"Headlong, heartsick and footsore…Frisbee sentences that sail, spin, hover, circle and come back to the reader like gifts of gravity and grace…Nobody writes better than Dave Eggers about young men who aspire to be, at the same time, authentic and sincere." – The New York Times Book Review

"You Shall Know Our Velocity! is the work of a wildly talented writer… Like Kerouac's book, Eggers's could inspire a generation as much as it documents it." – LA Weekly

"There's an echolet of James Joyce there and something of Saul Bellow's Chinatown bounce, but we're carried into the narrative by a fluidity of line that is Eggers's own." – Entertainment Weekly

"Eggers is a wonderful writer, bold and inventive, with the technique of a magic realist." – Salon

"An entertaining and profoundly original tale." – San Francisco Chronicle

"Eggers's writing really takes off – his forte is the messy, funny tirade, stuffed with convincing pain and wry observations." – Newsday

"Often rousing…achieves a kind of anguished, profane poetry." – Newsweek

"The bottom line that matters is this: Eggers has written a terrific novel, an entertaining and imaginative tale." – The Boston Globe

"There are some wonderful set-pieces here, and memorable phrases tossed on the ground like unwanted pennies from the guy who runs the mint." – The Washington Post Book World

"Powerful… Eggers's strengths as a writer are real: his funny pitch-perfect dialog; the way his prose delicately captures the bumblebee blundering of Will's thoughts;… and the stream-water clarity of his descriptions… There is genius here… Who is doing more, single-handedly and single-mindedly, for American writing?" – Time

***

Because of Dave Eggers' experiences with the industry when he released his first book, he decided to publish this novel on his own. It is only available online or at Independent Bookshops. If you enjoy this book, please buy a copy… this is one of the few cases where the author really will recieve his fair share of the proceeds, and you will be helping a fledgling publishing house. This e-copy was proofed carefully, italics left intact. There is no synopsis on the book, so here are excerpts from a Salon.com review:

Will Chmlielewski, the hero and narrator of "You Shall Know Our Velocity," is seeking relief for his head, which, on the inside, has been badly affected by the death of a friend and, on the outside, has been beaten to a pulp by a band of toughs. Will moves through the novel with a badly bruised and scabbed face, which everyone keeps telling him – and he keeps telling everyone – will heal to its former condition. It's the same hope Will holds out for his mind. He can't sleep without alcohol or masturbation.

The plot of "You Shall Know Our Velocity" is best recounted swiftly, since it hinges on motion and speed. Will has a friend called Hand. After Jack's death in a car crash, they agree to make a six-day trip around the world – "six, six and a half" – flying from country to country and dispersing $80,000 to strangers, money that Will has suddenly come into and which plagues him with white, Western guilt.

On their way to nowhere in particular, Will and Hand cross paths and lock horns with a variety of exotics – peasants, prostitutes, elegant Frenchwomen in dark cafes – none of whom seem to want Will's money. He literally can't give it away. In the cities, it causes pandemonium and never less than a quick escape. In the country, among African subsistence farmers, it throws Will into confusion – about money, charity, justice, his motives and such. Sometimes he calls his mother, which is no help. In Senegal, a statuesque Parisian named Annette joins Will and Hand for a midnight swim and tells them that they live in "the fourth world," something Will can't understand.

If it sounds a bit sophomoric, it is. So is "On the Road." So was "Emile." A certain crabbed critic for a paper of record has complained about Eggers' "shaggy-dog plot" and "self-indulgent yapping," but I think she's showing her age. A writer is among us, however imperfect, and he'll only get better if we leave him alone.

"You bitch, you killed me. You suck!"

Being dead sucks. Make that being undead sucks.

Literally. Just ask Thomas C. Flood. Waking up after a fantastic night unlike anything he's ever experienced, he discovers that his girlfriend, Jody—the woman of his dreams—is a vampire. And surprise! Now he's one, too.

For some couples, the whole biting-and-blood thing would have been a deal breaker. But Tommy and Jody are in love, and they vow to work through their issues. Like how much Jody should teach Tommy about his new superpowers (and how much he needs to learn on his own). Plus there's Tommy's cute new minion, sixteen-year-old goth girl Abby Normal. (Well, someone has to run errands during daylight hours!)

Making the relationship work, however, is the least of Jody and Tommy's problems. Word has it that the vampire who nibbled on Jody wasn't supposed to be recruiting any new members into the club. Even worse, Tommy's erstwhile turkey-bowling pals are out to get him, at the urging of a blue-dyed Las Vegas call girl named (duh) Blue.

The year: 1936. Europe dances while an invidious dictator establishes himself in Portugal. The city: Lisbon-gray, colorless, chimerical. Ricardo Reis, a doctor and poet, has just come home after sixteen years in Brazil. Translated by Giovanni Pontiero.

