Заглавие этой книги очень хорошо отражает ее содержание — это действительно фронтовые воспоминания без приукрас. Тяжелые воспоминания. Автор книги Евстахий Загачевський два с половиной года, прежде чем он перешел в 14–ю дивизию Войск СС «Галиция», постоянно находился на Восточном фронте, на передовой, в составе 3–й танковой дивизии СС «Тотенкопф».

Тяжелые фронтовые будни и военный быт, непрерывные бои, ранения, смерть боевых друзей, — все это ярко обрисовано в правдивых показаниях очевидца и участника событий трагической эпохи Второй мировой войны.

Автор отбыл настоящую фронтовую одиссею, на это указывают уже сами заголовки разделов: «В лесах под Невелем», «Великие Луки», «Десять дней под Ельней», «Ярцево». Несколько раз был ранен в боях.

Как только началось активное формирование дивизии Войск СС «Галиция», он просил о переводе туда. Но это произошло не так быстро, как хотелось: лишь во второй половине 1944 года, а именно, во время переформирования дивизии после Бродской катастрофы. Как фронтовой ветеран, Загачевський вскоре был откомандирован на 3–месячную сержантскую учебу.

Вместе с Дивизией «Галичина» автор отбыл вторую часть фронтовой одиссеи: борьба с партизанами в Словакии и в Словении, последние тяжелые бои в Австрии с Красной армией, передкапитуляционное отступление с фронта на запад, и наконец, «Три полных года неволи» (1945–48) в английском плену.

Pasjonująca autobiografia łączy w sobie brutalny realizm z ciepłem i poezją.

Ujawnia prawdziwe oblicze chińskiego socjalistycznego dobrobytu i pokazuje, że człowiek o rozbudzonej świadomości może odmienić własny los.

"Początkiem zawsze jest matka. Od niej zaczyna się wszystko". O tej prawdzie wykaligrafowanej w dzienniku Lu Ling, wnuczki tytułowego nastawiacza kości, mówią wszystkie powieści Amy Tan. Odnawiając zerwaną więź z matką, bohaterki odnajdują siebie.

W ostatniej książce, podobnie jak w poprzednich ("Żona Kuchennego Boga", "Sto tajemnych zmysłów", "Klub radości i szczęścia") opowieści matki i córki nawzajem się przeplatają.

Historia Ruth, współczesnej Amerykanki chińskiego pochodzenia, krzyżuje się ze wspomnieniami Lu Ling. Ruth zaczyna je czytać, kiedy u jej matki pojawiają się objawy demencji. Wtedy uświadamia sobie, jak dużo o swej matce nie wie.

Nie zna jej przeszłości, pragnień i tęsknot. Nie umie czytać jej gestów. Nie potrafi jej pomóc, bo nigdy jej nie rozumiała. Z trudem odcyfrowuje naniesione cienkim pędzelkiem chińskie znaki – których niegdyś nie chciała się uczyć – by w końcu uciec się do pomocy tłumacza. Wszystko, co nie mogło być wypowiedziane, zostało zapamiętane przez pismo. W piśmie Lu Ling ocala swoją przeszłość, przez pismo tłumacz, pan Tang, zakochuje się w niej

(przeczytawszy historię jej życia, "wie o niej więcej niż większość ludzi wie o swoich małżonkach"), dzięki pismu Ruth nie tylko poznaje swoją matkę, zaczyna również rozumieć samą siebie.

Powieść pełna subtelnych obserwacji, delikatnej chińskiej zmysłowości, dowcipu i ironii, kończy się iście amerykańskim happy endem. Demencja matki okazuje się źródłem ozdrowienia dla wszystkich.

Dla niej samej staje się sprawdzianem prawdy – w jej pamięci pozostaną jedynie zapisane w dalekiej przeszłości rzeczy bezwzględnie prawdziwe i ważne. Dla Ruth jest okazją do poznania tych rzeczy i tym samym zdania sobie sprawy z tego, czego sama pragnie. Ruth rzuca zawód redaktora – naprawiacza i korektora książek – i pisze sama.

Dla babki, matki i siebie. Dla Arta, by wiedział, kim jest kobieta, z którą żyje. Dla jego córek, by ją lepiej rozumiały. Żałuję, że trafiłam na Amy Tan tak późno. Za późno, by pożyczyć ją mojej babci. Babcia czytała dużo, a pod koniec nie mogłam już nadążyć z dostarczaniem jej powieści. Ale zawsze narzekała i skarżyła się, że wszystko, co przynoszę, jest "smutne i pesymistyczne". Amy Tan by ją ucieszyła. Bo Amy Tan niesie pokrzepienie. I jeszcze jedno: uczy, że przeszłość jest tym, co sami chcemy pamiętać. Nie pamiętam więc wieczne niezadowolonej staruszki. Moja babcia, kiedy chorowałam, przynosiła mi do łóżka maślane bułeczki i "Sagę rodu Forsyte'ów".

A brilliant epochal saga from the acclaimed author of Remainder ('One of the great English novels of the past ten years' – Zadie Smith), C takes place in the early years of the twentieth century and ranges from western England to Europe to North Africa.

Serge Carrefax spends his childhood at Versoie House, where his father teaches deaf children to speak when he's not experimenting with wireless telegraphy. Sophie, Serge's sister and only connection to the world at large, takes outrageous liberties with Serge's young body – which may explain the unusual sexual predilections that haunt him for the rest of his life. After recuperating from a mysterious illness at a Bohemian spa, Serge serves in World War I as a radio operator. C culminates in a bizarre scene in an Egyptian catacomb where all Serge's paths and relationships at last converge.

Tom McCarthy's mesmerizing, often hilarious accomplishment effortlessly blends the generational breadth of Ian McEwan with the postmodern wit of Thomas Pynchon and marks a writer rapidly becoming one of the most significant and original voices of his generation.

Alexander McCall Smith is the author of over sixty books on a wide array of subjects. For many years he was Professor of Medical Law at the University of Edinburgh and served on national and international bioethics bodies. Then in 1999 he achieved global recognition for his award-winning series The No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, and thereafter has devoted his time to the writing of fiction, including the 44 Scotland Street and the Isabel Dalhousie novels. His books have been translated into forty-five languages. He lives in Edinburgh with his wife, Elizabeth, a doctor.

Citadelle est un livre particulier dans le sens où il n'a jamais été achevé ni retouché (ou très peu) par Saint-Exupéry. L'œuvre est restée à l'état de brouillon dactylographié imparfait avant d'être mis en forme, tant bien que mal, par l'éditeur. Saint-Exupéry aborde ici tous ses thèmes récurrents déjà visités dans ses précédents écrits: l'Amour, l'Apprentissage, la Création, Dieu, les Hommes, les Voyages, etc.

Javier Salazar, um brilhante editor aposentado, leva uma existência confortável no seu apartamento de Madrid, chegado a uma idade em que se dá por satisfeito por finalmente a vida lhe ter sido graciosa… Até que, uma tarde, interrompe as suas leituras para dar um passeio pelo parque. Aí conhece o jovem Ramón Durán, com quem troca alguns gracejos e conversa. O começo da relação entre ambos dará início a uma série de preocupações que, lentamente, se vão insinuando na consciência de Salazar: uma consciência atormentada, reservada, ambígua. Quando reaparece Juanjo, um antigo professor de Ramón Durán, a relação torna-se um perigoso vórtice que os envolve.

***

No hay homosexualidad sino homosexualidades, dice Álvaro Pombo en esta novela. Una novela que refleja un discurso independiente, brutal a veces y políticamente incorrecto que queda tan lejos de las condenas de la Iglesia católica como de las gozosas figuritas del pastel de un allanado y edulcorado matrimonio gay.

La existencia del brillante editor jubilado Javier Salazar transcurre apacible y confortablemente en su elegante piso de Madrid. Tiene la sensación de hallarse por fin equilibrado y apaciguado, compensado en cierto modo por la vida… Hasta que una tarde de lectura interrumpida para dar un paseo, le conduce a un parque y sobre todo al encuentro con un muchacho malagueño, Ramón Durán, con el que se cruza e intercambia palabras y bromas. Este hecho fortuito y el inicio de una relación entre ambos disparará antiguos resortes de la conciencia de Salazar: una conciencia atormentada, reservada, cargada de brillantez y encanto, pero también de desprecio, vanidad, soberbia y afán de destrucción. La aparición en escena de un antiguo profesor de Ramón Durán, Juanjo Garnacho, por decirlo así metamorfoseado, convertirá la relación en un peligroso campo sembrado de minas, calculado para que todo salte por los aires. Chipri, Paco Allende, Emilia… completarán esta frenética y contemporánea trama donde no faltan suicidios, asesinatos e investigaciones policiales.

Contra natura era el modo global de referirse a los pensamientos, palabras y obras de los homosexuales nacidos alrededor de 1939. Éste es un uso antiguo que se ha prolongado hasta el presente. En esta novela, Pombo se sirve de la noción popularizada en España por Ortega y Gasset de que el hombre no tiene naturaleza sino que tiene historia. Esto significa que el hombre es una existencia abierta que se da a sí mismo libremente una configuración a lo largo de la vida. Esta imagen de una existencia creadora, abierta al futuro, en trance de darse a sí misma su propia configuración esencial, es, en opinión de Pombo, también una fecunda ocurrencia cristiana.

Una vez más, Pombo despliega sus mejores armas: el talento para captar la vida cotidiana, su maestría para los diálogos, la fina ironía y el sentido del humor, y una prosa poderosa, ágil y deslumbrante que nos atrapa y cautiva de principio a fin. Unas armas que lo han convertido en uno de los escritores mayores de la literatura contemporánea.

Sam Hunter, a yuppie salesman who has everything he needs except the beautiful Calliope's love, confronts Coyote, the Indian trickster god, and his own forgotten and buried life as Samson Hunts Alone, a native American outlaw.

A non fiction book

One of Zadie Smith's great gifts as a novelist is her openness: both to character and ideas in her stories, and to what a novel itself should be. That she's a novelist was clear as soon she broke through with White Teeth in her early twenties, but what kind she'll be (or will be next) seems open to change. Which all, along with her consistent intelligence, grace, and wit, makes her an ideal essayist too, especially for the sort of "occasional essays" collected for the first time in Changing My Mind. She can make the case equally for the cozy "middle way" of E.M. Forster and the most purposefully demanding of David Foster Wallace's stories, both as a reader and, you imagine, as a writer who is considering their methods for her own. The occasions in this book didn't only bring her to write about writers, though: she also investigates, among other subjects, Katherine Hepburn, Liberia, and Barack Obama (through the lens of Pygmalion), and, in the collection's finest piece, recalls her late father and their shared comedy snobbery. One wishes more occasions upon her.

Po śmierci matki, która w młodości zerwała kontakt z rodziną, Rebeka postanawia odwiedzić dziadków. Jedzie do Kornwalii, gdzie Baylissowie mieszkają, i tam wkracza w świat, który tylko wyrywkowo zna ze wspomnień matki. Stopniowo odkrywa rządzące nim prawa, zgłębia zasady zawiłej gry, jaką życie toczy z prawdą, aż uświadamia sobie, że to co ważne nie dzieje się z dnia na dzień…

Una abuela, una madre, una hija. A lo largo de esta saga, tan verídica como espeluznante, tres mujeres luchan por sobrevivir en una China sometida a guerras, invasiones y revoluciones. La abuela de la autora nació en 1909, época en la que China era aún una sociedad feudal. Sus pies permanecieron vendados desde niña, y a los quince años de edad se convirtió en concubina de uno de los numerosos señores de la guerra.

From Publishers Weekly

In contrast to the utopian official literature of Communist China, the stories in this wide-ranging collection marshal wry humor, entangled sex, urban alienation, nasty village politics and frequent violence. Translated ably enough to keep up with the colloquial tone, most tales are told with straightforward familiarity, drawing readers into small communities and personal histories that are anything but heroic. "The Brothers Shu," by Su Tong (Raise the Red Lantern), is an urban tale of young lust and sibling rivalry in a sordid neighborhood around the ironically named Fragrant Cedar Street. That story's earthiness is matched by Wang Xiangfu's folksy "Fritter Hollow Chronicles," about peasants' vendettas and local politics, and by "The Cure," by Mo Yan (Red Sorghum; The Garlic Ballads), which details the fringe benefits of an execution. Personal alienation and disaffection are as likely to appear in stories with rural settings (Li Rui's "Sham Marriage") as they are to poison the lives of urban characters (Chen Cun's "Footsteps on the Roof"). Comedy takes an elegant and elaborate form in "A String of Choices," Wang Meng's tale of a toothache cure, and it assumes the burlesque of small-town propaganda fodder in Li Xiao's "Grass on the Rooftop." Editor Goldblatt has chosen not to expand the contributors' biographies or elaborate on the collection's post-Tiananmen context. He lets the stories speak for themselves, which, fortunately, they do, quietly and effectively.

From Library Journal

The 20 authors represented here range from Wang Meng, the former minister of culture, to Su Tong, whose Raise the Red Lantern has been immortalized on screen.

***

Chinese literature has changed drastically in the past thirty years. During the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) arts and literature of all sorts were virtually nonexistent since they were frowned upon by official powers so that attempts to produce any were apt to cause one’s public humiliation and possibly even death by the Red Guards and other unofficial arms of the government. After 1976, in the wake of Mao’s death, literature slowly regained its importance in China, and by the mid-1980s dark, angry, satirical writings had become quite prominent on the mainland.

In the wake of Tiananmen Square, dark literature faded somewhat, but never vanished. Now Howard Goldblatt, a prominent translator of Chinese fiction and editor of the critical magazine Modern Chinese Literature, has compiled a representative collection of contemporary Chinese fiction entitled Chairman Mao Would Not Be Amused. Even with my limited knowledge of modern China I feel certain the title of the book is fairly accurate.

Mo Yan is one of my favorite contemporary writers. His dark, no-holds-barred satires Red Sorghum and The Garlic Ballads detailed what he sees as the failings of both Chinese peasants (of which he was born as one) and the Chinese leaders. His short story "The Cure" is in the same vein, detailing how a local government representative-probably self-appointed during the Cultural Revolution, although that is never made quite clear in the story-leads a lynching of the village’s two most prominent leaders and their wives. But, as in most Mo Yan stories, the bitterness directed at the lyncher is double-edged with the bitter look at a local peasant who sees the deaths of the two village leaders as a desperate chance to possibly rescue his mother from impending blindness. The story is coldly realistic and totally chilling in the rational way it treats the series of events.

Su Tong is the author of the novella "Raise The Red Lantern", the basis of the wonderful movie. His "The Brothers Shu" is a bitter look at some traditional character weaknesses of Chinese people, and particularly how they affect family life. The Shu family is incredibly dysfunctional. The father nightly climbs up the side of his two-family house to have sex with the woman upstairs until her husband bolts her windows shut. So the woman sneaks downstairs to have sex in the younger son’s bedroom while the son is tied to his bed, gagged and blindfolded. Meanwhile the elder son abuses the girl upstairs until she falls in love with him. When she becomes pregnant, they are both so shamed they form a suicide pact, tie themselves together and jump into a river, where the boy is rescued in time but the girl dies. The younger son so hates his older brother-somewhat deservedly considering the abuse heaped on him by the brother-that he pours gasoline through his bedroom and sets it ablaze.

And so on, complete with beatings and torments worthy of the most dysfunctional American families. While not a particularly likeable cast of characters, the story is strong and thoughtful.

Perhaps the most moving part about "First Person", by Shi Tiesheng is in the brief author description in the back of the book. Shi is described as “crippled during the Cultural Revolution”. So many lives were needlessly destroyed during that tumultuous decade, it is easy to feel that the arrest and subsequent conviction of the notorious Gang of Four was not nearly sufficient punishment for them.

"First Person" tells the story of a man with a heart condition-Shi frequently writes about the lives of handicapped people, according to his description-who is visiting his new 21st floor apartment for the first time. While climbing the stairs very slowly, taking frequent rests, he notices a cemetery separated from the apartment building by a huge wall. On one side of the wall is sitting a woman, while on the other side stands a man. As the man climbs the stairs he fantasizes about why the couple are there, and why they are separated by the wall. Perhaps the man is having an affair, and the wife is spying on him as he rendezvous with his lover?

But then the man notices a baby lying on a gravesite, being watched from a distance by the man, and he realizes that the couple is abandoning the child. An interesting story about the fanciful delusions a person can have, but with no real depth beyond that.

Two stories involve fear of dentists in completely different ways. Wang Meng’s "A String of Choices" is a very funny story that combines a bitter look at both Eastern and Western medicine with perhaps the most extreme case of fear of dentists imaginable. Chen Ran’s "Sunshine Between the Lips" tells of a young girl whose adult male friend exposes himself to her. If that were not traumatic enough, after he is arrested for exposing himself to a complete stranger, he sets his apartment on fire and dies a brutal death. This event, combined with a near-fatal bout of meningitis, creates in the girl a deep fear of phallic objects such as needles and penises. So imagine her trauma when she develops impacted wisdom teeth at the same time as she gets married. While this description might sound a bit ludicrous, this story is very serious and very well-executed.

A strong satire on how history can be rewritten to suit the writers’ needs is Li Xiao’s "Grass on the Rooftop". When a peasant’s hut goes on fire, he is rescued by a local student. The rescue is written up for an elementary school newspaper by a local child, but the story is picked up by other papers, changing radically with each reprinting until the rescuing student becomes a great hero of the Maoist revolution because of his supposed attempt to rescue a nonexistent portrait of Mao on the wall of the hut. While this story is uniquely Chinese in many ways, it resonates in all societies in which pride and agenda is often more important than the truth.

Anybody interested in a look at contemporary Chinese society should enjoy this collection immensely.

Un asesinato es el punto de arranque de esta novela publicada en 1950, la primera de Doris Lessing, autora galardonada con el premio Príncipe de Asturias de las letras. Situada en la Suráfrica segregacionista, Canta la hierba describe la historia de una mujer blanca en el seno de uña sociedad dividida por el color de la piel y en la que imperan la injusticia y la desesperación. Mary Turner, hija de unos pobres granjeros y nacida en África, se convierte en una joven urbana, trabajadora e independiente, hasta el día en que sorprende los cotilleos de sus amigas y decide que debe casarse para silenciarlos. Tras un periodo de angustiosa espera, conoce a un granjero que se enamora perdidamente de ella. Sin embargo, el matrimonio, la rutina de una granja aislada, las convenciones de la comunidad blanca y la relación con los nativos cambiarán su vida hasta límites insospechados.

Najgłośniejszy debiut literacki ostatnich lat w Chinach – historia szalonej miłości, buntu i upadku, rozgrywająca się u schyłku XX wieku w mrocznym, podziemnym świecie chińskich nocnych klubów, drobnych gangsterów, narkotyków i prostytucji.

Hong, wrażliwa i niepokorna siedemnastolatka, rzuca szkołę – co w ówczesnych Chinach oznaczało rezygnację z życiowych perspektyw – i wyjeżdża z rodzinnego Szanghaju. W rozkwitającym wówczas mieście Shenzhen doświadcza prawdziwych niebezpieczeństw, rozpoczyna karierę szansonistki, poznaje, co to narkotyki, seks i alkohol, wreszcie spotyka Saininga, młodego muzyka, i w jej życie wdziera się wielka miłość. Razem zanurzają się w szaleńczy rytm ciemnej strony miasta.

Książka Mian Mian, obrazoburcza i wywrotowa, nazwana przez chińskich cenzorów „świadectwem duchowego brudu”, przypominająca swym gorączkowym rytmem powieści Jacka Kerouaca, jest jednocześnie przejmującą, wyjątkowo osobistą opowieścią o młodzieńczych rozczarowaniach i samotności.

***

Zakazana w Chinach powieść młodej, skandalizującej autorki! Chiny, przełom lat osiemdziesiątych i dziewięćdziesiątych. Siedemnastoletnia Hong porzuca renomowaną szkołę i wyjeżdża z Szanghaju, by pracować jako piosenkarka w nocnych klubach. Trafia do miasta Shenzhen, leżącego w specjalnej strefie ekonomicznej. Do Shenzhen najszybciej docierają elementy kultury zachodniej? idole muzyczni, styl życia, używki, powstają coraz to nowe podejrzane lokale, kwitnie prostytucja, handel narkotykami, zorganizowana przestępczość. Hong wiąże się z młodym muzykiem, Sainingiem, z którym wiedzie cygańskie życie, pełne wrażeń i rozczarowań. Podróż przez chiński półświatek staje się dla bohaterki okazją do odkrycia własnych pragnień, osiągnięcia dojrzałości. Mian Mian w bezkompromisowy i niezwykle szczery sposób opisuje poszukiwanie przez Hong własnej wartości i godności w świecie podobnych do niej outsierów. Cukiereczki to jednocześnie jedyny w swoim rodzaju obraz współczesnych Chin? barwnych, tętniących życiem, czerpiących wzory z zachodniego świata, a przede wszystkim dalekich od znanej nam z reportaży szarej rzeczywistości komunistycznej. W tej świetnie napisanej powieści jedyną bronią masowego rażenia jest zachodnia popkultura.?Washington Post? Być może Mian Mian jest największą nadzieją chińskiej literatury. W jej opowieściach pojawiają się tematy kluczowe dla zrozumienia doświadczeń całej generacji? seksualność, narkotyki, otwieranie się Chin na świat.

An international literary phenomenon-now available for the first time in English translation-Candy is a hip, harrowing tale of risk and desire, the story of a young Chinese woman forging a life for herself in a world seemingly devoid of guidelines. Hong, who narrates the novel, and whose life in many ways parallels the author''s own, drops out of high school and runs away at age 17 to the frontier city of Shenzen. As Hong navigates the temptations of the city, she quickly falls in love with a young musician and together they dive into a cruel netherworld of alcohol, drugs, and excess, a life that fails to satisfy Hong''s craving for an authentic self, and for a love that will define her. This startling and subversive novel is a blast of sex, drugs, and rock ''n'' roll that opens up to us a modern China we''ve never seen before. – Banned in China -with Mian Mian labeled the ''poster child for spiritual pollution''-CANDY still managed to sell 60,000 copies, as well as countless additional copies in pirated editions. – CANDY has been published in eight countries to date and has become a bestseller in France.

***

Sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll: ingredients for novels about modern China? Yes, SHANGHAI BABY by Wei Hui (Pocket Books, 2001) showed international readers modern Chinese youth were not immune to the running dogs of Western decadence: Globalization might even include mixing with dissolute foreigners. Following SHANGHAI BABY to English by a few years, Mian Mian now suggests with CANDY the decadence is more likely homegrown, possibly an inevitable side-effect of China's ascension to manufacturing colossus for the world. After this first novel by Shanghainese Mian was banned in China -an "honor" Wei Hui also earned – she was labelled a "poster child for spiritual pollution."

The buzz made CANDY an underground bestseller.

Whether Mian Mian harvested autobiographical details for her protagonist Hong's drug-plagued odyssey is open to question. She prefaces the novel with a note: "This book exists because one morning as the sun was coming up I told myself that I had to swallow up all of the fear and garbage around me, and once it was inside me I had to transform it all into candy. Because I know you all will be able to love me for it."

In a larger context, Hong's story, the characters in her life, often resonate with American stories we've heard of the Old West and Gold Rush days (whether in California or Alaska). She leaves Shanghai to seek her future in the new frontier of the Special Economic Zones the Chinese government created along the south coast in the 1980s, near Guangzhou. Not only did the SEZs permit a laissez faire approach to business-much of the Confucian social rules that apply elsewhere are ignored. In the SEZ thick with fortune seekers and finders, prostitution flourishes, as does alcohol and drug addiction.

Hong, only 17, has dropped out of a competitive high school, somewhat dispirited by the suicide of a classmate (an echo of Murakami's NORWEGIAN WOOD), when she leaves for the south. There she meets a young musician Saining and they become lovers, so often hopeless for each other and so often hopeless for their addictions. They survive, slacker-style, largely by the generosity of Saining's mom, who lives in Japan.

Hong's love for Saining has compelling moments of violence, promiscuity, and druggy indifference. But the greatest achievement of Hong's story, perhaps, is the honest testimony to the erasure of desire, the great sucking away of soul only addiction can wreak on a love that nonetheless won't go away. From a null point, from a Murakami-esque death in life, Hong goes on to find redemption can be hers.This stark portrait is not without lighter moments. For example, Hong's friend Bug is convinced he has AIDS. The horror of that discovery is brought alive. Page after page: consultation with friends, plans to leave the country, examination by a Beijing AIDS specialist. Finally, the revelation too many OTC drugs to get high had caused the troubling symptoms.

Like Murakami's post-consumerist young generation in Japan, Mian Mian suggests the same search for individual authenticity is underway in China. As China 's economic engine gains force, so does disillusionment among the young with the old ways. Hong suggests her ambivalence towards China 's rising star: "The moment the plane left the ground, I fucking burst into tears. I swore I would never come back to this town in the South again. This weird, plastic, bullshit Special Economic Zone, with all that pain and sadness, and the face of love, and the whole totally fucked-up world of heroin, and the late 1980s gold rush mentality, and all that pop music from Taiwan and Hong Kong. This place had all of the best and all of the worst. It had become my eternal nightmare." Hong awakes before the CANDY is gone. Mian's compassion for youth of New China elevates and brings irony to a story lesser writers might have passed off as sensation-ridden heroin chic.

Raskolnikov, étudiant à Saint-Pétersbourg, a interrompu ses études. Rêveur solitaire, refermé sur lui-même, sombre, triste, altier et fier, mais également généreux et bon, il se considère comme un homme hors du commun. Il est persuadé que, sur Terre, certains êtres sont nuisibles ou parasites. Il a une théorie. On peut sacrifier un pou si, par ce sacrifice, on fait le bien par ailleurs. Ce pou, il l'a trouvé en la personne d'une femme ignoble, prêteuse sur gages. Après avoir imaginé ce meurtre des centaines de fois, le regard brûlant, les joues creuses, il finit par commettre ce crime, mais rien ne se passe comme prévu… et sa vie bascule.

Un des plus grands romans de Dostoïevski et de la littérature russe, qu'il faut absolument avoir lu…

Ce livre est plus connu sous le titre «Le bourg de Stépantchikovo et sa population».

Par une lettre, le narrateur est invité à rejoindre son oncle de toute urgence dans le village de Stépantchikovo, où il devra épouser une jeune gouvernante qu'il n'a pourtant jamais vue. Rendu sur les lieux, il pense se trouver dans un asile de fous: l'entière maisonnée est soumise à la tyrannie imbécile d'un tartuffe de province, animé d'une haine inexpugnable envers le monde qui a fait de lui un raté.

Ce roman porté par une belle énergie comique, celle de la farce ou du théâtre de marionnettes, fut écrit en 1859 par un auteur qui, après dix ans de bagne et de relégation, revenait dans la vie littéraire.

Дональд Бартельми (1931–1989) — один из крупнейших (наряду с Пинчоном, Бартом и Данливи) представителей американской «школы черного юмора». Непревзойденный мастер короткой формы, Бартельми по-новому смотрит на процесс творчества, опровергая многие традиционные представления. Для этого, одного из итоговых сборников, самим автором в 1982 г. отобраны лучшие, на его взгляд, произведения за 20 лет.

"Chronicle in Stone"…is epic in its simplicity; the history of a young Albanian and a primitive Albania awakening into the modern world."-Michael Dregni, Minneapolis Star Tribune

The internationally celebrated author of The Debt to Pleasure returns with this major, breakout novel – scathing and subversive, sharply witty and brilliantly observed as it follows the lives and fortunes of a group of people in London that becomes connected in unforeseen ways.

Pepys Road: an ordinary street in the capital. Today, through each letterbox along this ordinary street drops a card with a simple message: We Want What You Have. At forty, Roger Yount is blessed with an expensively groomed wife, two small sons and a powerful job in the city. Freddy Kano, teenage football sensation, has left a two-room shack in Senegal to follow his dream. Traffic warden Quentina has exchanged the violence of the police in Zimbabwe for the violence of the enraged middle classes. Elsewhere in the Capital, Zbigniew has come from Warsaw to indulge the super-rich in their interior decoration whims. These are just some of the unforgettable characters in Lanchester's unputdownable masterpiece novel of contemporary urban life.

Claude Gueux, condamné à de la prison pour le vol d'un pain, se retrouve persécuté par un gardien de prison. La seule issue que trouve Claude Gueux à cette injustice est le meurtre de cet homme…

Victor Hugo s'est déjà engagé dans le combat contre la peine de mort dans un roman précédent, Les Derniers Jours d'un condamné à mort. C'est en lisant, dans la gazette des tribunaux, le procès de Claude Gueux que Victor Hugo décide d'en écrire la vie depuis son entrée en prison jusqu'à son exécution, avant de conclure par un plaidoyer contre cette société implacable avec les victimes de la misère humaine.

Carta blanca se abre y se cierra con una guerra, la del RIF, en el Norte de Africa, y la Guerra Civil española pero es, sobre todo, la historia de una pasión, porque las huella de un amor verdadero son las que marcan de verdad el alma y el destino, un destino marcado inevitablemente por el desencanto, el conocimiento de los límites de la crueldad humana y el refugio del amor contra todo, frente a todo, como única redención y salida. Lorenzo Silva ha escrito, con la madurez de una prosa directa y sin concesiones, una novela soberbia, madura, descarnada, profundamente apasionada, que indaga en nuestro pasado y nos ofrece la figura carismática y apabullante de un antihéroe atípico y atractivo que debe vivir en una época convulsa en donde se extreman los sentimientos y la auténtica relevancia de nuestros actos.

Tita y Pedro se aman. Pero ella está condenada a permanecer soltera, cuidando a su madre hasta que ésta muera. Y Pedro, para estar cerca de Tita, se casa con la hermana de ella, Rosaura. Las recetas de cocina que Tita elabora puntean el paso de las estaciones de su vida, siempre marcada por la presente ausencia de Pedro. Como agua para chocolate es una agridulce comedia de amores y desencuentros, una obra chispeante, tierna y pletórica de talento, que se ha convertido en uno de los mayores éxitos de la literatura latinoamericana.

Luis Fiore, obrero metalúrgico, asesina a su mujer en la noche de un 1ª de mayo. El episodio sirve de base a las cuatro historias que integran esta novela de Juan José Saer, publicada originalmente en 1969. Una interrogación sobre el funcionamiento del mundo, sobre el conflicto entre el caos y el orden, sobre la posibilidad del conocimiento y la irrisión de la experiencia humana.

Dramaturgo y narrador español. Nació en París en 1903, hijo de padre alemán y madre francesa que se instalaron en Valencia en 1914. Dirigió entre 1935 y 1936 el teatro universitario `El búho` perfilándose como uno de los escritores jóvenes influido por la Revista de Occidente y José Ortega y Gasset. Durante la guerra civil colaboró con André Malraux en la filmación de L`Espoir (1937). Republicano, cruzó la frontera en 1939 y fue internado en un campo francés. Deportado a Argelia, consiguió escapar en 1942 y se trasladó a México, donde ha publicado la parte más significativa de su obra literaria. A pesar de sus comienzos esteticistas y de vanguardia, resulta ser un escritor de carácter realista y de fuerte contenido sociopolítico. Antes de la guerra civil había publicado Los poemas cotidianos (1930), Teatro incompleto (1930), Espejo de avaricia (1935) y Yo vivo (1936). A finales de la década de 1960 se atrevió a regresar a España, para comprobar el desconocimiento absoluto de su persona y de su obra entre los españoles, y poco después escribió La gallina ciega, diario español (1971) en la que recogió sus amargas impresiones. Publicó revistas muy personales: Sala de Espera (1960) y Los 60. Su obra narrativa comprende las novelas del ciclo El laberinto mágico (Campo cerrado, 1943, Campo de sangre, 1945, Campo abierto, 1951, Campo del moro, 1963, Campo francés, 1965, y Campo de los almendros, 1968), varios volúmenes de cuentos y, entre otras novelas, Juego de cartas (1964).

En este recopilación se encuentran los siguientes cuentos: El que ganó Almería, La gran guerra, La invasión, Sesión secreta, La sonrisa, la Gabardina y Las alpargatas.

Felipe IV pide un buen día ver a la reina desnuda.

El revuelo que ello provoca en Palacio no es poco, aun siendo la reina quién es, o lo que es lo mismo, su propia esposa, pues que los reyes en su lecho quieran verse desnudos, o en pelota picada, no es que no sea asunto privado, es que no lo es, y además, es asunto de Estado.

El reino entero se pone en vilo y el Santo Tribunal de la Santa Inquisición convoca urgente reunión para decidir qué es lo que se debe hacer al respecto, si permitir que semejante disparate (pecado mortal) se lleve a cabo o no, pues sabido es por todos que los pecados del rey los paga el pueblo entero y teniendo en cuenta los avatares históricos que por el momento azuzan España, a saber, el posible desembarco de oro en Cádiz para pagar deudas con los genoveses y la inminente batalla en Flandes que hace peligrar la supremacía del reino español en el mundo… digamos que el horno no estaba para magdalenas.

El suceso es digno de ser recordado, para tal efecto se escribe la crónica de todo cuanto sucede aquellos días en Palacio y en la Corte, sin pasar por alto ni el más mínimo detalle ni cuanto personaje aporte, aun siendo poco, vida a esta historia.

Delirante trama que Torrente Ballester nos regala en esta?Crónica del rey pasmado?, tan ingeniosa y divertida que dos años más tarde de ser publicado el libro, en 1991, el cineasta Imanol Uribe decide llevarla a la gran pantalla.

Un libro divertido, asombroso, descripción tremenda de aquella España del siglo XVII, España de Inquisiciones, comedias, glorias, poetas, de moralistas de medio pelo y fanáticos de tres al cuarto.

La ambigüedad del tiempo y una Córdoba tan mítica como real, constituyen el escenario propicio para el pacto diabólico y el rito iniciático. Es octubre de 1962. La inminencia de la guerra por la crisis de los misiles en Cuba y un grupo de intelectuales argentinos que asisten a un estrafalario congreso. En ese marco, Esteban Espósito se enamora de Graciela Oribe, fuente de la evocación y la memoria apasionada que dará cauce a esta enigmática historia de amor. De allí en más, las treinta y seis horas en la recóndita Córdoba y la máquina del recuerdo hacen del tiempo un protagonista sustancial, y Espósito asumirá otras búsquedas existenciales que lo conectarán con el delirio, con el ser, con el sentido de la vida y de la muerte y con su parte demoníaca. Y, en una encrucijada, pactará con el Diablo para aceptar una nueva moral y un gran desafío: canjear la vida por la literatura.

