Winner of the Flannery O’Connor Prize, the Edmund White Award, and the California Book Award, Lori Ostlund’s “heartbreaking and wonderful” (Pulitzer Prize — winning author Richard Russo) debut collection of stories about men and women confronting the unmapped and unexpected.In Lori Ostlund’s award-winning debut collection, people seeking escape from situations at home venture out into a world that they find is just as complicated and troubled as the one they left behind.In prose highlighted by both satire and poignant observation, The Bigness of the World contains characters that represent a different sort of everyman — men and women who poke fun at ideological rigidity while holding fast to good grammar and manners, people seeking connections in a world that seems increasingly foreign. In “Upon Completion of Baldness,” a young woman shaves her head for a part in a movie in Hong Kong that will help her escape life with her lover in Albuquerque. In “All Boy,” a young logophile encounters the limits of language when he finds he prefers the comfort of a dark closet over the struggle to make friends at school. In “Dr. Deneau’s Punishment,” a math teacher leaving New York for Minnesota as a means of punishing himself engages in an unsettling method of discipline. In “Bed Death,” a couple travels Malaysia to teach only to find their relationship crumbling as they are accepted in their new environment. And in “Idyllic Little Bali,” a group of Americans gather around a pool in Java to discuss their brushes with fame and end up witnessing a man’s fatal flight from his wife.“Ostlund constantly delights the reader with the subtlety of her insights as well as the carefulness of her prose” (San Francisco Chronicle), revealing that wherever you are in the world, where you came from is never far away. “Each piece is sublime” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).

It is Vienna, 1865: Dr Ignaz Semmelweis has been hounded into a lunatic asylum, ridiculed for his claim that doctors' unwashed hands are the root cause of childbed fever. The deaths of thousands of mothers are on his conscience and his dreams are filled with blood. It is 2153: humans are birthed and raised in breeding centres, nurtured by strangers and deprived of familial love. Miraculously, a woman conceives, and Prisoner 730004 stands trial for concealing it. London in 2009: Michael Stone's novel about Semmelweis has been published, after years of rejection. But while Michael absorbs his disconcerting success, his estranged mother is dying and asks to see him again. As Michael vacillates, Brigid Hayes, exhausted and uncertain whether she can endure the trials ahead, begins the labour of her second child. This is a beautifully constructed and immensely powerful work about motherhood that is also a story of rebellion, isolation and the damage done by rigid ideologies.

First published in 1937 by Kahane's Obelisk Press, Girodias added this famous title to Olympia's staple in the late '50s, shortly before censorship laws began to liberalize and The Black Book found could finally cross the channel legally. Though owing much to lifelong friend Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, The Black Book stands on its own with a portrait of the artist as an angry young man, chronicling numerous events among artists and others in a seedy London hotel.

A splendid, violent spring suddenly grips Bucharest in the 1980s after a brutal winter. Tolea, an eccentric middle-aged intellectual who has been dismissed from his job as a high school teacher on "moral grounds," is investigating his father's death forty years after the fact, and is drawn into a web of suspicion and black humor."Reading 'The Black Envelope,' one might think of the poisonous 'black milk' of Celan's 'Death Fugue' or the claustrophobic air of mounting terror in Mr. Appelfeld's 'Badenheim 1939'... Mr. Manea offers striking images and insights into the recent experience of Eastern Europe." — New York Times Book Review

A reign of terror begins for Alfred and Emma Munday when they take their failing marriage to the solace of an old country house.

Helen's brother is dying, and with two of his friends she waits for the end in her grandmother's crumbling old house. Her mother and grandmother, after years of strife have come to an uneasy peace. The six of them, from different generations and beliefs, are forced to come to terms with each other.

Jim Francis has finally found the perfect life — and is now unrecognisable, even to himself. A successful painter and sculptor, he lives quietly with his wife, Melanie, and their two young daughters, in an affluent beach town in California. Some say he’s a fake and a con man, while others see him as a genuine visionary.But Francis has a very dark past, with another identity and a very different set of values. When he crosses the Atlantic to his native Scotland, for the funeral of a murdered son he barely knew, his old Edinburgh community expects him to take bloody revenge. But as he confronts his previous life, all those friends and enemies — and, most alarmingly, his former self — Francis seems to have other ideas.When Melanie discovers something gruesome in California, which indicates that her husband’s violent past might also be his psychotic present, things start to go very bad, very quickly.The Blade Artist is an elegant, electrifying novel — ultra violent but curiously redemptive — and it marks the return of one of modern fiction’s most infamous, terrifying characters, the incendiary Francis Begbie from Trainspotting.

