Tertuliano Máximo Afonso is a divorced, depressed history teacher. To lift his spirits, a colleague suggests he rent a certain video. Tertuliano watches the film, unimpressed. But during the night, when he is awakened by noises in his apartment, he goes into the living room to find that the VCR is replaying the video. He watches in astonishment as a man who looks exactly like him-or, more specifically, exactly like he did five years before, mustachioed and fuller in the face-appears on the screen. He sleeps badly.Against his better judgment, Tertuliano decides to pursue his double. As he roots out the man's identity, what begins as a whimsical story becomes a "wonderfully twisted meditation on identity and individuality" (The Boston Globe). Saramago displays his remarkable talent in this haunting tale of appearance versus reality.

Originally part of a collaborative project with photographer David Goldblatt, Double Negative is a subtle triptych that captures the ordinary life of Neville Lister during South Africa's extraordinary revolution. Ivan Vladislavic lays moments side by side like photographs on a table. He lucidly portrays a city and its many lives through reflections on memory, art, and what we should really be seeking.Ivan Vladislavic is the author of a number of prize-winning fiction and nonfiction books. He currently lives in Johannesburg, South Africa.

It is 1947, the year Jackie Robinson breaks major-league baseball’s color barrier by playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers — and changes the world. This is the story of that season, as told through the eyes of a difficult, brooding, and wounded man named Joseph Burke. Burke, a veteran of World War II and a survivor of Guadalcanal, is hired by Brooklyn Dodgers manager Branch Rickey to guard Robinson. While Burke shadows Robinson, a man of tremendous strength and character suddenly thrust into the media spotlight, the bodyguard must also face some hard truths of his own, in a world where the wrong associations can prove fatal.

Tochtli lives in a palace. He loves hats, samurai, guillotines, and dictionaries, and what he wants more than anything right now is a new pet for his private zoo: a pygmy hippopotamus from Liberia. But Tochtli is a child whose father is a drug baron on the verge of taking over a powerful cartel, and Tochtli is growing up in a luxury hideout that he shares with hit men, prostitutes, dealers, servants, and the odd corrupt politician or two. Long-listed for The Guardian First Book Award, Down the Rabbit Hole, a masterful and darkly comic first novel, is the chronicle of a delirious journey to grant a child’s wish.

Представляют ли опасность эти люди для общества – еще никто не задавался целью выяснить. Зато известно, что они – бомба замедленного действия для корпораций. Их мысли – потемки, их души – загадки. Достигнув пика карьеры и получив от жизни все, о чем только может мечтать человек, они вдруг добровольно отказываются от всего. Их называют дауншифтерами. В строгом костюме руководителя, под маской успешного бизнесмена у руля крупной компании может оказаться человек, способный за день уничтожить отлаженный корпоративный механизм и переодеть весь коллектив топ-менеджеров в лагерные клифты. Он уйдет, унося с собой тайны фирмы, и кто станет их обладателем в будущем, не может предсказать даже сам Господь Бог… Дауншифтинг – это не мода. Это осознанная необходимость увидеть мир таким, каков он есть. Это билет в один конец, и придется еще немало потрудиться, чтобы он не стал билетом на собственные похороны.

Downriver is a brilliant London novel by its foremost chronicler, Iain Sinclair. WINNER OF THE ENCORE AWARD AND THE JAMES TAIT BLACK MEMORIAL PRIZE The Thames runs through Downriver like an open wound, draining the pain and filth of London and its mercurial inhabitants. Commissioned to document the shifting embankments of industry and rampant property speculation, a film crew of magpie scavengers, high-rent lowlife, broken criminals and reborn lunatics picks over the rivers detritus. They examine the wound, hoping to expose the cause of the city's affliction. . 'Remarkable: part apocalyptic documentary, part moth-eaten ghost story, part detective story. Inventive and stylish, Sinclair is one of the most interesting of contemporary novelists' Sunday Times 'One of those idiosyncratic literary texts that revivify the language, so darn quotable as to be the reader's delight and the reviewer's nightmare' Guardian 'Crazy, dangerous, prophetic' Angela Carter Iain Sinclair is the author of Downriver (winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Encore Award); Landor's Tower; White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings; Lights Out for the Territory; Lud Heat; Rodinsky's Room (with Rachel Lichtenstein); Radon Daughters; London Orbital, Dining on Stones, Hackney, that Rose-Red Empire and Ghost Milk. He is also the editor of London: City of Disappearances.