Abelardo Castillo maneja los hilos de la incertidumbre y nos da una novela monumental cuyo centro es un saber cifrado: `Hay un orden secreto, el demonio me lo dijo`, confiesa el narrador. Y los lectores sabemos que acceder a esa forma de sabiduría tiene un precio.

En la tradición de Goethe y Thomas Mann, de Arlt y Marechal, deslumbra y emociona la rebosante imaginación, la hondura metafísica y la perfecta arquitectura de Crónica de un iniciado.

Una consevadora mujer de clase media vela el cadáver de su marido, prematuramente fallecido. Mediante un soliloquio, la esposa recuerda los muchos aspectos insatisfactorios de su vida en común. La Biblia de cabecera de Mario está subrayada con pasajes y a partir de estas citas, Carmen va desgranando sus pensamientos reprochándole su integridad moral y su falta de ambición.

Frank Rosenthal, El Zurdo, tuvo algo de simbólica: como la traca final de una era en la historia de la capital mundial del juego, Las Vegas.

Rosenthal, formado en la escuela de las apuestas deportivas ilegales llegó, como otros muchos, a Las Vegas con el propósito de hacer olvidar su pasado y seguir trabajando en lo que siempre había hecho: ser jugador. La pequeña ciudad de Nevada, sumidero de esperanzas bajo una capa febril y brillante, era una verdadera mina de oro, ideal para quienes patrocinaron la mudanza de Rosenthal, como también la de su viejo amigo Tony Spilotro, tan amante del dinero como de la violencia. Ambos fueron símbolos de una etapa frenética, trufada de violencia e ilegalidades, marcada por los intentos de la Mafia de establecer su hegemonía sobre los casinos. Una ciudad sin sitio para el amor, por lo que éste -como el que sentía Rosenthal hacia Geri, su esposa- estaba abocado al fracaso.

Casino, basada en hechos reales es, más allá de una novela de ritmo casi cinematográfico, un fascinante documento sobre el mundo del juego, sus leyes y sus corruptelas. Amor y adulterio, negocio y delito se entremezclan en una obra intensa y original, reveladora y absorbente.

From Nicholas Pileggi, author of Wiseguy -the #1 bestseller that became Martin Scorsese’s Academy Award-winning film GoodFellas-comes the brilliantly told true story of love, marriage, adultery, murder, and revenge, Mafia-style… the shattering inside account of how the mob finally lost its stranglehold over the neon money-making machine it created: the multibillion-dollar casino gambling industry of Las Vegas.

Cuando el protagonista, homónimo del autor, conoce al gentleman Henry Morgan comprende que ha dado con su alma gemela. A Klas acaban de robárselo todo, así que decide ponerse en manos de Henry: este le descubre un anacrónico mundo de lujo, y le revela que está planeando robar el oro del castillo de Estocolmo. Y entonces aparece Leo, hermano de Henry y poeta maldito, que acaba de salir del psiquiátrico.

¿Quién supondría que una peligrosa trama de gángsters y contrabandistas estaría a la vuelta de la esquina?

From Publishers Weekly

DeLillo skates through a day in the life of a brilliant and precocious New Economy billionaire in this monotone 13th novel, a study in big money and affectlessness. As one character remarks, 28-year-old Eric Packer "wants to be one civilization ahead of this one." But on an April day in the year 2000, Eric's fortune and life fall apart. The story tracks him as he traverses Manhattan in his stretch limo. His goal: a haircut at Anthony's, his father's old barber. But on this day his driver has to navigate a presidential visit, an attack by anarchists and a rapper's funeral. Meanwhile, the yen is mounting, destroying Eric's bet against it. The catastrophe liberates Eric's destructive instinct-he shoots another character and increases his bet. Mostly, the action consists of sequences in the back of the limo (where he stages meetings with his doctor, various corporate officers and a New Economy guru) interrupted by various pit stops. He lunches with his wife of 22 days, Elise Shifrin. He has sex with two women, his art consultant and a bodyguard. He is hit in the face with a pie by a protester. He knows he is being stalked, and the novel stages a final convergence between the ex-tycoon and his stalker. DeLillo practically invented the predominant vernacular of the late '90s (the irony, the close reading of consumer goods, the mock complexity of technobabble) in White Noise, but he seems surprisingly disengaged here. His spotlighted New Economy icon, Eric, doesn't work, either as a genius financier (he is all about gadgetry, not exchange-there's no love of the deal in his "frozen heart") or a thinker. The threats posed by the contingencies that he faces cannot lever him out of his recalcitrant one-dimensionality. DeLillo is surely an American master, but this time out, he is doodling.

From Library Journal

Unlike his sprawling masterpiece, Underworld, DeLillo's 13th novel is short and tightly focused, indeed almost claustrophobic. Most of the action takes place inside a "prousted" (cork-lined) stretch limo, as the reclusive financial wizard Eric Packer is chauffeured across Manhattan for a haircut. Thanks to a presidential visit, antiglobalization demonstrations, and a celebrity funeral, this journey takes up most of the day. Stuck in traffic, Packer anxiously monitors the value of the yen on the limo's computer. Using the car as his office, he summons advisors from nearby shops and restaurants. His physician gives him a rubber-gloved physical exam in the back seat as Packer discusses imminent financial ruin with his broker and angry crowds block the streets. This work most closely resembles The Body Artist in its brevity and straightforward narrative flow. However, the earlier novel was written in an uncharacteristically warm, poetic style, promising a new direction for this important writer, while Cosmopolis reverts to the standard DeLillo boilerplate, perceptive and funny but also brittle and cold. This, coupled with the book's dated 1990s sensibility, makes Cosmopolis a step backward rather than an artistic advance.

CILVĒKS AR RĒTU

DŽEKS LONDONS

KOPOTI RAKSTI-1

Tulkojums latviešu valodā.

«Liesma», 1974

SASTĀDĪJUSI TAMĀRA ZĀLĪTE

NO ANGĻU VALODAS TULKOJUSI VALIJA BRUTĀNE, ALBERTS DZENITIS, ROTA EZERIŅA UN HELMA LAPIŅA MĀKSLINIEKS ĀDOLFS LIELAIS

In un mondo senza tempo e senza nome, devastato da una guerra che ha rivelato il fondo barbarico della natura umana, tra cumuli di macerie e colonne di profughi in fuga, si erge un antico castello di pietra. Tra le sue austere mura vive, assieme alla sorella-amante Morgan, Abel, l’ultimo discendente di una famiglia aristocratica. Per i due giovani, quel castello sarebbe un rifugio ideale, se un giorno, a turbare la loro idilliaca «intimità», non sopraggiungesse una banda di soldati irregolari, guidati da un oscuro personaggio femminile. Stregati dal fascino magnetico e perverso di quella donna senza volto e senza anima, Abel e Morgan si trasformano ben presto nelle pedine di un sordido gioco a tre, mentre l’antica dimora diviene teatro di inaudite violenze, eccessi e distruzioni, che porteranno in un crescendo di tensione e di suspense alla catastrofe finale.

Dostoevsky’s drama of sin, guilt, and redemption transforms the sordid story of an old woman’s murder into the nineteenth century’s profoundest and most compelling philosophical novel.

Raskolnikov, an impoverished student living in the St. Petersburg of the tsars, is determined to overreach his humanity and assert his untrammeled individual will. When he commits an act of murder and theft, he sets into motion a story that, for its excruciating suspense, its atmospheric vividness, and its depth of characterization and vision is almost unequaled in the literatures of the world. The best known of Dostoevsky’s masterpieces,Crime and Punishment can bear any amount of rereading without losing a drop of its power over our imaginations.

Award-winning translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky render this elusive and wildly innovative novel with an energy, suppleness, and range of voice that do full justice to the genius of its creator.

This novel takes place in the eponymous Cannery Row, a place made up of ’junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses’. Although there is a narrative trajectory — the desire of Mack and the other boys living at the Palace Flophouse to throw a party for their friend and benefactor, Doc — the plot of this novel is really that plot of land Steinbeck describes so well.

Marion and Shiva Stone are twin brothers born of a secret union between a beautiful Indian nun and a brash British surgeon at a mission hospital in Addis Ababa. Orphaned by their mother’s death in childbirth and their father’s disappearance, bound together by a preternatural connection and a shared fascination with medicine, the twins come of age as Ethiopia hovers on the brink of revolution. Yet it will be love, not politics—their passion for the same woman—that will tear them apart and force Marion, fresh out of medical school, to flee his homeland. He makes his way to America, finding refuge in his work as an intern at an underfunded, overcrowded New York City hospital. When the past catches up to him—nearly destroying him—Marion must entrust his life to the two men he thought he trusted least in the world: the surgeon father who abandoned him and the brother who betrayed him.

The acclaimed author of Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude returns with a roar with this gorgeous, searing portrayal of Manhattanites wrapped in their own delusions, desires, and lies.

Chase Insteadman, a handsome, inoffensive fixture on Manhattan's social scene, lives off residuals earned as a child star on a beloved sitcom called Martyr & Pesty. Chase owes his current social cachet to an ongoing tragedy much covered in the tabloids: His teenage sweetheart and fiancée, Janice Trumbull, is trapped by a layer of low-orbit mines on the International Space Station, from which she sends him rapturous and heartbreaking love letters. Like Janice, Chase is adrift, she in Earth's stratosphere, he in a vague routine punctuated by Upper East Side dinner parties.

Into Chase's cloistered city enters Perkus Tooth, a wall-eyed free-range pop critic whose soaring conspiratorial riffs are fueled by high-grade marijuana, mammoth cheeseburgers, and a desperate ache for meaning. Perkus's countercultural savvy and voracious paranoia draw Chase into another Manhattan, where questions of what is real, what is fake, and who is complicit take on a life-shattering urgency. Along with Oona Laszlo, a self-loathing ghostwriter, and Richard Abneg, a hero of the Tompkins Square Park riot now working as a fixer for the billionaire mayor, Chase and Perkus attempt to unearth the answers to several mysteries that seem to offer that rarest of artifacts on an island where everything can be bought: Truth.

Like Manhattan itself, Jonathan Lethem's masterpiece is beautiful and tawdry, tragic and forgiving, devastating and antic, a stand-in for the whole world and a place utterly unique.

Оксана Робски – автор восьми книг, ставших бестселлерами. Число книг-подражаний растет с каждым днем, маститые журналисты и искушенные критики продолжают яростно обсуждать этот феномен литературы.

Героиня ее нового романа – успешная и независимая писательница. У нее есть собственный дом, бывший муж, любимый сын и родители, которых надо поддерживать материально, подруги с личными проблемами, перспективный поклонник и собственный телефонный маньяк. Можно заработать миллионы и подняться на вершину успеха, но у всего есть своя цена. Готова ли героиня столкнуться с обратной стороной славы?

Crónica de una muerte anunciada, novela corta publicada en 1981, es una de Las obras más conocidas y apreciadas de García Márquez. Relata en forma de reconstrucción casi periodística el asesinato de Santiago Nasar a manos de los gemelos Vicario. Desde el comienzo de la narración se anuncia que Santiago Nasar va a morir: es el joven hijo de un árabe emigrado y parece ser el causante de la deshonra de Ángela, hermana de los gemelos, que ha contraído matrimonio el día anterior y ha sido rechazada por su marido. «Nunca hubo una muerte tan anunciada», declara quien rememora los hechos veintisiete años después: los vengadores, en efecto, no se cansan de proclamar sus propósitos por todo el pueblo, como si quisieran evitar el mandato del destino, pero un cúmulo de casualidades hace que quienes pueden evitar el crimen no logren intervenir o se decidan demasiado tarde. El propio Santiago Nasar se levanta esa mañana despreocupado, ajeno por completo a la muerte que le aguarda.

La fatalidad domina todo el relato: el crimen es tan público que se hace inevitable. García Márquez se esfuerza en demostrar que la vida, en ocasiones, se sirve de tantas casualidades que hacen imposible convertirla en literatura. Su prosa escueta, precisa y pegada al terreno logra envolver de credibilidad lo exageradamente increíble, inventando una tensión narrativa donde ya no hay argumento, volviendo del revés el tiempo para que revele sus verdades, dejando una duda en el aire que acabará por destruir a los protagonistas de este drama, que fue adaptado a la gran pantalla en 1987, dirigido por Franceso Rosie interpretado por Rupert Everett, Ornella Muti y Gian Maria Volonté.

El Domingo de Ramos de 1965 cuatro personajes inician un viaje hacia Veracruz y se detienen en Cholula, ciudad de las pirámides aztecas. En el laberinto de sus galerías se internarán las dos parejas, como en un descenso a los infiernos, que concluirá con una tragedia ritual inesperada. `Ficción total` en palabras del propio autor, `Cambio de piel` indaga en el mito del México prehispánico y en el holocausto europeo a través de la memoria de sus protagonistas para decirnos que, en definitiva, todas las violencias son la misma violencia. Un retrato del hombre de nuestro siglo, atormentado por las dudas sobre el presente, la carga del pasado y el miedo del porvenir.

En este breve ensayo-reseña se pretenderá distinguir el leitmotiv dentro de su cuento Chac Mool: las reminiscencias prehispánicas y el pasado indígena, pulsiones constantes en el trabajo del escritor. Conscientes estamos que intentar aprehender las fuentes del discurso literario de Fuentes es una tarea titánica, ya que independientemente de la vastedad de su obra y de la densidad de sus historias, determinar las ideas o mociones de un autor tan prolífico es adentrarse dentro de un maremágnum que no admite clasificación. Por tal razón sólo me atreveré a esbozar ideas y sugerir motivos. Impulsos esenciales e innegables que nos permiten comprender el mundo representando y ficticio del autor.

Fuentes no olvida, o al menos pretende no hacerlo, construye amalgamas que nos intuyen y justifican. Pensemos en el difuminado y nebuloso personaje Ixca Cienfuegos de La región más transparente, o en el Cristóbal Nonato, o en el misticismo de Aura o en La muerte de Artemio Cruz. En todos lados el escritor recurre a su herencia, aunque francamente en algunas ocasiones sus radiografías sociales parezcan más una especie de turismo sociológico o análisis de vitrina (Agua Quemada, Los años con Laura Díaz, Cambio de piel y La misma Región…). Sin embargo, la calidad de sus obras como su alta cota literaria es indiscutible, considero que tanto Cantar de ciegos como Los días enmascarados son libros excelentes. Sobre este último, o mejor dicho, sobre el cuento del Chac Mool, versa este opúsculo.

Catch-22 is like no other novel. It has its own rationale, its own extraordinary character. It moves back and forth from hilarity to horror. It is outrageously funny and strangely affecting. It is totally original.

Set in the closing months of World War II in an American bomber squadron off Italy, Catch-22 is the story of a bombardier named Yossarian, who is frantic and furious because thousands of people he hasn’t even met keep trying to kill him. Catch-22 is a microcosm of the twentieth-century world as it might look to someone dangerously sane. It is a novel that lives and moves and grows with astonishing power and vitality—a masterpiece of our time.

"Czas miłości" to, jak przeczytałam na okładce książki, już szesnasta powieść Colleen Mccullough, moja jednak pierwsza tej autorki. Muszę przyznać, że książka bardzo mi się podobała, co jest o tyle dziwne, że ostatnio żadna książka nie przypada mi do gustu.

Losy bohaterów osadzone są w XIX-wiecznych realiach, głównie w Australii, bądź – jak kto woli – Nowej Południowej Walii.

Oprócz bardzo interesującej fabuły w powieści znajdujemy mnóstwo typowo historycznych i geograficznych faktów. Wobec czego lektura dostarcza nam wiedzę, którą moglibyśmy zdobyć jedynie studiując książki historyczne czy też oglądając programy geograficzne, na co nie każdy ma ochotę. Informacje te wplecione są w treść książki bardzo ładnie, nie są nudne, jak i nie wybijają czytelnika z głównego wątku. Jednak dają sporą wiedzę o zamierzchłym XIX wieku, o tym, jak dawniej ludzie żyli, podróżowali, zdobywali majątki, zawierali małżeństwa, po prostu jak to było dawniej, gdy nie było odrzutowców, telefonów, kanalizacji etc.

To stanowi jednak tło historii kilkorga bohaterów powieści. Główny bohater, Alexander Kinross, żeni się ze swoją, o prawie połowę młodszą od siebie, kuzynką. Odkrywa złotonośne złoże, które zapewnia mu ogromny majątek i sławę. Niestety, jego powodzenie w interesach nie idzie w parze z życiem rodzinnym.

Dalszych losów Alexandra i jego rodziny nie chcę zdradzać, gdyż tym lepiej się czyta, im mniej się wie, czego można się spodziewać. Niemniej jest to piękna opowieść o miłości, przyjaźni, stosunkach międzyludzkich i chyba przede wszystkim o godzeniu się z losem.

Serdecznie polecam.

Pełna dramatyzmu opowieść o losach żołnierzy wcielonych przymusowo do armii austriackiej w latach pierwszej wojny światowej oparta jest na osobistych przeżyciach autora. Po raz pierwszy opublikowana w 1937 roku, przeżywa obecnie prawdziwy renesans popularności, wywołany zapewne filmem, który cieszył się niemałą frekwencją.

Pięciu dezerterów z c.k. armii, którym przewodzi Polak, przez dłuższy czas wymyka się obławom, stosując przeróżne fortele, aby zachować życie. Pod warstwą anegdotyczną kryją się głębsze problemy moralne, tak więc powieść Sejdy odznacza się walorami nie tylko historyczno-poznawczymi.

Сборник Хемингуэя "Мужчины без женщин" — один из самых ярких опытов великого американского писателя в «малых» формах прозы.

Увлекательные сюжетные коллизии и идеальное владение словом в рассказах соседствуют с дерзкими для 1920-х годов модернестическими приемами. Лучшие из произведений, вошедших в книгу, продолжают биографию Ника Адамса, своебразного альтер эго самого писателя и главного героя не менее знаменитого сборника "В наше время".

From Publishers Weekly

In contrast to the utopian official literature of Communist China, the stories in this wide-ranging collection marshal wry humor, entangled sex, urban alienation, nasty village politics and frequent violence. Translated ably enough to keep up with the colloquial tone, most tales are told with straightforward familiarity, drawing readers into small communities and personal histories that are anything but heroic. "The Brothers Shu," by Su Tong (Raise the Red Lantern), is an urban tale of young lust and sibling rivalry in a sordid neighborhood around the ironically named Fragrant Cedar Street. That story's earthiness is matched by Wang Xiangfu's folksy "Fritter Hollow Chronicles," about peasants' vendettas and local politics, and by "The Cure," by Mo Yan (Red Sorghum; The Garlic Ballads), which details the fringe benefits of an execution. Personal alienation and disaffection are as likely to appear in stories with rural settings (Li Rui's "Sham Marriage") as they are to poison the lives of urban characters (Chen Cun's "Footsteps on the Roof"). Comedy takes an elegant and elaborate form in "A String of Choices," Wang Meng's tale of a toothache cure, and it assumes the burlesque of small-town propaganda fodder in Li Xiao's "Grass on the Rooftop." Editor Goldblatt has chosen not to expand the contributors' biographies or elaborate on the collection's post-Tiananmen context. He lets the stories speak for themselves, which, fortunately, they do, quietly and effectively.

From Library Journal

The 20 authors represented here range from Wang Meng, the former minister of culture, to Su Tong, whose Raise the Red Lantern has been immortalized on screen.

***

Chinese literature has changed drastically in the past thirty years. During the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) arts and literature of all sorts were virtually nonexistent since they were frowned upon by official powers so that attempts to produce any were apt to cause one’s public humiliation and possibly even death by the Red Guards and other unofficial arms of the government. After 1976, in the wake of Mao’s death, literature slowly regained its importance in China, and by the mid-1980s dark, angry, satirical writings had become quite prominent on the mainland.

In the wake of Tiananmen Square, dark literature faded somewhat, but never vanished. Now Howard Goldblatt, a prominent translator of Chinese fiction and editor of the critical magazine Modern Chinese Literature, has compiled a representative collection of contemporary Chinese fiction entitled Chairman Mao Would Not Be Amused. Even with my limited knowledge of modern China I feel certain the title of the book is fairly accurate.

Mo Yan is one of my favorite contemporary writers. His dark, no-holds-barred satires Red Sorghum and The Garlic Ballads detailed what he sees as the failings of both Chinese peasants (of which he was born as one) and the Chinese leaders. His short story "The Cure" is in the same vein, detailing how a local government representative-probably self-appointed during the Cultural Revolution, although that is never made quite clear in the story-leads a lynching of the village’s two most prominent leaders and their wives. But, as in most Mo Yan stories, the bitterness directed at the lyncher is double-edged with the bitter look at a local peasant who sees the deaths of the two village leaders as a desperate chance to possibly rescue his mother from impending blindness. The story is coldly realistic and totally chilling in the rational way it treats the series of events.

Su Tong is the author of the novella "Raise The Red Lantern", the basis of the wonderful movie. His "The Brothers Shu" is a bitter look at some traditional character weaknesses of Chinese people, and particularly how they affect family life. The Shu family is incredibly dysfunctional. The father nightly climbs up the side of his two-family house to have sex with the woman upstairs until her husband bolts her windows shut. So the woman sneaks downstairs to have sex in the younger son’s bedroom while the son is tied to his bed, gagged and blindfolded. Meanwhile the elder son abuses the girl upstairs until she falls in love with him. When she becomes pregnant, they are both so shamed they form a suicide pact, tie themselves together and jump into a river, where the boy is rescued in time but the girl dies. The younger son so hates his older brother-somewhat deservedly considering the abuse heaped on him by the brother-that he pours gasoline through his bedroom and sets it ablaze.

And so on, complete with beatings and torments worthy of the most dysfunctional American families. While not a particularly likeable cast of characters, the story is strong and thoughtful.

Perhaps the most moving part about "First Person", by Shi Tiesheng is in the brief author description in the back of the book. Shi is described as “crippled during the Cultural Revolution”. So many lives were needlessly destroyed during that tumultuous decade, it is easy to feel that the arrest and subsequent conviction of the notorious Gang of Four was not nearly sufficient punishment for them.

"First Person" tells the story of a man with a heart condition-Shi frequently writes about the lives of handicapped people, according to his description-who is visiting his new 21st floor apartment for the first time. While climbing the stairs very slowly, taking frequent rests, he notices a cemetery separated from the apartment building by a huge wall. On one side of the wall is sitting a woman, while on the other side stands a man. As the man climbs the stairs he fantasizes about why the couple are there, and why they are separated by the wall. Perhaps the man is having an affair, and the wife is spying on him as he rendezvous with his lover?

But then the man notices a baby lying on a gravesite, being watched from a distance by the man, and he realizes that the couple is abandoning the child. An interesting story about the fanciful delusions a person can have, but with no real depth beyond that.

Two stories involve fear of dentists in completely different ways. Wang Meng’s "A String of Choices" is a very funny story that combines a bitter look at both Eastern and Western medicine with perhaps the most extreme case of fear of dentists imaginable. Chen Ran’s "Sunshine Between the Lips" tells of a young girl whose adult male friend exposes himself to her. If that were not traumatic enough, after he is arrested for exposing himself to a complete stranger, he sets his apartment on fire and dies a brutal death. This event, combined with a near-fatal bout of meningitis, creates in the girl a deep fear of phallic objects such as needles and penises. So imagine her trauma when she develops impacted wisdom teeth at the same time as she gets married. While this description might sound a bit ludicrous, this story is very serious and very well-executed.

A strong satire on how history can be rewritten to suit the writers’ needs is Li Xiao’s "Grass on the Rooftop". When a peasant’s hut goes on fire, he is rescued by a local student. The rescue is written up for an elementary school newspaper by a local child, but the story is picked up by other papers, changing radically with each reprinting until the rescuing student becomes a great hero of the Maoist revolution because of his supposed attempt to rescue a nonexistent portrait of Mao on the wall of the hut. While this story is uniquely Chinese in many ways, it resonates in all societies in which pride and agenda is often more important than the truth.

Anybody interested in a look at contemporary Chinese society should enjoy this collection immensely.

This novel starts April 25, 1986 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station which supplies the eastern Ukraine with one quarter of its electrical energy. While the characters are fiction, actual Soviet persons are referred to in the book. Dedicated to the people who kept a terrible accident from becoming far more terrible.

The novelist's camera pans from the dome of King Fuad University (now Cairo University) to students streaming out of the campus, focusing on four students in their twenties, each representing a different trend in Egypt in the 1930s. Finally the camera comes to rest on Mahgub Abd al-Da'im. A scamp, he fancies himself a nihilist, a hedonist, an egotist, but his personal vulnerability is soon revealed by a family crisis back home in al-Qanatir, a dusty, provincial town on the Nile that is also a popular destination for Cairene day-trippers. Mahgub, like many characters in works by Naguib Mahfouz, has a hard time finding the correct setting on his ambition gauge. His emotional life also fluctuates between the extremes of a street girl, who makes her living gathering cigarette butts, and his wealthy cousin Tahiya. Since he thinks that virtue is merely a social construct, how far will our would-be nihilist go in trying to fulfill his unbridled ambitions? What if he discovers that high society is more corrupt and cynical than he is? With a wink back at Goethe's Faust and Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews, Mahgub becomes a willing collaborator in his own corruption. Published in Arabic in the 1940s, this cautionary morality tale about self-defeating egoism and ill-digested foreign philosophies comes from the same period as one of the writer's best-known works, Midaq Alley. Both novels are comic and heart-felt indictments not so much of Egyptian society between the world wars as of human nature and our paltry attempts to establish just societies.

Do you have to honour a promise you made in the past if it means losing all you have now?

When Mark introduces his date, Julia, to Chloe and her husband at a London restaurant, it's obvious that something is very, very wrong. Alex and Julia pretend not to know one another, but the shocked expressions on their faces tell another story.

As the mystery of Julia's identity unravels, a terrible tragedy from ten years ago gradually comes to light. While Chloe struggles with a secret of her own, Alex has to decide whether he should take Julia back to Australia to try to lay the past to rest, when doing so will risk all he has with the wife he loves.

And Julia must decide whether to finally confront Alex with the whole truth about what happened back then.

Set in London and Perth, Come Back to Me is a taut psychological drama that will keep you enthralled until the very last page

A late-night phone call from a stranger involves Quinn, a mystery writer, in a baffling murder case stranger than his novels.

A 35-year-old architect is driving home from his London office when his car swerves and crashes onto a traffic island lying below three converging motorways. Uninjured, he climbs the embankment to seek help, but no one will stop for him and he is trapped on the island, where he remains.

"Visionary of both style and substance… the literary equivalent of Salvador Dalí or Max Ernst."-The Washington Post Book World

"Ballard's novels are complex, obsessive, frequently poetic, and always disquieting chronicles of nature rebelling against humans, of the survival of barbarism in a world of mechanical efficiency, of ethropy, anomie, breakdown, ruin… The blasted landscapes that his characters inhabit are both external settings and states of mind."-Luc Sante

This powerful and often terrifying novel, the fruit of J. G. Ballard's obsession with the motor-car, will shock and disturb many readers. Few products of modern technology excite as much fascination and interest as the automobile, but each year hundreds of thousands of people die in car crashes throughout the world, millions are injured. Yet attempts to regulate the motor-car and reduce this slaughter constantly meet with strong and almost unthinking resistance. Ballard believes that the key to this paradox is to be found in the car crash itself, which contains an image of all our fantasies of speed, power, violence and sexuality. 'Three years ago, I held an exhibition of crashed cars at the New Arts Laboratory in London,' he says. 'People were fascinated by the cars but I was surprised that these damaged vehicles were continually attacked and abused during the month they were on show – watching this, I decided to write Crash.'

The novel opens with the narrator recovering in hospital after a serious car crash in which he has killed the husband of a young woman doctor. In his pain-filled dreams he finds himself dominated by strange sexual fantasies, and he determines to find the real meaning of this horrific experience. When he leaves hospital he revisits the scene of the crash, and meets the woman doctor. During their affair they begin an exploration of the motor-car in all its forms, attending stock-car races, watching test vehicles being crashed, conducting a variety of sexual experiments on London motorways. They meet a violent and aggressive figure called Vaughan, a 'hoodlum scientist' who seems determined to die in a car crash with a famous film actress. Terrified of Vaughan, and yet under his spell, the narrator is carried closer to the sinister climax of the novel, a disquieting vision of the future in which sex and technology form a nightmare marriage.

Violent and frightening, but always true to its subject, Crash is above all a cautionary tale, a warning against the brutal, erotic and overlit future that beckons us, ever more powerfully, from the margins of the technological landscape.

There’s something wrong with Estrella Del Mar, the lazy, sun-drenched retirement haven on Spain’s Costa Del Sol. Lately this sleepy hamlet, home to hordes of well-heeled, well-fattened British and French expatriates, has come alive with activity and culture; the previously passive, isolated residents have begun staging boat races, tennis competitions, revivals of Harold Pinter plays, and lavish parties. At night the once vacant streets are now teeming with activity, bars and cafes packed with revelers, the sidewalks crowded with people en route from one event to the next.

Outward appearances suggest the wholesale adoption of a new ethos of high-spirited, well-controlled collective exuberance. But there’s the matter of the fire: The house and household of an aged, wealthy industrialist has gone up in flames, claiming five lives, while virtually the entire town stood and watched. There’s the matter of the petty crime, the burglaries, muggings, and auto thefts which have begun to nibble away at the edges of Estrella Del Mar’s security despite the guardhouses and surveillance cameras. There’s the matter of the new, flourishing trade in drugs and pornography. And there’s the matter of Frank Prentice, who sits in Marbella jail awaiting trial for arson and five counts of murder, and who, despite being clearly innocent, has happily confessed.

It is up to Charles Prentice, Frank’s brother, to peel away the onionlike layers of denial and deceit which hide the rather ugly truth about this seaside idyll, its residents, and the horrific crime which brought him here. But as is usually the case in a J.G. Ballard book, the truth comes with a price tag attached, and likely without any easing of discomfort for his principal characters.

Cocaine Nights marks a partial return on Ballard’s part to the provocative, highly-successful mid-career methodology employed in novels such as Crash and High Rise: after establishing himself as a science fiction guru in the 1960s, Ballard stylistically shifted gears towards an unnerving, futuristic variant on social realism in the 1970s. Both Crash and High Rise were what-if novels, posing questions as to what the likely results would be if our collective fascination with such things as speed, violence, status, power, and sex were carried just a little bit further: How insane, how brutal could our world become if we really cut loose?

Cocaine Nights asks a question better suited to the ’90s, the age of gated communities and infrared home security systems: Does absolute security guarantee isolation and cultural death? Conversely, is a measure of crime an essential ingredient in a vibrant, living, properly functioning social system? Is it true, as a character asserts, that “Crime and creativity go together, always have done,” and that “total security is a disease of deprivation”? Suffice to say that the answers presented in Nights will be anathema to moral absolutists; the world of Ballard’s fiction, like life in the hyperkinetic, relativistic 1990s, abounds with uncomfortable grey areas.

On the surface, Cocaine Nights is a whodunit and a race against time, but as it proceeds – and as preconceived conceptions of good and evil begin to dissolve – it evolves into a thoughtful, faintly frightening look at under-examined aspects of 1990s western society. As is his wont, Ballard confronts his readers with some faintly outlandish hypotheses unlikely to be embraced by many, but which nonetheless serve to provoke both thought and a bit of paranoia; it’s a method that Ballard has developed and refined on his own, and as usual, it propels his novel along marvellously.

Cocaine Nights doesn’t have either the broad sweep or brute impact of the landmark Crash, but it retains enough social relevance and low-key creepiness to more than satisfy Ballardphiles. As is often the case in Ballard’s alternate reality, it’s a given that his most appealing, human characters turn out to be the most twisted, and that even the most normal of events turn out to be governed by a perverse, malformed logic; that this logic turns out to be grounded in sound sociological and psychological principles is its most horrific feature.

David B. Livingstone

À Paris, le protestant Bernard de Mergy retrouve son frère aîné, converti au catholicisme. Décidés à ne pas quereller leurs croyances religieuses, les deux jeunes gens s'accordent de partager les jouissances qu'offre la cour des Médicis, où les intrigues amoureuses se démêlent à force de duels chevaleresques. Mais tandis que le roi Charles IX s'offre le plaisir barbare d'une chasse à cour, gronde le râle sourd et macabre de la Saint-Barthélemy… Répondant à la mode du roman historique, Mérimée tire du massacre politique orchestré par Charles IX et Catherine de Médicis la matière d'une fiction savoureuse. Violemment ironique, l'auteur peint sous des charmes romanesques l'image monstrueuse d'une France éventrée par la guerre civile pour le seul caprice d'un roi en mal de divertissement.

"Chłopaki nie płaczą" to znakomita powieść Krzysztofa Varga, opowiadająca o perypetiach paczki przyjaciół.

Kultowa rzecz o piciu, paleniu i pannach.

"Boys Don't Cry" to jedna ze sztandarowych piosenek The Cure. Do tego tytułu nawiązywali muzycy, pisarze i reżyserzy, m.in. Muniek Staszczyk i Krzysztof Varga

Captain Yossarian is an American bombardier stationed off the Italian coast during the final months of World War II. Paranoid and odd, Yossarian believes that everyone around him is trying to kill him. All Yossarian wants is to complete his tour of duty and be sent home. However, because the glory-seeking Colonel Cathcart continually raises the number of required missions, the men of the "fighting 256th squadron" must keep right on fighting.

With a growing hatred of flying, Yossarian pleads with Doc Daneeka to ground him on the basis of insanity. Doc Daneeka replies that Yossarian's appeal is useless because, according to army regulation Catch-22, insane men who ask to be grounded prove themselves sane through a concern for personal safety. Truly crazy people are those who readily agree to fly more missions. The only way to be grounded is to ask for it. Yet this act demonstrates sanity and thus demands further flying. Crazy or not, Yossarian is stuck.

