Breytenbach composed this docu-dream during a period of incarceration. Mouroir (mourir: to die + miroir: mirror) is a ship of thought moving with its own hallucinatory logic through a sea of mythic images, protean characters and what the author describes as “landscapes and spaces beyond death, spaces that have always existed and will always exist.” An Orphic voyage into memory and mirage, through passages between death and life, darkness and light, oppression and flight, sense and the sensed. Mouroir.An outspoken human rights activist, Breyten Breytenbach is a poet, novelist, memoirist, essayist, and visual artist. His paintings and drawings have been exhibited around the world. Born in South Africa, he immigrated to Paris in the late ’60s and became deeply involved in the anti-Apartheid movement. Breytenbach is the author of All One Horse, A Season in Paradise, The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist, Dog Heart, and The Memory of Birds in Times of Revolution, among many others. He received the Alan Paton Award for Return to Paradise in 1994 and the prestigious Hertzog Prize for Poetry for Papierblom in 1999 and for Die Windvanger (Windcatcher) in 2008.

A powerful, eerily unsettling story collection from a major international literary star.

Unearthly and unexpected, the stories in Mouthful of Birds burrow their way into your psyche and don't let go. Samanta Schweblin haunts and mesmerizes in this extraordinary, masterful collection.

Schweblin's stories have the feel of a sleepless night, where every shadow and bump in the dark take on huge implications, leaving your pulse racing, and the line between the real and the strange blur.

These stories are linked by humor, setting, themes and recurring characters — cat lovers, murderers, gamblers, ghosts and fools — but mostly by the movie stars, gods and goddesses who look down on us struggling mortals with a mixture of benevolence and wrath. From Scarlett Johansson to Joan Crawford, Clint Eastwood to Jerry Lewis, they represent the impossible ideals to which lesser beings turn for hope in an otherwise baffling world.

Movieola is a collection of linked short stories that delights and exploits the language and paraphernalia of industrial Hollywood. The collection delves into a night at the movies, featuring all the familiar types — the rom-com, the action-adventure, the superhero and the spy — but the narratives are still under construction, and every story line is an opportunity for the unimaginable twist. Motive and identity are constantly shifting in these short stories that offer both narrative and anti-narrative, while the stunted shoptalk of the movie business struggles to keep up.With the wit of Steve Erickson’s Zeroville and the inventive spirit of Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics, John Domini offers a collection at once comical and moving, carefully suspended between a game of language and a celebration of American film.

A feckless, comical narrator struggles against all odds to tell a story for which he is responsible, but which he neither controls nor understands. His characters multiply, repeat, and go astray; his employer pays no attention, asleep in a drunken stupor. The increasingly desperate narrator clambers over rooftops and through underground passages, watching helplessly as his characters reappear in different times and settings and start rival stories against his will. This brilliant, wryly humorous work tells of the sadness of the world and of the inadequate means that language and storytelling offer for describing and understanding it. Yet it does so in Tulli's characteristically clear, concrete, gorgeous prose. This extraordinary work, unique in both form and message, shows a European master at the height of her powers and constitutes a major contribution to a new century of European literature. A wildly inventive page-turner.

Jasper Gwyn, scrittore dal discreto successo, decide da un giorno all’altro che non ha più intenzione di scrivere. O perlomeno di scrivere romanzi. Il gesto dello scrivere però gli manca, sente il bisogno di continuare a mettere in fila le parole come aveva fatto per la maggior parte della sua vita. Diventare “copista” gli appare dunque la soluzione ideale: non di cifre o parole, bensì di persone. Inizia così a fare ritratti per, come dice lui, “riportare a casa le persone”. Adibisce un ex garage a studio di posa, lo illumina con lampadine dalla luce “infantile” e ciò che ne scaturisce è un qualcosa che solo un personaggio complesso e surreale come Jasper Gwyin poteva concepire. Non mancheranno gli imprevisti e più di una volta il fragile sogno su cui tutto è costruito rischierà di infrangersi. Il finale non può che sorprendere.

Welcome to Lomaverde — a new Spanish utopia for those seeking their place in the sun. Now a ghost town where feral cats outnumber the handful of anxious residents. A place of empty pools, long afternoons and unrelenting sunshine.Here, widowed Midlands bus driver Dermot Lynch turns up one bright morning. He's come to visit his son Eammon and his girlfriend, Laura. Except Eammon never opened Dermot's letter announcing his trip. Just like he can't quite get out of bed, or fix anything, or admit Laura has left him.Though neither father nor son knows quite what to make of the other, Lomaverde's Brits — Roger and Cheryl, Becca and Iain — see in Dermot a shot of fresh blood. Someone to enliven their goat-hunting trips, their paranoid speculations, the endless barbecuing and bickering.As Dermot and Eammon gradually reveal to one another the truth about why each left home, both get drawn further into the bizarre rituals of ex-pat life, where they uncover a shocking secret at the community's heart.Mr Lynch's Holiday is about how families fracture and heal themselves and explores how living 'abroad' can feel less like a holiday and more like a life sentence.

