A penetrating study of ordinary people resisting the Nazi occupation — and, true to its title, a dark comedy of wartime manners—"Comedy in a Minor Key "tells the story of Wim and Marie, a Dutch couple who first hide a Jew they know as Nico, then must dispose of his body when he dies of pneumonia. This novella, first published in 1947 and now translated into English for the first time, shows Hans Keilson at his best: deeply ironic, penetrating, sympathetic, and brilliantly modern, an heir to Joseph Roth and Franz Kafka. In 2008, when Keilson received Germany’s prestigious Welt Literature Prize, the citation praised his work for exploring “the destructive impulse at work in the twentieth century, down to its deepest psychological and spiritual ramifications.”Published to celebrate Keilson’s hundredth birthday, "Comedy in" "a Minor Key" — and "The Death of the Adversary," reissued in paperback — will introduce American readers to a forgotten classic author, a witness to World War II and a sophisticated storyteller whose books remain as fresh as when they first came to light.

Sobre el telón de fondo de un Afganistán respetuoso de sus ricas tradiciones ancestrales, la vida en Kabul durante el invierno de 1975 se desarrolla con toda la intensidad, la pujanza y el colorido de una ciudad confiada en su futuro e ignorante de que se avecina uno de los periodos más cruentos y tenebrosos que han padecido los milenarios pueblos que la habitan. Cometas en el cielo es la conmovedora historia de dos padres y dos hijos, de su amistad y de cómo la casualidad puede convertirse en hito inesperado de nuestro destino. Obsesionado por demostrarle a su padre que ya es todo un hombre, Amir se propone ganar la competición anual de cometas de la forma que sea, incluso a costa de su inseparable Hassan, un hazara de clase inferior que ha sido su sirviente y compañero de juegos desde la más tierna infancia. A pesar del fuerte vínculo que los une, después de tantos años de haberse defendido mutuamente de todos los peligros imaginables, Amir se aprovecha de la fidelidad sin límites de su amigo y comete una traición que los separará de forma definitiva.Así, con apenas doce años, el joven Amir recordará durante toda su vida aquellos días en los que perdió uno de los tesoros más preciados del hombre: la amistad.

Автобиографическая повесть рано ушедшего от нас писателя Сергея Милкина.

Un village isolé des Pyrénées. Dans les parois rocheuses qui le surplombent, il y a une grotte difficile d'accès baptisée la "grotte aux fées". On dit que les fées, jadis, y cachaient les bébés qu'elles volaient.

A l'écart des quelques habitants, Mariette et son fils, dit "l'Ours", vivent là depuis des années. L'Ours est presqu'un adulte, une force de la nature qui, depuis sa naissance, n'a jamais prononcé un seul mot. Il a une peur viscérale des êtres humains et possède un véritable don avec les bêtes.

En marge du village, l'Ours mène sa vie librement jusqu'au jour où un couple de touristes qui fait de la randonnée le voit dans un pré en compagnie d'une toute petite fille entièrement nue. Cette rencontre va bouleverser la vie de tous...

Née en 1967, Violaine Bérot vit dans les Pyrénées. Son parcours éclectique l'a menée de l'informatique à l'élevage de chèvres. Dans cette vie en soubresauts, une seule constante: écrire.

Les jeunes n'aiment pas lire. Et si ce n'était pas vrai ? S'il ne s'agissait que d'un amour égaré, facile à retrouver ? Détendez-vous, ceci n'est pas une dissertation sur la lecture, mais un joyeux manifeste contre la peur de lire… et le roman du lecteur que nous sommes. Par l'auteur de « La Petite marchande de prose ».

Plaidoyer passionnant pour la défense de la lecture, ce roman est un appel à la liberté et aux droits du lecteur. Daniel Pennac livre, avec un humour grinçant qui fera rire de 7 à77 ans, dans ce roman-essai, les droits imprescriptibles du lecteur. En dix chapitres, il nous expose le droit de ne pas lire, de sauter des pages, de ne pas finir un livre, de relire, de lire n'importe quoi,le droit au bovarysme (maladie textuellement transmissible), de lire n'import où, de gaspiller, de lire à haute voix, de nous taire.

It is 1964: Bert Cousins, the deputy District Attorney, shows up at Franny Keating’s christening party uninvited, bottle of gin in hand. As the cops of Los Angeles drink, talk and dance into the June afternoon, he notices a heart-stoppingly beautiful woman. When Bert kisses Beverly Keating, his host’s wife, the new baby pressed between them, he sets in motion the joining of two families whose shared fate will be defined on a day seven years later.In 1988, Franny Keating, now twenty-four, has dropped out of law school and is working as a cocktail waitress in Chicago. When she meets one of her idols, the famous author Leon Posen, and tells him about her family, she unwittingly relinquishes control over their story. Franny never dreams that the consequences of this encounter will extend beyond her own life into those of her scattered siblings and parents.Told with equal measures of humour and heartbreak, Commonwealth is a powerful and tender tale of family, betrayal and the far-reaching bonds of love and responsibility. A meditation on inspiration, interpretation and the ownership of stories, it is Ann Patchett’s most astonishing work to date.

