George Saunders has earned enthusiastic acclaim and a devoted cult-following with his first two story collections and the recent novella The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil. With his new book, In Persuasion Nation, Saunders ups the ante in every way, and is poised to break out to a wide new audience.The stories In Persuasion Nation are easily his best work yet. "The Red Bow,"about a town consumed by pet-killing hysteria, won a 2004 National Magazine Award and "Bohemians," the story of two supposed Eastern European widows trying to fit in in suburban USA, is included in The Best American Short Stories 2005. His new book includes both unpublished work, and stories that first appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, and Esquire. The stories in this volume work together as a whole whose impact far exceeds the simple sum of its parts. Fans of Saunders know and love him for his sharp and hilarious satirical eye. But In Persuasion Nation also includes more personal and poignant pieces that reveal a new kind of emotional conviction in Saunders's writing.Saunders's work in the last six years has come to be recognized as one of the strongest-and most consoling-cries in the wilderness of the millennium's political and cultural malaise. In Persuasion Nation's sophistication and populism should establish Saunders once and for all as this generation's literary voice of wisdom and humor in a time when we need it most.

Just three months ago Maddy O"Hara had been the freelance photojournalist to call for coverage of an international crisis. But now she's stuck at the far edge of the Chicago flyover, tapping in to what maternal instincts she can summon to raise her late sister's 8 year old daughter. She's also working for a small-time television station that wants warm-and-fuzzy interest pieces, Maddy, on the other hand, wants a story.And then she finds it-a photo of a deadman in Amish clothing hanging from a tree. Her instincts tell her there's a lot more to this than anyone wants to let on

In 1980s Syria, a young Muslim girl lives a secluded life behind the veil in the vast and perfumed house of her grandparents. Her three aunts — the pious Maryam, the liberal Safaa, and the free-spirited Marwa — raise her with the aid of their ever-devoted blind servant. Soon the high walls of the family home are no longer able to protect the girl from the social and political chaos outside. Witnessing the ruling dictatorship's bloody campaign against the Muslim Brotherhood, she is filled with hatred for the regime and becomes increasingly radical. In the footsteps of her beloved uncle, Bakr, she launches herself into a fight for her religion, her country, and ultimately, for her own future. Against the backdrop of real-life events, In Praise of Hatred is a stirring, layered story that echoes the violence currently plaguing the Middle East.

"The originality of Tulli's writing is not lessened by representing a family tree that includes Michaux, Kafka, Calvino, and Saramago." — W.S. MerwinIn this inventive novel, Magdalena Tulli creates a world that is unreal, yet strangely familiar and utterly convincing. Set in a mythical fourth partition of Poland, In Red is full of haunting descriptions of the town and its inhabitants; its power lies in Tulli's evocative, almost hallucinatory use of language.

With the precision of a surgeon, Peter Stamm cuts to the heart of the fragile and revealing moments of everyday life.They are bankers, students, mothers, or retirees. They live in New York City or somewhere in Switzerland, they work in London or Riga, they cross paths in a Fado bar in Lisbon. They breathe the banal routine of daily life. It is to these ordinary people that Peter Stamm grants center stage in his latest collection of short stories. Henry, a cowherd turned stuntman, crisscrosses the country, dreaming of meeting a woman. Inger, the Dane, refuses her skimpy life and takes off for Italy. Regina, so lonely in her big house since her children left and her husband passed away, discovers the world anew thanks to the Australian friend of her granddaughter, who helps Regina envision her next voyage.In these stories, Stamm's clean style expresses despair without flash, through softness and small gestures, with disarming retorts full of derision and infinite tenderness. There, where life hesitates, ready to tip over — with nothing yet played out — is where these people and their stories exist. For us, they all become exceptional. Praise for Unformed Landscape: "Sensitive and unnerving. . An uncommonly intimate work, one that will remind the reader of his or her own lived experience with a greater intensity than many of the books that are published right here at home." —The New Republic Online

The young intellectuals J. and Elena leave behind their comfortable lives, the parties and the money in Medellin to settle down on a remote island. Their plan is to lead the good life, self-sufficient and close to nature. But from the very start, each day brings small defeats and imperceptible dramas, which gradually turn paradise into hell, as their surroundings inexorably claim back every inch of the 'civilisation' they brought with them. Based on a true story, 'In the Beginning Was the Sea' is a dramatic and searingly ironic account of the disastrous encounter of intellectual struggle with reality — a satire of hippyism, ecological fantasies, and of the very idea that man can control fate.