Captain Yossarian is an American bombardier stationed off the Italian coast during the final months of World War II. Paranoid and odd, Yossarian believes that everyone around him is trying to kill him. All Yossarian wants is to complete his tour of duty and be sent home. However, because the glory-seeking Colonel Cathcart continually raises the number of required missions, the men of the "fighting 256th squadron" must keep right on fighting.

With a growing hatred of flying, Yossarian pleads with Doc Daneeka to ground him on the basis of insanity. Doc Daneeka replies that Yossarian's appeal is useless because, according to army regulation Catch-22, insane men who ask to be grounded prove themselves sane through a concern for personal safety. Truly crazy people are those who readily agree to fly more missions. The only way to be grounded is to ask for it. Yet this act demonstrates sanity and thus demands further flying. Crazy or not, Yossarian is stuck.

En el fondo de un pequeño lago volcánico, muy cerca de Roma, descansan desde hace veinte siglos dos barcos misteriosos, los más grandes de la Antigüedad. ¿Cómo llegaron estas naves egipcias a un lago romano? Una inscripción en el interior de los barcos puede ser la clave: el nombre Cayo César Germánico, más conocido como Calígula, sea tal vez la respuesta. Esta extraordinaria novela ofrece una nueva visión de la excéntrica y controvertida figura del emperador Calígula, tan despreciada y cuestionada por la historia. Un niño que logró sobrevivir y aprendió a defenderse en un medio hostil, un muchacho que veneraba a su padre y que junto a él descubrió y se enamoró de Egipto. Un joven marcado por la soledad, el dolor, arrastrado a la locura por el asesinato de toda su familia, víctima de las intrigas del poder. ¿Cabría ahora preguntarse si el gran verdugo, el asesino brutal, no fue en realidad una víctima?

Cayo Julio César Germánico se conviertió en emperador romano el año 37 d.C. Inteligente y cultivado, aunque acomplejado por su físico, tenía dos grandes pasiones: el teatro y Drusila, la más bella de sus hermanas. Calígula comenzó su gobierno adulado por el pueblo y lo terminó siendo detestado por todos: se había comportado como el peor de los dictadores, destacando por sus extravagancias, provocaciones y brutalidad. La ambición de poder era tal, que Calígula acabó creyendo ser un dios. Pero su ceguera y autocomplacencia le impidieron percatarse de la conspiración que se fraguaba en torno a su persona. Esta es la historia de un ser fuera de lo común, conocido por su crueldad, lujuria, y naturaleza desequilibrada, y por las intrigas familiares y políticas en las que participó

La historia es una especie de alucinación. Son las macabras y horripilantes memorias de un niño (o niña, porque se llama a sí misma niña pero todo el mundo la trata como si fuera un niño) que se llama César Aira.

Este fue el primer relato que contribuyó a crear una leyenda alrededor de este escritor de culto y uno de los más excéntricos entre los excéntricos, admirado sin reservas por escritores como Enrique Vila-Matas y Sergio Pitol.

Qué diablo de Dios es éste que, para enaltecer a Abel, desprecia a Caín. Si en El Evangelio según Jesucristo José Saramago nos dio su visión del Nuevo Testamento, en Caín regresa a los primeros libros de la Biblia. En un itinerario heterodoxo, recorre ciudades decadentes y establos, palacios de tiranos y campos de batalla de la mano de los principales protagonistas del Antiguo Testamento, imprimiéndole la música y el humor refinado que caracterizan su obra. Caín pone de manifiesto lo que hay de moderno y sorprendente en la prosa de Saramago: la capacidad de hacer nueva una historia que se conoce de principio a fin. Un irónico y mordaz recorrido en el que el lector asiste a una guerra secular, y en cierto modo, involuntaria, entre el creador y su criatura.

Недовольный всем, что вышло из-под его пера, Алессандро Барикко погрузился в современность и освоил профессию градостроителя. Так возник «City» — роман-город, с кварталами — сюжетными линиями и улицами-персонажами. Как и полагается уважающему себя городу, в нем есть все для увлекательной жизни: боксеры, футболисты, профессора, парикмахер, генерал, гениальный подросток, девушка на первом плане. А если этого покажется мало, — за углом демонстрируют захватывающий вестерн. Барикко не изменяет своему обыкновению — приговаривать к смерти полюбившихся ему героев. Так легче расставаться с ними...

Este libro recoge la transcripción de unas clases que di en el Centro Rojas en el invierno de 1988. El público fue una veintena de estudiantes muy jóvenes: a nuestro alrededor, los cuatro pisos del Rojas hervían de performances, videos, cine, música, pintura, capoeira, teatro, títeres, talleres, seminarios, cursos… Todo lo que se manifestaba parecía contiguo a su propia invención: igual que en la obra de Copi. Esa inmediatez dio el tono de nuestras reuniones.

El curso se llamaba "Cómo leer a Copi". Me pareció que la respuesta más plausible era postular una especie de continuo con el que podríamos "seguir" leyendo, a Copi o a quien sea, indefinidamente, creando un mundo que siempre pasará a otro mundo que lo incluya, y éste a otro más… Con la hipótesis complementaria de que todo pasaje es una transformación, ya estábamos listos para contarnos el cuento maravilloso de Copi.

César Aira

Osvaldo Aguirre

Aira revive a Copi

La publicación de COPI importa, por varios motivos, una novedad. Se trata del primer libro de ensayos de César Aira hasta ahora conocido por sus cuentos y novelas. Se trata también, del primer título de Beatriz Viterbo Editora, sello que tiene su sede en Rosario. La colección que inaugura ese libro se llama `EL ESCRIBIENTE` y está reservada a la edición de ensayos. El proyecto no parece reducirse a dar curso al `nuevo libro` de Aira, sino que apunta a situar como objeto de lectura – es decir, de reflexión y de debate- al ensayo género, de características difusas que no suele merecer demasiada atención a la hora de definir políticas editoriales (aunque la intuición sobre lo que es bueno reporte, a veces, más dinero que el olfateo de lo que es vendible).

COPI, Raúl Damonte, nació en Buenos Aires en 1939 y murió en París en 1987. Aparte de ser dibujante de cómics, escribió once obras teatrales – algunas interpretadas por él mismo-, cinco novelas y una serie de narraciones cortas. El ensayo de Aira es una transcripción de cuatro conferencias dictadas durante el invierno de 1988. `Dado que la obra de COPI es poco conocida en la Argentina – nos explica el autor-, opté por presentarla, en sucesión más o menos cronológica, contando y describiendo sus novelas y piezas teatrales, algunas con todo detalle`. Este procedimiento está ligado a la postulación de un `continuo`, formas de lectura que Aira extiende, virtualmente, a cualquier texto: se trata de leer llevando `adelante` la lectura, de buscar el significado en lo que sigue y no en lo ya leído, en lo que hace continuo y no en lo que se corta de recorrer la horizontal del funcionamiento y no la vertical del sentido. Ahora bien: la `transcripción` ha respetado el tono y la sintaxis del discurso oral. De ahí las anécdotas y las digresiones, las marchas y las contramarchas, las citas aproximadas y las improvisaciones? para nada accesorias, porque en esos lugares Aira se ocupa de cuestiones de poética (de las relaciones de sucesión en el relato, de las diferencias entre cuento y novela, etc.) y recupera, discute y, finalmente, acepta o rechaza materiales de la tradición (de Borges sobre todo). Paralelamente a la vida y a la obra de COPI se muestran así las maneras del narrador oral, que sabe atraer la atención del oyente y que sabe transmitir, con su historia, el arte de relatar.

La forma del cuento breve, según la corriente derivada de Poe, sería la de un hilo cuya tensión excluye adornos o digresiones, la del ensayo (de Aira), la de una madeja que se ovilla y se desovilla en forma ininterrumpida.

Tomado de `El cronista cultural, Julio de 1991`.

The bestselling author of The Devil Wears Prada and Everyone Worth Knowing is back with a delicious new novel about a trio of best friends in Manhattan who agree to change their lives in the most personal and dramatic way possible – and within one calendar year.

El mineral transparente llamado espato de Islandia posee la curiosa propiedad óptica de la doble refracción: duplica en paralelo la imagen del objeto que se mira a través de él. Si, desde cierta altura, se contemplara el planeta por una lámina de ese espato, la realidad no se distorsionaría, pero cabe sospechar que la imagen duplicada no sería exactamente la esperada. En un juego semejante se embarca Thomas Pynchon en Contraluz al recrear un mundo en descomposición, el que va de la Exposición Universal de Chicago de 1893 a los años inmediatamente posteriores a la primera guerra mundial. Cientos de tramas entrelazadas trasladan al lector de los conflictos laborales en las minas de Colorado al Nueva York finisecular, para pasearlo después por lugares tan dispares como Londres y Gotinga, Venecia y Viena, los Balcanes, Siberia durante el misterioso incidente de Tunguska, el México revolucionario, el París de posguerra o el Hollywood de la era del cine mudo. Por ese laberinto de palacios y burdeles, callejones insalubres y desiertos gélidos se mueve una abigarrada

galería de personajes: anarquistas, aeronautas, jugadores, matemáticos, canes parlantes, científicos locos, chamanes, videntes y magos, espías, detectives y pistoleros a sueldo, que se codean con personajes reales como Bela Lugosi o Groucho Marx.

El hilo conductor de muchas de las historias es la peculiar familia Traverse: Webb Traverse, minero sindicalista, muere a manos de los esbirros del magnate Scarsdale Vibe, y altera las vidas de sus cuatro hijos. Cáustico, misterioso y enciclopédico como siempre, pero más legible que nunca, Pynchon parodia todos los géneros literarios, en un festín narrativo en el que no falta nada: conspiraciones, prácticas sexuales peculiares, cancioncillas, mapas secretos, venganzas, saltos en el tiempo y el espacio… Y pese al vértigo de este frenético discurrir hacia el abismo, resulta un libro extrañamente luminoso, que se aferra a la dolorosa

certidumbre de la cita que lo encabeza: «Siempr e esde noche, si no, no necesitaríamos luz».

The Egyptian writer Alaa Al Aswany's second novel is a bit of a curate's egg, or maybe a mullah's omelette: on the one hand it's a racy campus novel set among the Egyptian émigré community of the University of Illinois, while on the other it's full of undigested lumps of socio-political commentary that appear to have been cut and pasted from an encyclopedia. But despite the catastrophically pedantic opening chapter, there are some treats. The best characters are worthy of an Arabic David Lodge, particularly Professor Graham, a sad, pony-tailed relic of the 1960s counter-culture who pores over his revolutionary press cuttings as if they were sacred relics; and Dr Ra'fat Thabit, more American than the Americans until his daughter runs off with one. Then at the other end of the scale there's the preposterous, pot-bellied villain Danana, a student informer for the Egyptian security services, whose features cloud over "just as a character's face changes from good to evil in science fiction movies", which makes you wonder if a bad science fiction movie is where he really belongs.

Historia żołnierskiego losu młodego Niemca, który nieoczekiwanie, w czasie klęski armii niemieckiej, dostaje urlop. Przepełniony nadzieją udaje się do kraju, do rodzinnego miasta, by szukać wytchnienia od nędzy, głodu, zimna i wszechobecnej śmierci frontu rosyjskiego. Czeka go z jednej strony ogromne rozczarowanie – jest bowiem świadkiem upadku swojej ojczyzny, a z drugiej niespodziewane szczęście – przeżywa wielką miłość. Pełen wątpliwości wraca na front, gdzie rozstrzygnie się konflikt między winą a poświeceniem.

Ta książka miała być historią młodej kobiety, która ciężko choruje, ale szczęśliwie wyzdrowieje. Tak się nie stało. Tamara Matzke dowiedziała się o swojej chorobie pod koniec 1999 roku. Miała wtedy 31 lat, za sobą kilka lat szczęśliwego małżeństwa i pierwsze doświadczenia dziennikarskie, przed sobą rozległe plany. Mimo cierpień i uciążliwej terapii długo wierzyła w zwycięstwo nad chorobą. Rak okazał się silniejszy, Tamara umarła w grudniu 2000 roku. Książka zawiera fragmenty pamiętnika Tamary, jej korespondencję z czasów choroby z przyjaciółmi i rodziną oraz wspomnienia męża. Wszystko to składa się na obraz godnej podziwu walki i braku rezygnacji wobec nieuchronności śmierci.

Собрание сочинений Джека Лондона открывает знаменитый роман «Сердца трех», написанный в 1916 году для кино по плану голливудского киносценариста Чарлза Годдарда. Весной 1920 года роман вышел отдельной книгой. «Сердца трех» соединяют в себе лучшие черты, присущие приключенческим произведениям Джека Лондона, и динамичность развития событий, которой требует специфический жанр киноромана.

«Cold Hand in Mine» was first published in the UK in 1975 and in the US in 1977. The story «Pages from a Young Girl's Journal» won Aickman the World Fantasy Award in 1975. It was originally published in «The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction» in 1973 before appearing in this collection.

«Cold Hand in Mine» stands as one of Aickman's best collections and contains eight stories that show off his powers as a «strange story» writer to the full, being more ambiguous than standard ghost stories. Throughout the stories the reader is introduced to a variety of characters, from a man who spends the night in a Hospice to a German aristocrat and a woman who sees an image of her own soul. There is also a nod to the conventional vampire story («Pages from a Young Girl's Journal») but all the stories remain unconventional and inconclusive, which perhaps makes them all the more startling and intriguing.

«Of all the authors of uncanny tales, Aickman is the best ever…His tales literally haunt me; his plots and his turns of phrase run through my head at the most unlikely moments.» — Russell Kirk.

Tanta insistencia se ha puesto en ponderar la calidad de los ensayos y novelas de Unamuno, que se ha olvidado el tesoro literario de sus cuentos, merecedores de un lugar destacado en el estudio de su obra. Su valor se incrementa cuando comprobamos que fueron raíz de lo `nivolesco` y que don Miguel veía en el género la itineración hacia atrás de la vida, un corte más profundo en lo vivido y, por ende, la forma protoliteraria que recoge las resonancias más arcanas de la psique humana.

A través de estas narraciones, de estos Cuentos de mí mismo, llega a nosotros el eco inquietante de don Miguel de Unamuno, de una personalidad escéptica, agónica y polémica que reitera en todas y cada una de sus criaturas de ficción y harán las delicias de los lectores. De aquí que estos Cuentos de mí mismo lleguen a lo más alto o más hondo, con abundantes huellas autobiográficas.

92 pp., México, Siglo XXI Editores, 1974, en, Novelas y relatos. «Carpentier en la maestría de sus novelas y relatos breves», por Salvador Bueno, La Habana, UNEAC, 1974 (Letras Cubanas)

La concepción de `lo real maravilloso` de Alejo Carpentier (La Habana, 1904-1980), uno de los más destacados intelectuales contemporáneos, marcó toda una época de producción y crítica literarias. Esta edición incluye un estudio preliminar de Federico Acevedo que ubica y analiza la obra de tal manera que el nuevo lector se anime a leerla y el que ya la conoce la relea con renovado placer

Concierto barroco es una novela deliciosa, propositiva, liberadora. En ella, el escritor utiliza los recursos propios del barroco: la parodia, el artificio, la hipérbole, la enu- meración proliferante, con mayor liberalidad, rompe con las ataduras de la cronología histórica y adquiere un extraordinario sentido del humor. Concierto barroco cuenta la historia de la puesta en escena de una ópera de Antonio Vivaldi, estrenada en el teatro Sant`Angelo de Venecia en el. otoño de 1733, en la cual se nana la derrota de Moctezuma por las fuerzas espa- ñolas que capitanea Hernán Cortés. El tema no puede ser más propicio para la pluma de Carpentier, pues se trata de una ópera barroca, que permite, además, enfrentar dos historias, dos culturas, dos mundos -América y Europa-, de cuya contraposición surge, en la óptica carpenteriana, precisamente lo real maravilloso. Novela que da cuenta del gusto de Alejo Carpentier. por la música, una segunda vocación que, junto con la arquitec- tura, subyace en toda su obra y que ya se había manifes- tado con singular vehemencia en Los pasos perdidos.

Regresa el fenómeno, regresa Moccia. La esperada nueva novela del best-seller italiano, Carolina se enamora, desembarca en nuestro país con un sólo objetivo: volver a arrasar. Con A tres metros sobre el cielo, Tengo ganas de ti, Perdona si te llamo amor y Perdona pero quiero casarme contigo, Moccia ha superado ya la cifra de 1.000.000 ejemplares vendidos en nuestro país, seduciendo tanto a jóvenes como a no tan jóvenes con sus relatos de amor adolescente.

Carolina no sólo tendrá que lidiar con este primer desengaño, que la alejará poco a poco de su infancia, sino que deberá enfrentarse a las difíciles relaciones familiares en la novela más intergeneracional de Moccia. La adolescente, como muchas otras de su generación, aprenderá a comprender las preocupaciones de su madre o a entender a su violento, aunque en el fondo adorable, hermano. Gracias a su admirada abuela, Carolina paso a paso irá averiguando qué significa crecer, hacerse adulto.

Como sus obras anteriores, Carolina se enamora, narrada en primera persona, conecta con los adolescentes, enganchados al iPod y a sus móviles. Aunque también deviene un libro imprescindible para los padres que quieran conocer qué hacen y sienten sus hijos cuando salen por la puerta de casa. Sin duda, los libros de Moccia radiografían con humor, ritmo y cascadas de emociones la juventud mediterránea de principios del siglo XXI. Los adultos del mañana.

Siguiendo las instrucciones de su amante, Gaia se encuentra en un parque de La Habana con cierta mujer misteriosa que la conduce a una mansión donde todo cambia continuamente. Pese al desconcierto que le dejará aquella breve visita, la joven regresa al lugar en busca de respuestas que le expliquen algunos fenómenos que comienzan a suceder a su alrededor. Su instinto -o quizá el destino- le indica que la solución del misterio podría estar en la casa. Allí pasará por experiencias surrealistas y aterradoras que, a la manera de los Misterios antiguos, la llevarán a un descubrimiento sobre sí misma. Ceremonias prohibidas, habitaciones mutantes, dioses en cuerpos humanos, humanos con figura de dioses: nada es seguro en ese universo sobrenatural, ni siquiera el amor; pero Gaia se aferrará a él como su última tabla de salvación.

En Casa de juegos, el erotismo permite a los personajes alcanzar niveles místicos que trascienden la experiencia individual. Pero para llegar al fondo de ese conocimiento es necesario atravesar

Un adolescente y su padre viajan por la España de 1974. El coche, un Citroën Tiburón, es lo único que poseen. Su vida es una continua mudanza, pero todos los apartamentos por los que pasan tienen al menos una cosa en común: el estar situados en urbanizaciones costeras, desoladas e inhóspitas en los meses de temporada baja. Bien pronto, sin embargo, tendrán que alejarse del mar y eso impondrá a sus vidas un radical cambio de rumbo. «Antes», comentará el propio Felipe «no´sabíamos hacia dónde íbamos pero al menos sabíamos por dónde.».A veces conmovedora y a veces amarga Carreteras secundarias es también una novela de humor cuyas páginas destilan un sobrio lirismo, en la que Ignacio Martínez de Pisón se ratifica coo uno de los mejores narradores de su generación.

Premio Nadal 1992

En una llanura desértica, atravesada por un río poderoso, un hombre despierta, ignorante de su propia identidad. Únicamente la palabra ‘soldado' parece decirle algo de sí mismo. Desde la otra orilla, un extraño le hace señas invitándole a cruzar el río. Jornada tras jornada, el hombre se enfrentará durante la noche al extraño mensajero y, durante el día, rescatará lentamente del olvido las principales experiencias de un itinerario vital marcado por la incapacidad de asumir su verdadera identidad. Su infancia en un Maruecos próximo a la independencia, el descubrimiento de la figura contradictoria del padre, su amor adolescente, su carrera militar, su matrimonio, el nacimiento de una hija… A lo largo de estos "días de sueño y noches de combate" se le ofrecerá la fuga definitiva, escapar al dolor y a la memoria, y tendrá la oportunidad, al revivir su vida, de tomar auténtica consciencia de sí mismo.

Premio Nadal 1995

"Cruzar el Danubio es una novela con distintos escenarios, pero uno de los más importantes es Viena, de ahí el título que hace referencia al Danubio", manifestó el periodista Ignacio Carrión que hasta ayer se hallaba en Suecia, realizando un reportaje para EL PAIS Semanal sobre los países recien incorporados a la CE. "La trama transcurre a lo largo de 30 años, con una alternancia constante del presente y el pasado. Hay un narrador objetivo cuando se refiere al pasado y un narrador subjetivo que habla del presente en primera persona. Los escenarios en los que transcurre la narración son España, Austria, Estados Unidos, Francia e India" Sarcástico

"El argumento cuenta la historia de un periodista, de algún modo poco convencido de la nobleza del oficio en si mismo, que trabaja con la convicción de que todo es un poco fraudulento, de modo que todas las situaciones están descritas de un modo muy sarcástico" añadió Ignacio Carrión, que interrumpió el reportaje que estaba realizando para asistir a la velada del Nadal. "El planteamiento es muy crítico con el momento actual del períodismo en España".

Ignacio Carrión nació en San Sebastián,en 1938. Estudió Periodismoen Valencia, ciudad donde regentó durante la dictadura franquista la librería Lope de Vega. Actualmente está separado -y tiene tres hijos: una hija también periodista, un hijo ingeniero y otro que estudia pintura en Nueva York.

Ha sido corresponsal del diano Abc en Londres y enviado especial del mismo periódico por todo el mundo. También trabajó como corresponsal de Diario 16 enEstados Unidos. Vivió un año en, Califórnia, y desde hace unos años trabaja.en EL PAÍS como autor de entrevistas y reportajes en el suplemento dominical. Carrión ha escrito un libro de relatos breves, Klaus ha vuelto, 11 historias, que tienen, según su autor "una presentación realista; algunas son medio oniricas y contienen recursos fantasmagóricos". Ha publicado una novela,. El milagro, en, la que integra la remembranza personal, la elaboración de lo autobiográfico, con la caracterización de nuestro pasado histórico. También es autor de tres libros de viajes frúto de su larga experiencia como corresponsal y enviado especial: India, vagón 14-24; Madrid, ombligo de España, y De Moscú a Nueva – York, ilustrado por Alfredo.

"El estilo de la novela es conciso, sin artificios, bastante en oposición a toda una suerte de literatura retórica y preciosista que se hace hoy en día", señaló también Carrión "Trato de mantener un cierto sentido de la economía del lenguaje, con frases cortas de lectura veloz y puntuación muy escueta (hasta el, punto de que tan sólo hay una coma en todo el libro), pues creo que hemos olvidado un poco que el idioma es una forma de comunicación muy directa. Por supuesto, la trama y las situaciones no son tan simples ni directas".

El único indicio del vasto incendio que asolaba los bosques milenarios lo ofrecía el sangriento resplandor que flotaba detrás de las montañas, coronándolas con una singular claridad. El reflejo, vivo y radiante sobre el cielo inmediato, se amortiguaba luego diluyéndose de nube en nube. Sobre las pampas centrales semejaba todavía un prolongado crepúsculo bermejo. Más allá el fuego se denunciaba apenas en un leve centelleo, igual al indeciso crecer del día. Desde las costas del golfo Grande, podía vislumbrarse el horizonte cortado por los cerros desiguales, en el que resplandecía un aura pálidamente rosada diluida por el gris violento del humo que ascendía pesadamente al cielo. Pero pasando las mesetas del Senguerr las señales del desastre se multiplicaban; lenguas de fuego sobrepasaban las alturas que guardaban el gran lago Escondido y el humo formaba un techo sombrío sobre la región de las pampas, donde el sol, perdido en un cielo de cenizas, fatigaba su curso. Grandes bandadas de avutardas huían al sur y al este, aumentando con sus gritos discordantes el desconcierto del éxodo. Gallardas bandurrias volando sumamente bajo, casi rozando las anchas hojas de la nalca1, las seguían, y en un plano más elevado los solitarios cisnes se unían en el vuelo. Garzas rosadas en inseparables parejas batían con ritmo sus alas incansables. Igual a un guerrero altivo y desdeñoso que desafiara la hecatombe, un águila blanca, deidad sagrada de los indios, planeaba en ceñidos círculos sobre el dilatado incendio, manteniéndose a una gran altura como una atalaya del cielo.

Premio Nadal 1974

"Culminación de Montoya", Premio Eugenio Nadal 1974, posee -dentro de una concepción clásica-un valor universal y permanente por el drama humano en que se inspira y una visión trágica de la existencia, presidida por la más inexorable fatalidad. El héroe mítico -héroe al revés, al decir del autor- es el coronel Montoya, aristócrata de raza y militar profesional, descendiente de una vieja estirpe de conquistadores, quien al no encontrar una empresa heroica en la que volcar su coraje, ha consagrado todas sus energías en su propia destrucción, hasta ser degradado y expulsado del ejército. Su voluntaria condena le lleva a un confinamiento en los remotos bosques del Sur en busca de un infierno donde purgar la muerte de su hijo y el suicidio de su mujer, de los que se cree responsable. Torturado por el venenoso resentimiento de un viejo asistente, simbólica encarnación de sus demonios familiares, arrastrado por el instinto de autodestrucción, Montoya encuentra en el generoso sacrificio de su vida una posible redención. La atención del lector se mantiene en suspenso dentro de un ambiente fascinante y angustioso.

«El carcelero tiene su carcelero y éste al suyo y así al infinito. Tú y yo somos los eslabones finales de una larga cadena de sumisiones. Así está ordenado el mundo, mi joven amigo. ¿Hay otra salida?». Eso dice el protagonista de uno de los nueve cuentos que integran esta obra, por donde Carolina Grau transitará como presencia sutil, como persona, como fantasma y como enigma, trazando siempre un fino halo de misterio.

Grady Tripp es un escritor ya cercano a la mediana edad y profesor en una universidad de provincias. En su juventud fue una promesa de la literatura, un esplendoroso chico prodigio que tuvo su fugaz temporada de gloria, pero el tiempo ha pasado y Grady arrstra desde hace ocho años una inmensa novela inconclusa, cada vez más larga e hirsuta y cuyo título es, claro está, Chicos prodigiosos. A Grady le gusta compararla con Ada, de Navokov, y dice que es la clase de obra que "enseña al lector cómo debe leerla a medida que se interna en ella". En una palabra, que Grady no sabe qué hacer con su novela, y está absolutamente perdido en una maraña de páginas que no llevan a ninguna parte.

Y, en medio de toda esta confusión literaria y también vital -Sara, su amante, está embarazada; su tercera esposa lo ha abandonado, y una joven escritora, alumna de sus talleres literarios, está fascinada por él, y le fascina-, recibe la visita del siempre sorprendente Terry Crabtree, su editor y cómplice desde hace muchos años, que declara que perderá su puesto en la editorial si no vuelve con un manuscrito genial bajo el brazo.

Y desde el mismo instante en que Crabtree baja del avión acompañado por la maravillosa Miss Sloviack -un(a) guapísimo(a) travesti-, y en los tres días que durará la Fiesta de las Palabras, una feria literaria que cada año se celebra en la universidad donde enseña Grady, se despliega ante el lector una de las novelas más deleitosas, brillantes y diversidad de los últimos años. Un irónico viaje por la espuma de los libros y la vida, donde la literatura y sus géneros, el cine y las mitologías de nuestra época son también protagonistas.

Two decades after Portuguese novelist and Nobel Laureate José Saramago shocked the religious world with his novel The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, he has done it again with Cain, a satire of the Old Testament. Written in the last years of Saramago's life, it tackles many of the moral and logical non sequiturs created by a wilful, authoritarian God, and forms part of Saramago's long argument with religion.

The stories in this book are witty and provocative. After Adam and Eve have been cast out of Eden, Eve decides to go back and ask the angel guarding the gate if he can give her some of the fruit that is going to waste inside. The angel agrees, and although Eve swears to Adam that she offered the angel nothing in return, their first child is suspiciously blond and fair-skinned. Cain, in his wandering, overhears a strange conversation between a man named Abraham and his son Isaac – and manages to prevent the father from murdering the son. The angel appointed by God to prevent the murder arrives late due to a wing malfunction. Cain brushes off his apology. 'What would have happened if I hadn't been here?' Cain asks, 'and what kind of god would ask a father to sacrifice his own son?'

In Joseph Heller's two best novels, Catch 22 and Something Happened, the narrative circles obsessively around a repressed memory that it is the stories' business finally to confront. We feel the tremors of its eventual eruption in each book even as the narrator frantically distracts us with slapstick improvisation. In his newest novel, Closing Time, Heller brings back the (anti-) hero of Catch 22, John Yossarian, and once again something horrific is building beneath his life and those of his generation and their century as they all draw to a close.

But this time it is not a brute fact lodged in memory, the something that draws its power simply from having happened. It is instead something that is going to happen-we're going to die-and it draws its power from-well-how we feel about that. The problem is that we may not all feel the same way about our approaching death, as we cannot fail to do about Howie Snowden bleeding to death on the floor of the bomber in Catch 22. We cannot really imagine our death. On the other hand, try as we might, we cannot help imagining Snowden. It comes down to a question of authority, the authority of an author's claim on our imagination. There is less of it in Closing Time.

It reaches for such authority by reading into the passing of the World War II generation a paranoid apocalypse in the manner of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo. Yossarian's life goes into and out of a kind of virtual reality involving a Dantesque underworld entered through the false back of a basement tool locker in the New York Port Authority Bus Terminal. Beneath this underworld runs an underground railroad meant to provide indefinite protection for the elite of the military/industrial/political complex chosen by triage to survive the coming nuclear holocaust. As catalyst for that holocaust we are given a mentally challenged president known to us only by his affectionate nickname, the Little Prick, who is enthralled by the video games that fill a room just off the Oval Office, especially the game called Triage which enables him eventually to trip the wire on the conclusive Big Bang.

Heller's underworld has some fetching attributes. It is managed by George C. Tilyou, the Coney Island entrepreneur who ran the Steeplechase amusement park before World War 1. Tilyou died before any of the novel's protagonists was born, but the remembered stories about him and his slowly sinking house with the family name on the front step qualify him as a jolly major domo of hell, a man whose love for his fellows sincerely expressed itself in fleecing them. Now, below the sub-sub-basement of the bus terminal, he rejoices in having taken it with him, for his house and eventually his whole amusement park sank down around him. Rockefeller and Morgan come by and panhandle miserably for his wealth, having learned too late that their more conventional philanthropy could not sanctify their plunder or secure their grasp on it.

Other aspects of Heller's grand scheme are less successful. Two characters from Catch 22, Milo Minderbinder and ex-Pfc. Wintergreen, are strawmen representatives of the military-industrial complex, peddling a nonexistent clone of the Stealth bomber to a succession of big-brass boobies with names like Colonel Pickering and Major Bowes. Much of this is the sort of thing that killed vaudeville and is now killing "Saturday Night Live."

Against these gathering forces of death, Yossarian asserts his allegiance to life in a way that is by now a reflex of the Norman Mailer generation: he has an affair with and impregnates a younger woman, a nurse whom he meets in a hospitalization of doubtful purpose at the opening of the novel. Thank heavens, I thought as I read, that I belong to the only sex capable of such late and surprising assertions. But, as the euphoria ebbed, I had to admit that Yossarian's amatory exertions were more than faintly repulsive.

So the novel is disappointing where it hurts the most, in its central organizing idea. Why, after all, does Yossarian's generation get to take the whole world down with it? Well, it doesn't, really, and yet the veterans of World War II do have a special claim on us as they pass from our sight. This claim is more convincingly urged by the long first-person narratives of two characters who, we learn, moved invisibly on the periphery of events in Catch-22.

Lew Rabinowitz and Sammy Singer are non-neurotics whose stories reveal their limitations and, at the same time, allow us to see around and beyond them. This is harder to do with normal people, and Heller brings it off beautifully. Rabinowitz is an aggressive giant, the son of a Coney Island junk dealer, an instinctively successful businessman who lacked the patience for the college education offered him by the G.I. Bill, and who never comprehended as we do his own delicacy of feeling. Singer, a writer of promotional and ad copy for Times, is, by his own account, a bit of a pedant given to correcting Rabinowitz's grammar. Heller sometimes allows Singer's prose style to stiffen in a way that is entirely in character and that gives an unexpected dignity and pathos to passages like those that describe his wife's last illness.

Rabinowitz and Singer basically get more respect from their author than Yossarian and the characters who figure in his story. The two new characters tell us stories embued with an unforced humor and with the sort of gravity that attends good people as they come to terms with their mortality. And this goes for their wives as well, for both men make good and entirely credible marriages that last a lifetime. Yossarian should have been so lucky.

Autentyczny zapis notatek i dyskusji prowadzonych na blogu założonym przez 17-letnią dziewczynę. Mieszkanka stolicy, uczennica dobrego liceum, wychowująca się w zamożnej i szczęśliwej rodzinie świadczy usługi seksualne, osiągając przy tym znaczne korzyści – cenne prezenty, duże kwoty pieniędzy. Jednocześnie dokonuje prowokacyjnego wpisu na założonej przez siebie stronie internetowej i czeka na reakcje internautów. Ich wypowiedzi są najczęściej bardzo krytyczne, co skłania Weronikę do ostrych komentarzy. Jest to okazja do wyrażania przez nią poglądów m.in. na temat polskiej mentalności, moralności, religijności. Co jakiś czas dziewczyna opowiada coś nowego o sobie, o kolejnych przygodach, o sytuacjach w szkole, planach wyjazdowych. Blog systematycznie się rozrasta, aż wreszcie liczba odwiedzin sięga prawie 300 000. Emocje i komentarze odwiedzających są bardzo zróżnicowane: jedni nazywają ją prostytutką, inni – nimfomanką, jeszcze inni składają jej propozycje seksualne, wielu chwali za odwagę i styl, niektórzy dzielą się swoimi doświadczeniami. A Weronika najwyraźniej świetnie się bawi…

Año 1187, Hattin (Tierra Santa): tras derrotar a la flor y nata del ejército cristiano, el sultán Saladino arrebata a los francos la Vera Cruz, el leño en que se crucificó a Cristo, que siempre había acompañado a los cristianos en sus combates. El caballero hospitalario Morgennes recupera la consciencia entre los caídos en el campo de batalla. Tras ser torturado por los sarracenos, acepta renegar de su fe y convertirse al islam.