You're just a typical fifteen-year-old sophomore, an average guy named Kyle Chase. This can't be happening to you. But then, how do you explain all the blood? How do you explain how you got here in the first place?

There had to have been signs, had to have been some clues it was coming. Did you miss them, or ignore them? Maybe if you can figure out where it all went wrong, you can still make it right. Or is it already too late? Think fast, Kyle. Time's running out. How did this happen?

You is the riveting story of fifteen-year-old Kyle and the small choices he does and doesn't make that lead to his own destruction.

In his stunning young-adult debut, Charles Benoit mixes riveting tension with an insightful – and unsettling – portrait of an ordinary teen in a tale that is taut, powerful, and shattering.

«Él me acusa de tener sentimientos. Me dice que soy débil y frágil, sutil, febril, casi pueril. Nada viril para mi profesión, y tendría que serlo, que adónde va una mujer policía tan sentimental como a punto de romperse.»

Clara Deza es contradictoria y deslenguada, Clara Deza es agente de la autoridad, esposa y compañera, tan sensible por dentro como dura por fuera. Inmersa en un mundo hostil marcado por el enfrentamiento entre dos esferas contrapuestas: la laboral, poblada por policías que oscilan entre la incomprensión o la superprotección, yonquis que inspiran su ternura y superiores que no la respetan, y la personal, que gira en torno a un matrimonio que es a la vez refugio y casa de fieras, remanso de paz y estanque de tormentas.

Clara Deza aprenderá a demostrar pronto su faceta más combativa y mordaz cuando, tras recibir un desconcertante mensaje de su mejor confidente, descubre que uno de los mafiosos más escurridizos planea su gran golpe. Movida por el pálpito de saber que se encuentra ante su caso más importante, comienza a escarbar en las cloacas de una sociedad brillante en apariencia y tremendamente cruel en realidad.

Con una poderosa voz narrativa cargada de ironía, Mercedes Castro irrumpe en el panorama literario con la historia de una mujer que se mueve entre claros y oscuros, una protagonista tan de carne y hueso que traspasa las páginas de esta novela con su humor agridulce, su contundente fragilidad y un inconformismo esencial que va más allá de cualquier punto y final.

Yo el Supremo Dictador de la República: Ordeno que al acaecer mi muerte mi cadáver sea decapitado, la cabeza puesta en una pica por tres días en la Plaza de la República donde se convocará al pueblo al son de las campanas echadas al vuelo. Todos mis servidores civiles y militares sufrirán pena de horca. Sus cadáveres serán enterrados en potreros de extramuros sin cruz ni marca que memore sus nombres. Esa inscripción garabateada sorprende una mañana a los secuaces del dictador, que corren prestos a eliminarla de la vida de los aterrados súbditos del patriarca. Así arranca una de las grandes novela de la literatura en castellano de este siglo: Yo el Supremo, de Augusto Roa Bastos, Premio Cervantes 1989. La obra no es sólo un extraordinario ejercicio de gran profundidad narrativa sino también un testimonio escalofriante sobre uno de los peores males contemporáneos: la dictadura. El déspota solitario que reina sobre Paraguay es, en la obra de Roa, el argumento para describir una figura despiadada que es asimismo metáfora de la biografía de América Latina.

Kolejna książka jednego z najwybitniejszych twórców europejskich XX wieku powstała jeszcze w Czechach (1969-1970), zanim jako emigrant polityczny Kundera osiadł we Francji. W tym kraju za Życie jest gdzie indziej pisarz otrzymał w 1973 roku prestiżową Prix Médicis Étranger. Powieść jest swoistym "portretem artysty w czasach młodości ", na co wskazuje także pierwotny tytuł książki – "Wiek liryczny " – w języku Kundery oznaczający "młodość ". Autor opowiada przypadki poety Jaromila, którego życiowe wybory naznaczone są dominującą osobowością matki, towarzyszącej mu – w przenośni – od łoża miłości aż po łoże śmierci – w znaczeniu dosłownym. Kundera zdaje się mówić, że poeci liryczni pochodzą z domów, w których rządzą kobiety. Kreśląc sylwetkę Jaromila, momentami wzruszająco śmiesznego, a przy tym niesłychanie naiwnego, pisarz z typową ironią i delikatnością dotyka tak kluczowych dla całej swojej twórczości pojęć, jak dzieciństwo, macierzyństwo, rewolucja czy poezja.

