These are brilliantly observed, large-hearted stories by a young writer that herald the introduction to a North American audience a major and mature literary talent. For readers of David Bezmozgis, Nathan Englander, Neil Smith, John Cheever, and Milan Kundera.In this stunningly accomplished work, award-winning author David Szalay explores the terrain of manhood. Inhabited by characters at different stages in their lives, ranging from the teenage years to old age, this virtuoso collection portrays men in utterly real and compelling terms as they grapple with relationships and masculinity. Set in various European cities, the stories are dark and disturbing, some almost surreal, but always with accute psychological insight that renders them fascinating. They deal with pride and greed, jealousy and love, grief and loneliness. Funny and heart-achingly sad, sometimes shocking, because the stories are invariably true to life, this is a collection to be read and savoured.

Jake Whyte is the sole resident of an old farmhouse on an unnamed British island, a place of ceaseless rains and battering winds. It’s just her, her untamed companion, Dog, and a flock of sheep. Which is how she wanted it to be. But something is coming for the sheep — every few nights it picks one off, leaves it in rags.It could be anything. There are foxes in the woods, a strange boy and a strange man, rumours of an obscure, formidable beast. And there is Jake’s unknown past, perhaps breaking into the present, a story hidden thousands of miles away and years ago, in a landscape of different colour and sound, a story held in the scars that stripe her back.All the Birds, Singing tells the life of an outsider. With extreme artistry and empathy, it reveals an existence of diurnal beauty, incremental horrors, stubborn hope and tentative redemption. The result is a novel of indelible emotional force.

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

The Fisher family of Alluvia, New York, is coming undone. Evelyn spends her days tending to her husband, Henry — an acclaimed and reclusive novelist slowly losing his battle with Alzheimer’s. Their son, Benji, onetime star of an ’80s sitcom called Prodigy, sinks deeper into drunken obscurity, railing against the bit roles he’s forced to take in uncelebrated regional theater. His sister, Claudia, tries her best to shore up her family even as she deals with the consequences of a remarkable, decades-old secret that’s come to light. When the Fishers mistake one of Benji’s drug-induced accidents for a suicidal cry for help, Benji commits to playing a role he hopes will reverse his fortune and stall his family’s decline. Into this mix comes Max Davis, a twentysomething cello virtuoso and real-life prodigy, whose appearance spurs the entire family to examine whether the secrets they thought were holding them all together may actually be what’s tearing them apart.David Hopson’s All the Lasting Things is a beautiful, moving family portrait that explores the legacy we all stand to leave — in our lives, in our work — and asks what those legacies mean in a world where all the lasting things do not last.

A man bets all he has on a horserace to pay for an expensive operation for his dog. A young refugee wants to box her way straight off the boat to the top of the sport. Old friends talk all night after meeting up by chance. She imagines their future together…Stories about people who have lost out in life and in love, and about their hopes for one really big win, the chance to make something of their lives. In silent apartments, desolate warehouses, prisons and down by the river, Meyer strikes the tone of our harsh times, and finds the grace notes, the bright lights shining in the dark.

One summer, a young woman travels with her lover to the isolated tobacco farm he has inherited after his family dies in a terrible accident. As Orren works to save his family farm from drought, Aloma struggles with the loneliness of farm life and must find her way in a combative, erotically-charged relationship with a grieving, taciturn man. A budding friendship with a handsome and dynamic young preacher further complicates her growing sense of dissatisfaction. As she considers whether to stay with Orren or to leave, she grapples with the finality of loss and death, and the eternal question of whether it is better to fight for freedom or submit to love.All the Living has the timeless quality of a parable, but is also a perfect evocation of a time and place, a portrait of both age-old conflicts and modern life. It is an ode to the starve-acre Southern farm, the mountain landscape, and difficult love. In her lyrical and moving debut novel, C.E. Morgan recalls both the serenity of Marilynne Robinson and the shifting emotional currents and unashamed eroticism of James Salter. It is an unforgettable book from a major new voice.

Senhor José is a low-grade clerk in the city's Central Registry, where the living and the dead share the same shelf space. A middle-aged bachelor, he has no interest in anything beyond the certificates of birth, marriage, divorce, and death that are his daily preoccupations. In the evenings, and on weekends, he works on bringing up to date his clipping file of the famous, the rising stars, the notorious. But when one day he comes across the birth certificate of an anonymous young woman, he decides that this cannot have been mere chance, he has to discover more about her. After all, to know a name is not to know the person.Under the increasingly mystified eye of the Registrar, a godlike figure whose name is spoken only in whispers, the now obsessed Senhor José sets off, in every moment he can steal from work, to follow the thread that leads him to the woman's school, to her godmother, to her father and mother-but as he gets closer to a meeting with the unknown woman, he discovers more about her, and about himself, than he would have wished....The loneliness of people's lives, the effects of chance and moments of recognition, the discovery of love, however tentative...once again José Saramago has written a timeless story.