Condenado por lo suyos, a modo de redención, parte en busca de la Vera Cruz con la esperanza de que esta dé ánimos a los francos y salvar así Jerusalén. Cuenta en su decisión con el apoyo del sobrino de Saladino, así como con el de una bella y misteriosa mujer de nombre Casiopea, un mercader de reliquias y un joven templario. Su aventura parece destinada al fracaso, pero una fuerza invisible lo acompaña, lo protege y lo guía.

¿Bastará con ella para librarse del más grande de todos los peligros?

«David Camus, el nieto de Albert, se apropia con gran acierto de los recursos del género en esta epopeya medieval. Hallamos en estas páginas la dosis ideal de misterio y de esoterismo.» – L'Observateur

«Una gesta épica que enfrenta la única verdad inexorable, la muerte, con la mayor incerteza: ¿existe algo más allá?» – El Mundo

Depuis Hygiène de l'assassin, elle est fidèle au poste! Amélie Nothomb fait donc sa rentrée avec Cosmétique de l'ennemi. Au rythme – soutenu – d'un roman par an, on se demande bien comment elle peut encore nous surprendre. N'ayez crainte, elle y parvient…

Coincé dans un aéroport alors qu'il s'apprêtait à embarquer pour Barcelone, l'homme d'affaires Jérôme Angust se voit contraint de supporter, en plus du retard de son avion, la logorrhée d'un étrange individu, bien décidé à lui imposer le récit de sa vie. Qui est donc ce Textor Texel qui le harcèle? Pourquoi ce raseur a-t-il jeté son dévolu sur lui? Le dialogue s'engage pourtant entre l'importun et sa victime, vif, alerte, ponctué de réparties cinglantes, prenant les allures d'une joute de haute tenue, et dévoile la passé trouble de Textor, en même temps que le malaise croissant de Jérôme. Car il se sent cerné, l'homme d'affaires irréprochable, par cet étranger qui semble si bien connaître les tréfonds de sa conscience et dont les crimes font douloureusement écho à un passé qu'il croyait enterré. Étranger, cet ennemi? Pas tant que ça! Et si, finalement, cette rencontre n'était pas tant le fruit du hasard que l'objet d'une préméditation diabolique destinée à l'anéantir?

Dans ce dialogue mené tambour battant, Amélie Nothomb s'en donne à cœur joie, faisant preuve une fois de plus de sa virtuosité. La phrase est vive, bondissante, corrosive, pour nous embarquer progressivement, mais sûrement, vers un retournement de situation dont l'auteur de Mercure a le secret. Gageons qu'une fois encore, elle recueillera vos suffrages…

Autor pragnie rozprawić się z tzw. 'wyborem mniejszego zła', a więc z problemem etycznym, dyskutowanym od stuleci przez wszelkich mędrców i demagogów, i ze zjawiskiem psychospołecznym, realizowanym od stuleci przez jednostki i każdą władzę, tak autokratyczną, jak demokratyczną. Cała akcja rozgrywa się w trakcie długiej i dramatycznej wieczerzy, w jednym pomieszczeniu, które staje się klatką bez wyjścia dla biesiadników. Cokolwiek nie zrobią zostaną skażeni grzechem. W tej powieści dominują kwestie uniwersalne, ale nie brak również analizy ściśle polskich problemów.

A Dance to the Music of Time – his brilliant 12-novel sequence, which chronicles the lives of over three hundred characters, is a unique evocation of life in twentieth-century England.

The novels follow Nicholas Jenkins, Kenneth Widmerpool and others, as they negotiate the intellectual, cultural and social hurdles that stand between them and the “Acceptance World.”

Kirpal Singh is travelling on the slow train to Kashmir. As India passes by the window in a stream of tiny lights, glistening fields and huddled, noisy towns, he reflects on his destination, which is also his past: a military camp to which he has not returned for fourteen years. Kirpal, Kip to his friends, is timorous and barely twenty when he arrives for the first time at General Kumar's camp, nestled in the shadow of the mighty Siachen Glacier that claimed his father's life. He is placed under the supervision of Chef Kishen, a fiery, anarchic mentor with long earlobes and a caustic tongue who guides Kip towards the heady spheres of food and women. 'The smell of a woman is thousand times better than cooking the most sumptuous dinner, kid,' he muses over an evening beer. Kip is embarrassed – he has never slept with a woman, though a loose-limbed nurse in the local hospital has caught his eye. In Srinagar, Kashmir, a contradictory place of erratic violence, extremes of temperature and high-altitude privilege, Kip learns to prepare indulgent Kashmiri dishes such as Mughlai mutton and slow-cooked Nahari, as well as delicacies from Florence, Madrid, Athens and Tokyo. Months pass and, though he is Sikh, Kip feels secure in his allegiance to India, the right side of this interminable conflict. Then, one muggy day, a Pakistani 'terrorist' with long, flowing hair is swept up on the banks of the river, and changes everything. Mesmeric, mournful and intensely lyrical, "Chef" is a brave and compassionate debut about hope, love and memory, set against the devastatingly beautiful, war-scarred backdrop of occupied Kashmir.

A recent legacy made Cassandra Palmer heir to the title of Pythia, the world's chief clairvoyant. It's a position that usually comes with years of training, but Cassie's circumstances are a little…unusual. Now she's stuck with a whopping amount of power that every vamp, fey, and mage in town wants to either monopolize or eradicate – and that she herself doesn't dare use.

What's more, she's just discovered that a certain arrogant master vampire has a geis on her-a magical claim that warns off any would-be suitors, and might also explain the rather… intense attraction between them. But Cassie's had it with being jerked around, and anyone who tries it from now on is going to find out that she makes a very bad enemy…

***

Claimed By Shadow is the follow up to Karen Chance’s exciting debut novel Touch The Dark. The story in Claimed By Shadow follows on straight from where Touch The Dark left off and although the author does a good job of filling in the back story during the first couple of chapters, because the story is somewhat complex I would recommend that readers unfamiliar with this series start by reading Touch The Dark first – rather than jumping straight in with Claimed By Shadow. (Touch The Dark is an excellent read – I can guarantee you won’t be disappointed!)

Claimed By Shadow starts about a week after where Touch The Dark finished, with Cassie still in Las Vegas and still trying to find a way to extract herself from her many problems, before someone kills her and solves all her problems for her. There is no shortage of would-be assassins. Tony, the Mafioso vampire that she turned into the Feds is still gunning for her – even though he is in hiding. The Vampire Senate want Cassie to be their tame Pythia; if she won’t do their bidding they will have no qualms about eliminating her. The Circle (the ruling council of good magic users) wants her out of the way so that someone of their own choice can inherit the Pythia’s power – and that’s just for starters!

Myra, the previous heir to the power of the Pythia will stop at nothing to eliminate Cassie so she can claim the title of Pythia back for herself. As Myra can travel through time her attempts to kill Cassie are not limited to the present and she hatches a plan to kill Mircea (the vampire who has protected Cassie since he discovered that she the potential to be a Pythia) in his past there by altering the timeline for Cassie’s life. If Mircea is dead, he will not be around to protect Cassie in the time before she obtains the Pythia’s power and Cassie will never come into power. Confused yet?

The problem with time travel in any novel is that the mixed up timelines can soon become confusing, Claimed By Shadow suffers a bit with this and when you add a trip to Faerie into the mix it’s enough to make any brain go into information overload (well, it did mine anyway!) There is a huge amount of information to take in, plus several twists and turns in the storyline, so the reader has to pay attention or risk losing the plot.

Luckily there is plenty to hold the readers attention. The action that starts in the second chapter doesn’t let up until the last page of the book as Cassie and her small band of allies fight their way from present day Las Vegas, through Victorian London into the Faerie kingdom and back again. The characters are multi-faceted and engaging, you just can’t help but like Pritkin the war mage and even his golem seems endearing.

The vampires in Claimed By Shadow are by turns super-sexy and super-scary and Cassie’s ambivalence towards them strikes just the right note in the face of their highly suspect morals and motivations.

Claimed By Shadow is an original, richly imagined tale and a solid follow-up to Touch The Dark, making this novel a must for urban fantasy fans.

Écrit en 1803, Catherine Morland (Northanger Abbey) est le premier roman de Jane Austen, même s'il n'a été publié qu'en 1818, un an après sa mort.

La jeune et naïve Catherine Morland est invitée par des voisins de ses parents à passer quelques semaines à Bath. Là, elle se lie d'amitié avec la jeune et inconstante Isabelle Thorpe et son frère, le présomptuteux John qui se pose rapidement en prétendant de Catherine. Elle y rencontre également Henry Tilney et sa charmante soeur Eléonore. Catherine n'est pas insensible au charme de Henry. Aussi, quand le père d'Henry invite Catherine à passer quelques jours dans sa maison, elle est au comble du bonheur. D'autant plus que Catherine, très imprégnée par ses lectures de romans gothiques alors très à la mode, apprend que la demeure de M. Tilney est une ancienne abbaye: Northanger Abbey…

La historia que se relata en la novela es una de las que ha despertado gran interés, debido a que cuenta la trágica vida de tres jóvenes de distintas clases sociales que nacen y mueren el mismo día, a la vez que expone las condiciones de la sociedad venezolana de las décadas de los 50 y 60 que comenzaba una salida a su camino de represión y violencia social. Estos jóvenes se llamaban Victorino Pérez, Victorino Peralta y Victorino Perdomo. Victorino Pérez es un joven muy conocido como el enemigo numero uno de nuestra sociedad, trata de respetar la forma de vida de cada quien pero siempre que respeten la de el, odia a su vecino, observa la forma de vida de un vecino llamado Don Ruperto quien no es casado por la ley de Dios, es decir, por la iglesia, mientras que la gorda que cobra los alquileres no pierde tiempo en echarle en cara a los demás que ella es una señora casada por la iglesia y por el civil, como si ese detalle fortuito significara algo en este país. Victorino esta enamorado de Carmen Eugenia la menor de las hijas de Don Ruperto, Victorino vive la triste realidad de que su padre Facundo Gutiérrez sea un alcohólico y llega hasta los extremos de golpear a su madre y hasta en su presencia. Esto es un poquito de la vida de este joven mientras que Victorino Peralta, hijo del ingeniero Argimiro Peralta Heredia es hijo único con tres hermanitas anodinas y enfermizas. Este joven es otro ejemplo de la sociedad venezolana en donde el materialismo y el gran apellido hacer valer a la persona y a sus descendientes. Así mismo se encuentra Victorino Perdomo joven que crece con el cuidado de su madre debido a que su padre se encontraba preso, vive rodeado de una sociedad de atracos, robos a la cual por influencia pasa a formar parte de la misma. Estos fueron unos jóvenes quienes guiados por personas de su medio social, algunos con educación y otros sin educación fueron defendidos por el amor de madre y solo pudieron lograr cumplir sus 18 años. En cada hogar, cada familia se vive una realidad plena y queremos hacernos los ciegos. Tres madres lloran desconsoladas por la pérdida de sus hijos, cada una hace lo que puede, buscan los restos de sus hijos, observan a personas entre lagrimas y sienten apoyo de sus amistades, será realmente ese dolor, quienes realmente serán los culpables de ese mundo vivido por estos jóvenes. Las tres mujeres enlutadas se cruzan entonces por ultima vez la que bajo desde el pie del cerro en la camioneta, la que sube desde el panteón de los Peralta, la que viene cabizbaja por la muy angosta avenida, las tres mujeres enlutadas se miran inexpresivamente como si nunca se hubiesen visto antes, nunca se han visto en verdad, como sino tuvieran nada en común. Como si fuera poco el significado de esta parte de cuando quiero llorar no lloro ha recorrido ríos de interpretaciones. Una de las mas comunes dice que se relaciona a una alegoría y a un alegato político contra el gobierno de Rómulo Betancourt. Desde luego este capitulo esta lleno de trampa y equívocos pues hechos y lenguaje no son precisamente fieles al ambiente antiguo que dice reconstruir. El humor es otro de los aspectos mas destacados de la novela. Según la interpretación del titulo, con frecuencia buscando un efecto impactante el autor trata de presentarnos de una manera velada el mensaje o la síntesis de esta magistral obra. Cuando quiero llorar, no lloro.

Zavalita y el zambo Ambrosio conversan en La Catedral. Estamos en Perú, durante el ochenio dictatorial del general Manuel A. Odría. Unas cuantas cervezas y un río de palabras en libertad para responder a la palabra amordazada por la dictadura.Los personajes, las historias que éstos cuentan, los fragmentos que van encajando, conforman la descripción minuciosa de un envilecimiento colectivo, el repaso de todos los caminos que hacen desembocar a un pueblo entero en la frustración.

Una galería de turbadores personajes en situaciones inquitantes, unidos a una prosa de alta tensión, convierten esta colección de cuentos de Javier Marías en un libro tan fascinante e imprescindible como sus novelas más celebradas. En estos relatos podemos captar y saborear, como en un concentrado, lo que constituye el hechizo único de la prosa de Javier Marías.

Una galería de turbadores personajes en situaciones inquietantes, unidos a una prosa de alta tensión, convierten esta collección de cuentos de Javier Marías en un libro tan fascinante e imprescindible como sus novelas más celebradas.

"Marías es un talento sobrecogedor: su prosa es ambiciosa, irónica, filosófica y a la postre compasiva" Elizabeth Judd, New York Times Book Review.

"En estos relatos podemos captar y saborear, como en un concentrado, lo que constituye el hechizo único de la prosa de Javier Marías" Jean Pierre Ressot, La Quinzaine Littéraire

"Un libro admirable, que uno quisiera haber escrito" Guillermo Cabrera Infante, El País

"Una de las mejores novelas españolas del siglo XX" J.Ortega, Brown University

Después de una bella y sugestiva introducción a la ciudad, Antonio Muñoz Molina narra para el lector la historia de la Córdoba musulmana, desde el año 711, en el que los invasores del norte de África conquistan el lugar, hasta las guerras civiles que desintegran el califato, haciendo posible que en 1236 Fernando III de Castilla se apoderara de lo que fue capital de los califas. Entre las estampas que componen el libro destacan los capítulos dedicados al primer emir cordobés, Abd al-Rahman I, a la vida cotidiana de la ciudad laberinto, con interesantes detalles significativos sobre las costumbres, las casas y la mentalidad de la época, a la Córdoba de Abd al-Rahman II, Ziryab y el mártir cristiano san Eulogio, Abd al-Rahman III y la mezquita, el extraordinario personaje que es al-Mansur, etc. Con una prosa de gran escritor, todo este magnífico pasado cordobés revive admirablemente con una brillantez insólita que hace de esta evocación una verdadera obra maestra.

Ésta es una colección de retratos de ciudades en sus momentos más brillantes, curiosos y significativos. Su ambiente, su vida cotidiana, sus personajes, sus mitos y anécdotas, la configuración urbana y sus características, el arte y la literatura, los restos más importantes de la época que aún se conservan y que pueden ser objeto de una especie de itinerario turístico, cultural o nostálgico, todo lo que contribuyó a hacer la leyenda y la historia de una ciudad en el período de mayor fama, se recoge en estas páginas de evocación del pasado. Grandes escritores que se sienten particularmente identificados con la atmósfera y el hechizo de estas ciudades de ayer y de hoy resumen para el lector contemporáneo lo que fue la vida, la belleza y a menudo el drama de cada uno de estos momentos estelares de la historia que se encarnan en un nombre de infinitas resonancias.

Con esta edición revisada de los Relatos sobre la falta de sustancia culmina la publicación en esta colección de toda la obra narrativa, hasta la fecha, de Álvaro Pombo, reconocido actualmente como una de las revelaciones mayores de la literatura española de la última década.

W lesie, z dala od ludzi, pod mądrą opieką czarownic dorasta złotowłosa dziewczynka. Choć pochłania magiczne księgi, uczy się czytać w myślach i rozmawiać z gwiazdami, nie przypuszcza nawet, jaki cel ma jej nauka i pełna niebezpieczeństw wędrówka po czterech stronach Wielkiego Królestwa. Przed wiekami jej kraj najechali okrutni barbarzyńcy.

Według słów tajemniczej Pieśni, teraz po siedmiuset siedemdziesięciu latach zbliża się koniec ich panowania. Czy na tronie zasiądzie wreszcie sprawiedliwy władca. Czy Luelle dorośnie, by spełnić przeznaczenie?

Autodidacta de poderosa imaginación. Juan José Arreola ha ejercido los más disímiles oficios: vendedor ambulante, periodista, maestro y sobre todo charlista de palabra deslumbrante y ademanes categóricos. Inquietador profesional de vidas y sensibilidades, buena parte de la |oven narrativa mexicana le debe enseñanzas definitivas. Su primer libro. Varia invención, lo situó como uno de los mejores cuentistas actuales. Confabularlo le da sitio aparte en nuestras letras. Su evolución literaria podría resumirse así: la ingenuidad que deviene sapiencia; la alusión que se convierte en elusión, el plano vertical que se trueca plano oblicuo. El tema del amor es capital en su obra: va del idealismo adolescente a una visión aterradora y caricaturesca de la mujer, cifra y símbolo de la enajenación, del dolor y de la muerte. Autor de textos redondos por lo que toca a los personajes, la estructura y el estilo, me parece el más perfecto, porque los lastres que venía padeciendo la literatura mexicana desaparecen en él sin dejar huella,

Emanuel Carballo

Los cuentos que componen Confabularlo rebasan cualquier intento de descripción: fábulas, poemas en prosa, crónicas, simples y llanas narraciones y divertimentos que trascienden, amén de por su profundidad y poesía, por su enorme maestría en el manejo del lenguaje. Clásico ya por la contundencia de su obra, Juan José Arreola nos da en Confabularlo una pequeña muestra de su gran talento literario.

Para usted, lector español, por fin en directo, esta selección de la obra de uno de-los autores más fascinantes y excéntricos de la mejor literatura argentina: Rodolfo Enrique Fogwill (1941). 0, como él mismo prefiere, Fogwill a secas. (`Probablemente por una especie de megalomanía`, explicaba en una entrevista. `Yo quería ocupar un lugar tipo Sócrates o Hegel. ¿Quién dice Guillermo Federico Hegel?`). Imposible dar aquí cabida al abigarrado currículo de este autor, quien, según declara en la indispensable presentación de sí mismo que antepone a este volumen, ha sido entre otras cosas `publicitario, investigador de mercados, redactor, empresario, especulador de Bolsa, terrorista y estafador -eso consta en mi prontuario de la policía federal argentina-, columnista especializado en temas de política cultural en todo tipo de medios, profesor universitario y consultor de empresas`. Como crítico y editor, Fogwill tuvo en los años setenta una intervención muy activa y polémica en la escena literaria argentina, dando a conocer las obras de Néstor Perlongher y Osvaldo Lamborghini y orientando la lectura de autores como Aira y Laiseca (`los únicos aportes a la literatura argentina que reivindico`). Tanto César Aira y Alberto Laiseca como el propio Fogwill, con Lamborghini a la cabeza (`el mejor maestro que tuvo la literatura argentina`), pertenecen a una facción destacadísima de la narrativa argentina, sin apenas paralelos en el resto del ámbito hispánico. Su actitud irreverente, y a menudo provocadora, no disimula una pasión y una cultura portentosas, refractarias por igual a todo atisbo de solemnidad como de ingenuidad, no sólo en literatura. De César Aira, Mondadori publicó hace unos meses Ema la cautiva y saca estos días un volumen estupendo, Cómo me hice monja-. La publicación ahora de esta antología de Fogwill insiste en llamar la atención sobre determinadas conductas literarias que, más allá de su valía indiscutible, conviene tener presentes en estos tiempos en que la entusiasta y sin duda saludable postulación de una difusión más global de la literatura latinoamericana propicia un espíritu indiscriminatorio que con frecuencia adquiere los ripios provincianamente internacionalistas de un festival de la OTI.

Poeta antes que narrador, y autor dotado de un fuerte carisma personal (`la construcción de la figura es hoy parte fundamental del trabajo de un escritor`), el retrato del propio Fogwill con el pelo revuelto y los ojos desorbitados funcionó, en la Argentina de los ochenta, como un auténtico logotipo, que desde la portada de sus libros señalaba la existencia de otras posibilidades para la actitud del creador. Esas posibilidades permanecen hoy todavía abiertas para los jóvenes escritores, que reconocerán en Fogwill el tratamiento precursor y profundamente intencionado de determinados rasgos de estilo que, a modo de tics, menudean en la actualidad. Así, la referencia constante a marcas genracionales, marcas de clase, marcas sociales, calles y locales de moda (`eso que gusta a los tontos y a los chicos posmodernos`),empleados con voluntad documental y -no mimética por parte de quien tiene la impresión de haber sido, en los setenta, `un preposmoderno y un pre-yuppy`. Así la prisa del estilo (`escribo mal, lo reconozco, pero rápido`). Así también la utilización del sexo o de las drogas como elementos estructurales de relatos en los que se explora la percepción del tiempo y del espacio, de la identidad sexual o la del género del narrador, por parte de quien admite intrigado que `con frecuencia imagino que soy una mujer` y lamenta el tiempo derrochado durante los más de diecisiete años en que fue cocainómano. Veinte años después de escrito, un relato como Muchacha punk (1979) conserva frescas toda su acidez y su ironía, Memoria de paso (1979) invierte el tránsito sexual de Orlando y parodia a la vez a Borges y a Virgnia Woolf. La larga risa de todos estos años (1983) engatusa genialmente al lector hasta conducirlo a una amarga reflexión sobre la negra sombra de la dictadura en Argentina. Restos diurnos (1986) reescribe, impregnándolo de cocaína y de una inteligencia lúgubre y feroz, el cortazariano La noche boca arriba. El relato que da título a este volumen, y el más reciente, Cantos de marineros en la Pampa (1997), entona una hermosa y destartalada elegía por la vieja épica guerrera… Pero, entre las 10 piezas, -todas formidables- que componen el volumen, merece mención particular Los pichiciegos, relato visionario y alucinante de la guerra en la nueva era tecnológica. Escrita en sólo tres días, durante el conflicto de las Malvinas, esta novelita traza un cuadro a la vez desopilante y atroz del sacrificio de miles de soldados en una guerra ciega, en la que se peleaba `de noche, con radios, radar, miras infrarrojas y en el oscuro`, y en la que ni siquiera se podía huir `porque atrás de ti, los de tu propio regimiento habían estado colocando minas a medida que avanzabas, y las minas son lo peor que hay`. Los reclutas desertores de Fogwili son adolescentes del extrarradiourbano, idénticos a los que -con la misma sintaxis narrativa- aparecen en las novelas de Ray Loriga o de Félix Romeo, pero arrojados a un infierno de nieve y barro en el que los Harrier británicos hacen las veces de ángeles exterminadores y en el que su condición social subalterna se evidencia brutalmente. Queda por señalar de qué modo el humor, el sentido lúdico, las innovaciones léxicas y el gesto vanguardista de Fogwill adquieren su justa dimensión en el marco de una vivencia ética del hecho literario. Pero para ello lo mejor es traer aquí las palabras de Fogwill en una entrevista memorable: `Escribo para no ser escrito. Viví escrito muchos años, representaba un relato. Supongo que escribo para escribir a otros, para operar sobre el comportamiento, la imaginación, la revelación, el conocimiento de los otros. Quizá sobre el comportamiento literario de los otros. Escribo para conservar el arte de contar sin sacrificar el ejercicio de pensar, un pensar que tiene que ver con la moral… Creo que es mucho más importante pensar que contar, pero para imponer el arte de pensar hay que contar. La razón no se sostiene sin relatos`. Va dicho. Escribir para no ser escrito Antología de uno de los escritores argentinos más fascinantes: Fogwill.

Cartas de amor de un sexagenario voluptuoso nos habla del amor, la esperanza o el codiano quehacer de un peculiar sexagenario convirtiéndonos en cómplices privilegiados del sorprendente desenlace de su historia.

Un viejo solterón castellano y periodista jubilado establece una corresponencia progresivamente amorosa con una viuda andaluza a través de una revista sentimental. Esta novela nos habla, con sutil ironía, del amor, la esperanza o el cotidiano quehacer para convertirnos en destinatarios de las confesiones de ese peculiar sexagenario y en cómplices privilegiados del sorprendente desenlace de su historia.

Oh Chelsea, how do I love thee… Seriously, I cannot get enough of Chelsea Handler. She first made it onto my radar when she would make guest appearances on VHI shows such as Best of the and Best Week Ever. Then she got her own show, Chelsea Lately, on E! and it was over for me. I became a devoted fan.

Handler’s written three books, this one being the newest (released this month) and I have read all three. Her first, My Horizontal Life: A History of One Night Stands, killed me. In a good way. The crap she gets herself into is laughable, especially given the fact that she has absolutely NO censor and will tell a good story whether it sheds her in a good light or not.

Handler’s second book was just as funny, although, like this book, it didn’t have the same connecting factor. Both Chelsea Chelsea, Bang Bang and Are You There Vodka, It’s Me, Chelsea involve stories from Handler’s life, both growing up and as an adult. Undoubtedly, the best “character” in the books, especially in CCBB is Handler’s father, Melvin. Melvin is an over-the-top eccentric and trying to talk sense into him is an impossible effort.

Melvin’s stubborness is especially apparent in the chapter “Dear Asshole”, in which Melvin rents out his dilapidated vacation home to unsuspecting vacationers. After spending a week in what can only be described a hell hole, the renters send Melvin a multiple page letter describing the most awful living conditions one could imagine in a vacation home, such as a broken refrigerator with liquified squid dripping from the freezer. The letter from the renters makes its way between Handler and her siblings, who are all mortified. However, their father sees nothing wrong with the living conditions and believes the renters are just making a stink over nothing. His obstinancy was unbelievable and quite humerous.

If you’ve enjoyed Handler’s previous books, this is one that can’t be missed. Now, if you are new to Handler, I would suggest any of her three books to read. They are all ridiculously funny and entertaining.

In closing, here is a picture of me and two of my sisters at a book signing for Are You There Vodka, It’s Me Chelsea. I am the one in the middle. I think my enthusiasm is obvious!

Into the summer heat of New York's Spanish Harlem strides Carmen, a chica who is as hot as the sizzling city streets. When she first meets José, she falls for him hard. He's not like the gansta types she knows – tipo duros who are tough, who think they are players. But José has a quick temper, and he likes to get his own way. And nobody gets in Carmen's way.

When Escamillo rolls into town, everyone takes notice of the Latino Jay-Z – a quadruple-threat singer/rapper/producer/businessman. But he only notices one person – Carmen. And Carmen has given up on José – he's not going to get her out of her tough neighborhood, el barrio, and into the action. Escamillo will.

But José won't let that happen.

Passion, love, and betrayal explode into tragedy in this modern retelling of an enduring love story.

Premio Planeta 2009.

La niña São, nacida para trabajar, como todas en su aldea, decide construirse una vida mejor en Europa. Tras aprender a levantarse una y otra vez encontrará una amistad nueva con una mujer española que se ahoga en sus inseguridades. São le devolverá las ganas de vivir y juntas construirán un vínculo indestructible, que las hará fuertes. Conmovedora historia de amistad entre dos mujeres que viven en mundos opuestos narrada con la belleza de la realidad. Una novela llena de sensibilidad para lectores ávidos de aventura y emoción. Ángeles Caso vuelve a cautivar con una historia imprescindible para leer y compartir.

Günter Grass has been wrestling with Germany's past for decades now. In this new novel Grass [examines a subject that has long been taboo — the suffering of Germans during World War II.

It is the story of the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff, J a former cruise ship turned refugee carrier, by a Soviet submarine in January 1945. Some 9,000 people, most of them women and children fleeing from the advancing Red Army, went down in the Baltic Sea, making it the deadliest maritime disaster of all time.

Grass's narrator is one of the few survivors, a middle-aged journalist who lives in Berlin. Born to an unwed mother on a lifeboat the night of the attack, Paul Pokriefke tries to piece together the tragic events. While his mother Tulla sees her whole existence in terms of that calamitous moment, Paul wishes their life could have been more normal, less touched by the past. For his teenage son Konrad, who dabbles in the dark, far-right corner of the internet, the Gustloff embodies the denial of Germany's wartime agony.

Esta segunda entrega de la ambiciosa y valiente crónica de la vida de Cristo comienza justo antes de su bautizo en aguas del Jordán y termina con el milagro de Caná. Jesús vive como un miembro más de su comunidad, a la espera de una señal que le indique el camino que habrá de tomar. Cuando el agua de las tinajas se convierte en vino, Jesús atiende a su llamado y se convierte en aquel que invoca a Israel para que tome las armas contra Roma.

La soledad y el dolor amargan la vida de Paula desde la marcha inesperada e inexplicable de su amadísimo esposo Lucas, su cómplice y su maestro, con quien había planeado una existencia de plenitud y de gozo en la que encarar el otoño de sus vidas. Ahora sólo quedan el vacío y el desánimo, la desolación de una ausencia incomprensible. Paula lucha por sobreponerse y viaja a León, el escenario de su infancia, para recuperar la memoria de su abuelo Román, condenado en un juicio inicuo y asesinado tras la Guerra Civil, en la feroz represión desatada por los vencedores contra los “enemigos de España”. En León, Paula reencontrará su propio pasado, el de su familia destrozada, y el pasado colectivo de una tierra asolada por el odio cainita. El reencuentro con sus parientes le permitirá recuperar los papeles con los que reconstruir los últimos días del abuelo Román, un hombre bueno destruido en ese “tiempo de canallas”. Es una novela descarnada, sin concesiones, pero llena también de emoción y ternura, y que gira en torno a dos temas esenciales y universales: la muerte y la memoria. Es también una novela valiente, con la pretensión de ser un canto al ser humano y lo más sublime de su esencia, a su capacidad de sobreponerse a la desgracia y de enfrentar el conocimiento de sí mismo.

Po Kodzie Leonarda Da Vinci, Zmierzchu, Harrym Potterze, Cieniu Wiatru władzę nad duszami czytelników przejmuje Księga Wszystkich Dusz, która połączyła to co najlepsze, w największych bestsellerach ostatnich lat:

– Suspens, przygodę i poszukiwanie wielkiego sekretu historii Kodu Leonarda da Vinci.

– Miłość wielką i nieziemską Zmierzchu.

– Magię Harry'ego Pottera.

– Tajemnicę, nastrój i piękno opowieści Cienia wiatru.

To wzruszający thriller, powieść przygodowa i romans, który ma w sobie to co najlepsze w Zmierzchu i Cieniu wiatru.

"The Bookseller"

Łączy w sobie liczne gatunki literatury. Tak jak świat w niej przedstawiony łączy istoty ludzkie i nadludzkie. Sama jest potężna jak zaginiona zaklęta księga, wokół której toczy się akcja. Bohaterowie, którym nie sposób się oprzeć. Każda kobieta marzy, by być taka jak ONA i mieć takiego mężczyznę jak ON. I żyć w świecie, który jest jak wyobraźnia: bez granic. Tam gdzie historia przenika się z magią, a miłość jest potężniejsza niż czas.

Piękna i młoda doktor historii Diana Bishop studiuje alchemiczne księgi w oksfordzkiej Bibliotece Bodlejańskiej. Jeden manuskrypt promieniuje dziwnym lśnieniem. Brakuje mu kilku stron. A spod pisma wyłania się niemożliwy do odczytania inny tekst. Diana wie, że by go odczytać, musiałaby użyć swoich magicznych mocy. Pochodzi bowiem z potężnej rodziny o wielowiekowych czarnoksięskich tradycjach. Z rodziny pierwszej czarownicy straconej w Salem. Ale Diana boi się swojej magii. Broni się przed nią.

Wraca jednak do księgi. Ale okazuje się, że manuskryptu nie ma w bibliotece, bo zaginął przeszło sto lat wcześniej… Tymczasem Oksfordem wstrząsają tajemnicze morderstwa. A Bibliotekę Bodlejańską zaludniają niebezpieczne czarownice, czarnoksiężnicy, demony i wampiry. Wszyscy poszukują księgi… Wśród tych istot, których nie sposób odróżnić od ludzi, jest urzekający Matthew Clairmont – tajemniczy światowej sławy profesor biochemii i neurologii. Diana wie, że nie wolno jej złamać zakazu wchodzenia w uczuciowe związki z przedstawicielami innych ras. Wie, że tę miłość może przypłacić życiem. Tak rozpoczyna się przebogata opowieść o zakazanej potężnej miłości, wśród walki o tajemnicę, która być może zmieni świat…

Premio Editorial Planeta

Esta novela obtuvo el Premio Editorial Planeta 1984, concedido por el siguiente, jurado: Ricardo Fernández de la Reguera, José Manuel Lara, Antonio Prieto, Carlos Pujol y José María Valverde.

¿En que se convertirá el nuevo Raval? ¿Será un barrio saneado, con pisos de alto standing donde los pisos son `algo` caros? ¿Un barrio donde habitarán diseñadores, actores y cineastas, todos muy Chics? O ¿pese a todas las reformas urbanísticas seguirá siendo un barrio para los recién llegados? Por el bien de Barcelona, que siempre he considerado una ciudad abierta espero que así sea. Espero que el barrio Chino siga siendo un barrio para la gente sin demasiado poder adquisitivo, pueda vivir. Un barrio donde una habitación, como la que Méndez tiene alquilada por dos reales, pueda existir. Donde existan personas no alienadas en una sociedad consumista.

`Crónica sentimental en Rojo` precisamente comienza con dos personajes de este barrio. Uno, por supuesto, es el Inspector Méndez: un policía de avanzada edad, de los de la escuela franquista, que debería jubilarse pero que solo le queda su trabajo. Expeditivo y brutal en sus quehaceres policiales pero honrado y justo, por lo menos a su manera. No le gusta salir de su barrio chino pero comienza la novela en la puerta de la modelo esperando la salida de un boxeador retirado, el Richard. Ricardo Arce es otro inadaptado de la misma zona acostumbrado a las peleas de bar y a los bajos fondos pero de buen corazón. Un buenazo sin remedio y sin esperanzas de cambiar. La novela esta escrita a principio de los años ochenta del pasado siglo XX y el paro en aquella época era un problema muy real. La crisis del 73 había llegado a Barcelona con cierto retraso las listas del paro empezaron a llenarse desde principio de los ochenta. Hubieron de pasar varios años hasta casi los noventa para que llegara `el pelotazo`. Pero al principio de los ochenta para un antiguo inquilino de `la modelo` encontrar empleo era muy complicado y era carne de paro y de presidio. Es decir, que tardaban muy poco en cometer otro delito para volver a la calle Entença.

