ALEKSANDRS PUŠKINS

NELAIĶA IVANA PETROVIČA BELKINA NOVELES

Tulkojusi Marija Šūmane

izdevniecība Liesma 1969

Noskannējis grāmatu un FB2 failu izveidojis Imants Ločmelis

Zenta Ērgle

Nosargāt mīlestību

Liesma Rīga 1987

 FB2 failu izveidojis Imants Ločmelis

Stāsta, galvenie varoņi Baiba un Daumants pēc skolas beig­šanas apprecas un sāk patstāvīgu dzīvi. Pēc rakstura abi ir dažādi - Baiba smagi pārdzīvo katru sīkāko nesaskaņu, Daumants turpretim ir straujš, vieglprātīgs. Lai nosargātu savu mīlestību, abiem nākas pārdzīvot grūtus brīžus. Tikai turot rokas mazo dēlu, Daumants paīstam saprot ka viņam vīrietim jāuzņemas galvenās rūpes ne vien par uzturu un apģērbu, bet ari par saticību, mīlestību un laimi mazajā pasaulē, ko sauc par Pētersonu ģimeni.

DAŽI VĀRDI IEVADAM

Grāmatām, tāpat kā cilvēkiem, katrai savs liktenis. Vienas veika­los ķertin izķer, bibliotēkās nolasa drisku driskās, citas vientuļas un aizmirstas guļ plauktos. Ir grāmatas, no kurām izlasījusi atvadāmies, bet ir tādas, no kuru varoņiem žēl šķirties, gribas uzzināt, kāds lik­tenis tos sagaida.

Pirms vairākiem gadiem uzrakstīju stāstu «Starp mums, meitenēm, runājot…». Tajā parādīta kādas Rīgas skolas astotās klases skolēnu dzīve, draudzēšanās un pirmās mīlestības jūtas. Viens no stāsta galvenajiem varoņiem — draiskulīgais un vieglprātīgais Daumants iemīlas klusajā, čaklajā Baibā. Viņai savukārt patīk talantīgais un iz­skatīgais konservatorijas students Tagils. Baiba viļas savā pirmajā mīlestībā un saprot, ka Daumants ir viņas vislabākais draugs.

Daudzajās tikšanās reizēs dažādās Latvijas skolās, kā arī man adresētajās vēstulēs lasītāji pieprasīja grāmatai turpinājumu.

Stāsta «Bez piecām minūtēm pieauguši» darbība risinās kādā pro­fesionāli tehniskajā šuvēju vidusskolā. Galvenajiem varoņiem Baibai un Daumantam piepulcējas citi — bārene Svetlana, skaistā, iecirtīgā Dēzija, paslinkais Leons. Baibas draudzība pret Daumantu beigās pāraug abpusējā mīlestībā.

«Mēs gribētu lūgt rakstnieci uzrakstīt ari šai grāmatai turpinā­jumu,» Siguldas internātskolas audzēkņu vārdā raksta bibliotēkas pulciņa sekretāre Laila Cevere. «Ļoti gribētos zināt, kā izveidosies jauniešu turpmākā dzīve, vai Daumants un Baiba būs laimīgi, vai Daces un Pētera draudzība turpināsies.» — «Es ļoti vēlētos, lai rakstniece uzrakstītu grāmatu vai pat mazu stāstiņu par jau pieaugušajiem jauniešiem, kuri mācās augstskolās vai strādā,» raksta V. 2arska no Rīgas 47. vidusskolas. «Tas varētu būt ar! turpinājums grāmatai «Bez piecām minūtēm pieauguši». Stāsta pamatā būtu jauniešu dzīve, kad jau Šīs piecas minūtes ir pagājušas un liekas, ka dzīvē viss ir sasniegts. Bet vēl jau ir daudzas neiekarotas virsotnes.»

Un, lūk, jūsu priekšā jauna grāmata — «Nosargāt mīlestību», kas stāsta par Baibas, Daumanta, Svetlanas un citu no iepriekšējām grā­matām iepazītu varoņu pirmo patstāvīgās dzīves gadu.

Zenta Ērgle

En una manzana de Nueva York conviven personajes de lo más variopinto: una solterona resignada a no encontrar la pareja ideal, una celestina obsesionada por planear citas a ciegas para su hermano, un ligón empedernido, un divorciado desengañado del amor…

Lo que une a Everett, Jody, Simon y Polly es su pasión por los perros. Y son sus adorables mascotas las que terminan por convertirse en tiernos cumplidos que lanzan flechas a sus amos… aunque suelan equivocarse de objetivo.

Go Go Grill, el restaurate a la par que ONG del barrio, será la cocina donde se cuezan los enredos en los que se verán envueltos los protagonistas de esta deliciosa comedia coral.

Losy dwojga czeskich emigrantów, powracających do ojczyzny po dwudziestoletnim wygnaniu. Drogi Ireny i Josefa krzyżują się dopiero na ostatnich stronach książki.

From the incomparable Anne Tyler, a wise, gently humorous, and deeply compassionate novel about a schoolteacher, who has been forced to retire at sixty-one, coming to terms with the final phase of his life.

Liam Pennywell, who set out to be a philosopher and ended up teaching fifth grade, never much liked the job at that run-down private school, so early retirement doesn’t bother him. But he is troubled by his inability to remember anything about the first night that he moved into his new, spare, and efficient condominium on the outskirts of Baltimore. All he knows when he wakes up the next day in the hospital is that his head is sore and bandaged.

His effort to recover the moments of his life that have been stolen from him leads him on an unexpected detour. What he needs is someone who can do the remembering for him. What he gets is-well, something quite different.

We all know a Liam. In fact, there may be a little of Liam in each of us. Which is why Anne Tyler’s lovely novel resonates so deeply.

модный роман

A Carl Streator, periodista de mediana edad, le han encargado que escriba una serie de artículos sobre la muerte súbita infantil, un tema que le resulta familiar pues él mismo perdió a su hijo en circunstancias extrañas. En el transcurso de la investigación descubre que en todas las casas donde ha muerto un bebé (o un niño, o un adulto) hay un ejemplar del mismo libro: una antología de poemas africanos que contiene una nana letal. Esta canción mata a aquel que la escucha; de hecho, su poder es tal que ni siquiera es necesario recitarla, con tan solo memorizarla y odiar a alguien intensamente, cae fulminado. Helen Hoover Boyle, agente inmobiliaria especializada en vender casas encantadas, también tenía un hijo que murió en circunstancias similares al de Streator. El periodista y la agente inmobiliaria emprenderán, acompañados por la secretaria de Helen, Mona, aficionada al esoterismo, y el novio de esta, Oyster, un ecologista ultrarradical, un viaje por carretera con el fin de destruir todos los ejemplares del libro y encontrar el grimorio original del que procede el hechizo. Con Nana damos la bienvenida a una nueva familia nuclear, un grupo disfuncional hasta extremos arrebantes. Y a una hilarante alegoría sobre la información y el poder.

Amazon.co.uk Review

"Namma" meaning bride is the first-hand account of Kate Karko, a designer from London and her husband Tsedup, a Tibetan nomad. The couple met, fell in love and married in India where Kate was travelling and Tsedup was living in exile. After an absence of nine years, four of which were spent in London waiting for the right documents to come through, Tsedup was finally able to return to his family on the roof of the world.

With very limited grasp of the Amdo dialect, Kate throws herself into life with her new family. She keeps an open mind to all new experiences and approaches her time with the nomads with enduring positivity-not many erstwhile city dwellers would have been able to cope with the complete lack of personal space and the constant smell of burning yak dung. Kate's position within the family group gave her remarkable access to nomadic life in the 21st century and full-colour photographs help bring her descriptions of her numerous in-laws to life. The reader is left with the impression of a beautiful country and a proud people whose cultural heritage is under threat of extinction. Indeed, the reality of nomadic life does not quite match up with Kate's early romantic imaginings:

The nomads were a tough and diligent people but now the men had been rendered impotent. Because of the fences there was no reason to herd the animals and it was more difficult for bandits to attack an enclosed encampment. Their role in the family had been all but erased. The new laws had tragically accomplished their goal of nomad domestication.

Given the author's emotional involvement with the family and the many difficulties she must have encountered during her six-month stay with the Amdo tribe, her pervasive objectivity is something of a disappointment. The reader learns very little, for example, about the real impact of her stay on her relationship with her husband or of the more day-to-day frustrations. Despite such minor flaws, Namma remains an absorbing insight into a deeply spiritual yet fun-loving people, written by a woman whose son has become a bridge between two worlds. -Simon Priestly -This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Geographical Magazine

'Fascinating read… a glimmering insight into the nomadic lifestyle inherent to the country'

En los años sombríos del nazismo, desaparecen de un rincón secreto de la prisión de Spandau unas valiosísimas monedas de oro. Casi cincuenta años después, caído el Muro de Berlín, dos personajes oscuros pero poderosos, con un pasado político turbio, contratan cada uno por su lado a dos «antiguos combatientes», Juan Belmonte -el que tiene nombre de torero – y Frank Galinsky. En «paro» laboral e ideológico, ambos deben partir en busca de un botín robado que nadie se atreve en realidad a reclamar oficialmente. Belmonte acepta el encargo por amor a Verónica, Galinsky, por un viejo hábito de obediencia militante cuyo ideal es ahora el de enriquecerse «como todos los demás». Al mismo tiempo, al otro lado del mundo, un viejo humilde y solitario recibe un misterioso mensaje ¿Llegarán a enfrentarse Belmonte y Galinsky? ¿Existe realmente el tesoro? En tiempos implacables como los que vivimos, ¿vencerá el amor o la codicia?

Nanon, née en 1775, raconte en 1850 les événements qu'elle a vécus dans son enfance et sa jeunesse. La période prérévolutionnaire est évoquée comme un temps immémorial, où rien ne semble devoir changer. On apprend la prise de la Bastille un jour de marché. George Sand évoque fort bien la Grande Peur dans ce qu'elle a d'irrationnel et de terrifiant, la fête de la Fédération, moment d'exaltation et de bonheur, puis la vente des biens nationaux. Ainsi, Nanon peut devenir propriétaire de sa maison…

C'est une vue de la Révolution, équilibrée et sans fanatisme, que donne ce grand roman. Paru en 1872 – George Sand a donc soixante-huit ans -, il témoigne que la capacité de travail et la force d'invention sont intactes chez la romancière. Forte d'une documentation impressionnante, l'auteur conduit le récit avec une allégresse et une célérité qui nous étonnent. Nanon est un des très rares romans qui traite de la Révolution Française dans les campagnes, vue à travers les yeux d'une paysanne.

Książka o charakterze autobiograficznym, w której Wharton opisuje przeżycia związane ze śmiercią swojej córki, zięcia i dwóch wnuczek. Dzieli się miłością, smutkiem, gniewem oraz pragnieniem doskonałej sprawiedliwości.

"Niezawinione śmierci" to powieść, która w tym samym stopniu jest afirmacją życia, co opowieścią o śmierci. To książka o życiu pogodzonym za śmiercią, o duchowej przemianie i pogłębionym rozumieniu naszych codziennych zmagań.

"Sądzę, że Wharton jest jedynym współczesnym pisarzem, który trafia wprost do czytelniczych serc i przyśpiesza ich bicie…".

"London Evening Standard"

NEVALDĀMAIS BALTAIS CILVĒKS

Džeks Londons, VII sēj.

Dienvidjūras stāsti

IZDEVNIECĪBA LIESMA 1977

SASTĀDĪJUSI TAMĀRA ZĀLĪTE NO ANGĻU VALODAS TULKOJUSI VALIJA BRUTĀNE, ROTA EZERIŅA UN OJĀRS SARMA MĀKSLINIEKS ĀDOLFS LIELAIS

Aleksandrs Grīns

NAMEJA GREDZENS

ROMĀNS-PAGĀTNES LIECINIEKS

Aleksandra Grīna romānā «Nameja gredzens» attēlota Zemgales ķēniņa Nameja mantinieka ciņa par brīvu Zemgali. Romāns «Nameja gredzens» nav īsti vēsturisks, jo sižets ir izdomāts, nebalstās kon­krētos Latvijas vēstures faktos, arī pats troņa pretendents, par kura likteni stāstīts, Ir autora fantāzijas radīts. Vēsturiskumu darbam pie­šķir laikmeta tēlojums ar Polijas un Zviedrijas intereSu sadursmi, kur sava loma ir Kurzemes un Zemgales hercogistei, kā arī latviešu zemnieku un muižnieku, arī hercoga ierēdņu attieksmju tēlojums un latviskā garīgā pasaule, ko neizdodas ne paverdzināt, ne iznīcināt muižniekiem un viņu pakalpiņiem.

Romāns tiek publicēts pēc 1931. gada izdevuma

«Nameja gredzens» ir rakstnieka pirmais romāns. Par vēsturisku to dēvēt nav īsta pamata, jo sižets un galvenais varonis ir autora fantāzijas, iztēles radīts. Romānā stāstīts par 17. gadsimta sākumu, kad visā Latvijā dega raganu sārti, bet tautā vēl bija dzīva at­miņa par ķēniņu Nameju, kas 13. gadsimta beigās ar saviem vīriem aizgāja uz Lietuvu.

Aleksandrs Grīns (1895—1941) ir viens no spēcīgākajiem, ta­lantīgākajiem 30. gadu latviešu romānistiem. Viņa interešu centrā ir tautas vēsture, sižeti bieži risinās 17. gadsimtā Kurzemes un Zemgales hercogistē, nereti darbojas arī konkrētas vēsturiskas per­sonas. A. Grīns ir spriega sižeta meistars, viņa varoņi ir drosmīgi vīri, veikli un izmanīgi cīņās. Tādu viņš tēlo arī latviešu zemnieku — ne nomāktu, pazemotu un salauztu, bet spējīgu uz varoņdarbiem, nāvi nicinot, celdamies cīņai par tautas un dzimtenes brīvību. Patrio­tisma, tautas mīlestības un varonības tēmas A. Grīna romānos savijas vienkopus.

 Sagatavošanā:

Ādolfa Ersa «Muižnieki» un Riharda Valdesa «Jūras vilki».

SĒRIJAS REDAKCIJAS KOLĒĢIJA:

V. HAUSMANIS (priekšsēdētājs) H.    HIRŠS J. KALNIŅŠ I.    KIRSENTĀLE I. RIEKSTIŅŠ I. RONIS

ROMANS-PAGATNES liecinieks

Aleksandrs Grīns

 Nameja gredzens

Vēsturisks romāns

RĪGA «ZINĀTNE» 1989

Tekstu publicēšana? sagatavojusi, priekšvārdu sarakstītus? I. KIR5ENTALE, pēcvārdu un komentārus — M. AIJNS

Ilustrācijām izmantoti arhīvu un muzeju fondu materiāli

Fotomateriālus publicēšanai sagatavojis E. OSIS

1 r.70 k.

Grīns A.

Gr6l4 Nameja gredzens: Vēsturisks romāns / Tekstu publicēšanai sagatavojusi un priekšvārdu sarak­stījusi I. Kiršentāle, pēcvārdu un komentārus — M. Auns. — R.: Zinātne, 1989. — 223 lpp., 8 lp. ii. — (Romāns — pagātnes liecinieks).

