The now-classic, utterly unique voice of Ann Beattie is so dry it throws off sparks, her eye endowed with the emotional equivalent of X-ray vision. Her characters are young men and women discovering what it means to be a grown-up in a country that promised them they'd stay young forever. And here, in shapely, penetrating stories, Beattie confirms why she is one of the most widely imitated — yet surely inimitable — literary stylists of her generation.In The Burning House, Beattie's characters go from dealing drugs to taking care of a bereaved friend. They watch their marriages fail not with a bang but with a wisecrack. And afterward, they may find themselves trading confidences with their spouses' new lovers. The Burning House proves that Beattie has no peer when it comes to revealing the hidden shapes of our relationships, or the depths of tenderness, grief, and anger that lie beneath the surfaces of our daily lives.

This brilliant memoir brings to life an entire era through the sensibility of one of America's finest authors. Recollecting fifty years of love, desire and friendship, Burning the Days traces the life of a singular man, who starts out in Manhattan and comes of age in the skies over Korea, before reinventing himself as a writer in the New York of the 1960s.It features — in Salter's uniquely beautiful style — some of the most evocative pages about flying ever written, together with portraits of the actors, directors and authors who influenced him. This is a book that through its sheer sensual force not only recollects the past, but reclaims it.

A collection of four short stories: "El Dia de las Madres", "Estos Fueron losPalacios", "Las Mananitas", and "El Hijo de Andres Aparicio".

Akcja reportaży składających się na Busz po polsku rozgrywa się w latach 50 i 60., na prowincji, w Olecku, w Puszczy Białowieskiej, nad Narwią, w okolicach Brodnicy, pod Mławą, we wsi Grunwald, w Pratkach koło Ełku, krótko mówiąc – gdzie diabeł mówi dobranoc.Kapuściński znajduje w polskiej rzeczywistości bohaterów, którzy robią wrażenie. Bohaterami są: dwie Niemki uciekające z domu starców w Szczytnie, flisak, stróż nocny, małorolny chłop klepiący biedę, robotnicy sezonowi, wyrzuceni ze studiów, którzy nie chcą wracać z Warszawy do swoich rodzinnych miasteczek i wsi, ludzie bez stałego adresu. Ale także inżynier, nauczyciel historii, student SGPiS nazwiskiem Piątkowski, który jest rekordzistą świata w rzucie dyskiem, młodzi mężczyźni odbywający służbę wojskową.Historia każdego bohatera jest na swój sposób niezwykle ciekawa. Problemy, jakie trawią polskie społeczeństwo zostają tutaj ukazane bez żadnego cięcia, bez cenzury. Takich problemów nie poruszała ówczesna prasa. Wszystko to opisane jak zwykle doskonale. Literatura podróży doskonała.

It’s so thin and small it seems impossible that it can end a human life. Two long, quick slices and the pain bleeds away… So begins But inside I’m screaming, an intense and absorbing novel. It is the unforgettable story of one woman’s account of what it is to lose control as the world watches, to figure out what went so every wrong, and to accept an imperfect life in a world that demands perfection.While breaking the hottest new story of the year, broadcast journalist Isabel Murphy unravels on life television in front of an audience of millions. She lands at Three Breezes, a four-star psychiatric hospital nicknamed the “nut hut,” where she begins the painful process of recovering the life everyone thought she had.But accepting her place among her fellow patients proves more difficult as Isabel struggles to reconcile the fact that she is, indeed, one of them, and faces the reality that in order to mend her painfully fractured life she must rely solely on herself.

In Butterflies in November, internationally best-selling author Auur Ava lafsdttir crafts a "funny, moving, and occasionally bizarre exploration of life's upheavals and reversals" (Financial Times).After a day of being dumped — twice — and accidentally killing a goose, a young woman yearns for a tropical vacation far away from the chaos of her life. Instead, her plans are thrown off course by her best friend's four-year-old deaf-mute son, thrust into her reluctant care. But when the boy chooses the winning numbers for a lottery ticket, the two of them set off on a road trip across Iceland with a glove compartment stuffed full of their jackpot earnings. Along the way, they encounter black sand beaches, cucumber farms, lava fields, flocks of sheep, an Estonian choir, a falconer, a hitchhiker, and both of her exes desperate for another chance. As she and the boy grow closer, what began as a spontaneous adventure unexpectedly and profoundly changes the way she views her past and charts her future.Butterflies in November is a blackly comic, charming, and uplifting tale of friends and lovers, motherhood, and self-discovery.

With wry humour and a deft touch, Butterfly Fish, the outstanding first novel by a stunning new writer, is a work of elegant and captivating storytelling. A dual narrative set in contemporary London and 18th century Benin in Africa, the book traverses the realms of magic realism with luminous style and graceful, effortless prose.