With The Blazing World, internationally bestselling author Siri Hustvedt returns to the New York art world in her most masterful and urgent novel since What I Loved. Hustvedt tells the provocative story of the artist Harriet Burden. After years of watching her work ignored or dismissed by critics, Burden conducts an experiment she calls Maskings: she presents her own art behind three male masks, concealing her female identity.The three solo shows are successful, but when Burden finally steps forward triumphantly to reveal herself as the artist behind the exhibitions, there are critics who doubt her. The public scandal turns on the final exhibition, initially shown as the work of acclaimed artist Rune, who denies Burden’s role in its creation. What no one doubts, however, is that the two artists were intensely involved with each other. As Burden’s journals reveal, she and Rune found themselves locked in a charged and dangerous game that ended with the man’s bizarre death.Ingeniously presented as a collection of texts compiled after Burden’s death, The Blazing World unfolds from multiple perspectives. The exuberant Burden speaks — in all her joy and fury — through extracts from her own notebooks, while critics, fans, family members, and others offer their own conflicting opinions of who she was, and where the truth lies.From one of the most ambitious and internationally renowned writers of her generation, The Blazing World is a polyphonic tour de force. An intricately conceived, diabolical puzzle, it explores the deceptive powers of prejudice, money, fame, and desire.

The acclaimed author of The Wasted Vigil now gives us a searing, exquisitely written novel set in Pakistan and Afghanistan in the months following 9/11: a story of war, of one family’s losses, and of the simplest, most enduring human impulses.Jeo and Mikal are foster brothers from a small town in Pakistan. Though they were inseparable as children, their adult lives have diverged: Jeo is a dedicated medical student, married a year; Mikal has been a vagabond since he was fifteen, in love with a woman he can’t have. But when Jeo decides to sneak across the border into Afghanistan — not to fight with the Taliban against the Americans, rather to help care for wounded civilians — Mikal determines to go with him, to protect him.Yet Jeo’s and Mikal’s good intentions cannot keep them out of harm’s way. As the narrative takes us from the wilds of Afghanistan to the heart of the family left behind — their blind father, haunted by the death of his wife and by the mistakes he may have made in the name of Islam and nationhood; Mikal’s beloved brother and sister-in-law; Jeo’s wife, whose increasing resolve helps keep the household running, and her superstitious mother — we see all of these lives upended by the turmoil of war.In language as lyrical as it is piercing, in scenes at once beautiful and harrowing, The Blind Man’s Garden unflinchingly describes a crucially contemporary yet timeless world in which the line between enemy and ally is indistinct, and where the desire to return home burns brightest of all.

Amid the chaos of civilians fleeing West in a provincial German railway station in 1945 Helene has brought her seven-year-old son. Having survived with him through the horrors and deprivations of the war years, she abandons him on the station platform and never returns.Many years earlier, Helene and her sister Martha's childhood in rural Germany is abruptly ended by the outbreak of the First World War. Her father, sent to the eastern front, comes home only to die. Their Jewish mother withdraws from the hostility of her surroundings into a state of mental confusion. Helene calls the condition blindness of the heart, and fears the growing coldness of her mother, who hardly seems to notice her daughters any more.The Blind Side of the Heart tells of two World Wars, of hope, loneliness and love, and of a life lived in terrible times. It is a great family novel, a powerful portrayal of an era, and the story of a fascinating woman.

