, shame and honor — collide through a witty narrative, cycling through such disparate tropes as skin disease, chair design, and Manifest Destiny. All this is folded into the narrator’s memories and emotional life, culminating in a séance that may offer escape and transcendence — or perhaps nothing. Grand and minute, elegiac and hilarious, Lynne Tillman expands the possibilities of the American novel in this dazzling read.

…or perhaps author Nikanor Teratologen is the devil himself, sending the English-speaking world a Scandinavian squib to remind readers that such reassuring figures as vampires and serial killers are no more frightening than pixies or unicorns in light of the depravity contained in one quiet suburb. Reading like a deranged hybrid of Deliverance, Naked Lunch, and Tuesdays with Morrie, and rivaling The 120 Days of Sodom in its challenge to our assumptions as to what is acceptable (or not) in literature, Assisted Living presents us with a series of queasy anecdotes concerning an eleven-year-old boy and his grandfather, a monster for whom murder, violence, incest, drunkenness, and philosophy all pass as equally valid ways to spend one’s time. Whether it’s a study in excess, a parody of provincial proto-fascism, a clear-eyed look at evil, or simply a prodigious literary dare, Assisted Living is unlikely to leave you indifferent.

Friedrich Baroh, is beset by problems. Anarch, aspiring entrepreneur, and amateur historian of ideas, the aristocratic Baroh is also, unfortunately, a soldier in the East German army. His eventual defection to the West leads to a college degree, marriage, and a good job at his uncle's funeral parlor, but it can't dispel Baroh's other problem, a metaphysical one: each man is alone. Since, paradoxically, this is a predicament he shares with the rest of humanity, Baroh decides to capitalize on it. He embarks on a mind-boggling and macabre enterprise — the construction of Terrestra, an international, nondenominational necropolis situated in the wastelands of Turkey. Soon, secondary businesses are called for: airlines, travel agencies, anything to make Terrestra more accessible to anyone who can afford it. His scheme is so overwhelmingly successful that Baroh is forced to take on help, including the enigmatic Phares, whose unsettling presence and gnomic utterances may, at last, help Baroh to understand the depths of the problem he has set for himself. As mordantly ironic as Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One, Aladdin's Problem is a richly poetic meditation on the rituals of death. In its prismatic complexity, its philosophical depth, Junger's half-mythical, half-political tale becomes a caustic allegory of the conditions of modern life.

Eimear McBride's debut tells, with astonishing insight and in brutal detail, the story of a young woman's relationship with her brother, and the long shadow cast by his childhood brain tumour. Not so much a stream of consciousness, as an unconscious railing against a life that makes little sense, and a shocking and intimate insight into the thoughts, feelings and chaotic sexuality of a vulnerable and isolated protagonist, to read A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing is to plunge inside its narrator's head, experiencing her world first-hand. This isn't always comfortable — but it is always a revelation.

Touching on everything from family violence to sexuality and the personal struggle to remain intact in times of intense trauma, McBride writes with singular intensity, acute sensitivity and mordant wit. A Girl is a Half-formed Thing is moving, funny — and alarming. It is a book you will never forget.

From the award-winning author of Waiting: a spare, haunting tale of espionage and conflicted loyalties that spans half a century in the entwined histories of two countries — China and the United States — and two families as it explores the complicated terrain of love and honor.

When Lilian Shang, born and raised in America, discovers her father’s diary after the death of her parents, she is shocked by the secrets it contains. She knew that her father, Gary, convicted decades ago of being a mole in the CIA, was the most important Chinese spy ever caught. But his diary — an astonishing chronicle of his journey from 1949 Shanghai to Okinawa to Langley, Virginia — reveals the pain and longing that his double life entailed. The trail leads Lilian to China, to her father’s long-abandoned other family, whose existence she and her Irish American mother never suspected. As Lilian begins to fathom her father’s dilemma — torn between loyalty to his motherland and the love he came to feel for his adopted country — she sees how his sense of duty distorted his life. But as she starts to understand that Gary, too, had been betrayed, she finds that it is up to her to prevent his tragedy from damaging yet another generation of her family.

In his first book of stories since The Bridegroom was published in 2000 ("Finely wrought. . Every story here is cut like a stone." — Chicago Sun-Times), National Book Award — winning Ha Jin gives us a collection that delves into the experience of Chinese immigrants in America.

With the same profound attention to detail that is a hallmark of his previous acclaimed works of fiction, Ha Jin depicts here the full spectrum of immigrant life and the daily struggles — some minute, some grand — faced by these intriguing individuals.

A lonely composer takes comfort in the antics of his girlfriend's parakeet; young children decide to change their names so that they might sound more "American," unaware of how deeply this will hurt their grandparents; a Chinese professor of English attempts to defect with the help of a reluctant former student. All of Ha Jin's characters struggle in situations that stir within them a desire to remain attached to be loyal to their homeland and its traditions as they explore and avail themselves of the freedom that life in a new country offers.

In these stark, deeply moving, acutely insightful, and often strikingly humorous stories, we are reminded once again of the storytelling prowess of this superb writer.

From the award-winning and highly acclaimed author of Ella Minnow Pea comes Mark Dunn's most ambitious novel to date. American Decameron tells one hundred stories, each taking place in a different year of the 20th century.

A girl in Galveston is born on the eve of a great storm and the dawn of the 20th century. Survivors of the Lusitania are accidentally reunited in the North Atlantic. A member of the Bonus Army find himself face to face with General MacArthur. A failed writer attempts to end his life on the Golden Gate Bridge until an unexpected heroine comes to his rescue, and on the doorstep of a new millennium, as the clock strikes twelve, the stage is set for a stunning denouement as the American century converges upon itself in a Greenwich nursing home, tying together all of the previous tales and the last one hundred years.

Zany and affecting, deeply moving and wildly hilarious, American Decameron is one America's most powerful voices at the top its game.

From acclaimed author Dinaw Mengestu, a recipient of the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 award, The New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 award, and a 2012 MacArthur Foundation genius grant, comes an unforgettable love story about a searing affair between an American woman and an African man in 1970s America and an unflinching novel about the fragmentation of lives that straddle countries and histories.

All Our Names is the story of two young men who come of age during an African revolution, drawn from the safe confines of the university campus into the intensifying clamor of the streets outside. But as the line between idealism and violence becomes increasingly blurred, the friends are driven apart — one into the deepest peril, as the movement gathers inexorable force, and the other into the safety of exile in the American Midwest. There, pretending to be an exchange student, he falls in love with a social worker and settles into small-town life. Yet this idyll is inescapably darkened by the secrets of his past: the acts he committed and the work he left unfinished. Most of all, he is haunted by the beloved friend he left behind, the charismatic leader who first guided him to revolution and then sacrificed everything to ensure his freedom.

Elegiac, blazing with insights about the physical and emotional geographies that circumscribe our lives, All Our Names is a marvel of vision and tonal command. Writing within the grand tradition of Naipul, Greene, and Achebe, Mengestu gives us a political novel that is also a transfixing portrait of love and grace, of self-determination and the names we are given and the names we earn.

Adrian Sherd is a teenage boy in Melbourne of the 1950s — the last years before television and the family car changed suburbia forever.

Earnest and isolated, tormented by his hormones and his religious devotion, Adrian dreams of elaborate orgies with American film stars, and of marrying his sweetheart and fathering eleven children by her. He even dreams a history of the world as a chronicle of sexual frustration.

The major work of fiction in this collection, ‘A History of Books’, explores the relationship between reading and writing in twenty nine sections, each of which begins with the memory of a book that has left an image in the writer’s mind. The memory of the books themselves might have faded, but the images remain in their clarity and import — scenes of discord and madness, a stern-faced man, a young woman on a swing, a glass of beer and rays of sunlight, mountain and woodland and horizon — images which together embody the anxieties and aspirations of a writing life, and its indebtedness to what has been written and read. ‘A History of Books’ is accompanied by three shorter works, ‘As It Were a Letter’, ‘The Boy’s Name was David’ and ‘Last Letter to a Niece’, in which a writer searches for an ideal world, an ideal sentence, and an ideal reader.

Новый роман одного из самых талантливых писателей поколения 35-летних, финалиста премий «Русский Букер»-2008 и «Национальный бестселлер»-2009.

Загадочное убийство на новогоднем корпоративе. Убит председатель совета директоров холдинга «А.Д.». Расследование поручают следователю по особо важным делам Главного следственного управления по Северо-Западному округу П.Б.Катаеву.

