“Of my generation I most admire Daniel Sada, whose writing project seems to me the most daring.” —Roberto Bolaño.This Rabelaisian tale of lust and longing in the drier precincts of postwar Mexico introduces one of Latin America’s most admired writers to the English-speaking world.Demetrio Sordo is an agronomist who passes his days in a dull but remunerative job at a ranch near Oaxaca. It is 1945, World War II has just ended, but those bloody events have had no impact on a country that is only on the cusp of industrializing. One day, more bored than usual, Demetrio visits a bordello in search of a libidinous solution to his malaise. There he begins an all-consuming and, all things considered, perfectly satisfying relationship with a prostitute named Mireya.A letter from his mother interrupts Demetrio’s debauched idyll: she asks him to return home to northern Mexico to accompany her to a wedding in a small town on the edge of the desert. Much to his mother’s delight, he meets the beautiful and virginal Renata and quickly falls in love — a most proper kind of love.Back in Oaxaca, Demetrio is torn, the poor cad. Naturally he tries to maintain both relationships, continuing to frolic with Mireya and beginning a chaste correspondence with Renata. But Mireya has problems of her own — boredom is not among them — and concocts a story that she hopes will help her escape from the bordello and compel Demetrio to marry her. Almost Never is a brilliant send-up of Latin American machismo that also evokes a Mexico on the verge of dramatic change.

Philosophical inquiry, examinations of language, and involuted domestic disputes are the focus of Lydia Davis’s inventive collection of short fiction, Almost No Memory. In each of these stories, Davis reveals an empathic, sometimes shattering understanding of human relationships.

At 59, Jerry Battle is coasting through life. His favorite pastime is flying his small plane high above Long Island. Aloft, he can escape from the troubles that plague his family, neighbors, and loved ones on the ground. But he can't stay in the air forever. Only months before his 60th birthday, a culmination of family crises finally pull Jerry down from his emotionally distant course.Jerry learns that his family's stability is in jeopardy. His father, Hank, is growing increasingly unhappy in his assisted living facility. His son, Jack, has taken over the family landscaping business but is running it into bankruptcy. His daughter, Theresa, has become pregnant and has been diagnosed with cancer. His longtime girlfriend, Rita, who helped raise his children, has now moved in with another man. And Jerry still has unanswered questions that he must face regarding the circumstances surrounding the death of his late wife.Since the day his wife died, Jerry has turned avoiding conflict into an art form-the perfect expression being his solitary flights from which he can look down on a world that appears serene and unscathed. From his comfortable distance, he can't see the messy details, let alone begin to confront them. But Jerry is learning that in avoiding conflict, he is also avoiding contact with the people he loves most.

Life was complicated enough in a group of physicians in the Maternal-Fetal Medicine division of the department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of New Mexico (UNM) in Albuquerque. Then, along came COVID.

Faith Pernitelli, distracted by her crumbling marriage to Brian, her relocation to Albuquerque, and her focus on becoming an excellent obstetrician, is blind to her coworker Josh’s romantic advances. Then, along came COVID.

Brian Yankton lost traction after leaving his comfort zone. From high school, college, medical school, a residency in Ob-Gyn, and a fellowship in Maternal-Fetal Medicine, all in Lubbock, Texas, he lands in Albuquerque to start his high-risk obstetric career, dragging with him an opiate abuse problem. Then, along came COVID.

Peggy Valdez, a seventy-year-old overweight diabetic, is a recent retiree, invited to fill a temporary faculty vacancy in Albuquerque, her wealth of wisdom and tricks longing to land on the young and the eager. Then, along came COVID.

Will Brian overcome his opiate addiction? Will Josh successfully woo Faith? Will the older mentor escape the virus and nurture the fledgling physicians?

