Hallucinatory and darkly comic, these 19 stories of paranoia, pursuit, sensory deprivation, amnesia, and retribution rattle the cages of the psyche. And through the illustrations of graphic novelist Zak Sally, this unsettling world is brought to life. From sadistic bosses with secret fears to a woman trapped in a mime's imaginary box, and from a post-apocalyptic misidentified messiah to unwitting portraitists of the dead, Brian Evenson's mind-bending fiction exposes the terror contained within our daily lives.Fugue State contains 19 drawings by two-time Eisner nominee Zak Sally, plus his graphic collaboration with Evenson, "Dread."Finalist for 2009 World Fantasy Award, Short Story Collection CategoryFinalist for 2009 Shirley Jackson Award, Short Story Collection CategoryOn Time Out New York's Best Books of 2009 List

Wkrótce potem opuściłem te okolice, po złożeniu ostatniej wizyty na własnym grobie. Nie wiem dokładnie, dlaczego to zrobiłem; zapewne chciałem w specyficzny sposób złożyć sobie wyrazy uszanowania. Był to dla mnie koniec pewnego etapu, niewykluczone, że koniec życia. Na grobie leżały świeże kwiaty. Nie zapomniano o mnie.Wspomnienia ojca, męża, przyjaciela zblakły z czasem, zawsze jednak zajmowały istotne miejsce w moich myślach. Od tego czasu moje życie potoczyło się inaczej. Wspomnienia z przeszłości nawiedzały mnie jeszcze co jakiś czas, zmieniały się jednak towarzyszące im emocje. Szybko stały się to uczucia psa, jak gdyby po zakończeniu poszukiwań psia natura wzięła górę nad ludzką duszą – duszą, która stanowiła o moim człowieczeństwie. Czułem się wolny jak ptak. Wolny, by żyć jak pies.

Fiction. Told in monologues, speeches, soliloquies, sermons, letters, cards, and lists, FUN CAMP is a freewheelin summer camp novel smashed to bits. Spend a week with the young inhabitants of a camp bent on molding campers into fun and interesting people via pranks, food fights, greased watermelon relays. Along the way, you'll meet Dave and Holly, totalitarian head counselors who may be getting too old for this shit, Bernadette, a Luddite chaplain with some kids to convert, Billy, a first-timer tasting freedom, and Tad, a shaggy dude with a Jesus complex. Prank hard, joke loud, break a bone or two: Half a forest got burned down for you to live it up. FUN CAMP was a semi-finalist for the Lake Forest/&Now 2011–2012 Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writer's Residency Prize.

In Fun with Problems, Robert Stone demonstrates once again that he is "one of our greatest living writers" (Los Angeles Times). The pieces in this new volume vary greatly in length — some are almost novellas, others no more than a page — but all share the signature blend of longing, violence, black humor, sex and drugs that has helped Stone illuminate the dark corners of the human soul. Entire lives are laid out with remarkable precision, in captivating prose: a screenwriter carries on a decades-long affair with a beautiful actress, whose descent into addiction he can neither turn from nor share; a bored husband picks up a mysterious woman only to find that his ego has led him woefully astray; a world-beating Silicon Valley executive receives an unwelcome guest at his mansion in the hills; a scuba dive guides uneasy newlyweds to a point of no return. Fun with Problems showcases Stone's great gift: to pinpoint and make real the impulses-by turns violently coercive and quietly seductive-that cause us to conceal, reveal, and betray our very selves.

Journalist Daniel Mandelkern leaves Hamburg on assignment to interview Dirk Svensson, a reclusive children's book author who lives alone on the Italian side of Lake Lugano with his three-legged dog. Mandelkern has been quarreling with his wife (who is also his editor); he suspects she has other reasons for sending him away.After stumbling on a manuscript of Svensson's about a complicated ménage à trois, Mandelkern is plunged into mysteries past and present. Rich with anthropological and literary allusion, this prize-winning debut set in Europe, Brazil, and New York, tells the parallel stories of two writers struggling with the burden of the past and the uncertainties of the future. Funeral for a Dog won the prestigious Uwe-Johnson Prize.

FUP, like all of Jim Dodge's work, takes place between rain and sunlight, diamonds and love. Read it. Live a little wiser.