Опрос свидетелей, поиск улик, оперативные мероприятия… Однако рутинная следственная работа приведет Катаева к удивительному открытию: не каждый подозреваемый виновен, но кто убийца, а кто жертва решает далеко не милиция…

The incomparable Ali Smith melds the tale and the essay into a magical hybrid form, a song of praise to the power of stories in our lives

In February 2012, the novelist Ali Smith delivered the Weidenfeld lectures on European comparative literature at St. Anne’s College, Oxford. Her lectures took the shape of this set of discursive stories. Refusing to be tied down to either fiction or the essay form, Artful is narrated by a character who is haunted — literally — by a former lover, the writer of a series of lectures about art and literature.

A hypnotic dialogue unfolds, a duet between and a meditation on art and storytelling, a book about love, grief, memory, and revitalization. Smith’s heady powers as a fiction writer harmonize with her keen perceptions as a reader and critic to form a living thing that reminds us that life and art are never separate.

Artful is a book about the things art can do, the things art is full of, and the quicksilver nature of all artfulness. It glances off artists and writers from Michelangelo through Dickens, then all the way past postmodernity, exploring every form, from ancient cave painting to 1960s cinema musicals. This kaleidoscope opens up new, inventive, elastic insights — on the relation of aesthetic form to the human mind, the ways we build our minds from stories, the bridges art builds between us. Artful is a celebration of literature’s worth in and to the world and a meaningful contribution to that worth in itself. There has never been a book quite like it.

From the MacArthur and Whiting Award — winning author of John Henry Days and The Intuitionist comes a new, brisk, comic tour de force about identity,history, and the adhesive bandage industry.

When the citizens of Winthrop needed a new name for their town, they did what anyone would do — they hired a consultant. The protagonist of Apex Hides the Hurt is a nomenclature consultant. If you want just the right name for your new product, whether it be automobile or antidepressant, sneaker or spoon, he’s the man to get the job done. Wardrobe lack pizzazz? Come to the Outfit Outlet. Always the wallflower at social gatherings? Try Loquacia. And of course, whenever you take a fall, reach for Apex, because Apex Hides the Hurt. Apex is his crowning achievement, the multicultural bandage that has revolutionized the adhesive bandage industry. “Flesh-colored” be damned — no matter what your skin tone is — Apex will match it, or your money back.

After leaving his job (following a mysterious misfortune), his expertise is called upon by the town of Winthrop. Once there, he meets the town council, who will try to sway his opinion over the coming days. Lucky Aberdeen, the millionaire software pioneer and hometown-boy-made-good, wants the name changed to something that will reflect the town’s capitalist aspirations, attracting new businesses and revitalizing the community. Who could argue with that? Albie Winthrop, beloved son of the town’s aristocracy, thinks Winthrop is a perfectly good name, and can’t imagine what the fuss is about. Regina Goode, the mayor, is a descendent of the black settlers who founded the town, and has her own secret agenda for what the name should be. Our expert must decide the outcome, with all its implications for the town’s future. Which name will he choose? Or perhaps he will devise his own? And what’s with his limp, anyway?

Apex Hides the Hurt brilliantly and wryly satirizes our contemporary culture, where memory and history are subsumed by the tides of marketing.

James Kelman's first collection of short stories — as fresh and sharp as when they first appeared from US publisher Puckerbrush Press. Set among the tenements and bedsits of Glasgow, they shine a light on the exploits of young and old. James Kelman had been writing since 1967 and by 1971 had enough stories for a book. In 1973, An Old Pub Near the Angel was published and the rest is history. The US edition has never been out of print.

Tammas is 20, a loner and a compulsive gambler. Unable to hold a job for long, his life revolves around Glasgow bars, living with his sister and brother-in-law, betting shops, and casinos. Sometimes Tammas wins, more often he loses. But gambling gives him as good a chance as any of discovering what he seeks from life since society offers no prospect of a more fulfilling alternative.

Two men, one in search of a woman, the other in search of his true self, meet in a bizarre household on an uncharted island hideaway in the Mississippi. Richard Ford's first novel is brutal, yet often moving and funny.

In each of these tales master storyteller Richard Ford is drawn to the themes of intimacy, love, and their failures. An illicit visit to the Grand Canyon reveals a vastness even more profound; an exacting career woman celebrates Christmas with her adamantly post-nuclear family; a couple weekending in Maine try to recapture the ardour that has disappeared, both gradually and suddenly, from their lives; on a spring evening's drive, a young wife confesses to her husband the affair she had with the host of the dinner party they're about to join.

"Jemc's novel My Only Wife is a brilliant, haunting, and heartbreaking debut that explores themes of loss and love." — Largehearted Boy

A thief steals the air from a room. Children invent a nursery rhyme to make sense of their fate. A band of girls rot from the outside in. These characters stumble through joy and murder and confusion, only to survive and wait for the next catastrophe to arrive. Moments so brief and disturbing you can't afford to look away. Jac Jemc's affecting stories mine the territory between what is real and the stories we tell to create understanding.

From the prize-winning Chilean novelist Antonio Skármeta, author of Il Postino, comes this soulful novella about a son and his estranged father.

Jacques is a schoolteacher in a small Chilean village, and a French translator for the local paper. He owes his passion for the French language to his Parisian father, Pierre, who, one year before, abruptly returned to France without a word of explanation. Jacques and his mother’s sense of abandonment is made more acute by their isolation in this small community where few read or think. While Jacques finds distraction in a crush on his student’s older sister, his preoccupation with his father’s disappearance continues to haunt him. But there is often more to a story than the torment it causes. This one is about forgiveness and second chances.

A singularly talented writer makes his literary debut with this provocative, soulful, and sometimes hilarious story of a failed journalist asked to do the unthinkable: Forge Holocaust-restitution claims for old Russian Jews in Brooklyn, New York.

Yevgeny Gelman, grandfather of Slava Gelman, "didn't suffer in the exact way" he needs to have suffered to qualify for the restitution the German government has been paying out to Holocaust survivors. But suffer he has-as a Jew in the war; as a second-class citizen in the USSR; as an immigrant to America. So? Isn't his grandson a "writer"?

High-minded Slava wants to put all this immigrant scraping behind him. Only the American Dream is not panning out for him-Century, the legendary magazine where he works as a researcher, wants nothing greater from him. Slava wants to be a correct, blameless American-but he wants to be a lionized writer even more.

Slava's turn as the Forger of South Brooklyn teaches him that not every fact is the truth, and not every lie a falsehood. It takes more than law-abiding to become an American; it takes the same self-reinvention in which his people excel. Intoxicated and unmoored by his inventions, Slava risks exposure. Cornered, he commits an irrevocable act that finally grants him a sense of home in America, but not before collecting a price from his family.

A Replacement Life is a dark, moving, and beautifully written novel about family, honor, and justice.

January 1944. Out in the wastes of the Indian Ocean, British ships are sinking. The cause: a German armed raider, disguised to deceive unwary merchantmen. In Williamstown, Australia, HMS Andromeda awaits transfer to the Australian navy. After years together in bloody combat with the Nazis, the cruiser's crew will disperse to fight in other ships, in other seas. But a call to Andromeda's youthful captain, Richard Blake VC, changes everything. He puts to sea immediately. His mission: to seek out and destroy the raider. And in this conflict, one ship must die.

An uninvited guest, entering the empty New York apartment of a man known to intimates as “Dom,” proceeds to write for his absent host a curious confession. Its close accounts of friendship since boyhood with two men surely unknown to Dom and certainly to each other is interleaved with the story of Dom himself.

This new work of fiction by one of Australia’s most highly regarded authors focuses on the importance of trust, and the possibility of betrayal, in storytelling as in life. It tests the relationship established between author and reader, and on occasions of intimacy, between child and parent, boyfriend and girlfriend, husband and wife. Murnane’s fiction is woven from images, and the feelings associated with them, and the images that flit through A Million Windows like butterflies — the reflections of the setting sun like spots of golden oil, the houses of two or perhaps three storeys, the procession of dark-haired females, the clearing in the forest, the colours indigo and silver-grey, the death of a young woman who had leaped into a well — build to an emotional crescendo that is all the more powerful for the intricacy of their patterning.

Robert Olen Butler's lyrical and poignant collection of stories about the aftermath of the Vietnam War and its impact on the Vietnamese was acclaimed by critics across the nation and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993. Now Grove Press is proud to reissue this contemporary classic by one of America's most important living writers, in a new edition of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain that includes two subsequently published stories — "Salem" and "Missing" — that brilliantly complete the collection's narrative journey, returning to the jungles of Vietnam.