A contemporary noir, Already Dead is the tangled story of Nelson Fairchild Jr., disenfranchised scion to a northern California land fortune. A relentless failure, Nelson has botched nearly every scheme he's attempted to pull off. Now his future lies in a potentially profitable marijuana patch hidden in the lush old-growth redwoods on the family land. Nelson has some serious problems. His marriage has fallen apart, and he may lose his land, cash and crop in the divorce. What's more, in need of some quick cash, he had foolishly agreed to smuggle $90,000 worth of cocaine through customs for Harry Lally, a major player in a drug syndicate. Chickening out just before bringing the drugs through, he flushed the powder. Now Lally wants him dead, and two goons are hot on his trail. Desperate, terrified and alone, for Nelson, there may be only one way out.This is Denis Johnson's biggest and most complex book to date, and it perfectly showcases his signature themes of fate, redemption and the unraveling of the fabric of today's society. Already Dead, with its masterful narrative of overlapping and entwined stories, will further fuel the acclaim that surrounds one of today's most fascinating writers.

If anything's going to save the characters in Amelia Gray's debut from their troubled romances, their social improprieties, or their hands turning into claws, it's a John Mayer concert tee. In AM/PM, impish humor and cutting insight are on full display. Readers tour the lives of 23 characters across 120 stories full of lizard tails, Schrödinger boxes, and volcano love. June wakes up one morning covered in seeds; Leonard falls in love with a chaise lounge; Betty insists everything except flowers are a symbol of her love for her husband; Andrew talks to his house in times of crisis. Written every morning and night for two months, these brief vignettes (50 to 100 words) recall Donald Barthelme in their whimsy and subtle yet powerful emotions. An intermittent love story as seen through a darkly comic lens, AM/PM mixes poetry and prose, humor and hubris to create a truly original work of fiction.

Estamos ante una novela sobre el poder, pero un poder con minúsculas, cotidiano y perfectamente reconocible: el que ejercen las empresas, el que sufren los asalariados, un poder risible que se mide en metros de despacho o en el número de veces que el jefe se ha parado a hablar contigo. César Miranda, protagonista de esta historia, es un hombre en crisis que intenta sobrevivir a las tormentas y tormentos de una competitividad desenfrenada. Y su peripecia nos va dibujando el implacable pero divertidísimo retrato de la disparatada sociedad en que vivimos.

En las sombras de la noche en Caldwell, Nueva York, se libra una guerra letal entre los vampiros y sus asesinos. Pero también existe una Hermandad secreta que no se puede comparar a ninguna otra que haya existido -seis guerreros vampiros, protegiendo a su raza. De todos ellos, Zsadist es el miembro más atemorizante de la Hermandad de la Daga Negra.Zsadist, que durante siglos fue un esclavo de sangre, aún porta las cicatrices de un pasado forjado a base de sufrimiento y humillaciones. Célebre por su insaciable furia y siniestras hazañas, es un salvaje temido por igual entre humanos y vampiros. La ira es su única compañera y el terror su única pasión… hasta que rescata a una bella aristócrata de la malvada Sociedad de los Lessers.Bella se siente hechizada de inmediato por el ardiente poder que emana Zsadist. Pero, cuando el mutuo deseo que ambos sienten comienza a consumirlos, la irrefrenable sed de venganza que Zsadist siente por los torturadores de Bella le lleva al límite de la locura. Ahora, Bella debe ayudar a su amante a superar las heridas de su atormentado pasado y a encontrar un futuro junto a ella…

Dentro de la Hermandad, Rhage es el vampiro más voraz, el mejor luchador, actuando siempre a través de sus instintos más primarios… y el amante más salvaje -porque en su interior arde una feroz maldición lanzada por la Virgen Escriba. Poseído por este lado oscuro, Rhage teme el momento en que el dragón que lleva dentro sea liberado, convirtiéndole en un peligro para quienes le rodean.Mary Luce, una mujer que ha conseguido sobrevivir a una vida llena de penurias, es introducida de manera involuntaria al mundo de los vampiros. Ahora, toda su existencia depende de la protección de Rhage. Con una maldición que amenaza su propia vida, Mary no está buscando el amor. Hace mucho tiempo que dejó de creer en los milagros. Pero cuando la intensa atracción animal de Rhage se convierte en algo más emocional, él sabe que debe hacerla suya. Y, mientras los enemigos les pisan los talones, Mary luchará desesperadamente por conseguir una vida eterna junto al hombre al que ama…

