Exemplary stories that reveal the bizarre, the disturbing, the perilous, and the wise in other civilizations -- from one of America's most important writers of the twentieth century.

Exemplary stories that reveal the bizarre, the disturbing, the perilous, and the wise in other civilizations -- from one of America's most important writers of the twentieth century.

Vancouver, summer 1962. Cyril Andrachuk and Connie Chow are seventeen and in love.Cyril is the only Canadian-born member of the Andrachuk family, his parents and older brother having survived Stalin’s systematic starving of the Ukraine. His brother’s brittle bones are not the only legacy of Stalin. Cyril’s famine-free childhood has built up a distance between him and the rest of the household.His family’s past charges Cyril’s present with bitter overtones he barely understands and Cyril’s love of art is beyond his family’s comprehension; Cyril is destined to be a working man, not a working artist.In this house built on the edge of a cemetery, where his mother reviews the burials over her morning tea, creativity and joy are suspect. Mourning the early death of his father, Cyril finds solace in lovingly drawing his father’s metal-working tools and in his happiness with Connie. But his family’s resentment sows the seeds of betrayal, and Cyril must find a way to live with his family’s past in order to find his future.Art, love, and history furnish the setting in this tale. The Delusionist is a novel of longing, loss and rediscovered joy.Praise for Grant Buday:“Buday's genius is that of the storyteller.”—The Vancouver Sun“…mordantly funny."—The National Post“…a rollicking black comedy of errors with a host of unforgettable characters.”—Quill & Quire (on White Lung)

His future is disastrous, his present indecent, his past divine. He Is Darcy Dancer, youthful squire of Andromeda Park, the great gray stone mansion inhabited by Crooks, the cross-eyed butler, and the sexy, aristocratic Miss Von B.

This new collection of eleven stories by the author of The Blue Afternoon takes readers back in time from a contemporary Hollywood film shoot to World War I in Vienna, introducing an unforgettable cast of characters. Artful, witty, moving, The Destiny of Nathalie X is a confirmation of Boyd's standing as a master storyteller. 208 pp. Author tour. 15,000 print. "From the Hardcover edition."

From one of our most celebrated masters, a touching, comic, deeply humane collection of linked stories about surprising developments in a gated community.“I find myself inclined to set down for whomever, before my memory goes kaput altogether, some account of our little community, in particular of what Margie and I consider to have been its most interesting hour: the summer of the Peeping Tom.” Something has disturbed the comfortably retired denizens of a pristine Florida-style gated community in Chesapeake Bay country. In the dawn of the new millennium and the evening of their lives, these empty nesters discover that their tidy enclave can be as colorful, shocking, and surreal as any of John Barth’s fictional locales. From the high jinks of a toga party to marital infidelities, a baffling suicide pact, and the sudden, apocalyptic destruction of the short-lived development, Barth brings mordant humor and compassion to the lives of characters we all know well. From “one of the most prodigally gifted comic novelists writing in English today” (Newsweek), The Development is John Barth at his most accessible and sympathetic best.

From the acclaimed author of Knockemstiff—called “powerful, remarkable, exceptional” by the Los Angeles Times—comes a dark and riveting vision of America that delivers literary excitement in the highest degree.In The Devil All the Time, Donald Ray Pollock has written a novel that marries the twisted intensity of Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers with the religious and Gothic overtones of Flannery O’Connor at her most haunting.Set in rural southern Ohio and West Virginia, The Devil All the Time follows a cast of compelling and bizarre characters from the end of World War II to the 1960s. There’s Willard Russell, tormented veteran of the carnage in the South Pacific, who can’t save his beautiful wife, Charlotte, from an agonizing death by cancer no matter how much sacrificial blood he pours on his “prayer log.” There’s Carl and Sandy Henderson, a husband-and-wife team of serial killers, who troll America’s highways searching for suitable models to photograph and exterminate. There’s the spider-handling preacher Roy and his crippled virtuoso-guitar-playing sidekick, Theodore, running from the law. And caught in the middle of all this is Arvin Eugene Russell, Willard and Charlotte’s orphaned son, who grows up to be a good but also violent man in his own right.Donald Ray Pollock braids his plotlines into a taut narrative that will leave readers astonished and deeply moved. With his first novel, he proves himself a master storyteller in the grittiest and most uncompromising American grain.

