This collection, available exclusively in e-book form, brings together the twelve novels (and one novella) of the great Portuguese writer José Saramago, with an introductory essay by Ursula Le Guin.From Saramago’s early work, like the enchanting Baltasar & Blimunda and the controversial Gospel According to Jesus Christ, through his masterpiece Blindness and its sequel Seeing, to his later fables of politics, chance, history, and love, like All the Names and Death with Interruptions, this volume showcases the range and depth of Saramago’s career, his inimitable narrative voice, and his vast reserves of invention, humor, and understanding.

Cipriano Algor, an elderly potter, lives with his daughter Marta and her husband Marçal in a small village on the outskirts of The Center, an imposing complex of shops, apartments, and offices to which Cipriano delivers his pots and jugs every month. On one such trip, he is told not to make any more deliveries. Unwilling to give up his craft, Cipriano tries his hand at making ceramic dolls. Astonishingly, The Center places an order for hundreds, and Cipriano and Marta set to work-until the order is cancelled and the three have to move from the village into The Center. When mysterious sounds of digging emerge from beneath their apartment, Cipriano and Marçal investigate, and what they find transforms the family's life. Filled with the depth, humor, and the extraordinary philosophical richness that marks each of Saramago's novels, The Cave is one of the essential books of our time.

This indispensable volume, which includes the classic stories “Silent Snow, Secret Snow” and “Mr. Arcularis,” is a testament to the dazzling artistry of one of the twentieth century’s most influential writers.A young woman passes through the countryside to visit her dying grandmother for a final time. A cabbie, exhausted from a long day’s work, fights to get an intoxicated woman out of his taxi. A man on his way to a bachelor party tries to come to grips with the brutishness that lies within every gentleman—and finds that Bacardi cocktails do nothing to help. A master craftsman whose poetry and prose offer profound insight into the riddle of consciousness, Conrad Aiken thrills, disturbs, and inspires in all forty-one of these astute and eloquent tales.

This collection of Roald Dahl's adult short stories, from his world-famous books, includes many seen in the television series, TALES OF THE UNEXPECTED. With their vibrant characters, their subtle twists and turns, and bizarre and often macabre plots, these stories shock in a way that makes them utterly addictive. Roald Dahl can stand you on your head, twist you in knots, tie up your hands and leave you gasping for more.

This further collection of Roald Dahi's adult short stories, from his world-famous books, again includes many seen in the television series, TALES OF THE UNEXPECTED. Through the stories runs a vein of macabre malevolence, springing from slight, almost inconsequential everyday things. These bizarre plots—spiced with vibrant characters and subtle twists and turns—are utterly addictive.

Leonard Michaels was a master of the short story. His collections are among the most admired, influential, and exciting of the last half century. The Collected Stories brings them back into print, from the astonishing debut Going Places (1969) to the uncollected last stories, unavailable since they appeared in The New Yorker, Threepenny Review, and Partisan Review.At every stage in his career, Michaels produced taut, spare tales of sex, love, and other adult intimacies: gossip, argument, friendship, guilt, rage. A fearless writer-"destructive, joyful, brilliant, purely creative," in the words of John Hawkes-Michaels probed his characters' motivations with brutal humor and startling frankness; his ear for the vernacular puts him in the company of Philip Roth, Grace Paley, and Bernard Malamud. Remarkable for its compression and cadences, his prose is nothing short of addictive.The Collected Stories is a landmark.

These 34 funny, tragic, bracing, and acerbic stories represent the complete short fiction of one of Ireland's finest living writers. On struggling farms, in Dublin's rain-drenched streets, or in parched exile in Franco's Spain, McGahern's characters wage a confused but touching war against the facts of life.

These 34 funny, tragic, bracing, and acerbic stories represent the complete short fiction of one of Ireland's finest living writers. On struggling farms, in Dublin's rain-drenched streets, or in parched exile in Franco's Spain, McGahern's characters wage a confused but touching war against the facts of life.

Since the publication of 'Self-Help', her first collection of stories, Lorrie Moore has been hailed as one of the greatest and most influential voices in American fiction. This title gathers together her complete stories and also includes: 'Paper Losses', 'The Juniper Tree', and 'Debarking'.