Set in contemporary New Orleans but working its way back in time, A Small Hotel chronicles the relationship between Michael and Kelly Hays, who have decided to separate after twenty-four years of marriage. The book begins on the day that the Hays are to finalize their divorce. Kelly is due to be in court, but instead she drives from her home in Pensacola, Florida, across the panhandle to New Orleans and checks into Room 303 at the Olivier House in the city’s French Quarter — the hotel where she and Michael fell in love some twenty-five years earlier and where she now finds herself about to make a decision that will forever affect her, Michael, and their nineteen-year-old daughter, Samantha. An intelligent, deeply moving, and remarkably written portrait of a relationship that reads as a cross between a romance novel and a literary page turner, A Small Hotel is a masterful story that will remind readers once again why Robert Olen Butler has been called the “best living American writer” (Jeff Guinn, Fort Worth Star-Telegram).

“Adventures in the Immediate Unreality” is an exceptional novel, highly personal and, in the same time, universal, describing the fall into maturity of a young man with exacerbated sensibility.

The small, insignificant town is the scenery of incredible encounters with different characters, who populate a world far away from the natural rules of the universe. The discovery of the sexuality has in itself the power of the primitive initiations, but also the perversity of the surrealist paintings.

The laws of friendship rely on the capacity of the two parts to build around them a world without meaning or history. The nature is overwhelming, miraculous, troublesome. The houses live their own lives, being true bodies that breathe, suffer, transform.

The final, senseless death of a young, beautiful, mysterious young woman brings with it a deep understanding of life as a long series of sufferings and illuminations, administered by fear, nightmares, pain, but also by aesthetic ecstasies and intellectual crisis.

As a child during the Depression and World War II, Pete Hamill learned early that drinking was an essential part of being a man, inseparable from the rituals of celebration, mourning, friendship, romance, and religion. Only later did he discover its ability to destroy any writer's most valuable tools: clarity, consciousness, memory. In *A Drinking Life*, Hamill explains how alcohol slowly became a part of his life, and how he ultimately left it behind. Along the way, he summons the mood of an America that is gone forever, with the bittersweet fondness of a lifelong New Yorker.

In her old house by the fjord, Signe lies on a bench and sees a vision of herself as she was more than twenty years earlier: standing by the window waiting for her husband Asle, on that terrible late November day when he took his rowboat out onto the water and never returned. Her memories widen out to include their whole life together, and beyond: the bonds of one family and their battles with implacable nature stretching back over five generations, to Asle's great-great-grandmother Aliss.

In Jon Fosse's vivid, hallucinatory prose, all these moments in time inhabit the same space, and the ghosts of the past collide with those who still live on.

Aliss at the Fire is a haunting exploration of love, ranking among the greatest meditations on marriage and loss.

"Rodrigo de Souza Leão is an exceptional author and has had a major impact on contemporary Brazilian literature." — Paulo Scott

All Dogs are Blue is a scurrilously funny tale of life in a Rio insane asylum. Its raw style and comic inventiveness signal a major voice in Brazilian literature. Sadly the author died, aged forty-three, soon after it was published in 2008.

Due to his mental fragility, Rodrigo de Souza Leão rarely left his house and yet, through social media, blogging, and e-mail, he became close to many Brazilian writers and poets and remains highly regarded today.

The stormy tale of a wife trapped in the antiquated ways of the past, and of two brothers who have fought on opposing sides of the Civil War.

Lucinda Delaney is a southern belle ruled by a vision of life that no longer exists. The Civil War has come and gone and her side has lost, yet she is determined to proceed as if nothing has changed — a denial that stokes the flames of her irrational angers. Despite her returned husband’s devotion, Lucinda is sure he is having an affair with one of their slaves. After all, his Union-sympathizing brother, Tom, did just that, scandalously running away with the woman and settling into contented family life in Philadelphia. Over the years, her racist feelings and fears only intensify, and when it’s time for her own daughter to marry, her chief concern is the color of the children.

The Angry Wife is a memorable and impassioned dissection of prejudice, as well as a riveting portrait of post—Civil War America.

"A House Divided," the third volume of the trilogy that began with "The Good Earth" and "Sons," is a powerful portrayal of China in the midst of revolution. Wang Yuan is caught between the opposing ideas of different generations. After 6 years abroad, Yuan returns to China in the middle of a peasant uprising. His cousin is a captain in the revolutionary army, his sister has scandalized the family by her premarital pregnancy, and his warlord father continues to cling to his traditional ideals. It is through Yuan's efforts that a kind of peace is restored to the family.

“A powerful debut novel that establishes Sharma as a supreme storyteller.”—Philadelphia Inquirer

Ram Karan, a corrupt official in New Delhi, lives with his widowed daughter and his little granddaughter. Bumbling, sad, ironic, Ram is also a man corroded by a terrible secret. Taking the reader down into a world of feuding families and politics, An Obedient Father is a work of rare sensibilities that presents a character as formulated, funny, and morally ambiguous as any of Dostoevsky’s antiheroes.

A lot of remarkable things have happened in the life of Sam Pulsifer, the hapless hero of this incendiary novel, beginning with the ten years he spent in prison for accidentally burning down Emily Dickinson's house and unwittingly killing two people. emerging at age twenty-eight, he creates a new life and identity as a husband and father. But when the homes of other famous New England writers suddenly go up in smoke, he must prove his innocence by uncovering the identity of this literary-minded arsonist.

In the league of such contemporary classics as A Confederacy of Dunces and The World According to Garp, An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England is an utterly original story about truth and honesty, life and the imagination.

When a copywriter is stranded on a small island in the Pacific after helping a soft drink commercial shoot, she uncovers a terrible secret that eventually drives her to the brink of insanity. Svoboda's stunning novel, frighteningly mysterious and complex, deals with many themes: a child's accidental death and the guilt a surviving parent must cope with, the inhumanity with which faraway governments often treat indigenous peoples, and the relationship between sex and reproduction in both personal and social contexts.

A novel about survival, self-reliance, and art, by Peter Stamm, finalist for the 2013 Man Booker International Prize.

All Days Are Night is the story of Gillian, a successful and beautiful TV host, content with her marriage to Matthias, even if she feels restless at times. One night following an argument, the couple has a terrible car accident: Matthias, who is drunk, hits a deer on the wet road and dies in the crash. Gillian wakes up in the hospital completely disfigured. Only slowly, after many twists and turns, does she put her life back together, and reconnects with a love interest of the past who becomes a possible future — or so it seems. In Stamm’s unadorned and haunting style, this new novel forcefully tells the story of a woman who loses her life but must stay alive all the same. How she works everything out in the end is at once surprising and incredibly rewarding.

“Of my generation I most admire Daniel Sada, whose writing project seems to me the most daring.” —Roberto Bolaño.

This Rabelaisian tale of lust and longing in the drier precincts of postwar Mexico introduces one of Latin America’s most admired writers to the English-speaking world.

Demetrio Sordo is an agronomist who passes his days in a dull but remunerative job at a ranch near Oaxaca. It is 1945, World War II has just ended, but those bloody events have had no impact on a country that is only on the cusp of industrializing. One day, more bored than usual, Demetrio visits a bordello in search of a libidinous solution to his malaise. There he begins an all-consuming and, all things considered, perfectly satisfying relationship with a prostitute named Mireya.

A letter from his mother interrupts Demetrio’s debauched idyll: she asks him to return home to northern Mexico to accompany her to a wedding in a small town on the edge of the desert. Much to his mother’s delight, he meets the beautiful and virginal Renata and quickly falls in love — a most proper kind of love.

Back in Oaxaca, Demetrio is torn, the poor cad. Naturally he tries to maintain both relationships, continuing to frolic with Mireya and beginning a chaste correspondence with Renata. But Mireya has problems of her own — boredom is not among them — and concocts a story that she hopes will help her escape from the bordello and compel Demetrio to marry her. Almost Never is a brilliant send-up of Latin American machismo that also evokes a Mexico on the verge of dramatic change.

Four people, each in search of some real value in life, drive from Mexico City to Veracruz for Semana Santa — Holy Week.

This brilliant new novel by an American master, the author of Ragtime, The Book of Daniel, Billy Bathgate, and The March, takes us on a radical trip into the mind of a man who, more than once in his life, has been an inadvertent agent of disaster.