`Crónica Sentimental en Rojo` nos muestra la realidad cuando una gran fortuna se debe repartir entre varios herederos de una manera no demasiado clara.

An astonishing PUSH novel about pain, release, and recovery from an amazing new author.

Fifteen-year-old Callie isn’t speaking to anybody, not even to her therapist at Sea Pines, the “residential treatment facility” where her parents and doctor sent her after discovering that she cuts herself. As her story unfolds, Callie reluctantly become involved with the other “guests” at Sea Pines — finding her voice and confronting the trauma that triggered her behavior.

Wznowienie legendarnej książki Ryszarda Kapuścińskiego (1932-2007) z 1975 roku. "Chrystus z karabinem na ramieniu" zaraz po wydaniu został okrzyknięty przez magazyn "Nowe Książki" tytułem książki roku. To zbiór reportaży z Bliskiego Wschodu, Afryki i Ameryki Łacińskiej. Bohaterami reportaży są Palestyńczycy, Syryjczycy, Libańczycy, Jordańczycy i Żydzi, partyzanci Mozambiku i Salwadoru, zamieszkujący jedną wyspę obywatele dwu państw Dominikany oraz Haiti, zmieniające się jak rękawiczki rządy Boliwii, porwany przez terrorystów ambasador RFN w Gwatemali Karl von Spreti, wreszcie prezydent Salvadore Allende i rewolucjonista Che Guevara, którego "Dziennik z Boliwii" Kapuściński opublikował w swoim tłumaczeniu w roku 1969.

Jeden z największych bestsellerów światowych.

Przedmiotem reportażu-powieści są ludzie dworu cesarza Etiopii Hajle Sellasje, zmarłego w 1975 roku. Ukazując ich służalczość, lizusostwo, strach, pazerność, uległość oraz walkę o względy władcy, Kapuściński w mistrzowski sposób przedstawia ponure kulisy jego panowania. Książka ma uniwersalny charakter, obnaża mechanizmy władzy nie tylko politycznej.

"Cesarzem" Ryszard Kapuściński rozpoczął karierę międzynarodową i nadał reportażowi wymiar literacki.

В «Самарской вольнице» — первой части дилогии о восстании донских казаков под предводительством Степана Разина показан начальный победный период разинского движения. В романе использован громадный документальный материал, что позволило Владимиру Буртовому реконструировать картину действий походных атаманов Лазарки Тимофеева, Романа Тимофеева, Ивана Балаки, а также других исторических личностей, реальность которых подтверждается ссылками на архивные данные.

Строгая документальность в сочетании с авантюрно-приключенческой интригой делают роман интересным, как в историческом, так и в художественном плане.

W cichej, spokojnej okolicy Willow Road odżywają wspomnienia makabrycznych wydarzeń sprzed lat, kiedy to grozę i obrzydzenie budziły dokonywane tam praktyki okultystyczne. Tak jak niegdyś zatriumfuje szaleństwo, prowadzące do nagłych aktów przemocy.

Chris Bishop, specjalista od zjawisk paranormalnych, wznawia dochodzenie w tej sprawie. Nie ma wątpliwości, że na Willow Road wciąż jest coś, co doprowadza ludzi do utraty zmysłów, wyzwala w nich najgorsze instynkty, popycha do morderstw i samounicestwień…

Согласитесь, до чего же интересно проснуться днем и вспомнить все творившееся ночью… Что чувствует женатый человек, обнаружив в кармане брюк женские трусики? Почему утром ты навсегда отказываешься от того, кто еще ночью казался тебе ангелом? И что же нужно сделать, чтобы дверь клубного туалета в Петербурге привела прямиком в Сан-Франциско?..

Клубы: пафосные столичные, тихие провинциальные, полулегальные подвальные, закрытые для посторонних, открытые для всех, хаус– и рок-… Все их объединяет особая атмосфера – ночной тусовочной жизни. Кто ни разу не был в клубе, никогда не поймет, что это такое, а тому, кто был, – нет смысла объяснять.

«Полный чилаут» – это сборник историй от авторов – профессионалов клубной жизни.

Состав сборника:

Алексей Егоренков «Всем плевать на электро»

Нина Демина «Танец в ритме свинг, или сказка о потерянном времени»

Александра Дрига «Животная», «Сумасшествие»

Олег Дриманович «Своя синкопа», «Стробоскопируй!»

Катя Коваленко «Падаю»

Сергей Карлик «Баллада о мертвом рокере»

Ирина Подгайко «В дыру»

Алекс Май «Путешественник»

Слава Модный «Еретики», «Пропить ангела»

Владимир Одинец «Мышь – рейв времени»

Людмила Пашкевич «Другая жизнь»

Альбина Руссо «Несколько дверей»

Андрей Руфимский «Питер/Сан-Франциско»

Алекс TeкилаZZ «Наваждение»

Татьяна Ти «Случайность»

Екатерина Четкина «Стриптизерша»

During the course of these stories Calvino toys with continuous creation, the transformation of matter, and the expanding and contracting reaches of space and time. His characters, made out of mathematical formulae and simple cellular structures, disport themselves among galaxies, experience the solidification of planets, move from aquatic to terrestrial existence, play games with hydrogen atoms, and have a love life. Calvino succeeds in relating complex scientific concepts to the ordinary reactions of common humanity.

"A poignant, freewheeling account of Creation itself… [Calvino] raises imagination to its exponential maximum." – Paul West, Book World

Italo Calvino's superb storytelling gifts earned him international renown and a reputation as "one of the world's best fabulists" (John Gardner, New York Times Book Review). Born in Cuba in 1923, Calvino was raised in Italy, where he lived most of his life. He died in Siena at the age of sixty-one.

Do małej mieściny na francuskiej prowincji, gdzie czas się zatrzymał, przyjeżdża tajemnicza młoda i piękna kobieta z córeczką. Mieszkańcy Lansquenet ze zdumieniem obserwują, jak Vianne z Anouk odnawiają starą piekarnię na rynku, by urządzić tam sklep z czekoladą. W dniu otwarcia właścicielka ofiarowuje zaglądającym do niej ciekawskim takie słodycze, jakie każdy z nich lubi najbardziej, jak gdyby znała ich najskrytsze myśli i pragnienia. Czyżby ta dziwna kobieta była czarownicą?

Dla wielu mieszkańców miasteczka przyjazd Vianne jest prawdziwym darem losu, ale są i tacy, którzy zrobią wszystko, by opuściła Lansquenet. Zbliża się Wielkanoc i Vianne zamierza urządzić dla dzieci "festiwal czekolady", lecz jej wrogowie za wszelką ceną chcą jej w tym przeszkodzić…

Frederique Farmer thought she'd found the perfect place to hide-from her life, the world at large, and even from God. She was wrong.

Hannah ma 15 lat. Dotąd czuła się bezpiecznie w społeczności świadków Jehowy, teraz jednak chciałaby z niej wystąpić, by żyć tak jak jej rówieśnicy. Hannah walczy o prawo wyboru, a dzięki wsparciu i miłości Paula postanawia uczynić pierwszy krok ku wolności, jakiej zaznają jej szkolni koledzy i koleżanki.

Weather Warden Joanne Baldwin hasn't had it easy. In the previous two books in Caine's sharply written series, she "had a really bad week, died, got reborn as a Djinn, had an even worse week, and saved the world, sort of" and "died again, sort of" before waking up human. Normally, Weather Wardens must simply protect the rest of the human race from deadly weather, but Joanne, who's deeply tough, resolutely moral and highly fond of fast cars and "bitchin' shoes," keeps getting tasked with saving the world. This time, a surly teenager named Kevin has holed up in Las Vegas with the world's most powerful Djinn and is wreaking utter havoc. In order to stop him, she'll have to surrender her own Djinn and lover David, die yet again, get resuscitated, interrogated and electrocuted by members of a powerful secret society, and experience countless other injuries and indignities, all the while trying to figure out who-among the detectives, Wardens, Djinns, Ikrits (a dark, undead Djinn), former bosses and former lovers-is really on her side. It's all a bit confusing, for Joanne and readers alike, especially those who haven't followed her through Ill Wind and Heat Stroke, but it's a rollicking good ride. Caine's prose crackles with energy, as does her fierce and lovable heroine.

У комедiï "Сто тисяч" викривається патологiчна зажерливiсть багатiя Герасима Калитки, який добре розумiє, що його багатство створюється працею наймитiв, ïх нещадною експлуатацiєю, проте шкодує для них поживноï страви, навiть шматка хлiба.

Dwupokojowe rezydencje w zapyziałych blokach, wypełnione niebiańskim blaskiem hipermarkety, jasełkowa religijność i misteria zakupów, społeczeństwo podzielone na konsumentów i abonentów, uwięzieni w tym świecie bohaterowie opowiadań Sławomira Shutego wierzą już tylko w konsumpcję i opinię publiczną. Tragikomiczne historie, gorączkowe monologi, katalog rytuałów towarzyskich imienin, styp, świąt, komunii splatają się w zjadliwą satyrę na panujące w Polsce gusta i obyczaje. Shuty szydzi z siermiężności, cwaniactwa, zawiści, obłudy, podatności na indoktrynację. Jednocześnie kreśli przejmujący obraz nudy, frustracji, duchowej pustki i alienacji, kryjących się w pstrokatym krajobrazie wielkomiejskich osiedli. Posługuje się agresywnym językiem, znakomicie wykorzystuje gwary rozmaitych środowisk, przysłuchuje się przenikaniu reklamowych sloganów do mowy potocznej. Opowiadania zebrane w tym tomie pochodzą z wczesnego zbioru proroka antykonsumpcji Cukru w normie, uzupełnionego o nowe utwory.

A mediados de los cuarenta, Ringo es un chiquillo de quince años que pasa las horas muertas en el bar de la señora Paquita, moviendo los dedos sobre la mesa, como si repasara las lecciones de piano que su familia ya no puede pagarle.En esa taberna del barrio de Gracia, el chaval es testigo de la historia de amor de Vicky Mir y el señor Alonso: ella, una mujer entrada en años y en carnes, masajista de profesión, ingenua y enamoradiza; él, un cincuentón apuesto que ha acabado instalándose en su casa. Allí viven junto a Violeta, la hija de la señora Mir, hasta que sucede algo inesperado: un domingo por la tarde, Vicky se echa a las vías muertas de un tranvía intentando un suicidio imposible y patético, y el señor Alonso desaparece para no volver. Lo único que queda de él es una carta que prometió escribir y que Vicky estará esperando y deseando hasta la locura, mientras Violeta mueve sus espléndidas caderas por el barrio, hosca e indiferente a los halagos.La vida entera discurre por el bar de la señora Paquita y bajo la mirada de Ringo, que escucha, lee y finalmente empezará a escribir, llenando de luz la triste caligrafía de toda una generación que alimentó sus sueños en los cines de barrio y en las calles grises de una ciudad donde el futuro parecía algo improbable.Espléndido relato de iniciación al deseo y a la escritura, Caligrafía de los sueños es la primera novela que Juan Marsé publica tras la concesión del Premio Cervantes en 2009.

Альфред Андерш (1914 — 1980) занимает видное место среди тех писателей ФРГ для которых преодоление прошлого, искоренение нацизма всегда было главной общественной и творческой задачей. В том его избранных произведений вошли последний роман «Винтерспельт», в котором выражен объективный взгляд на историю, на войну, показана обреченность фашизма, социальная и моральная повесть «Отец убийцы, (1980), которую можно назвать литературным, духовным и политическим завещанием писателя, и рассказы разных лет.

«Casual» — первый роман Оксаны Робски. Журналист и сценарист по образованию, состоятельная женщина по положению, Оксана Робски с легкой иронией пишет об обитателях респектабельных особняков. Авантюрный роман-коктейль, построенный на интригующем сочетании детективной коллизии и романтической истории, представляет собой литературную хронику реальных событий частной жизни российской буржуазии.

Hay libros que envejecen con el tiempo, y otros que mantienen lozana su juventud inmarchita. Este es el caso de los "Cuentos de la Alhambra", escritos por Washington Irving, diplomático, historiador y viajero norteamericano que vivió por algún tiempo en la misma Alhambra. La obra, editada por primera vez en 1832, fue de inmediato traducida a muchas lenguas y atrajo a Granada a viajeros de todas las latitudes.

When this true-crime story first appeared in 1980, it made the New York Times bestseller list within weeks. Two decades later, it's being rereleased in conjunction with a film version produced by DreamWorks. In the space of five years, Frank Abagnale passed $2.5 million in fraudulent checks in every state and 26 foreign countries. He did it by pioneering implausible and brazen scams, such as impersonating a Pan Am pilot (puddle jumping around the world in the cockpit, even taking over the controls). He also played the role of a pediatrician and faked his way into the position of temporary resident supervisor at a hospital in Georgia. Posing as a lawyer, he conned his way into a position in a state attorney general's office, and he taught a semester of college-level sociology with a purloined degree from Columbia University.

The kicker is, he was actually a teenage high school dropout. Now an authority on counterfeiting and secure documents, Abagnale tells of his years of impersonations, swindles, and felonies with humor and the kind of confidence that enabled him to pull off his poseur performances. "Modesty is not one of my virtues. At the time, virtue was not one of my virtues," he writes. In fact, he did it all for his overactive libido-he needed money and status to woo the girls. He also loved a challenge and the ego boost that came with playing important men. What's not disclosed in this highly engaging tale is that Abagnale was released from prison after five years on the condition that he help the government write fraud-prevention programs. So, if you're planning to pick up some tips from this highly detailed manifesto on paperhanging, be warned: this master has already foiled you. -Lesley Reed

***

"A book that captivates from first page to last." – West Coast Review of Books

"Whatever the reader may think of his crimes, the reader will wind up chortling with and cheering along the criminal." – Charlottesville Progress

"Zingingly told… richly detailed and winning as the devil." – Kirkus Reviews – Review

«Canto» (1963) — «культовый антироман» Пауля Низона (р. 1929), автора, которого критики называют величайшим из всех, ныне пишущих на немецком языке. Это лирический роман-монолог, в котором образы, навеянные впечатлениями от Италии, «рифмуются», причудливо переплетаются, создавая сложный словесно-музыкальный рисунок, многоголосый мир, полный противоречий и гармонии.

Исторический роман, в центре которого судьба простого русского солдата, погибшего во время пожара Зимнего дворца в 1837 г.

Действие романа происходит в Зимнем дворце в Петербурге и в крепостной деревне Тульской губернии.

Иванов погибает при пожаре Зимнего дворца, спасая художественные ценности. О его гибели и предыдущей службе говорят скупые строки официальных документов, ставших исходными данными для писателя, не один год собиравшего необходимые для романа материалы.

Sergio Pitol, la realidad de escenarios y la influencia de las literaturas no le han impedido a Sergio Pitol la creación de un mundo auténtico. El incendio que amenaza a cada uno de los personajes y el cerco de palabras que no ofrece resquicios pertenecen a un escritor profundamente singular. Al renunciar a escribir en la bitácora del extranjero, Sergio Pitol se ha vuelto nativo de su propio mundo, un mundo tan intenso y rico en cambios y matices como el más vigoroso de los elementos, el fuego.

Try me…Test me…Taste me…

When an exotic stranger, Vianne Rocher, arrives in the French village of Lansquenet and opens a chocolate boutique directly opposite the church, Father Reynaud identifies her as a serious danger to his flock – especially as it is the beginning of Lent, the traditional season of self-denial. War is declared as the priest denounces the newcomer's wares as the ultimate sin.

Suddenly Vianne's shop-cum-café means that there is somewhere for secrets to be whispered, grievances to be aired, dreams to be tested. But Vianne's plans for an Easter Chocolate Festival divide the whole community in a conflict that escalates into a 'Church not Chocolate' battle. As mouths water in anticipation, can the solemnity of the Church compare with the pagan passion of a chocolate éclair?

For the first time here is a novel in which chocolate enjoys its true importance. Rich, clever and mischievious, Chocolat is a literary feast for all senses.

Cuando tras décadas de ausencia Framboise Simon regresa a su pequeño pueblo en la campiña francesa, los habitantes no la reconocen como la hija de la mal afamada Mirabelle Dartigan,la mujer que aún consideran responsable de la tragedia sucedida en los años de la ocupación nazi. A la búsqueda de un nuevo comienzo en su vida, Framboise descubre rápidamente que el presente y el pasado se encuentran inextricablemente unidos, mientras recorre las páginas del cuaderno de recetas de cocina heredado de su madre.

Con la ayuda de esas recetas, Framboise recrea los platos de su madre, que sirve en un coqueto restaurante. Y a medida que analiza el cuaderno -a la búsqueda de pistas que le permitan comprender la contradicción entre el amor de su madre por la cocina y su conducta opresiva-, descubre poco a poco un significado oculto detrás de las crípticas anotaciones de Mirabelle. Entre las páginas del cuaderno, Framboise encontrará la clave para comprender lo que realmente sucedió aquel fatídico verano en el que tenía tan solo nueve años.

Exquisito y lleno de matices, Cinco cuartos de naranja es un libro sobre madres e hijas del pasado y del presente, sobre la resistencia y la derrota y, sin lugar a dudas, una extraordinaria muestra del talento de la autora de Chocolat.

Plaidoyer passionnant pour la defense de la lecture, ce roman est un appel a la liberte et aux droits du lecteur. Daniel Pennac livre, avec un humour grincant qui fera rire de 7 a77 ans, dans ce roman-essai, les droits imprescriptibles du lecteur. En dix chapitres, il nous expose le droit de ne pas lire, de sauter des pages, de ne pas finir un livre, de relire, de lire n'importe quoi,le droit au bovarysme (maladie textuellement transmissible), de lire n'import ou, de gaspiller, de lire a haute voix, de nous taire.

Un honnête garçon qui sert comme brigadier dans un régiment de dragons à Séville tombe amoureux de la gitane Carmen. Celle-ci lui ayant préféré un certain Lucas, rencontré lors d'un combat de taureau, il va, par amour pour elle, commettre le pire.

No le fue fácil a Charlie alcanzar el objetivo de amasar una fortuna; sin embargo algo había en él que le hacía un predestinado al triunfo y, como apreciará el lector, este algo tiene mucho que ver con su capacidad de trabajo, astucia, coraje, ganas de aprender y un maravilloso abuelo -el de más fino olfato para la venta- que le guió con su ejemplo en sus primeros tiempos.

Desde las primeras páginas la historia se convierte en una trepidante aventura sobre el mundo de los negocios, en una ascensión ilusionada desde la humilde situación de vendedor de verduras callejero hasta la realización de un gran proyecto empresarial: es la historia de un tendero que metido a negociante termina creando una importante red de establecimientos comerciales mientras van desfilando los grandes acontecimientos de este siglo.

¿Dónde está la frontera entre la culpabilidad y la inocencia? Solo un escritor como Jeffrey Archer es capaz de imprimir en las conciencias un sentimiento tan complejo como la duda.

¿Puede un convicto confesar su culpabilidad y conseguir que se desee su libertad, que se crea en su inocencia? Este es el dilema que presenta uno de los doce relatos, manifestación de talento y elegancia narrativa, que, inspirados en historias inolvidables de personajes reales, abordan la cuestión de la delincuencia: entre el engaño y la estafa, entre el asesinato y el robo, estos maravillosos relatos guían al lector por los laberintos de un mundo paralelo y subterráneo. Pero al tiempo muestran el lado más humano de sus protagonistas, culpables, pero no tanto.

Aunque algunas de estas historias fueron conocidas por el autor tras su puesta en libertad, la mayoría lo fueron durante su estancia en prisión, lo que les da una unidad de fondo. Todas confirman a Archer como uno de los mejores creadores de relatos cortos de la actualidad.

Las ilustraciones del inigualable Ronald Searle representan un valor añadido de una edición inolvidable.

«Con estilo, ingenioso y siempre entretenido… Jeffrey Archer tiene una aptitud natural para las historias cortas.» – The Times

«Probablemente el mejor contador de historias de nuestro tiempo.» – Mail-on Sunday

«Un narrador de la talla de Alejandro Dumas.» – Washington Post

«Archer es un maestro del entretenimiento.» – Time

«Este hombre es un genio.» – Evening Standard

«Archer es un narrador excelente, que cumple las expectativas del lector: el deseo de pasar la página y saber qué ocurre después.» – Sunday Times

«Archer tiene un don para la trama que solo se puede definir como genial.» – Daily Telegraph

Una reflexión en forma epistolar dirigida a todos aquellos a los que domina la ilusión de llegar a ser novelistas. El gran escritor peruano, a través de estas cartas, nos habla con lucidez del oficio y el arte de narrar, y aconseja: «… quien ve en el éxito el estímulo esencial de su vocación es probable que vea frustrado su sueño y confunda la vocación literaria con la vocación por el relumbrón y los beneficios económicos que a ciertos escritores (muy contados) depara la literatura. Ambas cosas son distintas. Tal vez, el atributo principal de la vocación literaria sea que, quien la tiene, vive el ejercicio de esa vocación como su mejor recompensa, más, mucho más, que todas las que pudiera alcanzar como consecuencia de sus frutos.» Y, a partir de esa idea fundamental sobre la vocación, Vargas Llosa discurre sobre el poder de persuasión, el estilo, el espacio y el tiempo del narrador, la realidad y la experiencia del escritor, la autenticidad y la ficción del relato, la eficacia de la escritura, su coherencia interna que emana del propio lenguaje, la estructura de la novela, «esa artesanía que sostiene como un todo armónico y viviente las ficciones que nos deslumbran»… Un alarde de sabiduría y experiencia, ilustrado con numerosos ejemplos de escritores y novelas, descritos con pinceladas breves y certeras, que acaba con un consejo definitivo: «Querido amigo: estoy tratando de decirle que se olvide de todo lo que ha leído en mis cartas sobre la forma novelesca y de que se ponga a escribir novelas de una vez.»

For historical fiction readers, a tantalizing new novel from New York Times bestselling author Alison Weir about the passionate and notorious French queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine.

Renowned for her highly acclaimed and bestselling British histories, Alison Weir has in recent years made a major impact on the fiction scene with her novels about Queen Elizabeth and Lady Jane Grey. In this latest offering, she imagines the world of Eleanor of Aquitaine, the beautiful twelfth-century woman who was Queen of France until she abandoned her royal husband for the younger man who would become King of England. In a relationship based on lust and a mutual desire for great power, Henry II and Eleanor took over the English throne in 1154, thus beginning one of the most influential reigns and tumultuous royal marriages in all of history. In this novel, Weir uses her extensive knowledge to paint a most vivid portrait of this fascinating woman.

Esta obra insólita, un auténtico estímulo para la lectura, ha sido uno de los grandes fenómenos de la edición francesa reciente. Pennac, profesor de literatura en un instituto, se propone una tarea tan simple como necesaria en nuestros días: que el adolescente pierda el miedo a la lectura, que lea por placer, que se embarque en un libro como en una aventura personal y libremente elegida. Todo el,lo escrito como un monólogo desenfadado, de una alegría y entusiasmo contagiosos: `En realidad, no es un libro de reflexión sobre la lectura -dice el autor-, sino una tentativa de reconciliación con el libro`.

Este antimanual de literatura concluye con un decálogo no de los deberes, sino de los derechos imprescindibles del lectir (derecho a no terminar un libro, a releer, etc., incluso a no leer).

Cat and Mouse was the book Günter Grass wrote immediately after The Tin Drum, and it shares its setting with that earlier novel: Danzig during World War II. But while The Tin Drum achieves its extraordinary cumulative effect through the sprawling and picaresque, Cat and Mouse depends on brevity and compactness.

The provocative story centers on the narrator's vivid recollection of a boyhood scene in which a black cat is provoked to pounce on his friend Mahlke's "mouse" – his prominent Adam's apple. This incident sets off a wild series of utterly Grassian events that ultimately leads to Mahlke's becoming a national hero. Because of Grass's singular storytelling virtuosity, Cat and Mouse is marvelously entertaining, powerful, and full of funny episodes – yet it also has a serious undercurrent "at the deepest level, [about] the survival of individual human qualities in this age of wars and state-directed politics" (The New York Times Book Review).

Günter Grass – novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, and graphic artist – is considered Germany's greatest contemporary writer. He lives in Berlin.

A surprised Southern matriarch is confronted by her family at an intervention… A life-altering break-in triggers insomniac introspection in a desperate actor… Streetwise New York City neighbors let down their guard for a naïve puppeteer and must suffer the consequences…

In this stunning collection of short stories – five of which are being published for the very first time – bestselling, award-winning author Debra Dean displays the depth and magnitude of her extraordinary literary talent. Replete with the seamless storytelling and captivating lyrical voice that made her debut novel, The Madonnas of Leningrad, a national bestseller, Dean's Confessions of a Falling Woman is a haunting, satisfying, and unforgettable reading experience.

Émigré à Paris, Kim s'adresse à son ami d'enfance, Arkadi. Avant d'être séparés à l'âge de quatorze ans, les deux garçons ont grandi ensemble dans un hameau communautaire, non loin de Leningrad. Kim et Arkadi vivent des années heureuses. Tous deux pionniers dans un mouvement de jeunesse, ils marchent fièrement vers l'horizon radieux que leur promettent les films de propagande, au rythme des chants qui célèbrent les héros de la guerre et la figure mythique du Travailleur. Mais certains silences des parents sont lourds de sous-entendus. Peu à peu émerge en eux le sentiment qu'on les dupe. Et pour l'adulte aux yeux depuis longtemps dessillés, la nostalgie est double: à celle des scènes de l'enfance que la mémoire baigne d'une lumière neigeuse, vient s'ajouter celle, plus inattendue, de l'époque du mensonge et de l'aveuglement.

From #1 New York Times and USA Today bestselling author Debbie Macomber – Mrs. Miracle on 34th Street! While working in the toy department of a family-run department store in NYC, Mrs. Miracle seizes the opportunity to connect Holly, who is searching for the perfect robot for her nephew, with Jake, the owner's son.

Era una ciudad sorprendente que, como un ser prehistórico, parecía haber surgido bruscamente en el valle en una noche de invierno para escalar penosamente la falda de la montaña. Todo en ella era viejo y pétreo, desde las calles y las fuentes hasta los tejados de sus soberbias casas seculares, cubiertos de losas de piedra gris semejantes a escamas gigantescas. Resultaba difícil creer que bajo aquella formidable coraza subsistiera y se renovara la carne tierna de la vida. No resultaba fácil ser niño en esta ciudad. Y tampoco en esos tiempos, vísperas de la Segunda guerra mundial. La novela autobiográfica del reconocido autor albanés está contada desde la perspectiva de un niño cuya voz nos desvela un mundo fuera de la historia, en el que supersticiones y acontecimientos se encabalgan y entremezclan hasta darle a estas memorias de infancia un carácter de onírica reflexión.

This powerful and often terrifying novel, the fruit of J.G. Ballard’s obsession with the motor-car, will shock and disturb many readers. Few products of modern technology excite as much fascination and interest as the automobile, but each year hundreds of thousands of people die in car crashes throughout the world, millions are injured. Yet attempts to regulate the motor-car and reduce this slaughter constantly meet with strong and almost unthinking resistance. Ballard believes that the key to this paradox is to be found in the car crash itself, which contains an image of all our fantasies of speed, power, violence and sexuality. ‘Three years ago, I held an exhibition of crashed cars at the New Arts Laboratory in London,’ he says. ‘People were fascinated by the cars but I was surprised that these damaged vehicles were continually attacked and abused during the month they were on show—watching this, I decided to write Crash.’

The novel opens with the narrator recovering in hospital after a serious car crash in which he has killed the husband of a young woman doctor. In his pain-filled dreams he finds himself dominated by strange sexual fantasies, and he determines to find the real meaning of this horrific experience. When he leaves hospital he revisits the scene of the crash, and meets the woman doctor. During their affair they begin an exploration of the motor-car in all its forms, attending stock-car races, watching test vehicles being crashed, conducting a variety of sexual experiments on London motorways. They meet a violent and aggressive figure called Vaughan, a ‘hoodlum scientist’ who seems determined to die in a car crash with a famous film actress. Terrified of Vaughan, and yet under his spell, the narrator is carried closer to the sinister climax of the novel, a disquieting vision of the future in which sex and technology form a nightmare marriage.

Violent and frightening, but always true to its subject, Crash is above all a cautionary tale, a warning against the brutal, erotic and overlit future that beckons us, ever more powerfully, from the margins of the technological landscape.

The book was filmed by Canadian director David Cronenberg in 1996; the movie Crash provoked fierce debates over censorship and obscenity.

Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2006

Sobre el telón de fondo de un Afganistán respetuoso de sus ricas tradiciones ancestrales, la vida en Kabul durante el invierno de 1975 se desarrolla con toda la intensidad, la pujanza y el colorido de una ciudad confiada en su futuro e ignorante de que se avecina uno de los periodos más cruentos y tenebrosos que han padecido los milenarios pueblos que la habitan. Cometas en el cielo es la conmovedora historia de dos padres y dos hijos, de su amistad y de cómo la casualidad puede convertirse en hito inesperado de nuestro destino. Obsesionado por demostrarle a su padre que ya es todo un hombre, Amir se propone ganar la competición anual de cometas de la forma que sea, incluso a costa de su inseparable Hassan, un hazara de clase inferior que ha sido su sirviente y compañero de juegos desde la más tierna infancia. A pesar del fuerte vínculo que los une, después de tantos años de haberse defendido mutuamente de todos los peligros imaginables, Amir se aprovecha de la fidelidad sin límites de su amigo y comete una traición que los separará de forma definitiva.

Así, con apenas doce años, el joven Amir recordará durante toda su vida aquellos días en los que perdió uno de los tesoros más preciados del hombre: la amistad.

Mary Elizabeth, a.k.a. Lola, is accustomed to playing the starring role in the fascinating production that is her life. Her pottery-making single mom and bratty twin sisters are merely bit players in Lola's dramatic existence. But all this changes when she is forced to move from her beloved Manhattan to the boring suburbs of New Jersey. According to Lola, "living in the suburbs is like being dead, only with cable TV and pizza delivery." The worst part is that someone has already snagged the coveted Drama Queen of Suburbia title--and that someone is Carla Santini. Carla, who is "sophisticated, beautiful, and radiates confidence the way a towering inferno radiates heat," isn't about to let anyone take away her hard-earned crown. Undaunted, Lola tries out for and wins the lead in the school play, a role much desired by Carla. In retaliation, Carla makes the entire student body give Lola the silent treatment (and in addition scores tickets to a sold-out concert of Lola's favorite rock band). Can Lola crash the concert, crush Carla, and still have enough energy to wow everyone in the school production of Pygmalion? It's all in a day's work for Lola, Teenage Drama Queen.

This magisterial collection of short works by Nobel Prize-winning author William Faulkner reminds readers of his ability to compress his epic vision into narratives as hard and wounding as bullets. Among the 42 selections in this book are such classics as “A Bear Hunt, ” “A Rose for Emily,” “Two Soldiers,” and “The Brooch.”

Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell nee Stevenson (1810–1865), often referred to simply as Mrs. Gaskell, was an English novelist and short story writer during the Victorian era. She is perhaps best known for her biography of Charlotte Brontë. Her novels offer a detailed portrait of the lives of many strata of society, including the very poor, and as such are of interest to social historians as well as lovers of literature. She married William Gaskell, the minister at Cross Street Unitarian Chapel in Manchester. They settled in Manchester, where the industrial surroundings would offer inspiration for her novels. Her first novel, Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life, was published anonymously in 1848. The best known of her remaining novels are Cranford (1853), North and South (1855), and Wives and Daughters (1866). She became popular for her writing, especially her ghost story writing, aided by her friend Charles Dickens, who published her work in his magazine Household Words. Her other works include: The Grey Woman (1865), Lois the Witch (1861) and The Old Nurse's Story (1852).

1072 – England is firmly under the heel of its new Norman rulers.

The few survivors of the English resistance look to Edgar the Atheling, the rightful heir to the English throne, to overthrow William the Conqueror. Years of intrigue and vicious civil war follow: brother against brother, family against family, friend against friend.

In the face of chaos and death, Edgar and his allies form a secret brotherhood, pledging to fight for justice and freedom wherever they are denied. But soon they are called to fight for an even greater cause: the plight of the Holy Land. Embarking on the epic First Crusade to recapture Jerusalem, together they will participate in some of the cruellest battles the world has ever known, the savage Siege of Antioch and the brutal Fall of Jerusalem, and together they will fight to the death.

1066 – Senlac Ridge, England. William the Bastard, Duke of Normandy, defeats Harold Godwinson, King Harold II of England, in what will become known as the Battle of Hastings.

The battle is hard fought and bloody, the lives of thousands have been spent, including that of King Harold. But England will not be conquered easily, the Anglo-Saxons will not submit meekly to Norman rule.

Although his heroic deeds will nearly be lost to legend, one man unites the resistance. His name is Hereward of Bourne, the champion of the English. His honour, bravery and skill at arms will change the future of England. His is the legacy of the noble outlaw.

This is his story.

Written with the riveting storytelling of authors like Emma Donoghue, Adam Johnson, Ann Patchett, and Curtis Sittenfeld, Cartwheel is a suspenseful and haunting novel of an American foreign exchange student arrested for murder, and a father trying to hold his family together.

When Lily Hayes arrives in Buenos Aires for her semester abroad, she is enchanted by everything she encounters: the colorful buildings, the street food, the handsome, elusive man next door. Her studious roommate Katy is a bit of a bore, but Lily didn’t come to Argentina to hang out with other Americans.