The critically acclaimed novel from a master of contemporary American fiction — now available as an ebook.A suspenseful novel of ideas that explores the limitations of science, the origins of immorality, and the ultimate unknowability of the human psyche. Rafael Neruda is a brilliant psychiatrist renowned for his effective treatment of former child-abuse victims. Apart from his talent as an analyst, he’s deeply empathetic — he himself has been a victim of abuse. Gene Kenny is simply one more patient that Dr. Neruda has “cured” of past trauma. And then Kenny commits a terrible crime. Desperate to find out why, Dr. Neruda must shed the standards of his training, risking his own sanity in uncovering the disturbing secrets of Kenny’s former life. Structured as actual case studies and steeped in the history of psychoanalysis, Dr. Neruda’s Cure for Evil is Yglesias’s most formally and intellectually ambitious novel. This ebook features a new illustrated biography of Rafael Yglesias, including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s personal collection.

A new edition of a classic of contemporary American literature, first published in 1997 by Sun & Moon Press but unavailable in recent years."Dra-, the nondescript heroine of this grim, hilarious fiction, might have fallen through the same hole as Lewis Carroll's Alice, only now, 130 years later, there's no time for frivolity, just the pressing need to get a job. In a sealed, modern Wonderland of "small stifled work centers, basements and sub-basements, night niches, and training hutches connected by hallways just inches across," Dra- seeks employment. . This labyrinthine journey is brilliantly mimicked in the architecture of the prose. Levine creates cozy little warrens, small safe spaces made of short clear sentences, then sends the reader spiraling down long broken passages, fragmented by colons and semi-colons which give a halting, lurching gait to our progress. A quest, a comedy of manners, and a parable, Dra- is, above all else, a philosophical novel concerned with the most basic questions of living."-Matthew Stadler, reviewing the original edition in The Stranger, 1997.

Afghanistan 1975: In Kabul wächst der zwölfjährige Amir auf, der mit Hilfe seines Freundes Hassan unbedingt einen Wettbewerb im Drachensteigen gewinnen will. Hassans Vater ist der Diener von Amirs Vater, doch trotz ihrer unterschiedlichen Herkunft verbindet die beiden Jungen eine innige Freundschaft. Am Ende des erfolgreichen Wettkampfs wird die Freundschaft von Amir auf schreckliche Weise verraten. Diese Tat verändert das Leben beider dramatisch, ihre Wege trennen sich. Viele Jahre später kehrt der erwachsene Amir aus dem Ausland in seine Heimatstadt Kabul zurück, um seine Schuld zu tilgen.Der Leser wird Zeuge der dramatischen Schicksale der beiden Jungen, ihrer Väter und Freunde, und erlebt ihre Liebe und ihre Lügen, ihre Trennung und Wiedergutmachung.»Ein kleines literarisches Wunder… das wohl spannendste Buch über die Menschen in Afghanistan.«Die Tageszeitung

A thrilling work of sophisticated suspense set amid the Vietnamese underworld in Las Vegas.Robert, an Oakland cop, still can't let go of Suzy, the enigmatic Vietnamese wife who left him two years ago. Now she's disappeared from her new husband, Sonny, a violent Vietnamese smuggler and gambler who's blackmailing Robert into finding her for him. As he pursues her through the sleek and seamy gambling dens of Las Vegas, shadowed by Sonny's sadistic son, "Junior," and assisted by unexpected and reluctant allies, Robert learns more about his ex-wife than he ever did during their marriage. He finds himself chasing the ghosts of her past, one that reaches back to a refugee camp in Malaysia after the fall of Saigon, as his investigation soon uncovers the existence of an elusive packet of her secret letters to someone she left behind long ago. Although Robert starts illuminating the dark corners of Suzy’s life, the legacy of her sins threatens to immolate them all.Vu Tran has written a thrilling and cinematic work of sophisticated suspense and haunting lyricism, set in motion by characters who can neither trust each other nor trust themselves. This remarkable debut is a noir page-turner resonant with the lasting reverberations of lives lost and lives remade a generation ago.

Meet the college graduate working in a whole body — donation clinic; a young woman obsessed with Benedictine monks; a middle-aged woman who becomes a stand-in talk-show guest; unlikely friends who meet in a domestic violence shelter; a young girl and the father who stole her away to escape his wife's mental illness; a graduate student from a suburban family who believes her physical connection to the world is deteriorating. Maud Casey — author of The Shape of Things to Come, a New York Times Notable Book — explores how we survive modern crises of loss and love through the lives of emotional and geographic nomads. Each flirts with madness and self-destruction while reaching toward life. These simple gestures of optimism and vitality, gorgeously rendered, make drastic an unforgettable collection.