Jonathan Fitch was shocked by Mr. Rinyo-Clacton's offer a million pounds and one year to live, but what happened next was even more shocking. In a state of desperation after being left by beautiful Serafina, Jonathan does his best to pull up his socks with varying success. Beginning with the chance meeting of two strangers in Piccadilly Circus Underground Station, MR RINYO-CLACTON'S OFFER is full of the loving and carefully observed London detail that Russell Hoban and his readers so enjoy. Some love stories are about triangles, but what happens between Jonathan and Serafina and Katerina and Mr. Rinyo-Clacton is perhaps more of a trapezoid, in the pointy corners of which a long hard look is taken at what goes on between consenting, relenting, and dissenting adults. Sharp and witty but written with affection, MR RINYO-CLACTON'S OFFER reaches parts not reached by other Hoban novels.

Ifi and Job, a Nigerian couple in an arranged marriage, begin their lives together in Nebraska with a single, outrageous lie: that Job is a doctor, not a college dropout. Unwittingly, Ifi becomes his co-conspirator — that is until his first wife, Cheryl, whom he married for a green card years ago, reenters the picture and upsets Job's tenuous balancing act.Julie Iromuanya has short stories and novel excerpts appearing or forthcoming in the Kenyon Review, Passages North, the Cream City Review, and the Tampa Review, among other journals. She is a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction. Mr. and Mrs. Doctor is her first novel.

A dark and bitingly humorous collection of short stories from the “brilliantly evocative” (Time) Paul Theroux A family watches in horror as their patriarch transforms into the singing, wise-cracking lead of an old-timey minstrel show. A renowned art collector relishes publicly destroying his most valuable pieces. Two boys stand by helplessly as their father stages an all-consuming war on the raccoons living in the woods around their house. A young artist devotes himself to a wealthy, malicious gossip, knowing that it’s just a matter of time before she turns on him.In this new collection of short stories, acclaimed author Paul Theroux explores the tenuous leadership of the elite and the surprising revenge of the overlooked. He shows us humanity possessed, consumed by its own desire and compulsion, always with his carefully honed eye for detail and the subtle idiosyncrasies that bring his characters to life. Searing, dark, and sure to unsettle, Mr. Bones is a stunning new display of Paul Theroux’s “fluent, faintly sinister powers of vision and imagination” (John Updike, The New Yorker).

Evan S. Connell achieved fame with his remarkable biography of General Armstrong Custer, SON OF MORNING STAR. But he was an accomplished artist long before that. His literary reputation rests in large measure on his two Bridge books.MR. BRIDGE is the companion volume to Connell's MRS. BRIDGE. It is made up of fragments of experience from the life of a middle-aged suburban couple between two wars. Brief episodes are juxtaposed to reveal the stereotyped values and emotional and spiritual aridity of the prosperous and ever-so-proper Bridges."Connell's art is one of restraint and perfect mimicry. His chapters are admirably short, his style is brevity itself…rarely has a satirist damned his subject with such good humor." (The New York Times)

From a prizewinning young writer, a brilliant and inventive story of love, lies, and inspiration.Fairy-tale romances end with a wedding, and the fairy tales don't get complicated. In this book, the celebrated writer Mr. Fox can't stop himself from killing off the heroines of his novels, and neither can his wife, Daphne. It's not until Mary, his muse, comes to life and transforms him from author into subject that his story begins to unfold differently.Mary challenges Mr. Fox to join her in stories of their own devising; and in different times and places, the two of them seek each other, find each other, thwart each other, and try to stay together, even when the roles they inhabit seem to forbid it. Their adventures twist the fairy tale into nine variations, exploding and teasing conventions of genre and romance, and each iteration explores the fears that come with accepting a lifelong bond. Meanwhile, Daphne becomes convinced that her husband is having an affair, and finds her way into Mary and Mr. Fox's game. And so Mr. Fox is offered a choice: Will it be a life with the girl of his dreams, or a life with an all-too-real woman who delights him more than he cares to admit?The extraordinarily gifted Helen Oyeyemi has written a love story like no other. Mr. Fox is a magical book, endlessly inventive, as witty and charming as it is profound in its truths about how we learn to be with one another.

Never before published in English, the stories in Mr. Kafka and Other Tales from the Time of the Cult were written mostly in the 1950s and present the Czech master Bohumil Hrabal at the height of his powers. The stories capture a time when Czech Stalinists were turning society upside down, inflicting their social and political experiments on mostly unwilling subjects. These stories are set variously in the gas-lit streets of post-war Prague; on the raucous and dangerous factory floor of the famous Poldi steelworks where Hrabal himself once worked; in a cacophonous open-air dance hall where classical and popular music come to blows; at the basement studio where a crazed artist attempts to fashion a national icon; on the scaffolding around a decommissioned church. Hrabal captures men and women trapped in an eerily beautiful nightmare, longing for a world where “humor and metaphysical escape can reign supreme.”

