Time Out New York's #1 Best Book of 2008."[A] funny, inquisitive novel [that] asks readers to re-examine their ideas of the Western frontier and personal freedom." — Jeffrey Trachtenberg, Wall Street Journal"May be the most hallucinogenic western you'll ever catch in the movie house of your mind's eye." — Erik Davis, Bookforum"A picaresque American Book of the Dead… in the tradition of Thomas Pynchon, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut and Terry Southern." — David Ulin, Los Angeles Times Book Review"Should be as well known as anything by Cormac McCarthy, Steve Erickson, or Jim Harrison." — Paul DiFilippo, Barnes & Noble Review“Rudolph Wurlitzer takes no prisoners. An uncompromising, wild, and woolly tale.”—Sam Shepard“Sam Beckett with a six-gun and a sack of rattlesnakes.”—Gary Indiana"Where has Rudy Wurlitzer been for the last fifteen years? The mental traveler who gave us Nog and the Two-Lane Blacktop screenplay takes another vision quest, this time into the Old American West. His mapping of mythic and sacred landscapes and his ability to distinguish between different tribal world-views makes this a truly revealing conversation." — KCRW's BookwormIn his fifth novel, Rudolph Wurlitzer has written a classic tale of the Western frontier and created one of his most memorable characters in Zebulon, a mountain man whose view of life has been challenged by a curse from a mysterious Native American woman whose lover he inadvertently murdered.The Drop Edge of Yonder begins in the mountains of Colorado and ends in the far reaches of the Northwest, a journey that includes the beginnings of a Mexican revolution, a voyage across the Gulf of Mexico to Panama, and up the coast of California to San Francisco and the gold fields. Along the trail, Zebulon becomes involved in a series of tragic love triangles, witnesses the death of his mother and father, and confronts the age-old questions of life, love, and death.Rudolph Wurlitzer is the author of the novels Nog, Flats, Quake, and Slow Fade, and the nonfiction book, Hard Travel to Sacred Places. Among his twelve produced screenplays are Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Two Lane Blacktop, Voyager, Walker, and Little Buddha.

Finally back in print, a frighteningly lucid feminist horror story about marriage

The Dry Heart begins and ends with the matter-of-fact pronouncement: “I shot him between the eyes.” As the tale—a plunge into the chilly waters of loneliness, desperation, and bitterness—proceeds, the narrator’s murder of her flighty husband takes on a certain logical inevitability. Stripped of any preciousness or sentimentality, Natalia Ginzburg’s writing here is white-hot, tempered by rage. She transforms the unhappy tale of an ordinary dull marriage into a rich psychological thriller that seems to beg the question: why don’t more wives kill their husbands?

Seventeen-year-old Bianca Piper is cynical and loyal, and she doesn't think she's the prettiest of her friends by a long shot. She's also way too smart to fall for the charms of man-slut and slimy school hottie Wesley Rush. In fact, Bianca hates him. And when he nicknames her "Duffy," she throws her Coke in his face.But things aren't so great at home right now. Desperate for a distraction, Bianca ends up kissing Wesley. And likes it. Eager for escape, she throws herself into a closeted enemies-with-benefits relationship with Wesley.Until it all goes horribly awry. It turns out that Wesley isn't such a bad listener, and his life is pretty screwed up, too. Suddenly Bianca realizes with absolute horror that she's falling for the guy she thought she hated more than anyone.

A few years ago, Owen Sheers stumbled upon a dusty book in his father's study by the extraordinary Arthur Cripps, part-time lyric poet and full-time unorthodox missionary who served in Rhodesia for fifty years from 1902. Sheers' discovery prompts a quest into colonial Africa at the turn of the century, by way of war, a doomed love affair and friction with the ruling authorities. His personal journey into the contemporary heart of darkness that is Mugabe's Zimbabwe finds more than Cripps' legacy — Sheers finds a land characterised by terror and fear, and blighted by the land reform policies that Cripps himself anticipated.

In the brief golden years of King Edward VII’s reign, Rosie McCosh and her three sisters are growing up in an idyllic and eccentric household in Kent, with their ‘pals’ the Pitt boys on one side of the fence and the Pendennis boys on the other. But their days of childhood innocence and adventure are destined to be followed by the apocalypse that will overwhelm their world as they come to adulthood.For Rosie, the path ahead is full of challenges: torn between her love for two young men, her sense of duty and her will to live her life to the full, she has to navigate her way through extraordinary times. Can she, and her sisters, build new lives out of the opportunities and devastations that follow the Great War?Louis de Bernières’ magnificent and moving novel follows the lives of an unforgettable cast of characters as the Edwardian age disintegrates into the Great War, and they strike out to seek what happiness can be salvaged from the ruins of the old world.