Todos los textos tratan sobre ese oscuro lugar de placer y dolor que es la pareja, esto es, tratan del amor y del desamor, de la necesidad y la invención del otro. Son historias que hablan del deseo carnal y la pasión, de la costumbre y la desesperación, de la felicidad y del infierno. Estos relatos, a menudo inquietantes, agridulces, llenos de sentido del humor y de la melancolía del amor, componen un sugestivo espejo de nuestra intimidad más turbia y más profunda, de ese territorio abisal e incandescente que siempre se resiste a ser nombrado.

Bajo el título de `Amarse con los Ojos Abiertos` (2000) editorial Del Nuevo Extremo presenta una novela original y atrapante. Jorge Bucay y Silvia Salinas narran la experiencia de un hombre y una mujer que se enredan a través del correo electrónico, dando comienzo al mismo tiempo a una fascinante historia y a un libro de reflexión sobre el sentido de la pareja.

Antanas is a young Lithuanian conscripted to fight in the Soviet War in Afghanistan where he falls in love with a young Afghani nurse. She opens his eyes to the politics of the war, while making bearable the brutal reality of their situation◦– until her sudden death sends him spiralling into a breakdown and to a psychiatric hospital back home in Vilnius. Vassily, a war comrade, rescues him and teaches him his trade◦– crafting amber jewellery◦– helping Antanas to let go of the past.

But Vassily has a guilty secret◦– eight years later, on his deathbed, he cannot make a full confession, but charges Antanas with retrieving the priceless amber bracelet he smuggled out of Afghanistan during the war. After Antanas reluctantly agrees, he discovers not only that a dangerous rival is also searching for it, but also the terrible price Vassily paid for it. Only then can he truly make peace with the past and with his estranged wife.About the Author

Stephan Collishaw was born in 1968. He lives in Nottingham and is a teacher, and received an East Midlands Arts Bursary for his acclaimed debut novel The Last Girl.

From the award-winning and highly acclaimed author of Ella Minnow Pea comes Mark Dunn's most ambitious novel to date. American Decameron tells one hundred stories, each taking place in a different year of the 20th century.A girl in Galveston is born on the eve of a great storm and the dawn of the 20th century. Survivors of the Lusitania are accidentally reunited in the North Atlantic. A member of the Bonus Army find himself face to face with General MacArthur. A failed writer attempts to end his life on the Golden Gate Bridge until an unexpected heroine comes to his rescue, and on the doorstep of a new millennium, as the clock strikes twelve, the stage is set for a stunning denouement as the American century converges upon itself in a Greenwich nursing home, tying together all of the previous tales and the last one hundred years.Zany and affecting, deeply moving and wildly hilarious, American Decameron is one America's most powerful voices at the top its game.

American Dirt is a rare exploration into the inner hearts of people willing to sacrifice everything for a glimmer of hope.

FEAR KEEPS THEM RUNNING.

HOPE KEEPS THEM ALIVE.

Vivid, visceral, utterly compelling, AMERICAN DIRT is the first novel to explore the experience of attempting to illegally cross the US-Mexico border.

She feels every molecule of her loss and she endures it. She is not diluted, but amplified. Her love for Luca is bigger, louder. Lydia is vivid with life.

Yesterday, Lydia had a bookshop.

Yesterday, Lydia was married to a journalist.

Yesterday, she was with everyone she loved most in the world.

Today, her eight-year-old son Luca is all she has left.

For him, she will carry a machete strapped to her leg.

For him, she will leap onto the roof of a high speed train.

For him, she will find the strength to keep running.