Elegant, demonic, obsessive, John Lanchester's The Debt to Pleasure won the Whitbread Award for first novel, was short-listed for many others, and was translated into a dizzying number of foreign languages. Its narrator, Tarquin Winot, displays an encyclopedic knowledge of food and haute cuisine, and must surely be one of the first fictional "foodie-killers." The author's second novel, Mr Phillips, is in a very different key. The eponymous protagonist, a 50-year-old London accountant, has lost his job but hasn't told his family. He leaves for work as usual on Monday morning, and finds himself wandering aimlessly around the city, taking it all in. So the odyssey begins.A statistician and inveterate quantifier, Mr Phillips likes to give marks out of ten for things (including sexual dreams), a habit that has especially humorous consequences when he visits the Tate Gallery. A Gaudier-Brzeska head: seven out of ten; The Boyhood of Raleigh: five. His thoughts on Millais's Ophelia are typical: "If she had drowned surely she wouldn't be floating on her back like that? Certainly that wasn't how drowned people looked on TV. Six out of ten." Mr Phillips's judgments may lack sophistication, but they are often hilariously apt, and above all true to his personality. He has a penchant for mental arithmetic, and speculates about how many women in England pose nude for magazines and tabloids (16,744, he deduces). He isn't exactly sex-obsessed, but he illustrates dramatically the notion that men think about sex a great deal of the time.His thoughts also meander in many directions: How many people on a London bus have never been on the river Thames? What would the financial accounts of the Battersea Park authorities look like? Standing on Chelsea Bridge, he calculates the speed at which a suicide would hit the water. Is this litany of seemingly trivial arithmetical puzzles a response to the trauma of unemployment, or is it a heightened version of the mind games we all privately play? Mr Phillips is extremely observant and insightful-he should have given up accountancy long ago. He is good on old age and especially good on death: "But the thought that you would be aware of what was going on as you died implied that somewhere in his future was a moment of the purest terror, terror at 200 proof, so that you could have a small taste of the fear every time you let your mind touch on the subject, even for a second or two."Reviewers have already been talking about literary influences-Woolf, Joyce, Wells-but John Lanchester's mesmerizing second novel has a cumulative power and brilliance all its own. -Jonathan Allison

"There are three things about this planet which are too wonderful for me. Make that four things. The way of dreams in the mind; the way of tears in the eye; the way of words in the mouth; and the way of my wife Edna Bradshaw when she acts like a cat and love-nibbles me into her arms." This is the voice of Desi, the hero of Robert Olen Butler's novel Mr. Spaceman, who has kept a quiet vigil above the Earth for decades while studying the confusing, fascinating, and frustrating primary species of our planet, occasionally venturing to the planet's surface to hear their thoughts and experience their memories using his empathic powers. Now, on December 31, 2000, he prepares for the final phase of his mysterious mission, which begins when he beams a tour bus bound for a Louisiana casino aboard his ship. The twelve passengers will be the last humans whose lives he will experience before he positions his spaceship in full and irrefutable view of the people of Earth, and descend to the planet's surface to proclaim his presence to all of humanity at the turn of the millennium. Poignant, funny, and charming, Mr. Spaceman is filled with unexpected twists and turns, a tribute to the powers of love and understanding and the essence of what it means to be human.

"There are three things about this planet which are too wonderful for me. Make that four things. The way of dreams in the mind; the way of tears in the eye; the way of words in the mouth; and the way of my wife Edna Bradshaw when she acts like a cat and love-nibbles me into her arms." This is the voice of Desi, the hero of Robert Olen Butler's novel Mr. Spaceman, who has kept a quiet vigil above the Earth for decades while studying the confusing, fascinating, and frustrating primary species of our planet, occasionally venturing to the planet's surface to hear their thoughts and experience their memories using his empathic powers. Now, on December 31, 2000, he prepares for the final phase of his mysterious mission, which begins when he beams a tour bus bound for a Louisiana casino aboard his ship. The twelve passengers will be the last humans whose lives he will experience before he positions his spaceship in full and irrefutable view of the people of Earth, and descend to the planet's surface to proclaim his presence to all of humanity at the turn of the millennium. Poignant, funny, and charming, Mr. Spaceman is filled with unexpected twists and turns, a tribute to the powers of love and understanding and the essence of what it means to be human.