Priekšvārds, pēcvārds, komentāri, ilustrācijas Izdevniecība «Zinātne». 1989

Noskannējis grāmatu un FB2 failu izveidojis I.Ločmelis

Il est Napoléon le Grand: après Austerlitz, qui peut arrêter l'empereur des Français? Il bouscule les rois, à Iéna, à Friedland, à Wagram. Il conquiert les femmes: Marie Walewska, la Polonaise, et Marie-Louise, l'Autrichienne, la petite-nièce de Marie-Antoinette! Son fils, le roi de Rome, descend donc de l'empereur d'Autriche. Quel parcours!

Napoléon, que nous suivons pas à pas, s'humanise. Amant impérieux de Marie Walewska et mari attentionné de Marie-Louise, il voudrait retenir l'Histoire, ne pas avoir à engager le fer contre le Tsar. Mais il est emporté: "Et ainsi la guerre aura lieu malgré moi, malgré lui", confie-t-il.

Max Gallo nous fait partager, à chaque instant de chaque jour, les bonheurs et les ardeurs du père, du mari, de l'amant, la volonté et l'esprit de décision de cet empereur des rois, lancé dans le ciel de l'Histoire comme un météore. "Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre".

´Era, en efecto, el automóvil de Maruja. Había transcurrido por lo menos media hora desde el secuestro, y sólo quedaban los rastros: el cristal del lado del chofer destruido por un balazo, la mancha de sangre y el granizo de vidrio en el asiento, y la sombra húmeda en el asfalto, de donde acababan de llevarse al chofer todavía con vida. El resto estaba limpio y en orden´.

Gabriel García Márquez

Красота смерти…

Эстетика мрачного и изысканного стиля «Natura Morta» эпохи позднего маньеризма, перенесенная в наши дни…

Элегантная, изысканная, блистательно-циничная проза, концептуальная в самом высоком смысле слова.

Гибель ребенка…

Гибель Помпеи…

Заупокойные службы…

In nineteen minutes, you can mow the front lawn, color your hair, watch a third of a hockey game. In nineteen minutes, you can bake scones or get a tooth filled by a dentist; you can fold laundry for a family of five.... In nineteen minutes, you can stop the world, or you can just jump off it.

In nineteen minutes, you can get revenge.

Sterling is a small, ordinary New Hampshire town where nothing ever happens -- until the day its complacency is shattered by a shocking act of violence. In the aftermath, the town's residents must not only seek justice in order to begin healing but also come to terms with the role they played in the tragedy. For them, the lines between truth and fiction, right and wrong, insider and outsider have been obscured forever. Josie Cormier, the teenage daughter of the judge sitting on the case, could be the state's best witness, but she can't remember what happened in front of her own eyes. And as the trial progresses, fault lines between the high school and the adult community begin to show, destroying the closest of friendships and families.

Nineteen Minutes is New York Times bestselling author Jodi Picoult's most raw, honest, and important novel yet. Told with the straightforward style for which she has become known, it asks simple questions that have no easy answers: Can your own child become a mystery to you? What does it mean to be different in our society? Is it ever okay for a victim to strike back? And who -- if anyone -- has the right to judge someone else?

Роман о последних годах жизни Фёдора Петровича Гааза

Vor 200 Jahren überschritt Napoleon — rastloser Feldherr, Retter der Revolution, Putschist und Kaiser der Franzosen, Herrscher über Europa, Gründer Groß-Württembergs und Schöpfer der deutschen Nation — seinen Rubikon. Die Jahreszahl 1812 markiert den Beginn vom Ende seiner Herrschaft: Vor Moskau lag sein Stalingrad, auf das in Leipzig 1813 und Waterloo (Belle-Alliance) 1815 die endgültigen Niederlagen folgten.

Erzählung aus Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre (1829).

Novelle ist eine Prosaerzählung von Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Am 23. März 1797 als Epos Die Jagd konzipiert, wurde der Stoff erst im Oktober 1826 und im Januar/Februar 1827 wieder aufgegriffen, in der Prosaform neu geschrieben, Anfang 1828 corrigirt und ajustirt und lag im Frühjahr 1828 im Druck vor.

Au Japon, en 1884, Yuko Akita, âgé de dix-sept ans, annonce la voie dans laquelle il a choisi de s'engager: il sera poète, contre l'avis de son père, un prêtre shintoïste qui estime que la poésie n'est pas un métier mais tout juste un passe-temps. Un poète de la cour Meiji a néanmoins vent des travaux de Yuko, lit ses poèmes, les trouve d'une limpidité admirable mais lui conseille de trouver de nouvelles couleurs et pour se faire de rejoindre un homme qui possède les plus grandes connaissances artistiques, Soséki. Yuko part à la recherche des couleurs de la neige, élément qui le fascine et à partir duquel il compose tous ses haïkus. En traversant les montagnes, il fait une découverte. Il tombe éperdument amoureux du corps d'une jeune fille européenne, à la beauté diaphane, prisonnière des glaces depuis longtemps. Sa rencontre avec Soséki, ancien samouraï, vieux peintre aujourd'hui aveugle, va le guider dans sa quête. Mais le savoir suprême, Yuko ne le trouvera qu'auprès d'une femme, car seul l'amour peut faire naître l'absolu de l'art.

Au fil des dialogues entre le maître et l'élève, la fragilité des choses, les images lumineuses du temps qui passe, la concision du langage ancrent ce récit initiatique dans la tradition et l'esthétique des haïkus dont il tire toute sa substance.

NAKTS FLORENCĒ

Aleksandrs Dimā (tēvs)

Kopoti raksti piecpadsmit sējumos

Piecpadsmitais sējums

"AEROEKSPRESIS" RĪGA 1993

SANKT PĒTERBURGA 

No franču valodas tulkojis J.JANSONS

Redaktors A.MUKĀNS

Sastādītāji: G.ŠPAKOVS un S.SMOĻSKIS

Ofseta papīrs. Formāts 60x90 1/16. Tirāža 16 000. Līgumcena.

Izdevumu sagatavojusi izdevējsabiedrība

"AEROEKSPRESIS"

Izdevējdarbības licence Nr. 2-0116

 Sanktpēterburga, Vasilija sala, 1.līnija 34

Aleksandrs Dima (tēvs)

Kopoti raksti piecpadsmit sējumos

Julian's words haunted Alison "your're only a schoolgirl," he'd saidl, and Alison knew he still considered her a child. Could she really mean so little to him? Somewhere under all the planning and preparations Alison had cherished a faint hope that her business-arrangement marriage with Julian would turn into the kind of relationship she'd always dreamed of. But now, with sickening certainty, she realized that Julian had never loved ehr. And Rosalie was free again, deternimed to win Julian back. Alison felt suddenly that there was no use fighting anymore.

Opowiada historię dramatycznych zmagań głównego bohatera z gruźlicą, która była "pamiątką" po obozie koncentracyjnym. Grzesiuk, mimo trudnego położenia, nie poddaje się, stara się sobie radzić, zachowuje poczucie humoru. To historia opowiedziana w iście Grzesiukowym stylu – prawdziwym, czasem brutalnym, ale lekkim i dość nonszalanckim, jak przystało na wychowanka przedwojennego Czerniakowa.

"Wikipedia"

Miguel de Unamuno escribió Niebla, en 1907, y desde su primera publicación en 1914 no ha dejado de reeditarse y se ha traducido a multitud de idiomas, lo que prueba su interés y vigencia, pero ¿qué es Niebla? Su autor la calificó de `novela malhumorada`, de `nivola`, de `rechifla amarga`. La realidad supuesta de «Niebla» es la de un caso patológico en busca de su ser a través del diálogo, pero el autor ha organizado esta anécdota en un juego de espejos, un laberinto de apariencias y simulacros donde al final lo único real es el propio acto de lectura que estamos realizando, en el que Unamuno da a sus lectores importancia de re-creadores, de eslabón final de la cadena narrativa.

Nada es una novela escrita por Carmen Laforet en 1944, que ganó el Premio Nadal ese mismo año. Luego, en 1948 obtuvo el Premio Fastenrath de la Real Academia Española. Llamó la atención no solamente por la juventud de la escritora, que por aquel entonces tenía 23 años, sino también porque mostraba la sociedad de aquella época. Hay quien dice que la novela es autobiográfica. Aunque la novela contiene elementos biográficos, la autora misma escribe en su introducción al cuento dentro de la compilación llamada Novelas (Primera edición 1957 Barcelona, Editorial Planeta) lo siguiente: `No es, como ninguna de mis novelas, autobiográfica, aunque el relato de una chica estudiante, como yo fui en Barcelona, e incluso la circunstancia de haberla colocado viviendo en una calle de esta ciudad donde yo misma he vivido, haya planteado esta cuestión más de una vez`.

La protagonista de la novela es una joven, llamada Andrea, que llega a la ciudad de Barcelona en los años de la posguerra para estudiar y empezar una nueva vida. Llega con muchas ilusiones a casa de su abuela, de donde sólo tiene recuerdos de su infancia. Sin embargo al llegar allí -donde aparte de la abuela viven la criada, tía Angustias, su tío Román, su tío Juan y la mujer de este último- estos sueños se ven rotos. En esta casa padecen hambre, hay suciedad, violencia y odio. Andrea, que vive oprimida por su tía Angustias, siente que su vida va a cambiar a partir de que Angustias se marcha, pero las cosas no acaban de ir como a ella le gustaría. Sin embargo en la universidad conoce a Ena, una chica de la que se hará íntima amiga y desempeñará un papel importante en su vida, y junto con la que aprenderá lo que la vida y el mundo exterior pueden ofrecer.

La novela llega a crear una atmósfera tan asfixiante que consigue traspasar el papel y llegar al lector. Cuando ante toda esa miseria en una casa oscura, cerrada, sucia, maloliente y un ambiente opresivo, en esa especie de microcosmos, a alguno de los personajes le pregunta qué le pasa, qué piensa, qué siente, éste responde `Nada`.

Carmen Laforet se adelanta a su tiempo con una prosa intimista y fotográfica, en la que se describe perfectamente la Barcelona de la época.

Santander. Barrio pesquero y ciudad vieja. Dos mundos separados. De uno a otro pasa Jacobo. Hijo de un maestro reconvertido en marinero, estudia COU en el otro lado. Del Barrio forman parte su padre, que ahoga su desamparo en el alcohol, un par de amigos que vagabundean por el puerto, y Roncal, sustituto del padre. De la mano de Roncal llega Jacobo al instituto, un mundo extraño y amenazador… Pero el instituto es también un nuevo comienzo: la palabra estimulante de don Máximo, los ojos aguamarina de Christine…Nunca seré como te quiero narra la doble mirada con que un adolescente se sitúa en el mundo: la descomposición moral y física de un padre; la extrañeza ante el amor.

A stunning work that sings with energy and expectation, Nexus is the last volume of the Rosy Crucifixion series, and the last major effort from this renowned author. Speaking of his life with June, and her friend who had gone on before, the work paints this bizarre trio. Still later, the time comes when Henry, finally, is free of NY, free of America, and free to truly begin writing as he'd been wanting to for so long. The only major novel in American letters to begin "Woof Woof," as it must.

Jacqueline Carey, New York Times bestselling author of the Kushiel's Legacy series, delivers book two in her new lushly imagined trilogy featuring daughter of Alba, Moirin.

NAAMAH'S CURSE

Far from the land of her birth, Moirin sets out across Tatar territory to find Bao, the proud and virile Ch'in fighter who holds the missing half of her diadh-anam, the divine soul-spark of her mother's people. After a long ordeal, she not only succeeds, but surrenders to a passion the likes of which she's never known. But the lovers' happiness is short lived, for Bao is entangled in a complication that soon leads to their betrayal.

Manuela Gretkowska, Namiętnik, 2005:Tom pięciu opowiadań Manueli Gretkowskiej mówi o potrzebie miłości-we wszystkich jej odmianach, obrazach, wcieleniach. Znajdziemy tu m.in. Sandrę K.-historię anorektyczki, ofiary kultu ciała, infantylnej czytelniczki pism kobiecych. Życie dwudziestoczteroletniej kobiety zatrudnionej w agencji reklamowej wypełnia praca, seks i nieustanna troska o swój wygląd. Zaskakującą historią życia Meksykanina jest Latin Lover. Po ślubie z cyniczną Szwedką bohater przenosi się do Europy, ale wkrótce okazuje się niepotrzebny. W akcie zemsty zostaje utrzymankiem bogatych koleżanek żony, jednak potem wraca do Meksyku. Namiętnik, mocny erotyczny tekst, którego narratorką jest kobieta, przynosi piękny opis aktu seksualnego. W ostatnich opowiadaniach Gretkowskiej eseistyczny temperament autorki ustępuje miejsca żywiołowi opowieści.

Герой повести – модный и дорогой художник Микис Самсонов, любимец Фортуны, проходит свидетелем (или подозреваемым?) по делу об убийстве своей бывшей любовницы, тоже художницы, Елены Макеевой. В результате следствия настоящий тайфун обрушивается на тихую заводь славы модного художника, открывая завесу над тайной его творчества…

Кто же Самсонов на самом деле? Гениальный художник? Великий мистификатор? Убийца?

Каждый человек, если, конечно, он не наплевательски относится к себе и своей жизни, стремится к успеху – в любом начинании, в карьере, в бизнесе, в семье, в любви. Такие люди, как лягушки в банке со сметаной, барахтаются и выплывают наверх, добиваясь заслуженного успеха. Однако пути к нему они выбирают самые разные и цену платит каждый свою.

История, которую предлагает автор, не рассказывает о реальных людях и реальных событиях, но характеры и обстоятельства, описываемые в книге, во многом типичны для нынешнего времени.

Comment conquérir une femme totalement insaisissable et indomptable. Un tête-à-tête torride, un duel sentimental et érotique. Voici un roman parfois comique, souvent grinçant et inquiétant, ressemblant à une course-poursuite, au style unique et à la langue rapide.

Komedia obyczajowa, kontynuacja losów dwóch rodzin zabużańskich, osadników na Dolnym Śląsku, którzy po latach szukają męża dla swej wnuczki, by zdobyć następcę do swojego gospodarstwa. Stary Pawlak, ciężko chory, musi przekazać swą ziemię. Ale starszy syn Witia, ożeniony z Jadźką Kargulówną, więcej gruntów uprawiać nie może, młodszy zaś, Paweł, jest pracownikiem naukowym we Wrocławiu. Cała nadzieja we wnuczce, osiemnastoletniej Ani. Pawlak i Kargul postanawiają ją wydać za mąż za młodego technika mechanizacji rolnictwa Zenka. Ich przemyślna intryga doprowadza do szczęśliwego finału – młodzi pobiorą się, a ziemia zostanie w rodzinie.

Введите сюда краткую аннотацию

Londyn, 1874 rok, Margaret Prior, inteligentna, niezależna młoda dama, aby odzyskać równowagę psychiczną po śmierci ojca, zaczyna odwiedzać więźniarki odsiadujące karę w ponurym zakładzie Millbank.

Tam, wśród pospolitych złodziejek, morderczyń i ulicznic, spotyka Selinę Dawes, która do niedawna święciła triumfy w londyńskim towarzystwie jako nadzwyczaj uzdolnione medium. Początkowo Margaret sceptycznie odnosi się do "talentu" dziewczyny. Potem jednak stopniowo zaczyna wkraczać w świat duchów i cieni.

