Пьеса из мира «Метро».

Готовилась для постановки одним молодым режиссёром на недостроенной станции метро.

ALEKSANDRS PUŠKINS

ĒĢIPTES NAKTIS

Sastādītājs Jāzeps Osmanis Mākslinieks Arturs Apinis

 tulkojis Kārlis Egle

izdevniecība Liesma 1969

Noskannējis grāmatu un FB2 failu izveidojis Imants Ločmelis

NIKOLAJS GOGOLIS

IZLASE

LATVIJAS VALSTS IZDEVNIECĪBA  1948

Tulk. M. Mencendorfa

Noskannējis grāmatu un FB2 failu izveidojis Imants Ločmelis

IVANS FJODOROVICS ŠPOŅKA UN VIŅA KRUSTMĀMIŅA

Este archivo es una corrección, a partir de otro encontrado en la red, para compartirlo con un grupo reducido de amigos, por medios privados. Si llega a tus manos debes saber que no deberás colgarlo en webs o redes públicas, ni hacer uso comercial del mismo. Que una vez leído se considera caducado el préstamo del mismo y deberá ser destruido.

En caso de incumplimiento de dicha advertencia, derivamos cualquier responsabilidad o acción legal a quienes la incumplieran.

Queremos dejar bien claro que nuestra intención es favorecer a aquellas personas, de entre nuestros compañeros, que por diversos motivos: económicos, de situación geográfica o discapacidades físicas, no tienen acceso a la literatura, o a bibliotecas públicas. Pagamos religiosamente todos los cánones impuestos por derechos de autor de diferentes soportes. No obtenemos ningún beneficio económico ni directa ni indirectamente (a través de publicidad). Por ello, no consideramos que nuestro acto sea de piratería, ni la apoyamos en ningún caso. Además, realizamos la siguiente…

Саймон Логан — виртуоз в искусстве создания мрачных апокалипсических мирков в небольшом пространстве рассказа, «i-o» — его первый сборник в жанре industrial, состоит из одиннадцати рассказов, в которых автор исследует обитателей футуристических свалок и заброшенных заводов — неудачных гибридов машин и людей, обретших душу. Выбор у этих существ невелик: либо продолжать жесткую борьбу за выживание в первобытно-техногенном мире, либо пойти на запчасти после мучительной смерти в контейнере с кислотой… Искусное сочетание бурной фантазии, стилистики игры «Doom» и черного юмора сделало автора культовым среди поклонников как киберготики, так и классической научной фантастики.

A pilot for the Mary Jean Cosmetics Corporation — a hopeless geek trapped in a cool guy's body — Tucker Case's troubles begin one very drunk morning at the Seattle airport Holiday Inn Lounge. Surrendering to the strident will of a call girl who wants desperately to join the Mile High Club, he proceeds to crash his shocking pink jet on the runway — totaling the plane and seriously damaging the organ that got him into this mess in the first place. Now, with his flying license revoked, his job and manhood demolished, facing a possible prison term or, worse, the murderous wrath of Mary Jean Dobbins and her corporate goons, Tuck has to run for his life toward the only employment opportunity left for him: piloting a Lear jet for a shady medical missionary and a sexy, naturally blond High Priestess on the remotest of Micronesian island hells.

But first he has to get there, encountering spies, cannibals, journalists, and would-be bitch goddesses every step of the way. Traveling with his Filipino transvestite navigator and a fruit bat companion, Roberto, Tuck braves shark-infested waters and a typhoon before reaching the dark heart of a tropical paradise — all before his first day of work.

A delightfully offbeat look at cargo cults, religious zeal, and pyramid schemes, Island of the Sequined Love Nun is Christopher Moore at his hilarious best.

Москва, 1957 год. Издательство "Известия". Приложение к журналу "Дружба народов".

Издательские переплеты. Сохранность хорошая.

В сокровищнице отечественной культуры литературное наследие писательницы Марко Вовчок (1833-1907) занимает почетное место. Свыше пятидесяти лет своей жизни она посвятила литературному творчеству.

В настоящий трехтомник выдающейся украинской писательницы включены вошли избранные произведения.

Том I

Рассказы из украинского быта ("Сестра", "Казачка", "Отец Андрей" и др.)

Рассказы из русского народного быта ("Надежда", "Катерина", "Купеческая дочка" и др.)

Повести ("Институтка", "Червонный король", "Тюленевая баба" и др.)

Том II

Сказки ("Невольница", "Кармелюк", "Совершенная курица" и др.)

Том III

Романы ("Записки причетника", "В глуши")

http://www.phayul.com/news/article.aspx?id=26803

Phayul[Friday, March 05, 2010 12:46]

This is a considerably revised and expanded version of the document, Losar Gift for Rangzen Activists, that I posted on Feb 25, 2009. This version has new information and illustrations. Last year when I was in India I gave a talk and powerpoint presentation based on this essay at a number of Tibetan schools and centers. I am happy to report that everyone was uplifted and energized by the sheer volume of indisputable facts substantiating Tibetan independence. It may have hit a sore spot in Beijing, though, for I was denounced at length on bbs.tibet.cn for this specific presentation. In order to ensure Beijing ’s continued “sensitivity” on the issue of Tibetan independence, a Chinese translation (in traditional as well as simplified script) will be up on lovetibet.ti-da.net, and other sites thanks to freedom activist Rosaceae. A full Tibetan translation will be at www.khabdha.org, and also be published in Tibet Times, all thanks to Gedun Rabsal la. You can also go on rangzen.net for the translations and for downloading print-ready pdf files to make flyers. I would like to thank all organizations that printed and distributed flyers last year, and would encourage them and others to do so again this year on March 10th and other occasions. Feel free to contact me for questions or suggestions.

Winner of 1971 Booker Prize

«V. S. Naipaul tells stories which show us ourselves and the reality we live in. His use of language is as precise as it is beautiful.» – The London Times

«A Tolstoyan spirit…The so-called Third World has produced no more brilliant literary artist.» – John Updike, The New Yorker

«The coolest literary eye and the most lucid prose we have.» – The New York Review

In the Tripoli of 1979, nine-year-old Sulaiman considers the origins of mulberries. They are, he decides, "the best fruit God has created", and imagines young angels conspiring to plant a crop on earth when they hear that Adam and Eve are being sent down there as punishment. This could be simply a charming piece of whimsy invented by a child – but the time and place in which Sulaiman imagines it reconfigures the story into a tale of dissidents (angels) and exiles (humans).

Sulaiman – whose adult self is the narrator of In the Country of Men – is himself the son of a dissident, Faraj. His family lives on Mulberry Street, along with the families of Ustath Rashid (who is arrested prior to the start of the novel for treasonous actions) and Ustath Jafer (a government official). The street was named for an orchard of mulberry trees, but now only one tree remains – in the garden of Ustath Rashid.

Of course, no tale of heaven and earth can be complete without acknowledging the third player. Sulaiman brings him into the story thus: "God knew of course, he's the Allknowing, but He liked the idea and so let the angels carry out their plan." In the novel, the figure of the Almighty is called not God but – close enough – Guide. "The Guide" is Colonel Gadafy who, Godlike, remains unseen but ever-present throughout this haunting debut of growing up in a world of uncertainty.

One of the book's most satisfying and moving aspects is Hisham Matar's decision to make uncertainty manifest itself to Sulaiman through the figure of his mother, Najwa. At nine, Sulaiman is able to remain relatively unaffected when Ustath Rashid, the father of his best friend, is taken away in a white car. He even finds himself somewhat drawn to the figure of Sharief, one of Rashid's abductors, who later takes to watching Sulaiman's own house when Sulaiman's father falls under suspicion of treason. But he cannot be unaffected by his mother, who starts taking copious amounts of "medicine" – sold to her by the baker in brown paper bags from under the counter – each time her husband is away (engaged, as she knows, in subversive activities). Under the effect of alcohol Najwa tells her son things she would never say when sober, revealing how she herself was crushed by authority when, as a 14-year-old girl, she was married off to a man more than twice her age after being seen holding hands with a boy in a coffee shop. What makes Najwa's tale distinctive is the fact that her laments stem not from a lack of care for her husband, but rather from the fact that his anti-state activities put him constantly under threat of discovery by the Guide's men. This is the other side of a dissident's life: the price paid by the family, who must live with fear at all times.

Away from his parents, Sulaiman's world is made up of the neighbourhood boys. But here, too, politics is never far from the reader's thoughts, even if the boys themselves aren't fully aware of how the state impinges on their childhood games. The boys are sons of governments officials or of dissidents – their parents are connected in a web of arrests, favours, confessions and betrayals. And as the neighbourhood games grow darker, Sulaiman learns about betrayal, violence and shame at first hand.

Ultimately, this is a novel most concerned with relationships between people – friends, spouses, comrades and, particularly, parents and their children. Matar movingly charts the ways in which love endures in situations of great repression, but also shows how repression threatens everything, even love, putting relationships under a strain that can be unendurable.

And whatever his subject, Matar writes beautifully. In describing the world of seas and mulberries he is a sensualist; when writing of executions and arrests he is a nuanced observer with a gift for conveying both absurdity and raw emotion. His description of a public execution is an exceptional piece of writing – he is not afraid to bring in details that seem entirely incongruous with the setting, yet serve to give it an air of greater verisimilitude. A man trying to resist being taken to the gallows reminds Sulaiman of "the way a shy woman would resist her friends' invitation to dance, pulling her shoulders up to her ears and waving her index finger nervously in front of her mouth". The scene is by turns absurd, painful and terrifying – and, with consummate confidence, at the crucial moment of the hanging Matar is able to step back from the detailed descriptions and evocative imagery to tell us, simply and chillingly: "Everybody seemed happy."

Es una obra mágica e intrigante, una novela sobre la memoria, el recuerdo, y el olvido. En donde indaga en el dilemma de, unas veces revivir el pasado y otras, sepultarlo.

El tema narrativo se podría explicar en pocas líneas: `Es la historia de amor de una mujer que se enamora de un hombre que no está en su tiempo ni en su espacio y que debe buscar en otro tiempo y en otro espacio, así de simple es la historia`, en palabras del autor.

Sin embargo, muy apesar de lo que el autor afirma, la historia que relata el libro es compleja, y en realidad son dos historias que se unen al final.

Por un lado, tenemos la vida en el siglo XX, de un jubilado director de orquesta, Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara, en la que se cuenta su discurrir profesional y sentimental con una soprano, Inez de Prada.

Por otra parte, el relato de una pareja de una etapa muy diferente, la Prehistoria, con sus problemas para sobrevivir y una gran violencia que les viene encima.

Algunos personajes de esta segunda historia pasan a la primera, y de esta manera se crea una historia muy atractiva para cualquier lector.

Esta obra como en la gran mayoría de los libros de Carlos Fuentes, nos entretiene, pero también nos obliga a pensar. No es una obra que solamente irradie belleza por medio de sus palabras y recursos literarios, sino que desprende ideas sobre los temas más importantes para el ser humano: el amor, la muerte, y la violencia, entre otros.

La novela narra las peripecias de Galcerán de Born, caballero de la orden del Hospital de San Juan, enviado por el papa Juan XXII a una misión secreta: desvelar la posible implicación de los caballeros templarios, clandestinos tras la reciente disolución de su orden, en el asesinato del papa Clemente V y el rey Felipe IV de Francia. Tras este encargo, se esconde en realidad la intención de encontrar los lugares secretos, situados a lo largo del Camino, donde los templarios albergar enormes riquezas y que Galcerán de Born debe encontrar.

Against the backdrop of the Korean War, a young man faces life’s unimagined chances and terrifying consequences.

It is 1951 in America, the second year of the Korean War. A studious, law-abiding, intense youngster from Newark, New Jersey, Marcus Messner, is beginning his sophomore year on the pastoral, conservative campus of Ohio’s Winesburg College. And why is he there and not at the local college in Newark where he originally enrolled? Because his father, the sturdy, hard-working neighborhood butcher, seems to have gone mad — mad with fear and apprehension of the dangers of adult life, the dangers of the world, the dangers he sees in every corner for his beloved boy.

As the long-suffering, desperately harassed mother tells her son, the father’s fear arises from love and pride. Perhaps, but it produces too much anger in Marcus for him to endure living with his parents any longer. He leaves them and, far from Newark, in the midwestern college, has to find his way amid the customs and constrictions of another American world.

In der Strafkolonie ist eine Erzählung von Franz Kafka, die im Oktober 1914 entstand und 1919 veröffentlicht wurde. Einem Forschungsreisenden wird das Rechtssystem einer Strafkolonie vorgeführt. Es besteht darin, dass jeder Angeklagte unabhängig von seiner Schuld von einem Apparat in minutiösem Ablauf stundenlang gefoltert und dann getötet wird. Den Apparat beschreibt Kafka als überdimensionalen Parlograph in der Funktionsweise eines Phonographen mit vibrierender Metallplatte und Nadel. Dieser Apparat ist der Hauptgegenstand der Erzählung, er repräsentiert die Einheit von Schrift und Tod.

Die Erzählung entstand im Oktober 1914 während eines Arbeitsurlaubs, als Kafka eigentlich an dem Roman Der Process arbeiten wollte. Im November 1916 liest sie Kafka in München im Rahmen einer literarischen Vortragsreihe vor kleinem Publikum, auch Rilke ist anwesend. Angeblich fallen mehrere Zuhörerinnen angesichts der vorgetragenen Grausamkeiten in Ohnmacht. Die Resonanz ist allgemein negativ. Ein Zeitungskritiker nennt Kafka einen Lüstling des Entsetzens. Kafka plante ursprünglich eine Veröffentlichung der Strafkolonie zusammen mit Das Urteil und Die Verwandlung unter dem Titel "Strafen". Sein Verlag hielt jedoch eine solche Thematik für unverkäuflich. Durch verschiedene Verzögerungen aufgrund der Skepsis seines Verlages erfolgte die Veröffentlichung als Einzelerzählung bei dem Verleger Kurt Wolff erst 1919. Der junge Journalist Kurt Tucholsky war sehr berührt von der Erzählung und schreibt dazu: "Seit dem Michael Kohlhaas ist keine deutsche Novelle geschrieben worden, die mit bewußter Kraft jede innere Anteilnahme anscheinend unterdrückt und doch so durchblutet ist von ihrem Autor."

An account of the senseless murder of a Kansas farm family and the search for the killers.

Of the many pitfalls lurking for the historical novel, the most dangerous is history itself. The best writers either warp it for selfish purposes (Gore Vidal), dig for the untold, interior history (Toni Morrison), or both (Jeannette Winterson). Allende, four years after Ines of My Soul, returns with another historical novel, one that soaks up so much past life that there is nowhere left to go but where countless have been. Opening in Saint Domingue a few years before the Haitian revolution would tear it apart, the story has at its center Zarité, a mulatto whose extraordinary life takes her from that blood-soaked island to dangerous and freewheeling New Orleans; from rural slave life to urban Creole life and a different kind of cruelty and adventure. Yet even in the new city, Zarité can't quite free herself from the island, and the people alive and dead that have followed her.Zarité's passages are striking. More than merely lyrical, they map around rhythms and spirits, making her as much conduit as storyteller. One wishes there was more of her because, unlike Allende, Zarité is under no mission to show us how much she knows. Every instance, a brush with a faith healer, for example, is an opportunity for Allende to showcase what she has learned about voodoo, medicine, European and Caribbean history, Napoleon, the Jamaican slave Boukman, and the legendary Mackandal, a runaway slave and master of black magic who has appeared in several novels including Alejo Carpentier's Kingdom of This World . The effect of such display of research is a novel that is as inert as a history textbook, much like, oddly enough John Updike's Terrorist, a novel that revealed an author who studied a voluminous amount of facts without learning a single truth.Slavery as a subject in fiction is still a high-wire act, but one expects more from Allende. Too often she forgoes the restraint and empathy essential for such a topic and plunges into a heavy breathing prose reminiscent of the Falconhurst novels of the 1970s, but without the guilty pleasure of sexual taboo. Sex, overwritten and undercooked, is where opulent hips slithered like a knowing snake until she impaled herself upon his rock-hard member with a deep sigh of joy. Even the references to African spirituality seem skin-deep and perfunctory, revealing yet another writer too entranced by the myth of black cultural primitivism to see the brainpower behind it. With Ines of My Soul one had the sense that the author was trying to structure a story around facts, dates, incidents, and real people. Here it is the reverse, resulting in a book one second-guesses at every turn. Of course there will be a forbidden love. Betrayal. Incest. Heartbreak. Insanity. Violence. And in the end the island in the novel's title remains legend. Fittingly so, because to reach the Island Beneath the Sea, one would have had to dive deep. Allende barely skims the surface.Marlon James's recent novel, The Book of Night Women was a finalist for the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award.

Na przełomie wieków, w odległym zakątku Indii, angielski urzędnik służby cywilnej poznaje młodą hinduskę podczas wyjątkowo ciężkiej ulewy. Dziewięć miesięcy później, rodzi się dziecko. Jego przyszłość jawi się niepewnie. Jasny kolor skóry Prana Natha jest odbierany jako symbol szlachetnego urodzenia, jednakże, gdy jego prawdziwe pochodzenie wychodzi na jaw zostaje wyrzucony z domu ojca. Sprzedany parze eunuchów, trafia do zaściankowego Pendżabu i staje się przynętą w dynastycznych intrygach rozwiązłego dworu hinduskiego. W końcu ucieka do Bombaju, gdzie odnajduje się w roli Pretty Boba (Ślicznego Boba), księcia dzielnicy czerwonych świateł. Gdy przypadkiem poznaje pewnego pijanego Anglika, w jego życiu dochodzi do niezwykłego przełomu. IMPRESJONISTA jest historią chłopca, którego życie zbudowano na kłamstwie. Autor stworzył niezwykle sugestywną opowieść, w sposób mistrzowski operując wyobraźnią. W swej pierwszej powieści przedstawił bohatera, jakiego można by długo szukać we współczesnej prozie. (Za tę pozycję, jej trzydziestoletni autor otrzymał już rekordową kwotę 1,8 miliona dolarów.)

Inside Mr Enderby is a the first volume in the four-book Enderby series of comic novels by the British author Anthony Burgess.

The book was first published in 1963 in London by William Heinemann under the pseudonym Joseph Kell. The series began in 1963 with the publication of this book, and concluded in 1984 with Enderby's Dark Lady, or No End to Enderby (after a ten year break following the publication of the third novel in the series, The Clockwork Testament, or Enderby's End).

The story opens on a note of pure fantasy, showing schoolchildren from the future taking a field trip through time to see the dyspeptic poet Francis Xavier Enderby while he is asleep. Enderby, a lapsed Catholic in his mid-40's, lives alone in Brighton as a 'professional' poet – his income being interest from investments left to him by his stepmother.

Enderby composes his poetry whilst seated on the toilet. His bathtub, which serves as a filing cabinet, is almost full of the mingled paper and food scraps that represent his efforts. Although he is recognised as a minor poet with several published works (and is even awarded a small prize, the 'Goodby Gold Medal', which he refuses), he has yet to be anthologised.

He is persuaded to leave his lonely but poetically fruitful bachelor life by the editor of a woman's magazine, Vesta Bainbridge, after he accidentally sends her a love poem instead of a complaint about a recipe in her magazine. The marriage, which soon ends, costs Enderby dearly, alienating him from his muse and depriving him of his financial independence.

Months pass, and Enderby is able to write only one more poem. After spending what remains of his capital, he attempts suicide with an overdose of aspirin, experiencing disgusting (and rather funny) visions of his stepmother as he nears death. His cries of horror bring help, and he regains consciousness in a mental institution, where the doctors persuade him to renounce his old, "immature" poetry-writing self. Rechristened "Piggy Hogg", he looks forward contentedly to a new career as a bartender.