Sometimes it’s best to leave the past alone. For when biographer Martin Nanther looks into the life of his famous great-grandfather Henry, Queen Victoria’s favorite physician, he discovers some rather unsettling coincidences, like the fact that the doctor married the sister of his recently murdered fiancée. The more Martin researches his distant relative, the more fascinated—and horrified—he becomes. Why did people have a habit of dying around his great grandfather? And what did his late daughter mean when she wrote that he’s done “monstrous, quite appalling things”?Barbara Vine (a.k.a. Ruth Rendell) deftly weaves this story of an eminent Victorian with a modern yarn about the embattled biographer, who is watching the House of Lords prepare to annul membership for hereditary peers and thus strip him of his position. Themes of fate and family snake throughout this teasing psychological suspense, a typically chilling tale from a master of the genre.From Publishers WeeklyThis rich, labyrinthine book by Vine (aka Ruth Rendell) concerns a "mystery in history," like her 1998 novel, The Chimney Sweeper's Boy. Martin Nanther-biographer and member of the House of Lords-discovers some blighted roots on his family tree while researching the life of his great-great-grandfather, Henry, an expert on hemophilia and physician to Queen Victoria. Martin contacts long-lost relatives who help him uncover some puzzling events in Henry's life. Was Henry a dour workaholic or something much more sinister? Vine can make century-old tragedy come alive. Still, the decades lapsed between Martin's and Henry's circles create added emotional distance, and, because they are all at least 50 years dead, we never meet Henry or his cohorts except through diaries and letters. Martin's own life-his wife's infertility and troubles with a son from his first marriage-is interesting yet sometimes intrudes on the more intriguing Victorian saga. Vine uses her own experience as a peer to give readers an insider's look into the House of Lords, at the dukes snoozing in the library between votes and eating strawberries on the terrace fronting the Thames. Some minor characters are especially vivid, like Martin's elderly cousin Veronica, who belts back gin while stonewalling about the family skeletons all but dancing through her living room. Readers may guess Henry's game before Vine is ready to reveal it, but this doesn't detract from this novel peopled by characters at once repellant and compelling.From Library JournalIn her tenth novel writing as Barbara Vine, Ruth Rendell offers a novel of suspense based in 19th-century England and centering on deceit, murder, and various other family skeletons. Martin Nanther, the fourth Lord Nanther, has a comfortable life in present-day London as a Hereditary Peer in the House of Lords and as a historical biographer. He chooses as his most recent subject his own great-grandfather, the first Lord Nanther, physician to the royal family (Victoria and Albert) and an early noted researcher into the cause and transmission of hemophilia. The reader is taken through the family history as Martin painstakingly uncovers some not so savory bits of his own family's past. The story is dense with characters, and the author provides family trees of the two principal families, for which any reader will be eternally grateful. The story lacks the usual page-turner suspense of the Rendell/Vine novels but makes up for that with unusually detailed glimpses into Victorian life and the inner workings of the House of Parliament, which American readers will find particularly intriguing. Recommended for all public libraries. Caroline Mann, Univ. of Portland, OR

"Rich, evocative, highly original piece of fiction. It gilds contemporary American literature with real, not synthetic, gold." — Anthony Burgess"Need I insist that the only enemy of the mature marriage is monogamy? That anything less than sexual multiplicity. . is naive? That our sexual selves are merely idylers in a vast wood?" Thus the central theme of John Hawkes's widely acclaimed novel The Blood Oranges is boldly asserted by its narrator, Cyril, the archetypal multisexualist. Likening himself to a white bull on Love's tapestry, he pursues his romantic vision in a primitive Mediterranean landscape. There two couples — Cyril and Fiona, Hugh and Catherine — mingle their loves in an "lllyria" that brings to mind the equally timeless countryside of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night.Yet no synopsis or comparison can convey the novel's lyric comedy or, indeed, its sinister power — sinister because of the strength of will Cyril exerts over his wife, his mistress, his wife's reluctant lover; lyric, since he is also a “sex-singer" in the land where music is the food of love.

Winner of the 1993 Sunday Express Book of the Year AwardA turn-of-the-century love story, set in Manila, between an American woman and Filipino-Spanish mestizo by the popular storyteller William Boyd. It's a memorable tale, richly detailed.

"The Blue Bistro is a wonderful, wonderful love story, the kind that you read, then recommend to many many friends – and so, I recommend it to you. Highly." – James PattersonThis sparkling new novel by the author of The Beach Club and Summer People is about the last summer in the life of a popular Nantucket restaurant.Adrienne Dealey has spent the past six years working for hotels in exotic resort towns and this summer she has decided to relocate to Nantucket. Left flat broke by her ex-boyfriend, she is desperate to earn some fast money. When the desirable Thatcher Smith, owner of the hottest restaurant on the island, is the only one to offer her a job, she wonders if she can get by with no restaurant experience. There seems to be a lot at stake: The Blue Bistro is in its final summer, before closing its doors for good. Adrienne gets a crash course in the business and things seem to be going smoothly… until Thatch makes Adrienne break one of her cardinal rules, which is never date the boss. Instant chemistry notwithstanding, Adrienne can't quite shake the feeling that there's something more to Thatch's relationship with his brilliant chef and business partner Fiona. It's a mystery she can't quite solve-does she open her heart for the first time, or move on, as she always does?