Między obiema młodymi kobietami wytwarza się niezwykła więź…

Hermann Hesses Erzählung über den Gegensatz zwischen Geist- und Sinnenmenschen und ihre produktive Vereinigung im Künstler ist eine moderne Gestaltung des Don-Juanund Casanova-Motivs. Sie ist aber auch ein Loblied der Freundschaft, voller Abenteuer in einem zeitlosen Mittelalter. Klösterlicher und städtischer Kunstbetrieb, Zigeunermädchen und Vagantenpoesie: »Alle diese Elemente deutsch-romantischer Erzählkunst vereinen sich hier in seltener Vollständigkeit« (Rolf Schneider). Jahre bevor der Nationalsozialismus die kulturellen Traditionen Deutschlands mißbrauchte, hat Hesse in diesem Roman die Idee von Deutschland und deutschem Wesen, die er seit seiner Kindheit in sich trug, dargestellt und ihr seine »Liebe gestanden, gerade weil ich alles, was heute spezifisch deutsch ist, so sehr hasse«, schrieb er 1933. Zu Hesses Lebzeiten war Narziß und Goldmund das erfolgreichste seiner Bücher. Die deutsche Gesamtauflage von 1930 bis heute beträgt mehr als zwei Millionen Exemplare. Übersetzt ist der Roman mittlerweile in dreißig Sprachen.

The Incomparable Sidney Sheldon Best known today for his exciting, blockbuster novels, Sidney Sheldon is the author of The Stars Shine Down, The Doomsday Conspiracy, Memories of Midnight, The Sands of Time, Windmills of the Cods, If Tomorrow Comes, Master of the Came, Rage of Angels, Bloodline, A Stranger in the Mirror, and The Other Side of Midnight. All have been number one international bestsellers. His first and only other book, The Naked Face, was acclaimed by the New York Times as "the best first mystery of the year." Most of his novels have become major feature films or TV mini-series, and there are 150 million copies of his books in print throughout the world. However, before he ever authored a book Sidney Sheldon had won a Tony Award for Broadway's Redhead and an Academy Award for The Bachelor and the Bobby Soxer. He wrote the screenplays for twenty-three motion pictures including Easter Parade (with Judy Garland) and Annie Cet Your Cun. In addition, he penned six other Broadway hits and created four long-running television series including "Hart to Hart" and "I Dream of Jeannie," which he also produced and directed. 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.

Entre diciembre de 1864 y enero de 1865 ocurrió uno de los episodios más dolorosos de la historia uruguaya: el sitio de Paysandú. Allí, se enfrentaron los seiscientos defensores liderados por Leandro Gómez, comandante de la plaza, y dieciséis mil hombres de tres ejércitos invasores; detrás se extendía un telón de intereses internacionales. La contienda terminó trágicamente para los sitiados, marcada por la inmensa desigualdad de fuerzas. Mario Delgado Aparaín introduce su propia ficción en esa Paysandú que va quedando en escombros, cubierta de cadáveres y saqueada por guerreros victoriosos.

Con más de ocho edicionas agotadas No robarás las botas de los muertos (Premio Bartolomé Hidalgo 2002) es ya un clásico de la novela histórica.

Pierre Antón deja el colegio el día que descubre que la vida no tiene sentido. Se sube a un ciruelo y declama a gritos las razones por las que nada importa en la vida. Tanto desmoraliza a sus compañeros que deciden apilar objetos esenciales para ellos con el fin de demostrarle que hay cosas que dan sentido a quiénes somos. En su búsqueda arriesgarán parte de sí mismos y descubrirán que sólo al perder algo se aprecia su valor. Pero entonces puede ser demasiado tarde.

To, co wyróżnia "Nieznośną lekkość bytu" – to wielokierunkowość, wielopłaszczyznowość tej książki. Kiedy zabieramy się do czytania jakiejś powieści, często znamy zarys jej fabuły, wiemy, co po kolei się wydarzy czy też, nie daj Boże, jak książka się skończy. W „Nieznośnej lekkości bytu” zakończenie nie ma znaczenia, co pozwala nam tak naprawdę skupić się na całej treści książki. Pisząc o wielokierunkowości mam na myśli to, że Kundera łączy w tej powieści historię, romans, filozofię i dramat człowieka, dramat miłości w jedną całość. Jeden z internautów zarzucił autorowi, że mógłby po prostu swoje przemyślenia zawrzeć w esejach, że niepotrzebnie zrobił z tego powieść. Ale właśnie to, że „Nieznośna lekkość bytu” różni się budową od innych klasycznych powieści, stanowi jej atut – bo nieczęsto trafia się na książkę, w której autor opowiada o swoich przemyśleniach, pisząc o bohaterach wtrąca swoje „Myślę, że” „Moim zdaniem” i tak dalej…

Historia miłości przedstawiona w tej powieści to studium psychologiczne związku dwojga ludzi, studium psychiki mężczyzny i kobiety. Tomasz i Teresa – bo tak nazywają się bohaterowie – reprzentują dwa zupełnie inne sposoby myślenia. On, szanowany lekarz – nieustannie ugania się za kobietami, w pewnym momencie stwierdza, że przez całe życie posiadł ponad dwieście kobiet… Teresa za to wychowała się na wsi, nigdy nie zaznała wielkomiejskiego życia i kiedy poznaje Tomasza, chwyta się go jako jedynej deski ratunku, jedynej możliwości wyrwania się ze znienawidzonego świata brudu, alkoholu… Kiedy zaczynają być razem, Tomasz nie rezygnuje ze swojego poligamicznego trybu życia – nadal odwiedza swoje kochanki… a Teresa umiera z zazdrości, zaczynają się w jej snach pojawiać koszmary – tu Kundera przenosi nas na kilka momentów w surrealistyczny świat snów, które są dla niego punktem wyjścia do analizy psychiki kobiety…

Spotkanie Teresy i Tomasza jest dziełem przypadku – i to, okazuje się, nie jednego, ale aż sześciu. Kundera w świetny sposób ukazuje ciąg zdarzeń, ciąg przypadków, które musiały zajść, aby ta para mogła się spotkać. „To co pewne – pisze Kundera – to co nieuchronne – jest nieme. Tylko przypadek do nas przemawia”*. Przypadek jest wręcz jednym z bohaterów tej książki – autor pokazuje, jak bawi się bohaterami, jak zbliża ich i oddala od siebie, jak wręcz decyduje o ich istnieniu…

„Słownik niezrozumiałych słów” – według wielu czytelników jedna z ciekawszych części książki. W każdym związku oprócz nici porozumienia między partnerami istnieje wiele pojęć, co do których każdy z partnerów ma inne zdanie – Kundera ubrał je właśnie w „Słownik niezrozumiałych słów”, który zawiera zarówno pojęcia ogólne – takie jak „muzyka” czy „wierność”, jak i słowa będące charakterystycznymi tylko dla danego związku…

Książkę polecam wszystkim szukającym czegoś "innego", czegoś oryginalnego w europejskiej literaturze oraz tym, którzy szukają w książkach czegoś więcej niż tylko ciekawej fabuły.

Adam ha heredado el don de su madre, Jem: cuando mira a alguien a los ojos puede ver la fecha en que la persona morirá. Para él, este poder también es una carga, que le angustia en las relaciones con los demás. Sarah, una adolescente de Londres, tiene que huir de su casa y empezar una vida nueva, sola. Cada noche tiene la misma pesadilla que la atormenta: un incendio, una catástrofe y un misterioso chico al que reconoce en el instituto. Las cosas cada vez se van poniendo más difíciles: el mundo tiende al caos, las autoridades insertan a las personas chips de identificación, violentas inundaciones obligan a evacuar pueblos enteros. Un día, Adam ve que la mayoría de la gente de la ciudad tiene la misma fecha: enero de 2027. Algo va a suceder. Algo muy malo. Pero, ¿qué? ¿Qué puede hacer él?

Рассказ вошёл в сборники:

Quicker Than The Eye (В мгновение ока)

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

With Nemesis Roth leaps back again, to Newark in 1944, in the summer, polio season — but this year, the worst outbreak of polio in a lifetime, and long before there was even a glimpse of a vaccine. The fact of the eradication of polio, an affliction unknown in the lifetime of most Americans now, only makes Roth's recreation of the disease all but horror-movie immediate: unstoppable, unpredictable, unknowable, evading diagnosis until it is too late, with cases spreading through a neighborhood by the hour and children dead overnight or consigned to an iron lung for the rest of their lives (and what is an iron lung, any reader might have to ask, only to find out, and then be horrified at how polio could redefine everyday life?).

The collection of stories

Las voces silenciadas. Xinran Xue era presentadora de un influyente programa radiofónico chino cuando en 1989 recibió una carta angustiosa: una niña había sido secuestrada y forzada a casarse con un anciano que desde entonces la mantenía encadenada. Los hierros estaban lacerándole la cintura y se temía por su vida. Xinran obtuvo la liberación de la víctima, pero se percató de que un silencio histórico imperaba sobre la situación de las mujeres en su nación. Decidió difundir las historias de oyentes que cada noche llamaban a su programa. Esta iniciativa inédita tuvo por respuesta miles de cartas con increíbles relatos personales y convirtió a Xinran en una celebridad. Entre los numerosos testimonios que escuchó y dio a conocer, seleccionó quince para que integraran este libro. Nacer mujer en China es un relato colectivo revelador acerca de los deseos, los sufrimientos y los sueños de muchas mujeres que hasta ahora no habían encontrado expresión pública.

Gerd Hansen, młoda nauczycielka plastyki uwielbiana przez uczniów, jest osobą dość skrytą. Któregoś dnia wścibska dziennikarka Goggo odnajduje w jej mieszkaniu projekty gobelinów utalentowanej artystki, która kilka lat wcześniej zaginęła w nie wyjaśnionych okolicznościach na drugim końcu Norwegii. Opublikowanie tej sensacyjnej wiadomości w lokalnej prasie wywołuje lawinę zdarzeń.

Ce roman commence au printemps 1779, lorsqu'un enfant de dix ans à l'accent étranger, maigre et mal peigné, entre à l'école militaire de Brienne. Quinze ans plus tard, cet enfant entre dans la légende. Bonaparte est nommé général en chef des armées d'Italie par le Directoire. La suite, c'est Vendémiaire, Lodi, Arcole, la campagne d'Egypte. Cet homme de génie, despotique et visionnaire, s'apprête à conquérir la France, l'Europe et le monde. Son destin impérial est tracé. Jamais plus il ne cessera d'inviter au rêve et de susciter la passion.

Le "Napoléon" de Max Gallo est à la fois une savante biographie historique et un palpitant roman d'aventures. Pouvait-il en être autrement alors que l'empereur lui-même s'exclamait "Quel roman que ma vie!"? Le récit captivant raconte en quatre tomes une destinée exceptionnelle: le lecteur est de toutes les batailles, de toutes les alcôves, de toutes les pensées de Napoléon. C'est d'abord "Le Chant du départ" (1769-1799) qui salue l'émergence de Bonaparte, le fils de la Révolution. Au lendemain du 18 Brumaire, "Le Soleil d'Austerlitz" (1799-1805) brille sur une fulgurante ascension couronnée par le sacre impérial et par le triomphe du militaire de génie. À son zénith, Bonaparte se heurte à une Europe coalisée dont il veut être le maître: c'est le temps de "L'Empereur des rois" (1806-1812). Plus dure en sera la chute qui aboutit à Waterloo. Mais la légende est en marche: battu et en exil, Napoléon reste "L'Immortel de Sainte-Hélène" (1812-1821).

Avec la plume enthousiaste de Max Gallo, l'Aigle déploie toute sa splendeur. (Loïs Klein).

Experiences and observations of the journalist in the Cuban-Spanish War, the Greek-Turkish War, the Spanish-American War, the South African War, and the Japanese-Russian War, accompanied by “A War Correspondent’s Kit.”

Summary by Neeru Iyer

Сельма Лагелеф (1858–1940) – Шведская писательница, лауреат нобелевской премии по литературе (1909). "Чудесное путешествие Нильса Хольгерссона по Швеции" появилось в 1906 году. Задумывая учебник по географии для шведских детей, талантливая писательница создала книгу, которая стала классическим произведением мировой детской литературы.

Здесь представлен полный вариант книги, а не тот "пересказ со шведского", который был ранее у нас известен.

Skriven som läsebok för folkskolan, erbjuder den samtidigt en saklig översikt över geografi, natur och kultur samt ett spännande äventyr utan motsvarighet i svensk läromedelshistoria.

Миниатюрные романы Бананы Ёсимото сделали молодую писательницу всемирно известной. Книги, отмеченные мировыми литературными премиями, стали основой популярных фильмов.

"N-P" – название последнего сборника рассказов известного японского писателя, написанного на английском языке. Но издать книгу в Японии никак не удается: всех переводчиков, пытавшихся работать над ней, постигала внезапная смерть. Такова завязка нового романа культовой японской писательницы, за который она удостоена премии Финдессимо.

En 1812, il entre en Russie à la tête de cinq cent mille hommes. Un océan de feu détruit Moscou. Un chaos de glace et de neige engloutit la Grande Armée. Pour la première fois, l'Aigle baisse la tête. Dès lors, l'Europe conquise se réveille et se venge. Les puissants le trahissent, sa vieille garde pleure à Fontainebleau. Le retour de l'île d'Elbe annonce-t-il un nouveau chant du départ? Le dernier acte est proche. Le soleil d'Austerlitz ne se lèvera pas sur la plaine boueuse de Waterloo. Enchaîné par les Anglais sur son rocher de Sainte Hélène, l'Empereur peut encore vaincre le temps et l'oubli et forger sa mémoire immortelle.

Dans le Paris du XVe siècle, une jeune et superbe gitane appelée la Esméralda danse sur le parvis de Notre Dame. Sa beauté bouleverse l’archidiacre de Notre-Dame, Claude Frollo, qui veut la faire enlever par son sonneur de cloches, le malformé Quasimodo. Esméralda est sauvée par une escouade d’archers, commandée par le capitaine de la garde Phoebus de Châteaupers. Quand Esmeralda retrouve Phoebus plusieurs jours plus tard, elle lui laisse voir l’amour qu’il lui a inspiré. Certes, Phoebus est fiancé à la jeune Fleur-de-Lys, mais il est également séduit par la gitane. Il lui donne rendez-vous dans une maison borgne, mais au moment où il va parvenir à ses fins, Frollo survient et le poignarde.Accusée de meurtre, la belle Esmeralda ne veut pourtant pas, pour échapper au supplice, accepter de se donner à Frollo. Quand on l’amène devant la cathédrale pour subir sa peine, Quasimodo – qui l’aime aussi – s'empare d'elle et la traîne dans l'église, où le droit d’asile la met à l’abri. Là, il veille sur elle, jaloux et farouche, espérant peut-être la séduire ?Cependant, les truands avec lesquels vivait la Esmeralda viennent pour la délivrer. Frollo profite du tumulte pour l’emmener avec lui, et tente à son tour de la séduire. Furieux de son refus, il la livre aux griffes de la vieille recluse du Trou-au-rats. Mais au lieu de déchirer la Esmeralda, celle ci reconnaît en elle sa propre fille. Elle ne peut cependant en profiter, car les sergents de ville la retrouvent, et la traînent à nouveau au gibet.Du haut de Notre-Dame, Quasimodo et Frollo assistent à l’exécution. Quasimodo, furieux de désespoir, précipite le prêtre du haut de la tour, et va lui-même se laisser mourir dans le charnier de Montfaucon, tenant embrassé le cadavre d’Esmeralda, enfin unis pour l’éternité.