Все идет как всегда, и ты ничего особенно не ждешь от этого лета. Ты торопливо шагаешь, скажем, в библиотеку, и вдруг застываешь на месте с прижатым к уху мобильным… И вот ты уже в поезде, мчишься за тысячу километров искать похищенного человека.

Роман Бориса Прокудина «In сайт / Out сайт, или Любовь из интернета» — молодежный детектив или лирическое путешествие по городам, где с улиц еще не ушла поэзия, где руки ищут руки, а тела содрогаются от… смеха.

Wydane po raz pierwszy w 1953 roku w Londynie i wznawiane wielokrotnie wspomnienia Gustawa Herlinga – Grudzińskiego z sowieckiego łagru w Jercewie pod Archagielskiem ukazują się w serii Lekcja Literatury poprzedzone niezwykle interesującą rozmową, jaką z autorem książki przeprowadził znakomity znawca jego twórczości, Włodzimierz Bolecki. Książka Gustawa Herlinga – Grudzińskiego obok nieprzeciętnych walorów literackich jest przede wszystkim – co podkreśla w rozmowie Autor – dokumentalną relacją ofiary, kronikarza i badacza instytucji i mechanizmów sowieckiego "innego świata" zbudowanego na utopijnej, zbrodniczej ideologii lewicowo – totalitarnej.

MIHAILS BULGAKOVS

JAUNĀ ĀRSTA PIEZĪMES

ĒĢIPTES TUMSĪBA

Dupont University—the Olympian halls of learning housing the cream of America's youth, the roseate Gothic spires and manicured lawns suffused with tradition . . . Or so it appears to beautiful, brilliant Charlotte Simmons, a freshman from Sparta, North Carolina (pop. 900), who has come here on full scholarship in full flight from her tobacco-chewing, beer-swilling high school classmates. But Charlotte soon learns, to her mounting dismay, that Dupont is closer in spirit to Sodom than to Athens, and that sex, crank, and kegs trump academic achievement every time.

As Charlotte encounters Dupont's privileged elite—her roommate, Beverly, a fleshy, Groton-educated Brahmin in lusty pursuit of lacrosse players; Jayjay Johanssen, the only white starting player on Dupont's godlike basketball team, whose position is threatened by a hotshot black freshman from the projects; the Young Turk of Saint Ray fraternity, Hoyt Thorpe, whose heady sense of entitlement and social domination is clinched by his accidental brawl with a bodyguard for the governor of California; and Adam Geller, one of the Millennium Mutants who run the university's "independent" newspaper and who consider themselves the last bastion of intellectual endeavor on the sex-crazed, jock-obsessed campus—she gains a new, revelatory sense of her own power, that of her difference and of her very innocence, but little does she realize that she will act as a catalyst in all of their lives.

Знаменитый англичанин А. А. Милн (1882–1956), создатель Винни-Пуха, известный «всем, всем, всем» детям, предстает на этот раз как автор замечательных рассказов, которые наверняка заинтересуют взрослых читателей. Мастерски построенные сюжеты, необычные персонажи, весьма неожиданные повороты событий, непредсказуемые финалы и, разумеется, присущая этому автору ирония, — таковы характерные особенности собранных в этой книге историй.

Fuentes ha reunido en Inquieta compañía seis relatos propios del género fantástico. El novelista mexicano ha bebido en fuentes originales y adaptaciones cinematográficas, transmutando con sabiduría el misterio, el terror o la angustia.

Muertos vivientes, ángeles y vampiros deambulan por paisajes mexicanos acompañados de otros personajes definidos de forma realista, diseñados con el cuidadoso buril de los clásicos modernos de la literatura hispanoamericana. Tal vez las vivencias londinenses de Fuentes le hayan conducido a esta mítica popular universal en la que lo mexicano no resulta extraño, y que le permite traducir en sombras y monstruos el reverso de la claridad expositiva de una obra amplia y luminosa, que va desde La región más transparente (1958) a El naranjo (1993).

Los relatos que aquí nos ofrece resultan inquietantes. En `El amante del teatro` se alude a la ocupación de Iraq y pese a que el protagonista, Lorenzo O`Shea, se hace pasar por irlandés, el tema va más allá del aparente voyeurismo: la mujer que observa desde su ventana es también la actriz que le obsesiona, como Ofelia, en una muda representación de Hamlet. Su silencio, también en la escena, nos conduce, como en otros relatos, a una deliberada ambigüedad final y al significado del espectador teatral, próximo al mirón.

Si el primer relato se sitúa en el Soho londinense, el segundo, `La gata de mi madre`, nos lleva ya a México. Iniciado como un cuadro de costumbres con el humor negro que descubriremos también en otros: la descripción de la muerte de la cruel Doña Emérita y su gata (gata significa también mujer de servicio), la mansión donde viven y sus macabros secretos se convierten en el núcleo del relato. `La buena compañía` se inicia en París, pero el protagonista se traslada a México, donde convivirá con dos extrañas tías en una no menos extraña mansión poblada de crueles fantasmas. Descubre su propia muerte, siendo niño, y Serena y Zenaida (las tías, también difuntas) cierran el relato de manera brillante, con un diálogo en el sótano donde se encuentran los féretros.

Más explícito que Rulfo, el culto a la muerte, tópico mexicano, está presente no sólo en éste, sino en otros cuentos. El germen de `Calixta Brand` parece derivar de El retrato de Dorian Gray. Una vez más, la mansión en la que transcurre se convierte en el eje principal. Calixta escribe, el protagonista es un ejecutivo. El paso del amor al odio viene acompañado de la invalidez de la esposa. Pero el cuadro que se modifica, las fotografías que al borrarse presagian la muerte, constituirán los misterios por los que caminaremos sabiamente conducidos. El árabe de un oscuro cuadro va convirtiéndose en el retrato de un médico-jardinero que cuidará de la mujer, hasta convertirse en ángel y desaparecer volando, llevándosela. Fuentes convierte lo inverosímil en simbólico.

También `La bella durmiente` se sitúa en México, aunque los orígenes y el significado del relato nos lleven a la Alemania nazi. La acción se inicia en Chihuahua, en los años de Pancho Villa, si bien el protagonista se sitúa en la actualidad. Natural de Enden, Baur mantiene su racista espíritu germánico, aunque su cuerpo se haya convertido en una ruina. Médico de profesión, es llamado a visitar a su mujer, con la que se casó a los 55 años. La visita se convertirá en una pesadilla que retrotraerá a los personajes a los tiempos de los campos de exterminio. No podía faltar `Vlad`, una historia de vampiros. Eloy Zurinaga pide a su colaborador, el licenciado Navarro, que busque una mansión para un amigo que ha de llegar a México con su hija. La vida matrimonial de Navarro había discurrido plácidamente. Su esposabuscará la casa apropiada, en la que hará construir un túnel y tapiar todas las ventanas. Vlad, el conde centroeuropeo, no será otro que Drácula.

Carlos Fuentes ha logrado, sirviéndose de materiales tópicos populares, construir relatos que trascienden la anécdota. No es casual que estas historias de misterio, de horror y muerte se hayan convertido en mitos universales. Fuentes los ha mexicanizado. Ha descrito de manera ejemplar y sobria paisajes de su patria y se ha servido de mecanismos elementales para convertirlos en historias cotidianas y confeccionar una literatura brillante y divertida, irracional, de amplio espectro, de gran nivel, como no podía ser menos.

Olivia Uriarte acaba de ser abandonada por su marido. Ha sido reemplazada por una mujer más joven y además está al borde de la ruina.

¿Qué puede hacer? Planear al milímetro su propio asesinato.

¿Cómo? Invitando a todos sus enemigos a un lujoso velero en el Mediterráneo.

Sin embargo… Será su hermana Ágata quien reconstruirá los últimos minutos de la vida de Olivia y buceará en los posibles motivos de cada invitado para asesinarla.

Esto, cambiará su propia vida y la de su hermana.

Just three months ago Maddy O"Hara had been the freelance photojournalist to call for coverage of an international crisis. But now she's stuck at the far edge of the Chicago flyover, tapping in to what maternal instincts she can summon to raise her late sister's 8 year old daughter. She's also working for a small-time television station that wants warm-and-fuzzy interest pieces, Maddy, on the other hand, wants a story.

And then she finds it-a photo of a deadman in Amish clothing hanging from a tree. Her instincts tell her there's a lot more to this than anyone wants to let on

Это книга о власти. Рим… Республика народа и Сената, императорский Рим – матрица современного мира. Это голографическое изображение мира.

This facsimile of Melville's historical novel appears in a paperback classroom edition, with a commentary by Hennig Cohen. "Israel Potter" is the story of a neglected hero of the American Revolution.

Un médiocre et plutôt antipathique paléontologue coule des jours à peu près tranquilles même si bien peu gratifiants dans l'institut qui l'emploie. Vie sans histoires et sans excès. Mais, à la faveur d'une promotion inespérée on s'aperçoit qu'il a égaré le diplôme de son baccalauréat. Catastrophe! Le voici rapidement mis au ban d'une société toute entière dédiée à l'archivisme

, à l'archivisme comme moteur, justification et fin de toute action. Un

monde fou avec sa bureaucratie, ses profiteurs et ses parias, un

monde dont un dérèglement mystérieux a changé les bases et tout bouleversé, jusqu'à la sexualité.

In 1938, Francis Phelan, a murderer, is reduced to flop houses and hobo jungles and returns to a depressed Albany, where-as a gravedigger-he shuffles his rag tag way to survival.

From the bestselling author of Pompeii comes the first volume in an exciting new trilogy set in ancient Rome – an imaginary biography of Cicero, Rome 's first and greatest politician. Of all the great figures of Roman times, none was more fascinating or attractive than Marcus Cicero. A brilliant lawyer and orator, a famous wit and philosopher, he launched himself at the age of twenty-seven into the violent, treacherous world of Roman politics. Cicero was determined to attain imperium, the supreme power in the state. Beside him at all times in his struggle to reach the top – the office of Consul – was his confidential secretary, Tiro. An accomplished man, Tiro was the inventor of shorthand and the author of numerous books, including a famous life of Cicero, unfortunately lost in the Dark Ages. In Imperium, Robert Harris recreates Tiro's vanished masterpiece, recounting in vivid detail the story of Cicero 's rise to power, from radical young lawyer to first citizen of Rome, competing with men such as Pompey, Caesar, Crassus and Cato. Harris's Cicero is an immensely sympathetic figure. In his introduction to this imaginary memoir, Tato states: “Cicero was unique in the history of the Roman republic in that he pursued supreme power with no resources to help him apart from his own talent… All he had was his voice, and by sheer effort of will, he turned it into the most famous voice in the world.”

Ever since Walter Scott wrote Waverley, the dominant tradition of the historical novel has been one of obsessive realism. Why this should be so is no great mystery. By and large, only novelists who take drug culture as their theme, or perhaps a poverty-stricken upbringing in Ireland, feel under greater pressure to demonstrate the authenticity of their material. This, for historical novelists who do not push their settings too far back in time, can often prove a positive inspiration. Robert Harris, writing about Bletchley Park in his thriller Enigma, was evoking a period when the fashion in English fiction had itself been broadly realist. Not only did this provide him with a ready supply of juicy period detail, it also justified the recycling of it. A genre, after all, is as much a product of its time as anything else. A novel set in 1940s England has every right to be as realist as it likes.

But what about fiction set in the more distant past? We have plenty of literature from the pre-modern era, but it is often of limited value to writers working in the realist tradition. Indeed, in most periods of ancient history, there isn't much of a reality to be realist about. The most surefire solution to this problem, because also the most brutal, is simply to embrace anachronism – what might be termed the Up Pompeii approach. The modern exemplar of this is Lindsey Davis, and her hugely entertaining Falco novels. Flavian Rome may provide the backdrop, but there is never any doubt that Falco himself, for all his togas, is a thoroughly modern private eye. Indeed, since the genre of the detective novel is a modern one, it is hard to imagine what a credibly ancient private eye might be like.

Harris, whose first three novels were set in the 20th century, played things similarly safe when he too moved back in time to Flavian Rome. Pompeii, a thriller about the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, was essentially a blending of Chinatown and any number of disaster movies. As a page-turner, it was predictably gripping; but as a recreation of the 1st century AD it had inevitable limitations. How, after all, was a contemporary genre supposed to offer an authentic vision of a period to which it was profoundly alien? This is a question to which Harris has evidently been giving much thought; and in his new novel, Imperium, he presents us with his solution.

The setting, like that of Pompeii, is classical. A century and a half before the eruption of Vesuvius, the Roman world was administered not by an emperor but as a republic. Rival players competed for the fruits of power: the "imperium" of the title. Since Rome was by this stage the undisputed mistress of the Mediterranean, the potential pickings were mouth-watering. As ambitions turned ever more carnivorous, so politics took on an increasingly lurid and epic hue. Two thousand years on, those who emerged from the power struggle still cast a lengthy shadow over the imagination: Pompey, Crassus, Caesar, Cicero.

Rich material for any writer – but there is a further reason, I suspect, why Harris has chosen the mid-1st century BC as his setting. It is, by a wide margin, the best documented period in ancient history, with what is, for the classicist, a whole wealth of evidence: orations, memoirs, even personal correspondence. Harris, like an excavator restoring a shattered mosaic, uses material native to the Romans whenever he can, fitting the fragments of real speeches and letters into the patterns of his own reconstruction. The result is an experiment as bold as it is unexpected: a novel that draws so scrupulously on the Roman source material that it forgoes much of what are traditionally regarded as the prime features of the thriller. Although there is detective work, there is no detective; although there are twists and turns, there is rarely any artificial ratcheting up of suspense. Instead, Harris trusts to the rhythm of the republic's politics to generate his trademark readability, a rhythm that the Romans themselves enshrined in their literature as something relentlessly exciting: in short, a thriller. Genres ancient and modern have rarely been so skilfully synthesised.

Like I Claudius, a novel that similarly exploited the resources of classical literature, Imperium takes the form of a memoir. Tiro, the shy and bookish slave who writes it, was celebrated in ancient times as the inventor of shorthand: Harris has him transcribing key conversations and speeches with a flawless accuracy, and even, on one occasion, when he is secreted into a conference, serving as a human bug. But that is not the limit of Tiro's value as a literary device, for he was also the slave of the most prolific author in ancient history, the Roman who more than any other reveals himself to us in all his manifold contradictions, his brilliance and his blindness, his ambition and his vulnerability: Marcus Tullius Cicero.

Tiro's master, unlike the aristocrats who customarily secured power in the republic, was a parvenu, with no family tradition of imperium to draw upon, and few other resources save for the spell-binding power of his oratory. It was this that made his rise to the consulship, the supreme office in Rome, all the more extraordinary; and it is the story of this rise that Harris uses to structure his narrative. Cicero, who was as vain as he was insecure, would have been delighted by the result. Once, in a letter to a friend, he anxiously wondered what people would be saying about him in a thousand years' time. To know, more than two millennia after his death, that he is the hero of such a gripping and accomplished novel must be giving his shade the most exquisite delight.

En Invisible, Auster nos cuenta la historia de Adam Walker, un joven poeta ilusionado y ávido de literatura que cuenta con muchas más cosas por hacer de las que ha hecho. Estamos en 1967 y nuestro protagonista estudia en la Universidad de Columbia (al igual que lo hizo el propio autor), está en contra de la guerra de Vietnam y según dicen todos los que lo conocen es guapísimo. En una fiesta de estudiantes conocerá a una seductora pareja de franceses. Lo primero que llama su atención es el nombre de él, Rudolf Born, ya que le recuerda a Bertrand de Born, el poeta que en uno de los cantos de Dante lleva su propia cabeza en la mano.

A partir de ahí, esta pareja se encargará poco a poco de que Adam vaya cayendo en sus redes, a través de un extraño juego de seducción. Hasta que Rudolf Born, que está en Columbia como profesor invitado, le propone que dirija una revista literaria que él mismo se encargará de financiar. Cuando esto ocurre Adam ya sospecha del profesor francés, le parece peligroso y hombre de muchas caras pero la oferta es tentadora. Tampoco podrá resistirse días después, cuando Rudolf se marche a París repentinamente, a las insinuaciones de Margot.

Best known today for his exciting blockbuster novels, Sidney Sheldon is the author of The Best Laid Plans, Nothing Lasts Forever, The Stars Shine Down, The Doomsday Conspiracy, Memories of Midnight, The Sands of Time, Windmills of the Gods, If Tomorrow Comes, Master of the Game, Rage of Angels, Bloodline, A Stranger in the Mirror, and The Other Side of Midnight. Almost all have been number-one international bestsellers. His first book, The Naked Face, was acclaimed by the New York Times as "the best first mystery of the year" and received an Edgar Award. Most of his novels have become major feature films or TV miniseries, and there are more than 275 million copies of his books in print throughout the world. Before he became a novelist, Sidney Sheldon had already won a Tony Award for Broadway's Redhead and an Academy Award for The Bachelor and the Bobby Soxer. He has written the screenplays for twenty-three motion pictures, including Easter Parade (with Judy Garland) and Annie Get Your Gun. In addition, he penned six other Broadway hits and created three long-running television series, including Hart to Hart and I Dream of Jeannie, which he also produced. A writer who has delighted millions with his award-winning plays, movies, novels, and television shows, Sidney Sheldon reigns as one of the most popular storytellers of all time.

From preface: In naming this second part of The Forsyte Chronicles "A Modern Comedy" the word Comedy is stretched, perhaps as far as the word Saga was stretched to cover the first part. And yet, what but a comedic view can be taken, what but comedic significance gleaned, of so restive a period as that in which we have lived since the war? An Age which knows not what it wants, yet is intensely preoccupied with getting it, must evoke a smile, if rather a sad one.

From preface: In naming this second part of The Forsyte Chronicles "A Modern Comedy" the word Comedy is stretched, perhaps as far as the word Saga was stretched to cover the first part. And yet, what but a comedic view can be taken, what but comedic significance gleaned, of so restive a period as that in which we have lived since the war? An Age which knows not what it wants, yet is intensely preoccupied with getting it, must evoke a smile, if rather a sad one.

Zbiór opowiadań o najintymniejszych zakamarkach ludzkiej duszy, ukazujący zaskakujące powiązania między biologią czy chemią a reakcjami psychologicznymi, emocjonalnymi człowieka. Jak ważny jest dla małżeństwa jest tlenek azotu? Jakie są przyczyny uczucia lekkości, które ogarnia człowieka po pierwszej spowiedzi? Jaki wpływ na limfocyt T4 może mieć miłość?

W Intymnej teorii względności Janusz L. Wiśniewski wyjaśnia te i inne zależności, łącząc w sposób nieco postmodernistyczny język literacki z kodem naukowym.

Intymna teoria względności to także opowieść o różnych rodzajach miłości i śmierci, nadziei i rozpaczy zainspirowana autentycznymi ludzkimi losami. Ukazuje portrety niespełnionych kochanków, bezradnych rodziców, niekochanych dzieci, samotnych ojców. Postęp technologiczny i naukowy w niczym nie zmienia ich dramatów.

Chosen by Glamour magazine as a Woman of the Year in 2008, Nujood of Yemen has become an international hero for her astonishingly brave resistance to child marriage. Sold off by her impoverished family at the age of 10, continually raped by her husband before she even reached puberty, Nujood found the courage to run away, and with the help of an activist lawyer, sympathetic judges, and the international press, she divorced her husband and returned home. Her clear, first-person narrative, translated from the French and written with Minoui, is spellbinding: the horror of her parents’ betrayal and her mother-in-law’s connivance, the “grown-ups” who send the child from classroom and toys to nightmare abuse. She never denies the poverty that drives her parents and oppresses her brothers, even as she reveals their cruelty. Unlike her passive mother, she is an activist, thrilled to return to school, determined to save others, including her little sister. True to the child’s viewpoint, the “grown-up” cruelty is devastating. Readers will find it incredible that such unbelievable abuse and such courageous resistance are happening now.

