I have been sleuthing my mother's symptoms for as long as I can remember. If I see myself as an unwilling detective with a desire for justice, is her illness an unsolved crime? If so, who is the villain and who is the victim?Sofia, a young anthropologist, has spent much of her life trying to solve the mystery of her mother's unexplainable illness. She is frustrated with Rose and her constant complaints, but utterly relieved to be called to abandon her own disappointing fledgling adult life. She and her mother travel to the searing, arid coast of southern Spain to see a famous consultant-their very last chance-in the hope that he might cure her unpredictable limb paralysis.But Dr. Gomez has strange methods that seem to have little to do with physical medicine, and as the treatment progresses, Sofia's mother's illness becomes increasingly baffling. Sofia's role as detective-tracking her mother's symptoms in an attempt to find the secret motivation for her pain-deepens as she discovers her own desires in this transient desert community.Hot Milk is a profound exploration of the sting of sexuality, of unspoken female rage, of myth and modernity, the lure of hypochondria and big pharma, and, above all, the value of experimenting with life; of being curious, bewildered, and vitally alive to the world.

Adam Levin’s debut novel The Instructions was one of the most buzzed-about books of 2010, a sprawling universe of “death-defying sentences, manic wit, exciting provocations and simple human warmth” (Rolling Stone).Now, in the stories of Hot Pink, Levin delivers ten smaller worlds, shaken snow-globes of overweight romantics, legless prodigies, quixotic dollmakers, Chicagoland thugs, dirty old men, protective fathers, balloon-laden dumptrucks, and walls that ooze gels. Told with lust and affection, karate and tenderness, slapstickery, ferocity, and heart, Hot Pink is the work of a major talent in his sharpest form.*Hot Pink comes in three resplendent colors (pink, gray and blue).

The critically acclaimed novel from a master of contemporary American fiction — now available as an ebookAn irreverent satire of New York’s media world — and its influence and allureWriters Tony, Patty, Fred, and David all know what they want: renown, glamour, wealth, recognition. They know where to get it: New York, a beacon for ambitious novelists, playwrights, and journalists. But what they don’t know is that the game is changing. This is the 1980s, an era of massive corporatization and commercialization in the business of arts and letters. Fame and fortune may come quickly for many, but dignity and lasting influence are in short supply.Rafael Yglesias’s most sharp-tongued satire, Hot Properties exposes the greed, envy, and backbiting in a media world bloated with money and power.This ebook features a new illustrated biography of Rafael Yglesias, including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s personal collection.From Publishers WeeklyTouted by the gossip columns as a roman a clef about the publishing world, Yglesias's fourth novel has definite commercial potential, since there are always people who like to read sordid tales about the media. Focusing on a group of ambitious, opportunistic New York yuppies, each desperate for success, power, fame, money and glamorous sexual partners, Yglesias follows his characters as their aspirations flourish or fade. And even for the one person who comes up with a smashing bestseller, happiness is an elusive emotion, banished by inner fear and self-loathing. The leading players in this fermenting brew are introduced in the book's opening scene, a dinner party so exquisitely awkward that even the reader is embarrassed. Thereafter we watch an aspiring playwright sell out to Hollywood; a sexy blonde discover she can really write, but must use her body to assure publication; a blocked novelist lose his scruples, professional and personal; a journalist at a leading newsmagazine realize that his way to the top has been sabotaged by office intrigue. Yglesias views his characters with cynicism, but he knows how to create the dramatic momentum that will have readers turning the pages. And if his book does become a bestseller, he will have the ironic last laugh.Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.Review“Hot Properties [is] the novel you want in the Hamptons. It lambastes the pretensions of the people you’ve been glaring at on the beach all day, and excoriates the city you’ve left behind.”—The New York Times Book Review“Sharp, funny, and fresh insight into the American literary world…”—Financial Times

From revered Colombian writer Laura Restrepo comes the smart, thrilling story of a young woman trying to outrun a nightmare.María Paz is a young Latin American woman who, like many others, has come to America chasing a dream. When she is accused of murdering her husband and sentenced to life behind bars, she must struggle to keep hope alive as she works to prove her innocence. But the dangers of prison are not her only obstacles: gaining freedom would mean facing an even greater horror lying in wait outside the prison gates, one that will stop at nothing to get her back. Can María Paz survive this double threat in a land where danger and desperation are always one step behind, and safety and happiness seem just out of reach?

The "gilded youth" party has turned out a disaster... A noble foreigner has killed two people in an accident and tries to get away with it... A daughter of a millionaire, saved from the hands of her rapists, falls in love with her rescuer... No, that's not a detective story. That's a day by day routine of an immense luxury hotel. Here the careers are made. Here the hearts are breaking. Here the deals are arranged and the money is raised. Here people are living...