In a return to the British setting of his much loved novel All Souls, Javier Marias embarks on a remarkable 'novel in parts', set in the murky world of surveillance and espionage. Fever and Spear is the first volume. In it Marias begins to weave a web of intrigue, both narrative and intellectual, that will entice the reader to follow him into the labyrinth of the novel's future books. Recently divorced, Jacques Deza moves from Madrid to London in order to distance himself from his ex-wife and children. There he picks up old friendships from his Oxford University days, particularly Sir Peter Wheeler, retired don and semi-retired spy. It is at an Oxford party of Wheeler's that Jacques is approached by the enigmatic Bertram Tupra. Tupra believes that Jacques has a talent: he is one of those people who sees more clearly than others, who can guess from someone's face today what they will become tomorrow. His services would be of use to a mysterious group whose aims are unstated but whose day-to-day activities involve the careful observation of people's character and the prediction of their future behaviour. The 'group' may be part of MI6, though Jacques will find no reference to it in any book; he will be called up to report on all types of people from politicians and celebrities, to ordinary citizens applying for bank loans. As Deza is drawn deeper into this twilight world of observation, Marias shows how trust and betrayal characterise all human relationships. How do we read people, and how far can the stories they tell about themselves be trusted when, by its very nature, all language betrays? Moving from the intimacy of Jacques' marriage to the deadly betrayals of the Spanish Civil War, Your Face Tomorrow is an extraordinary meditation on our ability to know our fellow human beings, and to save ourselves from fever and pain.

Few books in recent decades have excited the interest of readers and the raves of reviewers like Javier Marías's Your Face Tomorrow: 'This brilliant trilogy must be one of the greatest novels of our age' (Antony Beevor, The London Sunday Telegraph). Now available complete – all three paperback volumes in a shrinkwrapped set – Your Face Tomorrow in its full trilogy, one of the greatest literary masterpieces of our time.

Your Face Tomorrow, Javier Marías's daring novel in three parts culminates triumphantly in this much-anticipated final volume. Poison, Shadow, and Farewell, with its heightened tensions between meditations and noir narrative, with its wit and and ever deeper forays into the mysteries of consciousness, brings to a stunning finale Marías's three-part Your Face Tomorrow. Already this novel has been acclaimed 'exquisite' (Publishers Weekly), 'gorgeous' (Kirkus), and 'outstanding: another work of urgent originality' (London Independent). Poison, Shadow, and Farewell takes our hero Jaime Deza – hired by MI6 as a person of extraordinarily sophisticated powers of perception – back to Madrid to both spy on and try to protect his own family, and into new depths of love and loss, with a fluency on the subject of death that could make a stone weep..

If someone hurts your sister and you're any kind of man, you seek revenge, right?

If your brother's accused of a terrible crime but says he didn't do it, you defend him, don't you?

When Mikey's sister claims a boy assaulted her, his world begins to fall apart.

When Ellie's brother is charged with the offence, her world begins to unravel.

When Mikey and Ellie meet, two worlds collide.

This is a brave and unflinching novel from the bestselling author of Before I Die. It's a book about loyalty and the choices that come with it. But above all it's a book about love.

Grecka litera Pi stała się parasolem ochronnym dla głównego bohatera-miłośnika ogrodów zoologicznych i świetnego pływaka. Razem ze swoją rodziną mieszkał w Puttuczczeri, skąd jednak zamierzali przeprowadzić się do Kanady. Czekała ich długa podróż przez Ocean Spokojny, która niestety zakończyła się tragicznie.

Dramat jaki rozgrywał się na bezkresach wód stał w sprzeczności z piękną scenerią, jaka widoczna była z pokładu szalupy. 227 dni na Oceanie, mając za towarzysza jedynie tygrysa bengalskiego. Udało się przeżyć m.in. dzięki zapomnieniu o szybkim ratunku. Czas dla Pi nie istniał, o czym świadczy chociażby prowadzony przez niego dziennik, w którym nie ma dat ani żadnej numeracji. Tylko informacje praktyczne, pozwalające przetrwać w nowej sytuacji do której trzeba było się szybko dostosować. Jakże trafne okazało się powiedzenie potrzeba matką wynalazków.

An award-winning writer delivers a poignant and provocative novel of identity, race and the search for belonging in the age of globalization.

One afternoon, not long after Kelly Thorndike has moved back to his hometown of Baltimore, an African American man he doesn’t recognize calls out to him. To Kelly’s shock, the man identifies himself as Martin, who was one of Kelly’s closest friends in high school — and, before his disappearance nearly twenty years before, skinny, white, and Jewish. Martin then tells an astonishing story: After years of immersing himself in black culture, he’s had a plastic surgeon perform “racial reassignment surgery”—altering his hair, skin, and physiognomy to allow him to pass as African American. Unknown to his family or childhood friends, Martin has been living a new life ever since.