Trödler, ein junger Mäuserich, verläßt seine angestammte Hecke. Auf abenteuerlichen Wegen gelangt er zum »Haus«, in dem bereits eine bunte Mäusegesellschaft lebt - auf Kosten der »Nacktlinge«, der Menschen, deren Speisekammer sie nur zu gern bestiehlt. Um aber so recht aus dem vollen schöpfen zu können, beschließen die Tiere, unter denen Trödler eine immer bedeutendere Rolle spielt, die »Nacktlinge« zu vertreiben ...

»Ein wunderbares, witziges Buch. Lesen Sie es, und Sie werden niemals mehr eine Mausefalle kaufen.« William Horwood

Buch

Im Leben einer jeden Maus kommt die Zeit, in der sie ihren bisherigen Lebensraum aufgibt und weiterzieht. So verläßt auch Trödler die Hecke, die ihm bisher als Unterschlupf gedient hat, und begibt sich auf den Marsch in ein fernes Land, das unter dem Namen »Das Haus« bekannt ist. Er kommt in eine aufregende neue Welt. Kriegerische Stämme wohnen in ihr: die Stinkmorcheln des Kellers, die Wilden in der Küche, die Buchfresser in der Bibliothek, die Totenköpfe, die Unsichtbaren und die 13-K-Gang. Des langen Streits untereinander müde, beschließen die Tiere, sich gemeinsam gegen die schlimmste Pest des Hauses zu wenden - die Menschen. Die Vertreibung der »Nacktlinge« und ihrer Satelliten, der Katzen und eines Hundes, will indes nicht so recht gelingen und würde sogar scheitern, wenn die Mäuse nicht so findig wären .

Autor

Garry Kilworth, 1941 geboren, verließ als Fünfzehnjähriger die Schule und trat in den Dienst der britischen Luftwaffe, der ihn in viele Länder der Welt führte. 1974 gewann er einen Preis für die beste Kurzgeschichte. Er schied aus dem Dienst, studierte in London englische Literatur und machte das Schreiben zu seinem Beruf. Seither hat er Romane, Kinderbücher und zahlreiche Kurzgeschichten veröffentlicht. Er ist verheiratet und hat zwei Kinder. Mit seiner Familie lebt er in Hongkong.

Aus dem Englischen von Susanne Goga-Klinkenberg

Faktem jest, że cywilizacja mrówek jest niedościgniona, jeśli chodzi o budowę i organizację miast. Nie wszyscy zdajemy sobie jednak sprawę, jak potężne królestwa zdołała przez wieki stworzyć, jak zadziwiające technologie opracować i jaką sztukę wojenną posiąść. Bernard Werber swoją bestsellerową powieścią otwiera przed nami drzwi do alternatywnej rzeczywistości pełnej niezgłębionych do tej pory tajemnic i zagadek. To zaproszenie do świata, po którym co dzień stąpamy, a którego zdajemy się nie dostrzegać. Pozwala spojrzeć na człowieka spojrzeniem nie-człowieczym, z perspektywy stworzeń dużo mniejszych. Bo kim my, ludzie, jesteśmy dla mrówek? Siostrzeniec słynnego entomologa Jonatan Wells dostaje w spadku po wuju kamienicę oraz pisemny zakaz schodzenia do piwnicy. Choć bardzo się cieszy z przeprowadzki, z dnia na dzień coraz bardziej intryguje go zagadkowa prośba zmarłego. Jakie sekrety kryć może zamknięta piwnica? Werber w mistrzowski sposób wplótł w fabułę swojej powieści fascynujące teorie naukowe oraz rozważania filozoficzne na temat ludzkich społeczeństw. Nic dziwnego, że czytelnicy na całym świecie oszaleli na punkcie jego książek.

Michael Pinson – jeden z tanatonautów – w wyniku katastrofy samolotowej zmienia się w… anioła stróża. Musi odtąd zajmować się trzema „klientami”, jednocześniej starając się zgłębić zagadkę istot i rajów pozaziemskich. Jego nowe zajęcie to praca na pełny etat.

Miejsce zatrudnienia: Raj. Gdy mija pierwszy szok, Michael uświadamia sobie, że bycie aniołem to nie tylko przyjemności, tym bardziej że odpowiada za trzech dość upartych śmiertelników: Venus, amerykańską aktorkę cierpiącą na uporczywe migreny; Igora, rosyjskiego żołnierza i króla pokera; oraz wiecznie zatrwożonego Jacques’a. Co więcej, jego mentor, Edmond Wells, wyraźnie daje mu do zrozumienia, że jego anielskim obowiązkiem jest spełnianie wszystkich, nawet najbardziej bezsensownych życzeń podopiecznych.

Bestseller 1993 roku, tłumaczony na całym świecie. Imperium to bodaj najwybitniejsze dokonanie indywidualnego, pełnego inwencji stylu reportażu Kapuścińskiego, niemożliwego do naśladowania, a będącego niedościgłym wzorem dla największych dziennikarzy dzisiejszych czasów. Uchwycony na gorąco, w pełnych znaczeń przybliżeniach i detalu proces rozpadu Związku Radzieckiego – ostatniego imperium kończącego się stulecia

Рассказ вошёл в сборники:

The Golden Apples of the Sun (Золотые яблоки солнца)

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

Рассказ вошёл в сборники:

I Sing the Body Electric (Электрическое тело пою)

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

Рассказ вошёл в сборники:

A Medicine For Melancholy (Лекарство от меланхолии)

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

Рассказ вошёл в сборники:

One More for the Road (На посошок)

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

Рассказ вошёл в сборники:

The Golden Apples of the Sun (Золотые яблоки солнца)

The Vintage Bradbury (Классический Брэдбери)

S Is For Space (К значит Космос)

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

A compelling novel of desire, secrecy, and sexual identity, In One Person is a story of unfulfilled love—tormented, funny, and affecting—and an impassioned embrace of our sexual differences. Billy, the bisexual narrator and main character of In One Person, tells the tragicomic story (lasting more than half a century) of his life as a “sexual suspect,” a phrase first used by John Irving in 1978 in his landmark novel of “terminal cases,” The World According to Garp.

His most political novel since The Cider House Rules and A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving’s In One Person is a poignant tribute to Billy’s friends and lovers—a theatrical cast of characters who defy category and convention. Not least, In One Person is an intimate and unforgettable portrait of the solitariness of a bisexual man who is dedicated to making himself “worthwhile.”

* * *

“This tender exploration of nascent desire, of love and loss, manages to be sweeping, brilliant, political, provocative, tragic, and funny—it is precisely the kind of astonishing alchemy we associate with a John Irving novel. The unfolding of the AIDS epidemic in the United States in the ’80s was the defining moment for me as a physician. With my patients’ deaths, almost always occurring in the prime of life, I would find myself cataloging the other losses—namely, what these people might have offered society had they lived the full measure of their days: their art, their literature, the children they might have raised. In One Person is the novel that for me will define that era. A profound truth is arrived at in these pages. It is Irving at his most daring, at his most ambitious. It is America and American writing, both at their very best.”

— ABRAHAM VERGHESE

“In One Person is a novel that makes you proud to be human. It is a book that not only accepts but also loves our differences. From the beginning of his career, Irving has always cherished our peculiarities—in a fierce, not a saccharine, way. Now he has extended his sympathies—and ours—still further into areas that even the misfits eschew. Anthropologists say that the interstitial—whatever lies between two familiar opposites—is usually declared either taboo or sacred. John Irving in this magnificent novel—his best and most passionate since The World According to Garp—has sacralized what lies between polarizing genders and orientations. And have I mentioned it is also a gripping page-turner and a beautifully constructed work of art?”

— EDMUND WHITE

"Illywhacker is such an astonishing novel, of such major proportions, that before saying anything else one must record gratitude for its existence." – Geoffrey Dutton, Bulletin

"The finest and funniest picaresque novel yet written in Australia" – Peter Pierce National Times

"A great tottering tower of a novel which stands up astonishingly against all the odds." – Victoria Glendinning, London Sunday Times

"It is impossible to convey in a review the cumulative brilliance and accelerating hilarity of the prose." – Nicholas Spice, London Review of Books

"Awesome breadth, ambition and downright narrative joy…Illywhacker is a triumph." – Curt Suplee, Washington Post

"A sprawling, inventive and deeply absorbing saga…It is also one of the funniest, most vividly depicted, most entertainingly devious and bitterly insightful pieces of fiction to be published in recent years." – Alida Becker Newsday

Carey can spin a yarn with the best of them… Illywhacker is a big, garrulous, funny novel… If you haven't been to Australia, read Illywhacker. It will give you the feel of it like nothing else I know." – The New York Times Book ReviewIn Australian slang, an illywhacker is a country fair con man, an unprincipled seller of fake diamonds and dubious tonics. And Herbert Badgery, the 139-year-old narrator of Peter Carey's uproarious novel, may be the king of them all. Vagabond and charlatan, aviator and car salesman, seducer and patriarch, Badgery is a walking embodiment of the Australian national character – especially of its proclivity for tall stories and barefaced lies.As Carey follows this charming scoundrel across a continent and a century, he creates a crazy quilt of outlandish encounters, with characters that include a genteel dowager who fends off madness with an electric belt and a ravishing young girl with a dangerous fondness for rooftop trysts. Boldly inventive, irresistibly odd, Illywhacker is further proof that Peter Carey is one of the most enchanting writers at work in any hemisphere."A book of awesome breadth, ambition, and downright narrative joy… Illywhacker is a triumph." – Washington Post Book World

A vederlo da lontano, Belcolle sembra un paese da cartolina, una barca arenata su una montagna verde, e sullo sfondo il mare di Cefalù. Ma da vicino è ben altra cosa: d’inverno è gelido e nevoso, e per tutto l’anno è abitato da persone taciturne e diffidenti, «genti di montagna». Son cinque anni che il maresciallo Antonio Brancato, «un omo preciso al quale piaciva che tutto stava al posto indovi doviva stare», è a capo della Stazione dei Carabinieri di questo isolato paesino siciliano. Cinque anni non facili, ma durante i quali il maresciallo Brancato è riuscito a guadagnarsi la confidenza e la stima dei belcollesi. Forse addirittura troppo, infatti ormai tutti lo cercano, anche a sproposito, per ogni problema: per appianare le controversie, sgridare i ragazzini che marinano la scuola o indagare su misteri tutti privati. Come quello dell’inconsolabile Ciccino, che la recentissima scomparsa della moglie Marta sembra aver fatto uscire di senno… Del resto, chi altri potrebbe aiutarlo se non il maresciallo Antonio Brancato?

Andrea Camilleri nasce a Porto Empedocle nel 1925. Esordisce come romanziere nel 1978 con Il corso delle cose (ristampato da Seilerio nel 1999). Con Garzanti pubblica il secondo romanzo Un filo di fumo (1980; ristampato da Sellerio nel 1997). Della sua ricchissima produzione ricordiamo, nelle edizioni Sellerio: La strage dimenticata, Il gioco della mosca, La forma dell’acqua, Il cane di terracotta, Il ladro di merendine, La voce del violino, La stagione della caccia, Il birraio di Preston, La concessione del telefono, La bolla di componenda, La gita a Tindari, Il re di Cirgenti, Il giro di boa, La presa di Macallè, La luna di carta e Privo di titolo. Da Rizzoli sono usciti La mossa del cavallo e Biografia del figlio cambiato; da Mondadori Un mese con Montalbano, Gli arancini di Montalbano, La scomparsa di Patò, La paura di Montalbano e La prima indagine di Montalbano. Nella collezione I Meridiani, inoltre, sono usciti i due volumi delle Opere: Storie di Montalbano e Romanzi storici e civili.

Герой рассказа возвращается домой и видит, как с его дома снимают баскетбольный щит — он больше не понадобится, потому что его сын, его партнер в игре никогда не вернётся из Сайгона. Ночью отец вышел играть с сыном… в последний раз.

Invisible Man is a milestone in American literature, a book that has continued to engage readers since its appearance in 1952.  A first novel by an unknown writer, it remained on the bestseller list for sixteen weeks, won the National Book Award for fiction, and established Ralph Ellison as one of the key writers of the century.  The nameless narrator of the novel describes growing up in a black community in the South, attending a Negro college from which he is expelled, moving to New York and becoming the chief spokesman of the Harlem branch of "the Brotherhood", and retreating amid violence and confusion to the basement lair of the Invisible Man he imagines himself to be.  The book is a passionate and witty tour de force of style, strongly influenced by T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Joyce, and Dostoevsky.

Invisible Man is a milestone in American literature, a book that has continued to engage readers since its appearance in 1952.  A first novel by an unknown writer, it remained on the bestseller list for sixteen weeks, won the National Book Award for fiction, and established Ralph Ellison as one of the key writers of the century.  The nameless narrator of the novel describes growing up in a black community in the South, attending a Negro college from which he is expelled, moving to New York and becoming the chief spokesman of the Harlem branch of "the Brotherhood", and retreating amid violence and confusion to the basement lair of the Invisible Man he imagines himself to be.  The book is a passionate and witty tour de force of style, strongly influenced by T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Joyce, and Dostoevsky.

The story exposes the ways of thinking promulgated by the Communist propaganda in 1920s and 1930s and throws in quite a few realistic facts of everyday Soviet life in those times.

A victim of time famine, thirty-five-year-old Kate counts seconds like other women count calories. As she runs between appointments, through her head spools the crazy tape-loop of every high-flying mother's life: client reports, bouncy castles, Bob The Builder, transatlantic phone calls, dental appointments, pelvic floor exercises, flights to New York, sex (too knackered), and stress-busting massages she always has to cancel (too busy). Factor in a controlling nanny, a chauvinist Australian boss, a long-suffering husband, two demanding children and an e-mail lover, and you have a woman juggling so many balls that some day soon something's going to hit the ground. Pearson brings her sharp wit and compassionate intelligence to this hilarious and, at times, piercingly sad study of the human cost of trying to Have It All. Women everywhere are already talking about the Kate Reddy column which appears weekly in the "Daily Telegraph", and recommending it to their sisters, mothers, friends and even their bewildered partners.This fictional debut by one of Britain's most gifted journalists is the subject of a movie deal with Miramax rumoured to be for almost $ 1 million and has sold around the world, sparking bidding wars in Spain, Germany and Japan. Everyone is getting Reddy for Kate.

О жизни, о пьянстве, о себе. То что думаешь о пройденном пути когда к тебе приходит настольгия и хочется поделиться мыслями…

«I love New York» повесть о 14-летней американской школьнице, делающей страшное открытие в небольшой церквушке на Манхеттене.

A deeply moving debut novel set amid the perilous world of Nigerian email scams, I Do Not Come to You by Chance tells the story of one young man and the family who loves him.

Being the opera of the family, Kingsley Ibe is entitled to certain privileges-a piece of meat in his egusi soup, a party to celebrate his graduation from university. As first son, he has responsibilities, too. But times are bad in Nigeria, and life is hard. Unable to find work, Kingsley cannot take on the duty of training his younger siblings, nor can he provide his parents with financial peace in their retirement. And then there is Ola. Dear, sweet Ola, the sugar in Kingsley's tea. It does not seem to matter that he loves her deeply; he cannot afford her bride price.

It hasn't always been like this. For much of his young life, Kingsley believed that education was everything, that through wisdom, all things were possible. Now he worries that without a "long-leg"-someone who knows someone who can help him-his degrees will do nothing but adorn the walls of his parents' low-rent house. And when a tragedy befalls his family, Kingsley learns the hardest lesson of all: education may be the language of success in Nigeria, but it's money that does the talking.

Unconditional family support may be the way in Nigeria, but when Kingsley turns to his Uncle Boniface for help, he learns that charity may come with strings attached. Boniface-aka Cash Daddy-is an exuberant character who suffers from elephantiasis of the pocket. He's also rumored to run a successful empire of email scams. But he can help. With Cash Daddy's intervention, Kingsley and his family can be as safe as a tortoise in its shell. It's up to Kingsley now to reconcile his passion for knowledge with his hunger for money, and to fully assume his role of first son. But can he do it without being drawn into this outlandish mileu?

Año 1940. Imparables, los alemanes invanden Europa. Madrid pasa hambre y se ha convertido en un hervidero de espías de todas las potencias mundiales. Harry Brett es un antiguo soldado que conoció la Guerra Civil y quedó traumatizado tras la evacuación de Dunkerque. Ahora trabaja para el servicio secreto británico: debe ganarse la confianza de su antiguo condiscípulo Sandy Forsyth, quién se dedica a negocios turbios en la España del Caudillo. Por el camino, Harry se verá envuelto en un juego muy peligroso y asaltado por amargos recuerdos.

George Saunders has earned enthusiastic acclaim and a devoted cult-following with his first two story collections and the recent novella The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil. With his new book, In Persuasion Nation, Saunders ups the ante in every way, and is poised to break out to a wide new audience.

The stories In Persuasion Nation are easily his best work yet. "The Red Bow,"about a town consumed by pet-killing hysteria, won a 2004 National Magazine Award and "Bohemians," the story of two supposed Eastern European widows trying to fit in in suburban USA, is included in The Best American Short Stories 2005. His new book includes both unpublished work, and stories that first appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, and Esquire. The stories in this volume work together as a whole whose impact far exceeds the simple sum of its parts. Fans of Saunders know and love him for his sharp and hilarious satirical eye. But In Persuasion Nation also includes more personal and poignant pieces that reveal a new kind of emotional conviction in Saunders's writing.

Saunders's work in the last six years has come to be recognized as one of the strongest-and most consoling-cries in the wilderness of the millennium's political and cultural malaise. In Persuasion Nation's sophistication and populism should establish Saunders once and for all as this generation's literary voice of wisdom and humor in a time when we need it most.

Sir Jack Pitman, un magnate de aquellos que sólo la vieja Albión puede producir, mezcla de Murdoch, Maxwell y Al Fayed, emprende la construcción de la que será su obra magna. Convencido de que en la actualidad Inglaterra no es más que una cáscara vacía de sí misma, apta sólo para turistas, él creará una «Inglaterra, Inglaterra» mucho más concentrada, que de manera más eficaz contenga todos los lugares, todos los mitos, todas las esencias e incluso todos los tópicos de lo inglés, y que por consiguiente será mucho más rentable. En el mismo día se podrán visitar la torre de Londres, los acantilados de Dover, los bosques de Sherwood (con Robin Hood incluido en la gira) y los megalitos de Stonehenge. y para construir su Gran Simulacro, el parque temático por excelencia para anglófilos de todo el mundo, Sir Jack elige la isla de Wight y contrata aun selecto equipo de historiadores, semiólogos y brillantes ejecutivos.

El proyecto es monstruoso, arriesgado y, como todo lo que hace Sir Jack, tiene un éxito fulgurante. Mediante hábiles maniobras políticas, consigue que la isla de Wight se independice de la vieja Inglaterra, e incluso miembros de la casa real se trasladan al nuevo país para ejercer de monarquía de parque temático. Pero en un giro inesperado, el país de mentirijillas se vuelve tanto o más verdadero que el país de verdad, las ambiciones imperiales se desatan y los actores que representaban a personajes míticos, a filósofos, a gobernantes, y cuya función era «parecer», comienzan a «ser»…

«Если я останусь» рассказывает о 17-летней девушке по имени Мия, чья жизнь полностью изменилась после того, как в автокатастрофе погибает вся её семья. У неё была такая красивая, безоблачная и полная жизнь, музыкальный талант, прекрасный любящий парень Адам, эта трагедия во время Рождественских праздников становится для неё страшным ударом. Весь рассказ — это интуитивное чувство Мии, которая видит, как её собственное тело вытащили из под обломков на месте аварии, а её присутствие оборачивается каким-то внетелесным опытом. В то время, как Мия выжила в этой аварии, все её близкие погибли, а она оказалась в каком-то месте между мирами, где её тело, разум и душа пытаются решить, куда пойти. Пока её тело в коме, Мия пытается осознать, что произошло и что ей нужно сделать: вернуться к жизни без своей семьи или покинуть этот мир и объединиться с ними. 