El deseo de volar. Un huérfano de nueve años. La ciudad de Saint Louis. Los años veinte. Un judío de origen húngaro, mitad místico, mitad prestidigitador. Una granja perdida en las praderas de Kansas. Ritos iniciáticos. Una anciana india que trabajó en el espectáculo de Buffalo Bill. Un joven etíope. El Ku Klux Klan. Las ferias, los circos. El despertar de la sexualidad. La Depresión. Hollywood. Los gángsters de Chicago. Un jugador de béisbol en decadencia. La Segunda Guerra Mundial. El fin de la pubertad… Y un anciano que recuerda.Ésta es la historia de Walt, el niño al que el Maestro Yehudi enseñó a levitar y a volar. La historia de un adolescente que se convierte en adulto y pierde la magia. La historia de un hombre que trata desesperadamente de reencontrar el sentido de su existencia. La historia de un país. Estados Unidos, desde los «felices años veinte» hasta la dura posguerra. Una vez más Paul Auster, dueño de una prosa admirable y de una poderosa imaginación, logra atrapar y fascinar al lector, con una novela que toma como punto de partida uno de los más ancestrales sueños del ser humano: el deseo de volar.«Inquietante, sorprendente y emocionante» (J. Melmoth, The Sunday Times).«Auster sabe dotar de cuerpo, solidez y emoción a aquello que narra. Y lo que narra, como siempre, es en el sentido estricto de la palabra sumamente singular. Es decir, a un tiempo extraño y único. Al diablo con los abominables mensajes y las moralejas. En lugar de eso, se nos propone asistir a las aventuras sorprendentes, trágicas, cómicas, patéticas, sentimentales, policiacas, épicas, místicas, sensuales y acrobáticas del joven Walt» (Frédéric Vitoux, Le Nouvel Observateur).«Una emocionante parábola sobre el aprendizaje del amor» (Catherine Storey, The Independent).«Una de las más fascinantes obras de Auster, escrita con una prosa de gran solidez, hermosamente lírica en algunos momentos… La novela es una apasionante quimera que nunca deja de lado el mundo real. Un libro mágico que nos proporciona una visión panorámica de este siglo extraño, violento y paradójico que pronto dejaremos atrás» (Joanna Scott, Los Angeles Times).«Una novela brillante, escrita con una prosa rebosante de imaginación… Posee la fuerza de un cuento de hadas» (Anne Raver, The New York Times Book Review).

A woman in trouble turns to ice cream, and just might find love in its pursuit. Emelda is 46 years old. Her husband, Charlie, has just left her for a 23-year-old dancer. Her five difficult sons worship their father and blame Emelda for his departure. On top of everything else, she has to struggle with a new job at the local supermarket. For comfort she turns to her only true friend: ice-cream. But lately there's a handsome man driving the ice-cream van. Could romance be about to blossom? Part of successful Open Door series, originally designed to help adult literacy in Ireland. Original stories from best-selling authors and important new voices, never published in the States before now.

In Mrs. Bridge, Evan S. Connell, a consummate storyteller, artfully crafts a portrait using the finest of details in everyday events and confrontations. With a surgeon’s skill, Connell cuts away the middle-class security blanket of uniformity to expose the arrested development underneath — the entropy of time and relationships lead Mrs. Bridge's three children and husband to recede into a remote silence, and she herself drifts further into doubt and confusion. The raised evening newspaper becomes almost a fire screen to deflect any possible spark of conversation. The novel is comprised of vignettes, images, fragments of conversations, events — all building powerfully toward the completed group portrait of a family, closely knit on the surface but deeply divided by loneliness, boredom, misunderstandings, isolation, sexual longing, and terminal isolation. In this special fiftieth anniversary edition, we are reminded once again why Mrs. Bridge has been hailed by readers and critics alike as one of the greatest novels in American literature.

At her kitchen table somewhere in the South, Padgett Powell's narrator embarks on a spirited and often hilarious imagining of certain historical figures and current national preoccupations. Ostensibly writing her grocery list, Mrs. Hollingsworth most happily loses her sense of herself. Her list becomes a discovery of the things she has and those she lacks, including men — even her own husband.Mrs. Hollingsworth begins her list by imagining a lost-love story in which she is playful with and disdainful of the conventions of Southern literature. Soon tiring of that, she decides to turn up her imagination. For reasons unclear to her, the Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, an icon of the Lost Cause, rides into her tired lost-love story. He appears as a hologram created by a media giant, Roopit Mogul, who aims to find the real New Southerner — in a man who can recognize General Forrest's image. Into this surreal atmosphere enter Mrs. Hollingsworth's all too real daughters, the forgotten husband, Mr. and Mrs. Mogul, the boys of the neighborhood, and petty criminals named Oswald and Bundy. Within this singular narrative collage, strong tenderness arises, with accounts of genuine lost love, both familial and wholly romantic. MRS HOLLINGSWORTH'S MEN is a remarkable achievement, full of style and feeling.