“Dawn Raffel's stories are like prismatic drops of rain, hanging from the edge of a roof or sliding down a windshield, reflecting an entire world within. The language of motherhood, of adulthood, of childhood — the language of family and individual — has never been like this. Sly and probing, with the sting of precision and pain.” —Susan Straight“In Dawn Raffel's Further Adventures in the Restless Universe the oppressive truth of our mortality unsettles but does not vanquish the spirit. The woman as drudge may be "a failure at folding," but she is a rare songmaker whose dialogues with a son, a sister — the usual figures from the family romance — make for a musical and philosophical call and response. The son proposes one way to keep birds from crashing into fatally clear windows is to ‘open the windows all over the world.’ These stories promise more life. Take them to heart!” —Christine SchuttWhen Dawn Raffel was a very small child, her father used to read to her nightly from The Restless Universe — a layman’s guide to physics by the Nobel Laureate Max Born. Although she loved the time spent with her father, she didn’t — despite his statements to the contrary — comprehend a word of the physics. It was her first recognition that love so often comes with imperfect understanding.The 21 stories in Further Adventures in the Restless Universe are about fathers, daughters, mothers, sisters, husbands, wives, strangers, lovers, sons, neighbors, kings, death, faith, astronomical phenomena, and the way the heart warps time. Of her previous work, one reviewer stated, “Raffel takes conventions and smashes them to bits” and another called it “extreme literature.” Of Further Adventures, Publisher’s Weekly says, “Raffel's stripped-to-the-bone prose is a model of economy and grace.”Dawn Raffel is the author of a previous collection of short stories, In the Year of Long Division, and a novel, Carrying the Body. Her work has appeared in O, The Oprah Magazine, Conjunctions, NOON, Open City, The Mississippi Review, The Quarterly, Unsaid, and numerous other periodicals and anthologies. She has taught creative writing in the MFA program at Columbia University and is a magazine editor in New York City.“Readers have come to expect from Dawn Raffel’s prose nothing less than the syllable-by-syllable perfections of purest poetry and the boldest wisdom a human heart can hold. Her new collection of pithy, exquisite fictions about the timeless crises of mothers, daughters, and wives is breathtaking and haunting in its majestic exactitudes.” —Gary Lutz“Less has never been more than in Dawn Raffel's Further Adventures in the Restless Universe. These spare, high-intensity stories of brave people at the end of their ropes are not only models of writerly integrity, but monuments of the spirit asserting itself out of the depths of silence.” — David Gates

In eleven expertly crafted stories, John Brandon gives us a stunning assortment of men and women at the edge of possibility — gamblers and psychics, wanderers and priests, all of them on the verge of finding out what they can get away with, and what they can't. Ranging from haunted deserts to alligator-filled swamps, these are stories of foul luck and strange visitations, delivered with deadpan humor by an unforgettable voice.The New York Times praised Brandon's last novel for a style that combined Elmore Leonard and Charles Portis, and now Brandon brings that same darkly American artistry to his very first story collection, demonstrating once again that he belongs in the top ranks of contemporary writers.

Life is fury. Fury—sexual, Oedipal, political, magical, brutal—drives us to our finest heights and coarsest depths. This is what we are, what we civilize ourselves to disguise—the terrifying human animal in us, the exalted, transcendent, self-destructive, untrammeled lord of creation. We raise each other to the heights of joy. We tear each other limb from bloody limb.

В третьей книге Мирко Благовича главные герои продолжают сражение против Системы. На пути Николаича, Олюшки и Славуни встаёт чиновничья коррупционная махина, управляемая продажными и беспринципными людьми. Но ребята не отчаиваются, ведь они совсем уже не те слабачки-предприниматели, коими были десять лет назад. Дружная команда добивается успехов, приобретает нужные связи, зарабатывает свой первый капитал и… теряет близких. Преодолевая Систему, они даже и не подозревают, что главная битва против ненавистной Матрицы – испытание богатством и славой, не за горами. И смогут ли они пройти его достойно, покажет время.

In this luminous novel — winner of Britain's prestigious Booker Prize — John Berger relates the story of "G.," a young man forging an energetic sexual career in Europe during the early years of this century. With profound compassion, Berger explores the hearts and minds of both men and women, and what happens during sex, to reveal the conditions of the Don Juan's success: his essential loneliness, the quiet cumulation in each of his sexual experiences of all of those that precede it, the tenderness that infuses even the briefest of his encounters, and the way women experience their own extraordinariness through their moments with him. All of this Berger sets against the turbulent backdrop of Garibaldi and the failed revolution of Milanese workers in 1898, the Boer War, and the first flight across the Alps, making G. a brilliant novel about the search for intimacy in history's private moments.

The protagonist of this novel is a 15-year-old North London schoolboy called Gabriel. He is forced to come to terms with a new life, and use his gift for painting in order to make sense of his world, once the equilibrium of the family has been shattered by his father's departure.

After four novels and several years living abroad, the fictional protagonist of Galatea 2.2—Richard Powers — returns to the United States as Humanist-in-Residence at the enormous Center for the Study of Advanced Sciences. There he runs afoul of Philip Lentz, an outspoken cognitive neurologist intent upon modeling the human brain by means of computer-based neural networks. Lentz involves Powers in an outlandish and irresistible project: to train a neural net on a canonical list of Great Books. Through repeated tutorials, the device grows gradually more worldly, until it demands to know its own name, sex, race, and reason for exisiting.