William's life is beset with frustration: his band turns his melodic songs into grotesque parodies of Status Quo, and cool Madelaine dangles out of reach. Things could hardly get worse, it seems — until he becomes the only witness to a bizarre murder. "A very clever, very funny book…Brilliant" — "Sunday Times". "Like a Hitchcock movie on drugs…a novel of considerable gusto and panache" — "Observer". "It's about being young, poor, confused and in love…Sharp, lucid and witty" — "Guardian".

Here is a true literary event — the long-awaited new novel by Carlos Fuentes, one of the world’s great writers. By turns a tragedy and a farce, an acidic black comedy and an indictment of modern politics, The Eagle’s Throne is a seriously entertaining and perceptive story of international intrigue, sexual deception, naked ambition, and treacherous betrayal.In the near future, at a meeting of the United Nations Security Council, Mexico’s idealistic president has dared to vote against the U.S. occupation of Colombia and Washington’s refusal to pay OPEC prices for oil. Retaliation is swift. Concocting a “glitch” in a Florida satellite, America’s president cuts Mexico’s communications systems — no phones, faxes, or e-mails — and plunges the country into an administrative nightmare of colossal proportions.Now, despite the motto that “a Mexican politician never puts anything in writing,” people have no choice but to communicate through letters, which Fuentes crafts with a keen understanding of man’s motives and desires. As the blizzard of activity grows more and more complex, political adversaries come out to prey. The ineffectual president, his scheming cabinet secretary, a thuggish and ruthless police chief, and an unscrupulous, sensual kingmaker are just a few of the fascinating characters maneuvering and jockeying for position to achieve the power they all so desperately crave.

After a problematic start, Andrei Makine is getting better with every new book. His earlier setbacks were partly due to the snobbery of the French, who did not believe that a Russian could write better than they could in their own language. When he pretended his novels had been translated, they began to earn high accolades and won a couple of prestigious prizes.Yet the tone of these earlier triumphs was sometimes too dependent on mystique, as if cashing in on the much-vaunted but dubious "Russian soul", a quality eminently exploitable by crass publishers like the one who allowed Makine's Once on the River Amur (a Siberian waterway) to be rendered as Once Upon the River Love.Makine then found his true and necessary metier in a series of apparently slight novels that disclose profound insights into Russia's recent history. Requiem for the East and A Life's Music, his two most recent books, have given us a poignant and privileged understanding of what it was to be a Russian caught up in the Second World War.AdvertisementAdvertisementThe rather awkwardly named The Earth and Sky of Jacques Dorme (it sounds no better in French) continues to piece together this mosaic, much in the way that the novels of Solzhenitsyn, when read in chronological order, bear witness to the terrible march of the Soviet regime.But there the resemblance ends. Makine proceeds by glimpse and allusion; we don't realise, when we witness the vivid, stormy atmospherics of the first page, that this couple somewhere out on the steppe, swept away by urgent love-making in a strange bedroom that lacks a far wall, have seized a few precious hours from the Battle of Stalingrad raging 70 miles away.We don't know who they are, how they came together, or why they talk about France. The stateless man, who is piloting a Red plane, remarks mysteriously: "As for the English, I don't know whether we can count on them. But you know, it's like a battle in the air. It's not always the number of planes that decides it, nor even how good they are. How to explain? It's the air. Yes, the air. Sometimes you feel the air is supporting you, playing on your side. The air or heaven itself."With these few words you realise this is no ordinary war story. Genre-wise, it turns out to be partly a quest novel: the woman goes on to befriend a little boy from an orphanage and beguiles him with tales about her French provenance, her Russian destiny and the few days of desperate love. The boy feels intimately connected to that tempestuous night and 50 years later determines to find the plane in which the man crashed and died.His quest fulfilled, the boy, who has grown up to be a writer, tries to have an account of it published. His first encounter with a representative of the industry is bewildering and galling and leads, after his precipitous exit, to a superb meditation on the relationship of truth to fiction. Some historians, he reflects, dismissed the whole of War and Peace on the grounds that Tolstoy muddled some of the details regarding the Battle of Borodino. Makine's rebuttal lies precisely in the story he concocts, a factional tour de force brilliantly and incontrovertibly grounded in some of the most monumental events of the last century, yet fragmentary, impressionistic, and touchingly, passionately human in the telling. It is not only an exquisite pleasure to read, it is the best, because it is the most human kind of history.