From the acclaimed author of Knockemstiff—called “powerful, remarkable, exceptional” by the Los Angeles Times—comes a dark and riveting vision of America that delivers literary excitement in the highest degree.In The Devil All the Time, Donald Ray Pollock has written a novel that marries the twisted intensity of Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers with the religious and Gothic overtones of Flannery O’Connor at her most haunting.Set in rural southern Ohio and West Virginia, The Devil All the Time follows a cast of compelling and bizarre characters from the end of World War II to the 1960s. There’s Willard Russell, tormented veteran of the carnage in the South Pacific, who can’t save his beautiful wife, Charlotte, from an agonizing death by cancer no matter how much sacrificial blood he pours on his “prayer log.” There’s Carl and Sandy Henderson, a husband-and-wife team of serial killers, who troll America’s highways searching for suitable models to photograph and exterminate. There’s the spider-handling preacher Roy and his crippled virtuoso-guitar-playing sidekick, Theodore, running from the law. And caught in the middle of all this is Arvin Eugene Russell, Willard and Charlotte’s orphaned son, who grows up to be a good but also violent man in his own right.Donald Ray Pollock braids his plotlines into a taut narrative that will leave readers astonished and deeply moved. With his first novel, he proves himself a master storyteller in the grittiest and most uncompromising American grain.

"Goldbach's touch is light and his narrative momentum is fierce." — The Globe and MailRobert James, a private detective more interested in chronicling his cases than solving them, gets a midnight call from a young woman whose older husband has been found with a knife in his chest. Murder, corruption, and betrayal ensue as he's drawn into the dark underworld of his client, but hapless Robert and his sidekick, a flower-delivery guy, can't stop drinking, smoking, and philosophizing long enough to keep up. Imagine The Big Sleep via Fernando Pessoa, with a side of Buster Keaton.John Goldbach is the author of Selected Blackouts, a collection of stories.

There was a crooked man and he walked a crooked mile.He made a crooked deal and he blew a crooked pile.He dug a crooked hole.And he sank the crooked isle.And they all went to hell in a stew of crooked bile.The Devil I Know is a thrilling novel of greed and hubris, set against the backdrop of a brewing international debt crisis. Told by Tristram, in the form of a mysterious testimony, it recounts his return home after a self-imposed exile only to find himself trapped as a middle man played on both sides — by a grotesque builder he's known since childhood on the one hand, and a shadowy businessman he's never met on the other. Caught between them, as an overblown property development begins in his home town of Howth, it follows Tristram's dawning realisation that all is not well.From a writer unafraid to take risks, The Devil I Know is a bold, brilliant and disturbing piece of storytelling.

Three short novels by the author of the cult classic MotormanCOTTAGE INDUSTRYA bloody family drama about the bastard child of Charles MansonAfter aiding in the murder of his aunt, Charles Manson's illegitimate son starts his own home euthanasia business.Frequently interrupted by a PBS radio broadcast on American culture, Junior and Lorna capitalize on the population's desire to end the suffering of their family members with quick and painless death while living in their parents' basement. As the business grows, so does Junior's love for the job.WIND WAGONAn absurdist western for the screenAfter killing a gold prospector, shooting his own foot with a rifle, and killing a smithy, Howard Dewey sits in a jail cell, marking his time on the wall with lampblack, watching crickets copulate, sticking pill bugs in his ears, and memorizing the Bible.While Dewey's beard grows longer, his failed partner in crime, Jonah, settles down on a worthless homestead to farm prairie dogs with his mail-order bride from Kansas City. A baby boy is born to them, four months premature with a birthmark the shape of a vestigial third eye.Meanwhile, her entire family put in the ground by Dewey and Jonah, Miss Katie Binder, a woman with the power to heal all addictions, waits in an empty house for the legendary wind wagon to come tearing across the desert.THE DEVIL IN KANSASPhilip K. Dick meets the Cohen BrothersAfter Sherry lights her house on fire with her motocross star husband trapped inside, she sets out on a road trip with her seventeen-year-old son, Joey — a talented musical saw player — across the country and into a bizarre alternate universe called Witchy Toe, which Joey has previously visited. Like Terry Gilliam's Brazil or the corporate world of Kafka, the rules in this alien city change daily, on the whims of unseen masters. As they struggle to survive in this strange new world, Sherry's not-quite-dead husband sets out on a slaughtering rampage from Colorado to the heart of Texas.

