"Say, Cut, Map stakes out a literary terrain that so far has no name. Its constantly shifting cartography is made up of severed hands, premature burials, hospital wards, and fragile families. This novel of compounding mysteries redraws itself from sentence to sentence, while still relentlessly propelling the reader through its pages. Ken Baumann has constructed a dazzling mirage that pulses with real emotion."— Jeff Jackson, author of Mira Corpora.

Tina Bender is the gossip columnist at the infamous L.A. Informer tabloid. She knows everything about everyone who's anyone. And she's not afraid to print it. That is, until she receives a threatening note, promising, "If you don't stop writing about me, you're dead." Teaming with a built bodyguard, a bubbly blonde, and an alcoholic obituary writer, Tina sets out to uncover just which juicy piece of Hollywood gossip is worth killing over.

Juan José Saer’s Scars explores a crime committed by a laborer who shot his wife in the face; or, rather, it explores the circumstances of four characters who have some connection to the crime. Each of the stories in Scars explores a fragment in time when the lives of these characters are altered, more or less, by a singular event.

Here, for the first time in one volume, is J. M. Coetzee's majestic trilogy of fictionalised memoir, Boyhood, Youth and Summertime.Scenes from Provincial Life opens in a small town in the South Africa of the 1940s. We meet a young boy who, at home, is ill at ease with his father and stifled by his mother's unconditional love. At school he passes every test that is set for him, but he remains wary of his fellow pupils, especially the rough Afrikaners.As a student of mathematics in Cape Town he readies himself to escape his homeland, travel to Europe and turn himself into an artist. Once in London, however, the reality is dispiriting: he toils as a computer programmer, inhabits a series of damp, dreary flats and is haunted by loneliness and boredom. He is a constitutional outsider. He fails to write.Decades later, an English biographer researches a book about the late John Coetzee, particularly the period following his return to South Africa from America. Interviewees describe an awkward man still living with his father, a man who insists on performing dull manual labour. His family regard him with suspicion and he is dogged by rumours: that he crossed the authorities in America, that he writes poetry.Scenes from Provincial Life is a heartbreaking and often very funny portrait of the artist by one of the world's greatest writers.

Two soldiers travel across Italy at the height of summer, passing through Genoa, Rome and Naples. One of the soldiers is blind, graceful, gleefully vicious and wears a prosthetic arm; the other, twenty years his junior, is his guide. But as these men drink their way through bars, brothels and train carriages, who is guiding who? Only as they reluctantly approach the blind man’s destination, and a stifled love affair, does the purpose of the trip become tragically clear.The inspiration for two acclaimed films, Scent of a Woman is a lyrical exploration of regret, defiance, and what it really means to see.

Über Yann MartelYann Martel wurde 1963 in Spanien geboren. Seine Eltern sind Diplomaten. Er wuchs in Costa Rica, Frankreich, Mexiko, Alaska und Kanada auf und lebte später im Iran, in der Türkei und in Indien. Er studierte Philosophie und wohnt derzeit in Montreal. ›Schiffbruch mit Tiger‹ ist sein dritter Roman, er war nominiert für den Governor General Award und den Commonwealth Writers' Prize und gewann den Booker Prize 2002.Die Originalausgabe erschien 2001 unter dem Titel ›Life of Pi‹

Ein Gehirnschlag beendete Ende letzten Jahres das alltägliche, das «normale» Leben des vierundvierzigjährigen Jean-Dominique Bauby, der bis dahin Chefredakteur der Zeitschrift «Elle» war und von da an nur noch vier Monate zu leben hatte. Bauby nutzte seine Zeit, um alles, was ihn bewegte, zu Papier zu bringen. Doch er selber sollte dazu gar nicht mehr in der Lage sein, war er doch vollständig gelähmt und dazu verdammt, nur noch mit dem linken Auge zu blinzeln.Mittels eines Spezialalphabets, das sich an der Häufigkeit der Vokale und Konsonanten im Französischen orientierte, diktierte er der Lektorin Claude Mendibil fortan alles, was ihn bewegte – mittels Lidschlag: Aus seiner abgeschirmten Taucherglocke heraus funkte bzw. blinzelte er auf diese Weise empfindsame letzte Nachrichten an eine Welt, die für ihn schon unerreichbar weit weg war.