Speaking from an unknown place and to an unknown interlocutor, Andrew is thinking, Andrew is talking, Andrew is telling the story of his life, his loves, and the tragedies that have led him to this place and point in time. And as he confesses, peeling back the layers of his strange story, we are led to question what we know about truth and memory, brain and mind, personality and fate, about one another and ourselves.

From Ragtime and Billy Bathgate to World’s Fair, The March, and Homer & Langley, the fiction of E. L. Doctorow comprises a towering achievement in modern American letters. Now Doctorow returns with an enthralling collection of brilliant, startling short fiction about people who, as the author notes in his Preface, are somehow “distinct from their surroundings — people in some sort of contest with the prevailing world”.

A man at the end of an ordinary workday, extracts himself from his upper-middle-class life and turns to foraging in the same affluent suburb where he once lived with his family.

A college graduate takes a dishwasher’s job on a whim, and becomes entangled in a criminal enterprise after agreeing to marry a beautiful immigrant for money.

A husband and wife’s tense relationship is exacerbated when a stranger enters their home and claims to have grown up there.

An urbanite out on his morning run suspects that the city in which he’s lived all his life has transmogrified into another city altogether.

These are among the wide-ranging creations in this stunning collection, resonant with the mystery, tension, and moral investigation that distinguish the fiction of E. L. Doctorow. Containing six unforgettable stories that have never appeared in book form, and a selection of previous Doctorow classics, All the Time in the World affords us another opportunity to savor the genius of this American master.

It’s 1897. Gold has been discovered in the Yukon. New York is under the sway of Hearst and Pulitzer. And in a few months, an American battleship will explode in a Cuban harbor, plunging the U.S. into war. Spanning five years and half a dozen countries, this is the unforgettable story of that extraordinary moment: the turn of the twentieth century, as seen by one of the greatest storytellers of our time.

Shot through with a lyrical intensity and stunning detail that recall Doctorow and Deadwood both, A Moment in the Sun takes the whole era in its sights — from the white-racist coup in Wilmington, North Carolina to the bloody dawn of U.S. interventionism in the Philippines. Beginning with Hod Brackenridge searching for his fortune in the North, and hurtling forward on the voices of a breathtaking range of men and women — Royal Scott, an African American infantryman whose life outside the military has been destroyed; Diosdado Concepcíon, a Filipino insurgent fighting against his country’s new colonizers; and more than a dozen others, Mark Twain and President McKinley’s assassin among them — this is a story as big as its subject: history rediscovered through the lives of the people who made it happen.

It was a spring evening in Washington DC; a chilly autumn morning in Melbourne; it was exactly 22.00 Greenwich Mean Time when a worm entered the computerised control systems of hundreds of Australian prisons and released the locks in many places of incarceration, some of which the hacker could not have known existed.

Because Australian prison security was, in the year 2010, mostly designed and sold by American corporations the worm immediately infected 117 US federal correctional facilities, 1,700 prisons, and over 3,000 county jails. Wherever it went, it traveled underground, in darkness, like a bushfire burning in the roots of trees. Reaching its destinations it announced itself: The corporation is under our control. The angel declares you free.

Has a young Australian woman declared cyber war on the United States? Or was her Angel Worm intended only to open the prison doors of those unfortunates detained by Australia's harsh immigration policies? Did America suffer collateral damage? Is she innocent? Can she be saved?

Nelson’s life is not turning out the way he hoped. His girlfriend is sleeping with another man, his brother has left their South American country and moved to the United States, leaving Nelson to care for their widowed mother, and his acting career can’t seem to get off the ground. That is, until he lands a starring role in a touring revival of The Idiot President, a legendary play by Nelson’s hero, Henry Nunez, leader of the storied guerrilla theater troupe Diciembre. And that’s when the real trouble begins.

The tour takes Nelson out of the shelter of the city and across a landscape he’s never seen, which still bears the scars of the civil war. With each performance, Nelson grows closer to his fellow actors, becoming hopelessly entangled in their complicated lives, until, during one memorable performance, a long-buried betrayal surfaces to force the troupe into chaos.

Emmett has a wife and two children, a cat, and a duck, and he wants to know what life is about. Every day he gets up before dawn, makes a cup of coffee in the dark, lights a fire with one wooden match, and thinks.

What Emmett thinks about is the subject of this wise and closely observed novel, which covers vast distances while moving no farther than Emmett’s hearth and home. Nicholson Baker’s extraordinary ability to describe and celebrate life in all its rich ordinariness has never been so beautifully achieved.

Baker won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper. He now returns to fiction with this lovely book, reminiscent of the early novels—Room Temperature and The Mezzanine—that established his reputation.

A triumphant literary debut with notes of both The Art of Fielding and The Flamethrowers, which introduces the striking figure of Owen Burr, a gifted Olympics-bound athlete whose dreams of greatness are deferred and then transformed by an unlikely journey from California to Berlin, Athens, Iceland, and back again.

Owen Burr, a towering athlete at Stanford University, son of renowned classicist Professor Joseph Burr, was destined to compete in the Athens Olympic Games of 2004. But in his final match at Stanford, he is blinded in one eye. The wound shatters his identity and any prospects he had as an athlete.

Determined to make a new name for himself, Owen flees the country and lands in Berlin, where he meets a group of wildly successful artists living in the Teutonic equivalent of Warhol’s Factory. An irresistible sight — nearly seven-feet-tall, wearing an eye patch and a corduroy suit — Owen is quickly welcomed by the group’s leader, who schemes to appropriate Owen’s image and sell the results at Art Basel. With his warped and tortured image on the auction block, Owen seeks revenge.

Professor Burr has never been the father he wants to be. Owen’s disappearance triggers a call to action. He dusts off his more speculative theory, Liminalism, to embark on a speaking tour, pushing theory to its radical extreme — at his own peril and with Jean Baudrillard’s help — in order to send up flares for his son in Athens, Berlin, and Iceland.

A compulsively readable novel of ideas, action, and intrigue, A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall offers a persuasive vision of personal agency, art, family, and the narratives we build for ourselves.

On 3 December 1976, just weeks before the general election and two days before Bob Marley was to play the Smile Jamaica Concert to ease political tensions, seven gunmen from West Kingston stormed his house with machine guns blazing. Marley survived and went on to perform at the free concert, but the next day he left the country, and didn’t return for two years. Not a lot was recorded about the fate of the seven gunmen, but much has been said, whispered and sung about in the streets of West Kingston, with information surfacing at odd times, only to sink into rumour and misinformation.

Inspired by this near-mythic event, A Brief History of Seven Killings takes the form of an imagined oral biography, told by ghosts, witnesses, killers, members of parliament, drug dealers, conmen, beauty queens, FBI and CIA agents, reporters, journalists, and even Keith Richards' drug dealer. Marlon James’s bold undertaking traverses strange landscapes and shady characters, as motivations are examined — and questions asked — in this compelling novel of monumental scope and ambition.

From the highly acclaimed author of Atlas of Unknowns (“Dazzling. . One of the most exciting debut novels since Zadie Smith’s White Teeth”—San Francisco Chronicle; “An astonishment of a debut”—Junot Díaz), a bravura collection of short stories set in locales as varied as London, Sierra Leone, and the American Midwest that captures the yearning and dislocation of young men and women around the world.

In “Lion and Panther in London,” a turn-of-the-century Indian wrestler arrives in London desperate to prove himself champion of the world, only to find the city mysteriously absent of challengers. In “Light & Luminous,” a gifted dance instructor falls victim to her own vanity when a student competition allows her a final encore. In “The Scriptological Review: A Last Letter from the Editor,” a young man obsessively studies his father’s handwriting in hopes of making sense of his death. And in the marvelous “What to Do with Henry,” a white woman from Ohio takes in the illegitimate child her husband left behind in Sierra Leone, as well as an orphaned chimpanzee who comes to anchor this strange new family.

With exuberance and compassion, Tania James once again draws us into the lives of damaged, driven, and beautifully complicated characters who quietly strive for human connection.

A poignant, funny, blazingly original debut novel about sisterhood, the tantalizing dream of America, and the secret histories and hilarious eccentricities of families everywhere.

In the wake of their mother’s mysterious death, Linno and Anju are raised in Kerala by their father, Melvin, a reluctant Christian prone to bouts of dyspepsia, and their grandmother, the superstitious and strong-willed Ammachi. When Anju wins a scholarship to a prestigious school in America, she seizes the opportunity, even though it means betraying her sister. In New York, Anju is plunged into the elite world of her Hindu American host family, led by a well-known television personality and her fiendishly ambitious son, a Princeton drop out determined to make a documentary about Anju’s life. But when Anju finds herself ensnared by her own lies, she runs away and lands a job as a bikini waxer in a Queens beauty salon.