In the Café of Lost Youth is vintage Patrick Modiano, an absorbing evocation of a particular Paris of the 1950s, shadowy and shady, a secret world of writers, criminals, drinkers, and drifters. The novel, inspired in part by the circle (depicted in the photographs of Ed van der Elsken) of the notorious and charismatic Guy Debord, centers on the enigmatic, waiflike figure of Louki, who catches everyone’s attention even as she eludes possession or comprehension. Through the eyes of four very different narrators, including Louki herself, we contemplate her character and her fate, while Modiano explores the themes of identity, memory, time, and forgetting that are at the heart of his spellbinding and deeply moving art.

In the Tripoli of 1979, nine-year-old Sulaiman considers the origins of mulberries. They are, he decides, "the best fruit God has created", and imagines young angels conspiring to plant a crop on earth when they hear that Adam and Eve are being sent down there as punishment. This could be simply a charming piece of whimsy invented by a child – but the time and place in which Sulaiman imagines it reconfigures the story into a tale of dissidents (angels) and exiles (humans).Sulaiman – whose adult self is the narrator of In the Country of Men – is himself the son of a dissident, Faraj. His family lives on Mulberry Street, along with the families of Ustath Rashid (who is arrested prior to the start of the novel for treasonous actions) and Ustath Jafer (a government official). The street was named for an orchard of mulberry trees, but now only one tree remains – in the garden of Ustath Rashid.Of course, no tale of heaven and earth can be complete without acknowledging the third player. Sulaiman brings him into the story thus: "God knew of course, he's the Allknowing, but He liked the idea and so let the angels carry out their plan." In the novel, the figure of the Almighty is called not God but – close enough – Guide. "The Guide" is Colonel Gadafy who, Godlike, remains unseen but ever-present throughout this haunting debut of growing up in a world of uncertainty.One of the book's most satisfying and moving aspects is Hisham Matar's decision to make uncertainty manifest itself to Sulaiman through the figure of his mother, Najwa. At nine, Sulaiman is able to remain relatively unaffected when Ustath Rashid, the father of his best friend, is taken away in a white car. He even finds himself somewhat drawn to the figure of Sharief, one of Rashid's abductors, who later takes to watching Sulaiman's own house when Sulaiman's father falls under suspicion of treason. But he cannot be unaffected by his mother, who starts taking copious amounts of "medicine" – sold to her by the baker in brown paper bags from under the counter – each time her husband is away (engaged, as she knows, in subversive activities). Under the effect of alcohol Najwa tells her son things she would never say when sober, revealing how she herself was crushed by authority when, as a 14-year-old girl, she was married off to a man more than twice her age after being seen holding hands with a boy in a coffee shop. What makes Najwa's tale distinctive is the fact that her laments stem not from a lack of care for her husband, but rather from the fact that his anti-state activities put him constantly under threat of discovery by the Guide's men. This is the other side of a dissident's life: the price paid by the family, who must live with fear at all times.Away from his parents, Sulaiman's world is made up of the neighbourhood boys. But here, too, politics is never far from the reader's thoughts, even if the boys themselves aren't fully aware of how the state impinges on their childhood games. The boys are sons of governments officials or of dissidents – their parents are connected in a web of arrests, favours, confessions and betrayals. And as the neighbourhood games grow darker, Sulaiman learns about betrayal, violence and shame at first hand.Ultimately, this is a novel most concerned with relationships between people – friends, spouses, comrades and, particularly, parents and their children. Matar movingly charts the ways in which love endures in situations of great repression, but also shows how repression threatens everything, even love, putting relationships under a strain that can be unendurable.And whatever his subject, Matar writes beautifully. In describing the world of seas and mulberries he is a sensualist; when writing of executions and arrests he is a nuanced observer with a gift for conveying both absurdity and raw emotion. His description of a public execution is an exceptional piece of writing – he is not afraid to bring in details that seem entirely incongruous with the setting, yet serve to give it an air of greater verisimilitude. A man trying to resist being taken to the gallows reminds Sulaiman of "the way a shy woman would resist her friends' invitation to dance, pulling her shoulders up to her ears and waving her index finger nervously in front of her mouth". The scene is by turns absurd, painful and terrifying – and, with consummate confidence, at the crucial moment of the hanging Matar is able to step back from the detailed descriptions and evocative imagery to tell us, simply and chillingly: "Everybody seemed happy."