The "gilded youth" party has turned out a disaster... A noble foreigner has killed two people in an accident and tries to get away with it... A daughter of a millionaire, saved from the hands of her rapists, falls in love with her rescuer... No, that's not a detective story. That's a day by day routine of an immense luxury hotel. Here the careers are made. Here the hearts are breaking. Here the deals are arranged and the money is raised. Here people are living...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.During the breakdown of an unhappy marriage, writer Joanna Walsh got a job as a hotel reviewer, and began to gravitate towards places designed as alternatives to home. Luxury, sex, power, anonymity, privacy…hotels are where our desires go on holiday, but also places where our desires are shaped by the hard realities of the marketplace. Part memoir and part meditation, this book visits a series of rooms, suites, hallways, and lobbies-the spaces and things that make up these modern sites of gathering and alienation, hotels.Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

The "gilded youth" party has turned out a disaster... A noble foreigner has killed two people in an accident and tries to get away with it... A daughter of a millionaire, saved from the hands of her rapists, falls in love with her rescuer... No, that's not a detective story. That's a day by day routine of an immense luxury hotel. Here the careers are made. Here the hearts are breaking. Here the deals are arranged and the money is raised. Here people are living...

In this wickedly satiric romp, Paul Theroux captures the essence of Hawaii as it has never been depicted. The novel's narrator, a down-on-his-luck writer, escapes to Waikiki and soon finds himself the manager of the Hotel Honolulu, a low-rent establishment a few blocks off the beach. Honeymooners, vacationers, wanderers, mythomaniacs, soldiers, and families all check in to the hotel. Like the Canterbury pilgrims, every guest has come in search of something — sun, love, happiness, objects of unnameable longing — and everyone has a story. By turns hilarious, ribald, tender, and tragic, HOTEL HONOLULU offers a unique glimpse of the psychological landscape of an American paradise.

From the acclaimed Rick Moody, a darkly comic portrait of a man who comes to life in the most unexpected of ways: through his online reviews.Reginald Edward Morse is one of the top reviewers on RateYourLodging.com, where his many reviews reveal more than just details of hotels around the globe-they tell his life story.The puzzle of Reginald's life comes together through reviews that comment upon his motivational speaking career, the dissolution of his marriage, the separation from his beloved daughter, and his devotion to an amour known only as "K." But when Reginald disappears, we are left with the fragments of a life-or at least the life he has carefully constructed-which writer Rick Moody must make sense of.An inventive blurring of the lines between the real and the fabricated, Hotels of North America demonstrates Moody's mastery ability to push the bounds of the novel.

House Mother Normal, subtitled “A Geriatric Comedy,” is the English writer B. S. Johnson’s fifth novel. Unusual in both its subject and structure, this novel is a remarkable study of old age, stripped of sentimentality and spiked with bizarre language and perceptions. Made up of eight monologues describing a single day at a nursing home, House Mother Normal explores the failing minds of the elderly with precision, humor, and unflagging compassion, and Johnson achieves, with inventiveness and escalating absurdity, a vivid multidimensional effect.

Shandee finds a friendly arm at a granite quarry. Ned drops down a hole in a golf course. So begins Nicholson Baker’s fuse-blowing sexual escapade — a modern-day Hieronymus Boschian bacchanal set in a pleasure resort where normal rules don’t apply. House of Holes, one of the most talked-about books in recent memory, is a gleefully provocative novel sure to surprise, amuse, and arouse.

An extraordinary novel that ratifies Martin Amis's standing as "a force unto himself," as "The Washington Post" has attested: "There is, quite simply, no one else like him.""House of Meetings" is a love story, gothic in timbre and triangular in shape. In 1946, two brothers and a Jewish girl fall into alignment in pogrom-poised Moscow. The fraternal conflict then marinates in Norlag, a slave-labor camp above the Arctic Circle, where a tryst in the coveted House of Meetings will haunt all three lovers long after the brothers are released. And for the narrator, the sole survivor, the reverberations continue into the new century.Harrowing, endlessly surprising, epic in breadth yet intensely intimate, "House of Meetings" reveals once again that "Amis is a stone-solid genius. . a dazzling star of wit and insight" ("The Wall Street Journal").