Five weeks later, Katy is found brutally murdered in their shared home, and Lily is the prime suspect. But who is Lily Hayes? It depends on who’s asking. As the case takes shape—revealing deceptions, secrets, and suspicious DNA—Lily appears alternately sinister and guileless through the eyes of those around her: the media, her family, the man who loves her and the man who seeks her conviction. With mordant wit and keen emotional insight, Cartwheel offers a prismatic investigation of the ways we decide what to see—and to believe—in one another and ourselves.

In Cartwheel, duBois delivers a novel of propulsive psychological suspense and rare moral nuance. No two readers will agree who Lily is and what happened to her roommate. Cartwheel will keep you guessing until the final page, and its questions about how well we really know ourselves will linger well beyond.

A USA Today Pick for Biggest Books of the Fall • A Pick for The Millions’ Most Anticipated Books of 2013

“A tabloid tragedy elevated to high art.”

—Entertainment Weekly

“[A] compelling, carefully crafted, and, most importantly, satisfying novel.”

—Bustle

From Booklist

Starred Review

Lily Hayes, 21, is a study-abroad student in Buenos Aires. Her life seems fairly unexceptional until her roommate, Katy, is brutally murdered, and Lily, charged with the crime, is remanded to prison pending her trial. But is she guilty, and who is Lily, really? To find answers to these questions, the novel is told from multiple points of view—not only that of Lily but also that of her family; of sardonic Sebastien, the boy with whom she has been having an affair; and of the prosecutor in the case. In the process, it raises even more questions. What possible motive could Lily have had? Why, left momentarily alone after her first interrogation, did she turn a cartwheel? And has she, as her sister asserts, always been weird? In her skillful examination of these matters, the author does an excellent job of creating and maintaining a pervasive feeling of foreboding and suspense.

Sometimes bleak, duBois’ ambitious second novel is an acute psychological study of character that rises to the level of the philosophical, specifically the existential. In this it may not be for every reader, but fans of character-driven literary fiction will welcome its challenges. Though inspired by the Amanda Knox case, Cartwheel is very much its own individual work of the author’s creative imagination.

—Michael Cart

THE ZONE 8 • CIVILIAN SLAUGHTER

The Special Combat force is hardened to horror but during a truce they find a KGB battalion has exceeded anything they’ve seen. In a fury, despite the truce, despite threats from their own commanders, they decide to extract a revenge. They set out to wipe them out the KGB battalion to the last man.

SYNOPSIS

The men of the Special Combat Force have become hardened to atrocities performed by the Warsaw Pact armies. Or they thought they had. During a shaky truce, when those highly trained and experienced fighters are given mundane jobs, they discover mass graves and evidence of the grossest atrocities being performed on civilians. The evidence is that the horrors are perpetrated by a KGB battalion opposite their position. Driven to fury by what they have witnessed the Special Combat Force decide to take matters into their own hands when their reports are ignored and they are even threatened with disbandment if they don’t drop the accusations. Extracting revenge and putting a stop to further violations makes them enemies on both sides but nothing stops them, and they won’t stop until the job is done.

PUBLISHED

First NEL Paperback Edition April 1989

First IMPRINT Publication E-Book Edition May 2005

First Revision IMPRINT Publications E-Book Edition April 2007

* * *

A shaky truce has been called, and Major Revell’s Special Combat Company has been assigned mundane duties. But when evidence turns up of civilians being slaughtered by a KGB battalion, Revell and his men take matters into their own hands, waging merciless war on the vicious Reds.

Who do you trust, who do you love, and who can be saved?

It is 1943—the height of the Second World War—and Berlin has essentially become a city of women.

Sigrid Schröder is, for all intents and purposes, the model German soldier’s wife: She goes to work every day, does as much with her rations as she can, and dutifully cares for her meddling mother-in-law, all the while ignoring the horrific immoralities of the regime. But behind this façade is an entirely different Sigrid, a woman who dreams of her former lover, now lost in the chaos of the war. Her lover is a Jew.

But Sigrid is not the only one with secrets.

A high ranking SS officer and his family move down the hall and Sigrid finds herself pulled into their orbit.  A young woman doing her duty-year is out of excuses before Sigrid can even ask her any questions. And then there’s the blind man selling pencils on the corner, whose eyes Sigrid can feel following her from behind the darkness of his goggles.

Soon Sigrid is embroiled in a world she knew nothing about, and as her eyes open to the reality around her, the carefully constructed fortress of solitude she has built over the years begins to collapse. She must choose to act on what is right and what is wrong, and what falls somewhere in the shadows between the two.

In this page-turning novel, David Gillham explores what happens to ordinary people thrust into extraordinary times, and how the choices they make can be the difference between life and death.

Amazon.com Review

Amazon Best Books of the Month, August 2012: While the world hardly lacks for novels about WWII, David R. Gillham’s City of Women is extraordinary for what it does not do. It does not detail the events or imagined conversations of Hitler’s Reich, and it has not a single scene of life in the death camps. Instead, it chronicles—in detail so specific that it’s mesmerizing, but not so obviously researched as to be annoying—life for “ordinary” Berliners at a time that was anything but. Through Heroine Sigrid Schroder, a German wife drawn into an affair with a Jew, Gillham shows us a world in which not all Germans are bad, not all Jews are victims, and loyalty is a fiction, the grimmest of fairy tales.

—Sara Nelson

While the tumultuous 1970s rock the world around them, a collection of aging expatriates linger in a quiet town on the island of Crete, where they have escaped their pasts and their present. Among them is Horace, a gay American writer who fears he has finally reached old age. Friends only frustrate him, and his youthful Greek lover provides little satisfaction. Idling his time away with alcohol and working on a novel that he will never finish, Horace feels closer than ever to his own sorry end.

That is, until a young, enigmatic American woman named Helen joins his crowd of outsiders. In Helen, Horace discovers someone brilliant, beautiful, and stubbornly mysterious — in short, she becomes his absolute obsession.

But as Horace knows, people have a way of preserving their secrets even as they try to forget them. Soon, Helen’s past begins to follow her to Crete. A suicidal ex-lover appears without warning; whispers of her long-dead sister surface in local gossip; and signs of ancient Gypsy rituals come to the fore. Helen vanishes. Deep down, Horace knows that he must find her before he can find any peace within himself.

Meet John Cromer, one of the most unusual heroes in modern fiction. If the minority is always right then John is practically infallible. Growing up disabled and gay in the 1950s, circumstances force John from an early age to develop an intense and vivid internal world. As his character develops, this ability to transcend external circumstance through his own strength of character proves invaluable. Extremely funny and incredibly poignant, this is a major new novel from a writer at the height of his powers.'I'm not sure I can claim to have taken my place in the human alphabet…I'm more like an optional accent or specialised piece of punctuation, hard to track down on the typewriter or computer keyboard…'

In literary America, to utter the name “Gordon Lish” in a conversation is like adding hot sauce to a meal. You either enjoy the zesty experience, one that pushes your limits — or you prefer to stay away. It’s Lish who, first as fiction editor at Esquire magazine (where he earned the nickname “Captain Fiction”) and then at the publisher Alfred A. Knopf, shaped the work of many of the country’s foremost writers, from Raymond Carver and Barry Hannah to Amy Hempel and Lily Tuck.

As a writer himself, Lish’s stripped-down, brutally spare style earns accolades in increasing numbers. His oeuvre is coming to be recognized as among the most significant of the period that spans the transition between the 20th and 21st centuries. Kirkus Reviews wrote of his last collection that “Lish…is still our Joyce, our Beckett, our most true modernist.”

This definitive collection of Lish’s short work includes a new foreword by the author and 106 stories, many of which Lish has revised exclusively for this edition. His observations are in turn achingly sad and wryly funny as they spark recognition of our common, clumsy humanity. There are no heroes here, except, perhaps, for all of us, as we muddle our way through life: they are stories of unfaithful husbands, inadequate fathers, restless children and writing teachers, men lost in their middle age: more often than not first-person tales narrated by one “Gordon Lish.” The take on life is bemused, satirical, and relentlessly accurate; the language unadorned: the result is a model of modernist prose and a volume of enduring literary craftsmanship.

Funny, sad, bleak, weird, toxic — the future of America as the Free Market runs rampant,the environment skids into disarray, and civilization dissolves into surreal chaos. These wacky, brilliant, hilarious and entirely original stories cue us in on George Saunder's skewed vision of the legacy we are creating. Against the backdrop of our devolvement, our own worst tendencies and greatest virtues are weirdly illuminated.

A penetrating study of ordinary people resisting the Nazi occupation — and, true to its title, a dark comedy of wartime manners—"Comedy in a Minor Key "tells the story of Wim and Marie, a Dutch couple who first hide a Jew they know as Nico, then must dispose of his body when he dies of pneumonia. This novella, first published in 1947 and now translated into English for the first time, shows Hans Keilson at his best: deeply ironic, penetrating, sympathetic, and brilliantly modern, an heir to Joseph Roth and Franz Kafka. In 2008, when Keilson received Germany’s prestigious Welt Literature Prize, the citation praised his work for exploring “the destructive impulse at work in the twentieth century, down to its deepest psychological and spiritual ramifications.”

Published to celebrate Keilson’s hundredth birthday, "Comedy in" "a Minor Key" — and "The Death of the Adversary," reissued in paperback — will introduce American readers to a forgotten classic author, a witness to World War II and a sophisticated storyteller whose books remain as fresh as when they first came to light.

Remy is a young girl who lives in a town that believes in crystal count: that you are born with one-hundred crystals inside and throughout your life, through accidents and illness, your count is depleted until you reach zero.

As a city encroaches daily on the village, threatening their antiquated life, and the earth grows warmer, Remy sets out to accomplish something no one else has: to increase her sick mother’s crystal count.

An allegory, fable, touching family saga and poetic sci-fi adventure, Shane Jones underlines his reputation as an inspired and unique visionary.

Drawing comparisons with Shadow of the Wind, The Name of the Rose and The Reader, and an instant bestseller in more than 20 languages, Confessions is an astonishing story of one man s life, interwoven with a narrative that stretches across centuries to create an addictive and unforgettable literary symphony. I confess. At 60 and with a diagnosis of early Alzheimer s, Adrià Ardèvol re-examines his life before his memory is systematically deleted. He recalls a loveless childhood where the family antique business and his father s study become the centre of his world; where a treasured Storioni violin retains the shadows of a crime committed many years earlier. His mother, a cold, distant and pragmatic woman leaves him to his solitary games, full of unwanted questions. An accident ends the life of his enigmatic father, filling Adrià s world with guilt, secrets and deeply troubling mysteries that take him years to uncover and driving him deep into the past where atrocities are methodically exposed and examined. Gliding effortlessly between centuries, and at the same time providing a powerful narrative that is at once shocking, compelling, mysterious, tragic, humorous and gloriously readable, Confessions reaches a crescendo that is not only unexpected but provides one of the most startling denouements in contemporary literature. Confessions is a consummate masterpiece in any language, with an ending that will not just leave you thinking, but quite possibly change the way you think forever.

The Iraq War, two divers, a California family, and within that family an intimacy that open the larger stories more deeply still. Cannonball continues in McElroy's tradition of intricately woven story lines and extreme care regarding the placement of each and every word. A novel where the sentences matter as much as the overall story.

It’s been more than two decades since Spartina won the National Book Award and was acclaimed by critics as being “possibly the best American novel. . since The Old Man and the Sea” (The New York Times Book Review), but in this extraordinary follow-up novel barely any time has passed in the magical landscape of salt ponds and marshes in John Casey’s fictional Rhode Island estuary.

Elsie Buttrick, prodigal daughter of the smart set who are gradually taking over the coastline of Sawtooth Point, has just given birth to Rose, a child conceived during a passionate affair with Dick Pierce — a fisherman and the love of Elsie’s life, who also happens to live practically next door with his wife, May, and their children. A beautiful but guarded woman who feels more at ease wading through the marshes than lounging on the porches of the fashionable resort her sister and brother-in-law own, Elsie was never one to do as she was told. She is wary of the discomfort her presence poses among some members of her gossipy, insular community, yet it is Rose, the unofficially adopted daughter and little sister of half the town, who magnetically steers everyone in her orbit toward unexpected — and unbreakable — relationships. As we see Rose grow from a child to a plucky adolescent with a flair for theatrics both onstage and at home during verbal boxing matches with her mother, to a poised and prepossessing teenager, she becomes the unwitting emotional tether between Elsie and everyone else. “Face it, Mom,” Rose says, “we live in a tiny ecosystem.” And indeed, like the rugged, untouched marshes that surround these characters, theirs is an ecosystem that has come by its beauty honestly, through rhythms and moods that have shaped and reshaped their lives.

With an uncanny ability to plunge confidently and unwaveringly into the thoughts and desires of women — mothers, daughters, wives, lovers — John Casey astonishes us again with the power of a family saga.

Castle by J. Robert Lennon is a mesmerizing novel about memory, guilt, power, and violence.

In the late winter of 2006, I returned to my home town and bought 612 acres of land on the far western edge of the county.” So begins, innocuously enough, J. Robert Lennon’s gripping, spooky, and brilliant new novel. Unforthcoming, formal, and more than a little defensive in his encounters with curious locals, Eric Loesch starts renovating a run-down house in the small, upstate New York town of his childhood. When he inspects the title to the property, however, he discovers a chunk of land in the middle of his woods that he does not own. What’s more, the name of the owner is blacked out.

Loesch sets out to explore the forbidding and almost impenetrable forest — lifeless, it seems, but for a bewitching white deer — that is the site of an eighteenth-century Indian massacre. But this peculiar adventure story has much to do with America’s current military misadventures — and Loesch’s secrets come to mirror the American psyche in a paranoid age. The answer to what — and who — might lie at the heart of Loesch’s property stands at the center of this daring and riveting novel from the author whose writing, according to Ann Patchett, “contains enough electricity to light up the country.””

An American millionaire builds a Christian seminary in India, furthering his spiritual mission — and setting into motion a generations-spanning cycle of miscommunication and fracture within his family.

Beginning in the 1890s, Come, My Beloved describes an American family’s involvement with India over four generations. Touched by the poverty he encounters in Bombay, self-made millionaire David MacArd establishes a seminary for Christian missionary workers, and in so doing shapes the fates of his son and grandson. The choices made by each generation parallel one another, distinctly marked by the passage of time — though the patriarch remains in New York, the second David becomes a missionary in India himself, while his own son, Ted, goes even further, opting to live in a remote village — and these choices come with unforeseen sacrifices. Nor does their religious journey necessarily mean any growing harmony with their surroundings — something that is powerfully brought home when Ted refuses to let his daughter marry across racial lines. Featuring an unforgettable rendering of India during Gandhi’s rise to power, Come, My Beloved is a family saga of rare power and sensitivity.

Renowned as a novelist of unsurpassed invention, Carlos Fuentes here presents his second collection of stories to appear in English. Where his first, Burnt Water, published in 1980, had as its underlying theme Mexico City itself, Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins extends its imaginative boundaries out to Savannah, to Cadiz, to Glasgow, to Seville and Madrid, both past and present. This new collection is more mysterious, more magical, too, than its predecessor, and in its five related stories Fuentes comes closer to the registers of language and feeling that he explored so memorably in Aura. It reveals Fuentes at the height of his powers-bold, erudite, enthralling.

In the title story, a man discovers his wife's secret complicity with the Russian actor who is their neighbor-a complicity that includes not just a previous life but possibly a previous death as well. He finds himself "a mediator. . a point between one sorrow and the next, between one hope and the next, between two languages, two memories, two ages, and two deaths." In "La Desdichada," two students steal-and fall in love with-a store-window mannequin. In "The Prisoner of Las Lomas," a wealthy lawyer in possession of a powerful secret is held hostage by the past he has attempted to subvert and keep at bay. The celebrated bullfighter whose fame is the theme of "Viva Mi Fama" steps from the present into a past immortalized by Goya's portrait of the matador Pedro Romero; and the architects who are the "Reasonable People" of that story find themselves drawn into the irrational mysteries not only of religious fervor but of their famous mentor's identity-they discover "there are no empty houses," only a present fraught with the past.

Though each of these novella-length stories offers compelling evidence of Fuentes's talent for narrative free rein as well as for containment and closure, they are also brilliantly interwoven. Readers of his earlier work, especially of his acclaimed ribald epic, Christopher Unborn, will recognize with pleasure Fuentes's undiminished mastery of recurrent images and themes, and all readers will delight in the witty and evocative changes he rings on them. For those few readers who do not yet know the work of Mexico's foremost man of letters, these stories offer them the full gift of his imaginative resourcefulness.

Two men — Jay and Ben — sit in a Washington hotel room. Jay has called his old friend Ben there — to tell him why and how he wants to kill the President. Jay is a bit of a loser (he's lost his girlfriend, his job, and his car), generally easy-going, but now he's on edge and he's angry — and he's acquired some radio-controlled flying saws, and is working on a boulder with a depleted uranium centre — but he also has a gun and bullets. Ben is the voice of liberal reason, with a job and a family. Jay switches on a tape machine, and the two men argue. Well, Ben tries feebly to reason or cajole, while Jay rants and rages about everything from the horror of what happened at that southern Iraq checkpoint where US forces opened fire on a Shiite family in a Land Rover, killing most of them, and decapitating two young girls; to the iniquities of the present administration, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld et al., and abortion (if they're against abortion, how come they can kill women and children?), not to mention the napalm-like substance ('improved fire jelly') used in bombs in Iraq. Their dialogue veers from chilling and serious to wacky and crazed (Bush, says Jay, is 'one dead armadillo'). "Checkpoint" is a novel about a man pushed to the extremes, by a writer who is clearly angry. Like Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11", it takes the temperature of America just below the surface and finds it at boiling point.

At the very edge of its many interlocking worlds, the city of Bombay conceals a near invisible community of Parsi corpse bearers, whose job it is to carry bodies of the deceased to the Towers of Silence. Segregated and shunned from society, often wretchedly poor, theirs is a lot that nobody would willingly espouse. Yet thats exactly what Phiroze Elchidana, son of a revered Parsi priest, does when he falls in love with Sepideh, the daughter of an aging corpse bearer…

Derived from a true story, Cyrus Mistry's extraordinary new novel is a moving account of tragic love that, at the same time, brings to vivid and unforgettable life the degradation experienced by those who inhabit the unforgiving margins of history.

The hero of Zakes Mda's beloved Ways of Dying, Toloki, sets down with a family in Middle America and uncovers the story of the runaway slaves who were their ancestors.

Toloki, the professional mourner, has come to live in America. Lured to Athens, Ohio, by an academic at the local university, Toloki makes friends with an angry young man he meets at a Halloween parade and soon falls in love with the young man's sister. Toloki endears himself to a local quilting group and his quilting provides a portal to the past, a story of two escaped slaves seeking freedom in Ohio.

Making their way north from Virginia with nothing but their mother's quilts for a map, the boys hope to find a promised land where blacks can live as free men. Their story alternates with Toloki's, as the two narratives cast a new light on America in the twenty-first century and on an undiscovered legacy of the Underground Railroad.

When New Yorker Rachel Chu agrees to spend the summer in Singapore with her boyfriend, Nicholas Young, she envisions a humble family home and quality time with the man she hopes to marry. But Nick has failed to give his girlfriend a few key details. One, that his childhood home looks like a palace; two, that he grew up riding in more private planes than cars; and three, that he just happens to be the country’s most eligible bachelor.

On Nick’s arm, Rachel may as well have a target on her back the second she steps off the plane, and soon, her relaxed vacation turns into an obstacle course of old money, new money, nosy relatives, and scheming social climbers.

Paris in the 1920s — dizzy and decadent. Where a young man can make a fortune with his wits … unless he is led into temptation. Cocaine’s dandified hero Tito Arnaudi invents lurid scandals and gruesome deaths, and sells these stories to the newspapers. But his own life becomes even more outrageous than his press reports when he acquires three demanding mistresses. Elegant, witty and wicked, Pitigrilli’s classic novel was first published in Italian in 1921 and charts the comedy and tragedy of a young man’s downfall and the lure of a bygone era. The novel’s descriptions of sex and drug use prompted church authorities to place it on a list of forbidden books, while appealing to filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder who wrote a script based on the tale. Cocaine retains its venom even today.

Caryl Phillips' ambitious and powerful novel spans two hundred and fifty years of the African diaspora. It tracks two brothers and a sister on their separate journeys through different epochs and continents: one as a missionary to Liberia in the 1830s, one a pioneer on a wagon trail to the American West later that century, and one a GI posted to a Yorkshire village in the Second World War.

Cambridge is a powerful and haunting novel set in that uneasy time between the abolition of the slave trade and the emancipation of the slaves. It is the story of Emily Cartwright, a young woman sent from England to visit her father's West Indian plantation, and Cambridge, a plantation slave, educated and Christianised by his first master in England and now struggling to maintain his dignity.

When Silvio, a rich Italian dilettante, and his beautiful wife agree to move to the country and forgo sex so that he will have the energy to write a successful novel, something is bound to go wrong: Silvio's literary ambitions are far too big for his second-rate talent, and his wife Leda is a passionate woman. Antonio, the local barber who comes every morning to shave Silvio, sparks off this dangerously combustible situation when Leda accuses him of trying to molest her. Silvio obstinately refuses to dismiss him, and the quarrel and its shattering consequences put the couple's love to the test.

Alberto Moravia earned his international reputation with frank, finely-observed stories of love and sex at all levels of society. In this new English translation of Conjugal Love, he explores an imperiled relationship with his customary unadorned style, psychological penetration, and narrative art.

Cockroach is as urgent, unsettling, and brilliant as Rawi Hage's bestselling and critically acclaimed first book, De Niro's Game.

The novel takes place during one month of a bitterly cold winter in Montreal's restless immigrant community, where a self-described thief has just tried but failed to commit suicide. Rescued against his will, the narrator is obliged to attend sessions with a well-intentioned but naive therapist. This sets the story in motion, leading us back to the narrator's violent childhood in a war-torn country, forward into his current life in the smoky emigre cafes where everyone has a tale, and out into the frozen night-time streets of Montreal, where the thief survives on the edge, imagining himself to be a cockroach invading the lives of the privileged, but wilfully blind, citizens who surround him.

In 2008, Cockroach was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Governor General's Literary Award, and the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. It won the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction, presented by the Quebec Writers' Federation.

Shortlisted for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and the Quebec Writers' Federation Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction.

In the Carnival city there are two types of taxi drivers — the spiders and the flies. The spiders patiently sit in their cars and wait for the calls to come. But the flies are wanderers — they roam the streets, looking for the raised hands of passengers among life's perpetual flux.

Fly is a wanderer and a knower. Raised in the circus, the son of a golden-haired trapeze artist and a flying carpet pilot from the East, he is destined to drift and observe. From his taxi we see the world in all its carnivalesque beauty and ugliness. We meet criminals, prostitutes, madmen, magicians, and clowns of many kinds. We meet ordinary people going to extraordinary places, and revolutionaries trying to live ordinary lives. Hunger and injustice claw at the city, and books provide the only true shelter. And when the Carnival starts, all limits dissolve, and a gunshot goes off. .

With all of the beauty, truth, rage, and peripatetic storytelling that have made Cockroach and De Niro's Game international publishing sensations, Carnival gives us Rawi Hage at his searing best. Alternately laughing at absurdity and crying out at oppression, by turns outrageous, hilarious, sorrowful, and stirring, Carnival is a tour de force that will make all of life's passengers squirm in their comfortable, complacent backseats.

"There is a strangeness about Christabel Alderton. Elias Newman can see it right away, as well he might.

"When Christabel was 13 she was walking by the River Lea and some people in a cabin cruiser waved to her. The scene before her seemed to freeze like a photograph and she felt weird. A little later the boat blew up and killed everyone on board. Since then she's been troubled by a sort of second sight that works sometimes, but not always. Now, years later, she sings with a band called Mobile Mortuary who make their onstage entrance climbing out of body drawers. Death is much on her mind because the men in her life tend to die before their time and she's come to think she's bad luck. Elias Newman is a diabetologist who meets Christabel at a Royal Academy of Arts exhibition. Fascinated, he's keen to know her better. She's attracted to him but afraid of what might happen if she lets herself fall in love. Christabel and Elias are complicated people. Via Symbolist paintings and German ballads the narrative flows from the River Lea via a haunted woodland bog out to the crash of the Pacific surf on Kahakuloa Head in the Hawaiian Islands. And only in a Hoban novel could such an intensely involving love story embrace the redemptive power of ketchup bottles.

From one of our most deeply admired storytellers, author of the richly acclaimed Gallatin Canyon, his first collection in nine years.

Set in McGuane's accustomed Big Sky country, with its mesmeric powers, these stories attest to the generous compass of his fellow feeling, as well as to his unique way with words and the comic genius that has inspired comparison with Mark Twain and Ring Lardner. The ties of family make for uncomfortable binds: A devoted son is horrified to discover his mother's antics before she slipped into dementia. A father's outdoor skills are no match for an ominous change in the weather. But complications arise equally in the absence of blood, as when life-long friends on a fishing trip finally confront their dislike for each other. Or when a gifted cattle inseminator succumbs to the lure of a stranger's offer of easy money. McGuane is as witty and large-hearted as we have ever known him — a jubilant, thunderous confirmation of his status as modern master.

A searing, indelible love story of two ravaged spirits-a screenwriter and an actress- played out under the merciless, magnifying prism of Hollywood.

Tayo, a young Native American, has been a prisoner of the Japanese during World War II, and the horrors of captivity have almost eroded his will to survive. His return to the Laguna Pueblo reservation only increases his feeling of estrangement and alienation. While other returning soldiers find easy refuge in alcohol and senseless violence, Tayo searches for another kind of comfort and resolution.

Tayo's quest leads him back to the Indian past and its traditions, to beliefs about witchcraft and evil, and to the ancient stories of his people. The search itself becomes a ritual, a curative ceremony that defeats the most virulent of afflictions — despair.

"McClanahan's prose is miasmic, dizzying, repetitive. A rushing river of words that reflects the chaos and humanity of the place from which he hails. [McClanahan] aims to lasso the moon… He is not a writer of half-measures. The man has purpose. This is his symphony, every note designed to resonate, to linger."

— New York Times Book Review

"Crapalachia is the genuine article: intelligent, atmospheric, raucously funny and utterly wrenching. McClanahan joins Daniel Woodrell and Tom Franklin as a master chronicler of backwoods rural America."

— The Washington Post

"The book that took Scott McClanahan from indie cult writer to critical darling is a series of tales that read like an Appalachian Proust all doped up on sugary soft drinks, and has made a fan of everybody who has opened it up."

— Flavorwire

"McClanahan’s deep loyalty to his place and his people gives his story wings: 'So now I put the dirt from my home in my pockets and I travel. I am making the world my mountain.' And so he is."

— Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"[Crapalachia is] a wild and inventive book, unquestionably fresh of spirit, and totally unafraid to break formalisms to tell it like it was."

— Vice

"Part memoir, part hillbilly history, part dream, McClanahan embraces humanity with all its grit, writing tenderly of criminals and outcasts, family and the blood ties that bind us."

— Interview Magazine

"A brilliant, unnerving, beautiful curse of a book that will both haunt and charmingly engage readers for years and years and years."

— The Nervous Breakdown

"McClanahan's style is as seductive as a circuit preacher's. Crapalachia is both an homage and a eulogy for a place where, through the sorcery of McClanahan's storytelling, we can all pull up a chair and find ourselves at home."

— San Diego City Beat

"Epic. McClanahan’s prose is straightforward, casual, and enjoyable to read, reminiscent at times of Kurt Vonnegut. Crapalachia is one of the rare books that, after you reach the end, you don’t get up to check your e-mail or Facebook or watch TV. You just sit quietly and think about the people of the book and how they remind you of people you used to know. You feel lucky to have known them, and you feel grateful to McClanahan for the reminder."

— Rain Taxi Review of Books

When Scott McClanahan was fourteen he went to live with his Grandma Ruby and his Uncle Nathan, who suffered from cerebral palsy. Crapalachia is a portrait of these formative years, coming-of-age in rural West Virginia.

Peopled by colorful characters and their quirky stories, Crapalachia interweaves oral folklore and area history, providing an ambitious and powerful snapshot of overlooked Americana.

Scott McClanahan is the author of Stories II and Stories V! His fiction has appeared in BOMB, Vice, and New York Tyrant. His novel Hill William is forthcoming from Tyrant Books.

The award-winning author Amit Chaudhuri has been widely praised for the beauty and subtle power of his writing and for the ways in which he makes “place” as complex a character as his men and women. Now he brings these gifts to a spellbinding amalgam of memoir, reportage, and history in this intimate, luminous portrait of Calcutta.

Chaudhuri guides us through the city where he was born, the home he loved as a child, the setting of his acclaimed novels — a place he now finds captivating for all the ways it has, and, perhaps more powerfully, has not, changed. He shows us a city relatively untouched by the currents of globalization but possessed of a “self-renewing way of seeing, of inhabiting space, of apprehending life.” He takes us along vibrant avenues and derelict alleyways; introduces us to intellectuals, Marxists, members of the declining haute bourgeoisie, street vendors, domestic workers; brings to life the city’s sounds and smells, its architecture, its traditional shops and restaurants, new malls and hotels. And, using the historic elections of 2011 as a fulcrum, Chaudhuri looks back to the nineteenth century, when the city burst with a new vitality, and toward the politics of the present, finding a city “still not recovered from history” yet possessed of a singular modernity.

Chaudhuri observes and writes about Calcutta with rare candor and clarity, making graspable the complex, ultimately ineluctable reasons for his passionate attachment to the place and its people.

Hailed as a classic, Tim Winton's masterful family saga is both a paean to working-class Australians and an unflinching examination of the human heart's capacity for sorrow, joy, and endless gradations in between. An award-winning work, Cloudstreet exemplifies the brilliant ability of fiction to captivate and inspire.

Struggling to rebuild their lives after being touched by disaster, the Pickle family, who've inherited a big house called Cloudstreet in a suburb of Perth, take in the God-fearing Lambs as tenants. The Lambs have suffered their own catastrophes, and determined to survive, they open up a grocery on the ground floor. From 1944 to 1964, the shared experiences of the two overpopulated clans — running the gamut from drunkenness, adultery, and death to resurrection, marriage, and birth — bond them to each other and to the bustling, haunted house in ways no one could have anticipated.

This inspired novel is narrated by the as yet unborn first child to be born on October 12, 1992, the five hundredth anniversary of Columbus's discovery of America; his conception and birth bracket the novel. A playfully savage masterpiece.

On September 5, 2003, illusionist David Blaine entered a small Perspex box adjacent to London's Thames River and began starving himself. Forty-four days later, on October 19, he left the box, fifty pounds lighter. That much, at least, is clear. And the rest? The crowds? The chaos? The hype? The rage? The fights? The lust? The filth? The bullshit? The hypocrisy?

Nicola Barker fearlessly crams all that and more into this ribald and outrageous peep show of a novel, her most irreverent, caustic, up-to-the-minute work yet, laying bare the heart of our contemporary world, a world of illusion, delusion, celebrity, and hunger.

On a small island in a glacier-fed lake on Alaska's Kenai Peninsula, a marriage is unraveling. Gary, driven by thirty years of diverted plans, and Irene, haunted by a tragedy in her past, are trying to rebuild their life together. Following the outline of Gary's old dream, they're hauling logs to Caribou Island in good weather and in terrible storms, in sickness and in health, to build the kind of cabin that drew them to Alaska in the first place.

But this island is not right for Irene. They are building without plans or advice, and when winter comes early, the overwhelming isolation of the prehistoric wilderness threatens their bond to the core. Caught in the emotional maelstrom is their adult daughter, Rhoda, who is wrestling with the hopes and disappointments of her own life. Devoted to her parents, she watches helplessly as they drift further apart.

Brilliantly drawn and fiercely honest, Caribou Island captures the drama and pathos of a husband and wife whose bitter love, failed dreams, and tragic past push them to the edge of destruction. A portrait of desolation, violence, and the darkness of the soul, it is an explosive and unforgettable novel from a writer of limitless possibility.

McGahern's command of the short story places him among the finest practitioners of the form, in a lineage that runs from Chekhov through Joyce and the Anglo-American masters. When the collection was first published in 1992, the Sunday Times said 'there is a vivid pleasure to be had in the reading of these stories, ' while for Cressida Connolly in the Evening Standard 'these wonderful stories are sad and true… McGahern is undoubtedly a great short story writer.' Many of the stories here are already classics: Gold Watch, High Ground and Parachutes, among others. McGahern's spare, restrained yet powerfully lyrical language draws meaning from the most ordinary situations, and turns apparently undramatic encounters into profoundly haunting events: a man visits his embittered father with his new wife; an ageing priest remembers a funeral he had attended years before; a boy steals comics from a shop to escape the rain-bound melancholy of a seaside holiday; an ageing teacher, who has escaped a religious order, wastes his life in a rural backwater that he knows he will never leave.

Jim Crace's acclaimed debut novel explores an imaginary seventh continent, subtly different from any in the world we know. Its landscapes, wildlife, customs and communities are alien, even frightening — but the continent's inhabitants are nonetheless disarmingly familiar, known to us through their loves, their hopes, and their struggles to make sense of life.

On its first publication over twenty years ago, this captivating novel marked the arrival of one of the most imaginative minds at work: a writer capable of transporting his readers to a strange and wonderful landscape while revealing the humanity within the mirage.

'"Continent" invites — and sustains — comparison with Borges' David Lodge

'A remarkable first novel' John Fowles

Three months after George Saunders gave a graduation address at Syracuse University, a transcript of that speech was posted on the website of The New York Times, where its simple, uplifting message struck a deep chord. Within days, it had been shared more than one million times. Why? Because Saunders’s words tap into a desire in all of us to lead kinder, more fulfilling lives. Powerful, funny, and wise, Congratulations, by the way is an inspiring message from one of today’s most influential and original writers.

The all-too-human individuals who live within this extraordinary first novel are: Regan and William Hamilton-Sweeney, estranged heirs to one of the city's biggest fortunes; Keith and Mercer, the men who, for better or worse, love them; Charlie and Sam, two Long Island teenagers seduced by downtown's nascent punk scene; an obsessive magazine reporter; his spunky, West Coast-transplant neighbor; and the detective trying to figure out what they all have to do with a shooting in Central Park. From post-Vietnam youth culture to the fiscal crisis, from a lushly appointed townhouse on Sutton Place to a derelict squat on East 3rd Street, this city on fire is at once recognizable and completely unexpected. And when the infamous blackout of July 13th, 1977 plunges it into darkness, each of these entangled lives will be changed, irrevocably.