Enter the world of Evie Steppman, born into the dying days of the British Empire in Nigeria. It's loud and cacophonous. Why? Because Evie can hear things no one else can. Although she's too young to understand all the sounds she takes in, she hoards them in a vast internal sonic archive.Today, alone in an attic in Scotland, Evie's powers of hearing are starting to fade, and she must write her story before it disintegrates into a meaningless din. But the attic itself is not as quiet as she hoped. The scratching of mice, the hum of traffic, the tic-toc of a pocket watch and countless other sounds merge with the noises of Evie's past: her time in the womb, her childhood in Nigeria, her travels across America with her lover…

Winner of the 2006 National Book Award.The Echo Maker is "a remarkable novel, from one of our greatest novelists, and a book that will change all who read it" (Booklist, starred review).On a winter night on a remote Nebraska road, twenty-seven-year-old Mark Schluter has a near-fatal car accident. His older sister, Karin, returns reluctantly to their hometown to nurse Mark back from a traumatic head injury. But when Mark emerges from a coma, he believes that this woman-who looks, acts, and sounds just like his sister-is really an imposter. When Karin contacts the famous cognitive neurologist Gerald Weber for help, he diagnoses Mark as having Capgras syndrome. The mysterious nature of the disease, combined with the strange circumstances surrounding Mark's accident, threatens to change all of their lives beyond recognition. In The Echo Maker, Richard Powers proves himself to be one of our boldest and most entertaining novelists.

The mesmerising new novel from the acclaimed author of The Bellwether Revivals: a rich and immersive story of love, obsession, creativity and disintegration.On a forested island off the coast of Istanbul stands Portmantle, a gated refuge for beleaguered artists. There, a curious assembly of painters, architects, writers and musicians strive to restore their faded talents. Elspeth 'Knell' Conroy is a celebrated painter who has lost faith in her ability and fled the dizzying art scene of 1960s London. On the island, she spends her nights locked in her blacked-out studio, testing a strange new pigment for her elusive masterpiece.But when a disaffected teenager named Fullerton arrives at the refuge, he disrupts its established routines. He is plagued by a recurring nightmare that steers him into danger, and Knell is left to pick apart the chilling mystery. Where did the boy come from, what is 'The Ecliptic', and how does it relate to their abandoned lives in England?

Late on night, the body of a young man is delivered to the morgue of an Italian town. The next day's newspapers report that he was killed in a police raid, and that went by the obviously false name "Carlo Nobodi." Spino, the morgue attendant on duty at the time, becomes obsessed with tracing the identity of the corpse. "Why do you want to know about him?" asks a local priest. "Because he is dead and I'm alive," replies Spino. In this spare yet densely packed cautionary tale, Tabucchi reminds us that it is impossible to reach the edge of the horizon since it always recedes before us, but suggests that some people "carry the horizon with them in their eyes."

Ever since her engagement, the strangest thing has been happening to Marian McAlpin: she can't eat. First meat. Then eggs, vegetables, cake, pumpkin seeds-everything! Worse yet, she has the crazy feeling that she's being eaten. Marian ought to feel consumed with passion. But really she just feels…consumed. A brilliant and powerful work rich in irony and metaphor, The Edible Woman is an unforgettable materpiece by a true master of contemporary literary fiction.

“A fine book, a rich, achingly painful story that is made for all of us who have ever felt a hunger for the mountains. Few books have so accurately described the way stony heights can define one’s sense of joy and rightness. And it is an exquisite unfolding of the deep way humans may love one another.”

—Annie Proulx

For fans of Elena Ferrante, Fredrik Backman, and Paulo Coelho comes the international sensation about the friendship between two young Italian boys from different backgrounds and how their incredibly strong connection evolves, changes, and challenges them throughout their lives.

Pietro is a lonely boy living in Milan. With his parents becoming more distant each day, the only thing the family shares is their love for the Dolomites, the mountains that hug the northeastern border of Italy.

