Amazon.com Review"The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin." So begins Memories of My Melancholy Whores, and it becomes even more unlikely as the novel unfolds. This slim volume contains the story of the sad life of an unnamed, only slightly talented Colombian journalist and teacher, never married, never in love, living in the crumbling family manse. He calls Rosa Cabarcas, madame of the city's most successful brothel, to seek her assistance. Rosa tells him his wish is impossible-and then calls right back to say that she has found the perfect girl.The protagonist says of himself: "I have never gone to bed with a woman I didn't pay… by the time I was fifty there were 514 women with whom I had been at least once… My public life, on the other hand, was lacking in interest: both parents dead, a bachelor without a future, a mediocre journalist… and a favorite of caricaturists because of my exemplary ugliness."The girl is 14 and works all day in a factory attaching buttons in order to provide for her family. Rosa gives her a combination of bromide and valerian to drink to calm her nerves, and when the prospective lover arrives, she is sound asleep. Now the story really begins. The nonagenarian is not a sex-starved adventurer; he is a tender voyeur. Throughout his 90th year, he continues to meet the girl and watch her sleep. He says, "This was something new for me. I was ignorant of the arts of seduction and had always chosen my brides for a night at random, more for their price than their charms, and we had made love without love, half-dressed most of the time and always in the dark, so we could imagine ourselves as better than we were… That night I discovered the improbably pleasure of contemplating the body of a sleeping woman without the urgencies of desire or the obstacles of modesty."Márquez's style never falters throughout this recounting of his life and his exploration of love, found at an unexpected time and place. The erstwhile lover is still capable of being surprised-and fulfilled. After an absence of ten years, it is a treat to have another parable from the master.From Publishers WeeklyGarcía Márquez's slim, reflective contribution to the romance of the brothel, his first book-length fiction in a decade, is narrated by perhaps the greatest connoisseur ever of girls for hire. After a lifetime spent in the arms of prostitutes (514 when he loses count at age 50), the unnamed journalist protagonist decides that his gift to himself on his 90th birthday will be a night with an adolescent virgin. But age, followed by the unexpected blossoming of love, disrupts his plans, and he finds himself wooing the allotted 14-year-old in silence for a year, sitting beside her as she sleeps and contemplating a life idly spent. Flashes of García Márquez's brilliant imagery-the sleeping girl is "drenched in phosphorescent perspiration"-illuminate the novella, and there are striking insights into the euphoria that is the flip side of the fear of death. The narrator's wit and charm, however, are not enough to counterbalance the monotony of his aimlessness. Though enough grace notes are struck to produce echoes of eloquence, this flatness keeps the memories as melancholy as the women themselves. 250,000 first printing.

When historian Alfred “Alf” Clayton is invited by an academic journal to record his impressions of the Gerald R. Ford Administration (1974–77), he recalls not the political events of the time but rather a turbulent period of his own sexual past. Alf’s highly idiosyncratic contribution to Retrospect consists not only of reams of unbuttoned personal history but also of pages from an unpublished project of the time, a chronicle of the presidency of James Buchanan (1857–61). The alternating texts mirror each other and tell a story in counterpoint, a frequently hilarious comedy of manners contrasting the erotic etiquette and social dictions of antebellum Washington with those of late-twentieth-century southern New Hampshire. Alf’s style is Nabokovian. His obsessions are vintage Updike.

Memories of the Ford Administration is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

From this renowned philosopher comes a debut work of fiction, at once a brilliant précis of the history of philosophy, a semiautobiographical meditation on the absurd relationship between knowledge and memory, and a very funny story.A French philosopher dies during a savage summer heat wave. Boxes carrying his unpublished papers mysteriously appear in Simon Critchley’s office. Rooting through them, Critchley discovers a brilliant text on the ancient art of memory and a cache of astrological charts predicting the deaths of various philosophers. Among them is a chart for Critchley himself, laying out in great detail the course of his life and eventual demise. While waiting for his friend’s prediction to come through, Critchley receives the missing, final box, which contains a maquette of Giulio Camillo’s sixteenth-century Venetian memory theater, a space supposed to contain the sum of all knowledge. With nothing left to hope for, Critchley devotes himself to one final project before his death — the building of a structure to house his collective memories and document the remnants of his entire life.