Owen and Duncan are childhood friends who’ve grown up in picturesque Niagara Falls — known to them by the grittier name Cataract City. As the two know well, there’s more to the bordertown than meets the eye: behind the gaudy storefronts and sidewalk vendors, past the hawkers of tourist T-shirts and cheap souvenirs live the real people who scrape together a living by toiling at the Bisk, the local cookie factory. And then there are the truly desperate, those who find themselves drawn to the borderline and a world of dog-racing, bare-knuckle fighting, and night-time smuggling.

Owen and Duncan think they are different: both dream of escape, a longing made more urgent by a near-death incident in childhood that sealed their bond. But in adulthood their paths diverge, and as Duncan, the less privileged, falls deep into the town’s underworld, he and Owen become reluctant adversaries at opposite ends of the law. At stake is not only survival and escape, but a lifelong friendship that can only be broken at an unthinkable price.

About the Author

CRAIG DAVIDSON was born and grew up in the bordertown of St. Catharines, Ontario, near to Niagara Falls. He has published two previous books of literary fiction, Rust and Bone (Penguin Canada), which has been made into a major feature film of the same name, and The Fighter (Penguin Canada). He is a graduate of the famed Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and his journalism and articles have been published in The Globe and Mail, Esquire, GQ, The Paris Review, and the Washington Post, among other venues. He lives in Toronto, Canada, with his partner and child. The author lives in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Madeleine Thien's stunning debut novel hauntingly retells a crucial moment in history, through two unforgettable love stories. Gail Lim, a producer of radio documentaries, is haunted by the mystery of her father's Asian past. As a child, Gail's father, Matthew Lim, lived in a Malaysian village occupied by the Japanese. He and his beloved Ani wandered the jungle fringe under the terrifying shadow of war. The war shattered their families, splitting the two apart until a brief reunion years later. Matthew's profound connection to Ani and the life-changing secrets they shared cast a shadow that, later still, Matthew's wife, Clara, desperately sought to understand. Gail's journey to unravel the mystery of her parents' lives takes her to Amsterdam, where she unearths more about this mysterious other woman. But as Gail approaches the truth, Ani's story will bring Gail face-to-face, with the untold mysteries of her own life. Vivid, poignant, and written in understated yet powerful prose, CERTAINTY is a novel about the legacies of loss, the dislocations of war, and the timeless redemption afforded by love.

Thirty-eight-year-old Jeremy Pauling has never left home. He lives on the top floor of a Baltimore row house where he creates collages of little people snipped from wrapping paper. His elderly mother putters in the rooms below, until her death. And it is then that Jeremy is forced to take in Mary Tell and her child as boarders. Mary is unaware of how much courage it takes Jaremy to look her in the eye. For Jeremy, like one of his paper creations, is fragile and easily torn-especially when he's falling in love….

A dark, poetic mystery about the women of the remote village of Kulumani and the lionesses that hunt them.

Told through two haunting, interwoven diaries, Mia Couto’s Confession of the Lioness reveals the mysterious world of Kulumani, an isolated village in Mozambique whose traditions and beliefs are threatened when ghostlike lionesses begin hunting the women who live there.

Mariamar, a woman whose sister was killed in a lioness attack, finds her life thrown into chaos when the outsider Archangel Bullseye, the marksman hired to kill the lionesses, arrives at the request of the village elders. Mariamar’s father imprisons her in her home, where she relives painful memories of past abuse and hopes to be rescued by Archangel. Meanwhile, Archangel tracks the lionesses in the wilderness, but when he begins to suspect there is more to them than meets the eye, he starts to lose control of his hands. The hunt grows more dangerous, until it’s no safer inside Kulumani than outside it. As the men of Kulumani feel increasingly threatened by the outsider, the forces of modernity upon their traditional culture, and the danger of their animal predators closing in, it becomes clear the lionesses might not be real lionesses at all but spirits conjured by the ancient witchcraft of the women themselves.

Both a riveting mystery and a poignant examination of women’s oppression, Confession of the Lioness explores the confrontation between the modern world and ancient traditions to produce an atmospheric, gripping novel.

This collection of Raja Rao’s short fiction traverses the entire span of his literary career. These vibrant stories reveal his deep understanding of village life and his passion for India’s freedom struggle, and showcase his experimentation with form and style. They range from ones written by a struggling young writer to those of later years, displaying a mature, stylistic formalism.

Rubem Fonseca’s Crimes of August offers the first serious literary treatment of the cataclysmic events of August 1954, arguably the most turbulent month in Brazilian history.

A rich novel, both culturally and historically, Crimes of August tells two stories simultaneously. The first is private, involving the well-delineated character of Alberto Mattos, a police officer. The other is public, focusing on events that begin with the attempted assassination of Carlos Lacerda, a demagogic journalist and political enemy of President Getúlio Vargas, and culminate in Vargas’s suicide on August 24,1954. Throughout this suspenseful novel, deceptively couched as a thriller, Fonseca interweaves fact and fiction in a complex, provocative plot. At the same time, he re-creates the atmosphere of the 1950s, when Rio de Janeiro was Brazil’s capital and the nexus of political intrigue and corruption.

Mattos is assigned to solve the brutal murder of a wealthy entrepreneur in the aftermath of what appears to be a homosexual liaison. An educated and introspective man, and one of the few in his precinct not on the take from the “bankers” of the illegal lottery, Mattos suffers from alienation and a bleeding ulcer. His investigation puts him on a dangerous collision course with the conspiracy to depose Vargas, the novel’s other narrative thread. The two overlap at several points, coming to their tragic end with the aged politician’s suicide and Mattos’s downfall.

This is the story of a love-smitten Charles; his friend Sam, the Phi Beta Kappa and former coat salesman; and Charles' mother, who spends a lot of time in the bathtub feeling depressed.

A triumph of the imagination and a masterpiece of modern storytelling, Cloudsplitter is narrated by the enigmatic Owen Brown, last surviving son of America's most famous and still controversial political terrorist and martyr, John Brown. Deeply researched, brilliantly plotted, and peopled with a cast of unforgettable characters both historical and wholly invented, Cloudsplitter is dazzling in its re-creation of the political and social landscape of our history during the years before the Civil War, when slavery was tearing the country apart. But within this broader scope, Russell Banks has given us a riveting, suspenseful, heartbreaking narrative filled with intimate scenes of domestic life, of violence and action in battle, of romance and familial life and death that make the reader feel in astonishing ways what it is like to be alive in that time.

A powerful literary classic from one of contemporary fiction's most acclaimed and important writers, Russell Banks's Continental Drift is a masterful novel of hope lost and gained, and a gripping, indelible story of fragile lives uprooted and transformed by injustice, disappointment, and the seductions and realities of the American dream.

From the author of Inner Tube and Odditorium, a book of strikingly original, convention-defying short stories.

Cardinal Numbers is a posthumous collection of brilliantly enigmatic short fiction by Hob Broun, written with the aid of a respirator when the author was paralyzed from the neck down. Witty and full of minimalist surprise, these stories flirt with fragment, fabulism, and collage. In “Rosella, in Stages,” an old woman’s experience is movingly charted through the voice of her writing in six different life stages — and in six pages, no less. “Highspeed Linear Main Street,” a standout tale and an artistic credo of sorts, centers on a photographer’s fixation on highway life, while the surreal “Finding Florida” features a Che Guevara who becomes struck with longing for a librarian and receives some unwelcome news from a fortune teller.

Powerfully felt as well as mordantly funny, Cardinal Numbers is a freshly singular contribution to the American short story.

Conjuring slavery and witchcraft, and with bewitching powers all its own, Counternarratives continually spins history — and storytelling — on its head.

Ranging from the 17th century to the present and crossing multiple continents, Counternarrative’s novellas and stories draw upon memoirs, newspaper accounts, detective stories, interrogation transcripts, and speculative fiction to create new and strange perspectives on our past and present. In “Rivers,” a free Jim meets up decades later with his former raftmate Huckleberry Finn; “An Outtake” chronicles an escaped slave’s fate in the American Revolution; “On Brazil, or Dénouement” burrows deep into slavery and sorcery in early colonial South America; and in “Blues” the great poets Langston Hughes and Xavier Villaurrutia meet in Depression-era New York and share more than secrets.

From the highly acclaimed author of Edisto and The Interrogative Mood, Padgett Powell’s new collection of stories, Cries for Help, Various, follows his mentor Donald Barthelme’s advice that “wacky mode” must “break their hearts.” The surrealistic and comical terrain of most of the forty-four stories here is grounded by a real preoccupation with longing, fear, work, loneliness, and cultural nostalgia. These universal concerns are given exhilarating life by way of Powell’s “wit, his. . dazzling turns of phrase” (Scott Spencer). In “Joplin and Dickens,” the musician and writer meet as emotionally needy students in an American grade school; in “Change of Life,” a father ponders whether getting new clothes for the family or the patriotic purchase of a “new Government Cookie Flyer” would be more meaningful. In “The Imperative Mood,” giving orders to others—“Fall back and regroup”—leads less to power than to rumination.

Padgett Powell’s language is both lofty and low-down, his tone cranky and heartfelt, exuberant and inconsolable. His characters rebel against convention and ambition, hoping to maintain their very sanity by doing so. Even the most hilarious or fantastical stories in Cries for Help, Various ring gloriously, poignantly, true.

There shouldn’t be a Citrus County. Teenage romance should be difficult, but not this difficult. Boys like Toby should cause trouble but not this much. The moon should glow gently over children safe in their beds. Uncles in their rockers should be kind. Teachers should guide and inspire. Manatees should laze and palm trees sway and snakes keep to their shady spots under the azalea thickets. The air shouldn’t smell like a swamp. The stars should twinkle. Shelby should be her own hero, the first hero of Citrus County. She should rescue her sister from underground, rescue Toby from his life. Her destiny should be a hero’s destiny.

When a down-on-his-luck educational administrator arrives into the makeshift bus shelter of Cow Eye Junction, he finds a drought-stricken town and its community college on the precipice of institutional ruin. Struggling to navigate this strange world of bloated calf scrota, orgiastic math instruction, and onrushing regional accreditors, Charlie must devise a plan to lead Cow Eye Community College through the perils of continuous improvement to the triumphant culmination of world history. Idiosyncratic, wry, and ambitiously constructed, Cow Country is Adrian Jones Pearson’s most American work yet, deftly blending the lunacies of contemporary academia with the tragic consequences of New World nation-building. A must-read for anyone who has ever worked at an institution of higher education, or attempted to straddle partisan lines, this insightful novel offers a poetic requiem for the loss of our humanity — and our humanities.

John Egan is a misfit — "a twelve year old in the body of a grown man with the voice of a giant" — who diligently keeps a "log of lies." John's been able to detect lies for as long as he can remember, it's a source of power but also great consternation for a boy so young. With an obsession for the Guinness Book of Records, a keenly inquisitive mind, and a kind of faith, John remains hopeful despite the unfavorable cards life deals him.

This is one year in a boy's life. On the cusp of adolescence, from his changing voice and body, through to his parents’ difficult travails and the near collapse of his sanity, John is like a tuning fork sensitive to the vibrations within himself and the trouble that this creates for he and his family.

Carry Me Down is a restrained, emotionally taut, and sometimes outrageously funny portrait whose drama drives toward, but narrowly averts, an unthinkable disaster.

Lassé d’un monde dans lequel il ne trouve plus sa place, privé de ceux qu’il aime et qui disparaissent un à un, Andrew Blake décide de quitter la direction de sa petite entreprise pour se faire engager comme majordome en France, le pays où il avait rencontré sa femme.

En débarquant au domaine de Beauvillier, là où personne ne sait qui il est réellement, il espère marcher sur les traces de son passé. Pourtant, rencontres et situations hors de contrôle vont en décider autrement… Entre Nathalie, sa patronne veuve aux étranges emplois du temps, Odile, la cuisinière et ses problèmes explosifs, Manon, jeune femme de ménage perdue et Philippe, le régisseur bien frappé qui vit au fond du parc, Andrew ne va plus avoir le choix. Lui qui cherchait un moyen d’en finir va être obligé de tout recommencer…

Après une première comédie qui a surpris, touché et enthousiasmé lecteurs et libraires, Gilles Legardinier revient avec cette aventure humaine pleine de folie, d’émotion et d’humour qui parlera à beaucoup de monde, quel que soit l’âge… Né à Paris en 1965, Gilles Legardinier s'est toujours passionné pour la transmission de l'émotion. Dès l'âge de 15 ans, il travaille sur les plateaux de cinéma anglais et américains comme pyrotechnicien. Il s'oriente ensuite vers la production et réalise des films publicitaires ainsi que des bandes-annonces et quelques documentaires sur les coulisses de grands films. Il se consacre aujourd'hui à la communication écrite pour le cinéma et la réécriture de scénarii. Parallèlement, il a publié plusieurs romans dont des adaptations, mais aussi des livres pour la jeunesse tels que Le Sceau des Maîtres et Le Dernier Géant, récompensés à maintes reprises. L'Exil des Anges, son premier roman publié au Fleuve Noir en 2009, a reçu le prix SNCF du polar 2009. Il est aussi auteur de Nous étions les hommes et de Demain j'arrête !, sa première comédie.

« Il avait fait chaud cet été-là en Provence, une chaleur tyrannique, menaçante. Vers juillet, Pervenche est partie. Elle ne s'était même pas présentée au bac, à quoi bon ? Elle n'avait rien fait, elle savait bien qu'elle ne pouvait pas réussir. Toute l'année, elle avait traîné, surtout avec “Red” Laurent, dans les bistros, les boîtes, les fêtes, ou simplement dans la rue. Elle buvait des bières, elle fumait. L'après-midi, elle retrouvait Laurent devant le garage abandonné, au pied de la colline. Laurent soulevait le rideau de tôle, et ils se glissaient à l'intérieur. Ça sentait le cambouis, et une autre odeur plus piquante, comme de la paille, ou de l'herbe qui fermente. Ils faisaient l'amour par terre, sur une couverture. »

« La moitié de tout ce qui dans le monde est vraie beauté, vertu ou romance a été mise au cœur des gens simples, cachée dans les corps ordinaires » (Louisa M. Alcott, Mrs Podger’s teapot).

Over the course of the last 12 years, Hanif Kureishi has written short fiction. The stories are, by turns, provocative, erotic, tender, funny and charming as they deal with the complexities of relationships as well as the joys of children.This collection contains his controversial story Weddings and Beheadings, a well as his prophetic My Son the Fanatic, which exposes the religious tensions within the muslim family unit. As with his novels and screenplays, Kureishi has his finger on the pulse of the political tensions in society and how they affect people's everyday lives.

From the Pulitzer Prize—winning author of Ironweed, a dramatic novel of love and revolution from one of America's finest writers.

When journalist Daniel Quinn meets Ernest Hemingway at the Floridita bar in Havana, Cuba, in 1957, he has no idea that his own affinity for simple, declarative sentences will change his life radically overnight.

So begins William Kennedy's latest novel — a tale of revolutionary intrigue, heroic journalism, crooked politicians, drug-running gangsters, Albany race riots, and the improbable rise of Fidel Castro. Quinn's epic journey carries him through the nightclubs and jungles of Cuba and into the newsrooms and racially charged streets of Albany on the day Robert Kennedy is fatally shot in 1968. The odyssey brings Quinn, and his exotic but unpredictable Cuban wife, Renata, a debutante revolutionary, face-to-face with the darkest facets of human nature and illuminates the power of love in the presence of death.

Kennedy masterfully gathers together an unlikely cast of vivid characters in a breathtaking adventure full of music, mysticism, and murder — a homeless black alcoholic, a radical Catholic priest, a senile parent, a terminally ill jazz legend, the imperious mayor of Albany, Bing Crosby, Hemingway, Castro, and a ragtag ensemble of radicals, prostitutes, provocateurs, and underworld heavies. This is an unforgettably riotous story of revolution, romance, and redemption, set against the landscape of the civil rights movement as it challenges the legendary and vengeful Albany political machine.

Chromos is one of the true masterpieces of post-World War II fiction. Written in the 1940s but left unpublished until 1990, it anticipated the fictional inventiveness of the writers who were to come along — Barth, Coover, Pynchon, Sorrentino, and Gaddis. Chromos is the American immigration novel par excellence. Its opening line is: "The moment one learns English, complications set in." Or, as the novel illustrates, the moment one comes to America, the complications set in. The cast of characters in this book are immigrants from Spain who have one leg in Spanish culture and the other in the confusing, warped, unfriendly New World of New York City, attempting to meld two worlds that just won't fit together. Wildly comic, Chromos is also strangely apocalyptic, moving towards point zero and utter darkness.

From the acclaimed and prizewinning author of The Right Hand of Sleep (“Brilliant…A truly arresting work”—The New York Times Book Review), an explosive allegorical novel set on the eve of the Civil War, about a gang of men hunted by both the Union and the Confederacy for dealing in stolen slaves.

Geburah Plantation, 1863: in a crumbling estate on the banks of the Mississippi, eight survivors of the notorious Island 37 Gang wait for the war, or the Pinkerton Detective Agency, to claim them. Their leader, a bizarre charismatic known only as “the Redeemer,” has already been brought to justice, and each day brings the battling armies closer. The hatred these men feel for one another is surpassed only by their fear of their many pursuers. Into this hell comes a mysterious force, an “avenging angel” that compels them, one by one, to a reckoning of their many sins.

Canaan’s Tongue is rooted in the criminal world of John Murrell, as infamous in his day as Jesse James or Al Capone. It tells the story of his reluctant protégé, Virgil Ball, who derives riches, sexual privilege, and power from the commerce in stolen slaves, known only as “the Trade”—and discovers, when he finally decides to free himself from the Redeemer’s yoke, that the force he is challenging is far more formidable than he imagined. It is as old as the river, as vast as the country itself, and it is with us to this day.

Canaan’s Tongue is a work of extraordinary narrative and emotional power.

Clever Girl is an indelible story of one woman’s life, unfolded in a series of beautifully sculpted episodes that illuminate an era, moving from the 1960s to today, from one of Britain’s leading literary lights — Tessa Hadley — the author of the New York Times Notable Books Married Love and The London Train.

Like Alice Munro and Colm Tóibin, Tessa Hadley brilliantly captures the beauty, innocence, and irony of ordinary lives — an ability to transform the mundane into the sublime that elevates domestic fiction to literary art.

Written with the celebrated precision, intensity, and complexity that have marked her previous works, Clever Girl is a powerful exploration of family relationships and class in modern life, witnessed through the experiences of an English woman named Stella. Unfolding in a series of snapshots, Tessa Hadley’s moving novel follows Stella from the shallows of childhood, growing up with a single mother in a Bristol bedsit in the 1960s, into the murky waters of middle age.

Clever Girl is a story vivid in its immediacy and rich in drama — violent deaths, failed affairs, broken dreams, missed chances. Yet it is Hadley’s observations of everyday life, her keen skill at capturing the ways men and women think and feel and relate to one another, that dazzles.

Short story about a man who comes to work on a ranch and years later is kicked out when the ranch owner goes into a nursing home… The old fella makes me go into the house in my stocking feet. The fat old lady's in a chair. The old man…

From the pre-eminent chronicler of this forgotten territory, stories that range over one hundred years in the troubled, violent emergence of the New South.

In Ron Rash's stories, spanning the entire twentieth century in Appalachia, rural communities struggle with the arrival of a new era.

Three old men stalk the shadow of a giant fish no one else believes is there. A man takes up scuba diving in the town reservoir to fight off a killing depression. A grieving mother leads a surveyor into the woods to name once and for all the county where her son was murdered by thieves.

In the Appalachia of Ron Rash's stories, the collision of the old and new south, of antique and modern, resonate with the depth and power of ancient myths.

A volume containing the stories in The Fat Man in History and War Crimes, together with three other stories not previously published in book form. The author won the 1988 Booker Prize for Oscar and Lucinda.

Cometh the Hour opens with the reading of a suicide note, which has devastating consequences for Harry and Emma Clifton, Giles Barrington and Lady Virginia.

Giles must decide if he should withdraw from politics and try to rescue Karin, the woman he loves, from behind the Iron Curtain. But is Karin truly in love with him, or is she a spy?

Lady Virginia is facing bankruptcy, and can see no way out of her financial problems, until she is introduced to the hapless Cyrus T. Grant III from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, who’s in England to see his horse run at Royal Ascot.

Sebastian Clifton is now the Chief Executive of Farthings Bank and a workaholic, whose personal life is thrown into disarray when he falls for Priya, a beautiful Indian girl. But her parents have already chosen the man she is going to marry. Meanwhile, Sebastian’s rivals Adrian Sloane and Desmond Mellor are still plotting to bring him and his chairman Hakim Bishara down, so they can take over Farthings.

Harry Clifton remains determined to get Anatoly Babakov released from a gulag in Siberia, following the international success of his acclaimed book, Uncle Joe. But then something unexpected happens that none of them could have anticipated.

A painter torn between his domestic arrangements and his artistic pursuits makes a fateful choice in this brilliant and provocative novel from a winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.

Timothy Kane brought his wife and young daughter to Cape Cod in order to find the peace and quiet necessary to paint. But the mood inside their small cottage is far from tranquil — a past affair weighs on Timothy’s conscience, and the strain of running a household by herself is causing Enid to resent her husband.

To make matters worse, Timothy’s friend Jim Connor has decided to move to the Cape and bring a gaggle of their Greenwich Village acquaintances with him. A committed anarchist, Jim does more than just preach the redistribution of wealth: He accomplishes it himself by shoplifting from department stores and giving the loot to struggling poets and painters. Jim and his rabble-rousing, art-obsessed crew stir up trouble wherever they go, and Timothy’s association with the group soon becomes a major point of contention between him and Enid. She expects him to sacrifice his friendship for the sake of his family’s security — a demand that runs counter to Timothy’s nature and his sense of what it means to be an artist. With the pressure mounting, he must find a way to balance his marriage and his work, or risk devastating consequences to both.

An exquisitely crafted story about the hard truths of the creative life, Conversation has been lauded by the New York Times as a testament to “the brilliance of [Conrad Aiken’s] mind and the understanding of his heart.”

Nine Women. Nine Stories. And nothing ordinary about them.

From the slightly askew mind of Regan Wolfrom comes this collection of hilariously dark tales of love, death, and horrible timing.

Heather Smythe

Pretty. Shy. About as lapsed as a Catholic can get.

Heather’s trapped in the a cult of killer succubi with a taste for East Hollywood douches.

(“High Times at the Sixth Annual Succubus Sisters Garage and Bake Sale”)

Amanda Hackensack

Somewhat tall. Can’t dunk. Never knew her father.

Amanda wakes up in a world of voodoo and zombies that she knows shouldn’t exist.

(“The Zombification of Amanda Hackensack”)

Marguerite Frunkel

Lonely. Awkward. Painfully ginger.

Marguerite finds two strange little gnomes who show her just what she’s been missing.

(“Gnome on Girl on Gnome: A Love Story”)

Laura Daniels

Political outsider. Maverick. Avowed crazy cat lady.

Laura learns the sinister truth behind her unexpected electoral success.

(“The Siamese Candidate”)

Stephanie Munro

Hard working. Hard drinking. Hard to please.

Stephanie comes to regret taking a trip on the edge of the world with people she knows she shouldn’t trust.

(“The Raven’s Head Dagger and the Custom of the Seas”)

Marie-Claire Grimson

Pink hair. Pretty smile. Likes to eat people.

Marie-Claire may soon discover that meat is murder no matter how you slice it.

(“Vegans Are F**king Delicious”)

Maddy McKay

A little lonely. A little self-conscious. Starving to death.

Maddy’s trying to slim down to starving model size, but her little housemates don’t seem all that supportive.

(“Maddy McKay and the Elves in Her House”)

Vanessa Dervoe

Softball legend. Proud Yooper. Breathes underwater.

Vanessa’s strange gift has gotten her nowhere in life, stuck in a sad amusement park and surrounded by death.

(“The Ocean Goddess and The Home Run Queen”)

Kara Hermin

Mysterious. Troubled. Loads of fun at parties.

Kara’s lived a long and dangerous life, and may be forced to live it all over again.

(“Born Again at Granny’s Cave”)

From the Author

I’ve always been drawn to stories about women who are strong in their own way, like not necessarily because of their skill with a broadaxe or their ability to toss on their nunsuit and fly over the streets of Lubbock, Texas.

These stories are about women who are thrown into situations that are completely what the f**k, and about how they work to take control of their destinies.

Oh, and gnome sex. And zombies, of course. And something about cats bent on world domination. I did mention what the f**k, right?

About the Author

Regan Wolfrom (born at the tail end of the disco era) has come a long way from his 1986 debut novel Harry the Adventurous Hamster (currently out of print due to having never been published or completed).

After a break from writing to attend puberty, and to eventually sell six packs of Molson Canadian to his misnamed crush, Moosehead Girl, Regan returned to the craft with reckless abandon and a gallon jug of iced tea with just a smattering of extremely cheap rum.

Regan is now the author of the After The Fires Went Out series (with only one mention — so far — of zombie erections) and the slightly less controversial Persephone series (which, while appropriate for a YA audience, is still more likely to have actual zombie erections at some point). Regan hopes to one day write a novel set on Mars while sitting in his boxer shorts on the actual Red Planet, and everything that comes before that is really just his way of saving up for the one-way trip.

Though Regan has been shafted by residency requirements in his pursuit of the MacArthur genius grant, his current fiction is considered to be of high caliber, reflecting a marked improvement in style and grammar from the aforementioned thing with the hamster. It also has far fewer graphic scenes of pound puppy plushes having sex in the back of a shoebox with paper wheels.

What does Regan have to say about Regan?

“I recently passed up the chance to hassle Samuel L. Jackson.”

“I’ve always wanted to change my name to something boring, like Hugh Howey.”

“I know how to cook six things. None of them are oatmeal.”

“I write stories that are weird, a little dark, and definitely inappropriate for my children. It could be tough to keep that going when they get to be as old and weird as I am today.”

“Oh… and my dog is in love with me… like… in a disturbing way.”

For a more in-depth tour of Regan’s unresolved childhood issues, be sure to read one of his stories.

The epic bestseller and winner of the prestigious Aegon Literary Award in Hungary, Captivity is an enthralling and illuminating historical saga set in the time of Jesus about a Roman Jew on a quest to the Holy Land.

A literary sensation in Hungary, György Spiró’s Captivity is both a highly sophisticated historical novel and a gripping page-turner. Set in the tumultuous first century A.D., between the year of Christ’s death and the outbreak of the Jewish War, Captivity recounts the adventures of the feeble-bodied, bookish Uri, a young Roman Jew.

Frustrated with his hapless son, Uri’s father sends the young man to the Holy Land to regain the family’s prestige. In Jerusalem, Uri is imprisoned by Herod and meets two thieves and (perhaps) Jesus before their crucifixion. Later, in cosmopolitan Alexandria, he undergoes a scholarly and sexual awakening — but must also escape a pogrom. Returning to Rome at last, he finds an entirely unexpected inheritance.

Equal parts Homeric epic, brilliantly researched Jewish history, and picaresque adventure, Captivity is a dramatic tale of family, fate, and fortitude. In its weak-yet-valiant hero, fans will be reminded of Robert Graves’ classics of Ancient Rome, I, Claudius and Claudius the God.

"With the novel Captivity, Spiró proved that he is well-versed in both historical and human knowledge. It appears that in our times, it is playfulness that is expected of literary works, rather than the portrayal of realistic questions and conflicts. As if the two, playfulness and seriousness were inconsistent with each other! On the contrary (at least for me) playfulness begins with seriousness. Literature is a serious game. So is Spiró’s novel.?"

— Imre Kertész, Nobel Prize — winning author of Fatelessness

"Like the authors of so many great novels, György Spiró sends his hero, Uri, out into the wide world. Uri is a Roman Jew born into a poor family, and the wide world is an overripe civilization — the Roman Empire. Captivity can be read as an adventure novel, a Bildungsroman, a richly detailed portrait of an era, and a historico-philosophical parable. The long series of adventures — in which it is only a tiny episode that Uri is imprisoned together with Jesus and the two thieves — at once suggest the vanity of human endeavors and a passion for life. A masterpiece."

— László Márton

“[Captivity is] an important work by yet another representative of Hungarian letters who has all the chances to become a household name among the readers of literature in translation, just like Nadas, Esterhazy and Krasznahorkai.… Meticulously researched.… The novel has been a tremendous success in Hungary, having gone through more than a dozen editions. The critics lauded its page-turning quality along with the wealth of ideas and the ambitious recreation of historical detail.”

— The Untranslated

“A novel of education and a novel of adventure that brings to life ancient Rome, Alexandria and Jerusalem with a vividness of detail that is stunning. Spiró’s prose is crisp and colloquial, the kind of prose that aims for precision rather than literary thrills. A serious and sophisticated novel that is also engrossing and highly readable is a rare thing. Captivity is such a novel.”

— Ivan Sanders, Columbia University

“György Spiró aspired at nothing less than (…) present a theory in novelistic form about the interweavedness of religion and politics, lay bare the inner workings of power and give an insight into the art of survival….This book is an incredible page turner, it reads easily and avidly like the greatest bestsellers while also going as deep as the greatest thinkers of European philosophy.”

— Aegon Literary Award 2006 jury recommendation

“What this sensational novel outlines is the demonic nature of History. Ethically as well as historically, this an especially grand-scale parable. Captivity gets its feet under any literary table you care to mention."

— István Margócsy, Élet és Irodalom

“This book is a major landmark for the year.”

— Pál Závada, Népszabadság

“It would not be surprising if literary historians were soon calling him the re-assessor and regenerator of the post-modern novel.”

— Gergely Mézes, Magyar Hírlap

“Impossibly engrossing from the very first page….Building on a huge volume of reference material, the novel rings true from both a historical and a literary point of view.”

— Magda Ferch, Magyar Nemzet

In subtle, sensuous prose, the stories in Sara Majka's debut collection explore distance in all its forms: the emotional spaces that open up between family members, friends, and lovers; the gaps that emerge between who we were and who we are; the gulf between our private and public selves. At the center of the collection is a series of stories narrated by a young American woman in the wake of a divorce; wry and shy but never less than open to the world, she recalls the places and people she has been close to, the dreams she has pursued and those she has left unfulfilled. Interspersed with these intimate first-person stories are stand-alone pieces where the tight focus on the narrator's life gives way to closely observed accounts of the lives of others. A book about belonging, and how much of yourself to give up in the pursuit of that, Cities I've Never Lived In offers stories that reveal, with great sadness and great humor, the ways we are most of all citizens of the places where we cannot be.

Cities I've Never Lived In is the second book in Graywolf's collaboration with the literary magazine A Public Space.

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR Cities I've Never Lived In

“A human and eloquent exploration of isolation.” —Publishers Weekly

“These stories are a marvel that will break your heart. . Majka’s debut is breath-stopping.” —A.N. Devers, Longreads

"These stories are sparse and fierce and move elegantly to the very heart of the reader. The voice remains with me, has left an emotional trace like a person I lived with and loved and often recall.” —Catherine Lacey, author of Nobody is Ever Missing

“A collection that leaves you longing — as one longs to return to much loved, much missed homes and communities and cities — for places that you, the reader have never been. Prodigal with insight into why and how people love and leave, and love again. Humane, dazzling, and knowing.”

— Kelly Link, author of Magic for Beginners

“Like Alice Munro and Raymond Carver, Sara Majka writes stories of people on society’s ragged edge — in money trouble, work trouble, heart trouble — and does so with tremendous subtlety and a grave sophistication all her own. Every one of the spare sentences in this book is heavy with implication and insight. It’s impossible to read these stories too closely.” —Salvatore Scibona, author of The End

“I cannot remember a book that more perfectly achieves the sensation of, as Majka describes, ‘being nowhere, or in someone else’s life, or between lives.’ With each subsequent story, the feeling intensified until, as only the very best writing can do, I felt transformed by the experience. Cities I’ve Never Lived In is a momentous book, and Majka is a writer operating at a very high level of insight.” —Kevin Wilson, author of The Family Fang

“Cities I’ve Never Lived In is like no other book I’ve read: graceful and poignant, original and wise. Its stories unfold in the bars, thrift stores, and rented rooms of a Maine you won’t find in tourist guidebooks or outdoor catalogs, but their deeper territory is the human heart: loss and loneliness, desire and grief, and the strange beauty to be found in desolation. Like the memories that haunt her watchful, wounded characters, Sara Majka’s exquisite prose stayed with me long after I had turned the last page of this terrific debut.” —Mia Alvar, author of In the Country

“This is a beautiful and destabilizing book filled with ghosts. Majka is a writer I’d read anything by.” —Diane Cook, author of Man Vs. Nature

“The characters in Sara Majka’s haunting collection drift through cities and landscapes like refugees from feeling, searching for something they can’t begin to name. These stories confound all our expectations: they fade in and out like memories or dreams, at once indelible and impossible to grasp. Again and again they broke my heart. Majka is a daring and enormously gifted writer, and this is a thrilling, devastating debut.” —Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to You

The corridors and committee rooms of Whitehall are the setting for the ninth in the Strangers and Brothers series. They are also home to the manipulation of political power. Roger Quaife wages his ban-the-bomb campaign from his seat in the Cabinet and his office at the Ministry. The stakes are high as he employs his persuasiveness.

Calloustown, the seventh collection from master raconteur George Singleton, who’s been praised by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution as the “unchallenged king of the comic Southern short story,” finds the author at the absolute top of his game as he traces the unlikely inhabitants of the titular Calloustown in all their humanity. Whether exploring family, religion, politics or the true meaning of home, these stories range from deeply affecting to wildly absurd and back again, all in the blink of an eye.

Set in a fictional prairie town in which the two overarching industries are a living history facility and a laboratory for experiments in high-energy particle physics, Charmed Particles tells the intertwined stories of two families.

Abhijat is a theoretical physicist from India now working at the National Accelerator Research Laboratory. His wife, Sarala, home with their young daughter, Meena, struggles to assimilate to their new American culture.