While on vacation at the foot of the mountains, Pietro meets Bruno, an adventurous, spirited local boy. Together they spend many summers exploring the mountain’s meadows and peaks and discover the similarities and differences in their lives, their backgrounds, and their futures. The two boys come to find the true meaning of friendship and camaraderie, even as their divergent paths in life—Bruno’s in the mountains, Pietro’s in cosmopolitan cities across the world—test the strength and meaning of their connection.

A modern Italian masterpiece,The Eight Mountains is a lyrical coming-of-age story about the power of male friendships and the enduring bond between fathers and sons.

Opening on the windswept front of Morecambe Bay, on the remote north-west coast of England, The Electric Michelangelo is a novel of love, loss and the art of tattooing. Hugely atmospheric, exotic and familiar, it is an exquisitely rendered portrait of seaside resorts on opposite sides of the Atlantic by one of the most uniquely talented novelists of her generation.

In 1551, King João III of Portugal gave Archduke Maximilian an unusual wedding present: an elephant named Solomon. The elephant’s journey from Lisbon to Vienna was witnessed and remarked upon by scholars, historians, and ordinary people. Out of this material, José Saramago has spun a novel already heralded as “a triumph of language, imagination, and humor” (El País).Solomon and his keeper, Subhro, begin in dismal conditions, forgotten in a corner of the palace grounds. When it occurs to the king and queen that an elephant would be an appropriate wedding gift, everyone rushes to get them ready: Subhro is given two new suits of clothes and Solomon a long overdue scrub.Accompanied by the Archduke, his new wife, and the royal guard, our unlikely heroes traverse a continent riven by the Reformation and civil wars. They make their way through the storied cities of northern Italy: Genoa, Piacenza, Mantua, Verona, Venice, and Trento, where the Council of Trent is in session. They brave the Alps and the terrifying Isarco and Brenner Passes; they sail across the Mediterranean Sea and up the Inn River (elephants, it turns out, are natural sailors). At last they make their grand entry into the imperial city.The Elephant’s Journey is a delightful, witty tale of friendship and adventure.

A master of the travel narrative weaves three intertwined novellas of Westerners transformed by their sojourns in India.This startling, far-reaching book captures the tumult, ambition, hardship, and serenity that mark today’s India. Theroux’s Westerners risk venturing far beyond the subcontinent’s well-worn paths to discover woe or truth or peace. A middle-aged couple on vacation veers heedlessly from idyll to chaos. A buttoned-up Boston lawyer finds succor in Mumbai’s reeking slums. And a young woman befriends an elephant in Bangalore.We also meet Indian characters as singular as they are reflective of the country’s subtle ironies: an executive who yearns to become a holy beggar, an earnest young striver whose personality is rewired by acquiring an American accent, a miracle-working guru, and others.As ever, Theroux’s portraits of people and places explode stereotypes to exhilarating effect. The Elephanta Suite urges us toward a fresh, compelling, and often inspiring notion of what India is, and what it can do to those who try to lose--or find--themselves there.

Winner of the French Academy's Grand Prix du Roman."Michon's prose tends to slow down in order to oblige you to hear its rhythms and also to see and touch and smell what is happening beneath it."-"Harper's Magazine""He was not tall, unobtrusive, but he held your attention by his feverish silence, his dark cheer, his alternately arrogant and oblique manner-grim, you would call it. At least that was true seeing him later in life. None of that appears on the Wurzburg ceilings in the portrait Tiepolo left of him, when the model was twenty years old: he is there, so they say, and you can go see him there, perched among a hundred princes, a hundred constables, and ushers. . "Corentin, a young man of humble origins, rises up in Parisian society, becoming a famous painter who is called upon to decorate the homes of Louis XIV's mistresses. Yet his masterpiece is "The Eleven," a revolutionary representation of the eleven members of the Committee of Public Safety during the Reign of Terror.Pierre Michon, born in Cards, France, in 1945, is one of France's foremost contemporary writers. He has been awarded the Prix Decembre, the Grand Prix du Roman (for "The Eleven"), and the Prix de la Ville de Paris for his body of work.Elizabeth Deshays is a teacher and a translator. She is the author of a study on bilingual education, "L'Enfant Bilingue." She lives in Provence, France.Jody Gladding is a poet and translator of over twenty books from the French. Her most recent collection of poetry is "Rooms and Their Airs" (Milkweed Editions). She teaches in the MFA program at Vermont College of Fine Arts.