 Everybody has to make choices. Some might break you. For seventeen-year-old Mia, surrounded by a wonderful family, friends and a gorgeous boyfriend decisions might seem tough, but they’re all about a future full of music and love, a future that’s brimming with hope. But life can change in an instant. A cold February morning . . . a snowy road . . . and suddenly all of Mia’s choices are gone. Except one. As alone as she’ll ever be, Mia must make the most difficult choice of all. Gripping, heartrending and ultimately life-affirming, If I Stay will make you appreciate all that you have, all that you’ve lost - and all that might be.

In her bewitching 30th novel, I'll Take You There, Joyce Carol Oates returns again to neurotic female post-adolescence. The unnamed narrator attends an upstate New York university in the early 1960s. In those times of tightly prescribed femininity, she joins a sorority in a bald attempt to become part of the sisterhood of normalcy. It doesn't work. She reads philosophy, she works for a living, she's asexual, she's an orphan, she's a Jew: "I was a freak in the midst of their stunning, stampeding, blazing female normality." Booted from the sorority, she falls hard for a thirtyish black philosophy student who seems to her to live on a higher plane than the rest of humanity. In the final section, she is called west to the deathbed of someone she thought was lost to her forever. Oates brings together some of her strongest trademark qualities: She writes her character's life as though it were a fairy tale. She sells her material, bringing dramatic tension to the very first page: "They would claim I destroyed Mrs. Thayer… Yet others would claim that Mrs. Thayer destroyed me." And she writes with tender care about the intellectual life of her young protagonist. Some find Oates's obsession with nascent womanhood claustrophobic, but in this heroine she finds a vein of integrity and intellectual probity peculiar to those who are not quite adult. Most writers treat college life as comedy or romance. Oates, on the other hand, seriously explores an age when we are most terribly ourselves. She seems to find something deeply human and pleasingly dramatic in this time wedged between childhood and adulthood.

Told in the uproariously entertaining voice readers have come to expect from Jen Lancaster, If You Were Here follows Amish-zombie-teen- romance author Mia and her husband Mac (and their pets) through the alternately frustrating, exciting, terrifying-but always funny-process of buying and renovating their first home in the Chicago suburbs that John hughes's movies made famous. Along their harrowing renovation journey, Mia and Mac get caught up in various wars with the homeowners' association, meet some less-than-friendly neighbors, and are joined by a hilarious cast of supporting characters, including a celebutard ex- landlady. As they struggle to adapt to their new surroundings- with Mac taking on the renovations himself- Mia and Mac will discover if their marriage is strong enough to survive months of DIY renovations.

Though her friends think Maggie has the perfect life, she's actually perfectly miserable. The former Miss Alabama is worried about how her life has turned out-she's given up on her dream of living in a beautiful home like Crestview, and instead is a real estate agent in Birmingham. But just when Maggie begins to wonder if there's much point in going on, her life takes a wild turn, and she finds herself catapulted into one surprising discovery after the next. As Maggie learns valuable lessons about the nature of friendship, the challenges of modern life, and the dangers of impossible dreams, she starts to see how much more there is to life than what can be listed in a Miss Alabama bio. Bestselling author Fannie Flagg's trademark comic flair is out in full force in this fabulous new novel about the unpredictability of life.

Whenever Sam thinks about babies, he envisages rivers of vomit and sleepless nights. But wife Lucy can't walk past Mothercare without crying. What's more, she can't seem to conceive-not by traditional methods, anyway. Hippy confidante Drusilla suggests an array of New Age remedies, including the intimate use of nutmeg oil and al fresco lovemaking. As Lucy faces a possible verdict of infertility, her love for Sam enters tailspin, accelerated by the advent of arrogant actor Carl Phipps. Meanwhile Sam, desperate to escape his tedious BBC job, conceives the inconceivable-turning the intimacies of their battle for babies into an acclaimed movie script.

Inconceivable tells a poignant and heart-rending story with Elton's trademark wit, creating a novel that is entertaining and emotionally satisfying; as explosive as Popcorn and with the incendiary humour of Blast From the Past. It courageously tackles its central theme from both the male and the female points of view, and while delivering laughs on every page, it steers clear of laddish clichés. Lucy's tale, though pregnant with unfulfilled emotion, never stints on humour. "There seem", she fumes, "to be more urban myths attached to infertility than there are to… film stars filling their bottoms with small animals."

Aside from the rich vein of gags about DIY conception (Sam has to leave a power lunch with the excuse: "Sorry, my wife is ovulating…"), Elton also subjects the TV industry to relentless stand-up-style bombardment, giving birth to some brilliant asides, which enrich the main story but never overpower it. Funny, tragic, true and ultimately heart-warming, this book should be available on the National Health Service.

Боевые будни немецких летчиков Второй Мировой войны

Nacida en España, y proveniente de una familia pobre, Inés Suárez sobrevive a diario trabajando como costurera. Es el siglo dieciséis, y la conquista de América está apenas comenzando. Cuando un día el esposo de Inés desaparece rumbo al Nuevo Mundo, ella aprovecha para partir en busca de él y escapar de la vida claustrofóbica que lleva en su tierra natal. Tras el accidentado viaje que la lleva hasta Perú, Inés se entera de que su esposo ha muerto en una batalla. Sin embargo, muy pronto da inicio a una apasionada relación amorosa con el hombre que cambiará su vida por completo: Pedro de Validivia, el valiente héroe de guerra y mariscal de Francisco Pizarro.

Valdivia sueña con triunfar donde otros españoles han fracasado, llevando a cabo la conquista de Chile. Aunque se dice que en aquellas tierras no hay oro y que los guerreros son feroces, esto inspira a Valdivia aun más ya que lo que busca es el honor y la gloria. Juntos, los dos amantes fundarán la ciudad de Santiago y librarán una guerra sangrienta contra los indígenas chilenos en una lucha que cambiará sus vidas para siempre.

Invisible Man is a milestone in American literature, a book that has continued to engage readers since its appearance in 1952.  A first novel by an unknown writer, it remained on the bestseller list for sixteen weeks, won the National Book Award for fiction, and established Ralph Ellison as one of the key writers of the century.  The nameless narrator of the novel describes growing up in a black community in the South, attending a Negro college from which he is expelled, moving to New York and becoming the chief spokesman of the Harlem branch of "the Brotherhood", and retreating amid violence and confusion to the basement lair of the Invisible Man he imagines himself to be.  The book is a passionate and witty tour de force of style, strongly influenced by T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Joyce, and Dostoevsky.

These five stories remind us that Welsh is a master of the shorter form, a brilliant storyteller and, unarguably, one of the funniest and filthiest writers alive.

In Rattlesnakes, when three young Americans find themselves lost in the desert, how is it that one find himself performing fallatio on another while being watched by the bare-breasted Madeline and two armed Mexicans?

Who is the mysterious Korean chef who has moved in with Chicago socialite Kendra Cross, in The D.O.G.S. of Lincoln Park, and what does he have to do with the disappearance of her faithful pooch, Toto?

In the title story, can Mickey Baker, an English bar-owner on the Costa Brava, manage to keep all his balls in the air: maintaining his barmaid Teresa’s body weight at the sexual maximum while attending to the youthful Persephone, and dodging his persistent ex-wife and a pair of Spanish gangsters?

In Miss Arizona, Raymond Wilson Butler is writing a biography of a legendary U.S. movie director. By what train of events does he end up as a piece of movie memorabilia?

And how, in The Kingdom of Fife, will Jason King — diminutive ex-trainee jockey and Subbuteo star of Cowdenbeath — fare in the world of middle-class female equestrians?

No relationship is more charged than that between a psychotherapist and her patient — unless it is the relationship between a mother and her daughter. This disturbing literary thriller explores what happens when the line between those relationships blurs.

Jody Goodman enters psychotherapy with questions of career and love on her mind. But Claire Roth, her therapist, keeps changing the focus of their sessions to Jody's parentage — Jody was adopted; Claire gave up a baby for adoption who would now be exactly Jody's age. As the two women become increasingly involved, speculation turns into certainty, fantasy into fixation. Until suddenly it is no longer clear just which of them needs the other more — or with more terrifying consequences.

As with many of us, the life of acclaimed novelist Howard Norman has had its share of incidents of “arresting strangeness.” Yet few of us connect these moments, as Norman has done in this spellbinding memoir, to show how life tangles with the psyche to become art. Norman’s story begins with a portrait, both harrowing and hilarious, of a Midwest boyhood summer working in a bookmobile, in the shadow of a grifter father and under the erotic tutelage of his brother’s girlfriend. His life story continues in places as far-flung as the Arctic, where he spends part of a decade as a translator of Inuit tales — including the story of a soapstone carver turned into a goose whose migration-time lament is “I hate to leave this beautiful place”—and in his beloved Point Reyes, California, as a student of birds. In the Arctic, he receives news over the radio that “John Lennon was murdered tonight in the city of New York in the USA.” And years later, in Washington, D.C., another act of deeply felt violence occurs in the form of a murder-suicide when Norman and his wife loan their home to a poet and her young son. Norman’s story is also stitched together with moments of uncanny solace. Of life in his Vermont farmhouse Norman writes, “Everything I love most happens most every day.”

In the hands of Howard Norman, author of The Bird Artist and What Is Left the Daughter, life’s arresting strangeness is made into a profound, creative, and redemptive memoir.

"Cornelie De Retz Van Loo, a twenty-three-year-old divorcee from an upper-class Hague milieu, tries with mixed feelings to begin a new life in Italy in 1900. After some time in Rome, she discovers that Italy itself can never bring her the consolation she seeks. She meets the Dutch painter Duco van der Staal, and they move in together, flouting convention. Almost their only acquaintances are an amorous Italian prince and the American heiress he wants to marry for her money. Duco and Cornelie are happy but poor, and as their finances go from bad to worse, Cornelie, in desperation, takes a position as a companion to an elderly American lady in Nice. There she encounters her ex-husband." Considered one of Louis Couperus' most compelling achievements in fiction, Inevitable immerses us in turn-of-the-century Rome and examines a life in which Art is an exalted form of love. The social issues Couperus addresses in Inevitable provoked waves of criticism upon its publication in spite of the author's tremendous popularity.

Following his renowned The Coast of Chicago and Childhood, story writer Stuart Dybek returns with eleven masterful and masterfully linked stories about Chicago's fabled and harrowing South Side. United, they comprise the story of Perry Katzek and his widening, endearing clan. Through these streets walk butchers, hitmen, mothers and factory workers, boys turned men and men turned to urban myth. I Sailed With Magellan solidifies Dybek's standing as one of our finest chroniclers of urban America.

A debut novel of love, narcissism, and ailing cattle.

Idiopathy (ɪdɪˈɒpəθi): a disease or condition which arises spontaneously or for which the cause is unknown.

Idiopathy: a novel as unexpected as its title, in which Katherine, Daniel, and Nathan — three characters you won’t forget in a hurry — unsuccessfully try to figure out how they feel about one another and how they might best live their lives in a world gone mad. Featuring a mysterious cattle epidemic, a humiliating stint in rehab, an unwanted pregnancy, a mom — turned — media personality (“Mother Courage”), and a workplace with a bio-dome housing a perfectly engineered cornfield, it is at once a scathing satire and a moving meditation on love and loneliness. With unusual verbal finesse and great humor, Sam Byers neatly skewers the tangled relationships and unhinged narcissism of a self-obsessed generation in a remarkable, uproarious first novel.

A devilishly intelligent new novel by the internationally bestselling author and Prix Médicis winner.

A black writer from Montreal has found the perfect title for his next book I Am a Japanese Writer. His publisher loves it and gives him an advance. The problem is, he can't seem to write a word of it. He nurses his writer's block by taking baths, re-reading the Japanese poet Basho and engaging in amorous intrigues with rising pop star Midori. The book, still unwritten, becomes a cult phenomenon in Japan, and the writer an international celebrity. A Japanese writer publishes a book called I Am a Malagasy Writer. Even the Japanese consulate is intrigued. Our hero is delighted — until things start to go wrong. Part postmodern fantasy, part Kafkaesque nightmare and part travelogue to the inner reaches of the self, I Am a Japanese Writer calls into question everything we think we know about what-and who-makes a work of art.

Giving voice to the dispossessed and crafting stories of lives held in the balance, James Kelman reaches us all. Penetrating deeply into the hearts, minds, and desperation of characters who find themselves in everyday situations-in the hospital, at a bus stop, in a living room with the endless roar of the vacuum cleaner and a distant wife-Kelman follows their streams of consciousness and brings their worries to life. With honesty and dark humor, he confronts the issues of language, class, politics, gender, and age-identity in all its forms.

A new novel by the author Julian Barnes called “one of the best British writers to emerge in the last decade”.

Set in North Africa and Sicily at the end of World War II, In the Wolf’s Mouth follows the Allies’ botched “liberation” attempts as they chased the Nazis north toward the Italian mainland. Focusing on the experiences of two young soldiers — Will Walker, an English field security officer, ambitious to master and shape events; and Ray Marfione, a wide-eyed Italian American infantryman — the novel contains some of the best battle writing of the past fifty years. Eloquent on the brutish, blundering inaccuracy of war, the immediacy of Adam Foulds’s prose is uncanny and unforgettable.

The book also explores the continuity of organized crime in Sicily through the eyes of two men — Angilù, a young shepherd; and Cirò Albanese, a local Mafioso. These men appear in the prologue and in the book’s terrifying final chapters, making it evident that the Mafia were there before and are there still, the slaughter of war only a temporary distraction.

In the Wolf’s Mouth has achieved an extraordinary resurrection, returning humanity to the lives lost in the writing of history.

The Pulitzer-Prize Winning novel for 1996.In this visionary sequel to The Sportswriter, Richard Ford deepens his portrait of one of the most unforgettable characters in American fiction, and in so doing gives us an indelible portrait of America. Frank Bascombe, in the aftermath of his divorce and the ruin of his career, has entered an "Existence Period," selling real estate in Haddam, New Jersey, and mastering the high-wire act of normalcy. But over one Fourth of July weekend, Frank is called into sudden, bewildering engagement with life.Independence Day is a moving, peerlessly funny odyssey through America and through the layered consciousness of one of its most compelling literary incarnations, conducted by a novelist of astonishing empathy and perception.

In the Pond is a 2000 novel by Ha Jin, who has also written Under the Red Flag, Ocean of Winds, and Waiting. He has been praised for his works relating to Chinese life and culture. The novel centers around the character Shao Bin, a Chinese man working at fertilizer plant, and his epic struggle to obtain a decent apartment for his young family. Continually passed over by the plant's corrupt leaders, Bin decides to fight back against his communist superiors. Conflict espouses when Bin's struggle is met with counterattacks and opposition he could never have imagined.

“He has an evening suit, but never an occasion to wear it, so he puts it on when he paints his pictures.”

Insel, the only novel by the surrealist master Mina Loy, is a book like no other — about an impossible friendship amid the glamorous artistic bohemia of 1930s Paris.

German painter Insel is a perpetual sponger and outsider — prone to writing elegant notes with messages like “Am starving to death except for a miracle — three o’clock Tuesday afternoon will be the end”—but somehow writer and art dealer Mrs. Jones likes him.

Together, they sit in cafés, hatch grand plans, and share their artistic aspirations and disappointments. And they become friends. But as they grow ever closer, Mrs. Jones begins to realize just how powerful Insel’s hold over her is.

Unpublished during Loy’s lifetime, Insel—which is loosely based on her friendship with the painter Richard Oelze — is a supremely surrealist, deliberately excessive creation: baroque in style, yet full of deft comedy and sympathy. Now, with an alternate ending only recently unearthed in the Loy archives, Insel is finally back in print, and Loy’s extraordinary achievement can be appreciated by a new generation of readers.

A bold, epic debut novel set during the war and financial crisis that defined the beginning of our century.

One September morning in 2008, an investment banker approaching forty, his career in collapse and his marriage unraveling, receives a surprise visitor at his West London townhouse. In the disheveled figure of a South Asian male carrying a backpack, the banker recognizes a long-lost friend, a mathematics prodigy who disappeared years earlier under mysterious circumstances. The friend has resurfaced to make a confession of unsettling power.

In the Light of What We Know takes us on a journey of exhilarating scope-from Kabul to London, New York, Islamabad, Oxford, and Princeton-and explores the great questions of love, belonging, science, and war. It is an age-old story: the friendship of two men and the betrayal of one by the other. The visitor, a man desperate to climb clear of his wrong beginnings, seeks atonement; and the narrator sets out to tell his friend's story but finds himself at the limits of what he can know about the world-and, ultimately, himself. Set against the breaking of nations and beneath the clouds of economic crisis, this surprisingly tender novel chronicles the lives of people carrying unshakable legacies of class and culture as they struggle to tame their futures.

In an extraordinary feat of imagination, Zia Haider Rahman has telescoped the great upheavals of our young century into a novel of rare intimacy and power.

What would you do if you were driving on the highway with your two daughters, and those in the vehicle next to you started shooting at your car? And you noticed one of your daughters had been hit? Interstate is a multifaceted vision of American violence, and an ode to the truth that the greatest love one has is for his or her child.

When Grace, an exceedingly competent and devoted therapist in Montreal, stumbles across a man who has just failed to hang himself, her instinct to help kicks in immediately. Before long, however, she realizes that her feelings for this charismatic, extremely guarded stranger are far from straightforward. In the meantime, her troubled teenage patient, Annie, runs away from home and soon will reinvent herself in New York as an aspiring and ruthless actress, as unencumbered as humanly possible by any personal attachments.

And Mitch, Grace’s ex-husband, who is a therapist as well, leaves the woman he’s desperately in love with to attend to a struggling native community in the bleak Arctic. We follow these four compelling, complex characters from Montreal and New York to Hollywood and Rwanda, each of them with a consciousness that is utterly distinct and urgently convincing.

With razor-sharp emotional intelligence, Inside poignantly explores the many dangers as well as the imperative of making ourselves available to — and responsible for — those dearest to us.

A community theater's production of Special Yearnings triggers a string of underground nuclear explosions from St. Louis to Worcester, Massachusetts. A man frantically swats at the blaze that his girlfriend has ignited in his trousers, while her family tries to figure out whether his agonized sign language means "Under the Volcano" or "No Time for Sergeants." Charo, Marianne Faithfull, and Napoleon's sister swap glittering witticisms and pornographic come-ons with languid aesthetes and unhinged suburbanites.

Such scenarios are just par for the course in this gloriously disorienting volume by Mark Leyner, author of My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist and Et Tu, Babe, and a writer who plays the English language the way Jimi Hendrix played the guitar: at blinding speed, dangerous volume, and with a perfect mixture of lyricism and sheer menace.

From the author of Nine Months and Baby comes a daring new collection that seethes with alienation, lust and rage. Bomer takes us from hospitals, halfway houses, and alleyways, to boarding schools and Park Avenue penthouses, exploring the complex relationships girls have with their bodies, with other girls, and with boys. The title novella tracks the ins and outs of an outsider’s life: her childhood obesity and kinky sex life, her toxic relationships, whether familial or erotic, and her various disappearing acts, of body and mind.

Out of the crucible of medical training, award-winning writer Terrence Holt shapes this stunning account of residency, the years-long ordeal in which doctors are made. "Amid all the mess and squalor of the hospital, with its blind random unraveling of lives," Internal Medicine finds the compassion from which doctors discover the strength to care. Holt's debut collection of short stories, In the Valley of the Kings, was praised by the New York Times Book Review as one of "those works of genius" that "will endure for as long as our hurt kind remains to require their truth." Now he returns with Internal Medicine a work based on his own experiences as a physician offering an insider's access to the long night of the hospital, where the intricacies of medical technology confront the mysteries of the human spirit.