In All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy begins his Border Trilogy with a coming of age tale that is a departure from the bizarre richness and mysterious violence of his early novels, yet in many ways preserves the mystery and the richness in a more understated form. Like Blood Meridian, this novel follows a young man's journey to the regions of the unknown. John Grady Cole, more heroic than the protagonists of McCarthy's earlier novels, confronts the evil that is an inescapable part of the universe as well as the evil that grows out of his own ignorance and pride. His story is told in a style often restrained and simple, embedded with lyrical passages that echo his dreams and memory.In the spring of 1948 on a small Texas ranch, sixteen year old John Grady Cole attends the funeral of his grandfather, with whom he has lived since his parents' separation. The grandfather's ranch has been left to John Grady's mother, a small-time actress who has no interest in it and will sell it. John Grady's father, psychologically damaged by World War II and now physically ill as well, tells his son goodbye. With no apparent future in Texas, and sensing the threat of the new era to the traditional life he values, John Grady urges his old friend Rawlins to accompany him to Mexico. There, John Grady will find that his innocence, or ignorance, will ultimately lead him close to destruction.Before reaching the border they meet Jimmy Blevins, a dangerous young boy on a magnificent horse. Even though Cole and Rawlins do not trust Blevins and are sure his horse is stolen, they allow him to join them despite their doubts. As they ride into Mexico, they realize that they are no longer in a world that they can understand. When Blevins' clothes and horse disappear during a thunderstorm, they search a nearby Mexican town, where they find the clothes and finally the horse. In spite of Rawlins' voiced forebodings, Blevins steals the horse back, and as John Grady and Rawlins flee the town Blevins gallops past them, pursued by armed men.John Grady and Rawlins ride south, coming at last to a ranch, the Hacienda de Nuestra Senora de la Purisima Conception. As they talk with the vaqueros about the possibility of employment, John Grady sees a beautiful girl on a black horse, Alejandra, the daughter of hacendado Don Hector Rocha y Villareal. The heir of an aristocratic family, Don Hector is avidly interested in breeding wild mountain horses with his own stock, so John Grady and Rawlins join the vaqueros; John Grady amazes everyone with his ability to break the wild horses quickly and gently.When Don Hector questions Cole about his past, he omits the episode with Blevins and the fact that he and Rawlins may now be wanted as accomplices in Blevins's horse theft. Concerned about his blossoming relationship with Alejandra, Duena Alfonsa, Don Hector's aunt and Alejandra's godmother, warns John Grady away from the rebellious girl, and informs him that Don Hector will never allow her to marry an American, especially a poor one. But Alejandra comes to him one night and they become lovers.A few days later John Grady and Rawlins are arrested and taken to a jail in Encantada, where Blevins is already imprisoned for the murder of three men. While the three Americans are transported to the state prison at Saltillo, Blevins is taken from the group and shot. At the prison, they are questioned and beaten, and Rawlins is injured seriously. John Grady, attacked by another prisoner, whom he must kill, learns that evil exists not only in the world but in himself. When he and Rawlins are suddenly released as mysteriously as they were arrested, Rawlins returns to Texas.But John Grady goes back to La Purisima to search for Alejandra, who is not there. Once again Duena Alfonsa makes clear to him the impossibility of the match. She tells her own story of the power of ignorance and evil (her love for a man who was killed by a mob after helping depose the dictator Diaz) and of her determination to protect Alejandra. Although John Grady does meet Alejandra one last time at a hotel in Zacatecas, it is only as a farewell: she chooses her family's approval (and perhaps their money). In pain, Cole returns to Encantada where he finds Blevins's horse, innocent like all animals and yet the cause of much death and loss. John Grady captures both the horse and the brutal police captain who shot Blevins, and heads homeward. En route, the captain is seized by brigands with a score to settle with him, and John Grady finally returns to Texas.He finds even less there than before: his father and his childhood nurse are both dead. He rides on with the stolen horse, seeking to restore it to its rightful owner. John Grady has learned, but not yet enough; he has left home and returned a changed man, but there is no home to receive him. All the Pretty Horses is a hero's quest without a neat resolution, a book in which the strange light of mythic struggles shines through the quick-paced adventure.The Border Trilogy continues with Volume Two, The Crossing, and concludes with the third volume, Cities of the Plain.

