Mathea Martinsen has never been good at dealing with other people. After a lifetime, her only real accomplishment is her longevity: everyone she reads about in the obituaries has died younger than she is now. Afraid that her life will be over before anyone knows that she lived, Mathea digs out her old wedding dress, bakes some sweet cakes, and heads out into the world — to make her mark. She buries a time capsule out in the yard. (It gets dug up to make room for a flagpole.) She wears her late husband’s watch and hopes people will ask her for the time. (They never do.) Is it really possible for a woman to disappear so completely that the world won’t notice her passing? The Faster I Walk, the Smaller I Am is a macabre twist on the notion that life “must be lived to the fullest.”

Prize-winning author Benjamin Hale’s fiction abounds with a love of language and a wild joy for storytelling. In prose alternately stark, lush and hallucinatory, occasionally nightmarish and often absurd, the seven stories in this collection are suffused with fear and desire, introducing us to a company of indelible characters reeling with love, jealousy, megalomania, and despair.As in his debut novel, The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore, the voices in these stories speak from the margins: a dominatrix whose longtime client, a US congressman, drops dead during a tryst in a hotel room; an addict in precarious recovery who lands a job driving a truck full of live squid; a heartbroken performance artist who attempts to eat himself to death as a work of art. From underground radicals hiding in Morocco to an aging hippy in Colorado in the summer before 9/11 to a young drag queen in New York at the cusp of the AIDS crisis, these stories rove freely across time and place, carried by haunting, peculiar narratives that form the vast tapestry of American life.Hale’s work has earned accolades from writers as disparate as novelist Jonathan Ames, who compared discovering his work to watching Mickey Mantle play ball for the first time; Washington Post critic Ron Charles, who declared him “fully evolved as a writer,” and bestselling author Jodi Picoult, who simply called him “brilliant.” Pairing absurdity with philosophical musings on the human condition and the sway our most private selves and hidden pasts hold over us, the stories in The Fat Artist reside in the unnerving intersections between life and death, art and ridicule, consumption and creation.

The first collection of short stories published by Peter Carey, whose other books include "Bliss", "Illywhacker" and "Oscar and Lucinda", which was awarded the 1988 Booker Prize. The stories, set in an ominous near-future that has a feel of contemporary life, are by turn bizarre and funny.

TRUTH IS NOT AN OPTION…Beijing, sometime in the near future: a month has gone missing from official records. No one has any memory of it, and no one can care less. Except for a small circle of friends, who will stop at nothing to get to the bottom of the sinister cheerfulness and amnesia that has possessed the Chinese nation. When they kidnap a high-ranking official and force him to reveal all, what they learn – not only about their leaders, but also about their own people – stuns them to the core. It is a message that will rock the world…Terrifying methods of cunning, deception and terror are unveiled by the truth-seekers in this thriller-expose of the Communist Party's stranglehold on China today.

The Prix Goncourt winning author of the scandalous The Kindly Ones returns with four new novellas that offer startlingly fresh depictions of age-old obsessions: sex and love, desiring and gazing, and the memories that take a lifetime to process. In The Fata Morgana Books, Littell crafts unique narrative voices by letting sensual feelings take the fore, whether the slippery promise of silk underwear, the dizzy intensity of abstract art, the languid torpor of a French beach, the shock of a bull’s goring horn, or the warmth of a fondled breast. The connections between events are left obscure, yet these novellas are as striking as a gust of frigid air, presenting a skewed reality in which the reader is drawn forward to figure out who, or what, is telling the story, and why. Narrated by what may be hermaphrodites or ghosts, wanders or wonders, Littell’s masterful, effortless sentences carry these stories that illuminate the shadowy depths of solitude, reflection, longing, and lust."In Quarters" is a Proustian ghost story, or maybe a memory, or a dream. Narrated by a man who may or may not exist, it follows him through a sprawling mansion where he cares for a sick child, though he has forgotten whether or not the boy is his, while stealing food from other's plates and having sex with a beautiful young woman. When he travels to a provincial city, the young woman reappears — or does she? Repeated brushes with shadowy men with umbrellas offer a hint of menace that forms the backbone of this strange tale."Story About Nothing" follows a man who cannot remember his birthday "or even the sign under which I was born" as he experiences transgenderism, a pornographic tape given to him by a mysterious stranger, and a Hemingway-esque series of bullfights under the hot Spanish sun. As Littell takes his narrator through a series of affairs, each more ephemeral then the last, it becomes clear that this is a story about the transience of sex, the way that desire evaporates in satiation and then reappears when two strangers share a long look over a strong drink. Anchored by striking images — a lime sorbet, children diving off of high rocks — Littell's tale becomes a trip through desire that is not soon forgotten.Commanding in spite of their vagueness, beguilingly easy to read but full of depth and mystery, these novellas explore the in-between spaces: between thoughts, between bodies, between hungers and their satisfactions, between eyes and the things they look at.