"A Sign of Weakness" takes us through a grueling nightlong vigil at the bedside of a dying woman. In her "small whimpering noises, rhythmic, paced almost to the beating of my heart," a doctor confronts his own helplessness, clinging "like a child to the thought of morning." In the unforgettable "Giving Bad News," we struggle with a man who maddeningly, terrifyingly refuses to remember his terminal diagnosis, forcing us to tell him, again and again, what we never should have wanted to tell him at all.

At the bedside of a hospice patient dying in a house full of cursing parrots, in "The Surgical Mask," we reach the limits of what we are able to face in human suffering, in our own horror at what happens to our bodies as they die.

In the psychiatric hospital of "Iron Maiden," a routine chest X-ray opens a window onto a nightmare vision of medieval torture and a recognition of how our mortality drives all of us to madness.

In these four stories, and five others, Internal Medicine captures the doctor's struggle not only with sickness, suffering, and death but the fears and frailties each of us patient and doctor alike brings to the bedside. In a powerful alchemy of insight and compassion, Holt reveals how those vulnerabilities are the foundations of caring. Intensely realized, gently ironic, heartfelt and heartbreaking, Internal Medicine is an account of what it means to be a doctor, to be mortal, and to be human."

Praised for his "beautifully crafted and strangely surreal" (Peter Matthiessen) stories, Terrence Holt had been operating under the literary radar for more than fifteen years, placing award-winning stories in such noted journals as Zoetrope, Kenyon Review, and TriQuarterly. With the release of this debut collection, Holt's work takes its "rightful place besides those works of genius—fiction, philosophy, theology— unafraid of axing into our iced hearts" (William Giraldi, New York Times Book Review). Whether chronicling a plague that ravages a New England town or the anguish of a son who keeps his father's beating heart in a jar, Holt's stories oscillate between the rational and the surreal, the future and the past, masterfully weaving together reality and myth. Like Poe or Hawthorne, "Holt is a gifted wordsmith, his sentences carefully shaped and often beautiful, and he spins these ancient, irresolvable dilemmas in an elegiac poetry" (Los Angeles Times).

With the precision of a surgeon, Peter Stamm cuts to the heart of the fragile and revealing moments of everyday life.

They are bankers, students, mothers, or retirees. They live in New York City or somewhere in Switzerland, they work in London or Riga, they cross paths in a Fado bar in Lisbon. They breathe the banal routine of daily life. It is to these ordinary people that Peter Stamm grants center stage in his latest collection of short stories. Henry, a cowherd turned stuntman, crisscrosses the country, dreaming of meeting a woman. Inger, the Dane, refuses her skimpy life and takes off for Italy. Regina, so lonely in her big house since her children left and her husband passed away, discovers the world anew thanks to the Australian friend of her granddaughter, who helps Regina envision her next voyage.

In these stories, Stamm's clean style expresses despair without flash, through softness and small gestures, with disarming retorts full of derision and infinite tenderness. There, where life hesitates, ready to tip over — with nothing yet played out — is where these people and their stories exist. For us, they all become exceptional. Praise for Unformed Landscape: "Sensitive and unnerving. . An uncommonly intimate work, one that will remind the reader of his or her own lived experience with a greater intensity than many of the books that are published right here at home." —The New Republic Online

The moment just before Radar Radmanovic is born, all of the hospital’s electricity mysteriously fails. The delivery takes place in total darkness. Lights back on, the staff sees a healthy baby boy — with pitch-black skin — born to the stunned white parents. No one understands the uncanny electrical event or the unexpected skin color. “A childbirth is an explosion,” the ancient physician says by way of explanation. “Some shrapnel is inevitable, isn’t it?”

I Am Radar begins with Radar’s perplexing birth but rapidly explodes outward, carrying readers across the globe and throughout history, as well as to unknown regions where radio waves and subatomic particles dance to their own design, where a century of conflict and art unite in a mesmerizing narrative whole.

Deep in arctic Norway, a cadre of Norwegian schoolteachers is imprisoned during the Second World War. Founding a radical secret society that will hover on the margins of recorded history for decades to come, these schoolteachers steal radioactive material from a hidden Nazi nuclear reactor and use it to stage a surreal art performance on a frozen coastline. This strange society appears again in the aftermath of Cambodia’s murderous Khmer Rouge regime, when another secret performance takes place but goes horrifically wrong. Echoes of this disaster can be heard during the Yugoslavian wars, when an avant-garde puppeteer finds himself trapped inside Belgrade while his brother serves in the genocidal militia that attacks Srebrenica. Decades later, in the war-torn Congo, a disfigured literature professor assembles the largest library in the world even as the country around him collapses. All of these stories are linked by Radar — now a gifted radio operator living in the New Jersey Meadowlands — who struggles with love, a set of hapless parents,and a terrible medical affliction that he has only just begun to comprehend.

Tommy. How long have we been friends.’

‘All of our lives,’ Tommy said.

‘I can’t remember us ever not being friends. When would that have been.’ Jim said. ‘I think it could last the rest of our lives,’ he said carefully, in a low voice. ‘Don’t you think.’

‘It will last if we want it to. It depends on us. We can be friends for as long as we want to.’

Tommy’s mother has gone. She walked out into the snow one night, leaving him and his sisters with their violent father. Without his best friend Jim, Tommy would be in trouble. But Jim has challenges of his own which will disrupt their precious friendship.

Early one morning Arvid finds himself standing outside the bookshop where he used to work, drunk, dirty, with two fractured ribs, and no idea how he came to be there. He does not even recognise his face in the mirror. It is as if he has dropped out of the flow of life.

Slowly, uncontrollably, the memories return to him, and Arvid struggles under the weight of the tragedy which has blighted his life — the death of his parents and younger siblings in an accident six years previously.

At times almost unbearably moving, In the Wake is nonetheless suffused with unexpected blessings: humour, wisdom, human compassion, and a sense of the perpetual beauty of the natural world.

The moving story of a young man's life from an international literary master.

On his first day of school, a teacher welcomes Audun to the class by asking him to describe his former life in the country. But there are stories about his family he would prefer to keep to himself, such as the weeks he spent living in a couple of cardboard boxes, and the day of his little brother's birth, when his drunken father fired three shots into the ceiling. So he refuses to talk and refuses to take off his sunglasses.

In his late teens Audun is the only one of his family who remains with his mother in their home in a working-class district of Oslo. He delivers newspapers when he is not in school and talks for hours about Jack London and Ernest Hemingway with his best friend Arvid. But he's not sure that school is the right path for him, feeling that life holds other possibilities.

Sometimes tender, sometimes brutal, It's Fine by Me is a brilliant novel from the acclaimed author of Out Stealing Horses.

A gritty, smart thriller from a literary superstar.

A killer has Seattle on edge. The serial murderer has been dubbed “the Indian Killer” because he scalps his victims and adorns their bodies with owl feathers. As the city consumes itself in a nightmare frenzy of racial tension, a possible suspect emerges: John Smith. An Indian raised by whites, John is lost between cultures. He fights for a sense of belonging that may never be his — but has his alienation made him angry enough to kill? Alexie traces John Smith’s rage with scathing wit and masterly suspense.

In the electrifying Indian Killer, a national bestseller and New York Times Notable Book, Sherman Alexie delivers both a scintillating thriller and a searing parable of race, identity, and violence.

The stunning new novel by the author of Sway is another "brilliant portrayal of life as a legend" (Margot Livesey).

In 1972, the American gangster Meyer Lansky petitions the Israeli government for citizenship. His request is denied, and he is returned to the U.S. to stand trial. He leaves behind a mistress in Tel Aviv, a Holocaust survivor named Gila Konig.

In 2009, American journalist Hannah Groff travels to Israel to investigate the killing of an Israeli writer. She soon finds herself inside a web of violence that takes in the American and Israeli Mafias, the Biblical figure of King David, and the modern state of Israel. As she connects the dots between the murdered writer, Lansky, Gila, and her own father, Hannah becomes increasingly obsessed with the dark side of her heritage. Part crime story, part spiritual quest, I Pity the Poor Immigrant is also a novelistic consideration of Jewish identity.

The young intellectuals J. and Elena leave behind their comfortable lives, the parties and the money in Medellin to settle down on a remote island. Their plan is to lead the good life, self-sufficient and close to nature. But from the very start, each day brings small defeats and imperceptible dramas, which gradually turn paradise into hell, as their surroundings inexorably claim back every inch of the 'civilisation' they brought with them. Based on a true story, 'In the Beginning Was the Sea' is a dramatic and searingly ironic account of the disastrous encounter of intellectual struggle with reality — a satire of hippyism, ecological fantasies, and of the very idea that man can control fate.

Passing from the mannered drawing rooms of Pakistan s cities to the harsh mud villages beyond, Daniyal Mueenuddin s linked stories describe the interwoven lives of an aging feudal landowner, his servants and managers, and his extended family, industrialists who have lost touch with the land. In the spirit of Joyce s Dubliners and Turgenev s A Sportsman s Sketches, these stories comprehensively illuminate a world, describing members of parliament and farm workers, Islamabad society girls and desperate servant women. A hard-driven politician at the height of his powers falls critically ill and seeks to perpetuate his legacy; a girl from a declining Lahori family becomes a wealthy relative s mistress, thinking there will be no cost; an electrician confronts a violent assailant in order to protect his most valuable possession; a maidservant who advances herself through sexual favors unexpectedly falls in love. Together the stories in In Other Rooms, Other Wonders make up a vivid portrait of feudal Pakistan, describing the advantages and constraints of social station, the dissolution of old ways, and the shock of change. Refined, sensuous, by turn humorous, elegiac, and tragic, Mueenuddin evokes the complexities of the Pakistani feudal order as it is undermined and transformed.

The long-awaited final work and magnum opus of one of the United States’s greatest authors, critics, and tastemakers, In Partial Disgrace is a sprawling self-contained trilogy chronicling the troubled history of a small Central European nation bearing certain similarities to Hungary — and whose rise and fall might be said to parallel the strange contortions taken by Western political and literary thought over the course of the twentieth century. More than twenty years in the making, and containing a cast of characters, breadth of insight, and degree of stylistic legerdemain to rival such staggering achievements as William H. Gass’s The Tunnel, Carlos Fuentes’s Terra Nostra, Robert Coover’s The Public Burning, or Péter Nádas’s Parallel Lives, In Partial Disgrace may be the last great work to issue from the generation that changed American letters in the ’60s and ’70s.

On a street in a town in the North of England, ordinary people are going through the motions of their everyday existence. A young man is in love with a neighbour who does not even know his name. An old couple make their way up to the nearby bus stop. But then a terrible event shatters the quiet of the early summer evening.

From one of our most admired fiction writers: the searing story of breakdown and recovery in the life of one man and of a society moving from one idea of itself to another.

Keith — born in England in the early 1960s to immigrant West Indian parents but primarily raised by his white stepmother — is a social worker heading a Race Equality unit in London whose life has come undone. He is separated from his wife of twenty years, kept at arm’s length by his teenage son, estranged from his father, and accused of harassment by a coworker. And beneath it all, he has a desperate feeling that his work — even in fact his life — is no longer relevant.

Deeply moving in its portrayal of the vagaries of family love and bold in its scrutiny of the personal politics of race, this is Caryl Phillips’s most powerful novel yet.

In sixteen stories, T.C. Boyle tears through the walls of contemporary society to reveal a world at once comic and tragic, droll and horrific. Boyle introduces us to a death-defying stuntman who rides across the country strapped to the axle of a Peterbilt, and to a retired primatologist who can’t adjust to the “civilized” world. He chronicles the state of romance that requires full-body protection in a disease-conscious age and depicts with aching tenderness the relationship between a young boy and his alcoholic father. These magical and provocative stories mark yet another virtuoso performance from one of America’s most supple and electric literary inventors.

Mark Dunn returns for his third novel with MacAdam/Cage with Ibid, a novel written entirely in footnotes. "Being one of those rare birds who actually reads footnotes," comments Dunn, "I often find myself rewarded by my time spent in the margins. Many authors give themselves wonderful license in their footnotes to let their guard down, even get a little frisky and mischievous." And so the idea for Ibid was born. Dunn pushes this propensity to the limit, and has created a full-length hilarious novel entirely upon the margins of a fictitious text. Ibid tells the fictional story of Jonathan Blashette, great American entrepreneur and humanitarian, illuminating his life, 1888–1962, offering, along the way, glimpses into the lives of many of those who populated his expansive world. A comedic Typhoid Mary, Jonathan's life makes us both wince and laugh at those misplaced intentioned and the ideals of a century that perhaps took itself just a little too seriously. Dunn holds up a funhouse mirror at the pedestaled residents of the age and asks why so many of the more famous ones did so many stupid things and rarely got called for them.

Award-winning author Nancy Huston follows her bestselling novel, Fault Lines, winner of the Prix Femina, with an intensely provocative story about a passionate yet emotionally-wounded woman’s sexual explorations.

After a troubled childhood and two failed marriages, Rena Greenblatt has achieved success as a photographer. She specializes in infrared techniques that expose her pictures’ otherwise hidden landscapes and capture the raw essence of deeply private moments in the lives of her subjects.

Away from her lover, and stuck in Florence, Italy, with her infuriating stepmother and her aging, unwell father, Rena confronts not only the masterpieces of the Renaissance but the banal inconveniences of a family holiday. At the same time, she finds herself traveling into dark and passionate memories that will lead to disturbing revelations.

Infrared is both an explicitly bold story of how sexuality is influenced by childhood, family, and culture, and a portrait of a woman coming to terms with the end of her father’s life. With exceptional flair and intelligence, Huston fearlessly investigates the links between family intimacies and our collective lives, between destruction and creation.

Named after the "divine" Sarah Bernhardt, red-haired Sarah Nour El-Din is "wonderful, irresistibly unique, funny, and amazing," raves Amy Tan. Determined to make of her life a work of art, she tries to tell her story, sometimes casting it as a memoir, sometimes a novel, always fascinatingly incomplete.

"Alameddine's new novel unfolds like a secret… creating a tale…humorous and heartbreaking and always real" (Los Angeles Times). "[W]ith each new approach, [Sarah] sheds another layer of her pretension, revealing another truth about her humanity" (San Francisco Weekly). Raised in a hybrid family shaped by divorce and remarriage, and by Beirut in wartime, Sarah finds a fragile peace in self-imposed exile in the United States. Her extraordinary dignity is supported by a best friend, a grown-up son, occasional sensual pleasures, and her determination to tell her own story. "Like her narrative, [Sarah's] life is broken and fragmented. [But] the bright, strange, often startling pieces…are moving and memorable" (Boston Globe). Reading group guide included.

A heartfelt and wondrous debut, by a supremely gifted and exciting new voice in fiction.

Will has never been to the outside, at least not since he can remember. And he has certainly never gotten to know anyone other than his mother, a fiercely loving yet wildly eccentric agoraphobe who drowns in panic at the thought of opening the front door. Their little world comprises only the rooms in their home, each named for various exotic locales and filled with Will's art projects. Soon the confines of his world close in on Will. Despite his mother's protestations, Will ventures outside clad in a protective helmet and braces himself for danger. He eventually meets and befriends Jonah, a quiet boy who introduces Will to skateboarding. Will welcomes his new world with enthusiasm, his fears fading and his body hardening with each new bump, scrape, and fall. But life quickly gets complicated. When a local boy goes missing, Will and Jonah want to uncover what happened. They embark on an extraordinary adventure that pulls Will far from the confines of his closed-off world and into the throes of early adulthood and the dangers that everyday life offers. If I Fall, if I Die is a remarkable debut full of dazzling prose, unforgettable characters, and a poignant and heartfelt depiction of coming of age.

The event that changed all of their lives happened on a Saturday afternoon in June, just minutes after Michael Turner — thinking the Nelsons' house was empty — stepped through their back door.

After the sudden loss of his wife, Michael Turner moves to London and quickly develops a close friendship with the Nelson family next door. Josh, Samantha and their two young daughters seem to represent everything Michael fears he may now never have: intimacy, children, stability and a family home. Despite this, the new friendship at first seems to offer the prospect of healing, but then a catastrophic event changes everything. Michael is left bearing a burden of grief and a secret he must keep, but the truth can only be kept at bay for so long.

Moving from London and New York to the deserts of Nevada, I Saw a Man is a brilliant exploration of violence, guilt and attempted redemption, written with the pace and grip of a thriller. Owen Sheers takes the reader from close observation of the domestic sphere to some of the most important questions and dilemmas of the contemporary world.

The sequel to the classic memoir I Saw Ramallah, I Was Born There, I Was Born Here takes up the story in 1998 when Barghouti returned to the Occupied Territories to introduce his Cairo-born son, Tamim, to his Palestinian family.

Ranging freely back and forth in time between the 1990s and the present day, Barghouti weaves into his account of exile poignant evocations of Palestinian history and daily life — the pleasure of coffee arriving at just the right moment, the challenge of a car journey through the Occupied Territories, the meaning of home and the importance of being able to say, standing in a small village in Palestine, 'I was born here', rather than saying from exile, 'I was born there'.

Full of life and humour in the face of death, I Was Born There, I Was Born Here is destined, like its predecessor, to become a classic.

These nine globe-trotting, unforgettable stories from Mia Alvar, a remarkable new literary talent, vividly give voice to the women and men of the Filipino diaspora. Here are exiles, emigrants, and wanderers uprooting their families from the Philippines to begin new lives in the Middle East, the United States, and elsewhere — and, sometimes, turning back again.

A pharmacist living in New York smuggles drugs to his ailing father in Manila, only to discover alarming truths about his family and his past. In Bahrain, a Filipina teacher drawn to a special pupil finds, to her surprise, that she is questioning her own marriage. A college student leans on her brother, a laborer in Saudi Arabia, to support her writing ambitions, without realizing that his is the life truly made for fiction. And in the title story, a journalist and a nurse face an unspeakable trauma amidst the political turmoil of the Philippines in the 1970s and ’80s.

In the Country speaks to the heart of everyone who has ever searched for a place to call home. From teachers to housemaids, from mothers to sons, Alvar’s powerful debut collection explores the universal experiences of loss, displacement, and the longing to connect across borders both real and imagined. Deeply compassionate and richly felt, In the Country marks the emergence of a formidable new writer.

This novel exemplifies historical fiction at its best; the author's meticulous research and polished style bring the medieval world into vibrant focus. Set during the Hundred Years War (1337–1453), the narrative creates believable human beings from the great roll of historical figures. Here are the mad Charles VI, the brilliant Louis d'Orleans, Joan of Arc, Henry V, and, most importantly, Charles d'Orleans, whose loyalty to France brought him decades of captivity in England. A natural poet and scholar, his birth and rank thrust him into the center of intrigue and strife, and through his observant eyes readers enter fully into his colorful, dangerous times. First published in the Netherlands in 1949, this book has never been out of print there and has been reprinted 15 times.

Hella S. Haasse has written 17 novels as well as poetry, plays and essays, and has received many honors and awards including the Netherlands State Award for Literature. Her books have been translated into English, French, German, Swedish, Italian, Hungarian, Serbo-Croatian and Welsh.

"A triumph."

HARPERS

Ben Joe Hawkes is a worrier. Raised by his mother, grandmother, and a flock of busy sisters, he's always felt the outsider. When he learns that one of his sisters has left her husband, he heads for home and back into the confusion of childhood memories and unforseen love….

«Один из моих приятелей сообщил мне описание странного приключения, случившегося с ним во время его путешествия по Италии. Мой приятель не автор и не умеет рассказывать красно и витиевато; желаю, чтоб интерес самого происшествия заменил для моих читателей красоту рассказа. Повторяю, мой приятель не автор, но простой путешественник, турист, для очистки совести принявшийся за перо…»

In 1908, under orders to defend a tiny, isolated Pacific atoll from an improbable French invasion, Mexican captain Ramón Arnaud, his young bride, Alicia, and eleven soldiers and their families set sail for the so-called Isle of Passion. In this dire, forbidding place, a viable community is created under Ramón's guidance and inspired by Alicia's dedication. But they are soon forgotten by a motherland distracted by political upheaval and the first rumblings of World War I. Left to the mercies of nature and one another — falling victim one by one to disease, hunger, lust, despair, and, ultimately, violence — the castaways who remain must find strength in the courage and steadfast resourcefulness of Alicia Arnaud, upon whom their collective survival now depends.