A dozen sharp new stories by one of contemporary fiction's acknowledged masters.A. L. Kennedy's latest collection of stories is an investigation of "certain types of threat and the odder edges of sweet things"-another intense and luscious feast of language from the author of The Blue Book and Paradise. "I want to describe my genuine circumstances on the occasion in question, but I can't," confesses the narrator of "Baby Blue," who finds herself "somewhere like a very big grocers. . a supermarket full of sex." Kennedy hilariously explores the comic possibilities of fake genitalia before landing on a heartbreaking note.In "Takes You Home," a man tries to sell his apartment, the emptiness of the rooms. It's a journey to the interior that is both harrowing and humorous, as he considers the benefit of showing off the old kitchen rather than renovating-it "only quietly asks to be replaced and will shrug when it's knocked to pieces and hauled away and not take it personally one bit." Swarming with memory and moments of grace, All the Rage is Kennedy at her inimitable best.

Kyril Bonfiglioli, the groundbreaking satirist whose writing The New Yorker described as “an unholy collaboration between P. G. Wodehouse and Ian Fleming,” was truly a writer ahead of his time. In this hilarious novel, Bonfiglioli takes us back in time to an ironical maritime romp — Master and Commander by way of Monty Python.Inspired by a shotgun blast in the seat of his breeches, young Karli Van Cleef quits his native Holland to seek his fortune. He arrives in early Victorian London and soon he is turning a pretty profit. But Karli sees that true opportunity flowers in India’s fields of opium poppies and the treaty ports of the China coast. So he takes a berth in an opium clipper hell-bent for the Indies.It is a journey beset with perils. Karli is confronted by the mountainous seas, high-piled plates of curry, and the ferocious penalties of the Articles of War. He survives the malice of the Boers, the hospitality of anthropophagi, and the horrors of Lancashire cooking. En route he acquires some interesting diseases, dangerous friends and enemies, a fortune, and a wife almost as good as new.Fans and newcomers alike will revel in this picaresque tale of the early years of one of the men who helped make Britain great — for a consideration.

From Ragtime and Billy Bathgate to World’s Fair, The March, and Homer & Langley, the fiction of E. L. Doctorow comprises a towering achievement in modern American letters. Now Doctorow returns with an enthralling collection of brilliant, startling short fiction about people who, as the author notes in his Preface, are somehow “distinct from their surroundings — people in some sort of contest with the prevailing world”.A man at the end of an ordinary workday, extracts himself from his upper-middle-class life and turns to foraging in the same affluent suburb where he once lived with his family.A college graduate takes a dishwasher’s job on a whim, and becomes entangled in a criminal enterprise after agreeing to marry a beautiful immigrant for money.A husband and wife’s tense relationship is exacerbated when a stranger enters their home and claims to have grown up there.An urbanite out on his morning run suspects that the city in which he’s lived all his life has transmogrified into another city altogether.These are among the wide-ranging creations in this stunning collection, resonant with the mystery, tension, and moral investigation that distinguish the fiction of E. L. Doctorow. Containing six unforgettable stories that have never appeared in book form, and a selection of previous Doctorow classics, All the Time in the World affords us another opportunity to savor the genius of this American master.

Morning rush hour on the Golden Gate Bridge. Amidst the river of metal and glass a shocking event occurs, leaving those who witnessed it desperately looking for answers, most notably one man and his son Jake, who captured the event and uploaded it to the internet for all the world to experience. As the media swarms over the story, Jake will face the ramifications of his actions as he learns the perils of our modern disconnect between the real world and the world we create on line.In land-locked Arizona, as the entire country learns of the event, Sara views Jake’s video just before witnessing a horrible event of her own: her boyfriend’s posting of their intimate sex tape. As word of the tape leaks out, making her an instant pariah, Sara needs to escape the small town’s persecution of her careless action. Along with Rodney, an old boyfriend injured long ago in a freak accident that destroyed his parents’ marriage, she must run faster than the internet trolls seeking to punish her for her indiscretions. Sara and Rodney will reunite with his estranged mother, Kat, now in danger from a new man in her life who may not be who he — or his online profiles — claim to be, a dangerous avatar in human form.With a wide cast of characters and an exciting pace that mimics the speed of our modern, all-too-connected lives, All This Life examines the dangerous intersection of reality and the imaginary, where coding and technology seek to highlight and augment our already flawed human connections. Using his trademark talent for creating memorable characters, with a deep insight into language and how it can be twisted to alter reality, Joshua Mohr returns with his most contemporary and insightful novel yet.