These nine globe-trotting, unforgettable stories from Mia Alvar, a remarkable new literary talent, vividly give voice to the women and men of the Filipino diaspora. Here are exiles, emigrants, and wanderers uprooting their families from the Philippines to begin new lives in the Middle East, the United States, and elsewhere — and, sometimes, turning back again.A pharmacist living in New York smuggles drugs to his ailing father in Manila, only to discover alarming truths about his family and his past. In Bahrain, a Filipina teacher drawn to a special pupil finds, to her surprise, that she is questioning her own marriage. A college student leans on her brother, a laborer in Saudi Arabia, to support her writing ambitions, without realizing that his is the life truly made for fiction. And in the title story, a journalist and a nurse face an unspeakable trauma amidst the political turmoil of the Philippines in the 1970s and ’80s.In the Country speaks to the heart of everyone who has ever searched for a place to call home. From teachers to housemaids, from mothers to sons, Alvar’s powerful debut collection explores the universal experiences of loss, displacement, and the longing to connect across borders both real and imagined. Deeply compassionate and richly felt, In the Country marks the emergence of a formidable new writer.

A young Swedish boy finds himself in penniless and alone in California. He travels East in search of his brother, moving on foot against the great push to the West. Driven back over and over again on his journey through vast expanses, Håkan meets naturalists, criminals, religious fanatics, Indians, and lawmen, and his exploits turn him into a legend. Díaz defies the conventions of historical fiction and genre (travel narratives, the bildungsroman, nature writing, the Western), offering a probing look at the stereotypes that populate our past and a portrait of radical foreignness.

At first, it was a contest, but in time the beasts understood that, with an embrace and the slightest push, they had to lie down on their side and stay until Håkan got up. He did this each time he thought he spied someone on the circular horizon. Had Håkan and his animals ever been spotted, the distant travelers would have taken the vanishing silhouettes for a mirage. But there were no such travelers—the moving shadows he saw almost every day in the distance were illusions. With the double intention of getting away from the trail and the cold, he had traveled south for days.

From one of our most admired fiction writers: the searing story of breakdown and recovery in the life of one man and of a society moving from one idea of itself to another.Keith — born in England in the early 1960s to immigrant West Indian parents but primarily raised by his white stepmother — is a social worker heading a Race Equality unit in London whose life has come undone. He is separated from his wife of twenty years, kept at arm’s length by his teenage son, estranged from his father, and accused of harassment by a coworker. And beneath it all, he has a desperate feeling that his work — even in fact his life — is no longer relevant.Deeply moving in its portrayal of the vagaries of family love and bold in its scrutiny of the personal politics of race, this is Caryl Phillips’s most powerful novel yet.

The Hanburys of Egypt Hill are the last word in bohemian living — or so they think. Michael, a young student who first encounters the family at a party for Caris Hanbury's 18th birthday, is irresistibly attracted to their enfolding exuberance.

IN THIS SUITE of five short pieces — one of the unqualified literary masterpieces of the American 1960s — William Gass finds five beautiful forms in which to explore the signature theme of his fiction: the solitary soul's poignant, conflicted, and doomed pursuit of love and community. In their obsessions, Gass's Midwestern dreamers are like the "grotesques" of Sherwood Anderson, but in their hyper-linguistic streams of consciousness, they are the match for Joyce's Dubliners.First published in 1968, this book begins with a beguiling thirty-three page essay and has five fictions: the celebrated novella "The Pedersen Kid," "Mrs. Mean," "Icicles," "Order of Insects," and the title story.