The Feast of Love is a sumptuous work of fiction about the thing that most distracts and delights us. In a re-imagined A Midsummer Night's Dream, men and women speak of and desire their ideal mates; parents seek out their lost children; adult children try to come to terms with their own parents and, in some cases, find new ones.In vignettes both comic and sexy, the owner of a coffee shop recalls the day his first wife seemed to achieve a moment of simple perfection, while she remembers the women's softball game during which she was stricken by the beauty of the shortstop. A young couple spends hours at the coffee shop fueling the idea of their fierce love. A professor of philosophy, stopping by for a cup of coffee, makes a valiant attempt to explain what he knows to be the inexplicable workings of the human heart Their voices resonate with each other-disparate people joined by the meanderings of love-and come together in a tapestry that depicts the most irresistible arena of life.

Already acclaimed for providing unique insight into some of history’s greatest wrongs—and today’s issues of mass surveillance, neofascism, and the individual’s role in society—what does Wolfgang Hilbig have to add to contemporary questions about gender? A lot, it turns out. Acclaimed as one of Hilbig’s major works, The Females finds the lauded and legendarily irascible author focusing his labyrinthine, mercurial mind on how unequal societies can pervert sexuality and destroy a healthy, productive understanding of gender.

It begins with a factory laborer who ogles women in secret on the job. When those same women mysteriously vanish from their small town, the worker sets out on a uniquely Hilbiggian, hallucinatory journey to find them. Powerful and at times disturbing, The Females leaves us with some of the most challenging, radical, and enduring insights of any novel from the GDR.

Having turned phone sex into the subject of an astonishing national bestseller in Vox, Baker now outdoes himself with an outrageously arousing, acrobatically stylish "X-rated sci-fi fantasy that leaves Vox seeming more like mere fiber-optic foreplay" (Seattle Times). "Sparkling."-San Francisco Chronicle.

In a lush meadow, bounded by dense forest and a sparkling river, the flags of several tents flutter in the breeze, rich with the promise of halcyon days.Yet all is not as tranquil as it may seem: the balance of power wrought between the occupants of The Great Field, as it is properly known, is a delicate one, and relationships are stretched to breaking point when a new, large and disciplined group offers to share its surplus of milk pudding. Only the narrator acknowledges the gesture, but by forging links with the newcomers he becomes a conduit for change, change that threatens The Great Field.

In a lush meadow, bounded by dense forest and a sparkling river, the flags of several tents flutter in the breeze, rich with the promise of halcyon days.Yet all is not as tranquil as it may seem: the balance of power wrought between the occupants of The Great Field, as it is properly known, is a delicate one, and relationships are stretched to breaking point when a new, large and disciplined group offers to share its surplus of milk pudding. Only the narrator acknowledges the gesture, but by forging links with the newcomers he becomes a conduit for change, change that threatens The Great Field.

When a pair of fighters step into an illegal ring, sometimes only one walks out. This is the story of two men from radically different backgrounds, but with one thing in common. For Rob, it’s a question of talent and duty. For Paul, it’s one of fear. In the bloody world of bare-knuckle boxing the stakes are mercilessly high. Testing the difficult relationships between fathers and their sons, The Fighter explores the lengths to which these men are driven for self-knowledge, and the depths they will plumb in order to belong.‘This gripping novel sees two men dive perilously into a violent underworld — a world that very quickly threatens to rip them both apart’Maxim‘Bret Easton Ellis, Chuck Palahniuk and Irvine Welsh all rave about Davidson, with good reason. The Fighter is a brutally honest and explosively powerful novel. Examining masculinity in a startling way with visceral prose, it’s truly remarkable writing’Big Issue