Officially censored upon its Chinese publication, and the subject of a bitter lawsuit between author and publisher, Dream of Ding Village is Chinese novelist Yan Lianke's most important novel to date.Set in a poor village in Henan province, it is a deeply moving and beautifully written account of a blood-selling scandal in contemporary China. As the book opens, the town directors, looking for a way to lift their village from poverty, decide to open a dozen blood-plasma collection stations, with the hope of draining the townspeople of their blood and selling it to villages near and far. Although the citizens prosper in the short run, the rampant blood-selling leads to an outbreak of AIDS and huge loss of life. Narrated by the dead grandson of the village head and written in finely crafted, affecting prose, the novel presents a powerful absurdist allegory of the moral vacuum at the heart of communist-capitalist China as it traces the life and death of an entire community.Based on a real-life blood-selling scandal in eastern China, Dream of Ding Village is the result of three years of undercover work by Yan Lianke, who worked as an assistant to a well-known Beijing anthropologist in an effort to study a small village decimated by HIV/AIDS as a result of unregulated blood selling. Whole villages were wiped out with no responsibility taken or reparations paid. Dream of Ding Village focuses on one family, destroyed when one son rises to the top of the Party pile as he exploits the situation, while another son is infected and dies.The result is a passionate and steely critique of the rate at which China is developing—and what happens to those who get in the way.

From the National Book Award-winning author of Middle Passage, a fearless fictional portrait of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his pivotal moment in American history.Set against the tensions of Civil Rights era America, Dreamer is a remarkable fictional excursion into the last two years of Martin Luther King Jr.'s life, when the political and personal pressures on this country's most preeminent moral leader were the greatest. While in Chicago for his first northern campaign against poverty and inequality, King encounters Chaym Smith, whose startling physical resemblance to King wins him the job of official stand-in. Matthew Bishop, a civil rights worker and loyal follower of King, is given the task of training the smart and deeply cynical Smith for the job. In doing so, Bishop must face the issue of what makes one man great while another man can only stand in for greatness. Provocative, heartfelt, and masterfully rendered, Charles Johnson confirms yet again that he is one of the great treasures of modern American literature.

Dreams and Stones is a small masterpiece, one of the most extraordinary works of literature to come out of Central and Eastern Europe since the fall of communism. In sculpted, poetic prose reminiscent of Bruno Schulz, it tells the story of the emergence of a great city. In Tulli’s hands myth, metaphor, history, and narrative are combined to magical effect. Dreams and Stones is about the growth of a city, and also about all cities; at the same time it is not about cities at all, but about how worlds are created, trans- formed, and lost through words alone. A stunning debut by one of Europe’s finest new writers.

New Egypt is a village somewhere in the South of England. A village that nobody has ever left. Peach, the sadistic chief of police, makes sure of that. Then, one misty morning, a young couple secretly set their baby son Moses afloat on the river, in a basket made of rushes. Years later, Moses is living above a nightclub, mixing with drug-dealers, thieves and topless waitresses. He knows nothing about his past — but it is catching up with him nevertheless, and it threatens to put his life in danger. Terror, magic and farce all have a part to play as the worlds of Peach and Moses slowly converge.

