Praised for his "beautifully crafted and strangely surreal" (Peter Matthiessen) stories, Terrence Holt had been operating under the literary radar for more than fifteen years, placing award-winning stories in such noted journals as Zoetrope, Kenyon Review, and TriQuarterly. With the release of this debut collection, Holt's work takes its "rightful place besides those works of genius—fiction, philosophy, theology— unafraid of axing into our iced hearts" (William Giraldi, New York Times Book Review). Whether chronicling a plague that ravages a New England town or the anguish of a son who keeps his father's beating heart in a jar, Holt's stories oscillate between the rational and the surreal, the future and the past, masterfully weaving together reality and myth. Like Poe or Hawthorne, "Holt is a gifted wordsmith, his sentences carefully shaped and often beautiful, and he spins these ancient, irresolvable dilemmas in an elegiac poetry" (Los Angeles Times).

Praised for his "beautifully crafted and strangely surreal" (Peter Matthiessen) stories, Terrence Holt had been operating under the literary radar for more than fifteen years, placing award-winning stories in such noted journals as Zoetrope, Kenyon Review, and TriQuarterly. With the release of this debut collection, Holt's work takes its "rightful place besides those works of genius—fiction, philosophy, theology— unafraid of axing into our iced hearts" (William Giraldi, New York Times Book Review). Whether chronicling a plague that ravages a New England town or the anguish of a son who keeps his father's beating heart in a jar, Holt's stories oscillate between the rational and the surreal, the future and the past, masterfully weaving together reality and myth. Like Poe or Hawthorne, "Holt is a gifted wordsmith, his sentences carefully shaped and often beautiful, and he spins these ancient, irresolvable dilemmas in an elegiac poetry" (Los Angeles Times).

Early one morning Arvid finds himself standing outside the bookshop where he used to work, drunk, dirty, with two fractured ribs, and no idea how he came to be there. He does not even recognise his face in the mirror. It is as if he has dropped out of the flow of life.Slowly, uncontrollably, the memories return to him, and Arvid struggles under the weight of the tragedy which has blighted his life — the death of his parents and younger siblings in an accident six years previously.At times almost unbearably moving, In the Wake is nonetheless suffused with unexpected blessings: humour, wisdom, human compassion, and a sense of the perpetual beauty of the natural world.

A new novel by the author Julian Barnes called “one of the best British writers to emerge in the last decade”.Set in North Africa and Sicily at the end of World War II, In the Wolf’s Mouth follows the Allies’ botched “liberation” attempts as they chased the Nazis north toward the Italian mainland. Focusing on the experiences of two young soldiers — Will Walker, an English field security officer, ambitious to master and shape events; and Ray Marfione, a wide-eyed Italian American infantryman — the novel contains some of the best battle writing of the past fifty years. Eloquent on the brutish, blundering inaccuracy of war, the immediacy of Adam Foulds’s prose is uncanny and unforgettable.The book also explores the continuity of organized crime in Sicily through the eyes of two men — Angilù, a young shepherd; and Cirò Albanese, a local Mafioso. These men appear in the prologue and in the book’s terrifying final chapters, making it evident that the Mafia were there before and are there still, the slaughter of war only a temporary distraction.In the Wolf’s Mouth has achieved an extraordinary resurrection, returning humanity to the lives lost in the writing of history.

Dawn Raffel's debut delivers us to the wild spaces of a youth in the Midwest and to the blank terrors of the heart. There is a cold wind blowing through these stories, whose sentences come to us as a rebuke to anything felt. In her flight from sentiment, Raffel masterfully reifies the new will to absence that marks the moral and emotional bearing of her generation. The result is not just an acknowledgment of all our long divisions — the divide between impulse and the means to apprehend it, between desire and entrapment — but of the final sweet concession that we must each of us make to the futility of even the smallest mending. In the Year of Long Division gives us the triumph of craft over the obstinance of expression and the installation of a writer certain to be cited in the continuing reinvention of the American short story.

Знаменитый англичанин А. А. Милн (1882–1956), создатель Винни-Пуха, известный «всем, всем, всем» детям, предстает на этот раз как автор замечательных рассказов, которые наверняка заинтересуют взрослых читателей. Мастерски построенные сюжеты, необычные персонажи, весьма неожиданные повороты событий, непредсказуемые финалы и, разумеется, присущая этому автору ирония, — таковы характерные особенности собранных в этой книге историй.

О жизни, о пьянстве, о себе. То что думаешь о пройденном пути когда к тебе приходит настольгия и хочется поделиться мыслями…

Von den Jahren des Exils bis ins Wendejahr '89 und darüber hinaus reicht diese wechselvolle Geschichte einer deutschen Familie. Sie führt von Mexiko über Sibirien bis in die neu gegründete DDR, führt über die Gipfel und durch die Abgründe des 20. Jahrhunderts. So entsteht ein weites Panorama, ein großer Deutschlandroman, der, ungeheuer menschlich und komisch, Geschichte als Familiengeschichte erlebbar macht.