In Communion, using a new clear, bone-spare prose, Gibson traces the ordeal of Felix Oswald. Felix is now working as a veterinarian's assistant in Toronto, where he becomes obsessed with a great white husky dying in one of the cages. His attempts to free the dog are interwoven with a series of possibilities for his own life, many sexual, some lyrical, and some nightmarish.

The narration proceeds in haunting rhythms which make it mesmerizing reading. By the end, they rise to a harrowing and purgative intensity.

A city in ten chapters.Every city is made of stories: stories that intersect and diverge, stories of the commonplace and the strange, of love and crime, of ghosts and monsters.In this city an asylum seeker struggles to begin a new life, while a folk musician pays with a broken heart for a song and a butcher learns the secrets of the slaughterhouse. A tourist strays into a baffling ritual and a child commits an incalculable crime; private detectives search the streets for their archenemies and soulmates and, somewhere in the shadows, a figure which might once have been human waits to tell its tale.Communion Town is a city in ten chapters: a place imagined differently by each citizen, mixing the everyday with the gothic and the uncanny; a place of voices half-heard, sights half-glimpsed and desires half-acknowledged. It is a virtuosic first novel from a young writer of true talent.

Tita y Pedro se aman. Pero ella está condenada a permanecer soltera, cuidando a su madre hasta que ésta muera. Y Pedro, para estar cerca de Tita, se casa con la hermana de ella, Rosaura. Las recetas de cocina que Tita elabora puntean el paso de las estaciones de su vida, siempre marcada por la presente ausencia de Pedro. Como agua para chocolate es una agridulce comedia de amores y desencuentros, una obra chispeante, tierna y pletórica de talento, que se ha convertido en uno de los mayores éxitos de la literatura latinoamericana.

No le fue fácil a Charlie alcanzar el objetivo de amasar una fortuna; sin embargo algo había en él que le hacía un predestinado al triunfo y, como apreciará el lector, este algo tiene mucho que ver con su capacidad de trabajo, astucia, coraje, ganas de aprender y un maravilloso abuelo -el de más fino olfato para la venta- que le guió con su ejemplo en sus primeros tiempos.Desde las primeras páginas la historia se convierte en una trepidante aventura sobre el mundo de los negocios, en una ascensión ilusionada desde la humilde situación de vendedor de verduras callejero hasta la realización de un gran proyecto empresarial: es la historia de un tendero que metido a negociante termina creando una importante red de establecimientos comerciales mientras van desfilando los grandes acontecimientos de este siglo.

La historia es una especie de alucinación. Son las macabras y horripilantes memorias de un niño (o niña, porque se llama a sí misma niña pero todo el mundo la trata como si fuera un niño) que se llama César Aira.Este fue el primer relato que contribuyó a crear una leyenda alrededor de este escritor de culto y uno de los más excéntricos entre los excéntricos, admirado sin reservas por escritores como Enrique Vila-Matas y Sergio Pitol.

Esta obra insólita, un auténtico estímulo para la lectura, ha sido uno de los grandes fenómenos de la edición francesa reciente. Pennac, profesor de literatura en un instituto, se propone una tarea tan simple como necesaria en nuestros días: que el adolescente pierda el miedo a la lectura, que lea por placer, que se embarque en un libro como en una aventura personal y libremente elegida. Todo el,lo escrito como un monólogo desenfadado, de una alegría y entusiasmo contagiosos: `En realidad, no es un libro de reflexión sobre la lectura -dice el autor-, sino una tentativa de reconciliación con el libro`.Este antimanual de literatura concluye con un decálogo no de los deberes, sino de los derechos imprescindibles del lectir (derecho a no terminar un libro, a releer, etc., incluso a no leer).

"'He ascended, eyes riveted, nailed to the steps leading up to the top of the pyramid of the sun. How many human hearts he wondered had been plucked from bodies there to feed the dying light of the sun and create an obsession with royal sculptures, echoing stone?… It was time to take stock of others as hollow bodies and shelters into which one fell…'"In "Companions of the Day and Night" (first published in 1975) Wilson Harris revives figures from his earlier "Black Marsden" — chiefly Clive Goodrich, the 'editor' of this text, who constructs a narrative from the papers of a figure known as Idiot Nameless: a wanderer between present and past, taking an Easter sojourn in Mexico that lasts both for days and for centuries. The results have the strangely hypnotic power characteristic of Wilson Harris's fiction.