Джузеппе Д`Агата — известный итальянский писатель, автор многих романов, среди которых «Армия Сципиона», «Четверо повешенных на площади дель Пополо», «Возвращение тамплиеров»… Особым успехом у российских писателей пользуется его недавно опубликованный роман «Римский медальон». Герой нового романа Д`Агата «Memow, или Регистр смерти» — обычный бухгалтер. Этот человек мог быть блестящим ученым, но предпочел работу в Кредитном банке. Он всю жизнь занимался одним делом — составлял список Особых Должников, которые вскоре умирали. Однажды в этом списке оказался он сам. И тогда он попросил компьютер выдумать ему другую биографию…

A boozy ex-military captain trapped in a mysterious vessel searches for his runaway son, an aging superhero settles into academia, and a professional "dystopianist" receives a visit from a suicidal sheep. Men and Cartoons contains eleven fantastical, amusing, and moving stories written in a dizzying array of styles that shows the remarkable range and power of Lethem's vision. Sometimes firmly grounded in reality, and other times spinning off into utterly original imaginary worlds, this book brings together marvelous characters with incisive social commentary and thought provoking allegories.
 A visionary and creative collection that only Jonathan Lethem could have produced, the Vintage edition features two stories not published in the hardcover edition, "The Shape We're In" and "Interview with the Crab.

The first novel written by Booker finalist Tom McCarthy — acclaimed author of Remainder and C — Men in Space is set in a Central Europe rapidly fragmenting after the fall of communism. It follows an oddball cast — dissolute bohemians, political refugees, a football referee, a disorientated police agent, and a stranded astronaut — as they chase a stolen painting from Sofia to Prague and onward. Planting the themes that McCarthy’s later works develop, here McCarthy questions the meaning of all kinds of space — physical, political, emotional, and metaphysical — as reflected in the characters’ various disconnections. What emerges is a vision of humanity adrift in history, and a world in a state of disintegration.

The triumphant, long-awaited return of a writer of remarkable gifts: in this collection of richly imagined stories — her first new work in twenty years — the master of short fiction delivers a diverse suite of stories about men and women confronting their vulnerabilities in times of transition and challenge.Beginning in the 1980s, Elizabeth Tallent’s work, appeared in some of our most prestigious literary publications, including The New Yorker, Esquire, and Harper’s. Marked by its quiet power and emotional nuance, her fiction garnered widespread praise.Now, at long last, Tallent returns with a new collection of diverse, thematically linked, and deeply powerful stories that confirm her enduring gift for capturing relationships at their moment of transformation: marriages breaking apart, people haunted by memories of old love and reaching haltingly toward new futures. Mendocino Fire explore moments of fracture and fragmentation; it limns the wilderness of our inner psyche and brilliantly evokes the electric tension of deep emotion. In these pages, Tallent explores expectations met and thwarted, and our never-ending quest to avoid being alone.With this breathtaking collection, Elizabeth Tallent cements her rightful place in the literary pantheon beside her contemporaries Lorrie Moore, Ann Beattie, and Louise Erdrich. Visceral and surprising, profound yet elemental, Mendocino Fire is a welcome visit with a wise and familiar friend.

Premio Nadal 2007Una parodia sutil, aunque hilarante y demoledora, de las novelas de intrigas esotéricas.Corina y Jacob han vivido siempre de la organización de robos de obras de arte. Cuando se dan por retirados de la profesión a causa de su edad avanzada y de la falta de ofertas, reciben un encargo imprevisto por parte de un mexicano libertino y de tendencias místicas que sueña con construir un prisma para ver el rostro de Dios. El encargo consiste en llevar a cabo el robo de las presuntas reliquias de los Reyes Magos que se conservan en la catedral alemana de Colonia.A partir de ahí, Benítez Reyes traza una parodia sutil, aunque hilarante y demoledora, de las novelas de intrigas esotéricas, de su truculencia y de sus peculiaridades descabelladas. Pero Mercado de espejismos trasciende la mera parodia para ofrecernos un diagnóstico de la fragilidad de nuestro pensamiento, de las trampas de la imaginación, de la necesidad de inventarnos la vida para que la vida adquiera realidad. Y es en ese ámbito psicológico donde adquiere un sentido inquietante esta historia repleta de giros sorprendentes y de final insospechado.A través de una prosa envolvente y de una deslumbrante inventiva, Benítez Reyes nos conduce a un territorio de fascinaciones y apariencias, plagado de personajes insólitos y de situaciones inesperadas.

Urocza, przezabawna powiastka gdańskiego prozaika zaczyna się w okolicznościach iście dramatycznych: bohater (noszący wiele znamion, które pozwalają utożsamiać go z autorem), wsiadając w początku lat dziewięćdziesiątych do małego fiata z instruktorką kursu prawa jazdy, nieomal umiera z upokorzenia i wstydu.Pragnąc opóźnić moment ostatecznej kompromitacji, ucieka się do wypróbowanego sposobu: zaczyna snuć opowieść o samochodach swoich dziadków: citroenie zmiażdżonym przez pociąg relacji Wilno-Baranowicze, mercedesie zarekwirowanym w 1939 przez Sowietów w okolicach Lwowa…W trakcie opowieści, jak na wytrawnego narratora przystało, uświadamia sobie, że powiela fortel i zarazem literacki chwyt Hrabala, który w opowiadaniu Wieczorna lekcja jazdy w analogiczny sposób próbował obłaskawić i zmylić czujność instruktora usiłującego wprowadzić go w arkana jazdy na motocyklu. Narracja staje się piętrowa i wielowymiarowa: wątki hrabalowskie przeplatają się ze współczesnymi i z nostalgiczną, pełną ciepła i humoru wyprawą w głąb rodzinnych korzeni, w odeszły w przeszłość świat międzywojnia, wypraw na pikniki w sosnowe lasy, zawodów balonowych, spotkań w Automobilklubie i – przede wszystkim – cudownych chromowanych karoserii.