Butterfly Stories follows a dizzying cradle-to-grave hunt for love that takes the narrator from the comfortable confines of suburban America to the killing fields of Cambodia, where he falls in love with Vanna, a prostitute from Phnom Penh. Here, Vollmann's gritty style perfectly serves his examination of sex, violence, and corruption.

From China 's first-ever winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature comes an exquisite new book of fictions, none of which has ever been published before in English. A young couple on honeymoon visit a beautiful temple up in the mountains, and spend the day intoxicated by the tranquillity of the setting; a swimmer is paralysed by a sudden cramp and finds himself stranded far out to sea on a cold autumn day; a man reminisces about his beloved grandfather, who used to make his own fishing rods from lengths of crooked bamboo straightened over a fire! Blending the crisp immediacy of the present moment with the soft afterglow of memory and nostalgia, these stories hum with simplicity and wisdom – and will delight anyone who loved Gao's bestselling novels, Soul Mountain and One Man's Bible.***These six stories by Nobel Prize winner Gao Xingjian transport the reader to moments where the fragility of love and life, and the haunting power of memory, are beautifully unveiled. In "The Temple," the narrator's acute and mysterious anxiety overshadows the delirious happiness of an outing with his new wife on their honeymoon. In "The Cramp," a man narrowly escapes drowning in the sea, only to find that no one even noticed his absence. In the title story, the narrator attempts to relieve his homesickness only to find that he is lost in a labyrinth of childhood memories.Everywhere in this collection are powerful psychological portraits of characters whose unarticulated hopes and fears betray the never-ending presence of the past in their present lives.***"Beautiful… Suffused with the melancholy of nostalgia." – Milwaukee Journal Sentinel"[Gao's] narrators walk as if in a dream through a private landscape of memory and sensation." – Boston Globe"Precisely detailed and delicately suggestive: the best work of Gao's yet to appear in English translation." – Kirkus Reviews"Beautiful." – Village Voice"These spare, evocative pieces… offer a sample of Nobel-winner Gao's sharp, poetic early work." – Publishers Weekly"Observant… For variety of content, stylistic experimentation, graceful language, and poignant insight, Xingjian is a writer who does it all beautifully." – Booklist

Tahar Ben Jelloun’s By Fire, the first fictional account published on the Arab Spring, reimagines the true-life self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi in Tunisia, an event that has been credited with setting off the Tunisian revolt. The novella depicts the days leading up to Bouazizi’s self-immolation. Ben Jelloun’s deliberate ambiguity about the location of the story, set in an unnamed Islamic country, allows the reader to imagine the experiences and frustrations of other young men who have endured physical violence and persecution in places beyond Tunisia. The tale begins and ends in fire, and the imagery of burning frames the political accounts in The Spark, Ben Jelloun’s nonfiction writings on the Tunisian events that provide insight into the despotic regimes that drove Bouazizi to such despair. Rita S. Nezami’s elegant translations and critical introduction provide the reader with multiple strategies for approaching these potent texts.

A deathbed confession revolving around Opus Dei and Pinochet, By Night in Chile pours out the self-justifying dark memories of the Jesuit priest Father Urrutia.As through a crack in the wall, By Night in Chile’s single night-long rant provides a terrifying, clandestine view of the strange bedfellows of Church and State in Chile. This wild, eerily compact novel—Roberto Bolano’s first work available in English—recounts the tale of a poor boy who wanted to be a poet, but ends up a half-hearted Jesuit priest and a conservative literary critic, a sort of lap dog to the rich and powerful cultural elite, in whose villas he encounters Pablo Neruda and Ernst Junger. Father Urrutia is offered a tour of Europe by agents of Opus Dei (to study “the disintegration of the churches,” a journey into realms of the surreal); and ensnared by this plum, he is next assigned—after the destruction of Allende—the secret, never-to-be-disclosed job of teaching Pinochet, at night, all about Marxism, so the junta generals can know their enemy. Soon, searingly, his memories go from bad to worse. Heart-stopping and hypnotic, By Night in Chile marks the American debut of an astonishing writer.

By Night The Mountain Burns recounts the narrator’s childhood on a remote island off the West African coast, living with his mysterious grandfather, several mothers and no fathers. We learn of a dark chapter in the island’s history: a bush fire destroys the crops, then hundreds perish in a cholera outbreak. Superstition dominates: now the islanders must sacrifice their possessions to the enraged ocean god. What of their lives will they manage to save?Whitmanesque in its lyrical evocation of the island, Ávila Laurel’s writing builds quietly, through the oral rhythms of traditional storytelling, into gripping drama worthy of an Achebe or a García Márquez.