Now, however, Martin feels he can no longer keep his new identity a secret; he wants Kelly to help him ignite a controversy that will help sell racial reassignment surgery to the world. Kelly, still recovering from the death of his wife and child and looking for a way to begin anew, agrees, and things quickly begin to spiral out of control.

Inventive and thought-provoking, Your Face in Mine is a brilliant novel about cultural and racial alienation and the nature of belonging in a world where identity can be a stigma or a lucrative brand.

An unnerving and riveting psychological drama that challenges our notions of how we view others and how we construct our own sense of self.

Mia is an elementary schoolteacher in Denmark, while her husband, Frederik, is the talented, highly respected headmaster of a local private school. During a vacation in Spain, Frederik has an accident and his visit to the hospital reveals a brain tumor that is gradually altering his personality, confirming Mia's suspicions that her husband is no longer the man he used to be. Now she must protect herself and their teenage son, Niklas, from the strange, blunted being who lives in her husband's body — and with whom she must share her home, her son, and her bed.

When it emerges that one year ago Frederik had defrauded his school of millions of crowns, the consequences of his condition envelope the entire community. Frederick's apparent lack of concern doesn't help, and longstanding friendships with colleagues are thrown by the wayside. Increasingly isolated, Mia faces more tough questions. Had his illness already changed him back then when he still seemed so happy? What are the legal ramifications?

In her support group for spouses of people with brain injuries, Mia meets a defense attorney named Bernhard. Together they help prepare for Frederik's court case by immersing themselves in the latest brain research and in classic philosophical questions of free will, while simultaneously navigating the uncertain waters of their growing mutual infatuation. Jungersen's clear, spare prose and ceaseless plot twists will keep readers hooked until the last page.

A farmer perishing under a fallen tractor makes a last stab at philosophizing: “There was nothing dead that was ever beautiful.” It is a sentiment belied not only by the strange beauty in his story but also in the rough lives and deaths, small and large, that fill these haunting tales. Pulp-fiction grim and gritty but with the rhythm and resonance of classic folklore, these stories take place in a world of shadowy figures and childhood fears, in a countryside peopled by witches and skinflints, by men and women mercilessly unforgiving of one another’s trespasses, and in nights prowled by wolves and scrutinized by an “agonized and lamenting” moon. Ervin D. Krause’s characters pontificate in saloons, condemning the morals of others as they slowly get sloshed; they have affairs in old cars on winter nights; they traffic in gossip, terrorize their neighbors, steal, hunt, and spy.

This collection includes award-winning stories like “The Snake” and “The Quick and the Dead” as well as the previously unpublished “Anniversary,” which stirred a national controversy when it was censored by the University of Nebraska and barred from appearing in Prairie Schooner. Krause’s portrayal of the matter-of-fact cruelty and hopeful fragility of humanity is a critical addition to the canon of twentieth-century American literature.

When 'dream husband' Xan Meo is vengefully assaulted in the garden of a London pub, he suffers head-injury, and personality-change. Like a spiritual convert, the familial paragon becomes an anti-husband, an anti-father. He submits to an alien moral system — one among many to be found in these pages.

We are introduced to the inverted worlds of the 'yellow' journalist, Clint Smoker; the high priest of hardmen, Joseph Andrews; the porno tycoon, Cora Susan; and Royce Traynor, the corpse in the hold of the stricken airliner, apparently determined, even in death, to bring down the plane that carries his spouse. Meanwhile, we explore the entanglements of Henry England: his incapacitated wife, Pamela; his Chinese mistress, He Zizhen; his fifteen-year-old daughter, Victoria, the victim of a filmed 'intrusion' which rivets the world — because she is the future Queen of England, and her father, Henry IX, is its King.

Barry Hannah has been acclaimed by Larry McMurtry as "the best fiction writer to appear in the South since Flannery O'Connor." In his new novel, the first since 1991's Never Die, he again displays the master craftsmanship and wickedly brilliant storytelling that have earned him a deserved reputation as a modern master. In Yonder Stands Your Orphan, denizens of a lake community near Vicksburg are beset by madness, murder, and sin in the form of one Man Mortimer, a creature of the casinos who resembles dead country singer Conway Twitty. A killer who has turned mean and sick, he will visit upon this town a wreckage of biblical proportions. The young sheriff is confounded by Mortimer and distracted by his passion for a lovely seventy-two-year-old widow. Only Max Raymond, a weak Christian saxophonist, stands between Mortimer and his further depredations. But who will die, who will burn? Yonder Stands Your Orphan is a tour de force that confirms Barry Hannah's reputation — as William Styron wrote in Salon — "an original, and one of the most consistently exciting writers of the post-Faulkner generation."