Meena’s best friend at school is Lily, a precocious child prodigy whose father self-identifies as “the last great gentleman explorer” and whose mother, a local politician, becomes entangled in efforts to stop to the National Accelerator Research Laboratory’s plans to build a new superconducting supercollider.

The conflict over the collider fractures the community and creates deep divides within the families of the novel.

Germany, 1985.

The Reich Council has fallen and the Reich is sundered in two, but the uneasy peace will not last long. To the east, Karl Holliston – now styling himself the Fuhrer of the Greater German Reich – is planning the conquest of Berlin and the destruction of the rebels, while to the west Germany’s former satellites are planning a bid for independence and the North Atlantic Alliance is uneasily considering just what will happen to the Reich’s vast arsenal of nuclear weapons.

As the civil war begins, as the Panzers begin their advance on Berlin, the rebels are forced to fight to save their revolution…

…Or watch helplessly as a jackboot stamps down on Germany, forever.

^{[Like my other self-published Kindle books, Chosen of the Valkyries is DRM-free. You may reformat it as you choose. There is a large sample of the text – and my other books – on my site: chrishanger.net. Try before you buy.]}

I was thirteen. Being thirteen is like being in the middle of nowhere. Which was accentuated by the fact that I was in the middle of nowhere. In a house that wasn’t mine. in a city that wasn’t mine, in a country that wasn’t mine, with a one-man family that, in spite of the intersections and intentions (all very good), wasn’t mine.

When her mother dies, thirteen-year-old Vanja is left with no family and no sense of who she is, where she belongs, and what she should do. Determined to find her biological father to fill the void that has so suddenly appeared in her life, Vanja decides to leave Rio de Janeiro to live in Colorado with her stepfather, a former guerrilla notorious for his violent past. From there she goes in search of her biological father, tracing her mother’s footsteps and gradually discovering the truth about herself.

Rendered in lyrical and passionate prose, Crow Blue is a literary road trip through Brazil and America, and through dark decades of family and political history.

Captives, the acclaimed writer Norman Manea's first novel, is a fascinating, kaleidoscopic, and imaginative look into postwar Romania. Divided into three sections — narrated in first-, second-, and third-person voices—Captives explores the lives of several defeated characters as they become almost too much to bear under the weight of endless humiliations: loss of identity, trauma of having survived the Second World War, and submission to the totalitarian state.

This is a moving account of a country shaken by communism and anti-Semitism and haunted by recent atrocities, from "a distinguished writer whose vision of totalitarianism is close to Kafka's cloudy menace, universal yet internalized" (Richard Eder, The New York Times).

During the violence and chaos of the Lebanese Civil War, a car pulls up to a roadblock on a narrow side street in Beirut. After a brief and confused exchange, several rounds of bullets are fired into the car, killing everyone inside except for a small boy of four or five. The boy is taken to the hospital, adopted by one of the assassins, and raised in a new family. “My father used to kidnap and kill people …” begins this haunting tale of a child who was raised by the murderer of his real family. The narrator of Confessions doesn’t shy away from the horrible truth of his murderous father — instead he confronts his troubled upbringing and seeks to understand the distortions and complexities of his memories, his war-torn country, and the quiet war that rages inside of him.

В последнее время редко можно встретить в журналах такие тексты. Между тем, на мой взгляд, они достойны публикации и читательского внимания. Детство — неисчерпаемый источник тем для любого писателя, первые проблемы и сомнения спустя многие годы кажутся смешными, наивными. Но остается ностальгия по тому времени, когда человек только осваивал жизнь. Как можно писать иначе о детстве? Только с любовью… Или Con amore…

Желаю всем приятного чтения.

Редактор литературного журнала «Точка Зрения»,

Анна Болкисева

This best-selling debut novel from one of France’s most exciting young writers is based on the true story of the 1949 disappearance of Air France’s Lockheed Constellation and its famous passengers.

On October 27, 1949, Air France’s new plane, the Constellation, launched by the extravagant Howard Hughes, welcomed thirty-eight passengers aboard. On October 28, no longer responding to air traffic controllers, the plane disappeared while trying to land on the island of Santa Maria, in the Azores. No one survived.

The question Adrien Bosc’s novel asks is not so much how, but why? What were the series of tiny incidents that, in sequence, propelled the plane toward Redondo Mountain? And who were the passengers? As we recognize Marcel Cerdan, the famous boxer and lover of Edith Piaf, and we remember the musical prodigy Ginette Neveu, whose tattered violin would be found years later, the author ties together their destinies: “Hear the dead, write their small legend, and offer to these thirty-eight men and women, like so many constellations, a life and a story.”

A young Egyptian woman chronicles her personal and political coming of age in this debut novel.

Cairo, 1984. A blisteringly hot summer. A young girl in a sprawling family house. Her days pass quietly: listening to a mother’s phone conversations, looking at the Nile from a bedroom window, watching the three state-sanctioned TV stations with the volume off, daydreaming about other lives. Underlying this claustrophobic routine is mystery and loss. Relatives mutter darkly about the newly-appointed President Mubarak. Everyone talks with melancholy about the past. People disappear overnight. Her own father has left, too — why, or to where, no one will say.

We meet her across three decades, from youth to adulthood: As a six-year old absorbing the world around her, filled with questions she can’t ask; as a college student and aspiring filmmaker pre-occupied with love, language, and the repression that surrounds her; and then later, in the turbulent aftermath of Mubarak’s overthrow, as a writer exploring her own past. Reunited with her father, she wonders about the silences that have marked and shaped her life.

At once a mapping of a city in transformation and a story about the shifting realities and fates of a single Egyptian family, Yasmine El Rashidi’s Chronicle of a Last Summer traces the fine line between survival and complicity, exploring the conscience of a generation raised in silence.

Plaidoyer passionnant pour la defense de la lecture, ce roman est un appel a la liberte et aux droits du lecteur. Daniel Pennac livre, avec un humour grincant qui fera rire de 7 a77 ans, dans ce roman-essai, les droits imprescriptibles du lecteur. En dix chapitres, il nous expose le droit de ne pas lire, de sauter des pages, de ne pas finir un livre, de relire, de lire n'importe quoi,le droit au bovarysme (maladie textuellement transmissible), de lire n'import ou, de gaspiller, de lire a haute voix, de nous taire.

Chagrin d’école, dans la lignée de Comme un roman, aborde la question de l’école du point de vue de l’élève, et en l’occurrence du mauvais élève. Daniel Pennac, ancien cancre lui-même, étudie cette figure du folklore populaire en lui donnant ses lettres de noblesse, en lui restituant aussi son poids d’angoisse et de douleur.

Sandeep Sanghavi, the mixed-race son of an Indian businesswoman and a famous American astronomer lives a nomadic albeit mundane life traveling the country with his mother's hotel consulting firm. His life becomes more interesting when various lost objects suddenly begin to reappear. Then a stranger calls and claims responsibility for the returned objects in exchange for an introduction to Sandeep’s astronomer father, the rebellious and eccentric Van Ray, who has no phone, email or qualms about having abandoned his son twenty years ago.

Van Ray shows up broke with his pregnant ex-wife astronaut in tow, claiming to have discovered a big secret that will change their lives forever; a new discovery guaranteed to change him from “science famous” to “famous famous.”

With his family together for the first time in years, Sandeep must juggle his father’s scientific search, his mother’s failing business and the tension of having family all together for the first time in decades.

Yang Tianyi is a "leftover woman" and under pressure to find a husband. She is attractive and intelligent but knows little of the world, and finally makes a disastrous marriage to a man, Wang Lian. At the end of the 1980s, in Tiananmen Square, she meets her love Hua Zheng again. However, after the political turmoil, Hua Zheng is framed as one of the perpetrators of the disturbances, and is sentenced to prison. Set against the background of China's turbulent 1980s and 1990s, Crystal Wedding is a novel of searing emotional honesty. (Winner of English Pen Translates Award).

As bestselling author Walter Kirn says, “This scathing novel of our strange new century is like nothing else I’ve read in years.”

*Kirkus (Starred review): "A novel of unrelenting tension."

*Booklist: (Starred review): "Powerful"

*Publishers Weekly: "Propulsive…electric."

Following the breakout success of his “searing” (The New York Times Book Review) debut novel The Delivery Man, Joe McGinniss Jr. returns with Carousel Court: a bold, original, and exhilarating novel of marriage as blood sport that reads like Revolutionary Road for the era of The Unwinding.

Nick and Phoebe Maguire are a young couple with big dreams who move across the country to Southern California in search of a fresh start for themselves and their infant son following a devastating trauma. But they move at the worst possible time, into an economic crisis that spares few. Instead of landing in a beachside property, strolling the organic food aisles, and selecting private preschools, Nick and Phoebe find themselves living in the dark heart of foreclosure alley, surrounded by neighbors being drowned by their underwater homes who set fire to their belongings, flee in the dead of night, and eye one another with suspicion while keeping twelve-gauge shotguns by their beds. Trapped, broke, and increasingly desperate, Nick and Phoebe each devise their own plan to claw their way back into the middle class and beyond. Hatched under one roof, their two separate, secret agendas will collide in spectacular fashion.

A blistering and unforgettable vision of the way we live now, Carousel Court paints a darkly honest portrait of modern marriage while also capturing the middle-class America of vanished jobs, abandoned homes, psychotropic cure-alls, infidelity via iPhone, and ruthless choices.

Augusto Monterroso is widely known for short stories characterized by brilliant satire and wit. Yet behind scathing allusions to the weaknesses and defects of the artistic and intellectual worlds, they show his generous and expansive sense of compassion.

This book brings together for the first time in English the volumes Complete Works (and Other Stories) (Obras completas [y otros cuentos] 1959) and Perpetual Motion (Movimiento perpetuo 1972). Together, they reveal Monterroso as a foundational author of the new Latin American narrative.

Carmen Boullosa is one of Latin America’s most original voices, and in Cleopatra Dismounts she has written a remarkable imaginary life of one of history's most legendary women. Dying in Marc Antony’s arms, Cleopatra bewails the end of her political career throughout ancient Egypt, Greece, and the Mediterranean. But is this weak woman the true Cleopatra?

Through the intervention of Cleopatra's scribe and informer Diomedes, Boullosa creates two deliriously wild other lives for the young monarch — a girl escaping the intrigues of royal society to disguise herself and take up residence with a band of pirates; and the young queen who is carried across the sea on the back of a magical bull, to live among the Amazons.

Magical, multifaceted, and rippling with luminous imagination, Cleopatra Dismounts is a work that recalls Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry and confirms Carmen Boullosa as an important international voice.

In this vivid and compelling novel, Tim Murphy follows a diverse set of characters whose fates intertwine in an iconic building in Manhattan’s East Village, the Christodora. The Christodora is home to Milly and Jared, a privileged young couple with artistic ambitions. Their neighbor, Hector, a Puerto Rican gay man who was once a celebrated AIDS activist but is now a lonely addict, becomes connected to Milly and Jared’s lives in ways none of them can anticipate. Meanwhile, Milly and Jared’s adopted son Mateo grows to see the opportunity for both self-realization and oblivion that New York offers. As the junkies and protestors of the 1980s give way to the hipsters of the 2000s and they, in turn, to the wealthy residents of the crowded, glass-towered city of the 2020s, enormous changes rock the personal lives of Milly and Jared and the constellation of people around them. Moving kaleidoscopically from the Tompkins Square Riots and attempts by activists to galvanize a true response to the AIDS epidemic, to the New York City of the future, Christodora recounts the heartbreak wrought by AIDS, illustrates the allure and destructive power of hard drugs, and brings to life the ever-changing city itself.

In a Russian restaurant on Paris's Left Bank, Russian exile Golubchik alternately fascinates and horrifies a rapt audience with a wild story of collaboration, deception, and murder in the days leading up to the Russian Revolution. “Worthy to sit beside Conrad and Dostoevsky’s excursions into the twisted world of secret agents. Joseph Roth is one of the great writers in German of this century; and this novel is a fine introduction to this view of intrigue, necessity, and moral doubt.” The London Times

“Why, when we take such care to disguise our true selves from others, would we expect them to be an open book to us?”

Harry Steen, a businessman travelling in Mexico, ducks into an old bookstore to escape a frightening deluge. Inside, he makes a serendipitous discovery: a mid-nineteenth-century account of a sinister storm cloud that plagued an isolated Scottish village and caused many gruesome and unexplainable deaths. Harry knows the village well; he travelled there as a young man to take up a teaching post following the death of his parents. It was there that he met the woman whose love and betrayal have haunted him every day since. Presented with this astonishing record, Harry resolves to seek out the ghosts of his past and return to the very place where he encountered the fathomless depths of his own heart. With Cloud, critically acclaimed Canadian author Eric McCormack has written a masterpiece of literary Gothicism, an intimate and perplexing study of how the past haunts us, and how we remain mysterious to others, and even ourselves.

Clothed, Female Figure opens a singular investigation of women: mothers, daughters, gardeners, housecleaners, employers, aunts, nannies, friends. There are dispatches from haloed single-girl apartments in New York, from the horsetail scrubland behind the beach club, from the house behind the linden tree where the first baby was born. An overgrown back garden becomes the shrouded stage for a reunion. A Russian nanny guards a secret. A new wife subverts housekeeping to outflank her mother-in-law. An alcoholic daughter is haunted by her mother’s disappearance.

Through ten independent but thematically linked stories, Allio conjures women in conflict and on the edge, who embrace, battle, and transcend their domestic dimensions.

In the waning years of the Soviet Union, a sad young Finnish woman boards a train in Moscow. Bound for Mongolia, she’s trying to put as much space as possible between her and a broken relationship. Wanting to be alone, she chooses an empty compartment—No. 6.—but her solitude is soon shattered by the arrival of a fellow passenger: Vadim Nikolayevich Ivanov, a grizzled, opinionated, foul-mouthed former soldier. Vadim fills the compartment with his long and colorful stories, recounting in lurid detail his sexual conquests and violent fights.

There is a hint of menace in the air, but initially the woman is not so much scared of or shocked by him as she is repulsed. She stands up to him, throwing a boot at his head. But though Vadim may be crude, he isn’t cruel, and he shares with her the sausage and black bread and tea he’s brought for the journey, coaxing the girl out of her silent gloom. As their train cuts slowly across thousands of miles of a wintry Russia, where “everything is in motion, snow, water, air, trees, clouds, wind, cities, villages, people and thoughts,” a grudging kind of companionship grows between the two inhabitants of compartment No. 6. When they finally arrive in Ulan Bator, a series of starlit and sinister encounters bring Rosa Liksom’s incantatory Compartment No. 6 to its powerful conclusion.

Review

Wonderful, almost elegiac.

— Paul Simon Morning Star

About the Author

Rosa Liksom is a Finnish artist and the author of over a dozen books. She won the Finlandia prize in 2011 for Compartment No. 6.

Если, проходя под старым дубом, ты захочешь подпрыгнуть и ухватиться за толстую ветку, не спеши исполнить свое желание: ведь и ты можешь оказаться в положении главного героя романа — Вранцова.

Что это страшный кошмар или кошмарная явь? Неужели ему, Вранцову, предстоит теперь жить в образе Corvus corone — большого черного ворона? Отныне он в делах людских — незаинтересованное лицо. И за что это ему? Может быть для того, чтобы в теле птицы попробовать осознать, а правильно ли он жил, будучи человеком?

It is 1964: Bert Cousins, the deputy District Attorney, shows up at Franny Keating’s christening party uninvited, bottle of gin in hand. As the cops of Los Angeles drink, talk and dance into the June afternoon, he notices a heart-stoppingly beautiful woman. When Bert kisses Beverly Keating, his host’s wife, the new baby pressed between them, he sets in motion the joining of two families whose shared fate will be defined on a day seven years later.

In 1988, Franny Keating, now twenty-four, has dropped out of law school and is working as a cocktail waitress in Chicago. When she meets one of her idols, the famous author Leon Posen, and tells him about her family, she unwittingly relinquishes control over their story. Franny never dreams that the consequences of this encounter will extend beyond her own life into those of her scattered siblings and parents.

Told with equal measures of humour and heartbreak, Commonwealth is a powerful and tender tale of family, betrayal and the far-reaching bonds of love and responsibility. A meditation on inspiration, interpretation and the ownership of stories, it is Ann Patchett’s most astonishing work to date.

Un honnête garçon qui sert comme brigadier dans un régiment de dragons à Séville tombe amoureux de la gitane Carmen. Celle-ci lui ayant préféré un certain Lucas, rencontré lors d'un combat de taureau, il va, par amour pour elle, commettre le pire.

Lorsque Myriam, mère de deux jeunes enfants, décide malgré les réticences de son mari de reprendre son activité au sein d’un cabinet d’avocats, le couple se met à la recherche d’une nounou. Après un casting sévère, ils engagent Louise, qui conquiert très vite l’affection des enfants et occupe progressivement une place centrale dans le foyer. Peu à peu le piège de la dépendance mutuelle va se refermer, jusqu’au drame.

À travers la description précise du jeune couple et celle du personnage fascinant et mystérieux de la nounou, c’est notre époque qui se révèle, avec sa conception de l’amour et de l’éducation, des rapports de domination et d’argent, des préjugés de classe ou de culture. Le style sec et tranchant de Leïla Slimani, où percent des éclats de poésie ténébreuse, instaure dès les premières pages un suspense envoûtant.

Leïla Slimani est née en 1981. Elle est l’auteur d’un premier roman très remarqué, Dans le jardin de l’ogre (« Folio » n^o 6062), paru en 2014 aux Éditions Gallimard, dans la collection « Blanche ».

It's 1938 in San Francisco: a world's fair is preparing to open on Treasure Island, a war is brewing overseas, and the city is alive with possibilities.

Grace, Helen, and Ruby, three young women from very different backgrounds, meet by chance at the exclusive and glamorous Forbidden City nightclub. Grace Lee, an American-born Chinese girl, has fled the Midwest with nothing but heartache, talent, and a pair of dancing shoes. Helen Fong lives with her extended family in Chinatown, where her traditional parents insist that she guard her reputation like a piece of jade. The stunning Ruby Tom challenges the boundaries of convention at every turn with her defiant attitude and no-holds-barred ambition.

The girls become fast friends, relying on one another through unexpected challenges and shifting fortunes. When their dark secrets are exposed and the invisible thread of fate binds them even tighter, they find the strength and resilience to reach for their dreams. But after the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor, paranoia and suspicion threaten to destroy their lives, and a shocking act of betrayal changes everything.

Recit des amours tragiques de Don José Lizarrabengoa, jeune homme basque, brigadier de cavalerie et de Carmen, belle bohémienne, sensuelle et manipulatrice, dont la soif de liberté entrainera leur fin dramatique.

Texte intégral.

From the best-selling author of The Dog Stars and The Painter, a luminous, masterful novel of suspense—the story of Celine, an elegant, aristocratic private eye who specializes in reuniting families, trying to make amends for a loss in her own past.

Working out of her jewel box of an apartment at the base of the Brooklyn Bridge, Celine has made a career of tracking down missing persons, and she has a better record at it than the FBI. But when a young woman, Gabriela, asks for her help, a world of mystery and sorrow opens up. Gabriela’s father was a photographer who went missing on the border of Montana and Wyoming. He was assumed to have died from a grizzly mauling, but his body was never found. Now, as Celine and her partner head to Yellowstone National Park, investigating a trail gone cold, it becomes clear that they are being followed—that this is a case someone desperately wants to keep closed.

Inspired by the life of Heller’s own remarkable mother, a chic and iconoclastic private eye, Celine is a deeply personal novel, a wildly engrossing story of family, privilege, and childhood loss. Combining the exquisite plotting and gorgeous evocation of nature that have become his hallmarks, Peter Heller gives us his finest work to date.

Folcoche, c'est l'affreux surnom dont les enfants Rezeau avaient affublé leur terrible mère. après l'avoir combattue dans l'inoubliable Vipère au poing, Jean Rezeau avait fui la tribu : il s'était marié, avait fondé une famille normale — sa revanche — dans la Mort du petit cheval. Vingt-cinq ans plus tard, veuf, remarié avec Bertille dont il élève la fille parmi ses propres enfants, nous le retrouvons dans Cri de la chouette. Mais voilà que Madame Mère, Folcoche, jamais revue, fait irruption chez lui. Trahie, dépouillée par son fils préféré, elle vient offrir la paix. Jean, qui avait chassé les fantômes de sa jeunesse, accepte d'oublier le passé sur l'insistance de sa femme et de ses enfants qui croient pouvoir convertir leur redoutable aïeule. C'était oublier que Folcoche est toujours Folcoche. Et la vieille chouette, aussitôt, sème méfiance et discorde.

Passant d'un humour féroce à la nostalgie, du pittoresque à la poésie, Hervé Bazin nous donne, avec Cri de la chouette, le plus humain et le plus tragique de ses romans.

Anatole France avait une écriture très pure et ironique dont le présent recueil de nouvelles donne un bon aperçu.

Calligraphy Lesson is the first English-language collection of short stories by Mikhail Shishkin, the most acclaimed contemporary author in Russia. Spanning his entire writing career, from his first published story, “Calligraphy Lesson,” which heralded an entirely new voice in post-Soviet Russian literature and won him Russia’s prestigious Debut Prize in 1993, to creative essays reflecting on the transcendent importance of language, to the newest story, “Nabokov’s Inkblot,” written in 2013 for dramatic adaptation by a theater in Zurich. A master prose writer and unique stylist, Shishkin is heir to the greatest Russian writers, such as Tolstoy, Bunin, and Pasternak, and is the living embodiment of the combination of style and content that has made Russian literature so unique and universally popular for over two centuries. Shishkin’s breathtakingly beautiful writing style comes across perfectly in these stories, where he experiments with the forms and ideas that are worked into his grand novels while exploring entirely new literary territory in the space between fiction and creative nonfiction as he reflects on the most important and universal themes in life: love, happiness, art, death, resurrection…

Роман «Скитания Анны Одинцовой» написан совсем недавно и, хотя и посвящен событиям почти полувековой давности, тем не менее затрагивает проблемы, которые не изжиты до сегодняшнего дня. Это прежде всего насильственное выкорчевывание, под видом насаждения прогресса, вековых традиций, обычаев, образа жизни, которые крепко держали коренного человека Чукотки на своей суровой земле.

Un suspense haletant qui nous ouvre les portes de l'élection la plus secrète du monde.

Le pape est mort.

Derrière les portes closes de la chapelle Sixtine, cent dix-huit cardinaux venus des quatre continents vont participer à l'élection la plus secrète qui soit.

Ce sont tous des hommes de foi. Mais ils ont des ambitions. Et ils ont des rivaux.

En secret, les alliances se préparent.

Ce n'est plus qu'une question d'heures… L'un de ces cardinaux va devenir la figure spirituelle la plus puissante au monde. Sur la place Saint-Pierre, deux cent cinquante mille chrétiens attendent de voir la fumée blanche apparaître…

Biographie de l'auteur

Robert Harris est né à Nottingham en 1957. Il a été journaliste à la BBC, puis à l'Observer et au Sunday Times, activité pour laquelle il a reçu, en 1992, le titre d' « éditorialiste de l'année ». Il a publié cinq essais dont deux biographies politiques, puis s'est tourné vers la fiction. Il est l'auteur des déjà célèbres Imperium, Pompéi, Archange, Enigma et Dictator. Ses romans se sont vendus à plus de dix millions d'exemplaires et ont été traduits en trente-trois langues.

Rome, 63 av. J.-C. À la veille de sa prise de pouvoir comme consul, l’avocat Cicéron mesure l’ampleur de sa tâche. Lui, l’homme sans noble ascendance, se sait méprisé par les patriciens, haï par les populistes. Au-delà même de sa personne, c’est la République qui est menacée, cernée par les complots des brigands en toge blanche et les manigances de l’ambitieux César. Il le sait : il faudra davantage que ses talents d’orateur pour détourner le glaive de sa gorge. Et Rome ne manque pas de glaives…

« Un livre au rythme enlevé, basé sur des faits et délicieusement croustillant. »

The New York Times

« L’attrait du pouvoir et les périls qu’il provoque ont rarement été disséqués de manière aussi brillante dans un thriller. »

The Sunday Times

Février 1927. Le Tout-Paris assiste aux obsèques de Marcel Péricourt. Sa fille, Madeleine, doit prendre la tête de l’empire financier dont elle est l’héritière, mais le destin en décide autrement. Son fils, Paul, d’un geste inattendu et tragique, va placer Madeleine sur le chemin de la ruine et du déclassement.

Face à l’adversité des hommes, à la cupidité de son époque, à la corruption de son milieu et à l’ambition de son entourage, Madeleine devra déployer des trésors d’intelligence, d’énergie mais aussi de machiavélisme pour survivre et reconstruire sa vie. Tâche d’autant plus difficile dans une France qui observe, impuissante, les premières couleurs de l’incendie qui va ravager l'Europe.

Couleurs de l’incendie est le deuxième volet de la trilogie inaugurée avec Au revoir là-haut, prix Goncourt 2013, où l’on retrouve l’extraordinaire talent de Pierre Lemaitre.

Février 1927. Le Tout-Paris assiste aux obsèques de Marcel Péricourt. Sa fille, Madeleine, doit prendre la tête de l’empire financier dont elle est l’héritière, mais le destin en décide autrement. Son fils, Paul, d’un geste inattendu et tragique, va placer Madeleine sur le chemin de la ruine et du déclassement.

Face à l’adversité des hommes, à la cupidité de son époque, à la corruption de son milieu et à l’ambition de son entourage, Madeleine devra déployer des trésors d’intelligence, d’énergie mais aussi de machiavélisme pour survivre et reconstruire sa vie. Tâche d’autant plus difficile dans une France qui observe, impuissante, les premières couleurs de l’incendie qui va ravager l'Europe.

Couleurs de l’incendie est le deuxième volet de la trilogie inaugurée avec Au revoir là-haut, prix Goncourt 2013, où l’on retrouve l’extraordinaire talent de Pierre Lemaitre.

Великая русская литература и примазавшийся к ней детектив Эразм Фанаберия.

Set against the divergent landscape of British Columbia — from the splendours of nature to its immense dangers, from urban grease and grit to dry, desert towns — Clear Skies, No Wind, 100% Visibility examines human beings and their many frailties with breathtaking insight and accuracy.

Théodora Armstrong peoples her stories with characters as richly various — and as compelling — as her settings. A soon-to-be father and haute cuisine chef mercilessly berates his staff while facing his lack of preparedness for parenthood. A young girl revels in the dark drama of the murder of a girl from her neighbourhood. A novice air-traffic specialist must come to terms with his first loss — the death of a pilot — on his watch. And the dangers of deep canyons and powerful currents spur on the reckless behaviour of teenagers as they test the limits of bravery, friendship, and sex.

With startling intimacy and language stripped bare, Clear Skies, No Wind, 100% Visibility announces the arrival of Théodora Armstrong as a striking new literary voice.

A student pedals an old Ukraina bicycle between striking factories, delivering bulletins, in the tumultuous first days of the Solidarity movement…

A shepherd watches, unseen, as a strange figure disembarks from a pirate ship anchored in the cove below, to bury a chest on the beach that later proves empty…

A prisoner in a Berber dungeon recounts his life’s story – the failed pursuit of the world’s very first language – by scrawling in the sand on his cell floor…

The characters in Paweł Huelle’s mesmerising stories find themselves, willingly or not, at the heart of epic narratives; legends and histories that stretch far beyond the limits of their own lives. Against the backdrop of the Baltic coast, mythology and meteorology mix with the inexorable tide of political change: Kashubian folklore, Chinese mysticism and mediaeval scholarship butt up against the war in Chechnya, 9-11, and the struggle for Polish independence.

Central to Huelle’s imagery is the vision of the refugee – be it the Chechen woman carrying her newborn child across the Polish border (her face emblazoned on every TV screen), the survivor of the Gulag re-appearing on his friends’ doorstep, years after being presumed dead, or the stranger who befriends the sole resident of a ghostly Mennonite village in the final days of the Second World War. Each refugee carries a clue, it seems, or is in possession or pursuit of some mysterious text or book, knowing that only it – like the Chinese ‘Book of Changes’ – can decode their story. What we do with this text, this clue, Huelle seems to say, is up to us.

Independent Foreign Fiction Prize Nominee for Longlist (2013)

Daring and original stories set in New Testament times, from a rising young Norwegian author

Lars Petter Sveen’s Children of God recounts the lives of people on the margins of the New Testament; thieves, Roman soldiers, prostitutes, lepers, healers, and the occasional disciple all get a chance to speak. With language free of judgment or moralizing, Sveen covers familiar ground in unusual ways. In the opening story, a group of soldiers are tasked with carrying out King Herod’s edict to slaughter the young male children in Bethlehem but waver in their resolve. These interwoven stories harbor surprises at every turn, as the characters reappear. A group of thieves on the road to Jericho encounters no good Samaritan but themselves. A boy healed of his stutter will later regress. A woman searching for her lover from beyond the grave cannot find solace. At crucial moments an old blind man appears, urging the characters to give in to their darker impulses.

Children of God was a bestseller in Norway, where it won the Per Olov Enquist Literary Prize and gathered ecstatic reviews. Sveen’s subtle elevation of the conflict between light and dark focuses on the varied struggles these often-ignored individuals face. Yet despite the dark tone, Sveen’s stories retain a buoyancy, thanks to Guy Puzey’s supple and fleet-footed translation. This deeply original and moving book, in Sveen’s restrained and gritty telling, brings to light stories that reflect our own time, from a setting everyone knows.

From the award-winning Serbian author David Albahari comes a devastating and Kafkaesque war fable about an army unit sent to guard a military checkpoint with no idea where they are or who the enemy might be.

Atop a hill, deep in the forest, an army unit is dropped off to guard a checkpoint. The commander doesn’t know where they are, what border they’re protecting, or why. Their map is useless. The radio crackles with a language no one can recognize. A soldier is found dead in a latrine and the unit vows vengeance—but the killer, like the enemy, is unknown. Amid orgies and massacres, the commander struggles to maintain order and keep his soldiers alive, but he can’t be sure whether they’re fighting a war or caught in some bizarre military experiment.

Equal parts Waiting for Godot and Catch-22, David Albahari’s Checkpoint is a haunting and hysterical confrontation with the absurdity of war.

From the award-winning Serbian author David Albahari comes a devastating and Kafkaesque war fable about an army unit sent to guard a military checkpoint with no idea where they are or who the enemy might be.

Atop a hill, deep in the forest, an army unit is dropped off to guard a checkpoint. The commander doesn’t know where they are, what border they’re protecting, or why. Their map is useless. The radio crackles with a language no one can recognize. A soldier is found dead in a latrine and the unit vows vengeance—but the killer, like the enemy, is unknown. Amid orgies and massacres, the commander struggles to maintain order and keep his soldiers alive, but he can’t be sure whether they’re fighting a war or caught in some bizarre military experiment.

Equal parts Waiting for Godot and Catch-22, David Albahari’s Checkpoint is a haunting and hysterical confrontation with the absurdity of war.

A San Francisco Chronicle bestseller

Possessing a wisdom and maturity rarely found in a first novelist, Korean-American writer Nora Okja Keller tells a heartwrenching and enthralling tale in this, her literary debut.

Comfort Woman is the story of Akiko, a Korean refugee of World War II, and Beccah, her daughter by an American missionary. The two women are living on the edge of society—and sanity—in Honolulu, plagued by Akiko’s periodic encounters with the spirits of the dead, and by Beccah’s struggles to reclaim her mother from her past. Slowly and painfully Akiko reveals her tragic story and the horrifying years she was forced to serve as a “comfort woman” to Japanese soldiers. As Beccah uncovers these truths, she discovers her own strength and the secret of the powers she herself possessed—the precious gifts her mother has given her.

Nora Okja Keller, author of Fox Girl, was born in Seoul, Korea, and now lives in Hawaii. In 1995, Keller received the Pushcart Prize for “Mother Tongue,” a piece that is a part of Comfort Woman.

When New Yorker Rachel Chu agrees to spend the summer in Singapore with her boyfriend, Nicholas Young, she envisions a humble family home and quality time with the man she hopes to marry. But Nick has failed to give his girlfriend a few key details. One, that his childhood home looks like a palace; two, that he grew up riding in more private planes than cars; and three, that he just happens to be the country’s most eligible bachelor.

On Nick’s arm, Rachel may as well have a target on her back the second she steps off the plane, and soon, her relaxed vacation turns into an obstacle course of old money, new money, nosy relatives, and scheming social climbers.

When New Yorker Rachel Chu agrees to spend the summer in Singapore with her boyfriend, Nicholas Young, she envisions a humble family home and quality time with the man she hopes to marry. But Nick has failed to give his girlfriend a few key details. One, that his childhood home looks like a palace; two, that he grew up riding in more private planes than cars; and three, that he just happens to be the country’s most eligible bachelor.

On Nick’s arm, Rachel may as well have a target on her back the second she steps off the plane, and soon, her relaxed vacation turns into an obstacle course of old money, new money, nosy relatives, and scheming social climbers.

The story of The Revolution of Marina M. continues in bestselling author Janet Fitch’s sweeping epic about a young woman’s coming into her own against the backdrop of the Russian Revolution.

After the events of The Revolution of Marina M., the young Marina Makarova finds herself on her own amid the devastation of the Russian Civil War—pregnant and adrift in the Russian countryside, forced onto her own resourcefulness to find a place to wait out the birth of her child. She finds new strength and self-reliance to fortify her in her sojourn, and to prepare her for the hardships and dilemmas still to come.

When she finally returns to Petrograd, the city almost unrecognizable after two years of revolution, the haunted, half-emptied, starving Capital of Once Had Been, she finds the streets teeming with homeless children, victims of war. Now fully a woman, she takes on the challenge of caring for these civil war orphans, until they become the tool of tragedy from an unexpected direction.

But despite the ordeal of war and revolution, betrayal and privation and unimaginable loss, Marina at last emerges as the poet she was always meant to be.

Chimes of a Lost Cathedral finishes the epic story of Marina’s journey through some of the most dramatic events of the last century—as a woman and an artist, entering her full power, passion, and creativity just as her revolution reveals its true direction for the future.