Peter and Rebecca Harris: mid-forties denizens of Manhattan’s SoHo, nearing the apogee of committed careers in the arts—he a dealer, she an editor. With a spacious loft, a college-age daughter in Boston, and lively friends, they are admirable, enviable contemporary urbanites with every reason, it seems, to be happy. Then Rebecca’s much younger look-alike brother, Ethan (known in the family as Mizzy, “the mistake”), shows up for a visit. A beautiful, beguiling twenty-three-year-old with a history of drug problems, Mizzy is wayward, at loose ends, looking for direction. And in his presence, Peter finds himself questioning his artists, their work, his career—the entire world he has so carefully constructed.Like his legendary, Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, The Hours, Michael Cunningham’s masterly new novel is a heartbreaking look at the way we live now. Full of shocks and aftershocks, it makes us think and feel deeply about the uses and meaning of beauty and the place of love in our lives.

With this magnificently assured new novel, John McGahern reminds us why he has been called the Irish Chekhov, as he guides readers into a village in rural Ireland and deftly, compassionately traces its natural rhythms and the inner lives of its people. Here are the Ruttledges, who have forsaken the glitter of London to raise sheep and cattle, gentle Jamesie Murphy, whose appetite for gossip both charms and intimidates his neighbors, handsome John Quinn, perennially on the look-out for a new wife, and the town’s richest man, a gruff, self-made magnate known as “the Shah.”Following his characters through the course of a year, through lambing and haying seasons, market days and family visits, McGahern lays bare their passions and regrets, their uneasy relationship with the modern world, their ancient intimacy with death.

…Между ними нет ничего общего. Они могли встретиться раньше или встретиться позже, при других обстоятельствах. Они могли встретиться и тут же позабыть о встрече, посчитать ее ничего не значащим фактом. Они могли не встретиться вообще. Последний вариант – самый предпочтительный, ведь тогда бы им удалось избежать смерти. Но в этом случае они ни за что бы не узнали, что такое настоящая любовь. Цепь случайностей, которая приводит их к друг к другу, – и есть главная закономерность жизни. Ни один поступок не остается незамеченным высшими силами, и ничто не остается безнаказанным – ни добро, ни зло. Об этом нужно помнить всегда, ведь люди влияют на других людей, как солнце влияет на движение планет. А каждый человек и есть – маленькое солнце…

Zapis codziennych zmagań z życiem i próba rozrachunku z brutalną przeszłoscią kobiety chorej na schizofrenię. Poruszająca historia człowieka, którego cierpienie i choroba psychiczna popychają ku samobójstwu.

Najbardziej wstrząsająca, bardzo pouczająca i rozbijająca mity książka, w której były ksiądz-Roman Jonasz, na kanwie własnych przeżyć, opisuje prozę kapłańskiego życia- pełnego intryg, skandali, ludzkich słabości i upadków. Nie księża są tu jednak piętnowani, ale błędny system który ich deprawuje.

"…Najbardziej wstrząsająca, bardzo pouczająca i rozbijająca mity książka, w której były ksiądz-Roman Jonasz, na kanwie własnych przeżyć, opisuje prozę kapłańskiego życia- pełnego intryg, skandali, ludzkich słabości i upadków. Nie księża są tu jednak piętnowani, ale błędny system który ich deprawuje…"

"Brilliant writing — lively and heartbreaking at every turn.”—Jill McCorkle, author of Life After Life.In this debut novel, 33-year-old Addie Lockwood bears and surrenders for adoption a son, her only child, without telling his father, little imagining how the secret will shape their lives. Told through letters and spare, precisely observed vignettes, Byrd is an unforgettable story about making and living with the most difficult, intimate, and far-reaching of choices.Kim Church’s stories have appeared in Shenandoah, Painted Bride Quarterly, Flash Fiction Forward, and elsewhere. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she has received fellowships from the North Carolina Arts Council, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Millay Colony, and Vermont Studio Center. She lives in Raleigh, North Carolina with her husband, artist Anthony Ulinski. Byrd is her first novel.

Winner of the Bakeless Prize for Fiction, an imaginative debut that ranges from Havana to Berlin.Ancient cities and fallen empires come to life in this masterful collection. In the Byzantine court, a noble with a crippled hand is called upon to ensure that a holy man poses no threat to the throne. On an island in Lake Michigan, a religious community crumbles after an ardent convert digs a little too deep. And the black detective Jackson Hieronymus Burke rises to fame and falls from favor in two stories that recount his origins in Havana and the height of his success in Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany. Ben Stroud’s historical reimaginings twist together with contemporary stories to reveal startling truths about human nature across the centuries. In his able hands, Byzantium makes us believe that these are accounts we haven’t heard yet. As the chronicler of Burke’s exploits muses, “After all, where does history exist, except in our imagination? Does that make it any less true?”