From the author of the Man Booker Prize— winning literary sensation and long-time Globe and Mail bestseller The Gathering, comes a dazzling, seductive new collection of stories.

“Anne Enright’s style is as sharp and brilliant as Joan Didion’s; the scope of her understanding is as wide as Alice Munro’s;. . her vision of Ireland is as brave and original as Edna O’Brien’s.” — Colm Tóibín

A rich collection of sharp, vivid stories of loss and yearning, of the ordinary defeats and unexpected delights that grow out of the bonds between husbands and wives, mothers and children, and intimate strangers.

Bringing together in a single elegant edition new stories as well as a selection of stories never before published in Canada (from her UK published The Portable Virgin, 1991), Yesterday’s Weather exhibits the unsettling, carefully drawn reality, the subversive wit, and the awkward tenderness that mark Anne Enright as one of the most thrillingly gifted writers of our time.

From Dave Eggers, best-selling author of The Circle, a tightly controlled, emotionally searching novel. Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever? is the formally daring, brilliantly executed story of one man struggling to make sense of his country, seeking answers the only way he knows how.

In a barracks on an abandoned military base, miles from the nearest road, Thomas watches as the man he has brought wakes up. Kev, a NASA astronaut, doesn't recognize his captor, though Thomas remembers him. Kev cries for help. He pulls at his chain. But the ocean is close by, and nobody can hear him over the waves and wind. Thomas apologizes. He didn't want to have to resort to this. But they really needed to have a conversation, and Kev didn't answer his messages. And now, if Kev can just stop yelling, Thomas has a few questions.

Zoë Wicomb's complex and deeply evocative fiction is among the most distinguished recent works of South African women's literature. It is also among the only works of fiction to explore the experience of "Coloured" citizens in apartheid-era South Africa, whose mixed heritage traps them, as Bharati Mukherjee wrote in the New York Times, "in the racial crucible of their country."Wicomb deserves a wide American audience, on a part with Nadine Gordimer and J.M.Coetzee." — Wall St. Journal

Wicomb is a gifted writer, and her compressed narratives work like brilliant splinters in the mind, suggesting a rich rhythm and shape."-Seattle Times

"[Wicomb's] prose is vigorous, textured, lyrical. [She] is a sophisticated storyteller who combines the open-endedness of contemporary fiction with the force of autobiography and the simplicity of family stories."-Bharati Mukherjee, New York Times Book Review

For course use in: African literature, African studies, growing up female, world literature, women's studies

Zoe Wicomb was born in 1948 and raised in Namaquland, South Africa. After 20 years voluntary exile, she returned to South Africa in 1991 to teach at the University of the Western Cape. She currently lives in Glasgow and teaches at the University of Strathclyde, Scotland. Marcia Wright is professor of history at Columbia University and a member of the executive committee for the Women Writing Africa series. Carol Sicherman is professor emerita of English at Lehman College, CUNY.

Following Like You’d Understand, Anyway—awarded the Story Prize and a finalist for the National Book Award — Jim Shepard returns with an even more wildly diverse collection of astonishingly observant stories. Like an expert curator, he populates the vastness of human experience — from its bizarre fringes and lonely, breathtaking pinnacles to the hopelessly mediocre and desperately below average — with brilliant scientists, reluctant soldiers, workaholic artists, female explorers, depraved murderers, and deluded losers, all wholly convincing and utterly fascinating.

A “black world” operative at Los Alamos isn’t allowed to tell his wife anything about his daily activities, but he can’t resist sharing her intimate confidences with his work buddy. A young Alpine researcher falls in love with the girlfriend of his brother, who was killed in an avalanche he believes he caused. An unlucky farm boy becomes the manservant of a French nobleman who’s as proud of his military service with Joan of Arc as he’s aroused by the slaughter of children. A free-spirited autodidact, grieving her lost sister, traces the ancient steps of a ruthless Middle Eastern sect and becomes the first Western woman to travel the Arabian deserts. From the inventor of the Godzilla epics to a miserable G.I. in New Guinea, each comes to realize that knowing better is never enough.

Enthralling and unfailingly compassionate, You Think That’s Bad traverses centuries, continents, and social strata, but the joy and struggle that Shepard depicts with such devastating sensitivity — all the heartbreak, alienation, intimacy, and accomplishment — has a universal resonance.

"No one is smarter or funnier about the absurdities and agonies of modern love. Reading You is an affair to relish and remember." — Hilda Wolitzer

With each new novel, Jonathan Baumbach nudges the parameters of the novel — this time his narrator remembers, or invents, or imagines, the life of a not easily defined woman known only as You. It's another great look at the idea of love and the many various holds it can take.

Jonathan Baumbach is the author of fourteen books of fiction, and has also published over ninety stories in such places as Esquire and Boulevard.