Based on true events, Laura Restrepo's Isle of Passion is a brilliantly rendered and dramatic tale of savage human nature — and one woman's determination to triumph over a harrowing fate.

A semi-sequel to the visionary Anti-Twitter: 150 50-Word Stories, Induced Coma: 50 & 100 Word Stories once again features Harold Jaffe writing to the Nth power, taking as his subject no less than the benighted globe. Including published mainstream narratives and “news” articles from the US and abroad, the collection covers an extraordinary range of subjects — activist art, global warming, revolution, the entertainment industry, and the freakishly banal happenings of our day-to-day lives — all of which the author deconstructs to expose their ideological subtexts in uncanny ways. Satirical, critical, tragic and ruminative, Jaffe works every register masterfully. Induced Coma is a singular tour de force composed by one of the most innovative writers of our generation.

Dawn Raffel's debut delivers us to the wild spaces of a youth in the Midwest and to the blank terrors of the heart. There is a cold wind blowing through these stories, whose sentences come to us as a rebuke to anything felt. In her flight from sentiment, Raffel masterfully reifies the new will to absence that marks the moral and emotional bearing of her generation. The result is not just an acknowledgment of all our long divisions — the divide between impulse and the means to apprehend it, between desire and entrapment — but of the final sweet concession that we must each of us make to the futility of even the smallest mending. In the Year of Long Division gives us the triumph of craft over the obstinance of expression and the installation of a writer certain to be cited in the continuing reinvention of the American short story.

In these quirkily imaginative short stories about writing and writers, the scrivener Quartermain (our “Bartleby”) goes her stubborn way haunted by Pauline Johnson, Malcolm Lowry, Robin Blaser, Daphne Marlatt, and a host of other literary forebears. Who is writing whom, these stories ask in their musing reflections — the writer or the written? The thinker or the alphabet? The calligrapher or the pictograms hidden in her Chinese written characters?

Intimate jealousies between writers, wagers of courage and ambition, and histories of the colours violet and yellow are some of the subjects in the first section, “Caravan.” Struggles of mothers, fathers, and sisters (and the figures drawn in the Chinese written characters that represent them) unfold as tales of love, death, and revenge in the group of stories in the second section, “Orientalisme.” In “Scriptorium,” the third section, we find out how Bartleby’s father, a Caucasian cook specializing in Chinese cuisine, got Bartleby into writing in the first place. In the fourth series of stories, “How to Write,” we learn how Bartleby loses her I while meeting Allen Ginsberg, Alice Toklas, and a real Chinese cook who works in a fictional house of Ethel Wilson, and how Malcolm Lowry’s life came to an end. The fifth and last section, “Moccasin Box,” investigates how a Sebaldesque Bartleby is silenced by Pauline Johnson.

Taking its cue from genre-bending writers like Robert Walser and Enrique Vila-Matas, I, Bartleby cunningly challenges boundaries between fiction and reality.

Invisible Women is really two books entwined in one, a dialogue between psychoanalysts weaving through descriptions of luminous women. Told in a specific collective “we,” Hoang’s own voice becomes a compelling part of what’s being told. Just like Italo Calvino wrote of vast buildings constructed of words alone in Invisible Cities, Invisible Womenpresents complicated stories of feminine archetypes in the form of psychoanalytic case studies.

After a family tragedy, a man chases consolation — or is it oblivion? — by traveling through some seedy locales of place and spirit.

Early on in Hob Broun’s second novel, the mother of the unnamed narrator, a failed actress, commits suicide by putting her head through a television. That fact, together with our hero’s desire for his ex-girlfriend’s older sister, prompts a radical departure as he quits his job cataloging old television shows and sets off on a westward journey. Pursuing solace in unlikely places, he embarks on a string of just-as-unlikely romances, including ones with a motel maid and an archaeology professor. But can anything distract him from the painful emptiness within? In the desert, finally free of society, a self-reckoning awaits.

Bracing in its vision, Inner Tube is a fearless and often bitingly funny novel about what happens when our civilized veneers are shed.

Steve Tomasula is a novelist like no other; his experiments in narrative and design have won him a loyal following. Exemplifying Tomasula’s style, IN & OZ is a heady, avant-garde book, rooted in convincing characters even as it simultaneously subverts the genre of novel and moves it forward.

IN & OZ is a novel of art, love, and auto mechanics. The story follows five different characters — an auto designer, photographer, musical composer, poet/sculptor, and mechanic — who live in two very different places: IN, a back-alley here and now; and OZ, which reflects the desire for somewhere better. The men and women who populate Tomasula’s landscape desperately hope to fill a void in their lives through a variety of media: music, language, dirt, light, and automobiles. As the plot moves forward, the story of the residents of INand that of their counterparts in OZconverge. A fanciful allegory that tackles class relations, art, commerce, and language, IN & OZ is a tale of the human condition that is as visually compelling as it is moving.

A novel not only for fiction lovers, but also for artists of all stripes, IN & OZ creates a fantasy that illumines our own world as it lucidly builds its own.

Infinite Jest is the name of a movie said to be so entertaining that anyone who watches it loses all desire to do anything but watch. People die happily, viewing it in endless repetition. The novel Infinite Jest is the story of this addictive entertainment, and in particular how it affects a Boston halfway house for recovering addicts and a nearby tennis academy, whose students have many budding addictions of their own. As the novel unfolds, various individuals, organisations, and governments vie to obtain the master copy of Infinite Jest for their own ends, and the denizens of the tennis school and halfway house are caught up in increasingly desperate efforts to control the movie — as is a cast including burglars, transvestite muggers, scam artists, medical professionals, pro football stars, bookies, drug addicts both active and recovering, film students, political assassins, and one of the most endearingly messed-up families ever captured in a novel.

On this outrageous frame hangs an exploration of essential questions about what entertainment is, and why it has come to so dominate our lives; about how our desire for entertainment interacts with our need to connect with other humans; and about what the pleasures we choose say about who we are. Equal parts philosophical quest and screwball comedy, Infinite Jest bends every rule of fiction without sacrificing for a moment its own entertainment value. The huge cast and multilevel narrative serve a story that accelerates to a breathtaking, heartbreaking, unfogettable conclusion. It is an exuberant, uniquely American exploration of the passions that make us human and one of those rare books that renew the very idea of what a novel can do.

The Hanburys of Egypt Hill are the last word in bohemian living — or so they think. Michael, a young student who first encounters the family at a party for Caris Hanbury's 18th birthday, is irresistibly attracted to their enfolding exuberance.

Miriam Toews' new novel brings us back to the beloved voice of her award-winning, #1 bestseller A Complicated Kindness, and to a Mennonite community in the Mexican desert. Original and brilliant, she is a master of storytelling at the height of her powers, who manages with trademark wry wit and a fierce tenderness to be at once heartbreaking and laugh-out-loud funny.

Irma Voth entangles love, longing and dark family secrets. The stifling, reclusive Mennonite life of nineteen-year-old Irma Voth — newly married and newly deserted and as unforgettable a character as Nomi Nickel in A Complicated Kindness — is irrevocably changed when a film crew moves in to make a movie about the community. She embraces the absurdity, creative passion and warmth of their world but her intractable and domineering father is determined to keep her from it at all costs. The confrontation between them sets her on an irrevocable path towards something that feels like freedom as she and her young sister, Aggie, wise beyond her teenage years, flee to the city, upheld only by their love for each other and their smart wit, even as they begin to understand the tragedy that has their family in its grip.

Irma Voth delves into the complicated factors that set us on the road to self-discovery and how we can sometimes find the strength to endure the really hard things that happen. And as Gustavo, a taxi driver, says, you go on, you live and you laugh and you are compassionate toward others. It also asks that most difficult of questions: How do we forgive? And most importantly, how do we forgive ourselves?

IN THIS SUITE of five short pieces — one of the unqualified literary masterpieces of the American 1960s — William Gass finds five beautiful forms in which to explore the signature theme of his fiction: the solitary soul's poignant, conflicted, and doomed pursuit of love and community. In their obsessions, Gass's Midwestern dreamers are like the "grotesques" of Sherwood Anderson, but in their hyper-linguistic streams of consciousness, they are the match for Joyce's Dubliners.

First published in 1968, this book begins with a beguiling thirty-three page essay and has five fictions: the celebrated novella "The Pedersen Kid," "Mrs. Mean," "Icicles," "Order of Insects," and the title story.

A beautifully wrought story of an ad hoc family and the crisis they must overcome together.

Edith is a widowed landlady who rents apartments in her Brooklyn brownstone to an unlikely collection of humans, all deeply in need of shelter. Crippled in various ways — in spirit, in mind, in body, in heart — the renters struggle to navigate daily existence, and soon come to realize that Edith’s deteriorating mind, and the menacing presence of her estranged, unscrupulous son, Owen, is the greatest challenge they must confront together.

Faced with eviction by Owen and his designs on the building, the tenants — Paulie, an unusually disabled man and his burdened sister, Claudia; Edward, a misanthropic stand-up comic; Adeleine, a beautiful agoraphobe; Thomas, a young artist recovering from a stroke — must find in one another what the world has not yet offered or has taken from them: family, respite, security, worth, love.

The threat to their home scatters them far from where they’ve begun, to an ascetic commune in Northern California, the motel rooms of depressed middle America, and a stunning natural phenomenon in Tennessee, endangering their lives and their visions of themselves along the way.

With humanity, humor, grace, and striking prose, Kathleen Alcott portrays these unforgettable characters in their search for connection, for a life worth living, for home.

An irresistible comic novel from the master storyteller Percival Everett, and an irreverent take on race, class, and identity in America.

I was, in life, to be a gambler, a risk-taker, a swashbuckler, a knight. I accepted, then and there, my place in the world. I was a fighter of windmills. I was a chaser of whales. I was Not Sidney Poitier.Not Sidney Poitier is an amiable young man in an absurd country. The sudden death of his mother orphans him at age eleven, leaving him with an unfortunate name, an uncanny resemblance to the famous actor, and, perhaps more fortunate, a staggering number of shares in the Turner Broadcasting Corporation.

Percival Everett’s hilarious new novel follows Not Sidney’s tumultuous life, as the social hierarchy scrambles to balance his skin color with his fabulous wealth. Maturing under the less-than watchful eye of his adopted foster father, Ted Turner, Not gets arrested in rural Georgia for driving while black, sparks a dinnertable explosion at the home of his manipulative girlfriend, and sleuths a murder case in Smut Eye, Alabama, all while navigating the recurrent communication problem: “What’s your name?” a kid would ask. “Not Sidney,” I would say. “Okay, then what is it?”

"What lies beneath my veiled perfection is the ugly truth—my truth, my reality, my destiny."

Vivian Graham has an acceptance letter into Harvard, a badass tattoo, loyal friends, ties to marijuana, a penchant for Dunkin’ Donuts, and her pesky V-card.

Everyday she takes the Red Line to her job at The Green Pot in Boston while her friends enter the coveted, black iron gates to higher learning. The ramifications from a tragic accident have put her life on hold while time marches on for everyone around her.

After graduating from Harvard Law, Boston native, Oliver Konrad, moves to Portland to start his career and his life. Three years later, after a horrific discovery, he returns home to trade in his three-piece suit for leather work boots and his suburban home for a condo in Cambridge.

All he brought back to the East Coast was an aversion to pillows and secrets he keeps hidden behind a mysterious locked door. Oliver’s days are predictable and his nights are lonely until he meets Vivian on the subway. Her long raven hair, green eyes, and mile-long legs are achingly sexy, but the way she "innocently" fingers and licks her Boston Kreme doughnut can only be described in two words—complete torture.

When their paths cross at every turn, laughter is abundant, friendship is easy, and love is unintentional. However, their future seems improbable.

A tale of love, heroism and resistance set against the stunning backdrop of 1930s Florence, In Love and War weaves fact and fiction to create a sweeping portrait of a city under siege. The novel is told through the eyes, letters and journals of Esmond Lowndes, who comes to Italy a lonely young man in the shadow of his politician father. On the cobbles of Florence’s many-storied streets, he deepens his appreciation of art and literature, and falls in love.

With the coming of war, Esmond finds himself drawn into the Tuscan Resistance, hunted by the malevolent Mario Carità, head of the Fascist secret police. With his lover, Ada, at his side, he is at the centre of assassination plots, shoot-outs and car chases, culminating in a final mission of extraordinary daring.

In Love and War is a novel that will take you deep into the secret heart of history. It is a novel of art and letters, of bawdy raconteurs and dashing spies. With Esmond Lowndes you will see the beauty of Florence and the horror of war as it sweeps over the city’s terracotta rooftops. In Love and War is both epic and intimate, harrowing and heartwarming.

In this powerful debut novel, three American soldiers haunted by their actions in Afghanistan search for absolution and human connection in family and civilian life.

Wintric Ellis joins the army as soon as he graduates from high school, saying goodbye to his girlfriend, Kristen, and to the backwoods California town whose borders have always been the limits of his horizon. Deployed for two years in Afghanistan in a directionless war, he struggles to find his bearings in a place where allies could at any second turn out to be foes. Two career soldiers, Dax and Torres, take Wintric under their wing. Together, these three men face an impossible choice: risk death or commit a harrowing act of war. The aftershocks echo long after each returns home to a transfigured world, where his own children may fear to touch him and his nightmares still hold sway.

Jesse Goolsby casts backward and forward in time to track these unforgettable characters from childhood to parenthood, from redwood forests to open desert roads to the streets of Kabul. Hailed by Robert Olen Butler as a “major literary event,” I’d Walk with My Friends If I Could Find Them is a work of disarming eloquence and heart-wrenching wisdom, and a debut novel from a writer to watch.

In 1980s Syria, a young Muslim girl lives a secluded life behind the veil in the vast and perfumed house of her grandparents. Her three aunts — the pious Maryam, the liberal Safaa, and the free-spirited Marwa — raise her with the aid of their ever-devoted blind servant. Soon the high walls of the family home are no longer able to protect the girl from the social and political chaos outside. Witnessing the ruling dictatorship's bloody campaign against the Muslim Brotherhood, she is filled with hatred for the regime and becomes increasingly radical. In the footsteps of her beloved uncle, Bakr, she launches herself into a fight for her religion, her country, and ultimately, for her own future. Against the backdrop of real-life events, In Praise of Hatred is a stirring, layered story that echoes the violence currently plaguing the Middle East.

Bruno Schulz has foreseen catastrophe and is almost paralysed by fear. His last chance of survival is to leave the home town to which, despite being in his late forties, he clings as if to a comforting blanket. So he retreats into his cellar (and sometimes hides under his desk) to write a letter to Thomas Mann: appealing to the literary giant to help him find a foreign publisher, in order that the reasons to leave Drohobych will finally outweigh the reasons to stay.

Evoking Bulgakov and Singer, Biller takes us on an astounding, burlesque journey into Schulz's world, which vacillates between shining dreams and unbearable nightmares — a world which, like Schulz's own stories, prophesies the apocalyptic events to come.

Includes two stories by Bruno Schulz: 'Birds' and 'The Cinnamon Shops', from The Street of Crocodiles.

Ruth Galm’s spare, poetic debut novel, set in the American West of early Joan Didion, traces the drifting path of a young woman caught between generations as she skirts the law and her own oppressive anxiety.

Into the Valley opens on the day in July 1967 when B. decides to pass her first counterfeit check and flee San Francisco for the Central Valley. Unmarried at 30, B. doesn't understand the youth counterculture but doesn't fit into her mother's world of dresses and kid gloves.

B. is beset by a disintegrative anxiety she calls “the carsickness,” and the only relief comes in handling illicit checks and driving endlessly through the valley. As she travels the bare, anonymous landscape, meeting an array of other characters — an alcoholic professor, a bohemian teenage girl, a criminal admirer — B.’s flight becomes that of a woman unraveling, a person lost between who she is and who she cannot yet be.

A mesmerizing novel about memory, privacy, fear, and what happens when our past catches up with us.

After a decade living in England, Jeremy O'Keefe returns to New York, where he has been hired as a professor of German history at New York University. Though comfortable in his new life, and happy to be near his daughter once again, Jeremy continues to feel the quiet pangs of loneliness. Walking through the city at night, it's as though he could disappear and no one would even notice.

But soon, Jeremy's life begins taking strange turns: boxes containing records of his online activity are delivered to his apartment, a young man seems to be following him, and his elderly mother receives anonymous phone calls slandering her son. Why, he wonders, would anyone want to watch him so closely, and, even more upsetting, why would they alert him to the fact that he was being watched?

As Jeremy takes stock of the entanglements that marked his years abroad, he wonders if he has unwittingly committed a crime so serious that he might soon be faced with his own denaturalization. Moving towards a shattering reassessment of what it means to be free in a time of ever more intrusive surveillance, Jeremy is forced to ask himself whether he is 'no one', as he believes, or a traitor not just to his country but to everyone around him.

William Gay established himself as "the big new name to include in the storied annals of Southern Lit" (Esquire) with his debut novel, The Long Home, and his highly acclaimed follow-up, Provinces of Night. Like Faulkner's Mississippi and Cormac McCarthy's American West, Gay's Tennessee is redolent of broken souls. Mining that same fertile soil, his debut collection, I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down, brings together thirteen stories charting the pathos of interior lives. Among the colorful people readers meet are: old man Meecham, who escapes from his nursing home only to find his son has rented their homestead to "white trash"; Quincy Nell Qualls, who not only falls in love with the town lothario but, pregnant, faces an inescapable end when he abandons her; Finis and Doneita Beasley, whose forty-year marriage is broken up by a dead dog; and Bobby Pettijohn — awakened in the night by a search party after a body is discovered in his back woods.

William Gay expertly sets these conflicted characters against lush backcountry scenery and defies our moral logic as we grow to love them for the weight of their human errors.

Dana Spiotta’s new novel is about two women, best friends, who grow up in LA in the 80s and become filmmakers. Meadow and Carrie have everything in common — except their views on sex, power, movie-making, and morality. Their lives collide with Jelly, a loner whose most intimate experience is on the phone. Jelly is older, erotic, and mysterious. She cold calls powerful men and seduces them not through sex but through listening. She invites them to reveal themselves, and they do.

In the Café of Lost Youth is vintage Patrick Modiano, an absorbing evocation of a particular Paris of the 1950s, shadowy and shady, a secret world of writers, criminals, drinkers, and drifters. The novel, inspired in part by the circle (depicted in the photographs of Ed van der Elsken) of the notorious and charismatic Guy Debord, centers on the enigmatic, waiflike figure of Louki, who catches everyone’s attention even as she eludes possession or comprehension. Through the eyes of four very different narrators, including Louki herself, we contemplate her character and her fate, while Modiano explores the themes of identity, memory, time, and forgetting that are at the heart of his spellbinding and deeply moving art.

In the Austrian state of Styria lies the Helianau Institute, a boarding school for children born with a mysterious condition known as Indigo syndrome. Anyone who comes near them immediately suffers from nausea and vertigo. Clemens Setz a fictionalized doppelganger of the author is a young math teacher who loses his job at the school after attempting to investigate the mysterious relocations of several children. Fourteen years later, Robert, a former student, discovers a newspaper article about Setz s acquittal for the murder of an animal abuser. Could there be a connection between this story, which continues to haunt Robert, and the puzzling events of the past? DeLillo-esque in its exploration of alienation and anxiety, Indigo weaves together bizarre historical anecdotes, such as Edison s electrocution of an elephant, with pop cultural marginalia and pseudoscience to create a literary work that makes its own laws. rich in dialogue and variety, amusing and anecdotal, but also brutal and unfathomable (Der Spiegel)."