"The Devil's Larder" is a novel in sixty-four parts, exploring our deepest human concerns — love, hate, hopes and desires — through our relationship with food. Packed with delightful and subversive ingredients, with behaviour more suited to the bedroom than to the table, and with the most curious and idosyncratic of diners, this is a sensuous portrait of a community where meals are served with lashings of passion and recipes come spiced with unexpected challenges and hopes.'Delicious. . the sheer quantity of inventiveness is astounding' " Mail on Sunday "'Funny, frightening and erotic' "The Times "

PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction (nominee)From the universally acclaimed author of Breath, Eyes, memory and Krik?Krak! (both Opera's Book Club selections), a powerful new work of fiction that explores the trials and reconciliations in the life of a man known as a 'dew breaker,' a torturer, whose past crimes in the country of his birth, lie hidden beneath his new American relaity. In Haiti in the dictatorial 1960's, Manhattan in the 1970s, Brooklyn and Queens today, we meet the dew breaker's family, neighbours, and victims. An unforgettable, deeply resonant book – of love, remorse, history, and hope, of rebellions both personal and political – The Dew Breaker proves once more that in Edwidge Danticat we have a major American writer.“Breathtaking… With terrifying wit and flowered pungency, Edwidge Danticat has managed over the past 10 years to portray the torment of the Haitian people… In The Dew Breaker, Danticat has written a Haitian truth: prisoners all, even the jailers.” – The New York Times Book Review“Danticat [is] surely one of contemporary fiction’s most sensitive conveyors of hope’s bittersweet persistence in the midst of poverty and violence.” – The Miami Herald“Thrillingly topical… [The Dew Breaker] shines… Danticat leads her readers into the underworld. It’s furnished like home.” – Los Angeles Times Book Review“Stunning… Beautifully written fiction [that] seamlessly blend[s] the personal and political, [and] asks questions about shame and guilt, forgiveness and redemption, and the legacy of violence… haunting.” – USA Today“Fascinating… Danticat is a fine and serious fiction writer who has slowly grown as an artist with each book she has written.” – Chicago Tribune“In its varied characters, its descriptive power and its tightly linked images and themes, [The Dew Breaker] is a rewarding and affecting read, rich with insights not just about Haiti but also about the human condition.” – San Francisco Chronicle“[The Dew Breaker] is, most profoundly, about love’s healing powers. From its marvelous descriptions of place to the gentle opening up of characters, this is a book that engages the imagination.” – Elle“With her grace and her imperishable humanity… [Danticat] makes sadness beautiful.” – The New York Observer“Danticat has an emotional imagination capable of evoking empathy for both predator and prey.” – Entertainment Weekly“With characteristic lyricism and grace, Danticat probes the painful legacy of a time when sons turned against their fathers, children were orphaned, and communities were torn apart.” – The Philadelphia Inquirer“Delicate and poetic… Danticat [is] more than a storyteller, she’s a writer… Her voice is like an X-Acto knife-precise, sharp and perfect for carving out small details.” – Minneapolis Star Tribune“Filled with quiet intensity and elegant, thought-provoking prose… An elegiac and powerful novel with a fresh presentation of evil and the healing potential of forgiveness.” – People“[Danticat] fuses the beauty and tragedy of her native land, a land her characters want to forget and remember all at once.” – Ebony“In these stories Edwidge Danticat continues to speak eloquently for those who in losing their sorrowful homeland have lost their voices.” – The Boston Globe“Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat presents simple truths… this, the novelist seems to be saying, is how you understand; here is the primer for survival.” – The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