When a massive suicide bomb explodes at a London soccer match a woman loses both her four-year-old son and her husband. But the bombing is only the beginning. In a voice alive with grief, compassion, and startling humor, Incendiary is a stunning debut of one ordinary life blown apart by terror.

A daring novel that made Christine Angot one of the most controversial figures in contemporary France recounts the narrator’s incestuous relationship with her father. Tess Lewis’s forceful translation brings into English this audacious novel of taboo.

The narrator is falling out from a torrential relationship with another woman. Delirious with love and yearning, her thoughts grow increasingly cyclical and wild, until exposing the trauma lying behind her pain. With the intimacy offered by a confession, the narrator embarks on a psychoanalysis of herself, giving the reader entry into her tangled experiences with homosexuality, paranoia, and, at the core of it all, incest. In a masterful translation from the French by Tess Lewis, Christine Angot’s Incest audaciously confronts its readers with one of our greatest taboos.

Whenever Sam thinks about babies, he envisages rivers of vomit and sleepless nights. But wife Lucy can't walk past Mothercare without crying. What's more, she can't seem to conceive-not by traditional methods, anyway. Hippy confidante Drusilla suggests an array of New Age remedies, including the intimate use of nutmeg oil and al fresco lovemaking. As Lucy faces a possible verdict of infertility, her love for Sam enters tailspin, accelerated by the advent of arrogant actor Carl Phipps. Meanwhile Sam, desperate to escape his tedious BBC job, conceives the inconceivable-turning the intimacies of their battle for babies into an acclaimed movie script.Inconceivable tells a poignant and heart-rending story with Elton's trademark wit, creating a novel that is entertaining and emotionally satisfying; as explosive as Popcorn and with the incendiary humour of Blast From the Past. It courageously tackles its central theme from both the male and the female points of view, and while delivering laughs on every page, it steers clear of laddish clichés. Lucy's tale, though pregnant with unfulfilled emotion, never stints on humour. "There seem", she fumes, "to be more urban myths attached to infertility than there are to… film stars filling their bottoms with small animals."Aside from the rich vein of gags about DIY conception (Sam has to leave a power lunch with the excuse: "Sorry, my wife is ovulating…"), Elton also subjects the TV industry to relentless stand-up-style bombardment, giving birth to some brilliant asides, which enrich the main story but never overpower it. Funny, tragic, true and ultimately heart-warming, this book should be available on the National Health Service.

The Pulitzer-Prize Winning novel for 1996.In this visionary sequel to The Sportswriter, Richard Ford deepens his portrait of one of the most unforgettable characters in American fiction, and in so doing gives us an indelible portrait of America. Frank Bascombe, in the aftermath of his divorce and the ruin of his career, has entered an "Existence Period," selling real estate in Haddam, New Jersey, and mastering the high-wire act of normalcy. But over one Fourth of July weekend, Frank is called into sudden, bewildering engagement with life.Independence Day is a moving, peerlessly funny odyssey through America and through the layered consciousness of one of its most compelling literary incarnations, conducted by a novelist of astonishing empathy and perception.

http://www.phayul.com/news/article.aspx?id=26803Phayul[Friday, March 05, 2010 12:46]This is a considerably revised and expanded version of the document, Losar Gift for Rangzen Activists, that I posted on Feb 25, 2009. This version has new information and illustrations. Last year when I was in India I gave a talk and powerpoint presentation based on this essay at a number of Tibetan schools and centers. I am happy to report that everyone was uplifted and energized by the sheer volume of indisputable facts substantiating Tibetan independence. It may have hit a sore spot in Beijing, though, for I was denounced at length on bbs.tibet.cn for this specific presentation. In order to ensure Beijing ’s continued “sensitivity” on the issue of Tibetan independence, a Chinese translation (in traditional as well as simplified script) will be up on lovetibet.ti-da.net, and other sites thanks to freedom activist Rosaceae. A full Tibetan translation will be at www.khabdha.org, and also be published in Tibet Times, all thanks to Gedun Rabsal la. You can also go on rangzen.net for the translations and for downloading print-ready pdf files to make flyers. I would like to thank all organizations that printed and distributed flyers last year, and would encourage them and others to do so again this year on March 10th and other occasions. Feel free to contact me for questions or suggestions.

