“A novel of epic scope and ambition.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)An influential Polish classic celebrates 50 years — and its first English editionStone Tablets is a richly rendered novel of the plight of a Hungarian diplomat working in India in 1956. As it opens, Istvan Terey, a poet and World War II veteran, is serving as cultural attaché with the Hungarian embassy in Delhi just a few months before his country is torn apart by the Hungarian Uprising. Though he is personable and popular with Indians and Europeans, communists and capitalists, Terey’s outspoken criticisms of corruption in the Hungarian government and the embassy threaten to undermine his career. Meanwhile, he has fallen in love with Margit, an Australian ophthalmologist working in India, who is still living through a tragedy of her own: her fiancé died under torture during World War II.Draining heat, brilliant color, intense smells, and intrusive animals enliven this sweeping Cold War romance. Based on the author’s own experience as a Polish diplomat in India in the late 1950s, Stone Tablets was one of the first literary works in Poland to offer trenchant criticisms of Stalinism. Stephanie Kraft’s wondrously vivid translation unlocks this book for the first time to English-speaking readers."A high-paced, passionate narrative in which every detail is vital." — Leslaw Bartelski"[Zukrowski is] a brilliantly talented observer of life, a visionary skilled at combining the concrete with the magical, lyricism with realism." — Leszek ZulinskiWojciech Zukrowski(1916–2000) was a Polish novelist, screenwriter, and essayist. He worked at the embassy in New Delhi from 1956 to 1959, hence the Indian setting of his novel. In 1996 Zukrowski won the Reymont Prize for lifetime literary achievement.

A masterpiece of postwar Polish literature, Stone Upon Stone is Wiesław Myśliwski's grand epic in The rural tradition — a profound and irreverent stream of memory cutting through the rich and varied terrain of one man’s connection to the land, to his family and community, to women, to tradition, to God, to death, and to what it means to be alive. Wise and impetuous, plainspoken and compassionate Szymek, recalls his youth in their village, his time as a guerrilla soldier, as a wedding official, barber, policeman, lover, drinker, and caretaker for his invalid brother. Filled with interwoven stories and voices, by turns hilarious and moving, Szymek’s narrative exudes the profound wisdom of one who has suffered, yet who loves life to the very core.

Иэн Макьюэн – один из самых известных современных британских прозаиков, Букеровский лауреат.В нашей стране выходили его романы «Амстердам» и «Невинный». Предлагаемый читателю роман «Stop-кадр!» переведен на русский язык впервые.Не названный, но легко узнаваемый итальянский город с его дворцами, мостами, гондолами и толпами разноязычных туристов, летняя томительная жара, дни, полные праздности… Английская пара, чья любовная связь с течением лет вошла в спокойное русло, вливается в неторопливое течение летней жизни. Нюансы отношений двух близкий людей, их разговоры, полные недомолвок и запоздалых открытий, их многозначительное молчание… Ничто не предвещает грядущего взрыва, трагического финала, оборвавшего размеренные дни, как оказалось, счастливой жизни двоих.

Ekaterina Sedia resides in the Pinelands of New Jersey. Her new novel, The Secret History of Moscow, was published by Prime Books in November 2007. Her next one, The Alchemy of Stone, will be published in June 2008. Her short stories have sold to Analog, Baen's Universe, Fantasy Magazine, and Dark Wisdom, as well as the Japanese Dreams (Prime Books) and Magic in the Mirrorstone (Mirrorstone Books) anthologies. Visit her at www.ekaterinasedia.com.

Stories and Essays of Mina Loy is the first book-length volume of Mina Loy’s narrative writings and critical work ever published. This volume brings together her short fiction, as well as hybrid works that include modernized fairy tales, a Socratic dialogue, and a ballet. Loy’s narratives address issues such as abortion and poverty, and what she called “the sex war” is an abiding theme throughout. Stories and Essays of Mina Loy also contains dramatic works that parody the bravado and misogyny of Futurism and demonstrate Loy’s early, effective use of absurdist technique. Essays and commentaries on aesthetics, historical events, and religion complete this beguiling collection, cementing Mina Loy’s place as one of the great writers of the twentieth century.

Эту книгу вы прочитаете на одном дыхании, потому что именно так - на одном дыхании - она написана. Парсонс рассказывает об одном дне жизни героев, но в этот день произошло столь много событий, что их могло бы хватить на целый год. Этот день каждый из них запомнит навсегда, ибо он стал границей, отделяющей беззаботную молодость от размеренной зрелости. Скоро, очень скоро романтическая дружба и страстная любовь станут воспоминаниями. Историями, которые так приятно рассказывать.