One of the best and most popular of Kerouac's autobiographical novels, The Dharma Bums is based on experiences the writer had during the mid-1950s while living in California, after he'd become interested in Buddhism's spiritual mode of understanding. One of the book's main characters, Japhy Ryder, is based on the real poet Gary Snyder, who was a close friend and whose interest in Buddhism influenced Kerouac. This book is a must-read for any serious Kerouac fan.Two ebullient young men are engaged in a passionate search for dharma, or truth. Their major adventure is the pursuit of the Zen way, which takes them climbing into the high Sierras to seek the lesson of solitude, a lesson that has a hard time surviving their forays into the pagan groves of San Francisco's Bohemia with its marathon wine-drinking bouts, poetry jam sessions, experiments in "yabyum," and similar nonascetic pastimes.This autobiographical novel appeared just a year after the author's explosive On the Road put the Beat generation on the literary map and Kerouac on the best-seller lists. The same expansiveness, humor, and contagious zest for life that sparked the earlier novel ignites this one.

Shaun Bythell owns The Bookshop, Wigtown - Scotland's largest second-hand bookshop. It contains 100,000 books, spread over a mile of shelving, with twisting corridors and roaring fires, and all set in a beautiful, rural town by the edge of the sea. A book-lover's paradise? Well, almost ... In these wry and hilarious diaries, Shaun provides an inside look at the trials and tribulations of life in the book trade, from struggles with eccentric customers to wrangles with his own staff, who include the ski-suit-wearing, bin-foraging Nicky. He takes us with him on buying trips to old estates and auction houses, recommends books (both lost classics and new discoveries), introduces us to the thrill of the unexpected find, and evokes the rhythms and charms of small-town life, always with a sharp and sympathetic eye.

Look who's on the "Dick Gibson Radio Show": Arnold the Memory Expert ("I've memorized the entire West Coast shoreline — except for cloud cover and fog banks"). Bernie Perk, the burning pharmacist. Henry Harper, the nine-year old orphan millionaire, terrified of being adopted. The woman whose life revolves around pierced lobes. An evil hypnotist. Swindlers. Con-men. And Dick Gibson himself. Anticipating talk radio and its crazed hosts, Stanley Elkin creates a brilliant comic world held together by American manias and maniacs in all their forms, and a character who perfectly understands what Americans want and gives it to them.

THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER‘People say I am a megalomaniac. It is not true. I am an exceptional being, providence incarnate, envied by the gods, able to make a faith of his cause.’October 2011. In the dying days of the Libyan civil war, Muammar Gaddafi is hiding out in his home town of Sirte along with his closest advisors. They await a convoy that will take them south, away from encroaching rebel forces and NATO aerial attacks. The mood is sombre. In what will be his final night, Gaddafi reflects on an extraordinary life, whilst still raging against the West, his fellow Arab nations and the ingratitude of the Libyan people.In this gripping imagining of the last hours of President Gaddafi, Yasmina Khadra provides us with fascinating insight into the mind of one of the most complex and controversial figures of recent history.

This is a searing short novel, built of the interlocking fates of a badger-baiter and a disconsolate farmer, unfolding in a stark rural setting where man, animal, land and weather are at loggerheads. Their two paths converge with tragic inevitability. Jones writes of the physiology of grief and the isolation of loss with brilliance, and about the simple rawness of animal existence with a naturalist's unblinking eye. His is a pared-down prose of resonant simplicity and occasional lushness. His writing about ducks and dogs and cows is axe-sharp. There is not a whiff of the bucolic pastoral or the romanticized sod here. This is a real rural ride. It is short, but crackles with latent compressed energy that makes it swell to fill more space than at first glance it occupies.

Manfred Baumann is a loner. Socially awkward and perpetually ill at ease, he spends his evenings quietly drinking and surreptitiously observing Adele Bedeau, the sullen but alluring waitress at a drab bistro in the unremarkable small French town of Saint-Louis. But one day, she simply vanishes into thin air. When Georges Gorski, a detective haunted by his failure to solve one of his first murder cases, is called in to investigate the girl's disappearance, Manfred's repressed world is shaken to its core and he is forced to confront the dark secrets of his past. 'The Disappearance of Adele Bedeau' is a literary mystery novel that is, at heart, an engrossing psychological portrayal of an outsider pushed to the limit by his own feverish imagination.