A frighteningly prescient novel of today’s America — one man’s story of a racially-charged real estate experiment in Detroit, Michigan.

“You get in the habit of living a certain kind of life, you keep going in a certain direction, but most of the pressure on you is just momentum. As soon as you stop the momentum goes away. It’s easier than people think to walk out on things, I mean things like cities, leases, relationships and jobs.” —From You Don’t Have to Live Like This

Greg Marnier, Marny to his friends, leaves a job he doesn’t much like and moves to Detroit, Michigan in 2009, where an old friend has a big idea about real estate and the revitalization of a once great American city. Once there, he gets involved in a fist-fight between two of his friends, a racially charged trial, an act of vigilante justice, a love affair with a local high school teacher, and a game of three-on-three basketball with the President — not to mention the money-soaked real estate project itself, cut out of 600 acres of emaciated Detroit. Marny’s billionaire buddy from Yale, Robert James, calls his project “the Groupon model for gentrification,” others call it “New Jamestown,” and Marny calls it home— until Robert James asks him to leave. This is the story of what went wrong.

You Don’t Have to Live Like This is the breakout novel from the “fabulously real” (Guardian) voice of the only American included in Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists. Using the framework of our present reality, Benjamin Markovits blurs the line between the fictional and the fact-based, and captures an invisible current threaded throughout American politics, economics, and society that is waiting to explode.

A woman known only as A lives in an unnamed American city with her roommate, B, and boyfriend, C, who wants her to join him on a reality dating show called That's My Partner! A eats mostly popsicles and oranges, watches endless amounts of television, often just for the commercials— particularly the recurring cartoon escapades of Kandy Kat, the mascot for an entirely chemical dessert — and models herself on a standard of beauty that exists only in such advertising. She fixates on the fifteen minutes of fame a local celebrity named Michael has earned after buying up a Wally's Supermarket's entire, and increasingly ample, supply of veal.

Meanwhile, B is attempting to make herself a twin of A, who in turn hungers for something to give meaning to her life, something aside from C's pornography addiction. Maybe something like what's gotten into her neighbors across the street, the family who's begun "ghosting" themselves beneath white sheets and whose garage door features a strange scrawl of graffiti: he who sits next to me, may we eat as one.

An intelligent and madly entertaining novel reminiscent of The Crying of Lot 49, White Noise, and City of Glass, Alexandra Kleeman's unforgettable debut is a missing-person mystery told from the point of view of the missing person; an American horror story that concerns sex and friendship, consumption and appetite, faith and transformation, real food and reality television; and, above all, a wholly singular vision of modern womanhood by a frightening, "stunning" (Conjunctions), and often very funny voice of a new generation.

The Flamethrowers meets Let the Great World Spin in this debut novel set amid the heated conflict of Seattle's 1999 WTO protests.

On a rainy, cold day in November, young Victor-a boyish, scrappy world traveler who's run away from home-sets out to sell marijuana to the 50,000 anti-globalization protestors gathered in the streets. It quickly becomes clear that the throng determined to shut the city down-from environmentalists to teamsters to anarchists-are testing the patience of the police, and what started as a peaceful protest is threatening to erupt into violence.

Over the course of one life-altering afternoon, the lives of seven people will change forever: foremost among them police chief Bishop, the estranged father Victor hasn't seen in three years, two protestors struggling to stay true to their non-violent principles as the day descends into chaos, two police officers in the street, and the coolly elegant financial minister from Sri Lanka whose life, as well as his country's fate, hinges on getting through the angry crowd, out of jail, and to his meeting with the president of the United States.

In this raw and breathtaking novel, Yapa marries a deep rage with a deep humanity, and in doing so casts an unflinching eye on the nature and limits of compassion.

“An urgent and deeply moving novel.”—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

The US military is preparing to withdraw from Iraq, and newly-minted lieutenant Jack Porter struggles to accept how it’s happening — through alliances with warlords who have Arab and American blood on their hands. Day after day, Jack tries to assert his leadership in the sweltering, dreary atmosphere of Ashuriyah. But his world is disrupted by the arrival of veteran Sergeant Daniel Chambers, whose aggressive style threatens to undermine the fragile peace that the troops have worked hard to establish.

As Iraq plunges back into chaos and bloodshed and Chambers’s influence over the men grows stronger, Jack becomes obsessed with a strange, tragic tale of reckless love between a lost American soldier and Rana, a local sheikh’s daughter. In search of the truth and buoyed by the knowledge that what he finds may implicate Sergeant Chambers, Jack seeks answers from the enigmatic Rana, and soon their fates become intertwined. Determined to secure a better future for Rana and a legitimate and lasting peace for her country, Jack will defy American command, putting his own future in grave peril.