What if you told the truth and the whole world heard you? What if you lived in a country swamped with Internet outrage? What if you were a woman in a society that hated women?

Set in the San Francisco of 2013, I Hate the Internet offers a hilarious and obscene portrayal of life amongst the victims of the digital boom. As billions of tweets fuel the city’s gentrification and the human wreckage piles up, a group of friends suffers the consequences of being useless in a new world that despises the pointless and unprofitable.

In this, his first full-length novel, Jarett Kobek tackles the pressing questions of our moment. Why do we applaud the enrichment of CEOs at the expense of the weak and the powerless? Why are we giving away our intellectual property? Why is activism in the 21st Century nothing more than a series of morality lectures typed into devices built by slaves?

Here, at last, comes an explanation of the Internet in the crudest possible terms.

“A writer without mercy. . this book is like a wire stretched across the throat.” —Oliver Stone

In an epic novel that does for Hollywood what Nashville did for Nashville, I’m Losing You follows the rich and famous and the down and out as their lives intersect in a series of coincidences that exposes the “bigger than life” ferocity of Hollywood — and proves that Bruce Wagner is a talent to be reckoned with. Wagner, author of the novel Dead Stars, examines the psychological complexities of Hollywood reality and fantasy, soaring far beyond the reaches of Robert Stone's Children of Light and Nathaniel West's The Day of the Locust.

Twelve-year-old Toulouse “Tull” Trotter lives on his grandfather’s vast Bel-Air parkland estate with his mother, the beautiful, drug-addicted Katrina — a landscape artist who specializes in topiary labyrinths. He spends most of his time with young cousins Lucy, “the girl detective,” and Edward, a prodigy undaunted by the disfiguring effects of Apert Syndrome. One day, an impulsive revelation by Lucy sets in motion a chain of events that changes Tull — and the Trotter family — forever.

In this latter-day Thousand and One Nights, a boy seeks his lost father and a woman finds her long-lost love. . while a family of unimaginable wealth learns that its fate is bound up with two fugitives: Amaryllis, a street orphan who aspires to be a saint, and her protector, a homeless schizophrenic, clad in Victorian rags, who is accused of a horrifying crime.

When Margaret's fiancé, John, is hospitalized for depression in 1960s London, she faces a choice: carry on with their plans despite what she now knows of his condition, or back away from the suffering it may bring her. She decides to marry him. Imagine Me Gone is the unforgettable story of what unfolds from this act of love and faith. At the heart of it is their eldest son, Michael, a brilliant, anxious music fanatic who makes sense of the world through parody. Over the span of decades, his younger siblings-the savvy and responsible Celia and the ambitious and tightly controlled Alec-struggle along with their mother to care for Michael's increasingly troubled and precarious existence.

An emotional thriller by novelist Bruce Wagner, I Met Someone is the story of a fictional Hollywood marriage on the precipice of disaster — and an enthralling meditation on the world in which we live.

Bruce Wagner’s I Met Someone is the story of Oscar award-winning actress Dusty Wilding, her wife Allegra, a long-lost daughter, and the unspeakable secret hidden beneath the glamor of their lavish, carefully calibrated, celebrity life. After Allegra suffers a miscarriage, Dusty embarks on a search for the daughter she lost at age sixteen and uncovers the answer to a question that has haunted for decades. With riveting suspense, Wagner moves between the perspectives of his characters, revealing their individual trauma and the uncanny connections to each other's past lives. I Met Someone sends the reader down a rabbit hole of the human psyche, with Wagner’s remarkable insights into our collective obsession with great wealth and fame, and surprises with unimaginable plot turns and unexpected fate. Alternately tender, shocking, and poetic, I Met Someone is Wagner’s most captivating and affecting novel yet.

Ein vielstimmiger Gesang der Nacht: Prostituierte, Engel und Geschäftsmänner kämpfen um Geld und Macht und ihre Träume. Eine junge Frau steht am Fenster, schaut in den Abendhimmel, im Januar laufen die Geschäfte nicht, die Gedanken tanzen ihn ihrem Kopf.»Der Pferdemann«, der alte Jockey, sucht seine Tochter.»Der Bielefelder «rollt mit neuen Geschäftskonzepten den Markt auf, investiert in Clubs und Eroscenter.»AK 47«liegt angeschossen auf dem Asphalt. Schonungslos und zärtlich schreibt Clemens Meyer in seinem großen Roman von den Menschen, den Nachtgestalten, von ihrem Aufstieg und Fall, vom Schmutz der Straße und dem Fluss des Geldes. Mit großer Kraft und Emotion erzählt er die Geschichte einer Stadt, die zum Epochen-Roman unserer Zeit wird.

Im Norden der Steiermark liegt die Helianau, eine Internatsschule für Kinder, die an einer rätselhaften Störung leiden, dem Indigo-Syndrom. Jeden, der ihnen zu nahe kommt, befallen Übelkeit, Schwindel und heftige Kopfschmerzen. Der junge Mathematiklehrer Clemens Setz unterrichtet an dieser Schule und wird auf seltsame Vorgänge aufmerksam: Immer wieder werden Kinder in eigenartigen Maskierungen in einem Auto mit unbekanntem Ziel davongefahren. Setz beginnt, Nachforschungen anzustellen, doch er kommt nicht weit; er wird aus dem Schuldienst entlassen. Fünfzehn Jahre später berichten die Zeitungen von einem aufsehenerregenden Strafprozess: Ein ehemaliger Mathematiklehrer wird vom Vorwurf freigesprochen, einen Tierquäler brutal ermordet zu haben.

Und jetzt noch einmal von vorne. Vergessen Sie die Zusammenfassung einer Romanhandlung, die sich jeder Zusammenfassung entzieht, und lesen Sie das Buch Indigo von Clemens J. Setz. Sein viertes insgesamt. Sie werden feststellen: Das radikale Gegenprogramm zur hübsch verkasteten Literaturwerkstättenliteratur (Die Welt) geht weiter. Rasend spannend und so erholsam wie eine gute Massage. Hinterher spüren Sie jeden Muskel.

Von den Jahren des Exils bis ins Wendejahr '89 und darüber hinaus reicht diese wechselvolle Geschichte einer deutschen Familie. Sie führt von Mexiko über Sibirien bis in die neu gegründete DDR, führt über die Gipfel und durch die Abgründe des 20. Jahrhunderts. So entsteht ein weites Panorama, ein großer Deutschlandroman, der, ungeheuer menschlich und komisch, Geschichte als Familiengeschichte erlebbar macht.

The sixth in a series of books that cover World War Three, from July 1945 through to its close in September 1947.

1946 has moved out of its suspended state, and violence has blossomed once again.

In the Pacific, the war reaches a peak of horror previously undreamt of in the history of man.

The severe European winter is a fading memory, but its after effects still resonate, particularly with the Red Army, deprived of the chattels of war. The fighting drags on, with little to show for the plans and devices of the politicians and generals.

Each side has its new efforts; each side experiences new disappointments.

Germany is strengthening and starts to shoulder more of the Allied burden, filling gaps left by the weakening of Britain and the United States.

Logistically bankrupt, the Red Army strives for one more struggle, one focussed effort against one of the Allies, in an effort to knock that nation out of the war, knowing that failure could spell the end, but that success could pluck victory from the jaws of defeat.

^{[The ‘Red Gambit Series’ novels are works of fiction, and deal with fictional events. Most of the characters therein are a figment of the author’s imagination. Without exception, those characters that are historical figures of fact or based upon historical figures of fact are used fictitiously, and their actions, demeanour, conversations, and characters are similarly all figments of the author’s imagination.]}

Twenty-year-old Taguchi Hiro has spent the last two years of his life living as a hikikomori — a shut-in who never leaves his room and has no human interaction — in his parents' home in Tokyo. As Hiro tentatively decides to reenter the world, he spends his days observing life around him from a park bench. Gradually he makes friends with Ohara Tetsu, a middle-aged salaryman who has lost his job but can't bring himself to tell his wife, and shows up every day in a suit and tie to pass the time on a nearby bench. As Hiro and Tetsu cautiously open up to each other, they discover in their sadness a common bond. Regrets and disappointments, as well as hopes and dreams, come to the surface until both find the strength to somehow give a new start to their lives. This beautiful novel is moving, unforgettable, and full of surprises. The reader turns the last page feeling that a small triumph has occurred.

I Called Him Necktie won the 2012 Austrian Alpha Literature Prize.

Есть два способа постижения таинств окружающего нас мира: научные открытия на основании экспериментов и прозрения. В этой книге собраны мои прозрения по поводу самых важных для человеческого вида тем: происхождения человека, ответ на вопрос, кто и для чего нас создал, мной брошен свет на эпизоды восстания человека против Создателя. Героями моей книги стала первосемья человека: прародительница Ева, взревновавший к матери Авеля Каин; вождь восстания гастарбайтеров в Египте египтянин Мозес; соперничество пророков Иоанна и Иисуса; трагический заговор Иисуса; прозревший Устройство Бездны Хаоса: черную материю и темную энергию, борьбу света и тьмы — маленький калека-армянин, пророк Мани. По страницам этой книги пролетают драконы; стыдливый и одновременно наглый Чарльз Дарвин — отец религии безбожия разоблачен мною на последних страницах книги.

Прозрения, или illuminationеs, не приходят все сразу — они являются, когда считают нужным появиться. Несколько первых пришли ко мне в 2007 году и были опубликованы в книге «Ереси». В ноябре 2009-го, когда я сидел под арестом в спецприемнике ГУВД на Симферопольском бульваре, меня озарило, что человек обладает инстинктом убийства, тогда же я написал исследования «О душе», «Соавтор создания Человека», «Дети Создателя». В 2011-м — «Пророк М.», «Заговор Христа», «Пророк Мани», «Праматерь наша Хавва» и «Против теории эволюции». И вот я собрал их в одной книге.

“The greatest Afrikaner poet of this generation. … No one elevated the Boer language to such pure beauty and wielded it so devastatingly against the apartheid regime.”—The New Yorker

This eclectic and generous work full of wisdom and wit is addressed to a young writer. Breyten Breytenbach’s candid and provocative reflections on reading and writing guide without guiding, open mental channels, surprise, and inspire. A stirring glimpse into the mind of an artist.

An outspoken human rights activist, Breyten Breytenbach is a poet, novelist, playwright, memoirist, and painter. He received the Alan Paton Prize in 1994 and the prestigious Hertzog Prize for his collection of poetry Windcatcher in 2008.

A taxi-driver in 1930s Vienna impersonates a murder victim-with unsettling consequences.

"One doesn't step into anyone's life, not even a dead man's, without having to live it to the end."

A man climbs into Ferdinand Sponer's cab, gives the name of a hotel, and before he reaches it has been murdered: shot through the throat. And though Sponer has so far committed no crime, he is drawn into the late Jack Mortimer's life, and might not be able to escape its tangles and intrigues before it is too late…

Twice filmed, I Was Jack Mortimer is a tale of misappropriated identity as darkly captivating and twisting as the books of Patricia Highsmith.

A son receives an inheritance from his father and tries to dispose of it before it destroys him. Inherited Disorders tells this elemental story in over 100 hilarious, witty variations.

Adam Ehrlich Sachs’s Inherited Disorders is a rueful, absurd, and endlessly entertaining look at a most serious subject — the eternally vexed relations between fathers and sons. In a hundred and seventeen shrewd, surreal vignettes, Sachs lays bare the petty rivalries, thwarted affection, and mutual bafflement that have characterized the filial bond since the days of Davidic kings. A philosopher’s son kills his father and explains his aphorisms to death. A father bequeaths to his son his jacket, deodorant, and political beliefs. England’s most famous medium becomes possessed by the spirit of his skeptical father — who questions, in front of the nation, his son’s choice of career. A Czech pianist amputates his fingers one by one to thwart his father, who will not stop composing concertos for him. A nineteenth-century Italian nobleman wills his ill-conceived flying contraption — incapable of actual flight — to his newborn son. In West Hollywood, an aspiring screenwriter must contend with the judgmental visage of his father, a respected public intellectual whose frozen head, clearly disappointed in him, he keeps in his freezer. Keenly inventive, but painfully familiar, these surprisingly tender stories signal the arrival of a brilliant new comic voice — and fresh hope for fathers and sons the world over.

The perfect book for paranoid times, “I” introduces us to W, a mere hanger-on in East Berlin’s postmodern underground literary scene. All is not as it appears, though, as W is actually a Stasi informant who reports to the mercurial David Bowie lookalike, Major Feuerbach. But are political secrets all that W is seeking in the underground labyrinth of Berlin? In fact, what W really desires are his own lost memories, the self undone by surveillance: his ‘I.’

First published in Germany in 1993 and hailed as an instant classic, “I” is a black comedy about state power and the seductions of surveillance. Its penetrating vision seems especially relevant today in our world of cameras on every train, bus, and corner. This is an engrossing read, available now for the first time in English.

“[Hilbig writes as] Edgar Allan Poe could have written if he had been born in Communist East Germany.”—LA Review of Books

From Kenya to Quebec, these wry and unconventional stories explore the different ways we’re haunted…

Teenagers philosophize on the nature of ontology while fearing there's a ghost in the old mill they're stuck in; a man encounters an old friend in the unlikeliest of places; nineteenth-century inventor Sigismund Mohr is vividly brought back from obscurity; and two journalists travel to Kenya for a conference, where one of them has a paranoid breakdown.

It Is an Honest Ghost is a funny and often eerie collection that explores what lies beyond mortality — if anything, that is.

'A thrilling collection: hot-headed, existential, crystalline. Goldbach’s novella Hic et Ubique illuminates the nightmare of being a man in this world — the twisted, spiritual conversion of buddy into warrior. This book is cadenced and visionary.'

— Tamara Faith Berger

'Searching and restless, a new Goldbach story is a thing to celebrate. A whole collection of them? A Mardi Gras of mischievous goodness. This fiction slays hearts in the most wondrous of ways.'

— Jeff Parker

Praise for The Devil and the Detective:

'The world has hitherto been divided into plotters who wrote in shoddy sentences and linguistic aesthetes who wrote beautiful sentences but couldn't make anything happen on the page, no plot. Goldbach manages to do both — a thrilling plot and beautiful language. He has raised the bar for both murder mysteries and literary writing.'

— Josip Novakovich

'Mr. Goldbach will be a fun writer to watch. Check him out.'

— Padgett Powell

John Goldbach is the author of The Devil and the Detective (Coach House, 2013) and the collection Selected Blackouts (Insomniac, 2009). He lives in Montreal, Quebec.

Inseparable through university, Eva, Benedict, Sylvie and Lucien graduate into an exhilarating world on the brink of the new millennium. Eager to shrug off the hardships of her childhood, Eva breaks away to work in the City. Benedict stays behind to complete his PhD in Physics and pine for Eva, while siblings Sylvie and Lucien seek a more bohemian life of art, travel and adventure.

As their twenties give way to their thirties, the four friends find their paths diverging as they struggle to navigate broken hearts and thwarted dreams. With every summer that passes, they try to remain as close as they once were — but this is far from easy. One friend's triumph coincides with another's disaster, one finds love as another loses it, one comes to their senses as another is changing their mind. . And who knows where any of us will be in twenty summers' time?

A warm, wise and witty novel about finding the courage to carry on despite life not always turning out as expected, and a powerful testament to love and friendship as the constants in an ever-changing world, Invincible Summer is a dazzling depiction of the highs and lows of adulthood and the greater forces that shape us.

A suicidal father looks to an older neighbor — and the Cookie Monster — for salvation and sanctuary as his life begins to unravel. A man seeking to save his estranged, drug-addicted brother from the city's underbelly confronts his own mortality. A chess match between a girl and her father turns into a master class about life, self-realization, and pride: "Now hold on little girl…. Chess is like real life. The white pieces go first so they got an advantage over the black pieces."

These are just a few glimpses into the world of the residents of the fictional town of Cross River, Maryland, a largely black settlement founded in 1807 after the only successful slave revolt in the United States. Raw, edgy, and unrelenting yet infused with forgiveness, redemption, and humor, the stories in this collection explore characters suffering the quiet tragedies of everyday life and fighting for survival.

In "Insurrections," Rion Amilcar Scott's lyrical prose authentically portrays individuals growing up and growing old in an African American community. Writing with a delivery and dialect that are intense and unapologetically current, Scott presents characters who dare to make their own choices — choices of kindness or cruelty — in the depths of darkness and hopelessness. Although Cross River's residents may be halted or deterred in their search for fulfillment, their spirits remain resilient — always evolving and constantly moving.

After a disturbing call from a certain Josias Brandt, Karl Hofmeyr departs for Cape Town to help his brother, Iggy, who is apparently running amok. On this journey Karl — hard-core heavy-metal fan — valiantly contends with inner demons as well as outer obstacles. Meanwhile, in an attempt to fend off a beleaguering emptiness, Maria Volschenk embarks on a journey to understand her sister’s search for enlightenment. . and her subsequent death. These two narratives converge on a highly unconventional city farm, where Iggy is locked in a bitter duel with the inscrutable Brandt fellow, under the laconic gaze of Maria’s friend Jakobus. Die aanspraak van lewende wesens, the original Afrikaans version of It Might Get Loud, won five major literary awards: the M-Net Award, the University of Johannesburg Literary Prize, the Hertzog Prize, the WA Hofmeyr Prize and the Great Afrikaans Novel Prize.

In the summer of 1946, while secluded in August Strindberg’s small cabin in the Stockholm archipelago, Stig Dagerman wrote Island of the Doomed. This novel was unlike any other yet seen in Sweden and would establish him as the country’s brightest literary star. To this day it is a singular work of fiction — a haunting tale that oscillates around seven castaways as they await their inevitable death on a desert island populated by blind gulls and hordes of iguanas. At the center of the island is a poisonous lagoon, where a strange fish swims in circles and devours anything in its path. As we are taken into the lives of each castaway, it becomes clear that Dagerman’s true subject is the nature of horror itself.

Island of the Doomed is a chilling profile of terror and guilt and a stunning exploration — written under the shadow of the Nuremberg Trials — of the anxieties of a generation in the postwar nuclear age.

I, City is a novel about the city of Most in north Bohemia, an ancient city founded on a primeval wetland that was literally "relocated" to get to the brown coal beneath it. The city is the narrator, telling its own story through its inhabitants, who make their "appearances" in fleeting, ghost-like vignettes, Joycean epiphanies straight out of a Bohemian Dubliners. The "I" that purports to be Most seems to be an entire consciousness, at enough of a remove from the town itself that he, she or it can see and can know seemingly everything, past and present. As Most's inhabitants emerge from the pollution, or from the swamp of the town's founding, we find not individuals but representatives. Theirs are historical lives that mistrust history, or that live it at least with typical Czech irony. This abstraction, Brycz's making of archetypes, isn't accomplished in a spirit of abuse. Brycz obviously loves his "small" people, and has more than sympathy — he is one of them. As Brycz makes fictional people say factual things and factual people (Kafka, the Pope, the last president of Communist Czechoslovakia, Gustav Husak) say fictional things, post-modernity via Marquez and other so-called Magical Realists makes its almost requisite — though noiseless — appearance.

I, City is many things: a novel-in-stories, a series of lyrical prose sketches in the best easterly European tradition of Danilo Kiš, or Isaac Babel.

Long before he was the taco seller whose ‘Gringo Dog’ recipe made him famous throughout Mexico City, our hero was an aspiring artist: an artist, that is, till his would-be girlfriend was stolen by Diego Rivera, and his dreams snuffed out by his hypochondriac mother. Now our hero is resident in a retirement home, where fending off boredom is far more gruelling than making tacos. Plagued by the literary salon that bumps about his building’s lobby and haunted by the self-pitying ghost of a neglected artist, Villalobos’s old man can’t help but misbehave.