Meanwhile, back in Kerala, Linno is undergoing a transformation of her own, rejecting the wealthy blind suitor with whom her father had sought to arrange her marriage and using her artistic gifts as a springboard to entrepreneurial success. When Anju goes missing, Linno strikes out farther still, with a scheme to procure a visa so that she can travel to America to search for her vanished sister.

The convergence of their journeys — toward each other, toward America, toward a new understanding of self and country, and toward a heartbreaking mystery long buried in their shared past — brings to life a predicament that is at once modern and timeless: the hunger for independence and the longing for home; the need to preserve the past and the yearning to break away from it. Tania James combines the gifts of an old-fashioned storyteller — engrossing drama, flawless control of plot, beautifully drawn characters, surprises around every turn — with a voice that is fresh and funny and powerfully alive with the dilemmas of modern life. She brings grace, humor, deep feeling, and the command of a born novelist to this marvelous debut.

“A Chance to Get Even” is a story about a poker game. A friendly game-or at least that's how it starts out. I played in a friendly game for years, and still take a hand now and then, but the evenings I spent at the card table never turned out like this.

And that's probably just as well.

When a fire rips through the Venetian Arsenal in 1569, the enigmatic Emanuele De Zante, spy-catcher and secret agent, is betrayed by his lover, imprisoned, and accused of treason. Given the chance to escape, he embarks on a trans-European odyssey that will test his loyalty and force him to question even his own identity.

Through a series of deadly political games leading all the way to the Sultan’s palace in Constantinople, De Zante and his companions spiral headfirst toward a conflict in which the great empires of the Republic of Venice and the Ottomans threaten the very foundations of civilization.

The stories in A Better Angel describe the terrain of human suffering — illness, regret, mourning, sympathy — in the most unusual of ways. In “Stab,” a bereaved twin starts a friendship with a homicidal fifth grader in the hope that she can somehow lead him back to his dead brother. In “Why Antichrist?” a boy tries to contact the spirit of his dead father and finds himself talking to the Devil instead. In the remarkable title story, a ne’er do well pediatrician returns home to take care of his dying father, all the while under the scrutiny of an easily-disappointed heavenly agent.

With Gob’s Grief and The Children’s Hospital, Chris Adrian announced himself as a writer of rare talent and originality. The stories in A Better Angel, some of which have appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, and McSweeney’s, demonstrate more of his endless inventiveness and wit, and they confirm his growing reputation as a most exciting and unusual literary voice — of heartbreaking, magical, and darkly comic tales.

Ever since he can remember, Animal has gone on all fours, the catastrophic result of what happened on That Night when, thanks to an American chemical company, the Apocalypse visited his slum. Now not quite twenty, he leads a hand-to-mouth existence with his dog Jara and a crazy old nun called Ma Franci, and spends his nights fantasising about Nisha, the daughter of a local musician, and wondering what it must be like to get laid.

When a young American doctor, Elli Barber, comes to town to open a free clinic for the still suffering townsfolk — only to find herself struggling to convince them that she isn't there to do the dirty work of the 'Kampani' — Animal plunges into a web of intrigues, scams and plots with the unabashed aim of turning events to his own advantage.

Compellingly honest, entertaining and entirely without self-pity, Animal's account lights our way into his dark world with flashes of pure joy — from the very first page all the way to the story's explosive ending.

American Purgatorio is the story of a happily married man who discovers, as he walks out of a convenience store, that his wife has suddenly vanished. In cool, precise prose, written as both a detective story and a meditation on the seven deadly sins, Haskell tells a story that ranges from the brownstones of New York City to the sandy beaches of Southern California. The novel follows the journey of a man whose object of desire is both heartbreaking and ephemeral, and confirms John Haskell's reputation as "one of those rare authors who makes language seem limitless in its possibilities" (Los Angeles Times).

Dorothy is a retired schoolteacher who has recently moved to a housing estate in a small village. Solomon is a night-watchman, an immigrant from an unnamed country in Africa. Each is desperate for love. And yet each harbors secrets that may make attaining it impossible.

With breathtaking assurance and compassion, Caryl Phillips retraces the paths that lead Dorothy and Solomon to their meeting point: her failed marriage and ruinous obsession with a younger man, the horrors he witnessed as a soldier in his disintegrating native land, and the cruelty he encounters as a stranger in his new one. Intimate and panoramic, measured and shattering, A Distant Shore charts the oceanic expanses that separate people from their homes, their hearts, and their selves.

In a famous but declining Hollywood bar works A Barman. Morbidly amused by the decadent decay of his surroundings, he watches the patrons fall into their nightly oblivion, making notes for his novel. In the hope of uncovering their secrets and motives, he establishes tentative friendships with the cast of variously pathological regulars.

But as his tenure at the bar continues, he begins to serve himself more often than his customers, and the moments he lives outside the bar become more and more painful: he loses his wife, his way, himself. Trapped by his habits and his loneliness, he realizes he will not survive if he doesn't break free. And so he hatches a terrible, necessary plan of escape and his only chance for redemption.

Step into Ablutions and step behind the bar, below rock bottom, and beyond the everyday take on storytelling for a brilliant, new twist on the classic tale of addiction and its consequences.

"Blowtorch of a novel. . matchless and prescient." — Publishers Weekly

"Spokesman for those who were angry and beat. . turbulent, temperamental, and tortured." — The New York Times

"A self-taught writer with an uncanny gift for narrative and dialogue. . a born rebel and troublemaker of immense charm." — Roman Polanski

In this novel of breathtaking tension and sweltering love, two desperate friends on the edge of the law — one of them tough and gutsy, the other small and scared — travel to the southern Israeli city of Eilat to find work. There, Dov Ben Dov, the handsome native Israeli with a reputation for causing trouble, and Israel, his sidekick, stay with Ben Dov's recently married younger brother, Little Dov, who has enough trouble of his own. Local toughs are encroaching on Little Dov's business, and he enlists his older brother to drive them away. It doesn't help that a beautiful German widow named Ursula is rooming next door. What follows is a story of passion, deception, violence, and betrayal, all conveyed in hardboiled prose reminiscent of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, with a cinematic style that would make Humphrey Bogart and Marlon Brando green with envy.

Thirteen-year-old Agostino is spending the summer at a Tuscan seaside resort with his beautiful widowed mother. When she takes up with a cocksure new companion, Agostino, feeling ignored and unloved, begins hanging around with a group of local young toughs. Though repelled by their squalor and brutality, and repeatedly humiliated for his weakness and ignorance when it comes to women and sex, the boy is increasingly, masochistically drawn to the gang and its rough games. He finds himself unable to make sense of his troubled feelings. Hoping to be full of manly calm, he is instead beset by guilty curiosity and an urgent desire to sever, at any cost, the thread of troubled sensuality that binds him to his mother.

Alberto Moravia’s classic, startling portrait of innocence lost was written in 1942 but rejected by Fascist censors and not published until 1944, when it became a best seller and secured the author the first literary prize of his career. Revived here in a new translation by Michael F. Moore, Agostino is poised to captivate a twenty-first-century audience.

"Joshua Cohen has created a visionary novel that is terrifying and heartbreaking and humbling in its luminous brilliance. In my view, it firmly places the author on the same level as Kafka." — Michael Disend, author of Stomping the Goyim

"The idea that there are multiple heavens, right ones and wrong ones, white ones and black ones, is pushed to its fantastical limits by Brooklyn writer Joshua Cohen in his dream-world novel of the afterlife. . Heaven is a challenging but rewarding read on thematic and formal levels." — The Brooklyn Rail

"A breathless flight of controlled delirium, an exquisitely blasphemous tour of an afterlife where earth's dominion, in all its terror and glory, trumps the miraculous and overturns the world to come. . It's a brave book that should earn its young author the reader's profound and enduring admiration." — Steve Stern, author of The Frozen Rabbi

When a ten-year-old Jewish boy is exploded on a Jerusalem street by a ten-year-old Palestinian boy, he wakes up in a heaven no one in his tradition prepared him for, a heaven of others. Joshua Cohen's novel stands at the crossroads of a conflicted city and wordplay that both celebrates and dismantles tradition.