In the mid 1930s, two young Irish-American scholars voyage to the Albanian highlands with an early model of a marvelous invention, the tape recorder, in hand. Their mission? To discover how Homer could have composed works as brilliant and as long as the Iliadand the Odysseywithout ever writing them down. The answer, they think, can be found only in Albania, the last remaining natural habitat of the oral epic. But immediately on their arrival the scholars' seemingly arcane research puts them at the center of ethnic strife in the Balkans. Mistaken for foreign spies, they are placed under the surveillance of a nearsighted informer with a prodigious gift for reproducing conversations he has overheard. He is soon generating a stream of floridly written reports about the visitors' puzzling activities. News of their presence in the provincial town of N---- sets gossip to flying, and while the town's governor speculates on their imminent capture, his pretty wife, from her bath, plots her delivery from a marital ennui worthy of Madame Bovary. Research and intrigue proceed apace, but it isn't until a fierce-eyed monk from the Serbian side of the mountains makes his appearance that the scholars glimpse the full political import of their search for the key to the Homeric question. Part spy novel, part comedy of errors, The File on H.is a work of inventive genius and piercing irony that may be Ismail Kadare's funniest and most accessible to date. From an author who has been called ""one of the most compelling novelists now writing in any language"" (Wall Street Journal), it is also a profound and eloquent comment on one of the most intractable conflicts of our time.

In the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, prose magician Michael Chabon conjured up the golden age of comic books — intertwining history, legend, and storytelling verve. In The Final Solution, he has condensed his boundless vision to craft a short, suspenseful tale of compassion and wit that reimagines the classic nineteenth-century detective story.In deep retirement in the English country-side, an eighty-nine-year-old man, vaguely recollected by locals as a once-famous detective, is more concerned with his beekeeping than with his fellow man. Into his life wanders Linus Steinman, nine years old and mute, who has escaped from Nazi Germany with his sole companion: an African gray parrot. What is the meaning of the mysterious strings of German numbers the bird spews out — a top-secret SS code? The keys to a series of Swiss bank accounts perhaps? Or something more sinister? Is the solution to this last case — the real explanation of the mysterious boy and his parrot — beyond even the reach of the once-famed sleuth?Subtle revelations lead the reader to a wrenching resolution. This brilliant homage, which won the 2004 Aga Khan Prize for fiction, is the work of a master storyteller at the height of his powers.

James Frey isn't like other writers. He's been called a liar. A cheat. A con man. He's been called a saviour. A revolutionary. A genius. He's been sued by readers. Dropped by publishers because of his controversies. Berated by TV talk-show hosts and condemned by the media. He's been exiled from America, and driven into hiding. He's also a bestselling phenomenon. Published in 38 languages, and beloved by readers around the world. What scares people about Frey is that he plays with truth; that fine line between fact and fiction. Now he has written his greatest work, his most revolutionary, his most controversial. The Final Testament of the Holy Bible.What would you do if you discovered the Messiah were alive today? Living in New York. Sleeping with men. Impregnating young women. Euthanizing the dying, and healing the sick. Defying the government, and condemning the holy. What would you do if you met him? And he changed your life. Would you believe? Would you?The Final Testament of the Holy Bible. It will change you. Hurt you. Scare you. Make you think differently. Live differently. Enrage you. Offend you. Open your eyes to the world in which we live. We've waited 2,000 years for the Messiah to arrive. We've waited 2,000 years for this book to be written. He was here. The Final Testament of the Holy Bible is the story of his life.

From the acclaimed filmmaker, artist, and bestselling author of "No One Belongs Here More Than You," a spectacular debut novel that is so heartbreaking, so dirty, so tender, so funny-so Miranda July-readers will be blown away.Here is Cheryl, a tightly-wound, vulnerable woman who lives alone, with a perpetual lump in her throat. She is haunted by a baby boy she met when she was six, who sometimes recurs as other people's babies. Cheryl is also obsessed with Phillip, a philandering board member at the women's self-defense non-profit where she works. She believes they've been making love for many lifetimes, though they have yet to consummate in this one.When Cheryl's bosses ask if their twenty-one-year-old daughter Clee can move into her house for a little while, Cheryl's eccentrically-ordered world explodes. And yet it is Clee-the selfish, cruel blond bombshell-who bullies Cheryl into reality and, unexpectedly, provides her the love of a lifetime.Tender, gripping, slyly hilarious, infused with raging sexual fantasies and fierce maternal love, Miranda July's first novel confirms her as a spectacularly original, iconic and important voice today, and a writer for all time. "The First Bad Man" is dazzling, disorienting, and unforgettable.