Ein Gehirnschlag beendete Ende letzten Jahres das alltägliche, das «normale» Leben des vierundvierzigjährigen Jean-Dominique Bauby, der bis dahin Chefredakteur der Zeitschrift «Elle» war und von da an nur noch vier Monate zu leben hatte. Bauby nutzte seine Zeit, um alles, was ihn bewegte, zu Papier zu bringen. Doch er selber sollte dazu gar nicht mehr in der Lage sein, war er doch vollständig gelähmt und dazu verdammt, nur noch mit dem linken Auge zu blinzeln.Mittels eines Spezialalphabets, das sich an der Häufigkeit der Vokale und Konsonanten im Französischen orientierte, diktierte er der Lektorin Claude Mendibil fortan alles, was ihn bewegte – mittels Lidschlag: Aus seiner abgeschirmten Taucherglocke heraus funkte bzw. blinzelte er auf diese Weise empfindsame letzte Nachrichten an eine Welt, die für ihn schon unerreichbar weit weg war.

Ein Gehirnschlag beendete Ende letzten Jahres das alltägliche, das «normale» Leben des vierundvierzigjährigen Jean-Dominique Bauby, der bis dahin Chefredakteur der Zeitschrift «Elle» war und von da an nur noch vier Monate zu leben hatte. Bauby nutzte seine Zeit, um alles, was ihn bewegte, zu Papier zu bringen. Doch er selber sollte dazu gar nicht mehr in der Lage sein, war er doch vollständig gelähmt und dazu verdammt, nur noch mit dem linken Auge zu blinzeln.Mittels eines Spezialalphabets, das sich an der Häufigkeit der Vokale und Konsonanten im Französischen orientierte, diktierte er der Lektorin Claude Mendibil fortan alles, was ihn bewegte – mittels Lidschlag: Aus seiner abgeschirmten Taucherglocke heraus funkte bzw. blinzelte er auf diese Weise empfindsame letzte Nachrichten an eine Welt, die für ihn schon unerreichbar weit weg war.

Attending summer camp as a boy, Erik Schroder — a first generation East German immigrant — adopts the name of Eric Kennedy, a decision that will set him on an improbable and transformative journey, SCHRODER relates the story of how years later, Erik finds himself on an urgent escape to Lake Champlain, Vermont with his daughter, hiding from authorities amidst a heated custody battle with estranged wife, Laura, who is unaware of his previous identity. From a correctional facility, Erik surveys the course of his life: his love for Laura, his childhood, his experience as a father. In this way, this sweeping and deftly-imagined novel is an exploration of the identities we take on in our lives-those we are born with, and those we construct for ourselves.

Schultz, Sigmund Franz, Impresario, producer of flops in London's West End.A walking or sometimes chauffeur-driven and often boot-propelled disaster area. Which disasters are often indulgently plotted by his aristocratic partners His Amazing Grace Basil Nectarine and the languid Binky. But more frequently caused by Schultz's desperate need to seduce as many beautiful women as is humanly possible and then more.Meanwhile fighting furiously in the battle for bachelordom and in an unquenchable quest for the soothing balm of box-office riches embellished by a beautiful woman who will sock him in the spiritual solar-plexus…

In this striking novel-in-stories, a series of strange apocalypses have hit America. Entire neighborhoods drown in mud, glass rains from the sky, birds speak gibberish, and parents of young children disappear. Millions starve while others grow coats of mold. But a few are able to survive and find a light in the aftermath, illuminating what we’ve become. In "The Disappeared", a father is arrested for missing free throws, leaving his son to search alone for his lost mother. A boy swells to fill his parents’ ransacked attic in "The Ruined Child". Rendered in a variety of narrative forms, from a psychedelic fable to a skewed insurance claim questionnaire, Blake Butler’s full-length fiction debut paints a gorgeously grotesque version of America, bringing to mind both Kelly Link and William H. Gass, yet imbued with Butler's own vision of the apocalyptic and bizarre.

Kelly scavenges for scrap metal from the hundred thousand abandoned buildings in a part of Detroit known as “the zone,” an increasingly wild landscape where one day he finds something far more valuable than the copper he’s come to steal: a kidnapped boy, crying out for rescue. Briefly celebrated as a hero, Kelly secretly takes on the responsibility of avenging the boy’s unsolved kidnapping, a task that will take him deeper into the zone and into a confrontation with his own past, his long-buried trauma, memories made dangerous again.Scrapper is a devastating reimagining of one of America’s greatest cities, its beautiful architecture, Its lost houses and its shuttered factories, its boxing gyms and storefront churches, anywhere hope lingers. With precise and powerful prose, it asks: What transgressions would we allow if we believed they would ensure the safety of the people we loved? What do we owe for our crimes, even those committed to protect our charges from harm?

All of Magnus Mills' darkly comic and hugely entertaining stories are here collected in one book for the first time.