Lynne Tillman’s previous novels have won her both popular approval and critical praise from such literary heavyweights as Edmund White and Colm Tóibín. With American Genius, her first novel since 1998's No Lease on Life, she shows what might happen if Jane Austen were writing in 21st-century America. Employing her trademark crystalline prose and intricate, hypnotic sentences, Tillman fashions a microcosm of American democracy: a scholarly colony functioning like Melville’s Pequod. In this otherworld, competing values — rationality and irrationality, generosity and selfishness, love and lust, shame and honor — collide through a witty narrative, cycling through such disparate tropes as skin disease, chair design, and Manifest Destiny. All this is folded into the narrator’s memories and emotional life, culminating in a séance that may offer escape and transcendence — or perhaps nothing. Grand and minute, elegiac and hilarious, Lynne Tillman expands the possibilities of the American novel in this dazzling read.

In one of the intensely imaginative stories in Rivka’s Galchen’s American Innovations, a young woman’s furniture walks out on her. In another, the narrator feels compelled to promise to deliver a takeout order that has incorrectly been phoned in to her. In a third, the petty details of a property transaction illuminate the complicated pains and loves of a family.The tales in this groundbreaking collection are secretly in conversation with canonical stories, reimagined from the perspective of female characters. Just as Wallace Stevens’s “Anecdote of the Jar” responds to John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” Galchen’s “The Lost Order” covertly recapitulates James Thurber’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” while “The Region of Unlikeness” is a smoky and playful mirror to Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Aleph.” The title story, “American Innovations,” revisits Nikolai Gogol’s “The Nose.”By turns realistic, fantastical, witty, and lyrical, these marvelously uneasy stories are deeply emotional and written in exuberant, pitch-perfect prose. Whether exploring the tensions in a mother-daughter relationship or the finer points of time travel, Galchen is a writer like none other today.

In this panoramic tale of Manifest Destiny, Stephen Moran comes of age with the young country that he crosses on the Union Pacific, just as the railroad unites the continent. Propelled westward from his Brooklyn neighborhood and the killing fields of the Civil War to the Battle of Little Big Horn, he befriends Walt Whitman, receives a medal from General Grant, becomes a bugler on President Lincoln’s funeral train, goes to work for railroad mogul Thomas Durant, apprentices with frontier photographer William Henry Jackson, and stalks General George Custer. When he comes face-to-face with Crazy Horse, his life will be spared but his dreams haunted for the rest of his days.By turns elegiac and comic, American Meteor is a novel of adventure, ideas, and mourning: a unique vision of America’s fabulous and murderous history.

American Purgatorio is the story of a happily married man who discovers, as he walks out of a convenience store, that his wife has suddenly vanished. In cool, precise prose, written as both a detective story and a meditation on the seven deadly sins, Haskell tells a story that ranges from the brownstones of New York City to the sandy beaches of Southern California. The novel follows the journey of a man whose object of desire is both heartbreaking and ephemeral, and confirms John Haskell's reputation as "one of those rare authors who makes language seem limitless in its possibilities" (Los Angeles Times).

EDITORIAL REVIEW: Set in a beautiful but economically devastated Pennsylvania steel town, American Rust is a novel of the lost American dream and the desperation—as well as the acts of friendship, loyalty, and love—that arise from its loss. From local bars to trainyards to prison, it is the story of two young men, bound to the town by family, responsibility, inertia, and the beauty around them, who dream of a future beyond the factories and abandoned homes.Left alone to care for his aging father after his mother commits suicide and his sister escapes to Yale, Isaac English longs for a life beyond his hometown. But when he finally sets out to leave for good, accompanied by his temperamental best friend, former high school football star Billy Poe, they are caught up in a terrible act of violence that changes their lives forever.Evoking John Steinbeck’s novels of restless lives during the Great Depression, American Rust takes us into the contemporary American heartland at a moment of profound unrest and uncertainty about the future. It is a dark but lucid vision, a moving novel about the bleak realities that battle our desire for transcendence and the power of love and friendship to redeem us.Newsweek’s list of “Best. Books. Ever”Amazon Top 100 book of 2009A Washington Post Top Ten Book of 2009A New York Times Notable Book of 2009An Economist Best Book of 2009A Kansas City Star Top 100 book of 2009Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s Best Books of 2009Idaho Statesman’s Best Books of 2009