Not After Midnight is a collection of short stories by Daphne du Maurier, all with different characters and themes but similar in that they touch on the supernatural or strange events.

"Don't Look Now" — this novella features John and Laura who are on holiday in Venice. But it is a dangerous place for them as they are being followed by two old sisters and there is a killer on the loose.

"Not After Midnight" is a tale about a lonely teacher who goes on a painting holiday in Crete and meets a strange American couple. The woman invites him to visit them in their hotel room but "not after midnight," the reason for this becoming clear as the story progresses.

In "A Border Line Case", a young actress pursues old family friend Nick after the death of her father. She discovers he is an IRA executive and accompanies him on a bombing raid in Ireland, but soon learns he is not all he seems to be.

In "The Way of the Cross", a disparate group of pilgrims from the same village embark on a trip to frenetic, dusty Jerusalem. Their regular vicar is taken ill and replaced by The Reverend Babcock, a rough diamond from Leeds. On the first night, young Robin, a precocious nine-year-old, suggests a walk to the Garden of Gethsemane. In the dark, among the bushes and trees, two people overhear things about themselves that force them to re-evaluate their lives. Subsequently the whole group learn a great deal about themselves and their loved ones, and return home better people.

"The Breakthrough" is a science fiction-style story set in a deserted lab in the wilds of Norfolk. A man is sent to help with a new computer but soon realizes the strange purpose of the scientific team and decides to leave. However, he gets caught up in the experiment and stays. Mac, the leader of the group, is convinced that he can trap the life force, or soul, at the point of death and utilize its energy. His guinea pig Ken is the affable young assistant who happens to be dying of leukemia. Needless to say, the plan goes horribly awry.

Set in our own time along the bloody frontier between Texas and Mexico, this is Cormac McCarthy's first novel since Cities of the Plain completed his acclaimed, best-selling Border Trilogy.

Llewelyn Moss, hunting antelope near the Rio Grande, instead finds men shot dead, a load of heroin, and more than $2 million in cash. Packing the money out, he knows, will change everything. But only after two more men are murdered does a victim's burning car lead Sheriff Bell to the carnage out in the desert, and he soon realizes how desperately Moss and his young wife need protection. One party in the failed transaction hires an ex-Special Forces officer to defend his interests against a mesmerizing freelancer, while on either side are men accustomed to spectacular violence and mayhem. The pursuit stretches up and down and across the border, each participant seemingly determined to answer what one asks another: how does a man decide in what order to abandon his life?

A harrowing story of a war that society is waging on itself, and an enduring meditation on the ties of love and blood and duty that inform lives and shape destinies, No Country for Old Men is a novel of extraordinary resonance and power.

In a sublime story cycle, Kazuo Ishiguro explores ideas of love, music and the passing of time. From the piazzas of Italy to the Malvern Hills, a London flat to the 'hush-hush floor' of an exclusive Hollywood hotel, the characters we encounter range from young dreamers to cafe musicians to faded stars, all of them at some moment of reckoning. Gentle, intimate and witty, this quintet is marked by a haunting theme: the struggle to keep alive a sense of life's romance, even as one gets older, relationships flounder and youthful hopes recede.

From the acclaimed author of “The Remains of the Day” and “When We Were Orphans,” a moving new novel that subtly reimagines our world and time in a haunting story of friendship and love.

As a child, Kathy—now thirty-one years old—lived at Hailsham, a private school in the scenic English countryside where the children were sheltered from the outside world, brought up to believe that they were special and that their well-being was crucial not only for themselves but for the society they would eventually enter. Kathy had long ago put this idyllic past behind her, but when two of her Hailsham friends come back into her life, she stops resisting the pull of memory.

And so, as her friendship with Ruth is rekindled, and as the feelings that long ago fueled her adolescent crush on Tommy begin to deepen into love, Kathy recalls their years at Hailsham. She describes happy scenes of boys and girls growing up together, unperturbed—even comforted—by their isolation. But she describes other scenes as well: of discord and misunderstanding that hint at a dark secret behind Hailsham’s nurturing facade. With the dawning clarity of hindsight, the three friends are compelled to face the truth about their childhood—and about their lives now.

A tale of deceptive simplicity, “Never Let Me Go” slowly reveals an extraordinary emotional depth and resonance—and takes its place among Kazuo Ishiguro’s finest work.

A primera vista, los jovencitos que estudian en el internado de Hailsham son como cualquier otro grupo de adolescentes. Practican deportes, o tienen clases de arte donde sus profesoras se dedican a estimular su creativi-dad. Es un mundo hermйtico, donde los pupilos no tienen otro contacto con el mundo exterior que Madame, como llaman a la mujer que viene a llevarse las obras mбs interesantes de los adolescentes, quizб para una galerнa de arte, o un museo. Kathy, Ruth y Tommy fueron pupilos en Hailsham y tambiйn fueron un triбngulo amoroso. Y ahora, Kathy K. se permite recordar cуmo ella y sus amigos, sus amantes, descubrieron poco a poco la verdad. El lector de esta esplйndida novela, utopнa gуtica, irб descubriendo que en Hailsham todo es una re-presentaciуn donde los jуvenes actores no saben que lo son, y tampoco saben que no son mбs que el secreto terrible de la buena salud de una sociedad.

June 1941. Dutch diplomat Oscar Verschuur has been posted to neutral Switzerland. His family is spread across Europe. His wife Kate works as a nurse in London and their daughter Emma is living in Berlin with her husband Carl, a ‘good’ German who works at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Briefly reunited with her father in a restaurant in Geneva, Emma drops a bombshell. A date and a codename, and the fate of nations is placed in Verschuur’s hands: June 22, Barbarossa.

What should he do? Warn the world, or put his daughter’s safety first? The Gestapo are watching them both. And with Stalin lulled by his alliance with Hitler, will anyone even listen?

Otto de Kat is fast gaining a reputation as one of Europe’s sharpest and most lucid writers. News from Berlin, a book for all readers, a true page-turner driven by the pulse of a ticking clock, confirms him as a storyteller of subtly extravagant gifts.

An extraordinary novel about a wife who disguises herself as a man and goes off to fight in the Civil War.

She calls herself Ash, but that's not her real name. She is a farmer's faithful wife, but she has left her husband to don the uniform of a Union soldier in the Civil War. Neverhome tells the harrowing story of Ash Thompson during the battle for the South. Through bloodshed and hysteria and heartbreak, she becomes a hero, a folk legend, a madwoman and a traitor to the American cause.

Laird Hunt's dazzling new novel throws a light on the adventurous women who chose to fight instead of stay behind. It is also a mystery story: why did Ash leave and her husband stay? Why can she not return? What will she have to go through to make it back home?

In gorgeous prose, Hunt's rebellious young heroine fights her way through history, and back home to her husband, and finally into our hearts.

One of the most acclaimed young voices of his generation, Blake Butler now offers his first work of nonfiction: a deeply candid and wildly original look at the phenomenon of insomnia.

Invoking scientific data, historical anecdote, Internet obsession, and figures as diverse as Andy Warhol, Gilles Deleuze, John Cage, Anton LaVey, Jorge Luis Borges, Brian Eno, and Stephen King, Butler traces the tension between sleeping and conscious life. And he reaches deep into his own experience — from disturbing waking dreams, to his father’s struggles with dementia, to his own epic 129-hour bout of insomnia — to reveal the effect of sleeplessness on his imaginative landscape.

The result is an exhilarating exploration of dream and awareness, desperation and relief, consciousness and conscience — a fascinating maze-map of the borders between sleep and the waking world by one of today’s most talked-about writers.

From the National Book Award — winning, bestselling author of Tree of Smoke comes a provocative thriller set in the American West. Nobody Move, which first appeared in the pages of Playboy, is the story of an assortment of lowlifes in Bakersfield, California, and their cat-and-mouse game over $2.3 million. Touched by echoes of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, Nobody Move is at once an homage to and a variation on literary form. It salutes one of our most enduring and popular genres — the American crime novel — but with a grisly humor and outrageousness that are Denis Johnson’s own. Sexy, suspenseful, and above all entertaining, Nobody Move shows one of our greatest novelists at his versatile best.

This book channels the rage, filth, anguish, and the bust-a-gut hilarity of pre-gentrified New York.

The New York of Lynne Tillman’s hilarious, audacious fourth novel is a boiling point of urban decay. The East Village streets are overrun with crooked cops, drug addicts, pimps, and prostitutes. Garbage piles up along the sidewalks amid the blaring soundtrack of car stereos. Confrontations are supercharged by the summer heat wave. This merciless noise has left Elizabeth Hall an insomniac. Junkies roam her building and overturn trashcans, but the landlord refuses to help clean or repair the decrepit conditions. Live-in boyfriend Roy is good-natured but too avoidant to soothe the sores of city life. Though Elizabeth fights for sanity in this apathetic metropolis, violent fantasies threaten to push her over the edge. In vivid detail, she begins to imagine murders: those of the “morons” she despises, and, most obsessively, her own. Frightening, hilarious, and wholly addictive, No Lease on Life is an avant-garde sucker-punch, a plea for humanity propelled by dark wit and unflinching honesty. Tillman’s spare prose, frank, poignant and always illuminating, captures all the raving absurdity of a very bad day in America's toughest, hottest melting pot.

The award-winning author of Waiting and War Trash returns to his homeland in a searing new novel that unfurls during one of the darkest moments of the twentieth century: the Rape of Nanjing.

In 1937, with the Japanese poised to invade Nanjing, Minnie Vautrin — an American missionary and the dean of Jinling Women’s College — decides to remain at the school, convinced that her American citizenship will help her safeguard the welfare of the Chinese men and women who work there. She is painfully mistaken. In the aftermath of the invasion, the school becomes a refugee camp for more than ten thousand homeless women and children, and Vautrin must struggle, day after day, to intercede on behalf of the hapless victims. Even when order and civility are eventually restored, Vautrin remains deeply embattled, and she is haunted by the lives she could not save.

With extraordinarily evocative precision, Ha Jin re-creates the terror, the harrowing deprivations, and the menace of unexpected violence that defined life in Nanjing during the occupation. In Minnie Vautrin he has given us an indelible portrait of a woman whose convictions and bravery prove, in the end, to be no match for the maelstrom of history.

At once epic and intimate, Nanjing Requiem is historical fiction at its most resonant.

“After my wife, Elizabeth Church, was murdered by the bellman Alfonse Padgett in the Essex Hotel, she did not leave me.”

Sam Lattimore meets Elizabeth Church in 1970s Halifax, in an art gallery. The sparks are immediate, leading quickly to a marriage that is dear, erotically charged, and brief. In Howard Norman’s spellbinding and moving novel, the gleam of the marriage and the circumstances of Elizabeth’s murder are revealed in heart-stopping increments. Sam’s life afterward is complicated. For one thing, in a moment of desperate confusion, he sells his life story to a Norwegian filmmaker named Istvakson, known for the stylized violence of his films, whose artistic drive sets in motion an increasingly intense cat-and-mouse game between the two men. For another, Sam has begun “seeing” Elizabeth — not only seeing but holding conversations with her, almost every evening, and watching her line up books on a small beach. What at first seems simply hallucination born of terrible grief reveals itself, evening by evening, as something else entirely.

Next Life Might Be Kinder is a story of murder, desperate faith, the afterlife, and of love as absolute redemption — from one of our most compelling storytellers at the height of his talents.

Christopher, the only bookseller in the small farm town of Low Ferry, lives an uneventful life -- until one day he encounters a shy newcomer named Lucas, and accidentally sells him the wrong book. What follows is a journey for both men, in vastly different ways, set against the strange, ritualistic, magic backdrop of a midwestern winter. A tale about the masks people wear and a meditation on the power of magic, Nameless revels in the simple pleasure of storytelling.

Not Not While the Giro is James Kelman's first major collection of short stories — originally published by Polygon in 1983. The reader follows the lives of young men, social misfits, whose lives are spent waiting — waiting for their next giro or menial job — in the pub, the dole office, the snooker table and the greyhound track. This collection, written with irony and great tenderness, confirmed James Kelman's status as one of the most significant writers in the UK, and remains as powerful, relevant and truthful as it was in the early 1980s.

Hailed by Spain's Revista Quimera as one of the top ten Spanish-language novels of the decade, alongside Bolaño's 2666, Vila-Matas's Bartleby & Co., and Marías's Your Face Tomorrow, The No World Concerto is a many-layered puzzle concerning an old screenwriter who has holed up in a shabby hotel in a never-named but familiar city in order to write a script about his lover — a young piano prodigy who wants in turn to give up music and become a novelist, and who believes she may be in contact with creatures from another world. Ambition, lust, hate, and the need to create all combine to make up a potent depiction of youth — and age — lost in a labyrinth of their own making.

Sinister and erotic, shifting restlessly between realities, and populated by conspirators both real and imagined, The No World Concerto is an investigation of the limits of language, storytelling, and the known world, set against a backdrop of empty concert halls and hazy foosball bars. It is the first of A. G. Porta's books to appear in English, finally joining those of his early writing partner and devotee Roberto Bolaño.

Best known for his complex and beautiful novels — regularly compared to those of Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, and Don DeLillo — Joseph McElroy is equally at home in the short story, having written numerous pieces over the course of his career that now, collected at last, serve as an ideal introduction to one of the most important contemporary American authors. Combining elements of classic McElroy with tantalizing stories pointing the way ahead (the spare and dangerous “No Man’s Land,” the lush and mischievous “The Campaign Trail”), Night Soul and Other Stories presents a wide range of work from a monumental artist.

One night at Trieste in September 1943 a seriously wounded soldier is found on the quay. The doctor, of a newly arrived German hospital ship, Pietri Friari gives the unconscious soldier medical assistance. His new patient has no documents or anything that can identifying him. When he regains consciousness he has lost his memory and cannot even remember what language he speaks. From a few things found on the man the doctor, who is originally from Finland, believes him to be a sailor and a fellow countryman, who somehow or other has ended up in Trieste. The doctor dedicates himself to teaching the man Finnish, beginning the reconstruction of the identity of Sampo Karjalainen, leading the missing man to return to Finland in search of his identity and his past.

New Finnish Grammar won three literary prizes in Italy in 2001: Premio Grinzane Cavour, Premio Ostia Mare and Premio Giuseppe Desi and has received critical acclaim across Europe.

Winner of the Machado de Assis Prize.

Driving home, law student Paulo passes a figure at the side of the road. The indigenous girl stands in the heavy rain, as if waiting for something. Paulo gives her a lift to her family’s roadside camp.

With sudden shifts in the characters’ lives, this novel takes in the whole story: telling of love, loss and family, it spans the worlds of São Paulo’s rich kids and dispossessed Guarani Indians along Brazil’s highways. One man escapes into an immigrant squatter’s life in London, while another’s performance activism leads to unexpected fame on Youtube.

Written from the gut, it is a raw and passionate classic in the making, about our need for a home.

It is 1934, and New York City is in the icy grip of the Great Depression. With enormous compassion, Dr. James Delaney tends to his hurt, sick, and poor neighbors, who include gangsters, day laborers, prostitutes, and housewives. If they can’t pay, he treats them anyway.

But in his own life, Delaney is emotionally numb, haunted by the slaughters of the Great War. His only daughter has left for Mexico, and his wife Molly vanished months before, leaving him to wonder if she is alive or dead. Then, on a snowy New Year’s Day, the doctor returns home to find his three-year-old grandson on his doorstep, left by his mother in Delaney’s care. Coping with this unexpected arrival, Delaney hires Rose, a tough, decent Sicilian woman with a secret in her past. Slowly, as Rose and the boy begin to care for the good doctor, the numbness in Delaney begins to melt.