Con esta novela epistolar -«una pequeña comedia humana de bolsillo» la define irónicamente su autor- Tabucchi renueva una ilustre tradición narrativa, si bien rompiendo sus códigos y pervirtiendo el género. Poco a poco nos damos cuenta de que algo «no funciona» en todas estas misivas: el paisaje parece desplazarse ante nuestros ojos, los tiempos se vuelven del revés, como si las cartas llegaran anticipadamente o con retraso respecto al propio mensaje que transmiten, como si los destinos de los hombres, según exige el Mito, siguieran sin encontrarse y las personas se extraviaran en el laberinto de sus breves existencias. Como si la vida fuera una película perfecta, pero cuyo montaje resultara totalmente equivocado.El conjunto resulta un extraordinario recorrido por las pasiones humanas, donde el amor parece el ilusorio punto central, cuando en realidad no es más que el punto de fuga que nos conduce hacia las zonas más oscuras del alma. Ternura, sensualidad, nostalgia, diecisiete cartas de personajes masculinos a otras tantas figuras femeninas, en las que se tejen los hilos de una insólita trama narrativa hecha de círculos concéntricos que parecen ensancharse en la nada, pobres voces monologantes, ávidas de una respuesta que nunca llegará. A todas ellas responde, por último, una voz femenina distante e implacable, y al mismo tiempo rebosante de pena.

At the heart of this vibrant saga is a vast ship, the Ibis. Its destiny is a tumultuous voyage across the Indian Ocean; its purpose, to fight China 's vicious nineteenth-century Opium Wars. As for the crew, they are a motley array of sailors and stowaways, coolies and convicts.In a time of colonial upheaval, fate has thrown together a diverse cast of Indians and Westerners, from a bankrupt raja to a widowed tribeswoman, from a mulatto American freedman to a freespirited French orphan. As their old family ties are washed away, they, like their historical counterparts, come to view themselves as jahaj-bhais, or ship-brothers. An unlikely dynasty is born, which will span continents, races, and generations.The vast sweep of this historical adventure spans the lush poppy fields of the Ganges, the rolling high seas, the exotic backstreets of China. But it is the panorama of characters, whose diaspora encapsulates the vexed colonial history of the East itself, that makes Sea of Poppies so breathtakingly alive – a masterpiece from one of the world's finest novelists.

Three novellas filled with humor and insight by one of America’s modern literary masters.In Searches & Seizures, Elkin tells the story of the criminal, the lovelorn, and the grieving, each searching desperately for fulfillment—while on the verge of receiving much more than they bargained for. Infused with Elkin’s signature wit and richly drawn characters, “The Bailbondsman,” “The Making of Ashenden,” and “The Condominium” are the creations of a literary virtuoso at the pinnacle of his craft.This ebook features rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s estate and from the Stanley Elkin archives at Washington University in St. Louis.

Duncan Peck has a fascination for randomness and is always taking his family on the move. His wife, Justine, is a fortune teller who can't remember the past. Her grandfather, Daniel, longs to find the brother who walked out of his life in 1912, with nothing more than a fiddle in his hand. All three are taking journeys that lead back to the family's deepest roots . . . to a place where rebellion and acceptance have the haunting power to merge into one. . . .

"Magic and true, dazzling and wise . . . It has an astounding confidence, depth and range . . . A wonderful, wonderful novel."

THE BOSTON GLOBE

Duncan Peck has a fascination for randomness and is always taking his family on the move. His wife, Justine, is a fortune teller who can't remember the past. Her grandfather, Daniel, longs to find the brother who walked out of his life in 1912, with nothing more than a fiddle in his hand. All three are taking journeys that lead back to the family's deepest roots . . . to a place where rebellion and acceptance have the haunting power to merge into one. . . .

*From the Paperback edition.*

From the author of Maps for Lost Lovers, which was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, Aslam’s exquisite first novel, the powerful story of a secluded Pakistani village after the murder of its corrupt and prominent judge.Judge Anwar’s murder sets the people of the village on edge. Their anxieties are compounded when a sack of letters, thought lost in a train crash nineteen years ago, suddenly reappears under mysterious circumstances. What secrets will these letters bring to light? Could the letters shed any light on Judge Anwar’s murder? As Aslam traces the murder investigation over the next eleven days, he explores the impact that these two events have on the town’s inhabitants — from Judge Anwar’s surviving family to the journalist reporting on the delivery of the mail packet. With masterful attention to detail and beautiful scenes that set the rhythms of daily life in Pakistan, Aslam creates a lush and timeless world — played out against an ominous backdrop of religious tensions, assassinations, changing regimes, and faraway civil wars.