He antagonises his neighbours, tortures American missionaries with passages from Adorno, flirts with the revolutionary greengrocer, and in short does everything that can be done to fend off the boredom of retirement and old age. . while still holding a beer.

A delicious take-down of pretensions to cultural posterity, I’ll Sell You a Dog is a comic novel whose absurd inventions, scurrilous antics and oddball characters are vintage Villalobos.

Rosa Lane is 35, at Dante's centre point of life, when the individual is meant to garner experience and become wise. So far she has managed well enough without wisdom; she has been obedient to prevailing mores, she has worked hard at her decent job in London and has never troubled the stream. Yet she is suddenly disoriented by events, unable to understand the death of her mother, finding the former buttresses of her life — her long-term relationship, her steady job — no longer support her. When she leaves her job, and her relationship ends, she is thrust out into a great loneliness; she becomes acutely aware of — tormented by — the details of the city, the lives of those around her, and the deluge of competing cries.

Having stripped herself of her former context, and become inexplicable to her friends and family, she embarks on a mock-epic quest for a sense of purpose, for an answer to the hoary old question 'Why Live?' Her comical grail quest is fraught with minor trials — encounters with former friends, unsympathetic landladies, prospective employers, theory-mongers, and denizens of the 'real world'. Rosa also falls into a state of constant motion, nervously treading around London. Yet her constant circumnavigations of the city fail to enlighten her, and she escapes from the city to join friends in Cumbria. This escape finally precipitates the climax of the book, the greatest trial, and the beginnings of her return to normality, whatever that was.

After the success of his first novels (Edwin Mullhouse and Portrait of a Romantic), Steven Millhauser went on to enchant critics and readers with two short story collections that captured the magic and beauty of his longer works in vivid miniature.

The seven stories of In the Penny Arcade blend the real and the fantastic in a seductive mix that illuminates the full range of the author's gifts, from the story of "August Eschenburg," the clockmaker's son whose extraordinary talent for creating animated figures is lost on a world whose taste for the perverse and crude supersedes that of the refined and beautiful, to "Cathay," a kingdom whose wonders include elaborate landscape paintings executed on the eyelids and nipples of court ladies.

From the celebrated author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine,a thought-provoking, often unsettling story collection that consists, broadly, of narrative diagrams of the three main stages in a human life: birth, life, and death.

Alexandra Kleeman’s debut novel You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine earned her comparisons to Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Ben Marcus, and Tom Perrotta. It was praised by the New York Times as "a powerful allegory of our civilization’s many maladies, artfully and elegantly articulated, by one of the young wise women of our generation."

In her second book, a collection of twelve stories irresistibly seductive in their strangeness, she explores human life from beginning to end: the distress of birth into a world already formed; the brief and confusing period of "living" where we understand what is expected of us and struggle to do it; and the death-y period toward the end where we sense it is ending and will end only partially understood, at best.

The title is taken from one of the stories ("Intimation"), but is also a play on Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortality" — only in this case it’s not clear exactly what is being intimated, but it’s nothing so gleaming and good as Immortality. The middle, "Living" section of the book, is fleshed out with a set of stories that borrow more from traditional realist fiction to illustrate the inner lives of the characters.

At once familiar and mysterious, these stories have an eerie resonance as its characters find themselves in new and surprising situations. An unnamed woman enters a room with no exit and a ready-made life; the disappearance of people, objects, and memory creates an apocalypse; the art of dance is used to try to tame a feral child; the key to surviving a house-party lies in knowing the difference between fake and real blood.

Elegant, surprising, wondrous, and haunting, Intimations is an utterly transporting collection from one of our most ingenious and brilliant young writers.

A wry, touching short story from one of New Zealand's best-loved writers.

When Uncle Rangiora visits his sister and dances with her in the garden, she knows she has to visit the place where he died, and where he and other of his comrades from the Maori Battalion were buried during the Second World War. His sister is an old woman now, her husband is even older, but that's not going to stop them from setting off across the world alone, to the great consternation of their children who wonder if they will ever get there and back.

This moving and entertaining story is a fictionalised version of the trip to Tunisia taken by the author's elderly parents. Musing upon postcolonial politics and perspectives, it also considers the lyrical form the author used at the beginning of his literary career and the wit, style and drama that readers can discover in his newer works.

The narrative interweaves history, myth, rumor, and news with the experiences of a young girl living in the flatness of South Florida. Like Grace Paley’s narrators, she is pensive and eager, hungry for experience but restrained. Into the sphere of her regard come a Ted Bundy reject, the God Osiris, a Caribbean slave turned pirate, a circus performer living in a box, broken horses, a Seminole chief in a swamp, and a murderous babysitter. What these preposterously commonplace figures all know is that murder is identity: “Of course what matters really is the psychokiller, what he’s done, what he threatens to do. Of course to be the lucky one you have to be abducted in the first place. Without him, you wouldn’t exist.”

It’s all-out war for ruthless red state special operator Kelly Turnbull when he returns in this blockbuster prequel to “People’s Republic,” Kurt Schlichter’s top selling novel of America after the polarized politics of blue versus red have split our country apart.

“Indian Country” finds Turnbull sent back into the blue states to help those trapped inside resist a politically correct police state. As the progressive government ratchets up the violence, Turnbull must mold regular Americans into a fighting force capable of resisting the People’s Republic Army, led by his former US Army Special Forces mentor.

Longer, bigger and bolder than the original, “Indian Country” is filled with Kurt Schlichter’s trademark snarky humor and even more non-stop action, drawing on his work as a television commentator and Senior Columnist for Townhall.com, and his experience as a retired Army infantry colonel.

A daring novel that made Christine Angot one of the most controversial figures in contemporary France recounts the narrator’s incestuous relationship with her father. Tess Lewis’s forceful translation brings into English this audacious novel of taboo.

The narrator is falling out from a torrential relationship with another woman. Delirious with love and yearning, her thoughts grow increasingly cyclical and wild, until exposing the trauma lying behind her pain. With the intimacy offered by a confession, the narrator embarks on a psychoanalysis of herself, giving the reader entry into her tangled experiences with homosexuality, paranoia, and, at the core of it all, incest. In a masterful translation from the French by Tess Lewis, Christine Angot’s Incest audaciously confronts its readers with one of our greatest taboos.

Lorsque Tiron, le secrétaire particulier d'un sénateur romain, ouvre la porte à un étranger terrorisé, il déclenche une suite d'événements qui vont propulser son maître au sein d'une des plus célèbres et dramatiques affaires de l'Histoire.

L'étranger est un Sicilien victime de Verrès, gouverneur vicieux et corrompu. Le sénateur en question, c'est Cicéron, un jeune et brillant avocat déterminé à atteindre l'imperium — pouvoir suprême au sein de l'État.

À travers la voix captivante de Tiron, nous sommes plongés dans l'univers perfide et violent de la politique romaine, et nous suivons un homme — intelligent, sensible, mais aussi arrogant et roublard — dans sa lutte pour accéder au sommet.

C'est un monde qui ressemble étonnamment à celui d'aujourd'hui, toile de fond d'un véritable thriller politique autour de l'irrésistible ascension de Cicéron. « Tout ce qu'il avait, écrit Tiron de son maître, c'était sa voix, et par sa seule volonté, il en a fait la voix la plus célèbre du monde. »

Journaliste politique, romancier Robert Harris est l'auteur de Fatherland, Enigma, Archange, traduits dans le monde entier. Son précédent roman, Pompéi, a été en tête de toutes les listes de best-sellers.

« Harris combine magistralement son esprit critique de journaliste politique et ses techniques d'auteur de thrillers. »

The Sunday Times

Шарль Нодье (1780–1844), французский писатель, драматург, библиофил, библиотекарь Арсенала, внес громадный вклад в развитие романтической и в частности готической словесности, волшебной и «страшной» сказки, вампирической новеллы и в целом литературы фантастики и ужаса. Впервые на русском языке — сборник Ш. Нодье «Инферналиана» (1822), который сам автор назвал собранием «анекдотов, маленьких повестей, рассказов и сказок о блуждающих мертвецах, призраках, демонах и вампирах».

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Legion of the Damned® Novels and The Mutant Files comes the first novel in a post-apocalyptic military science fiction series about America rising from the ashes of a global catastrophe…

On May Day, 2018, sixty meteors entered Earth’s atmosphere and exploded around the globe with a force greater than a nuclear blast. Earthquakes and tsunamis followed. Then China attacked Europe, Asia, and the United States in the belief the disaster was an act of war.

Washington D.C. was a casualty of the meteor onslaught that decimated the nation’s leadership and left the surviving elements of the armed forces to try and restore order as American society fell apart.

As refugees across America band together and engage in open warfare with the military over scarce resources, a select group of individuals representing the surviving corporate structure makes a power play to rebuild the country in a free market image as The New Confederacy…

The seductive story of a dangerous love triangle, inspired by the infamous Nabokov marriage, with a spellbinding psychological thriller at its core.

In the 1920s, Zoya Andropova, a young refugee from the Soviet Union, finds herself in the alien landscape of an elite all-girls New Jersey boarding school. Having lost her family, her home, and her sense of purpose, Zoya struggles to belong, a task made more difficult by the malice her peers heap on scholarship students and her new country’s paranoia about Russian spies. When she meets the visiting writer and fellow Russian émigré Leo Orlov—whose books Zoya has privately obsessed over for years—her luck seems to have taken a turn for the better. But she soon discovers that Leo is not the solution to her loneliness: he’s committed to his art and bound by the sinister orchestrations of his brilliant wife, Vera.

As the reader unravels the mystery of Zoya, Lev, and Vera’s fate, Zoya is faced with mounting pressure to figure out who she is and what kind of life she wants to build. Grappling with class distinctions, national allegiance, and ethical fidelity—not to mention the powerful magnetism of sex—Invitation to a Bonfire investigates how one’s identity is formed, irrevocably, through a series of momentary decisions, including how to survive, who to love, and whether to pay the complicated price of happiness.

“This is a superb text of astonishing modernity, a veritable manifesto of the wretched of the earth…”

— Marianne

Bruno Jasienski’s I Burn Paris has remained one of Poland’s most uncomfortable masterstrokes of literature since its initial and controversial serialization in 1928 in the French magazine L’Humanité (for which Jasienski was deported). It tells the story of a disgruntled factory worker who, finding himself on the streets, takes the opportunity to poison Paris's water supply with a deadly virus. With the deaths piling up, we encounter Chinese communists, rabbis, disillusioned scientists, American millionaires and a host of others as the city sections off into ethnic enclaves and everyone plots their route of escape. At the heart of the cosmopolitan city is a deep-rooted xenophobia and hatred — the one thread that binds all these groups together. As Paris lies in ruin, Jasienski issues a rallying cry to the downtrodden of the world while mixing “The Internationale” with a broadcast of popular music.

With its montage strategies reminiscent of early avant-garde cinema and fist-to-the-gut metaphors, I Burn Paris has lost none of its vitality and vigor. Ruthlessly dissecting various utopian fantasies, Jasienski is out to disorient, and he has a seemingly limitless ability to transform the Parisian landscape into the product of disease-addled minds. An exquisite example of literary Futurism and Catastrophism, the novel presents a filthy, degenerated world where factories and machines have replaced the human, but rather than cliché and simplistic propaganda, these features are given an immediacy that depicts the modern metropolis as only superficially cosmopolitan, as hostile and animalistic to its core.

Like many ambitious New York City teenagers, Craig Gilner sees entry into Manhattan’s Executive Pre-Professional High School as the ticket to his future. Determined to succeed at life—which means getting into the right high school to get into the right college to get the right job—Craig studies night and day to ace the entrance exam, and does.  That’s when things start to get crazy.

At his new school, Craig realizes that he isn't brilliant compared to the other kids; he’s just average, and maybe not even that. He soon sees his once-perfect future crumbling away. The stress becomes unbearable and Craig stops eating and sleeping—until, one night, he nearly kills himself. 

Craig’s suicidal episode gets him checked into a mental hospital, where his new neighbors include a transsexual sex addict, a girl who has scarred her own face with scissors, and the self-elected President Armelio.  There, isolated from the crushing pressures of school and friends, Craig is finally able to confront the sources of his anxiety.

Ned Vizzini, who himself spent time in a psychiatric hospital, has created a remarkably moving tale about the sometimes unexpected road to happiness. For a novel about depression, it’s definitely a funny story.

Like many ambitious New York City teenagers, Craig Gilner sees entry into Manhattan’s Executive Pre-Professional High School as the ticket to his future. Determined to succeed at life—which means getting into the right high school to get into the right college to get the right job—Craig studies night and day to ace the entrance exam, and does.  That’s when things start to get crazy.

At his new school, Craig realizes that he isn't brilliant compared to the other kids; he’s just average, and maybe not even that. He soon sees his once-perfect future crumbling away. The stress becomes unbearable and Craig stops eating and sleeping—until, one night, he nearly kills himself. 

Craig’s suicidal episode gets him checked into a mental hospital, where his new neighbors include a transsexual sex addict, a girl who has scarred her own face with scissors, and the self-elected President Armelio.  There, isolated from the crushing pressures of school and friends, Craig is finally able to confront the sources of his anxiety.

Ned Vizzini, who himself spent time in a psychiatric hospital, has created a remarkably moving tale about the sometimes unexpected road to happiness. For a novel about depression, it’s definitely a funny story.

A beautifully moving tale of loss and reaching out to the ones we love, of one man’s journey to discover what really matters in modern life.

Our narrator’s days are numbered. Estranged from his family, living alone with only his cat Cabbage for company, he was unprepared for the doctor’s diagnosis that he has only months to live. But before he can set about tackling his bucket list, the Devil appears with a special offer: in exchange for making one thing in the world disappear, he can have one extra day of life. And so begins a very bizarre week…

Because how do you decide what makes life worth living? How do you separate out what you can do without from what you hold dear? In dealing with the Devil our narrator will take himself – and his beloved cat – to the brink. If Cats Disappeared from the World is a story of loss and reconciliation, of one man’s journey to discover what really matters in modern life.

This beautiful tale is translated from the Japanese by Eric Selland, who also translated The Guest Cat by Takashi Hiraide. Fans of The Guest Cat and The Travelling Cat Chronicles will also surely love If Cats Disappeared from the World.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVdwRk5LFTw

The epic of Island Life that has gripped Finland Winner of the Finlandia Prize Nominated for the Nordic Criti Prize

It is the summer of 1946. A novice Lutheran priest, his wife and baby daughter arrive at a windswept island off the coast of Finland, where they are welcomed by its frugal, self-sufficient community of fisher folk turned reluctant farmers. In this deeply atmospheric and quietly epic tale, Lundberg uses a wealth of everyday detail to draw us irresistibly into a life and mindset far removed from our own—stoic and devout yet touched with humour and a propensity for song. With each season, the young family’s love of the island and its disparate and scattered inhabitants deepens, and when the winter brings ice new and precarious links appear.

Told in spare, simple prose that mirrors the islanders’ unadorned style, this is a story as immersive as it is heartrending.

A passionate novel of unstoppable physical obsession amongst a group of Brussels eurocrats, “Illegal Liaisons” offers a fascinating insight into the first Polish generation that is truly ‘free’, but struggle to know where the boundaries of that freedom lie.

Plebanek’s characters have to negotiate between the old-fashioned devout Catholicism they grew up with, and the modern way of living they are desperate to embrace. Watch them as they try to claim their rightful place within the international crowd in the big world that turns out to be really rather small.

Expect the upending of stereotypes, libidos run wild, graphic eroticisim, and, ultimately, the soul searching and hard realities.

Summer 1944. When German sniper Dieter Rohde’s older brother is unjustly shot for desertion by the SS, he will stop at nothing to win the Iron Cross medal and redeem his family’s name by targeting as many Allied troops as possible. Rohde’s deadly efforts bring him into direct confrontation with American sniper Caje Cole. Rohde may be driven by ambition, but he hasn’t encountered an adversary like Cole, the so-called hillbilly sniper who is as hard as the mountains he calls home and as wily as a backwoods fox. As the final pitched battle for France takes place around them at the Falaise Pocket, these two snipers declare war on each other.

Icelander is the debut novel from a brilliant new mind, an intricate, giddy romp steeped equally in Nordic lore and pulpy intrigue.

When Shirley MacGuffin is found murdered one day prior to the annual town celebration in remembrance of Our Heroine’s mother — the legendary crime-stopper and evil-thwarter Emily Bean — everyone expects Our Heroine to follow in her mother’s footsteps and solve the case. She, however, has no interest in inheriting the family business, or being chased through steam-tunnels, or listening to skaldic karaoke, or fleeing the inhuman Refurserkir. But evil has no interest in her lack of interest.

A Nabokovian goof on Agatha Christie, a madcap mystery that is part The Third Policeman and part The Da Vinci Code, The Icelander is one thing above all else: a true original.

03:15, 22nd June 1941◦— Barbarossa is unleashed and Kampfgruppe von Schroif are right there at the cutting edge of the battle for Russia. Thrown into action against the fortress of Brest-Litovsk, von Schroif and his crew drive a new weapon into battle◦— the legendary Sturmgeschütz. However, even with this latest armoured marvel there is hard fighting as the Reds dig in and doggedly defend the island fortress to the last man.

Penetrating, authentic and stunning in its detail, the long awaited prequel to the highly acclaimed “Tiger Command!” is a powerful addition to the series. Based on a true story of combat on the Eastern Front, this atmospheric new novel puts the reader right into the action and unveils the story of how a legend was forged in the heat of the first great battle of the campaign.

Written by Emmy™ Award winning writer Bob Carruthers and newcomer Sinclair McLay and edited by Mark Farr, this much anticipated Eastern Front novel also explores the dark underside of war as von Schroif is faced with the malevolent presence of Oskar Dirlewanger.

03:15, 22nd June 1941◦— Barbarossa is unleashed and Kampfgruppe von Schroif are right there at the cutting edge of the battle for Russia. Thrown into action against the fortress of Brest-Litovsk, von Schroif and his crew drive a new weapon into battle◦— the legendary Sturmgeschütz. However, even with this latest armoured marvel there is hard fighting as the Reds dig in and doggedly defend the island fortress to the last man.

Penetrating, authentic and stunning in its detail, the long awaited prequel to the highly acclaimed “Tiger Command!” is a powerful addition to the series. Based on a true story of combat on the Eastern Front, this atmospheric new novel puts the reader right into the action and unveils the story of how a legend was forged in the heat of the first great battle of the campaign.

Written by Emmy™ Award winning writer Bob Carruthers and newcomer Sinclair McLay and edited by Mark Farr, this much anticipated Eastern Front novel also explores the dark underside of war as von Schroif is faced with the malevolent presence of Oskar Dirlewanger.

Diabolically funny and subversively philosophical, Italian novelist Giacomo Sartori’s I Am God is the diary of the Almighty’s existential crisis that erupts when he falls in love with a human.

I am God. Have been forever, will be forever. Forever, mind you, with the razor-sharp glint of a diamond, and without any counterpart in the languages of men. So begins God’s diary of the existential crisis that ensues when, inexplicably, he falls in love with a human. And not just any human, but a geneticist and fanatical atheist who’s certain she can improve upon the magnificent creation she doesn’t even give him the credit for. It’s frustrating, for a god.

God has infinitely bigger things to occupy his celestial attentions. Yet he can’t tear his eyes (so to speak) from the geneticist who’s unsettlingly avid when it comes to science, sex, and Sicilian cannoli. Whatever happens, he must safeguard his transcendental dignity. So he watches—disinterestedly, of course—as the handsome climatologist who has his sights set on her keeps having strange accidents. And as the lanky geneticist becomes hell-bent on infiltrating the Vatican’s secret files, for reasons of her own….

A sly critique of the hypocrisy and hubris that underlie faith in religion, science, and macho careerism, I Am God takes us on a hilarious and provocative romp through the Big Questions with the universe’s supreme storyteller.