Love, sex, death, family, friendship, betrayal, tenderness, sacrifice and revelation…This incendiary collection of stories from acclaimed bestselling international writer Christos Tsiolkas takes you deep into worlds both strange and familiar, and characters that will never let you go.'…there is not a more important writer working in Australia today.' AB&P'Tsiolkas has become that rarest kind of writer in Australia, a serious literary writer who is also unputdownable, a mesmerising master of how to tell a story. He has this ability more than any other writer in the country….' Peter Craven, The Sun Herald'The sheer energy of Tsiolkas' writing — its urgency and passion and sudden jags of tenderness — is often an end in itself: a thrilling, galvanising reminder of the capacity of fiction to speak to the world it inhabits.' James Bradley, The Monthly

C'est l'histoire d'une infirmière à qui est confiée la mission d'aller soigner une jeune femme qui habite sur une île déserte avec un homme beaucoup plus âgé qu'elle. L'infirmière se lie d'amitié avec la jeune fille ce qui ne fait qu'envenimer les choses qui étaient déjà assez étranges dans la demeure de l'homme…C'est excellent, un suspense, une intensité d'émotions… tout est merveilleusement lié et décrit. C'est du Nothomb à son meilleur!

Sixty years after the publication of his great modernist masterpiece, Call It Sleep, Henry Roth, a retired waterfowl farmer already in his late eighties, shocked the literary world with the announcement that he had written a second novel. It was called, he reported, Mercy of a Rude Stream, the title inspired by Shakespeare, and it followed the travails of one Ira Stigman, whose family had just moved to New York’s Jewish Harlem in that "ominous summer of 1914.""It is like hearing that…J. D. Salinger is preparing a sequel to The Catcher in the Rye," the New York Times Book Review pronounced, while Vanity Fair extolled Roth's new work as "the literary comeback of the century." Even more astonishing was that Roth had not just written a second novel but a total of four chronologically linked works, all part of Mercy of a Rude Stream. Dying in 1995 at the age of eighty-nine, Roth would not live to see the final two volumes of this tetralogy published, yet the reappearance of Mercy of a Rude Stream, a fulfillment of Roth's wish that these installments appear as one complete volume, allows for a twenty-first-century public to reappraise this late-in-life masterpiece, just as Call it Sleep was rediscovered by a new generation in 1964.As the story unfolds, we follow the turbulent odyssey of Ira, along with his extended Jewish family, friends, and lovers, from the outbreak of World War I through his fateful decision to move into the Greenwich Village apartment of his muse and older lover, the seductive but ultimately tragic NYU professor Edith Welles. Set in both the fractured world of Jewish Harlem and the bohemian maelstrom of the Village, Mercy of a Rude Stream echoes Nabokov in its portrayal of sexual deviance, and offers a harrowing and relentless family drama amid a grand panorama of New York City in the 1910s and Roaring 20s.Yet in spite of a plot that is fraught with depictions of menace, violence, and intense self-loathing, Mercy of a Rude Stream also contains a cathartic, even redemptive, overlay as "provocative as anything in the chapters of St. Augustine" (Los Angeles Times), in which an elder Ira, haunted by the sins of his youth, communes with his computer, Ecclesias, as he recalls how his family's traditional piety became corrupted by the inexorable forces of modernity. As Ira finally decides to get "the hell out of Harlem," his Proustian act of recollection frees him from the ravages of old age, and suddenly he is in his prime again, the entire telling of Mercy his final pronouncement.Mercy of a Rude Stream is that rare work of fiction that creates, through its style and narration, a new form of art. Indeed, the two juxtaposed voices — one of the "little boys swimming in a sea of glory," the other of one of those same boys "in old age being rudely swept to sea" — creates a counterpoint, jarring yet oddly harmonious, that makes this prophetic American work such an lasting statement on the frailties of memory and the essence of human consciousness.Mercy of a Rude Stream: The Complete Novels includes A Star Shines Over Mt. Morris Park, A Diving Rock on the Hudson, From Bondage, and Requiem for Harlem.