In Ariosto's epic 16th-century poem Orlando Furioso, the beautiful Angelica, chained, naked, to a rock and menaced by a sea monster is rescued by the valiant Ruggiero, riding a 'hippogriff', the offspring of a griffin and a mare — an entirely imaginary winged creature (as readers of Harry Potter know). Volatore, as this hippogriff calls himself, has escaped the poem in which he has been confined for centuries and is determined to find his Angelica, even if it takes him to the 21st century and involves some shape-shifting. He lands in contemporary San Francisco and the first person he sets eyes on is Angelica Greenberg, the Jewish owner of a San Franciscan art gallery, who has just dumped her fiance. Volatore rises to her window and they hit it off big-time. But no sooner have they met and fallen in love than events conspire to separate the two so that Volatore must not only seek Angelica but also find the perfect form in which to consummate his undying love. The first is too masculine, the second not enough so, but will the third be just right, and how will Angelica reconcile the imaginary and the real in the perfect lover?

Angelica's Grotto is a pornographic website into which 72-year-old art historian Harold Klein wanders one evening. Klein, a walking catalogue of infirmities, may not be up to much physically but there's a lot of sex going on in his head. His odyssey takes him through erogenous zones and into various corners of the London art world.

Now considered a contemporary classic, Airships was honored by Esquire magazine with the Arnold Gingrich Short Fiction Award. The twenty stories in this collection are a fresh, exuberant celebration of the new American South — a land of high school band contests, where good old boys from Vicksurg are reunited in Vietnam and petty nostalgia and the constant pain of disappointed love prevail. Airships is a striking demonstration of Barry Hannah's mature and original talent.

A new collection of stories by Mavis Gallant is always a major publishing event. For this is the writer who — like Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro — has made Canadian short stories a presence on the world literary scene, and on our bestseller lists.

In Across the Bridge four of the eleven stories are connected, following the fortunes of the Carette family in Montreal. In “1933” their widowed mother teaches Berthe and Marie to deny that she was a seamstress and to say instead that she was “clever with her hands.” In “The Chosen Husband” the luckless suitor Louis has to undergo the front-parlour scrutiny of Marie’s mother and sister: “But then Louis began to cough and had to cover his mouth. He was in trouble with a caramel. The Carettes looked away, so that he could strangle unobserved. ‘How dark it is,’ said Berthe, to let him think he could not be seen.”

We then follow their marriage, the birth of Raymond, and Raymond’s flight from his mother and aunt to his eventual role as a motel manager in Florida. “‘The place was full of Canadians,’ he said. ‘They stole like raccoons…’”

With the exception of “The Fenton Child,” an eerie story set in postwar Montreal, the other stories take place in the Paris Mavis Gallant knows so well. “Across the Bridge,” the title story, begins with the narrator’s mother throwing her reluctant daughter’s wedding invitations into the Seine. “I watched the envelopes fall in a slow shower and land on the dark water and float apart. Strangers leaned on the parapet and stared, too, but nobody spoke.”

This is a superb collection of stories by a writer at the top of her form.

Politically incorrect, provocative, and steeped in wit and irony, a fast-paced tragicomedy about the perfectly ordinary madness in today's Middle East.

A thirtysomething Tel Aviv businessman, Eitan "Croc" Einoch's life is turned upside down when he narrowly escapes a suicide bombing on the minibus he rides to work. When he lives through a second attack, and then a third, he becomes, reluctantly, a national media celebrity. Naturally, the Palestinian terrorists responsible for the attacks are less than happy. This embarrassing symbol of their failure-this "CrocAttack"-must be neutralized.

Meanwhile, Fahmi Sabih lies in a coma, quarrelling with his conscience. The young Palestinian suicide bomber has learned everything he knows about bombs, targets, and revenge from his brother. So why has Einoch survived? As Fahmi's story unfolds, it becomes clear that their paths are destined to cross again-for there is another bombing still to come-and then luck will change drastically for one or both of them. But who, if anyone, has right on his side?

An emotional, dramatic and philosophical novel about Americans drawn into a small Central American country on the brink of revolution.

"The smartest zombie novel since Colson Whitehead's Zone One."

— Ron Charles, The Washington Post

"A Questionable Shape presents the yang to the yin of Whitehead’s Zone One, with chess games, a dinner invitation, and even a romantic excursion. Echoes of [Thomas] Bernhard’s hammering circularity and [David Foster] Wallace’s bright mind that can’t stop making connections are both present. The point is where the mind goes, and, in that respect, Sims has his thematic territory down cold."

— The Daily Beast

"A thinking fan's zombie novel… one that asks the question: Do we lose our humanity when the world starts to crumble?"

— Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"Yes, it's a zombie novel, but also an emotionally resonant meditation on memory and loss."

— San Francisco Chronicle

"Compressed, copiously footnoted and literary, Bennett Sims' A Questionable Shape focuses on a zombie outbreak's effect on a young man and his girlfriend in a single week, in which he and his best friend undertake a quixotic, zombie-strewn search for a missing father."

— Los Angeles Times

"Evokes the power of David Foster Wallace with a narrative that's cerebral, strangely beautiful, philosophical, and pretty, well, brilliant."

— Bustle

"A Questionable Shape is a novel for those who read in order to wake up to life, not escape it, for those who themselves like to explore the frontiers of the unsayable. [A Questionable Shape] is more than just a novel. It is literature. It is life."

— The Millions

"Brilliantly sensitive, whip-smart… Sims’ genius lies in how he builds a terrifically engrossing and utterly unique novel, not in spite, but rather because of the familiarity of the material. A book that is just as touching and funny as it is riotously smart."

— The Rumpus

"Bennett Sims is a writer fearsomely equipped with an intellectual and linguistic range to rival a young Nabokov's, Nicholson Baker's gift for miniaturistic intaglio, and an arsenal of virtuosities entirely his own. A Questionable Shape announces a literary talent of genre-wrecking brilliance."

— Wells Tower

Mazoch discovers an unreturned movie sleeve, a smashed window, and a pool of blood in his father's house; the man has gone missing. So he creates a list of his father's haunts and asks Vermaelen to help track him down.

However, hurricane season looms over Baton Rouge, threatening to wipe out any undead not already contained, and eliminate all hope of ever finding Mazoch's father.

Bennett Sims turns typical zombie fare on its head to deliver a wise and philosophical rumination on the nature of memory and loss.

Bennett Sims was born and raised in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. His fiction has appeared in A Public Space, Tin House, and Zoetrope: All-Story. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he currently teaches at the University of Iowa, where he is the Provost Postgraduate Visiting Writer in fiction.

Michael Moran is an old Irish Republican whose life was forever transformed by his days of glory as a guerrilla leader in the Irish War of Independence. Moran is till fighting-with his family, his friends, and even himself-in this haunting testimony to the enduring qualities of the human spirit.

Hailed as one of the best short story writers of his generation, T.C. Boyle presents sixteen stories-nine of which appeared in The New Yorker-that highlight the evolving excellence of his inventive, modern, and wickedly witty style. In After the Plague, Boyle exhibits his maturing themes through an amazing array of subjects in a range of emotional keys. He taps today's headlines, from air rage ("Friendly Skies") to abortion doctors ("Killing Babies"), and delves into more naturalistic themes of quiet power and passion, from a tale of first love ("The Love of My Life") to a story about confronting old age ("Rust"). Combining joy and humor with the dark, intense scenarios that Boyle's audience has come to love, After the Plague reveals a writer at the top of his form.

Set partially in the 1980s and 90s and partially in the year 2025, T.C. Boyle's gripping new novel offers a provocative vision of the near future. Boyle tells the story of Tyrone Tierwater, a manager of a suburban shopping center in Peterskill, New York, whose life is completely turned upside down when, late in the 1980s, he meets and then marries Andrea Knowles, a prominent environmental activist. The couple moves to California with Sierra, Ty's daughter from a pervious marriage, and Ty takes up the life of the environmental agitator himself, until he lands in serious trouble with the law. The novel flashes back and forth between this period and the year 2025, which finds the now 75-year old Tyrone seeking out a living in Southern California as the manager of a popstar's private animal menagerie — holding some of the last surviving animals in that part of the world, for by then the rhinos and elephants are extinct and global warming has led to unremitting meteorological cataclsyms. Boyle dovetails these two stories together, examining the ups and downs of Ty's life as a monkeywrencher, the saga of his daughter Sierra who trees its for three years, and revealing what happens to Tyrone in 2025 when Andrea, who had divorced him, comes back into his life.

