"Andrés Barba needs no introduction. He has his own intentional world perfectly contained and a literary gift that belies his age." — Mario Vargas Llosa"A story that has been described as an explosive clash between Pavese's The Beautiful Summer and the adolescents of Gus van Sant's Elephant." — Daniel Entrialgo, Esquire"A new Spanish great, that’s all I need to say." — LireFourteen-year-old Tomás goes with his well-off family on their usual seaside summer holiday, but he is at a stage in his life when nothing is the same. Sullenly detached from them, full of confused intimations of sexuality, he is also faced with death when his widowed aunt, who lives in the resort, is taken seriously ill. As he becomes close to her on her deathbed he frequents the forbidden in the form of some lower-class village kids — casually transgressive boys and even more alien, sexually knowing girls — that will get him involved on the last day in a gang rape of a vulnerable girl. Though when it is his turn, Tomás only pretends to do it — enough to save face with the boys. Back in Madrid, he wrestles with guilt and confusion. He finally decides to go back secretly, alone, to find the girl and apologize for what happened, but despite the moving scene of atonement and forgiveness, ambiguity lurks even in this redemption.Andrés Barba is a multi-awarded Spanish novelist, essayist, translator, scriptwriter and photographer. He is the author of a total of thirteen books of literary fiction, non-fiction, photography, arts, and children's literature.Lisa Dillman translates from SPanish and Catalan and teaches at Emory University in Atlanta.

La acción narrada en Aura (1962), la novela de Carlos Fuentes a que me deseo referir (5), constituye aparentemente un proceso de reencuentro con la historia. El protagonista, Felipe Montero, un historiador de 27 años, se desplaza desde un espacio exterior y periférico, en el que prevalecen las apariencias superficiales y las máscaras -el de la moderna Ciudad de México, cotidiana, alienante- hacia otro espacio interior y central, en el que supuestamente descubre una realidad esencial- la Ciudad de México colonial, histórica, representada por la calle Donceles, en la que se encuentra la casa de la anciana Consuelo, con el número 815.(6) Sin embargo, si se lee la novela atendiendo a su elaboración simbólica, el mencionado reencuentro se traduce en una efectiva regresión en la que el pasado, del que es portadora la anciana Consuelo, se apodera del presente, representado por el joven historiador. Ni las hechicerías de aquélla ni la juventud de Felipe, son suficientes para revitalizar a una situación de encierro estéril, en la que el pasado, convocado por el presente, termina por apoderarse de éste último hasta identificarse con él.La imagen de la bruja metaforiza en Aura las contradicciones de la memoria histórica latinoamericana, especialmente el anquilosamiento que le produce su incapacidad de introspección.La historia que se relata en Aura, aunque vincula los poderes de la bruja con el conocimiento de la naturaleza y la búsqueda del amor eterno, conduce a los protagonistas a un estado de encierro, asfixia y esterilidad.La historia que conduce a esta situación es de amor: en ella dos amantes se vuelven a unir, superando las barreras del tiempo y de la muerte.Se la ha interpretado como la narración de una aventura interior, que puede ocurrir tanto en la imaginación de Felipe como en la de Consuelo. Quien propone que la historia no es otra cosa que un sueño de Consuelo, interpreta a este personaje como a una anciana demente a causa de su propia esterilidad y temor a la senectud, que en su delirio recuperaría a su amado por medio de la imaginación. Las dos interpretaciones se fundamentan en marcas textuales muy precisas que permiten atribuir el relato a uno u otro de los dos personajes.El epígrafe, tomado de La sorciére de Michelet, es uno de los elementos que inducen a afirmar que la historia narrada es producto de la imaginación de la anciana Consuelo:El hombre caza y lucha. La mujer intriga y sueña, es la madre de la fantasía, de los dioses. Posee la segunda visión, las alas que le permiten volar hacia el infinito del deseo y de la imaginación… Los dioses son como los hombres: nacen y mueren sobre el pecho de una mujer…

While browsing in an Austin shop, Nicola James finds a blank vintage journal hidden among a set of Jane Austen novels. Even though Nic is a straight-laced engineer, she's still a sucker for anything Austen-esque. But her enthusiasm turns to disbelief once she starts writing in the journal - because somehow, it's writing her back...Itching for a bit of excitement, Nic decides to follow her "Fairy Jane's" advice. The result: a red-hot romance with a sexy Scottish musician who charms his way into Nic's heart in about five seconds flat. But a guy like Sean doesn't exactly fit into her Life Plan. With no one but Fairy Jane to guide her, Nic must choose between the life she thought she wanted - and the kind of happy ending she never saw coming...