Pulling readers into the captivating immediacy of a conflict that can shift from drudgery to devastation at any moment, Youngblood provides startling new dimension to both the moral complexity of war and its psychological toll.

"Amy Gustine's You Should Pity Us Instead is a devastating, funny, and astonishingly frank collection of stories. Gustine can be brutally honest about the murky calculations, secret dreams and suppressed malice to which most of us never admit, not even to ourselves." — Karen Russell

"You Should Pity Us Instead is an unbroken spell from first story to last, despite the enormous range of subjects and landscapes, sufferings and joys it explores." — Laura Kasischke

"Amy Gustine's stories cross impossible borders both physical and moral: a mother looking for her kidnapped son sneaks into Gaza, an Ellis Island inspector mourning his lost love plays God at the boundary between old world and new. Brave, essential, thrilling, each story in You Should Pity Us Instead takes us to those places we've never dared visit before." — Ben Stroud

You Should Pity Us Instead explores some of our toughest dilemmas: the cost of Middle East strife at its most intimate level, the likelihood of God considered in day-to-day terms, the moral stakes of family obligations, and the inescapable fact of mortality. Amy Gustine exhibits an extraordinary generosity toward her characters, instilling them with a thriving, vivid presence.

Sarah Zuckerman and Jennifer Jones are best friends in an upscale part of Washington, D.C., in the politically charged 1980s.  Sarah is the shy, wary product of an unhappy home: her father abandoned the family to return to his native England; her agoraphobic mother is obsessed with fears of nuclear war.  Jenny is an all-American girl who has seemingly perfect parents.  With Cold War rhetoric reaching a fever pitch in 1982, the ten-year-old girls write letters to Soviet premier Yuri Andropov asking for peace.  But only Jenny's letter receives a response, and Sarah is left behind when her friend accepts the Kremlin's invitation to visit the USSR and becomes an international media sensation.  The girls' icy relationship still hasn't thawed when Jenny and her parents die tragically in a plane crash in 1985.

Ten years later, Sarah is about to graduate from college when she receives a mysterious letter from Moscow suggesting that Jenny's death might have been a hoax.  She sets off to the former Soviet Union in search of the truth, but the more she delves into her personal Cold War history, the harder it is to separate facts from propaganda.

Young Once is a crucial book in the career of Nobel laureate Patrick Modiano. It was his breakthrough novel, in which he stripped away the difficulties of his earlier work and found a clear, mysteriously moving voice for his haunting stories of love, nostalgia, and grief. It has also been called “the most gripping Modiano book of all” (Der Spiegel).

Odile and Louis are leading a happy, bucolic life with their two children in the French countryside near the Swiss mountains. It is Odile’s thirty-fifth birthday, and Louis’s thirty-fifth birthday is a few weeks away. Then the story shifts back to their early years: Louis, just freed from his military service and at loose ends, taken up by a shady character who brings him to Paris to do some work for a friend who manages a garage; Odile, an aspiring singer, at the mercy of the kindness and unkindness of strangers. They move through a Paris saturated with the crimes and secrets of the past but breathing hopes for the future; they find each other and struggle together to create what, looking back, will have been their youth.

In one of the most acclaimed fiction debuts in years, Adam Haslett explores the lives that appear shuttered by loss and discovers entire worlds hidden inside them.

An ageing inventor, burning with manic creativity, tries to reconcile with his estranged gay son. An orphaned boy draws a thuggish classmate into a relationship of escalating guilt and violence. A genteel middle-aged woman, a long-time resident of a rest home, becomes the confidante of a lovelorn, teenage volunteer.

With Checkovian restraint and compassion, conveying both the sorrow of life and the courage with which people rise to meet it, You Are Not A Stranger Here is a triumph.

In a café by the seaside, two friends, Christy Andrapper and Jesintha, witness the murder of a young man. When Christy discovers that it was Senthil, his classmate from school, who had been shot, he tries to follow up on the investigation. But the police deny such a crime ever took place. The hospital to which Senthil’s body was delivered insists he died of a heart attack.

Christy begins to suspect a conspiracy. Was he caught in the middle of a giant cover-up? How was his powerful family connected with it? As the mystery deepens, the story moves back and forth between the archipelago of Diego Garcia and peninsular India, delving into the very heart of early Christianity in India.

After the success and acclaim of Goat Days, Benyamin crafts a clever and absorbing crime-novel-within-a-novel that is dazzlingly inventive and hugely enjoyable.