The haunting story of a Jewish family in Eastern Europe in the 1930s that prefigures the fate of the Jews during World War II.At the center is nine-year-old Paul Rosenfeld, the beloved only child of divorced parents, through whose eyes we view a dissolving, increasingly chaotic world. Initially, Paul lives with his mother — a secular, assimilated schoolteacher, who he adores until she “betrays” him by marrying the gentile André. He is then sent to live with his father — once an admired avant-garde artist, but now reviled by the critics as a “decadent Jew,” who drowns his anger, pain, and humiliation in drink. Paul searches in vain for stability and meaning in a world that is collapsing around him, but his love for the earthy peasant girl who briefly takes care of him, the strange pull he feels towards the Jews praying in the synagogue near his home, and the fascination with which he observes Eastern Orthodox church rituals merely give him tantalizing glimpses into worlds of which he can never be a part.The fates that Paul’s parents will meet with Paul as terrified witness — his mother, deserted by her new husband and dying of typhus; his father, gunned down while trying to stop the robbery of a Jewish-owned shop — and his own fate as an orphaned Jewish child alone in Europe in 1938 are rendered with extraordinary subtlety and power, as they foreshadow, in the heart-wrenching story of three individuals, the cataclysm that is about to engulf all of European Jewry.

Zuerst die gute Nachricht: Emmi und Leo sind wieder da! Und jetzt die schlechte Nachricht: Es sieht so aus, als wäre ihre zauberhafte Geschichte mit diesem Band zu einem endgültigen Ende gebracht. Obwohl — man weiß ja nie…Aber der Reihe nach: 2006 veröffentlichte Daniel Glattauer jenen ungewöhnlichen Liebesroman Gut gegen Nordwind, der einschlug wie eine Bombe: Die Geschichte einer Liebe zwischen einem Mann und einer Frau, die in zufälligen E-Mail-Kontakt geraten und dann von dem, was der jeweils andere schreibt, so eingenommen sind, dass sie voneinander nicht mehr lassen können (und das, ohne sich je zu begegnen), wurde ein Sensationserfolg. Und die Leser, süchtig geworden nach Glattauers virtuosem E-Mail-Stakkato, konnten, als sie die letzte Seite des Buches umschlugen, kaum fassen, dass das Vergnügen schon vorbei sein sollte — und dass die Geschichte dieses unerwartete, einem Schlag in die Magengrube gleichkommende Ende nahm.Tja, doch das Ende war kein Ende. Ein knappes Jahr nach dem furiosen Finale von Gut gegen Nordwind kehrt Leo aus Boston zurück, wohin er quasi geflohen war. Emmi hat in der Zwischenzeit immer wieder versucht, ihn zu kontaktieren, doch zu mehr als einem (köstlichen!) „Dialog“ mit den automatisch generierten Antwortmails des Systemadministrators war es nicht gekommen. Aber plötzlich ist Leo wieder da — und antwortet. Und obwohl sie es beide eigentlich nicht möchten (oder doch?), obwohl jeder in der Zwischenzeit sein Leben ohne den anderen einzurichten versucht hat (Leo hat sogar eine Freundin, allerdings in Boston…), sind sie sich so schnell wieder so nah, dass aus „Ich“ und „Du“ ein „Wir“ wird. Schon wieder. Und diesmal kommt es zur Begegnung. Mit turbulenten Folgen.

"Allegheny Front has few sentimental trappings. . Men's stubbornness is a rock face, in these intelligent and unpretentious stories, their anger a crown fire, their occasional tenderness a rill. . It remains at a distance from judgment, at a remove from easy definitions, unspooling a lucid and often painful history of appetite, exploitation, and bereavement." — Lydia Millet, from the introductionSet in the author's homeland of West Virginia, this panoramic collection of stories traces the people and animals who live in precarious balance in the mountains of Appalachia over a span of two hundred years, in a disappearing rural world. With omniscient narration, rich detail, and lyrical prose, Matthew Neill Null brings his landscape and characters vividly to life.Matthew Neill Null is the author of the novel Honey from the Lion (Lookout Books). A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and a winner of the PEN/O. Henry Award, his short fiction has appeared in the Oxford American, Ploughshares, the Mississippi Review, American Short Fiction, Ecotone, and elsewhere. He divides his time between West Virginia and Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he coordinates the writing fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center.