Recreating 1930s New York with the vibrancy and rich detail that are his trademarks, Pete Hamill weaves a story of hon…

In 1939, the families in a remote Jewish village in Romania feel the war close in on them. Their tribe has moved and escaped for thousands of years- across oceans, deserts, and mountains-but now, it seems, there is nowhere else to go. Danger is imminent in every direction, yet the territory of imagination and belief is limitless. At the suggestion of an eleven-year-old girl and a mysterious stranger who has washed up on the riverbank, the villagers decide to reinvent the world: deny any relationship with the known and start over from scratch. Destiny is unwritten. Time and history are forgotten. Jobs, husbands, a child, are reassigned. And for years, there is boundless hope. But the real world continues to unfold alongside the imagined one, eventually overtaking it, and soon our narrator-the girl, grown into a young mother-must flee her village, move from one world to the next, to find her husband and save her children, and propel them toward a real and hopeful future. A beguiling, imaginative, inspiring story about the bigness of being alive as an individual, as a member of a tribe, and as a participant in history, No One Is Here Except All Of Us explores how we use storytelling to survive and shape our own truths. It marks the arrival of a major new literary talent.

Bjørn Hansen, a respectable town treasurer, has just turned fifty and is horrified by the thought that chance has ruled his life. Eighteen years ago he left his wife and their two-year-old son for his mistress, who persuaded him to start afresh in a small, provincial town and to dabble in amateur dramatics. In time that relationship also faded, and after four years of living alone Bjørn contemplates an extraordinary course of action that will change his life for ever.

He finds a fellow conspirator in Dr Schiøtz, who has a secret of his own and offers to help Bjørn carry his preposterous and dangerous plan through to its logical conclusion. However, the sudden reappearance of his son both fills Bjørn with new hope and complicates matters. The desire to gamble with his comfortable existence proves irresistible, however, taking him to Vilnius in Lithuania, where very soon he cannot tell whether he's tangled up in a game or reality.

Novel 11, Book 18, for which Dag Solstad received the Norwegian Critics' Prize for Literature, is an uncompromising and concentrated existential novel that accommodates all of the author's fundamental themes.

Without telling her family, Elyria takes a one-way flight to New Zealand, abruptly leaving her stable but unfulfilling life in Manhattan. As her husband scrambles to figure out what happened to her, Elyria hurtles into the unknown, testing fate by hitchhiking, tacitly being swept into the lives of strangers, and sleeping in fields, forests, and public parks.

Her risky and often surreal encounters with the people and wildlife of New Zealand propel Elyria deeper into her deteriorating mind. Haunted by her sister’s death and consumed by an inner violence, her growing rage remains so expertly concealed that those who meet her sense nothing unwell. This discord between her inner and outer reality leads her to another obsession: If her truest self is invisible and unknowable to others, is she even alive?

The risks Elyria takes on her journey are paralleled by the risks Catherine Lacey takes on the page. In urgent, spiraling prose she whittles away at the rage within Elyria and exposes the very real, very knowable anxiety of the human condition. And yet somehow Lacey manages to poke fun at her unrelenting self-consciousness, her high-stakes search for the dark heart of the self. In the spirit of Haruki Murakami and Amelia Gray, Nobody Is Ever Missing is full of mordant humor and uncanny insights, as Elyria waffles between obsession and numbness in the face of love, loss, danger, and self-knowledge.

Shuklaji Street, in Old Bombay. In Rashid's opium room the air is thick and potent. A beautiful young woman leans to hold a long-stemmed pipe over a flame, her hair falling across her dark eyes. Around her, men sprawl and mutter in the gloom, each one drifting with his own tide. Here, people say that you introduce only your worst enemy to opium.

Outside, stray dogs lope in packs. Street vendors hustle. Hookers call for custom through the bars of their cages as their pimps slouch in doorways in the half-light. There is an underworld whisper of a new terror: the Pathar Maar, the stone killer, whose victims are the nameless, invisible poor. There are too many of them to count in this broken city.

Narcopolis is a rich, chaotic, hallucinatory dream of a novel that captures the Bombay of the 1970s in all its compelling squalor. With a cast of pimps, pushers, poets, gangsters and eunuchs, it is a journey into a sprawling underworld written in electric and utterly original prose.

"NW" is Zadie Smith's masterful novel about London life. Zadie Smith's brilliant tragi-comic "NW" follows four Londoners — Leah, Natalie, Felix and Nathan — after they've left their childhood council estate, grown up and moved on to different lives. From private houses to public parks, at work and at play, their city is brutal, beautiful and complicated. Yet after a chance encounter they each find that the choices they've made, the people they once were and are now, can suddenly, rapidly unravel. A portrait of modern urban life, "NW" is funny, sad and urgent — as brimming with vitality as the city itself.

Amy Bloom has won a devoted readership and wide critical acclaim for fiction of rare humor, insight, grace, and eloquence, and the same qualities distinguish Normal, a provocative, intimate journey into the lives of “people who reveal, or announce, that their gender is variegated rather than monochromatic”—female-to-male transsexuals, heterosexual crossdressers, and the intersexed.

We meet Lyle Monelle and his mother, Jessie, who recognized early on that her little girl was in fact a boy and used her life savings to help Lyle make the transition. On a Carnival cruise with a group of crossdressers and their spouses, we meet Peggy Rudd and her husband, “Melanie,” who devote themselves to the cause of “ordinary heterosexual men with an additional feminine dimension.” And we meet Hale Hawbecker, “a regular, middle-of-the-road, white-bread guy” with a wife, kids, and a medical condition, the standard treatment for which would have changed his life and his gender.

Casting light into the dusty corners of our assumptions about sex, gender and identity, Bloom reveals new facets to the ideas of happiness, personality and character, even as she brilliantly illuminates the very concept of "normal.”

In this, her first collection of stories, Christine Schutt gives exquisite and provocative form to feelings and memories. Nightwork is a masterful dreamwork, revealing our lives with the startling clarity we long for.

A young woman remembers, after a forbidden embrace, the exact quality of her father's skin, "pitted and stubbled under all that color." A girl recalls the strange kingdom that was her grandfather's estate, a place she came to inhabit only through betrayal.

Romantic linkings are often unexpected: mother-son, father-daughter, mother-lover-daughter. In "What Have You Been Doing?" a mother teaches her son how to kiss. In "Dead Men," a woman finds herself unable to be touched by her new lover without experiencing intensely erotic recollections of the lover who is gone.

The stories are sensually detailed and sometimes shocking. Hands, feet, breasts… bodies are known, as they are known, mostly in bed. "Before the dead man, she had slept by herself with her hands to herself like a poultice."

Here is an Everywoman, voiced from familiar enclosures: a house in the country, an apartment in town. The muted landscapes, too, are an Everyplace made of "wind and slashes of high blue sky in the heads of furious trees."

Schutt's fearlessness, her passionate honesty, is the source for the language of these splendid stories — night worlds, which may disturb our composure but enable us to dream while awake.

Thomas McGuane's high-spirited and fiercely lyrical new novel chronicles the fall and rise of Frank Copenhaver, a man so unhinged by his wife's departure that he finds himself ruining his business, falling in love with the wrong women, and wandering the lawns of his neighborhood, desperate for the merest glimpse of normalcy.

The result is a ruefully funny novel of embattled manhood, set in the country that McGuane has made his own: a Montana where cowboys slug it out with speculators, a cattleman's best friend may be his insurance broker, and love and fishing are the only consolations that last.

Patrick Fitzpatrick is a former soldier, a fourth-generation cowboy, and a whiskey addict. His grandfather wants to run away to act in movies, his sister wants to burn the house down, and his new stallion is bent on killing him: all of them urgently require attention. But increasingly Patrick himself is spiraling out of control, into that region of romantic misadventure and vanishing possibilities that is Thomas McGuane's Montana. Nowhere has McGuane mapped that territory more precisely — or with such tenderhearted lunacy — than in Nobody's Angel, a novel that places him in a genre of his own.

Set in Key West-the nation's extreme limit-this is the story of a man seeking refuge from a world of drug addiction by becoming a skiff guide for tourists-even though a tough competitor threatens to kill him.

This sweeping novel depicts the intertwined lives of an assortment of Egyptians-Muslims and Copts, northerners and southerners, men and women-as they begin to settle in Egypt's great second city, and explores how the Second World War, starting in supposedly faraway Europe, comes crashing down on them, affecting their lives in fateful ways. Central to the novel is the story of a striking friendship between Sheikh Magd al-Din, a devout Muslim with peasant roots in northern Egypt, and Dimyan, a Copt with roots in southern Egypt, in their journey of survival and self-discovery. Woven around this narrative are the stories of other characters, in the city, in the villages, or in the faraway desert, closer to the fields of combat. And then there is the story of Alexandria itself, as written by history, as experienced by its denizens, and as touched by the war. Throughout, the author captures the cadences of everyday life in the Alexandria of the early 1940s, and boldly explores the often delicate question of religious differences in depth and on more than one level. No One Sleeps in Alexandria adds an authentically Egyptian vision of Alexandria to the many literary-but mainly Western-Alexandrias we know already: it may be the same space in which Cavafy, Forster, and Durrell move but it is certainly not the same world.

From one of the most accomplished writers to emerge from Latin America, No Place for Heroes is a darkly comic novel about a mother and son who return to Buenos Aires in search of her former lover, whom she met during Argentina’s Dirty War.

During Argentina’s “Dirty War” of the late ’70s and early ’80s, Lorenza and Ramon, two passionate militants opposing Videla’s dictatorship, met and fell in love. Now, Lorenza and her son, Mateo, have come to Buenos Aires to find Ramon, Mateo’s father. Holed up in the same hotel room, mother and son share a common goal, yet are worlds apart on how they perceive it. For Lorenza, who came of age in the political ferment of the ’60s, it is intertwined with her past ideological and emotional anchors (or were they illusions?), while her postmodernist son, a child of the ’90s who couldn’t care less about politics or ideology, is looking for his actual father — not the idea of a father, but the Ramon of flesh and blood.

Anything goes as this volatile pair battle it out: hilarious misunderstandings, unsettling cruelty, and even a temptation to murder. In the end, they begin to come to a more truthful understanding of each other and their human condition.

No Place for Heroes is an addition to that long tradition of the eternal odd couple — in works ranging from Waiting for Godot to Kiss of the Spider Woman—waiting for their fortunes to change, written by one of the most talented and internationally celebrated authors at work today.

This stunning and elegiac novel by the author of the internationally acclaimed Wind-Up Bird Chronicle has sold over 4 million copies in Japan and is now available to American audiences for the first time.  It is sure to be a literary event.

Toru, a quiet and preternaturally serious young college student in Tokyo, is devoted to Naoko, a beautiful and introspective young woman, but their mutual passion is marked by the tragic death of their best friend years before.  Toru begins to adapt to campus life and the loneliness and isolation he faces there, but Naoko finds the pressures and responsibilities of life unbearable.  As she retreats further into her own world, Toru finds himself reaching out to others and drawn to a fiercely independent and sexually liberated young woman.

A poignant story of one college student's romantic coming-of-age, Norwegian Wood takes us to that distant place of a young man's first, hopeless, and heroic love.

A collection of 23 big, fierce stories by xTx.

A page-turning thriller for readers of Stephen King, Gillian Flynn, and Stieg Larsson, Night Film tells the haunting story of a journalist who becomes obsessed with the mysterious death of a troubled prodigy — the daughter of an iconic, reclusive filmmaker.

On a damp October night, beautiful young Ashley Cordova is found dead in an abandoned warehouse in lower Manhattan. Though her death is ruled a suicide, veteran investigative journalist Scott McGrath suspects otherwise. As he probes the strange circumstances surrounding Ashley’s life and death, McGrath comes face-to-face with the legacy of her father: the legendary, reclusive cult-horror-film director Stanislas Cordova — a man who hasn’t been seen in public for more than thirty years.

For McGrath, another death connected to this seemingly cursed family dynasty seems more than just a coincidence. Though much has been written about Cordova’s dark and unsettling films, very little is known about the man himself.

Driven by revenge, curiosity, and a need for the truth, McGrath, with the aid of two strangers, is drawn deeper and deeper into Cordova’s eerie, hypnotic world.

The last time he got close to exposing the director, McGrath lost his marriage and his career. This time he might lose even more.

Night Film, the gorgeously written, spellbinding new novel by the dazzlingly inventive Marisha Pessl, will hold you in suspense until you turn the final page.

One Man, one day, and a novel bursting with drama, comedy, and humanity.

Kevin Quinn is a standard-variety American male: middle-aged, liberal-leaning, self-centered, emotionally damaged, generally determined to avoid both pain and responsibility. As his relationship with his girlfriend approaches a turning point, and his career seems increasingly pointless, he decides to secretly fly to a job interview in Austin, Texas. Aboard the plane, Kevin is simultaneously attracted to the young woman in the seat next to him and panicked by a new wave of terrorism in Europe and the UK. He lands safely with neuroses intact and full of hope that the job, the expansive city, and the girl from the plane might yet be his chance for reinvention. His next eight hours make up this novel, a tour-de-force of mordant humor, brilliant observation, and page-turning storytelling.

In this collection of sixteen stories and three sketches, translated by Rakhshanda Jalil, Manto brazenly celebrates the warts of a seemingly decent society as well as its dark underbelly — tired and overworked prostitutes in 'The Candle's Tears' or 'Loser all the Way'; ruthless as also humane pimps in 'The Hundred Candle Watt Bulb' and 'Sahay'; the utter helplessness of men in the face of a sexual encounter in 'Naked Voices' and 'Coward'; and the madness perpetrated by the Partition as witnessed in 'By God!' and 'Yazid'. In one of the three sketches, which form part of this collection, the author brilliantly reveals himself to the world in a schizophrenic piece titled 'Saadat Hasan' calling 'Manto the writer' a liar, a thief and a failure! And in another titled 'In a Letter to Uncle Sam', Manto superbly couches his anti-imperialistic views in an innocent letter from a poor nephew to a capitalist and prosperous uncle in America.

The third book in Edward Whittemore’s acclaimed Jerusalem Quartet is a riveting tale of espionage and intrigue in which the outcome of World War II and the destiny of the Middle East could hinge on the true identity of one shadowy man.

On a clear night in 1941, a hand grenade explodes in a Cairo bar, taking the life of Stern, a petty gunrunner and morphine addict, nationality unknown, his aliases so numerous that it’s impossible to determine whether he was a Moslem, Christian, or Jew.

His death could easily go unnoticed as Rommel’s tanks charge through the desert in an attempt to take the Suez Canal and open the Middle East to Hitler’s forces. Yet the mystery behind Stern’s death is a top priority for intelligence experts. Master spies from three countries converge on Joe O’Sullivan Beare, who is closer to Stern than anyone, in an effort to unravel the disturbing puzzle. The search for the truth about Stern leads O’Sullivan Beare through the slums of Cairo to a decaying former brothel called the Hotel Babylon, populated by unusual characters. Slowly, the mystery of Stern unravels as Whittemore explores the tragedy and yearning of one man fighting a battle for the human soul.