Безумная атмосфера рок-движения середины 70-х насквозь пронизывает этот роман. Даже его название («Stories We Could Tell») в точности повторяет название хита Тома Петти, звезды рок-музыки того времени. Истории, которые рассказывает нам автор, продолжаются всего один день, 16 августа 1977 года. Но для трех героев романа, работающих в музыкальном журнале, это не просто день. В этот день умер Элвис Пресли, король рок-н-ролла. Для одних это означает конец эпохи, лозунгом которой было знаменитое «Секс, наркотики, рок-н-ролл». Для других это всего лишь этап быстротечной и изменчивой жизни, один из многих…

Stork Mountain tells the story of a young Bulgarian immigrant who, in an attempt to escape his mediocre life in America, returns to the country of his birth. Retracing the steps of his estranged grandfather, a man who suddenly and inexplicably cut all contact with the family three years prior, the boy finds himself on the border of Bulgaria and Turkey, a stone's throw away from Greece, high up in the Strandja Mountains. It is a place of pagan mysteries and black storks nesting in giant oaks; a place where every spring, possessed by Christian saints, men and women dance barefoot across live coals in search of rebirth. Here in the mountains, the boy reunites with his grandfather. Here in the mountain, he falls in love with an unobtainable Muslim girl. Old ghosts come back to life and forgotten conflicts, in the name of faith and doctrine, blaze anew.Stork Mountain is an enormously charming, slyly brilliant debut novel from an internationally celebrated writer. It is a novel that will undoubtedly find a home in many readers' hearts.

From Paulette Jiles, the acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of Enemy Women, comes a poignant and unforgettable story of hardship, sacrifice, and strength in a tragic time-and of a desperate dream born of an undying faith in the arrival of a better day.Oil is king of East Texas during the darkest years of the Great Depression. The Stoddard girls-responsible Mayme, whip-smart tomboy Jeanine, and bookish Bea-know no life but an itinerant one, trailing their father from town to town as he searches for work on the pipelines and derricks; that is, when he's not spending his meager earnings at gambling joints, race tracks, and dance halls. And in every small town in which the windblown family settles, mother Elizabeth does her level best to make each sparse, temporary house they inhabit a home.But the fall of 1937 ushers in a year of devastating drought and dust storms, and the family's fortunes sink further than they ever anticipated when a questionable "accident" leaves Elizabeth and her girls alone to confront the cruelest hardships of these hardest of times. With no choice left to them, they return to the abandoned family farm.It is Jeanine, proud and stubborn, who single-mindedly devotes herself to rebuilding the farm and their lives. But hard work and good intentions won't make ends meet or pay the back taxes they owe on their land. In desperation, the Stoddard women place their last hopes for salvation in a wildcat oil well that eats up what little they have left… and on the back of late patriarch Jack's one true legacy, a dangerous racehorse named Smoky Joe. And Jeanine, the fatherless "daddy's girl," must decide if she will gamble it all… on love.

Whatever this is, it started when Nicky Slopen came back from the dead.Nicholas Slopen has been dead for months. So when a man claiming to be Nicholas turns up to visit an old girlfriend, deception seems the only possible motive.Yet nothing can make him change his story.From the secure unit of a notorious psychiatric hospital, he begins to tell his tale: an account of attempted forgery that draws the reader towards an extraordinary truth — a metaphysical conspiracy that lies on the other side of madness and death.With echoes of Jorge Luis Borges, Philip K. Dick, Mary Shelley, Dostoevsky’s Double, and George Eliot’s The Lifted Veil, Strange Bodies takes the reader on a dizzying speculative journey that poses questions about identity, authenticity, and what it means to be truly human.

Shortlisted for the 2012 Man Asian Literary Prize, Strange Weather in Tokyo is a story of loneliness and love that defies age.

Tsukiko, thirty-eight, works in an office and lives alone. One night, she happens to meet one of her former high school teachers, “Sensei,” in a local bar. Tsukiko had only ever called him “Sensei” (“Teacher”). He is thirty years her senior, retired, and presumably a widower. Their relationship develops from a perfunctory acknowledgment of each other as they eat and drink alone at the bar, to a hesitant intimacy which tilts awkwardly and poignantly into love.

As Tsukiko and Sensei grow to know and love one another, time’s passing is marked by Kawakami’s gentle hints at the changing seasons: from warm sake to chilled beer, from the buds on the trees to the blooming of the cherry blossoms. Strange Weather in Tokyo is a moving, funny, and immersive tale of modern Japan and old-fashioned romance.

Literary Awards: Man Asian Literary Prize Nominee (2012), Independent Foreign Fiction Prize Nominee (2014), Tanizaki Prize 谷崎潤一郎賞 (2001).