The world of the child is a world where things aren't what they always seem to be. In The Fish and the Not Fish, Peter Markus brings us back inside that not-so-simple space and its slippery way of seeing and saying, a place that is primal and mythic in its re-making.Peter Markus is the author of the novel Bob, or Man on Boat as well as three books of short-short fiction, the most recent of which is The Singing Fish. In 2012 he was named a Kresge Arts in Detroit fellow in Literary Arts. He lives in Trenton, Michigan.

In a Nigerian town in the mid 1990's, four brothers encounter a madman whose mystic prophecy of violence threatens the core of their close-knit family.Told from the point of view of nine year old Benjamin, the youngest of four brothers, THE FISHERMEN is the Cain and Abel-esque story of an unforgettable childhood in 1990's Nigeria, in the small town of Akure. When their strict father has to travel to a distant city for work, the brothers take advantage of his extended absence to skip school and go fishing. At the ominous, forbidden nearby river, they meet a dangerous local madman who persuades the oldest of the boys that he is destined to be killed by one of his siblings. What happens next is an almost mythic event whose impact-both tragic and redemptive-will transcend the lives and imaginations of its characters and its readers. Dazzling and viscerally powerful, The Fishermen never leaves Akure but the story it tells has enormous universal appeal. Seen through the prism of one family's destiny, this is an essential novel about Africa with all of its contradictions-economic, political, and religious-and the epic beauty of its own culture. With this bold debut, Chigozie Obioma emerges as one of the most original new voices of modern African literature, echoing its older generation's masterful storytelling with a contemporary fearlessness and purpose.

There was a sailor's graveyard in Moon Beach. This was where the funeral business first started. Rumour had it that the witch's fingers used to reach out and sink ships. But there hadn't been a wreck for years, and all the funeral parlours had moved downtown.

Eddie is a grizzled war veteran who feels trapped in a meaningless life of fixing rides at a seaside amusement park. As the park has changed over the years—from the Loop-the-Loop to the Pipeline Plunge—so, too, has Eddie changed, from optimistic youth to embittered old age. His days are a dull routine of work, loneliness, and regret.Then, on his 83rd birthday, Eddie dies in a tragic accident, trying to save a little girl from a falling cart. With his final breath, he feels two small hands in his—and then nothing. He awakens in the afterlife, where he learns that heaven is not a lush Garden of Eden, but a place where your earthly life is explained to you by five people who were in it. These people may have been loved ones or distant strangers. Yet each of them changed your path forever.One by one, Eddie’s five people illuminate the unseen connections of his earthly life. As the story builds to its stunning conclusion, Eddie desperately seeks redemption in the still-unknown last act of his life: Was it a heroic success or a devastating failure? The answer, which comes from the most unlikely of sources, is as inspirational as a glimpse of heaven itself.In The Five People You Meet in Heaven, Mitch Albom gives us an astoundingly original story that will change everything you’ve ever thought about the afterlife—and the meaning of our lives here on earth. With a timeless tale, appealing to all, this is a book that readers of fine fiction, and those who loved Tuesdays with Morrie, will treasure.

The year is 1975 and Reno — so-called because of the place of her birth — has come to New York intent on turning her fascination with motorcycles and speed into art. Her arrival coincides with an explosion of activity in the art world — artists have colonized a deserted and industrial SoHo, are staging actions in the East Village, and are blurring the line between life and art. Reno meets a group of dreamers and raconteurs who submit her to a sentimental education of sorts. Ardent, vulnerable, and bold, she begins an affair with an artist named Sandro Valera, the semi-estranged scion of an Italian tire and motorcycle empire. When they visit Sandro’s family home in Italy, Reno falls in with members of the radical movement that overtook Italy in the seventies. Betrayal sends her reeling into a clandestine undertow.The Flamethrowers is an intensely engaging exploration of the mystique of the feminine, the fake, the terrorist. At its center is Kushner’s brilliantly realized protagonist, a young woman on the verge. Thrilling and fearless, this is a major American novel from a writer of spectacular talent and imagination.