“The Blue Fox is a magical novel.”—BjorkThe year is 1883, and the stark Icelandic landscape is the backdrop for this spellbinding fable that is part mystery, part fairy tale. The fates of a priest, a naturalist, and a young woman with Down syndrome are intrinsically bound and gradually, surprisingly unraveled."Sjon's fable…describes its world with brilliant, precise, concrete colour and detail while at the same time making things and people mysterious and ungraspable…The world of 19th-century Iceland is brilliantly and economically present: the bareness of the dwellings, the roughness of the churches and congregations, the meager food…The novel is a parable, comic, and lyrical about the nature of things." — A.S. Byatt for The TimesSjon was born in Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1962. A novelist, playwright, lyricist, and poet, he wrote the lyrics to Bjork’s hit songs “Isobel,” “Joga,” and “Bachelorette” and was nominated for an Academy Award for his lyrics to the music for the film Dancer in the Dark, directed by Lars von Trier.

From the Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea and Ancient Light, a new novel-at once trenchant, witty, and shattering-about the intricacies of artistic creation and theft, and about the ways in which we learn to possess one another, and to hold on to ourselves.Equally self-aggrandizing and self-deprecating, our narrator, Oliver Otway Orme, is a painter of some renown, and a petty thief who does not steal for profit and has never before been caught. But he's pushing fifty, feels like a hundred, and things have not been going so well lately. Having recognized the "man-killing crevasse" that exists between what he sees and any representation he might make of it-any attempt to make what he sees his own-he's stopped painting. And his last purloined possession-aquired the last time he felt the "secret shiver of bliss" in thievery-has been discovered. The fact that it was the wife of the man who was, perhaps, his best friend, has compelled him to run away: from his mistress, his home, his wife, from whatever remains of his impulse to paint and from the tragedy that haunts him, and to sequester himself in the house where he was born, trying to uncover in himself the answer to how and why things have turned out as they did. Excavating memories of family, of places he's called home, and of the way he has apprehended the world around him ("no matter what else is going on, one of my eyes is always swivelling towards the world beyond"), Ollie reveals the very essence of a man who, in some way, has always been waiting to be rescued from himself.

Новый рассказ об эротических приключениях Мишки и Белки. Вы думаете, они уже все испробовали, наелись и успокоились? Нет, мои дорогие. Голод терзает их с еще большей силой - всегда и везде.

Новый рассказ об эротических приключениях Мишки и Белки. Вы думаете, они уже все испробовали, наелись и успокоились? Нет, мои дорогие. Голод терзает их с еще большей силой - всегда и везде.

Originally published in 1970, The Bluest Eye is Toni Morrison's first novel. In an afterword written more than two decades later, the author expressed her dissatisfaction with the book's language and structure: "It required a sophistication unavailable to me." Perhaps we can chalk up this verdict to modesty, or to the Nobel laureate's impossibly high standards of quality control. In any case, her debut is nothing if not sophisticated, in terms of both narrative ingenuity and rhetorical sweep. It also shows the young author drawing a bead on the subjects that would dominate much of her career: racial hatred, historical memory, and the dazzling or degrading power of language itself.Set in Lorain, Ohio, in 1941, The Bluest Eye is something of an ensemble piece. The point of view is passed like a baton from one character to the next, with Morrison's own voice functioning as a kind of gold standard throughout. The focus, though, is on an 11-year-old black girl named Pecola Breedlove, whose entire family has been given a cosmetic cross to bear:You looked at them and wondered why they were so ugly; you looked closely and could not find the source. Then you realized that it came from conviction, their conviction. It was as though some mysterious all-knowing master had given each one a cloak of ugliness to wear, and they had each accepted it without question… And they took the ugliness in their hands, threw it as a mantle over them, and went about the world with it.There are far uglier things in the world than, well, ugliness, and poor Pecola is subjected to most of them. She's spat upon, ridiculed, and ultimately raped and impregnated by her own father. No wonder she yearns to be the very opposite of what she is-yearns, in other words, to be a white child, possessed of the blondest hair and the bluest eye.This vein of self-hatred is exactly what keeps Morrison's novel from devolving into a cut-and-dried scenario of victimization. She may in fact pin too much of the blame on the beauty myth: "Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another-physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion." Yet the destructive power of these ideas is essentially colorblind, which gives The Bluest Eye the sort of universal reach that Morrison's imitators can only dream of. And that, combined with the novel's modulated pathos and musical, fine-grained language, makes for not merely a sophisticated debut but a permanent one. -James Marcus