The 11 fantasies in this first collection from rising star Link are so quirky and exuberantly imagined that one is easily distracted from their surprisingly serious underpinnings of private pain and emotional estrangement. In "Water Off a Black Dog's Back," a na‹ve young man who has never known personal loss finds that the only way he can curry favor with his lover's physically afflicted family is to suffer a bizarre amputation. The protagonist in "Travels with the Snow Queen" reconsiders her fairy-tale romance when she deconstructs the clich‚s of traditional fairy tales and realizes that their heroines inevitably sacrifice and suffer much more than their heroes do. Link favors impersonal and potentially off-putting postmodern narrative approaches, but draws readers to the emotional core of her stories through vulnerable but brave characters who cope gamely with all the strangeness the world can throw their way. In the book's most effective tale, "Vanishing Act," a young girl's efforts to magically reunite herself with her distant family by withdrawing from the world around her poignantly calls attention to the spiritual vacancies and absence of affection in the family she stays with. "The Specialist's Hat" features twin sisters whose morbid obsessions seems due as much to their father's parental neglect as their mother's death. Although a few of the selections seem little more than awkward freshman exercises in the absurd, the best shed a warm, weird light on their worlds, illuminating fresh perspectives and fantastic possibilities.

This is the history of an unfaithful husband — his illusions, his stratagems, his fears, his entrapment.

The young husband in Evan Hunter’s new novel is not a philanderer, not a disturbed personality. He has been a responsible family man. He loves his wife.

But at a moment when his ego is slightly bruised, he meets a woman, a neighbor, who gives him a dangerous new image of himself — the image of a man who is not fully alive. He is convinced, and he is caught.

In Strangers When We Meet, Evan Hunter charts the progress of infidelity: the beginning of the affair — stage fright and an illusion of romance; the first small deceptions that multiply into a nightmarish entanglement of lies; the panic when the phone rings at home; the endless, tortuous arrangements for hurried meetings; the strained chance encounters in public (“Did I give myself away?”); the rising guilt and desperation. And in the background — the person who knows, the confidant who should never have been told, who might some evening drink too much and bring the walls crashing down.

Развитие технологии и биотехнологии поставило Человечество перед парадоксом: стремление заменить в сознании человека агрессивное начало чем-то вполне невинным, может обернуться кошмаром, не снившимся Гойе. Впрочем, повесть можно рассматривать и как еще одну научно-фантастическую притчу о том, чем выстлана дорога в ад... А еще – это первая из повестей, открывающая цикл о Федеральном Следователе Кае Санди, который, возможно, вызовет симпатию читателя...

Recipient of three French literary awards, Mathias Énard's follow-up to the critically acclaimed Zone is a timely novel about a young Moroccan boy caught up in the turbulent events of the Middle East, and a possible murder.Exiled from his family for religious transgressions related to his feelings for his cousin, Lekhdar finds himself on the streets of Barcelona hiding from both the police and the Muslim Group for the Propagation of Koranic Thoughts, a group he worked for in Tangiers not long after being thrown out on the streets by his father.Lekhdar's transformations — from a boy into a man, from a devout Muslim into a sinner — take place against the backdrop of some of the most important events of the past few years: the violence and exciting eruption of the Arab Spring and the devastating collapse of Europe's economy.If all that isn't enough, Lekhdar reunites with a childhood friend — one who is planning an assassination, a murder Lekhdar opposes.A finalist for the prestigious Prix Goncourt, Street of Thieves solidifies Énard's place as one of France's most ambitious and keyed-in novelists of this century. This novel may even take Zone's place in Christophe Claro's bold pronouncement that Énard's earlier work is "the novel of the decade, if not of the century."Mathias Énard studied Persian and Arabic and spent long periods in the Middle East. A professor of Arabic at the University of Barcelona, he received several awards for Zone—also available from Open Letter — including the Prix du Livre Inter and the Prix Décembre.Charlotte Mandell has translated works from a number of important French authors, including Marcel Proust, Gustave Flaubert, Jean Genet, Guy de Maupassant, and Maurice Blanchot, among others.

Renegade librarian Ishmael (aka Barry) takes to the open road in his customized VW Beetle in search of himself only to find that the M62 is a very poor substitute for Route 66. The sequel to this book, Geoff Nicholson's first novel, is called "Still Life with Volkwagons".

Ignazio Silvio Di Palermo was born in an Italian neighborhood in New York’s East Harlem in 1926. He was born blind but was raised in a close, vivid, lusty world bounded by his grandfather’s love, his mother’s volatility, his huge array of relatives, weekly feasts, discovery of girls, the exhilaration of music and his great talent leading to a briefly idolized jazz career.

Miracle drugs save lives and ease suffering, but for profit-motivated companies, the miracle is the money they generate... at any cost.  Billions of dollars in profits will make men and women do many things--lie, cheat, even kill.  now one beautiful woman will be caught in the cross fire between ethics and profits.  As Celia Jordan's fast-track career sweeps her into the highest circles of an international drug company, she begins to discover the sins and secrets hidden in the research lab... and in the marketplace.  Now the company's powerful new drug promises a breakthrough in treating a deadly disease.  But Celia Jordan knows it may deliver a nightmare.