Welcome to the village of Notwithstanding, where a lady dresses in plus fours and shoots squirrels, a retired general gives up wearing clothes altogether, a spiritualist lives in a cottage with the ghost of her husband, and people think it quite natural to confide in a spider that lives in a potting shed. Based on de Bernières' recollections of the village he grew up in, Notwithstanding is a funny and moving depiction of a charming vanished England.

Professor Murray Watson is rather a sad sack. His family, his career, his affair…not even drinking offers much joy. All his energies are now focused on his research into Archie Lunan, a minor poet who drowned 30 years ago off a remote stretch of Scottish coast. By redeeming Lunan's reputation, Watson hopes to redeem his own. But the more he learns about Lunan's sordid life, the more unlikely redemption appears.

Sharply observed, beautifully rendered stories about gender, sexuality, and nationality by a fresh new voice.

The stories in New York 1, Tel Aviv 0 speak to a contemporary generation and explore the tension between an anonymous, globalized world and an irrepressible lust for connection. The result is an intimate document of niche moments, when relationships either run their course, take flight, or enter holding patterns.

The characters in this collection are as intelligent and charming as they are lonely. In some stories, realistic urges materialize in magical settings: a couple discovers the ability to stop time together; another couple lives in an apartment where only one of them can hear a constant beeping, while the other must try to believe. In other stories, a nameless voice narrates the arc of a love affair through a list of the couple’s best and worst kisses; a father leaves his daughter in Israel to pursue a painting career in New York; and a sex worker falls in love with the Israeli photographer who studies her.

The stories in this ambitious and exciting debut share a prevailing sense of existential strangeness, otherworldliness, and the search to belong, while the altering of time and space and memory creates unexpected magic. And yet there is something entirely familiar about the experiences of these characters, who are so brilliantly and subtly rendered by Shelly Oria’s capable mind.

Set in northern New Mexico, an astonishing, beautifully rendered debut about living in a landscape shaped by love, loss, and violence.

A 2014 National Book Foundation "5 Under 35" Honoree

With intensity, dark humor, and emotional precision, Kirstin Valdez Quade’s unforgettable stories plunge us into the fierce, troubled hearts of characters torn between their desires to escape the past and to plumb its depths. The deadbeat father of a pregnant teenager tries to transform his life by playing the role of Jesus in a bloody penitential Passion. A young man discovers that his estranged father and a boa constrictor have been squatting in his grandmother’s empty house. A young woman finds herself at an impasse when she is asked to hear her priest's confession.

Always hopeful, these stories chart the passions and obligations of family life, exploring themes of race, class, and coming-of-age, as Quade's characters protect, betray, wound, undermine, bolster, define, and, ultimately, save one another.

A nurse sleeps at the bedside of his dying patients; a wife deceives her husband by never telling him he has cancer; a bedridden man has to be hidden from his demented and amorous eighty-year-old wife. In her poignant and genre-busting debut, Susana Moreira Marques confronts us with our own mortality and inspires us to think about what is important. Accompanying a palliative care team, Moreira Marques travelled to Trás-os-Montes, a forgotten corner of northern Portugal, a rural area abandoned by the young. Crossing great distances where eagles circle over the roads, she visits villages where rural ways of life are disappearing. She listens to families facing death and gives us their stories in their words as well as through her own meditations. Brilliantly blending the immediacy of oral history with the sensibility of philosophical reportage, Moreira Marques’ book speaks about death in a fresh way.

An acclaimed, award-winning comic novel about truth, lies and storytelling, with an unforgettably unreliable narrator, translated from its innovative Swiss vernacular back into the Glaswegian that was its original inspiration.

Known only as ‘the goalie’, the novel’s narrator is always taking the blame. He’s just been released from jail, having kept schtum during a drugs bust at his local pub. The goalie is a sucker for a good story, he lives and breathes them, is forever telling stories to himself and anyone who’ll listen.

He returns to his hometown broke, falling in love with Regi, a barmaid. On a trip together to Spain, to hook up with his shady mates, Regi realises that this obsession with storytelling has its downsides, the goalie all too ready to believe the yarns his so-called friends spin.

Naw Much of a Talker is a charming, hilarious tour through the goalie’s anecdotes. Storytelling is his way of avoiding problems and conflict, his crowning achievement and tragic flaw. Regi concludes that it isn’t a woman the goalie needs, but an audience.

Inspired by a six month residency in Glasgow, Pedro Lenz harnesses his considerable powers as a performer and oral storyteller in this powerful and unforgettable celebration of the rhythms and musicality of the spoken word.

An exquisite debut novel that brilliantly captures the lives and romances of young expatriates in newly democratic Prague.

It’s October 1990. Jacob Putnam is young and full of ideas. He’s arrived a year too late to witness Czechoslovakia’s revolution, but he still hopes to find its spirit, somehow. He discovers a country at a crossroads between communism and capitalism, and a picturesque city overflowing with a vibrant, searching sense of possibility. As the men and women Jacob meets begin to fall in love with one another, no one turns out to be quite the same as the idea Jacob has of them — including Jacob himself.

Necessary Errors is the long-awaited first novel from literary critic and journalist Caleb Crain. Shimmering and expansive, Crain’s prose richly captures the turbulent feelings and discoveries of youth as it stretches toward adulthood — the chance encounters that grow into lasting, unforgettable experiences and the surprises of our first ventures into a foreign world — and the treasure of living in Prague during an era of historic change.

It’s the summer of 1999 when the two children of wealthy video game executive Jose Francisco Vivar, Alicia and Bruno, go missing in the beach town of Matanza. Long after their disappearance, the people of Matanza and the adjacent towns of Navidad consistently report sightings of Bruno — on the beach, in bars, gambling — while reports on Alicia, however, are next to none. And every story and clue keeps circling back to a man named Boris Real. .

At least that’s how the story — or one of many stories, rather — goes. All of them are told by a journalist narrator, who recounts the mysterious case of the Vivar family from an underground laboratory where he and six other “subjects” have taken up a novel-game, writing and exchanging chapters over email, all while waiting for the fear-inducing drug hadón to take its effect, and their uncertain fates.

A literary descendent of Roberto Bolaño and Andrés Neuman, Carlos Labbé’s Navidad and Matanza is a work of metafiction that not only challenges our perceptions of facts and observations, and of identity and reality, but also of basic human trust.

“Carlos Labbé’s [Navidad & Matanza] begins to fuck with your head from its very first word — moving through journalese, financial reporting, whodunit, Joseph Conrad, Raymond Chandler, Nabokov to David Lynch.”—Toby Litt

Ben Marcus, one of the most innovative and vital writers of this generation, delivers a stellar anthology of the best short fiction being written today in America.

In New American Stories, the beautiful, the strange, the melancholy, and the sublime all comingle to show the vast range of the American short story. In this remarkable anthology, Ben Marcus has corralled a vital and artistically singular crowd of contemporary fiction writers. Collected here are practitioners of deep realism, mind-blowing experimentalism, and every hybrid in between. Luminaries and cult authors stand side by side with the most compelling new literary voices. Nothing less than the American short story renaissance distilled down to its most relevant, daring, and unforgettable works, New American Stories puts on wide display the true art of an American idiom.

A nameless narrator passes through her life, searching for meaning and connection in experiences she barely feels. For her, time and identity blur, and all action is reaction. She can’t quite understand what motivates others to take life seriously enough to focus on anything — for her existence is a loosely woven tapestry of fleeting concepts. From losing her virginity to mindless jobs and a splintered, unsupportive family, the lessons learned have less to do with the reality we all share and more to do with the truth of the imagination, which is where the narrator focuses to discover herself.

This is a novel about the hundreds of tiny connections between the public and private worlds and how they affect us all.

It's about the legacy of war and the end of innocence.

It's about how comedy and politics are battling it out and comedy might have won.

It's about how 140 characters can make fools of us all.

It's about living in a city where bankers need cinemas in their basements and others need food banks down the street.

It is Jonathan Coe doing what he does best — showing us how we live now.

Siamese fighting fish, cockroaches, cats, a snake, and a strange fungus all serve here as mirrors that reflect the unconfessable aspects of human nature buried within us. The traits and fates of these animals illuminate such deeply natural, human experiences as the cruelty born of cohabitation, the desire to reproduce and the impulse not to, and the inexplicable connection that can bind, eerily, two beings together. Each Nettel tale creates, with tightly wound narrative tension, a space wherein her characters feel excruciatingly human, exploring how the wounds we incur in life manifest themselves within us, clandestinely, irrevocably, both unseen and overtly.

In a precise writing style that is both subtle and spellbinding, Nettel renders the ordinary unsettling, and the grotesque exquisite. Natural Histories is the winner of the 3rd Ribera del Duero International Award for Short Narratives, an important Spanish literature prize.

First published in l965, Hubert Aquin’s Next Episode is a disturbing and yet deeply moving novel of dissent and distress. As he awaits trial, a young separatist writes an espionage story in the psychiatric ward of the Montreal prison where he has been detained. Sheila Fischman’s bold new translation captures the pulsating life of Aquin’s complex exploration of the political realities of contemporary Quebec.

Set in Birmingham, The News Where You Are tells the funny, touching story of Frank, a local TV news presenter. Beneath his awkwardly corny screen persona, Frank is haunted by disappearances: the mysterious hit and run that killed his predecessor Phil Smethway; the demolition of his father’s post-war brutalist architecture; and the unmarked passing of those who die alone in the city. Frank struggles to make sense of these absences while having to report endless local news stories of holes opening up in people’s gardens and trying to cope with his resolutely miserable mother. The result is that rare thing: a page-turning novel which asks the big questions in an accessible way, and is laugh-out-loud funny, genuinely moving and ultimately uplifting.

In Paula Bomer's bold, unapologetic debut novel, a pregnant mother and wife abandons her family in search of an identity that is hers alone after she finds herself unexpectedly pregnant for the third time. She does everything a pregnant mother shouldn't do — engaging in casual sex, drinking beer, and smoking weed — as she attempts to reclaim her sidelined career as an artist. A lacerating response to the culture of mommy blogs, helicopter parents, and "parental correctness" as well as an unflinching look at the choices women face when trying to balance art and family.

In Noonday, Pat Barker — the Man Booker-winning author of the definitive WWI trilogy, Regeneration — turns for the first time to WWII. 'Afterwards, it was the horses she remembered, galloping towards them out of the orange-streaked darkness, their manes and tails on fire…' London, the Blitz, autumn 1940. As the bombs fall on the blacked-out city, ambulance driver Elinor Brooke races from bomb sites to hospitals trying to save the lives of injured survivors, working alongside former friend Kit Neville, while her husband Paul works as an air-raid warden. Once fellow students at the Slade School of Fine Art, before the First World War destroyed the hopes of their generation, they now find themselves caught in another war, this time at home. As the bombing intensifies, the constant risk of death makes all three of them reach out for quick consolation. Old loves and obsessions re-surface until Elinor is brought face to face with an almost impossible choice. Completing the story of Elinor Brooke, Paul Tarrant and Kit Neville, begun with Life Class and continued with Toby's Room, Noonday is both a stand-alone novel and the climax of a trilogy. Writing about the Second World War for the first time, Pat Barker brings the besieged and haunted city of London into electrifying life in her most powerful novel since the Regeneration trilogy. Praise for Pat Barker: 'She is not only a fine chronicler of war but of human nature.' Independent 'A brilliant stylist… Barker delves unflinchingly into the enduring mysteries of human motivation.' Sunday Telegraph 'You go to her for plain truths, a driving storyline and a clear eye, steadily facing the history of our world.' The Guardian 'Barker is a writer of crispness and clarity and an unflinching seeker of the germ of what it means to be human." The Herald Praise for Toby's Room: 'Heart-rending, superb, forensically observant and stylistically sublime' Independent 'Magnificent; I finished it eagerly, wanting to know what happened next, and as I read, I was enjoying, marvelling and learning' Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 'Dark, painful, yet also tender. It succeeds brilliantly' New York Times 'The plot unfurls to a devastating conclusion. a very fine piece of work' Melvyn Bragg, New Statesman

A Colombian philosophy student is arrested in Bangkok and accused of drug trafficking. Unless he enters a guilty plea he will almost certainly be sentenced to death. But it is not his own death that weighs most heavily on him but a tender longing for his sister, Juana, whom he hasn't seen for years. Before he dies he wants nothing more than to be reunited with her.

As a boy, Manuel was a dreamer, a lover of literature, and a tagger. Juana made a promise to do everything in her power to protect him from the drug-and violence-infested streets of Bogotá. She decided to take him as far from Colombia as possible, and in order to raise the money to do so, she went to work as a high priced escort and entered into contact with the dangerous world of corrupt politicians. When things spun out of control she was forced to flee, leaving her beloved brother behind.

Juana and Manuel's story reaches the ears of the Colombian counsel general in New Delhi, and he tracks down Juana, now married to a rich Japanese man, in Tokyo. The counsel general takes it upon himself to reunite the two siblings. A feat that may be beyond his power.

Fans of both Roberto Bolaño and Gabriel García Márquez will find much to admire in this story about the mean streets of Bogotá, the sordid bordellos of Thailand, and a love between siblings that knows no end. With the stylishness that has earned him a reputation as one of "the most important Colombian writers" (Manuel Vázquez Montalbán), Santiago Gamboa lends his story a driving, irresistible rhythm.

Qian Xiaohong is born into a sleepy Hunan village, where the new China rush towards development is a mere distant rumour. A buxom, naïve sixteen-year-old, she yearns to leave behind hometown scandal, and joins the mass migration to the bustling boomtown of Shenzhen. There, she must navigate dangerous encounters with ruthless bosses, jealous wives, sympathetic hookers and corrupt policemen as she tries to find her place in the ever-evolving society.

Hardship and tragedy are in no short supply as her journey takes her through a grinding succession of dead end jobs. To help her through this confusing maze, Xiaohong finds solace in the close ties she makes with the other migrant girls — the community of her fellow 'northern girls' — who quickly learn to rely on each other for humour and the enjoyment of life's simple pleasures.

A beautiful coming-of-age novel, Northern Girls explores the inner lives of a generation of young, rural Chinese women who embark on life-changing journeys in search of something better.

Nova Express takes William S. Burroughs’s nightmarish future one step beyond The Soft Machine. The diabolical Nova criminals have gained control and plan on wreaking untold destruction. It’s up to Inspector Lee of the Nova Police to attack and dismantle the word-and-imagery machine of these “control addicts” before it’s too late.

Upon recovering from a prolonged illness, an author is invited to a literary gathering in Jerusalem that turns out to be a most unusual affair. In the conference rooms of a luxury hotel, as bombs fall outside, at times too close for comfort, he listens to a series of extraordinary life stories: the saga of a chess-playing duo, the tale of an Italian porn star with a socialist agenda, the drama of a Colombian industrialist who has been waging a longstanding battle with local paramilitaries, and many more. But it is José Maturana — evangelical pastor, recovering drug addict, ex-con — with his story of redemption at the hands of a charismatic tattooed messiah from Miami, Florida, who fascinates the author more than any other. Maturana’s language is potent and vital, and his story captivating.

Hours after his stirring presentation to a rapt audience, however, Maturana is found dead in his hotel room. At first it seems likely that Maturana has taken his own life and everybody seems willing to accept this version of the story. But there are a few loose ends that don’t support the suicide hypothesis, and the author-invitee, moved by Maturana’s life story to discover the truth about his death, will lead an investigation that turns the entire plot of this chimerical novel on its end.