Jake Whyte is the sole resident of an old farmhouse on an unnamed British island, a place of ceaseless rains and battering winds. It’s just her, her untamed companion, Dog, and a flock of sheep. Which is how she wanted it to be. But something is coming for the sheep — every few nights it picks one off, leaves it in rags.

It could be anything. There are foxes in the woods, a strange boy and a strange man, rumours of an obscure, formidable beast. And there is Jake’s unknown past, perhaps breaking into the present, a story hidden thousands of miles away and years ago, in a landscape of different colour and sound, a story held in the scars that stripe her back.

All the Birds, Singing tells the life of an outsider. With extreme artistry and empathy, it reveals an existence of diurnal beauty, incremental horrors, stubborn hope and tentative redemption. The result is a novel of indelible emotional force.

Following the breakdown of a turbulent relationship, Frank moves from Canberra to a shack on the east coast once owned by his grandparents. There, among the sugar cane and sand dunes, he struggles to rebuild his life. Forty years earlier, Leon is growing up in Sydney, turning out treacle tarts at his parents' bakery and flirting with one of the local girls. But when he's conscripted as a machine-gunner in Vietnam, he finds himself suddenly confronting the same experiences that haunt his war-veteran father. As these two stories weave around each other — each narrated in a voice as tender as it is fierce — we learn what binds together Frank and Leon, and what may end up keeping them apart.

As young widow Rehana Haque awakes one March morning, she might be forgiven for feeling happy. Her children are almost grown, the city is buzzing with excitement after recent elections. Change is in the air.

But no one can foresee what will happen in the days and months that follow. For this is East Pakistan in 1971, a country on the brink of war. And this family's life is about to change forever.

Set against the backdrop of the Bangladesh War of Independence, 'A Golden Age' is a story of passion and revolution, of hope, faith, and unexpected heroism. In the chaos of this era, everyone must make choices. And as she struggles to keep her family safe, Rehana will be forced to face a heartbreaking dilemma.

Brace yourself for the most astonishing, challenging, upsetting, and profoundly moving book in many a season. An epic about love and friendship in the twenty-first century that goes into some of the darkest places fiction has ever traveled and yet somehow improbably breaks through into the light. Truly an amazement — and a great gift for its publisher.

When four classmates from a small Massachusetts college move to New York to make their way, they're broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition. There is kind, handsome Willem, an aspiring actor; JB, a quick-witted, sometimes cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world; Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm; and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their center of gravity. Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride. Yet their greatest challenge, each comes to realize, is Jude himself, by midlife a terrifyingly talented litigator yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of trauma that he’ll not only be unable to overcome — but that will define his life forever.

In rich and resplendent prose, Yanagihara has fashioned a tragic and transcendent hymn to brotherly love, a masterful depiction of heartbreak, and a dark examination of the tyranny of memory and the limits of human endurance.

A year after his divorce, Jayojit Chatterjee, an economics professor in the American Midwest, travels to his native Calcutta with his young son, Bonny, to spend the summer holidays with his parents. Jayojit is no more accustomed to spending time alone with Bonny — who lives with his mother in California — than he is with the Admiral and his wife, whose daily rhythms have become so synchronized as to become completely foreign to their son. Together, the unlikely foursome struggles to pass the protracted hours of summer, each in his or her own way mourning Jayojit’s failed marriage. And as Jayojit walks the bustling streets of Calcutta, he finds himself not only caught between clashing memories of India and America, but also between different versions of his life, revisiting lost opportunity, realized potential, and lingering desire.

As he did in his acclaimed trilogy Freedom Song, Amit Chaudhuri lovingly captures life’s every detail on the page while infusing the quiet interactions of daily existence with depth and compassion.

‘With extraordinary devotion, Mary Costello brings to life a woman who would otherwise have faded into oblivion amid the legions of the meek and the unobtrusive.’

J.M. Coetzee

Academy Street is the heart-breaking and evocative story of one woman’s life spanning six decades. Tess’s childhood in 1940’s rural Ireland is defined by the sudden death of her mother. Later, in New York, she encounters the ferocious power and calamity of love, and the effects of catastrophic fate. The novel resonates with the rhythms of memory and home as well as those of America’s greatest city.

This is an intimate story about unexpected gifts and unbearable losses, and the perpetual ache for belonging. It is exquisitely written and profoundly moving.

Vikram Seth's novel is, at its core, a love story: the tale of Lata — and her mother's — attempts to find her a suitable husband, through love or through exacting maternal appraisal. At the same time, it is the story of India, newly independent and struggling through a time of crisis as a sixth of the world's population faces its first great general election and the chance to map its own destiny.

With the same élan and wit that inform her internationally acclaimed and award-winning plays, Yasmina Reza’s second novel, Adam Haberberg, revels in the tragicomedy of one man’s midlife crisis.

While slumped on a park bench in Paris, a man is suddenly hailed by an old female classmate whom he has not seen since high school. The poor guy is, of course, a writer. Morose, panicked about his health, preoccupied with his marriage miseries and the fiasco of his recent book launch, he finds himself stranded in the desert of male middle age. And now there’s the strange business of this woman, who may or may not still be in love with him. Somehow he finds himself riding in her Jeep, riding to her place, not for any of the sensational reasons you might imagine, but because he sort of got stuck in a conversation without any chance of escape. Now he has to find his way out — and home.

A bitingly funny, lethally wise portrait of a hapless nonhero’s big adventure.

Abie follows the arc of a letter from London back to Africa to a coffee plantation that now could be hers if she wants it. Standing among the ruined groves she strains to hear the sound of the past, but the layers of years are too many. Thus begins the gathering of her family's history through the tales of her aunts — four women born to four different wives of a wealthy plantation owner, her grandfather. Asana, Mariama, Hawa and Serah: theirs is the story of a nation, a family and four women's attempts to alter the course of her own destiny.

In Pat Barker's Another World, the First World War casts its shadow down the generations.

At 101 years old, Geordie, a proud Somme veteran, lingers painfully through the days before his death. His grandson Nick is anguished to see this once-resilient man haunted by the ghosts of the trenches and the horror surrounding his brother's death. But in Nick's family home the dark pressures of the past also encroach on the present. As he and his wife Fran try to unite their uneasy family of step- and half-siblings, the discovery of a sinister Victorian drawing reveals the murderous history of their house and casts a violent shadow on their lives. .

'Gripping in the best, most exquisite sense of the word — as if something wicked were holding you in its clutches' Mail on Sunday

'Brilliant. . without question the best novel I have read this year. . once again, World War I extends its dark shadows across Pat Barker's extraordinary writing' Val Hennessy, Daily Mail

'One of the best things she has ever done' Ruth Rendell

'Utterly compelling. . she is a novelist who probes deep, revealing what people prefer to keep hidden' Allan Massie, Scotsman

'Demonstrates the extraordinary immediacy and vigour of expression we have come to expect from Barker. . brilliant touches of observation, an unfailing ear for dialogue, a talent for imagery that is darting and brief but unfailingly apt. . this is a novel that doesn't allow you to miss a sentence' Barry Unsworth, The New York Times Book Review

'Intensely feeling. . Geordie is a beautifully realised character, tough, humorous, and finally enigmatic' Helen Dunmore, The Times

Pat Barker was born in 1943. Her books include the highly acclaimed Regeneration trilogy, comprising Regeneration, which has been filmed, The Eye in the Door, which won the Guardian Fiction Prize, and The Ghost Road, which won the Booker Prize. The trilogy featured the Observer's 2012 list of the ten best historical novels. She is also the author of the more recent novels Another World, Border Crossing, Double Vision, Life Class, and Toby's Room. She lives in Durham.

his collection of reflective essays forms a “spiritual autobiography” of André Gide, a key figure of French letters.

André Gide, a literary and intellectual giant of twentieth-century France, mines his memories and personal observations in this collection of essays. Gide’s reflections and commentary masterfully showcase his delicate writing style and evocative sensibility, yielding new insights on writers such as Goethe and contemporaries Joseph Conrad, Nicolas Poussin, Arthur Rimbaud, and Paul-Marie Verlaine. Through it all, Gide skillfully investigates humanity’s contradictory nature and struggles to resolve the moral, political, and religious conflicts inherent in daily life. This ebook features a new introduction by Jeanine Parisier Plottel, selected quotes, and an image gallery.