Voici donc des histoires croisées, celle de Jérémie, en quête de Raphus cucullatus, alias l’oiseau de nausée, le dodo mauricien jadis exterminé par les humains, et celle de Dominique, alias Dodo, l’admirable hobo, né pour faire rire. Leur lieu commun est Alma, l’ancien domaine des Felsen sur l’île Maurice, que les temps modernes ont changée en Maya, la terre des illusions :

« Dans le jardin de la Maison Blanche le soleil d’hiver passe sur mon visage, bientôt le soleil va s’éteindre, chaque soir le ciel devient jaune d’or. Je suis dans mon île, ce n’est pas l’île des méchants, les Armando, Robinet de Bosses, Escalier, ce n’est pas l’île de Missié Kestrel ou Missié Zan, Missié Hanson, Monique ou Véronique, c’est Alma, mon Alma, Alma des champs et des ruisseaux, des mares et des bois noirs, Alma dans mon cœur, Alma dans mon ventre. Tout le monde peut mourir, pikni, mais pas toi, Artémisia, pas toi. Je reste immobile dans le soleil d’or, les yeux levés vers l’intérieur de ma tête puisque je ne peux pas dormir, un jour mon âme va partir par un trou dans ma tête, pour aller au ciel où sont les étoiles. »

Наши дни. Семьдесят километров от Москвы, Сергиев Посад, Троице-Сергиева Лавра, Московская духовная семинария – древнейшее учебное заведение России. Закрытый вуз, готовящий будущих священников Церкви. Замкнутый мир богословия, жесткой дисциплины и послушаний.Семинарская молодежь, стремящаяся вытащить православие из его музейного прошлого, пытается преодолеть в себе навязываемый администрацией типаж смиренного пастыря и бросает вызов проректору по воспитательной работе игумену Траяну Введенскому.Гений своего дела и живая легенда, отец Траян принимается за любимую работу по отчислению недовольных.

Politically incorrect, provocative, and steeped in wit and irony, a fast-paced tragicomedy about the perfectly ordinary madness in today's Middle East.A thirtysomething Tel Aviv businessman, Eitan "Croc" Einoch's life is turned upside down when he narrowly escapes a suicide bombing on the minibus he rides to work. When he lives through a second attack, and then a third, he becomes, reluctantly, a national media celebrity. Naturally, the Palestinian terrorists responsible for the attacks are less than happy. This embarrassing symbol of their failure-this "CrocAttack"-must be neutralized.Meanwhile, Fahmi Sabih lies in a coma, quarrelling with his conscience. The young Palestinian suicide bomber has learned everything he knows about bombs, targets, and revenge from his brother. So why has Einoch survived? As Fahmi's story unfolds, it becomes clear that their paths are destined to cross again-for there is another bombing still to come-and then luck will change drastically for one or both of them. But who, if anyone, has right on his side?

Albert is nineteen, grew up in an orphanage, and never knew his mother. All his life Albert had to be a father to his father: Fred is a child trapped in the body of an old man. He spends his time reading encyclopedias, waves at green cars, and is known as the hero of a tragic bus accident. Albert senses that Fred, who has just been given five months left to live, is the only one who can help him learn more about his background.With time working against them, Albert and Fred set out on an adventurous voyage of discovery that leads them via the underground sewers into the distant past-all the way back to a night in August 1912, and to the story of a forbidden love.Almost Everything Very Fast, Christopher Kloeble's U.S. debut, is a sensitive and dramatic family saga and page-turning road novel all in one.

From "a top-notch emerging writer with a crisp and often poetic voice and wily, intelligent humor" (The Boston Globe): a collection of stories that explores the lives of talented, gutsy women throughout history.The fascinating lives of the characters in Almost Famous Women have mostly been forgotten, but their stories are burning to be told. Now Megan Mayhew Bergman, author of Birds of a Lesser Paradise, resurrects these women, lets them live in the reader's imagination, so we can explore their difficult choices. Nearly every story in this dazzling collection is based on a woman who attained some celebrity — she raced speed boats or was a conjoined twin in show business; a reclusive painter of renown; a member of the first all-female, integrated swing band. We see Lord Byron's illegitimate daughter, Allegra; Oscar Wilde's troubled niece, Dolly; West With the Night author Beryl Markham; Edna St. Vincent Millay's sister, Norma. These extraordinary stories travel the world, explore the past (and delve into the future), and portray fiercely independent women defined by their acts of bravery, creative impulses, and sometimes reckless decisions.The world hasn't always been kind to unusual women, but through Megan Mayhew Bergman's alluring depictions they finally receive the attention they deserve. Almost Famous Women is a gorgeous collection from an "accomplished writer of short fiction" (Booklist).