Estamos en los territorios de la frontera entre México y Estados Unidos a mitad del siglo XIX. Las autoridades mexicanas y del estado de Texas organizan una expedición paramilitar para acabar con el mayor número posible de indios. Es el llamado Grupo Glanton, que tiene como lider espiritual al llamado juez Holden, un ser violento y cruel, un hombre calvo, albino, sin pestañas ni cejas. Nunca duerme, le gusta tocar el violín y bailar. Viola y asesina niños de ambos sexos y afirma que nunca morirá. Todo cambia cuando los carniceros de Glanton pasan de asesinar indios y arrancarles la cabellera a exterminar a los mexicanos que les pagan. Se instaura así la ley de la selva, el terreno moral donde la figura del juez se convierte en una especie de dios arbitrario.

El viejo Merlín de las historias de Bretaña hace posada en Galicia. Allí llegan las gentes en procura de sus saberes mágicos. Un conjunto de historias y presencias que surgen de las crónicas del medievo, de las leyendas gallegas y bretonas, creando un retablo de gentes hermanadas en el gozo vital con la carga de humor que conviene el hecho de vivir.

Mermaids, kidnappers, and mercenaries hijack a tropical vacation in this genre-bending sendup of the American honeymoon.On the grounds of a Caribbean island resort, newlyweds Deb and Chip — our opinionated, skeptical narrator and her cheerful jock husband who’s friendly to a fault — meet a marine biologist who says she’s sighted mermaids in a coral reef.As the resort’s “parent company” swoops in to corner the market on mythological creatures, the couple joins forces with other adventurous souls, including an ex — Navy SEAL with a love of explosives and a hipster Tokyo VJ, to save said mermaids from the “Venture of Marvels,” which wants to turn their reef into a theme park.Mermaids in Paradise is Lydia Millet’s funniest book yet, tempering the sharp satire of her early career with the empathy and subtlety of her more recent novels and short stories. This is an unforgettable, mesmerizing tale, darkly comic on the surface and illuminating in its depths.

A unique work of fiction from the troubled streets of Ukraine, giving invaluable testimony to the new history unfolding in the nation’s post-independence years

This captivating book is Serhiy Zhadan’s ode to Kharkiv, the traditionally Russian-speaking city in Eastern Ukraine where he makes his home. A leader among Ukrainian post-independence authors, Zhadan employs both prose and poetry to address the disillusionment, complications, and complexities that have marked Ukrainian life in the decades following the Soviet Union’s collapse. His novel provides an extraordinary depiction of the lives of working-class Ukrainians struggling against an implacable fate: the road forward seems blocked at every turn by demagogic forces and remnants of the Russian past. Zhadan’s nine interconnected stories and accompanying poems are set in a city both representative and unusual, and his characters are simultaneously familiar and strange. Following a kind of magical-realist logic, his stories expose the grit and burden of stalled lives, the universal desire for intimacy, and a wistful realization of the off-kilter and even perverse nature of love.

Книга Алексея Иванова, лауреата множества литературных премий, автора знаменитых романов «Золото бунта», «Сердце Пармы», «Географ глобус пропил», знакомит читателей с теми местами, где происходит действие всех этих романов, и прежде всего — с рекой Чусовой.Чусовая — река легендарная. Возможно в России из всех уральских рек только Чусовую и знают. Так уж сложилось: говорят — «Урал», вспоминают — «Чусовая». И не случайно. Урал без Чусовой — как паруса без мачты, как кони без упряжки, как планета без орбиты. В прошлом «государева дорога», по которой шли «железные караваны», ныне — прекрасный туристический маршрут, по которому скользят байдарки, непревзойденный национальный парк горнозаводской природы, Чусовая тесно вплелась в историю Пермского края, историю Урала, историю России. А с легкой руки Алексея Иванова, одного из лучших отечественных писателей, — еще и в историю современной русской литературы.Книга впервые публикуется в авторской редакции.

Gore Vidal's satirical fantasy, with a new introduction by the author. From his long-time hiding-place in provincial Egypt, Eugene Luther tells the story of John Cave, a former Californian undertaker, his rise to power and the subsequent global impact of his new religion.

Piteris Meilas ir jo žmona padarė tai, apie ką daugelis iš mūsų gal tik mąsto. Jie įgyvendino savo ilgametę svajonę apsigyventi užsienyje: nepaisydami sunkumų nusipirko nuostabų 200 metų senumo namą Luberono vietovėje ir pradėjo naują gyvenimą. Per metus, kurie prasidėjo nepaprastai ilgais pietumis ir tęsėsi su daugybe gastronominių malonumų, jie išgyveno netikėtų ir dažnai labai triukšmingų kaimiško gyvenimo kuriozų. Mokydamiesi vietinės tarmės ir ištvėrę nerangius statybininkus, atrado boules (rutulius) ir ožkų lenktynių subtilumus. Visi žemiški gyvenimo Provanse malonumai yra pavaizduoti šiame kerinčiame paveiksle