In an era when everything is an event, and nothing just happens naturally, it's hard not to be suspicious of the a novel that is the first ever to win both the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Medicis, by a Russian émigré who has been compared to Nabokov, Pasternak, and Proust. Add in the fact, repeated in the novel, though apparently true, that after being turned away by French publishers, the author pretended to be only the translator of the novel, and that it was then published, and you've got a book that can't possibly live up to the hype that precedes it.Makine, who fled the Soviet Union in 1987 when he was thirty, tells the semi-autobiographical tale of a young man who, along with his sister, spends summers in Siberia with his French grandmother, Charlotte Lemonnier. Trapped there after the death of her Russian husband, Charlotte shares a world of memory with the children, memory of France prior to WWII. In the intensely paranoid world of Soviet Communism, Charlotte 's very Frenchness is deeply suspicious to her neighbors and the authorities.The boy grows up loving his grandmother and the idyllic world she summons, but torn between this Francophilia and a youngster's need to conform and embrace his Russian side. In his mind, the Russian aspect of his character comes to represent a kind of barbarism and a capacity for brutality, while the French aspect represents a gauzy humanism and a love of beauty. It is this sense that shows him that it is right for the Soviets to fear their Frenchness:I became aware of a disconcerting truth: to harbor this distant past within oneself, to let one's soul live in this legendary Atlantis, was not guiltless. No, it was well and truly a challenge, a provocation in the eyes of those who lived in the present.Here in the West, it is blithely assumed that humanism and the good reside exclusively in the souls of progressives. For Makine, and his narrator, precisely the opposite is true; in the East, at that time, it was necessary to look backwards to find values and a culture which exalted human being, while the progressives of the Soviet Union did all they could to extinguish them.Memory is so personal that it's not too surprising that Makine's narrative sometimes seems overly diffuse and obscure. He lays on the Proust and Nabokov parallels a tad too heavily at times-a few less references to cork-lined rooms and moths wouldn't hurt; we get the message. And I'm sufficiently Francophobic to find it amusing, rather than touching, that someone recalls France with such a golden glow. But the lyricism of the writing, some memorable images, and the way the story implicates the tragedy of 20th Century Russia earn the book a qualified recommendation.

David Sedaris plays in the snow with his sisters.He goes on vacation with his family.He gets a job selling drinks.He attends his brother's wedding.He mops his sister's floor.He gives directions to a lost traveller.He eats a hamburger.He has his blood sugar tested.It all sounds so normal, doesn't it?In his new book David Sedaris lifts the corner of ordinary life, revealing the absurdity teeming below its surface. His world is alive with obscure desires and hidden motives a world where forgiveness is automatic and an argument can be the highest form of love. DRESS YOUR FAMILY IN CORDUROY AND DENIM finds one of the wittiest and most original writers at work today at the peak of his power.ALSO BY David SedarisBarrel FeverNakedHolidays on IceMe Talk Pretty One Day

An outstanding debut story collection, Z.Z. Packer's Drinking Coffee Elsewhere has attracted as much book-world buzz as a triple espresso. Yet, surprisingly, there are no gimmicks in these eight stories. Their combination of tenderness, humor, and apt, unexpected detail set them apart. In the title story (published in the New Yorker's summer 2000 Debut Fiction issue), a Yale freshman is sent to a psychotherapist who tries to get her-black, bright, motherless, possibly lesbian-to stop "pretending," when she is sure that "pretending" is what got her this far. "Speaking in Tongues" describes the adventures of an Alabama church girl of 14 who takes a bus to Atlanta to try to find the mother who gave her up. Looking around the Montgomery Greyhound station, she wonders if it has changed much since the Reverend King's days. She "tried to imagine where the 'Colored' and 'Whites Only' signs would have hung, then realized she didn't have to. All five blacks waited in one area, all three whites in another." Packer's prose is wielded like a kitchen knife, so familiar to her hand that she could use it with her eyes shut. This is a debut not to miss. -Regina Marler

Drive Your Plow…

DUSZEJKO IS IN HER SIXTIES, AN ECCENTRIC schoolteacher and caretaker of holiday homes who lives in a remote Polish village. Her two beloved dogs disappear, and then members of a local hunting club are found murdered; she decides to get involved in the investigation. But she has her own theories about things because she reads the stars, as well as the poetry of William Blake.

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is an entertaining thriller by the author of Flights, winner of the Man Booker International Prize. In this scintillating translation by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, Olga Tokarczuk explores ideas about madness, injustice, animal rights, hypocrisy and predestination—and how to get away with murder.

‘A strongly voiced existential thriller.’ Guardian

‘Tokarczuk is one of Europe’s most daring and original writers.’ Los Angeles Review of Books

Drive Your Plow…

DUSZEJKO IS IN HER SIXTIES, AN ECCENTRIC schoolteacher and caretaker of holiday homes who lives in a remote Polish village. Her two beloved dogs disappear, and then members of a local hunting club are found murdered; she decides to get involved in the investigation. But she has her own theories about things because she reads the stars, as well as the poetry of William Blake.

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is an entertaining thriller by the author of Flights, winner of the Man Booker International Prize. In this scintillating translation by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, Olga Tokarczuk explores ideas about madness, injustice, animal rights, hypocrisy and predestination—and how to get away with murder.

‘A strongly voiced existential thriller.’ Guardian

‘Tokarczuk is one of Europe’s most daring and original writers.’ Los Angeles Review of Books