In this brilliant and sobering self-portrait, Edouard Levé hides nothing from his readers, setting out his entire life, more or less at random, in a string of declarative sentences. Autoportrait is a physical, psychological, sexual, political, and philosophical triumph. Beyond "sincerity," Levé works toward an objectivity so radical it could pass for crudeness, triviality, even banality: the author has stripped himself bare. With the force of a set of maxims or morals, Levé's prose seems at first to be an autobiography without sentiment, as though written by a machine — until, through the accumulation of detail, and the author's dry, quizzical tone, we find ourselves disarmed, enthralled, and enraptured by nothing less than the perfect fiction. . made entirely of facts.

Fusing Keatsian mists and mellow fruitfulness with the vitality, the immediacy and the colour-hit of Pop Art (via a bit of very contemporary skulduggery and skull-diggery), Autumn is a witty excavation of the present by the past. The novel is a stripped-branches take on popular culture and a meditation, in a world growing ever more bordered and exclusive, on what richness and worth are, what harvest means.Autumn is the first installment in Ali Smith's novel quartet Seasonal: four standalone books, separate yet interconnected and cyclical (as the seasons are), exploring what time is, how we experience it, and the recurring markers in the shapes our lives take and in our ways with narrative.From the imagination of the peerless Ali Smith comes a shape-shifting series, wide-ranging in timescale and light-footed through histories, and a story about ageing and time and love and stories themselves.

Kirils PartiksAvalonaŽurnālists - neveiksminieks aizbraucis uz vientuļu taigas ciematu, lai ar tautas medicīnas līdzekļiem izārstētu augoni smadzenēs. Izrādās, ka attālajā nomalē notiek mežonīga taigas mežu izciršana, kurai aktīvi pretojas žurnālista paziņa, vietējais mežsargs.Viņi arī ticēja maģijai, t.i. zināšanām par lietu slepeno spēku...Īpaši liela bija ticība Vārda slepenajam spēkam.N. I. Komtomarovs. "Krievijas vēsture"Tulkojis Imants Ločmelis

John Irving returns to the themes that established him as one of our most admired and beloved authors in this absorbing novel of fate and memory.As we grow older — most of all, in what we remember and what we dream — we live in the past. Sometimes, we live more vividly in the past than in the present.As an older man, Juan Diego will take a trip to the Philippines, but what travels with him are his dreams and memories; he is most alive in his childhood and early adolescence in Mexico. “An aura of fate had marked him,” John Irving writes, of Juan Diego. “The chain of events, the links in our lives — what leads us where we’re going, the courses we follow to our ends, what we don’t see coming, and what we do — all this can be mysterious, or simply unseen, or even obvious.”Avenue of Mysteries is the story of what happens to Juan Diego in the Philippines, where what happened to him in the past — in Mexico — collides with his future.

One of the loveliest riddles of Austrian literature is finally available in English translation: Gert Jonke’s 1982 novel, Awakening to the Great Sleep War, is an expedition through a world in constant nervous motion, where reality is rapidly fraying — flags refuse to stick to their poles, lids sidle off of their pots, tram tracks shake their stops away like fleas, and books abandon libraries in droves. Our cicerone on this journey through the possible (and impossible) is an “acoustical decorator” by the name of Burgmüller — a poetical gentleman, the lover of three women, able to communicate with birds, and at least as philosophically minded as his author: “Everything has suddenly become so transparent that one can’t see through anything anymore.” This enormously comic — and equally melancholic — tale is perhaps Jonke’s masterwork.

Alice Munro has long been heralded for her penetrating, lyrical prose, and in “The Bear Came Over the Mountain”—the basis for Sarah Polley’s film Away from Her —her prodigious talents are once again on display.As she follows Grant, a retired professor whose wife Fiona begins gradually to lose her memory and drift away from him, we slowly see how a lifetime of intimate details can create a marriage, and how mysterious the bonds of love really are.

Premio Nadal 1994Azul es la relación de una intensa pasión amorosa entre una mujer, Andrea periodista, casada y con una complicada vida social y un muchacho más joven, Martín Ures, que llega del interior de la península para descubrir un variado mundo de gentes y trabajos y, sobre todo, esa capacidad alquímica del amor que lo convierte en algo tan mutable y tan definitivamente peligroso.