In the waning years of the Soviet Union, a sad young Finnish woman boards a train in Moscow. Bound for Mongolia, she’s trying to put as much space as possible between her and a broken relationship. Wanting to be alone, she chooses an empty compartment—No. 6.—but her solitude is soon shattered by the arrival of a fellow passenger: Vadim Nikolayevich Ivanov, a grizzled, opinionated, foul-mouthed former soldier. Vadim fills the compartment with his long and colorful stories, recounting in lurid detail his sexual conquests and violent fights.There is a hint of menace in the air, but initially the woman is not so much scared of or shocked by him as she is repulsed. She stands up to him, throwing a boot at his head. But though Vadim may be crude, he isn’t cruel, and he shares with her the sausage and black bread and tea he’s brought for the journey, coaxing the girl out of her silent gloom. As their train cuts slowly across thousands of miles of a wintry Russia, where “everything is in motion, snow, water, air, trees, clouds, wind, cities, villages, people and thoughts,” a grudging kind of companionship grows between the two inhabitants of compartment No. 6. When they finally arrive in Ulan Bator, a series of starlit and sinister encounters bring Rosa Liksom’s incantatory Compartment No. 6 to its powerful conclusion.ReviewWonderful, almost elegiac.— Paul Simon Morning StarAbout the AuthorRosa Liksom is a Finnish artist and the author of over a dozen books. She won the Finlandia prize in 2011 for Compartment No. 6.

It’s been more than two decades since Spartina won the National Book Award and was acclaimed by critics as being “possibly the best American novel. . since The Old Man and the Sea” (The New York Times Book Review), but in this extraordinary follow-up novel barely any time has passed in the magical landscape of salt ponds and marshes in John Casey’s fictional Rhode Island estuary.Elsie Buttrick, prodigal daughter of the smart set who are gradually taking over the coastline of Sawtooth Point, has just given birth to Rose, a child conceived during a passionate affair with Dick Pierce — a fisherman and the love of Elsie’s life, who also happens to live practically next door with his wife, May, and their children. A beautiful but guarded woman who feels more at ease wading through the marshes than lounging on the porches of the fashionable resort her sister and brother-in-law own, Elsie was never one to do as she was told. She is wary of the discomfort her presence poses among some members of her gossipy, insular community, yet it is Rose, the unofficially adopted daughter and little sister of half the town, who magnetically steers everyone in her orbit toward unexpected — and unbreakable — relationships. As we see Rose grow from a child to a plucky adolescent with a flair for theatrics both onstage and at home during verbal boxing matches with her mother, to a poised and prepossessing teenager, she becomes the unwitting emotional tether between Elsie and everyone else. “Face it, Mom,” Rose says, “we live in a tiny ecosystem.” And indeed, like the rugged, untouched marshes that surround these characters, theirs is an ecosystem that has come by its beauty honestly, through rhythms and moods that have shaped and reshaped their lives.With an uncanny ability to plunge confidently and unwaveringly into the thoughts and desires of women — mothers, daughters, wives, lovers — John Casey astonishes us again with the power of a family saga.

Augusto Monterroso is widely known for short stories characterized by brilliant satire and wit. Yet behind scathing allusions to the weaknesses and defects of the artistic and intellectual worlds, they show his generous and expansive sense of compassion.This book brings together for the first time in English the volumes Complete Works (and Other Stories) (Obras completas [y otros cuentos] 1959) and Perpetual Motion (Movimiento perpetuo 1972). Together, they reveal Monterroso as a foundational author of the new Latin American narrative.

Lassé d’un monde dans lequel il ne trouve plus sa place, privé de ceux qu’il aime et qui disparaissent un à un, Andrew Blake décide de quitter la direction de sa petite entreprise pour se faire engager comme majordome en France, le pays où il avait rencontré sa femme.En débarquant au domaine de Beauvillier, là où personne ne sait qui il est réellement, il espère marcher sur les traces de son passé. Pourtant, rencontres et situations hors de contrôle vont en décider autrement… Entre Nathalie, sa patronne veuve aux étranges emplois du temps, Odile, la cuisinière et ses problèmes explosifs, Manon, jeune femme de ménage perdue et Philippe, le régisseur bien frappé qui vit au fond du parc, Andrew ne va plus avoir le choix. Lui qui cherchait un moyen d’en finir va être obligé de tout recommencer…Après une première comédie qui a surpris, touché et enthousiasmé lecteurs et libraires, Gilles Legardinier revient avec cette aventure humaine pleine de folie, d’émotion et d’humour qui parlera à beaucoup de monde, quel que soit l’âge… Né à Paris en 1965, Gilles Legardinier s'est toujours passionné pour la transmission de l'émotion. Dès l'âge de 15 ans, il travaille sur les plateaux de cinéma anglais et américains comme pyrotechnicien. Il s'oriente ensuite vers la production et réalise des films publicitaires ainsi que des bandes-annonces et quelques documentaires sur les coulisses de grands films. Il se consacre aujourd'hui à la communication écrite pour le cinéma et la réécriture de scénarii. Parallèlement, il a publié plusieurs romans dont des adaptations, mais aussi des livres pour la jeunesse tels que Le Sceau des Maîtres et Le Dernier Géant, récompensés à maintes reprises. L'Exil des Anges, son premier roman publié au Fleuve Noir en 2009, a reçu le prix SNCF du polar 2009. Il est aussi auteur de Nous étions les hommes et de Demain j'arrête !, sa première comédie.