Farhad is a typical student, twenty-one years old, interested in wine, women, and poetry, and negligent of the religious conservatism of his grandfather. But he lives in Kabul in 1979, and the early days of the pro-Soviet coup are about to change his life forever. One night Farhad goes out drinking with a friend who is about to flee to Pakistan, and is brutally abused by a group soldiers. A few hours later he slowly regains consciousness in an unfamiliar house, beaten and confused, and thinks at first that he is dead. A strange and beautiful woman has dragged him into her home for safekeeping, and slowly Farhad begins to feel a forbidden love for her — a love that embodies an angry compassion for the suffering of Afghanistan’s women. As his mind sifts through its memories, fears, and hallucinations, and the outlines of reality start to harden, he realizes that, if he is to escape the soldiers who wish to finish the job they started, he must leave everything he loves behind and find a way to get to Pakistan.

Rahimi uses his tight, spare prose to send the reader deep into the fractured mind and emotions of a country caught between religion and the political machinations of the world’s superpowers.

Amy Bloom was nominated for a National Book Award for her first collection, Come to Me, and her fiction has appeared in "The New Yorker, Story, Antaeus, " and other magazines, and in The Best American Short Stories""and""Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards." "In her new collection, she enhances her reputation as a true artist of the form.

Here are characters confronted with tragedy, perplexed by emotions, and challenged to endure whatever modern life may have in store. A loving mother accompanies her daughter in her journey to become a man, and discovers a new, hopeful love. A stepmother and stepson meet again after fifteen years and a devastating mistake, and rediscover their familial affection for each other. And in "The Story," a widow bent on seducing another woman's husband constructs and deconstructs her story until she has "made the best and happiest ending" possible "in this world."

What will happen to George Smith? Mysteriously rich and desperately lonely, George appears to be under attack from all quarters: his former wife and four horrible children are suing to get his money; his dipsomaniacal housekeeper is trying to arouse his carnal interest; his secretary, the beautiful, blond Miss Thomson, will barely give him the time of day. Making matters even worse are the threatening letters: Dear Sir: Only for the moment are we saying nothing. Yours, etc., Present Associates.

Despite such precautions as a two-inch-thick surgical steel door and a bullet-proof limousine, Smith remains worried. So he undertakes to build a giant mausoleum, complete with plumbing, in which to live. Hunter S. Thompson called reading this book “like sitting down to an evening of good whisky and mad laughter in a rare conversation somewhere on the edge of reality.”

Shortlisted for the 2015 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for comic fiction.

A rampaging force of nature is wreaking havoc on the streets of Edinburgh, but has top shagger, drug-dealer, gonzo-porn-star and taxi-driver, ‘Juice’ Terry Lawson, finally met his match in Hurricane ‘Bawbag’?

Can Terry discover the fate of the missing beauty, Jinty Magdalen, and keep her idiot-savant lover, the man-child Wee Jonty, out of prison?

Will he find out the real motives of unscrupulous American businessman and reality-TV star, Ronald Checker?

And, crucially, will Terry be able to negotiate life after a terrible event robs him of his sexual virility, and can a new fascination for the game of golf help him to live without… A DECENT RIDE?

A Decent Ride sees Irvine Welsh back on home turf, leaving us in the capable hands of one of his most compelling and popular characters, ‘Juice’ Terry Lawson, and introducing another bound for cult status, Wee Jonty MacKay: a man with the genitals and brain of a donkey.

In his funniest, filthiest book yet, Irvine Welsh celebrates an un-reconstructed misogynist hustler — a central character who is shameless but also, oddly, decent — and finds new ways of making wild comedy out of fantastically dark material, taking on some of the last taboos. So fasten your seatbelts, because this is one ride that could certainly get a little bumpy…

Ritwik Ghosh, twenty-two and recently orphaned, finds the chance to start a new life when he arrives in England from Calcutta. But to do so, he must not only relive his entire past but also make sense of his relationship with his mother — scarred, abusive and all-consuming. But Oxford holds little of the salvation Ritwik is looking for. Instead he moves to London, where he drops out of official existence into a shadowy hinterland of illegal immigrants. However, the story that Ritwik writes to stave off his loneliness — a Miss Gilby who teaches English, music and Western manners to the wife of a liberal zamindar — begins to find ghostly echoes in his life with his aged landlady, Anne Cameron. But then, one night, in the badlands of King's Cross, Ritwik runs into the suave, unfathomable Zafar bin Hashm. As present and past of several lives collide, Ritwik's own goes into free fall.

Svevo Romano is every woman's dream turned nightmare, living the life of excess in Rome. He may be handsome, rich and successful, but he is also a ruthless businessman, workaholic and playboy. At the back of his mind he has a nagging feeling that his life has no meaning; a feeling he tries to ignore. But one day, everything changes: time suddenly speeds up — but only for him. Svevo finds himself in a race against life itself, trying desperately to keep up with his colleagues and friends, to hold on to all the things he once thought important. His life becomes a mad whirl; but just as everything threatens to spiral out of control, life acquires a meaning that reaches beyond time and space.

Mona Gray was ten when her father contracted a mysterious illness and she became a quitter, abandoning each of her talents just as pleasure became intense. The only thing she can't stop doing is math: She knocks on wood, adds her steps, and multiplies people in the park against one another. When Mona begins teaching math to second-graders, she finds a ready audience. But the difficult and wonderful facts of life keep intruding. She finds herself drawn to the new science teacher, who has an unnerving way of seeing through her intricately built facade. Bender brilliantly directs her characters, giving them unexpected emotional depth and setting them in a calamitous world, both fancifully surreal and startlingly familiar.

Boyd's excruciatingly funny first novel presents an unforgettable anti-hero and a vision of Africa seldom seen. British diplomat Morgan Leafy bumbles heavily through his job in Kinjanja. When he finds himself blackmailed, diagnosed with a venereal disease, and confounded with a dead body, he realizes very little is going according to plan.

"Rich in character and incident, An Ice-Cream War fulfills the ambition of the historical novel at its best."

— The New York Times Book Review

Booker Prize Finalist

"Boyd has more than fulfilled the bright promise of [his] first novel. . He is capable not only of some very funny satire but also of seriousness and compassion." — Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

1914. In a hotel room in German East Africa, American farmer Walter Smith dreams of Theodore Roosevelt. As he sleeps, a railway passenger swats at flies, regretting her decision to return to the Dark Continent-and to her husband. On a faraway English riverbank, a jealous Felix Cobb watches his brother swim, and curses his sister-in-law-to-be. And in the background of the world's daily chatter: rumors of an Anglo-German conflict, the likes of which no one has ever seen.

In An Ice-Cream War, William Boyd brilliantly evokes the private dramas of a generation upswept by the winds of war. After his German neighbor burns his crops-with an apology and a smile-Walter Smith takes up arms on behalf of Great Britain. And when Felix's brother marches off to defend British East Africa, he pursues, against his better judgment, a forbidden love affair. As the sons of the world match wits and weapons on a continent thousands of miles from home, desperation makes bedfellows of enemies and traitors of friends and family. By turns comic and quietly wise, An Ice-Cream War deftly renders lives capsized by violence, chance, and the irrepressible human capacity for love.

"Funny, assured, and cleanly, expansively told, a seriocomic romp. Boyd gives us studies of people caught in the side pockets of calamity and dramatizes their plights with humor, detail and grit." — Harper's

"Boyd has crafted a quiet, seamless prose in which story and characters flow effortlessly out of a fertile imagination. . The reader emerges deeply moved." — Newsday

Patrick Doyle is a 29-year-old teacher in an ordinary school. Disaffected, frustrated and increasingly bitter at the system he is employed to maintain, Patrick begins his rebellion, fuelled by drink and his passionate, unrequited love for a fellow teacher. A Disaffection is the apparently straightforward story of one week in a man's life in which he decides to change the way he lives. Under the surface,however, lies a brilliant and complex examination of class, human culture and character written with irony, tenderness,enormous anger and, above all, the honesty that has marked James Kelman as one of the most important writers in contemporary Britain.

I wanted to escape this. I wanted to free myself from the working world and have time to write. And I wanted adventure. Grendel could never free me, but this boat could.

David Vann has loved boats all his life. So when the opportunity arises to start an educational charter business, teaching creative writing workshops aboard a sailboat, he leaps at it. But a trip to Turkey sees him dreaming bigger — and before he knows it, he is at the helm of his own ninety-foot boat, running charters along the Turkish coast.

And here his troubles begin. Sinking deep into debt, and encountering everything from a lost rudder to freak storms, Vann is on the verge of losing everything — including his life.

Part high-seas adventure, part journey of self-discovery, A Mile Down is a gripping and unforgettable story of struggle and redemption by a writer at the top of his game.