A gritty, smart thriller from a literary superstar.A killer has Seattle on edge. The serial murderer has been dubbed “the Indian Killer” because he scalps his victims and adorns their bodies with owl feathers. As the city consumes itself in a nightmare frenzy of racial tension, a possible suspect emerges: John Smith. An Indian raised by whites, John is lost between cultures. He fights for a sense of belonging that may never be his — but has his alienation made him angry enough to kill? Alexie traces John Smith’s rage with scathing wit and masterly suspense.In the electrifying Indian Killer, a national bestseller and New York Times Notable Book, Sherman Alexie delivers both a scintillating thriller and a searing parable of race, identity, and violence.

Antonio Tabucchi describes his novella Indian Nocturne (winner of the Medicis Prize in its French translation) as 'an insomnia' but 'also a journey… in which a Shadow is sought.' In his provocatively elusive but totally compelling way, Tabucchi takes us along on a nightmarish trip through the Indian subcontinent, producing sensations by turns exotic, sensual, menacing, and oppressive, as the profound weight of an ancient culture settles on the unwary traveler.

Against the backdrop of the Korean War, a young man faces life’s unimagined chances and terrifying consequences.It is 1951 in America, the second year of the Korean War. A studious, law-abiding, intense youngster from Newark, New Jersey, Marcus Messner, is beginning his sophomore year on the pastoral, conservative campus of Ohio’s Winesburg College. And why is he there and not at the local college in Newark where he originally enrolled? Because his father, the sturdy, hard-working neighborhood butcher, seems to have gone mad — mad with fear and apprehension of the dangers of adult life, the dangers of the world, the dangers he sees in every corner for his beloved boy.As the long-suffering, desperately harassed mother tells her son, the father’s fear arises from love and pride. Perhaps, but it produces too much anger in Marcus for him to endure living with his parents any longer. He leaves them and, far from Newark, in the midwestern college, has to find his way amid the customs and constrictions of another American world.

Im Norden der Steiermark liegt die Helianau, eine Internatsschule für Kinder, die an einer rätselhaften Störung leiden, dem Indigo-Syndrom. Jeden, der ihnen zu nahe kommt, befallen Übelkeit, Schwindel und heftige Kopfschmerzen. Der junge Mathematiklehrer Clemens Setz unterrichtet an dieser Schule und wird auf seltsame Vorgänge aufmerksam: Immer wieder werden Kinder in eigenartigen Maskierungen in einem Auto mit unbekanntem Ziel davongefahren. Setz beginnt, Nachforschungen anzustellen, doch er kommt nicht weit; er wird aus dem Schuldienst entlassen. Fünfzehn Jahre später berichten die Zeitungen von einem aufsehenerregenden Strafprozess: Ein ehemaliger Mathematiklehrer wird vom Vorwurf freigesprochen, einen Tierquäler brutal ermordet zu haben.Und jetzt noch einmal von vorne. Vergessen Sie die Zusammenfassung einer Romanhandlung, die sich jeder Zusammenfassung entzieht, und lesen Sie das Buch Indigo von Clemens J. Setz. Sein viertes insgesamt. Sie werden feststellen: Das radikale Gegenprogramm zur hübsch verkasteten Literaturwerkstättenliteratur (Die Welt) geht weiter. Rasend spannend und so erholsam wie eine gute Massage. Hinterher spüren Sie jeden Muskel.

In the Austrian state of Styria lies the Helianau Institute, a boarding school for children born with a mysterious condition known as Indigo syndrome. Anyone who comes near them immediately suffers from nausea and vertigo. Clemens Setz a fictionalized doppelganger of the author is a young math teacher who loses his job at the school after attempting to investigate the mysterious relocations of several children. Fourteen years later, Robert, a former student, discovers a newspaper article about Setz s acquittal for the murder of an animal abuser. Could there be a connection between this story, which continues to haunt Robert, and the puzzling events of the past? DeLillo-esque in its exploration of alienation and anxiety, Indigo weaves together bizarre historical anecdotes, such as Edison s electrocution of an elephant, with pop cultural marginalia and pseudoscience to create a literary work that makes its own laws. rich in dialogue and variety, amusing and anecdotal, but also brutal and unfathomable (Der Spiegel)."

A semi-sequel to the visionary Anti-Twitter: 150 50-Word Stories, Induced Coma: 50 & 100 Word Stories once again features Harold Jaffe writing to the Nth power, taking as his subject no less than the benighted globe. Including published mainstream narratives and “news” articles from the US and abroad, the collection covers an extraordinary range of subjects — activist art, global warming, revolution, the entertainment industry, and the freakishly banal happenings of our day-to-day lives — all of which the author deconstructs to expose their ideological subtexts in uncanny ways. Satirical, critical, tragic and ruminative, Jaffe works every register masterfully. Induced Coma is a singular tour de force composed by one of the most innovative writers of our generation.