"Sam Pink is dictator of the island of the bizarre." — As You Recognize Your Transience

"Reading Sam Pink will make you recognize the reptile smuggler that has always been hiding out inside your brain." — Cameron Pierce, author of Ass Goblins of Auschwitz and The Pickled Apocalypse of Pancake Island

When Vladan Borojević googles the name of his father Nedelko, a former officer in the Yugoslav People’s Army, supposedly killed in the civil war after the decay of Yugoslavia, he unexpectedly discovers a dark family secret. The story which which then unfolds takes him back to the catastrophic events of 1991, when he first heard the military term deployment and his idyllic childhood came to a sudden end.

Seventeen years later Vladan’s discovery that he is the son of a fugitive war criminal sends him off on a journey round the Balkans to find his elusive father. On the way, he also finds out how the falling apart of his family is closely linked with the disintegration of the world they used to live in. The story of the Borojević family strings and juxtaposes images of the Balkans past and present, but mainly deals with the tragic fates of people who managed to avoid the bombs, but were unable to escape the war.

This groundbreaking novel, set in New York City during the 1990s, is guaranteed to be unlike any literary experience you have ever had. Acclaimed Puerto Rican author Giannini Braschi has crafted this creative and insightful examination of the Hispanic-American experience, taking on the voices of a variety of characters — painters, poets, sculptors, singers, writers, filmmakers, actors, directors, set designers, editors, and philosophers — to draw on their various cultural, economic, and geopolitical backgrounds to engage in lively cultural dialogue. Their topics include love, sex, food, music, books, inspiration, despair, infidelity, jobs, debt, war, and world news. Braschi’s discourse winds throughout the city’s public, corporate, and domestic settings, offering an inside look at the cultural conflicts that can occur when Anglo Americans and Latin Americans live, work, and play together. Hailed by Publishers Weekly as “a literary liberation,” this energetic and comical novel celebrates the contradiction that makes contemporary American culture so wonderfully diverse.

This iconic Spanglish novel by the leading Hispanic-American poet Giannina Braschi was heralded by the New York Daily News as "an in your face assertion of the vitality of Latino culture in the U.S." Jean Franco of Columbia University praised Braschi for her "extraordinary virtuosity, her command of many different registers, her dizzying ability to switch between English and Spanish. It is also a very funny novel, a novel of argumentative conversations that cover food, movies, literature, art, the academy, sex, memory, and every day life. It is a book that should be performed as well as read.

In You Are Having a Good Time, Amie Barrodale’s collection of highly compressed and charged tales, the veneer of normality is stripped from her characters’ lives to reveal the seething and contradictory desires that fuel them. In “Animals,” an up-and-coming starlet harbors a complicated attraction toward her abusive director. In “Frank Advice for Fat Women,” an ethically compromised psychiatrist is drawn into the middle of a dysfunctional mother-daughter relationship. And in “The Imp,” a supernatural possession ruins a man’s relationship with his pregnant wife.

Barrodale’s protagonists drink too much, say the wrong things, want the wrong people. They’re hounded by longings (and sometimes ghosts) to the point where they are forced to confront the illusions they cling to. They’re brought to life in stories that don’t behave as you expect stories to behave. Barrodale’s startlingly funny and original fictions get under your skin and make you reconsider the fragile compromises that underpin our daily lives.

"Unyoku 2.0" Окончательно переработанная версия "Lucky" (никакой связи с первоисточником и прочим, градус мистики понижен до минимум, но кое-что собственное/сюжетное сохранено). 18.07.15.

Togo Tashimoto, captain of the Japanese submarine I-357 and a ruthless disciplinarian steeped in the samurai tradition; and John Barratt, captain of HMS Restless, haunted by his wife's death while a prisoner of the Japanese in Changi Jail; were two very different men whose destinies were linked in the deadly game of hide and seek they were to play out among the islands and atolls of the Mozambique coast.

Homeward bound after a disappointing patrol in the Indian Ocean, Yashimoto encounters an unescorted American freighter making for Cape Delgado. To conserve his remaining torpedoes he decides to attack by gunfire. In the night action which follows he sinks the Fort Nebraska, but not before her stern gun has scored a lucky hit. Unable to dive, Yashimoto makes for the coast to carry out repairs and to hide from the British air and surface forces he expects on the scene at dawn.

HMS Restless, returning to her base, picks up Brad Corrigan, the only member of the freighter's crew to survive the massacre that followed her sinking. On the strength of the American's report, Barratt sets out in pursuit of the submarine. Stretching over four days, the destroyer's relentless search has the added flavor of a vendetta, since Barratt and Corrigan have personal scores to settle with the Japanese. Skillfully, hour by hour, the tension is built up until at last hunter and hunted meet in a tremendous climax. Never have Antony Trew's mastery of naval detail and powers as a storyteller been more successfully blended than in this novel of thrilling authority.