Lydia Davis is one of our most original and influential writers. She has been called “an American virtuoso of the short story form” (Salon) and “one of the quiet giants. . of American fiction” (Los Angeles Times Book Review). Now, for the first time, Davis’s short stories will be collected in one volume, from the groundbreaking Break It Down (1986) to the 2007 National Book Award nominee Varieties of Disturbance.The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis is an event in American letters.

The supreme introduction to the neurosis of Noah Cicero, "The Collected Works of Noah Cicero Vol. I" contains the early masterpieces by the greatest minimalist writer ever to hail from Youngstown, Ohio. Collecting Noah Cicero's most acclaimed and popular works, this volume includes the short novels "The Human War" (soon to be a major motion picture), "The Doomed," "The Condemned," and "Burning Babies," along with rare novellas and short stories that have not been available to the public in years. Stark in their beauty, raw in their sadness, and driven by a desperate compulsion to save — and be saved by — humanity, "The Collected Works of Noah Cicero Vol. I" highlights what it is to be young and poor in America. Buy this book and learn why freedom is good. Buy this book and become beautiful. Buy this book and know that the distance between you and happiness is the distance between you and the nearest Denny's. So get in the car and drive.(

Vasily Krymov is a first-generation Russian immigrant living in Youngstown, Ohio. He drinks coffee at the Waffle House. He drinks rum in seedy strip clubs. He washes dishes at a steakhouse for minimum wage. Through all of it, he thinks of suicide, envisioning grand escapes from his own personal hell.When he discovers a pill bottle full of Oxycontin in the restroom of a bar, Vasily thinks he has found his escape. He and his best friend devise a plant to sell the pills to raise enough money to head out west and escape the squalid streets of Youngstown forever. But for a man like Vasily, escaping one hell only means finding another.A bleak, comedic masterpiece of down-and-outers in decaying America, "The Insurgent" is Noah Cicero at his minimalistic best. "The Collected Works of Noah Cicero Vol. 2" also features three of Noah Cicero's most acclaimed short stories: "Two Old Lovers Bring Out Their Guns," "Visiting My Sister," and "Two Hard Workers."

"Scott McClanahan is a powerful, exceptional writer, and the overall effect of reading his deceptively simple stories is like getting hit in the head by a champion cage fighter cranked up on meth that was cooked in a trailer without running water in some Kentucky backwoods where people sing murder ballads to their children to put them to sleep." — DONALD RAY POLLOCK, author of "The Devil All the Time""He might be one of the great southern storytellers of our time." — VOL. 1 BROOKLYN"When I discovered the stories of Scott McClanahan last year, I was instantly enthralled with his natural storytelling voice and freaky funny tales. There's no pretense to Scott's work. It's like you're just dropped right into the middle of these fantastic and true stories. It's like a sweet blend of my favorite southern writers, Larry Brown and Harry Crews. Reading McClanahan is like listening to a good friend telling you his best real-life stories on your back porch on a humid night. And you both got a nice whiskey buzz going." — KEVIN SAMPSELL, author of "A Common Pornography""McClanahan's prose is unfettered and kinetic and his stories seem like a hyper-modern iteration of local color fiction. His delivery is guileless and his morality ambivalent and you get the sense, while reading him, that he is sitting next to you on a barstool, eating peanuts and drinking a beer, and intermittently getting up to pick a song on the jukebox." — THE RUMPUS"Reads like Bukowski with more surprises." — IMPOSE MAGAZINE

In 1988, Eric Cho, an aspiring writer, arrives at Macalester College. On his first day he meets a beautiful fledgling painter, Jessica Tsai, and another would-be novelist, the larger-than-life Joshua Yoon. Brilliant, bawdy, generous, and manipulative, Joshua alters the course of their lives, rallying them together when they face an adolescent act of racism. As adults in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the three friends reunite as the 3AC, the Asian American Artists Collective together negotiating the demands of art, love, commerce, and idealism until another racially tinged controversy hits the headlines, this time with far greater consequences. Long after the 3AC has disbanded, Eric reflects on these events as he tries to make sense of Joshua 's recent suicide. With wit, humor, and compassion, The Collective explores the dream of becoming an artist, and questions whether the reality is worth the sacrifice.