In this epic, mythical debut novel, a newly-wed couple escapes the busy confusion of their homeland for a distant and almost-uninhabited lakeshore. They plan to live there simply, to fish the lake, to trap the nearby woods, and build a house upon the dirt between where they can raise a family. But as their every pregnancy fails, the child-obsessed husband begins to rage at this new world: the song-spun objects somehow created by his wife’s beautiful singing voice, the giant and sentient bear that rules the beasts of the woods, the second moon weighing down the fabric of their starless sky, and the labyrinth of memory dug into the earth beneath their house.This novel, from one of our most exciting young writers, is a powerful exploration of the limits of parenthood and marriage—and of what happens when a marriage’s success is measured solely by the children it produces, or else the sorrow that marks their absence.

A bold, epic debut novel set during the war and financial crisis that defined the beginning of our century.One September morning in 2008, an investment banker approaching forty, his career in collapse and his marriage unraveling, receives a surprise visitor at his West London townhouse. In the disheveled figure of a South Asian male carrying a backpack, the banker recognizes a long-lost friend, a mathematics prodigy who disappeared years earlier under mysterious circumstances. The friend has resurfaced to make a confession of unsettling power.In the Light of What We Know takes us on a journey of exhilarating scope-from Kabul to London, New York, Islamabad, Oxford, and Princeton-and explores the great questions of love, belonging, science, and war. It is an age-old story: the friendship of two men and the betrayal of one by the other. The visitor, a man desperate to climb clear of his wrong beginnings, seeks atonement; and the narrator sets out to tell his friend's story but finds himself at the limits of what he can know about the world-and, ultimately, himself. Set against the breaking of nations and beneath the clouds of economic crisis, this surprisingly tender novel chronicles the lives of people carrying unshakable legacies of class and culture as they struggle to tame their futures.In an extraordinary feat of imagination, Zia Haider Rahman has telescoped the great upheavals of our young century into a novel of rare intimacy and power.

From the author of Sepharad comes an internationally best-selling novel set against the tumultuous events that led to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War.October 1936. Spanish architect Ignacio Abel arrives at Penn Station, the final stop on his journey from war-torn Madrid, where he has left behind his wife and children, abandoning them to uncertainty. Crossing the fragile borders of Europe, he reflects on months of fratricidal conflict in his embattled country, his own transformation from a bricklayer’s son to a respected bourgeois husband and professional, and the all-consuming love affair with an American woman that forever alters his life.Winner of the 2012 Prix Méditerranée Étranger and hailed as a masterpiece, In the Night of Time is a sweeping, grand novel and an indelible portrait of a shattered society, written by one of Spain’s most important contemporary novelists.

After the success of his first novels (Edwin Mullhouse and Portrait of a Romantic), Steven Millhauser went on to enchant critics and readers with two short story collections that captured the magic and beauty of his longer works in vivid miniature.The seven stories of In the Penny Arcade blend the real and the fantastic in a seductive mix that illuminates the full range of the author's gifts, from the story of "August Eschenburg," the clockmaker's son whose extraordinary talent for creating animated figures is lost on a world whose taste for the perverse and crude supersedes that of the refined and beautiful, to "Cathay," a kingdom whose wonders include elaborate landscape paintings executed on the eyelids and nipples of court ladies.

In the Pond is a 2000 novel by Ha Jin, who has also written Under the Red Flag, Ocean of Winds, and Waiting. He has been praised for his works relating to Chinese life and culture. The novel centers around the character Shao Bin, a Chinese man working at fertilizer plant, and his epic struggle to obtain a decent apartment for his young family. Continually passed over by the plant's corrupt leaders, Bin decides to fight back against his communist superiors. Conflict espouses when Bin's struggle is met with counterattacks and opposition he could never have imagined.

An intricately woven fable filled with magical creatures — and astonishing surprises.In this wonderful fantasy, John Gardner weaves tales within tales to bring a magical world to vivid life. When three travelers on their way to the Suicide Mountains meet an enigmatic man, the Abbot of the Ancient Monastery, they begin a series of wild adventures in which they must confront mystical creatures — and come to terms with the roles fate has determined for each of them.Superbly imagined and brimming with philosophical insight, In the Suicide Mountains is a tribute to Gardner’s passion for medieval storytelling, and an unforgettable novel in its own right.