A Children's Book About Beer?Yes, believe it or not — but B Is for Beer is also a book for adults, and bear in mind that it's the work of maverick bestselling novelist Tom Robbins, inter-nationally known for his ability to both seriously illuminate and comically entertain.Once upon a time (right about now) there was a planet (how about this one?) whose inhabitants consumed thirty-six billion gallons of beer each year (it's a fact, you can Google it). Among those affected, each in his or her own way, by all the bubbles, burps, and foam, was a smart, wide-eyed, adventurous kindergartner named Gracie; her distracted mommy; her insensitive dad; her non-conformist uncle; and a magical, butt-kicking intruder from a world within our world.Populated by the aforementioned characters — and as charming as it may be subversive—B Is for Beer involves readers, young and old, in a surprising, far-reaching investigation into the limits of reality, the transformative powers of children, and, of course, the ultimate meaning of a tall, cold brewski.

Government warnings about radiation levels in her hometown (a stone’s throw from Chernobyl) be damned! Baba Dunja is going home. And she’s taking a motley bunch of her former neighbors with her. With strangely misshapen forest fruits to spare and the town largely to themselves, they have pretty much everything they need and they plan to start anew.The terminally ill Petrov passes the time reading love poems in his hammock; Marja takes up with the almost 100-year-old Sidorow; Baba Dunja whiles away her days writing letters to her daughter. Life is beautiful. That is until one day a stranger turns up in the village and once again the little idyllic settlement faces annihilation.From the prodigiously talented Alina Bronsky, this is a return to the iron-willed and infuriatingly misguided older female protagonist that she made famous with her unforgettable Russian matriarch, Rosa Achmetowna, in The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine. Here she tells the story of a post-meltdown settlement, and of an unusual woman, Baba Dunja, who, late in life, finds her version of paradise.

“Baba Yaga is an old hag who lives in a house built on chicken legs and kidnaps small children. She is one of the most pervasive and powerful creatures in all mythology.”“But what does she have to do with a writer’s journey to Bulgaria in 2007 on behalf of her mother?”“Or with a trio of women who decide in their old age to spend a week together at a hotel spa?”By the end of Dubravka Ugrešić’s novel, the answers are revealed. Her story is shot through with spellbinding, magic, involving a gambling triumph, sudden death on the golf course, a long-lost grandchild, an invasion of starlings, and wartime flight, the consequences of which are revealed only decades later.

“Baba Yaga is an old hag who lives in a house built on chicken legs and kidnaps small children. She is one of the most pervasive and powerful creatures in all mythology.”“But what does she have to do with a writer’s journey to Bulgaria in 2007 on behalf of her mother?”“Or with a trio of women who decide in their old age to spend a week together at a hotel spa?”By the end of Dubravka Ugrešić’s novel, the answers are revealed. Her story is shot through with spellbinding, magic, involving a gambling triumph, sudden death on the golf course, a long-lost grandchild, an invasion of starlings, and wartime flight, the consequences of which are revealed only decades later.

Beginning in the middle of crisis, then accelerating through plots that grow stranger by the page, Naja Marie Aidt’s stories have a feel all their own. Though they are built around the common themes of sex, love, desire, and gender, Aidt pushes them into her own desperate, frantic realm. In one, a whore shows up unannounced at a man’s apartment, roosts in his living room, and then violently threatens him when he tries to make her leave. In another, a wife takes her husband to a city where it is women, not men, who are the dominant sex — but was it all a hallucination when she finds herself tied to a board and dragged back to his car? And in the unforgettable “Blackcurrant,” two young women who have turned away from men and toward lesbianism abscond to a farm, where they discover that their neighbor’s son is experimenting with his own kind of sexuality. The first book from the widely lauded Aidt to reach the English language, Baboon delivers audacious writing that careens toward bizarre, yet utterly truthful, realizations.

In Richmond, Virginia, Stephanie and Jasmine compete for affection from their grandmother, Big Mama. The oldest sister, Jasmine, is waiting on her boyfriend, Derrick, to get out of jail. After three years of loyalty and celibacy, on one of her visits she finds Derrick in a compromising position with his baby's mama, Wendy. The hurt of that encounter causes her to seek out her friend, Dylan. Their relationship starts off shaky when his ex-girlfriend claims that she is pregnant. Little sister, Stephanie, has a daughter by her high-school sweetheart, Malek, who left her to pursue a music career in Washington, D.C. Throughout all of the "baby's mama drama," Jasmine and Stephanie learn that they actually have more in common and that no matter what they will always be sisters.

Нова чудова книжка від культової авторки – весела, позитивна, повчальна!З дітьми до Індії, Піренеїв чи Балкан? Легко! Невгамовна мандрівниця Ірена Карпа та її маленькі непосиди готові до будь-яких пригод! Нові відкриття, веселі історії, жарти, конфузи і яскраві враження – шалена подорож разом із письменницею та її дітлахами починається! І не кажіть, що вас не попереджали…