Zhang Jie trata en sus libros problemas de actualidad como la corrupción, la burocracia o los cambios económicos, con unos principios literarios que no están en realidad muy lejanos del realismo y el didactismo que imperaba en la China maoísta. Una de sus novelas más representativas es Galera (Fang zhou), crónica de tres mujeres mayores 40 años en la China de finales del siglo XX las tres marcadas por el divorcio y por un entorno que a pesar de los cambios revolucionarios y de las reformas modernizadoras sigue siendo hostil a la mujer que escapa a los papeles tradicionales familiares. Lo que salva una literatura como la de Zhang Jie, que tiene todos los números para convertirse en un aburrido excurso sociológico, es la gracia sutil de una escritura aferrada a las pequeñas cosas y a la vida cotidiana. El feminismo de manual queda atemperado por la capacidad de dar vida al mundo que recrea.

The ‘bonkers’ book that ‘it is impossible not to be moved by’ DAILY MAILA joyful and hilarious tale of some very spirited septuagenarians as they overcome innumerable obstacles to save their beloved mutt from a heartless exterminator in a land where bureaucracy reigns above all else.Perhaps you’re not a member of the Azov House of Culture Elderly Club?Perhaps you missed the talk on the Cabbage Root Fly last week?Galina Petrovna hasn’t missed one since she joined the Club, when she officially became old. But she would much rather be at home with her three-legged dog Boroda. Boroda isn’t ‘hers’ exactly, they belong to each other really, and that’s why she doesn’t wear a collar.And that’s how Mitya the Exterminator got her.And that’s why Vasily Semyonovich was arrested.And Galina had to call on Zoya who had to call on Grigory Mikhailovich.And go to Moscow.Filled to the brim with pickle, misadventure and tears, Galina Petrovna’s Three-Legged Dog Story will leave you smiling at every page.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4cZR5JF5RA

The stories of Gallatin Canyon are rich in the wit, compassion, and matchless language for which Thomas McGuane is celebrated.Place exerts the power of destiny in these tales: a boy makes a surprising discovery skating at night on Lake Michigan; an Irish clan in Massachusetts gather around their dying matriarch; a battered survivor of the glory days of Key West washes up on other shores. Several of the stories unfold in Big Sky country: a father tries to buy his adult son’s way out of virginity; a convict turns cowhand on a ranch; a couple makes a fateful drive through a perilous gorge. McGuane's people are seekers, beguiled by the land's beauty and myth, compelled by the fantasy of what a locale can offer, forced to reconcile dream and truth.

Honest and entertaining, Columbia University professor Venkatesh vividly recounts his seven years following and befriending a Chicago crack-dealing gang in a fascinating look into the complex world of the Windy City 's urban poor. As introduced in Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner's bestseller, Freakonomics, Venkatesh became involved with the Black Kings-and their charismatic leader J.T.-as a first-year doctoral student at the University of Chicago. Sent to the projects with a multiple-choice test on poverty as his calling card, Venkatesh was, to his surprise, invited in to see how the drug dealers functioned in real life, from their corporate structure to the corporal punishment meted out to traitors and snitches. Venkatesh's narrative breaks down common misperceptions (such as all gang members are uneducated and cash rich, when the opposite is often true), the native of India also addresses his shame and subsequent emotional conflicts over collecting research on illegal activities and serving as the Black Kings' primary decision-maker for a day-hardly the actions of a detached sociological observer. But overinvolved or not, this graduate student turned gang-running rogue sociologist has an intimate and compelling tale to tell.

Sal Cupertine is a legendary hit man for the Chicago Mafia, known for his ability to get in and out of a crime without a trace. Until now, that is. His first-ever mistake forces Sal to botch an assassination, killing three undercover FBI agents in the process. This puts too much heat on Sal, and he knows this botched job will be his death sentence to the Mafia. So he agrees to their radical idea to save his own skin.A few surgeries and some intensive training later, and Sal Cupertine is gone, disappeared into the identity of Rabbi David Cohen. Leading his growing congregation in Las Vegas, overseeing the population and the temple and the new cemetery, Rabbi Cohen feels his wicked past slipping away from him, surprising even himself as he spouts quotes from the Torah or the Old Testament. Yet, as it turns out, the Mafia isn't quite done with him yet. Soon the new cemetery is being used as both a money and body-laundering scheme for the Chicago family. And that rogue FBI agent on his trail, seeking vengeance for the murder of his three fellow agents, isn't going to let Sal fade so easily into the desert.Gangsterland is the wickedly dark and funny new novel by a writer at the height of his power — a morality tale set in a desert landscape as ruthless and barren as those who inhabit it.

A fast-paced novel told heavily through dialogue, Garbage examines just how far one is willing to go to live under his own terms.