Building can be seen as a master metaphor for modernity, which some great irresistible force, be it fascism or communism or capitalism, is always busy building anew, and Houses is a book about a man, Arseniev Negoyan, who has devoted his life and his dreams to building.Bon vivant, Francophile, visionary, Negoyan spent the first half of his life building houses he loved and even gave names to — Juliana, Christina, Agatha — making his hometown of Belgrade into a modern city to be proud of. The second half of his life, after World War II and the Nazi occupation, he has spent in one of those houses, being looked after by his wife and a nurse, in hiding. Now, on the last day of his life, Negoyan has decided to go out at last to see what he has wrought.Negoyan is one of the great characters in modern fiction, a charming monster of selfishness and self-delusion. And for all his failings, his life poses a question for the rest of us: Where in the modern world is there a home except in illusion?

The most notable story is again an investigation into the gulf between the sexes. "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?" won both the Hugo (in a tie with Spider Robinson's "By Any Other Name") and Nebula awards as the best novella published in 1976. In it a crew of three American astronauts are caught up in an intense solar storm which apparently propels them through a time vortex into a world several hundred years into their future. A devastating plague has reduced the human population to just a few thousand, all female, whose only means of reproduction is the cloning of several basic genome types.

Yongju is an accomplished student from one of North Korea's most prominent families. Jangmi, on the other hand, has had to fend for herself since childhood, most recently by smuggling goods across the border. Then there is Danny, a Chinese-American teenager of North Korean descent whose quirks and precocious intelligence have long marked him as an outcast in his California high school.These three disparate lives converge when each of them escapes to the region where China borders North Korea — Danny to visit his mother, who is working as a missionary there, after a humiliating incident keeps him out of school; Yongju to escape persecution after his father is killed at the hands of the Dear Leader himself; and Jangmi to protect her unborn child. As they struggle to survive in a place where danger seems to close in on all sides, in the form of government informants, husbands, thieves, abductors, and even missionaries, they come to form a kind of adoptive family. But will Yongju, Jangmi and Danny find their way to the better lives they risked everything for?Transporting the reader to one of the most little-known and threatening environments in the world, and exploring how humanity persists even in the most desperate circumstances, How I Became a North Korean is a brilliant and essential first novel by one of our most promising writers.

"My story, the story of 'how I became a nun,' began very early in my life; I had just turned six. The beginning is marked by a vivid memory, which I can reconstruct down to the last detail. Before, there is nothing, and after, everything is an extension of the same vivid memory, continuous and unbroken, including the intervals of sleep, up to the point where I took the veil." So starts Cesar Aira's astounding "autobiographical" novel. Intense and perfect, this invented narrative of childhood experience bristles with dramatic humor at each stage of growing up: a first ice cream, school, reading, games, friendship. The novel begins in Aira's hometown, Coronel Pringles. As self-awareness grows, the story rushes forward in a torrent of anecdotes which transform a world of uneventful happiness into something else: the anecdote becomes adventure, and adventure, fable, and then legend. Between memory and oblivion, reality and fiction, Cesar Aira's How I Became a Nun retains childhood's main treasures: the reality of fable and the delirium of invention.A few days after his fiftieth birthday, Aira noticed the thin rim of the moon, visible despite the rising sun. When his wife explained the phenomenon to him he was shocked that for fifty years he had known nothing about "something so obvious, so visible." This epiphany led him to write How I Became a Nun. With a subtle and melancholic sense of humor he reflects on his failures, on the meaning of life and the importance of literature.

As a wealthy, young real-estate developer in Los Angeles, T. lives an isolated life. He has always kept his distance from people — from his doting mother to his crass fraternity brothers — but remains unaware of his loneliness until one night, while driving to Las Vegas, he hits a coyote on the highway.The experience unnerves him and inspires a spiritual transformation that leads T. to question his financial pursuits for the first time in his life, to finally fall in love with a woman, and to begin sneaking into the local zoo, where he finds solace in the presence of endangered species.A beautiful, heart-wrenching tale, How the Dead Dream is also a riveting commentary on community in the modern suburban landscape and how the lives of animals are affected by it. Judged by many- including the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post Book World- to be Millet's best work to date, it is, as Time Out New York perfectly states: "This beautiful writer’s most ambitious novel yet, a captivating balancing act between full-bodied satire and bighearted insight."

For young Aleksandar — the best magician in the non-aligned states and painter of unfinished things — life is endowed with a mythic quality in the Bosnian town of Višegrad, a rich playground for his imagination. When his grandfather dies, Aleks channels his storytelling talent to help with his grief.It is a gift he calls on again when the shadow of war spreads to Višegrad, and the world as he knows it stops. Though Aleks and his family flee to Germany, he is haunted by his past — and by Asija, the mysterious girl he tried to save. Desperate to learn of her fate, Aleks returns to his hometown on the anniversary of his grandfather's death to discover what became of her and the life he left behind.