The novel is about a lonely young man, Frederick Clegg, who works as a clerk in a city hall, and collects butterflies in his spare time. Clegg is obsessed with Miranda Grey, a middle-class art student at the Slade School of Fine Art. He admires her from a distance, but is unable to make any contact with her because of his nonexistent social skills.There have been numerous presentations and adaptations of The Collector, including film and theatre. The Collector also appears in various songs, television episodes, and books.

Night on an island. A well-behaved demon will come from the woods and ask you your name. Answer, and you are left nameless. But can anybody live without a name, even through one single night?

Winner of the 2013 Jan Michalski PrizeLonglististed for the Man Asian Literary PrizeA new novel by the master of Iranian letters that directly engages politics in Iran todayTen years in the writing, this fearless novel — so powerful it’s banned in Iran — tells the stirring story of a tortured people forced to live under successive oppressive regimes.It begins on a pitch black, rainy night, when there’s a knock on the Colonel’s door. Two policemen have come to summon him to collect the tortured body of his youngest daughter. The Islamic Revolution is devouring its own children. Set over the course of a single night, the novel follows the Colonel as he pays a bribe to recover his daughter’s body and then races to bury her before sunrise.As we watch him struggle with the death of his innocent child, we find him wracked with guilt and anger over the condition of his country, particularly as represented by his own children: a son who fell during the 1979 revolution; another driven to madness after being tortured during the Shah’s regime; a third who went off to martyr himself fighting for the ayatollahs in their war against Iraq; one murdered daughter, and another who survives by being married to a cruel opportunist.An incredibly powerful novel about nation, history and family, The Colonel is a startling illumination of the consequences of years of oppression and political upheaval in Iran.

After 20 years of hibernation, former pool champion "Fast" Eddie Felson is playing exhibition matches with former rival Minnesota Fats in shopping malls for prizes like cable television. With one failed marriage and years of running a pool hall, Eddie is now ready to regain the skills needed to compete in a world of pool that has changed dramatically since he left it behind. The real challenge comes when Eddie realizes that in order to compete successfully, he must hone his skills in the game of nine-ball as opposed to the straight pool that had once won him fame. With a new generation of competitors, fear and doubt and the daily possibility of failure arise, giving Fast Eddie a new challenge to overcome.

The Color of Money is the source of the 1986 film starring Paul Newman in the role he had originated in The Hustler.

His eyes “shine with a glimmer of perpetual amusement”; his sartorial taste is impeccable; Ossama is “a thief, not a legitimated thief, such as a minister, banker, or real-estate developer; he is a modest thief.” He knows “that by dressing with the same elegance as the licensed robbers of the people, he could elude the mistrustful gaze of the police,” and so he glides lazily around the cafés of Cairo, seeking his prey. His country may be a disaster, but he’s a hedonist convinced that “nothing on this earth is tragic for an intelligent man.”One fat victim (“everything about him oozed opulence and theft on a grand scale”) is relieved of his crocodile wallet. In it Ossama finds not just a gratifying amount of cash, but also a letter — a letter from the Ministry of Public Works, cutting off its ties to the fat man. A source of rich bribes heretofore, the fat man is now too hot to handle; he’s a fabulously wealthy real-estate developer, lately much in the news because one of his cheap buildings has just collapsed, killing 50 tenants. Ossama “by some divine decree has become the repository of a scandal” of epic proportions. And so he decides he must act. .Among the books to be treasured by the utterly singular Albert Cossery, his last, hilarious novel, The Colors of Infamy, is a particular jewel.

'In the race to be first in describing the lost generation of the 1980s, Geoff Dyer in The Colour of Memory leads past the winning post. 'We're not lost,' one of his hero's friend's says, 'we're virtually extinct'. It is a small world in Brixton that Dyer commemorates, of council flat and instant wasteland, of living on the dole and the scrounge, of mugging, which is merely begging by force, and of listening to Callas and Coltrane. It is the nostalgia of the DHSS Bohemians, the children of unsocial security, in an urban landscape of debris and wreckage. Not since Colin MacInnes's City of Spades and Absolute Beginners thirty years ago has a novel stuck a flick-knife so accurately into the young and marginal city. A low-keyed style and laconic wit touch up The Colour of Memory.' The Times