In Necropolis, Santiago Gamboa displays the talent and inventiveness that have earned him a reputation as one of the leading figures in his generation of Latin American authors.

Ivan Klima has been acclaimed by The Boston Globe as "a literary gem who is too little appreciated in the West" and a "Czech master at the top of his game." In No Saints or Angels, a Washington Post Best Book of 2001, Klima takes us into the heart of contemporary Prague, where the Communist People's Militia of the Stalinist era marches headlong into the drug culture of the present. Kristyna is in her forties, the divorced mother of a rebellious fifteen-year-old daughter, Jana. She is beginning to love a man fifteen years her junior, but her joy is clouded by worry — Jana has been cutting school, and perhaps using heroin. Meanwhile Kristyna's mother has forced on her a huge box of personal papers left by her dead father, a tyrant whose Stalinist ideals she despised. No Saints or Angels is a powerful book in which "Mr. Klima's keen sense of history, his deep compassion for the ordinary people caught up in its toils, and his abiding awareness of the fragility and resilience of human life shine through…. Like Anton Chekhov, Mr. Klima is a writer able to show us what's extraordinary about ordinary life." (The Washington Times). "Ultimately, it's Prague, with its centuries of glory and misery, that gives No Saints or Angels its humane power." — Melvin Jules Bukiet, The Washington Post Book World" A compassionate realist, [Klima] unflinchingly presents the problems facing modern Prague and civilization in general… [and] fills it with mercy." — Jennie Yabroff, San Francisco Chronicle "Stirring and valuable." — Jules Verdone, The Hartford Courant

Céline au milieu de l'Allemagne en flammes. Avec ses compagnons d'infortune, — sa femme Lili, l'acteur Le Vigan, et le chat Bébert —, le voici à Baden-Baden dans un étrange palace où le caviar, la bouillabaisse et le champagne comptent plus que les bombardements, puis dans Berlin en ruines, et enfin à Zornhof dans une immense propriété régie par un fou. C'est une gigantesque tragédie-bouffe, aux dimensions d'un pays qui s'effondre, vécue par celui qui se nomme lui-même « le clochard vieillard dans la merde ».

21 песня - это "Новый альбом" группы Noize МС. 11 рассказов - это "Новый альбом" барабанщика Павла Тетерина. Место действия - огромный, чудовищных размеров, город. В каком-то параллельном пространстве и времени, совершенно невероятный... и вместе с тем имеющий знакомые до боли черты. Одиннадцать историй становятся для нас проводником сквозь эту реальность - жестокую и человечную, одновременно причудливую и повседневно-привычную. Связанные между собой, с героями песен, с музыкой альбома, рассказы сплетаются в единое целое, позволяя читателю словно сквозь искривленную линзу взглянуть на мир, ежедневно окружающий нас.

Markus Lee reist in den Herbstferien in die Normandie, um für ein Hamburger Kunstmagazin Brücken zu zeichnen, die bei der Landung der Alliierten im Sommer 1944 eine entscheidende Rolle spielten. Lee nimmt seinen fünfzehnjährigen Neffen Jesse mit, dessen bester Freund mit seiner Familie in Nordfrankreich ein verlassenes Strandhotel hütet. Überschattet wird die Reise von der Trauer um Jesses Mutter Ira, deren Suizid der Bruder und der Sohn jeder für sich verwinden müssen. In der verwunschenen Atmosphäre des Hotels L’Angleterre entwickelt sich der geplante einwöchige Aufenthalt zu einer monatelangen Auszeit, die nicht nur für Markus Lee einen Wendepunkt im Leben markiert.

NIE MEHR NACHT erzählt schonungslos und ergreifend von der Befreiung Frankreichs, bei der zahllose junge Männer umkamen, die kaum älter als Jesse waren. Dem Zeichner aber ist es zunehmend unmöglich, die Verheerungen des Krieges künstlerisch darzustellen. Doch beinahe noch schwerer fällt es ihm, den Tod der geliebten Schwester zu vergessen. Denn während ein dramatisches Kapitel europäischer Geschichte auf unheimliche Weise in ihm auflebt, stellt sich Markus Lee einem Trauma der eigenen Jugend und Abgründen seiner Familie.

Spanning the waning years of vaudeville and the golden age of Hollywood, Niagara Falls All Over Again chronicles a flawed, passionate friendship over thirty years, weaving a powerful story of family and love, grief and loss. In it, McCracken introduces her most singular and affecting hero: Mose Sharp — son, brother, husband, father, friend… and straight man to the fat guy in baggy pants who utterly transforms his life.

To the paying public, Mose Sharp was the arch, colorless half of the comedy team Carter and Sharp. To his partner, he was charmed and charming, a confirmed bachelor who never failed at love and romance. To his father and sisters, Mose was a prodigal son. And in his own heart and soul, he would always be a boy who once had a chance to save a girl’s life — a girl who would be his first, and greatest, loss.

Born into a Jewish family in small-town Iowa, the only boy among six sisters, Mose Sharp couldn’t leave home soon enough. By sixteen Mose had already joined the vaudeville circuit. But he knew one thing from the start: “I needed a partner,” he recalls. “I had always needed a partner.”

Then, an ebullient, self-destructive comedian named Rocky Carter came crashing into his life — and a thirty-year partnership was born. But as the comedy team of Carter and Sharp thrived from the vaudeville backwaters to Broadway to Hollywood, a funny thing happened amid the laughter: It wasMose who had all the best lines offstage.

Rocky would go through money, women, and wives in his restless search for love; Mose would settle down to a family life marked by fragile joy and wrenching tragedy. And soon, cracks were appearing in their complex relationship… until one unforgivable act leads to another and a partnership begins to unravel.

In a novel as daring as it is compassionate, Elizabeth McCracken introduces an indelibly drawn cast of characters — from Mose’s Iowa family to the vagabond friends, lovers, and competitors who share his dizzying journey — as she deftly explores the fragile structures that underlie love affairs and friendships, partnerships and families.

An elegiac and uniquely American novel, Niagara Falls All Over Again is storytelling at its finest — and powerful proof that Elizabeth McCracken is one of the most dynamic and wholly original voices of her generation.

Dies ist die Geschichte von Marleen, die sich, noch ehe sie Lesen lernt, in die Welt der Buchstaben verliebt. Hineingeboren in eine erfolgreiche Werber- und Illustratorenfamilie, träumt sie früh von wahrhaft Großem: der perfekten Schrift.

An der Kunsthochschule hat sie Rückenwind, kann Marleen sich selbst Kontur verleihen. Ihr Pioniergeist treibt sie voran, bald steckt sie mittendrin in der Jobwelt der Achtziger — und erliegt deren Verheißungen. Die Medien erfahren einen Schub, plötzlich geht alles rasend schnell, schon hat man den Halt verloren. Sie muss erste Rückschläge einstecken, berufliche wie private. Flexibilität ist gefragt, schon in den Anfangszeiten der Globalisierung, und Marleen gibt sich flexibel, koste es, was es wolle — in der Hoffnung, dass ihr Traum weniger flüchtig ist als die Welt, gegen die es gilt, ihn wahrzumachen.

Mit Nichts Weißes legt Ulf Erdmann Ziegler den Roman einer Generation vor, für die das Hereinbrechen des Computerzeitalters identisch ist mit dem eigenen Erwachsenwerden. Randscharf, raffiniert, brillant.

In the tradition of Jennifer Close’s Girls in White Dresses comes a “a pin-sharp, utterly addictive debut” (Vogue U.K.) told in vignettes that speak to a new generation not trying to have it all but hoping to make sense of it all.

Claire Flannery has just quit her office job, hoping to take some time to discover her real passion. The problem is, she’s not exactly sure how to go about finding it. Without the distractions of a regular routine, Claire confronts the best and worst parts of herself: the generous, attentive part that visits her grandmother for tea and cooks special meals for her boyfriend, Luke, and the part that she feels will never measure up and makes regrettable comments after too many glasses of wine. What emerges is a candid, moving portrait of a clear-eyed heroine trying to forge her own way, a wholly relatable character whose imperfections and uncanny observations highlight what makes us all different and yet inescapably linked.

Wilbur, gerade mal 1,50 Meter groß, ist wirklich kein Glückskind: Seine irische Mutter stirbt bei der Geburt, sein schwedischer Vater macht sich aus dem Staub, und sein erstes Zuhause ist der Brutkasten. Erst als seine Großeltern ihn nach Irland holen, erfährt er, was Heimat ist. Doch das Glück währt nicht lang: Sein bester Freund kommt in die Erziehungsanstalt, und seine Großmutter Orla stirbt bei einem Unfall. Auch wenn er gern so stark wäre wie Bruce Willis: Er ist und bleibt ein Verlierer. Erst die charmante Aimee bringt ihm etwas anderes bei: Wilbur muss endlich lernen, zu leben — ob er will oder nicht. Rolf Lappert hat einen großen Roman über das Erwachsenwerden eines kleinen, an der Welt verzweifelnden Jungen geschrieben, der durch seine bezwingende Komik mitreißt.

Ostdeutsche Provinz, Januar 1990. Enrico Türmer, Theatermann und heimlicher Schriftsteller, kehrt der Kunst den Rücken und heuert bei einer neu gegründeten Zeitung an. Unter der Leitung seines Mephisto, des allgegenwärtigen Clemens von Barrista, entwickelt der Schöngeist einen ungeahnten Aufstiegswillen. Von dieser Lebenswende in Zeiten des Umbruchs erzählen die Briefe Enrico Türmers, geschrieben an seine drei Lieben — an die Schwester Vera, den Jugendfreund Johann und an Nicoletta, die Unerreichbare.Als Chronist der jüngsten deutschen Geschichte gelingt Ingo Schulze das einzigartige Panorama des Weltenwechsels 1989/90 — der Geburtsstunde unserer heutigen Welt.

An astonishing, even shocking debut-darker than a bad night in hell-that is written with both humor and heart by "a writer with abundant and scary gifts and consummate skill."

Set in a bitterly benighted, mine-polluted corner of Virginia, Nitro Mountain follows a group of people bound together by alcohol, small-time crime, and music. There's Leon, a hapless bass player who can embroil himself in trouble just by getting out of bed in the morning. And his would-be girlfriend, Jennifer, who's living with Arnett, the town's most dangerous thug-and hoping Leon will help poison him. And there's Arnett himself, a psychopath for the ages-albeit so charming and deranged, so strikingly authentic, that he arrests the reader's attention at first sight and holds it fast. His mirror image, a singer-songwriter named Jones, has his own moral issues, though at least he's trying to be a good man. The bright if battered soul who pulls us through this story is Jennifer, struggling heroically to survive the endemic hopelessness and violence that have surrounded her since birth. Relentless? Yes. But nothing remotely gratuitous: only the pain and misery that inspire so much of the music these people love more than life itself.

A provocative novel about the fallout from a search for truth by the author of the national bestseller The Lifeboat.

For Maggie Rayburn-wife, mother, and secretary at a munitions plant-life is pleasant, predictable, and, she assumes, secure. When she finds proof of a high-level cover-up on her boss's desk, she impulsively takes it, an act that turns her world, and her worldview, upside down. Propelled by a desire to do good-and also by a newfound taste for excitement-Maggie starts to see injustice everywhere. Soon her bottom drawer is filled with what she calls "evidence," her small town has turned against her, and she must decide how far she will go for the truth. For Penn Sinclair-Army Captain, Ivy League graduate, and reluctant heir to his family's fortune-a hasty decision has disastrous results. Home from Iraq and eager to atone, he reunites with three survivors to expose the truth about the war. They launch a website that soon has people talking, but the more they expose, the cloudier their mission becomes.

Now and Again is a blazingly original novel about the interconnectedness of lives, the limits of knowledge, and the consequences of doing the right thing.

The first volume of this three-part autobiographical series begins in 1938 with the expulsion of the Kovacic family from their home of Switzerland, eventually leading to their settlement in the father's home country of Slovenia. Narrated by Kovacic as a ten-year-old boy, he describes his family's journey with uncanny naiveté. Before leaving their home, he imagines his father's home country as something beautiful out of a fairytale, but as they make their way toward exile, he and his family realize that any attempt to make a home in Slovenia will be in vain. Confronted by misery, hunger, and hostility, the young boy refuses to learn Slovenian and falls silent, his surroundings becoming a social, cultural and mental abyss.

Kovačič meticulously, boldly, and sincerely portrays the objective, everyday world; the style is clear and direct. Told from the point of view of a child, one memory is interrupted by fragments and visions of another. Some are innocent and tender, while others are miserable and ruthless, resulting in a profound and heart-wrenching description of a period torn apart by conflict, reflected in the author's powerful and innovative command of language.

East Germany, January 1990. Enrico Türmer, man of the theater, secret novelist, turns his back on art and signs on to work at a newly started newspaper. Freed from the compulsion to describe the world, he plunges into everyday life. Under the guidance of his Mephisto, the ever-present Clemens von Barrista, the former aesthete suddenly develops worldly ambitions even he didn’t know he had.

This upheaval in our hero’s life, mirrored in the vaster upheaval gripping Germany itself after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the birth pangs of a reunified nation, is captured in the letters Enrico writes to the three people he loves most: his sister, Vera; his childhood friend Johann; and Nicoletta, the unattainable woman of his dreams. As he discovers capitalism and reports on his adventures as a businessman, he peels away the layers of his previous existence, in the process creating the thing he has dreamed of for so long — the novel of his own life, in whose facets contemporary history is captured. Thus Enrico comes to embody all the questionable aspects not only of life in the old Germany, but of life in the Germany just taking form.

Once again Ingo Schulze proves himself a master storyteller, with an inimitable power to reconjure the complete insanity of this wildest time in postwar German history. As its comic chronicler, he unfurls a panorama of a world in transformation — and the birth of a new era.

Richard Russo's slyly funny and moving novel follows the unexpected operation of grace in a deadbeat town in upstate New York — and in the life of one of its unluckiest citizens, Sully, who has been doing the wrong thing triumphantly for fifty years.

Divorced from his own wife and carrying on halfheartedly with another man's, saddled with a bum knee and friends who make enemies redundant, Sully now has one new problem to cope with: a long-estranged son who is in imminent danger of following in his father's footsteps. With its sly and uproarious humor and a heart that embraces humanity's follies as well as its triumphs, Nobody's Fool is storytelling at its most generous.

"Native Believer stands as an important contribution to American literary culture: a book quite unlike any I've read in recent memory, which uses its characters to explore questions vital to our continuing national discourse around Islam."

— New York Times Book Review , Editors' Choice

"M.'s life spins out of control after his boss discovers a Qur'an in M.'s house during a party, in this wickedly funny Philadelphia picaresque about a secular Muslim's identity crisis in a country waging a never-ending war on terror."

— O, the Oprah Magazine

"[A] poignant and profoundly funny first novel….Eteraz combines masterful storytelling with intelligent commentary to create a nuanced work of social and political art."

— Booklist

"Eteraz's narrative is witty and unpredictable…and the darkly comic ending is pleasingly macabre. As for M., in this identity-obsessed dandy, Eteraz has created a perfect protagonist for the times. A provocative and very funny exploration of Muslim identity in America today."

— Kirkus Reviews

"In bitingly funny prose, first novelist Eteraz sums up the pain and contradictions of an American not wanting to be categorized; the ending is a bang-up surprise."

— Library Journal

"Who wants to be Muslim in post-9/11 America? Many of the characters in Ali Eteraz‘s new novel Native Believer have no choice in the matter; they deal in a variety of ways with issues of belonging and identity in a society bent on categorizing, stereotyping, and targeting Muslims."

— KPFA Pacifica

"Ali Eteraz’s fiction has encompassed everything from the surreal and fantastical to the urgently political. Native Believer, his debut novel, explores questions of nationality, religion, and the fears and paranoia in American society circa right now.

— Vol. 1 Brooklyn

Included in John Madera's list of Most Anticipated Small Press Books of 2016 at Big Other

"Ali Eteraz has written a hurricane of a novel. It blows open the secrets and longings of Muslim immigration to the West, sweeping us up in the drama of identity in ways newly raw. This is no poised and prettified tale; buckle in for a uproariously messy and revealing ride."

— Lorraine Adams, author of The Room and the Chair

"Merciless, intellectually lacerating, and brutally funny, Native Believer is not merely a Gonzo panorama of Muslim America-it's one of the most incisive novels I've ever read on America itself. Eteraz paints our empire with the same erotic longing and black, depraved wit that Nabokov used sixty years ago in Lolita. But whereas Nabokov's work was set in the heyday of America's cheerful upswing, Eteraz sets the country in the new, fractious world order. Here, sex, money, and violence all stake their claims on treacherously shifting identities-and neither love nor god is an escape."

— Molly Crabapple, author of Drawing Blood

Ali Eteraz's much-anticipated debut novel is the story of M., a supportive husband, adventureless dandy, lapsed believer, and second-generation immigrant who wants nothing more than to host parties and bring children into the world as full-fledged Americans. As M.'s life gradually fragments around him-a wife with a chronic illness; a best friend stricken with grief; a boss jeopardizing a respectable career-M. spins out into the pulsating underbelly of Philadelphia, where he encounters others grappling with fallout from the War on Terror. Among the pornographers and converts to Islam, punks and wrestlers, M. confronts his existential degradation and the life of a second-class citizen.

Darkly comic, provocative, and insightful, Native Believer is a startling vision of the contemporary American experience and the human capacity to shape identity and belonging at all costs.

Upon the death of their leader, a group of Tuareg, a nomadic Berber community whose traditional homeland is the Sahara Desert, turns to the heir dictated by tribal custom; however, he is a poet reluctant to don the mantle of leadership. Forced by tribal elders to abandon not only his poetry but his love, who is also a poet, he reluctantly serves as leader. Whether by human design or the meddling of the Spirit World, his death inspires his tribe to settle down permanently, abandoning not only nomadism but also the inherited laws of the tribe. The community they found, New Waw, which they name for the mythical paradise of the Tuareg people, is also the setting of Ibrahim al-Koni's companion novel, The Puppet.

For al-Koni, this Tuareg tale of the tension between nomadism and settled life represents a choice faced by people everywhere, in many walks of life, as a result of globalism. He sees an inevitable interface between myth and contemporary life.

"A magnificent novel, a profound and inspiring text that resolves itself with the apparent simplicity that only comes with technical mastery." — Pablo Martínez Zarracina, El Correo Español

"A beautiful novel that takes us into the world of conflicting points of view, of ethics and aesthetics, of moral turpitude in politics. . the unmistakable and diaphanous echo of a great story that makes no concession to the gallery."—Á. M. Salazar, Deia

"One of those books that stays in your memory for a long time after reading." — Ramón Jiménez, La Opinión de Murcia

When Felipe Díaz Carrión loses his job he eventually emigrates with his family to the Spanish Basque country in search of a new opportunity. Regarded as foreigners in a region affected by political violence and separatism, he suffers his son and his wife's detachment and rejection in their struggle for integration. A masterfully written, profound, inspiring fable on values and identity.

Trudy has betrayed her husband, John. She's still in the marital home — a dilapidated, priceless London townhouse — but not with John. Instead, she's with his brother, the profoundly banal Claude, and the two of them have a plan. But there is a witness to their plot: the inquisitive, nine-month-old resident of Trudy's womb.

Told from a perspective unlike any other, Nutshell is a classic tale of murder and deceit from one of the world’s master storytellers.

In 1936, classical pianist Thomas Greene is recruited to Shanghai to lead a jazz orchestra of fellow African-American expats. From being flat broke in segregated Baltimore to living in a mansion with servants of his own, he becomes the toast of a city obsessed with music, money, pleasure, and power, even as it ignores the rising winds of war.Song Yuhua is refined and educated, and has been bonded since age eighteen to Shanghai's most powerful crime boss in payment for her father's gambling debts. Outwardly submissive, she burns with rage and risks her life spying on her master for the Communist Party.Only when Shanghai is shattered by the Japanese invasion do Song and Thomas find their way to each other. Though their union is forbidden, neither can back down from it in the turbulent years of occupation and resistance that follow. Torn between music and survival, freedom and commitment, love and world war, they are borne on an irresistible riff of melody and improvisation to Night in Shanghai's final, impossible choice.In this stunningly researched novel, Nicole Mones not only tells the forgotten story of black musicians in the Chinese jazz age, but also weaves in a startling true tale of Holocaust heroism little-known in the West.

Over forty short stories spanning the career of England’s most acclaimed postwar writer — including the iconic “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner.”

This comprehensive collection of short fiction from bestselling British author Alan Sillitoe mixes aggression with humor, and common working-class men with extraordinary twists of fate. It compiles works selected from the master storyteller’s bestselling books, including The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner; The Ragman’s Daughter; Guzman, Go Home; Men, Women and Children; and The Second Chance. Several previously unpublished works are also included.

In the title story from The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner — which was adapted for film in 1962—a seventeen-year-old inmate in a juvenile detention center must make a difficult life choice. Should he strive to win the national long-distance running competition as everyone is counting on him to do, or should he refuse to vindicate the very system and society that has locked him up?

The titular piece from The Ragman’s Daughter is a lively and poignant narrative about an eighteen-year-old thief named Tony and his new girlfriend, Doris, the seventeen-year-old daughter of a well-to-do scrap dealer. The couple embarks on a wild robbery spree, but after a raid on a shoe shop goes absurdly wrong, Tony ends up behind bars and Doris remains free — but suffers a dark destiny.

A standout tale from Guzman, Go Home, “Revenge” details the dangerously tumultuous marriage between factory foreman Richard and his ornery wife, Caroline. “Mimic,” from the previously collected Men, Women and Children, takes place in the mind of a nameless hero who is locked away in an asylum — a man who uses the art of mimicry to escape reality and avoid being himself. And in “No Name in the Street,” from The Second Chance, an ex-miner who ekes out a living collecting social security and hunting for golf balls, moves in with a woman who has indoor plumbing — but his dog refuses to go along with the plan.

This essential collection reveals the power and timelessness of Sillitoe’s short fiction. Called “a master of the short story” by the Times, the author portrays the complex ethos and pathos of working-class life.

Модный роман

« De temps à autre apparaît un auteur amoureux de son art, du langage écrit et des grands mystères qui résident de l'autre côté du monde physique. Il y avait William Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy ou Annie Proulx. Vous pouvez maintenant ajouter Michael Farris Smith à la liste. »

James Lee Burke

Une femme marche seule avec une petite fille sur une route de Louisiane. Elle n'a nulle part où aller. Partie sans rien quelques années plus tôt de la ville où elle a grandi, elle revient tout aussi démunie. Elle pense avoir connu le pire. Elle se trompe.

Russel a lui aussi quitté sa ville natale, onze ans plus tôt. Pour une peine de prison qui vient tout juste d'arriver à son terme. Il retourne chez lui en pensant avoir réglé sa dette. C'est sans compter sur le désir de vengeance de ceux qui l'attendent.

Dans les paysages désolés de la campagne américaine, un meurtre va réunir ces âmes perdues, dont les vies vont bientôt ne plus tenir qu'à un fil.

Michael Farris Smith possède un style et un talent d'évocation totalement singuliers qui vont droit au cœur du lecteur. Avec ces personnages qui s'accrochent à la vie envers et contre tout, il nous offre un magnifique roman sur la condition humaine.

Michael Farris Smith vit à Oxford, Mississippi. Après Une pluie sans fin (Super 8 éditions, 2015), Nulle part sur la terre est son deuxième roman.

SVETLANA ALEXIYEVICH constructs powerful narrative collages out of «live human voices» culled from her interviews with witnesses to and participants in the most shattering national events. Her «Landscape of Loneliness» shows how tragic social circumstances deprive people of ability to experience and enjoy love.MARIA ARBATOVA's frank and witty «My Name is Woman» takes place in an abortion clinic where the heroine reflects on her failed love affair and women's submissive role in love and life.NINA GORLANOVA sets her «How Lake Jolly Came About» in the closed world of a maternity ward. As a new life is born the town is being flooded and the inhabitants are moved to a new location.ANASTASIA GOSTEVA's heroine («Closed Americas») attempts to run away from herself and her unrequited love, which is in fact a desperate effort to come to terms with herself.LUDMILA PETRUSHEVSKAYA's absurd middle-aged heroine (in «Waterloo Bridge») finds she has fallen in love with a character in a movie. Seeing the film again and again, she experiences the romantic love she never had in real life.MARGARITA SHARAPOVA draws on her unique personal experience as a circus animal tamer to juxtapose the small world of the circus to the harsh wide world of today's Russia in her brilliantly crafted «ComFuture».OLGA SLAVNIKOVA depicts a Ural town where most men are involved in the illegal mining and cutting of precious stones. «Krylov's Childhood» combines memorable characters with rich ethnographic detail.NATALIA SMIRNOVA paints a disquieting picture of a provincial town where two cultivated women must survive amidst crude working-class surroundings. Her prose is deep and subtle, but by no means female.LUDMILA ULITSKAYA's «Women's Lies» look at women who lie with verve just to escape dreary reality. Permeated with a tolerant humorous warmth, her stories exemplify that strand in the humanist tradition that neither denounces nor deifies, but attempts to understand human psychology in its infinitely numerous manifestations.

После ядерной войны на Земле сохранились только вороны. Но и они погибают — от голода. И один из воронов находит бутылку с заключенным в ней джинном. И загадывает желание…

Thirteen transfixing new stories from one of the most innovative writers of his generation and one of the most vital and original voices of our time—for fans of George Saunders, Nathan Englander, and Elizabeth Strout.

In these thirteen ingenious stories, Ben Marcus reveals moments of redemption in the sometimes nightmarish modern world. In “The Grow-Light Blues,” a hapless, corporate drone finds love after being disfigured testing his employer’s newest nutrition supplement—the enhanced glow from his computer monitor. In the chilling “Cold Little Bird,” a father finds himself alienated from his family when he starts to suspect that his son’s precocity has turned sinister. “The Boys” follows a sister who descends into an affair with her recently widowed brother-in-law. In “Blueprints for St. Louis,” two architects in a flailing marriage consider the ethics of adding a mist that artificially incites emotion in mourners to their latest assignment, a memorial to a terrorist attack.

A heartbreaking collection of stories that showcases the author’s compassion, tenderness, and mordant humor—blistering, beautiful work from a modern master.

A Japanese detective agency in Midwest America; a sex triangle with the vampish Angela at its apex, and love-sick Pohl and lust-warped Burnett at the receiving ends; a Fat Man devouring a huge luncheon amidst the splendors of his garden; and has-been vixen Violet seeking justice and revenge. Just some of the elements of No. 22 Pleasure City, a novel that ranges in flavor between Japanese manga, pulp fiction and tongue-in-cheek pornography. The novel is a story of betrayal, obsession, rejection, friendship, and—ultimately—redemption.

Winner of the 2015 Epigram Books Fiction Prize

Winner of the 2017 Singapore Book Award for Fiction

During the Christmas holidays in 2004, an earthquake in the Indian Ocean triggers a tsunami that devastates fourteen countries. Two couples from Singapore are vacationing in Phuket when the tsunami strikes. Alternating between the aftermath of the catastrophe and past events that led these characters to that fateful moment, Now That It’s Over weaves a tapestry of causality and regret, and chronicles the physical and emotional wreckage wrought by natural and manmade disasters.

Nadezdah “Little Boar” Buzina, a young pilot with the Red Army’s 586th all-female fighter regiment, dreams of becoming an ace. Those dreams shatter when a dogfight leaves her severely burned and the sole survivor from her flight.

For the latter half of 1942, she struggles against crack Luftwaffe pilots, a vengeful political commissar, and a new addiction to morphine, all the while questioning her worth and purpose in a world beyond her control. It’s not until the Soviet counter-offensive at Stalingrad that she finds her unlikely answers, and they only come after she’s saved her mortal enemy’s life and fallen in love with the one who nearly kills her.

Nadezdah “Little Boar” Buzina, a young pilot with the Red Army’s 586th all-female fighter regiment, dreams of becoming an ace. Those dreams shatter when a dogfight leaves her severely burned and the sole survivor from her flight.

For the latter half of 1942, she struggles against crack Luftwaffe pilots, a vengeful political commissar, and a new addiction to morphine, all the while questioning her worth and purpose in a world beyond her control. It’s not until the Soviet counter-offensive at Stalingrad that she finds her unlikely answers, and they only come after she’s saved her mortal enemy’s life and fallen in love with the one who nearly kills her.

A propulsive, “chilling” (Lee Child) novel exploring the dangerous fault lines of female friendships, Necessary People deftly plumbs the limits of ambition, loyalty, and love.

One of them has it all. One of them wants it all. But they can’t both win.

Stella and Violet are best friends, and from the moment they met in college, they knew their roles. Beautiful, privileged, and reckless Stella lives in the spotlight. Hardworking, laser-focused Violet stays behind the scenes, always ready to clean up the mess that Stella inevitably leaves in her wake.

After graduation, Violet moves to New York and lands a job in cable news, where she works her way up from intern to assistant to producer, and to a life where she’s finally free from Stella’s shadow. In this fast-paced world, Violet thrives, and her ambitions grow—but everything is jeopardized when Stella, envious of Violet’s new life, uses her connections, beauty, and charisma to get hired at the same network. Stella soon moves in front of the camera, becoming the public face of the stories that Violet has worked tirelessly to produce—and taking all the credit. Stella might be the one with the rich family and the right friends, but Violet isn’t giving up so easily. As she and Stella strive for success, each reveals just how far she’ll go to get what she wants—even if it means destroying the other person along the way.

Connell and Marianne grow up in the same small town in rural Ireland. The similarities end there; they are from very different worlds. When they both earn places at Trinity College in Dublin, a connection that has grown between them lasts long into the following years.

This is an exquisite love story about how a person can change another person's life — a simple yet profound realisation that unfolds beautifully over the course of the novel. It tells us how difficult it is to talk about how we feel and it tells us — blazingly — about cycles of domination, legitimacy and privilege. Alternating menace with overwhelming tenderness, Sally Rooney's second novel breathes fiction with new life.

As a young adult, she started to turn tricks in the parking lot of the local bar. Not because she needed the money, but because the money made explicit what sex had always been for her, a loveless transaction.

A sadist takes her home to replay family dramas with his beautiful wife, and she becomes hopelessly drawn into their dangerous web, and eventually, ends up in more trouble than she ever bargained for. Arrested and confined to a psyche ward, a therapist is assigned to help her. But instead of treatment, they develop a sexual relationship, bringing her both confusion and revelation.

Heather Lewis was the author of two other novels, House Rules and Second Suspect. In 2002, she took her own life at the age of 40.