This entire novel consists of a discussion between two friends — one who just returned from Europe, the other a young accountant — about a grand birthday party neither one was able to attend. This doesn't stop them from swapping stories and hypotheses, which balloon into a riveting depiction of the complexities of life, especially at the dawn of Argentina's Dirty War.

Set in the seaside town of Z, on the Costa Brava, north of Barcelona, The Skating Rink oscillates between two poles: a camp ground and a ruined mansion, the Palacio Benvingut. The story, told by three male narrators, revolves around a beautiful figure skating champion, Nuria Martí. When she is suddenly dropped from the Olympic team, a pompous but besotted civil servant secretly builds a skating rink in the ruined Palacio Benvingut, using public funds. But Nuria has affairs, provokes jealousy, and the skating rink becomes a crime scene. A mysterious pair of women, an ex-opera singer and a taciturn girl often armed with a knife, turn up as well.A complex book, The Skating Rink’s short chapters are skillfully broken off with questions to maintain the narrative tension: Who was murdered? Who was the murderer? Will the murderer be caught? All of these questions are answered, and yet The Skating Rink is not fundamentally a crime novel, or not exclusively; it’s also about political corruption, sex, the experience of immigration, and frustrated passion. And it’s an atmospheric chronicle of one summer season in a seaside town, with its vacationers, its drifters, its businessmen, bureaucrats and social workers.

Jakob Kinsky believes that the noir film that will put him on the map is just waiting to be filmed in the decaying New England town of Quinsigamond. While searching for the "elemental image," he meets a photographer with a mystery of her own to solve. Their respective quests entangle them with evangelists, feminists, erotic brokers, a missing 10-year-old, and a porn theater known as Herzog's Erotic Palace. HC: Mysterious Press.

“Intoxicating…I’ll be thinking of these characters, what they longed to create and what they managed to despoil, for a long time.” —Helen OyeyemiA retelling of a fantastical true story: two young men seduce Nobel laureate Juan Ramón Jiménez with the words of an imaginary woman and inspire one of his greatest love poems.José Gálvez and Carlos Rodríguez are poets. Or, at least, they’d like to be. Sons of Lima’s elite in the early twentieth century, they scribble bad verses and read the greats: Rilke, Rimbaud, and, above all others, Juan Ramón Jímenez, the Spanish Maestro. Desperate for Jímenez’s latest work, unavailable in Lima, they decide to ask him for a copy. They’re sure Jímenez won’t send two dilettantes his book, but he might favor a beautiful woman. They write to him as the lovely, imaginary Georgina Hübner. Jímenez responds with a letter and a book. Elated, José and Carlos write back. Their correspondence continues, as the Maestro falls in love with Georgina, and the boys abandon poetry for the pages of Jímenez’s life.

Doppelgängers, a murderer’s guilt, pulp noir, fanatical police, and impossible romances — these are the pieces from which German master Wolfgang Hilbig builds a divided nation battling its demons. Delving deep into the psyches of both East and West Germany, The Sleep of the Righteous reveals a powerful, apocalyptic account of the century-defining nation’s trajectory from 1945 to 1989. From a youth in a war-scarred industrial town to wearying labor as a factory stoker, surreal confrontations with the Stasi, and, finally, a conflicted escape to the West, Hilbig creates a cipher that is at once himself and so many of his fellow Germans. Evoking the eerie bleakness of films like Tarkovsky’s Stalker and The Lives of Others, this titan of German letters combines the Romanticism of Poe with the absurdity of Kafka to create a visionary, somber statement on the ravages of history and the promises of the future.

Spanning India in the 70s to New Mexico in the 80s to Seattle in the 90s, The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing is a winning, irreverent debut novel about a family wrestling with its future and its past.When brain surgeon Thomas Eapen decides to cut short a visit to his mother's home in India in 1979, he sets into motion a series of events that will forever haunt him and his wife, Kamala; their intellectually precocious son, Akhil; and their watchful daughter, Amina. Now, twenty years later, in the heat of a New Mexican summer, Thomas has begun having bizarre conversations with his dead relatives and it's up to Amina-a photographer in the midst of her own career crisis-to figure out what is really going on. But getting to the truth is far harder than it seems. From Thomas's unwillingness to talk, to Kamala's Born Again convictions, to run-ins with a hospital staff that seems to know much more than they let on, Amina finds herself at the center of a mystery so thick with disasters that to make any headway at all, she has to unravel the family's painful past.

What would happen if you invited Lorrie Moore, Mona Simpson, Tom Perrotta, and Steven Wright to a suburban barbecue? Something like this wry and wistful new novel of marriage, lust, and disconnection, from the author of What He's Poised to Do.William and Louisa Day are a suburban husband and wife with no children confronting the question of what their relationship means to them, and if and how it will survive. One day, after weeks of bizarre behavior-disappearing in the middle of parties, hoarding mail-Louisa approaches William with a simple appeal: "I want you to build us a house." Caught off-guard by the request, William is suddenly forced to reckon with his own hopes and desires, his growing discomfort at home and work, and, in the end, the fight-or-flight ultimatum his wife has posed for their future. Complicating these questions are the ghosts of other relationships in William's past, both ancient and recent-from the ex-girlfriend whose child is a kind of surrogate son, to his new neighbor, his partner in a recent indiscretion now uncomfortably returned to the foreground.Ben Greenman is a poet of romantic angst in contemporary American life, hailed for his whimsical yet unbearably poignant portraits of people grasping at connection through the fog of crumbling relationships. The Slippage is an emotionally powerful work, marked by Greenman's trademark blend of yearning and mordant wit.

Tatyana Tolstaya's powerful voice is one of the best in contemporary Russian literature. She wrote many a commentary on modern-day Russia for the New York Review of Books before moving back to Moscow to complete her first novel, The Slynx. Tolstaya is a descendant of the great Leo Tolstoy but that might be beside the point.The Slynx is a brilliantly imaginative satire set in a hypothetical Moscow two hundred years after an event termed "the Blast." The Blast has forever altered the landscape of Moscow. People now live with mutations, called Consequences. Some have cockscombs growing everywhere, some have three legs and then there are the Degenerators who are humans in doglike bodies. Some "Oldeners" still linger on. Their only Consequence is that they remain unchanged and seemingly live forever. They remember life before the Blast and moan the primitive cultural mores of the society they live in, where only the wheel has been invented thus far and the yoke is just catching on. This feudal landscape is ruled by Fyodor Kuzmich, Glorybe, a tyrant who rules with an iron hand. Kuzmich passes off all Russian literature as his own works and issues decrees at the drop of a hat to keep the public ignorant and docile.The primary protagonist of The Slynx is a young scribe, Benedikt. His job is to copy all of Kuzmich's "works" on to bark, for use by the public. Benedikt marries a coworker, Olenka, and discovers the wonder of books through his father-in-law, Kudeyar Kudeyarich. His father-in-law, however, harbors nefarious plans to oust the current regime. Benedikt's love of books soon turns ugly and Kudeyarich channels this force to implement his own evil designs.The Slynx is translated fluidly by Jamey Gambrell. One wonders how she worked in intelligent phrases such as: "You feel sorry for someone. Must be feelosophy." Tolstaya's descriptions of the futuristic backdrop where people eat and trade mice as currency are bizarre yet not hugely so. Sometimes she seems to be so in love with her own creation that the storyline tends to wander. But she does not stray too far and her prose dripping with rich imagery more than makes up for it.Tolstaya's futuristic Russia might not be very different from the one she often complains about. "Why is it that everything keeps mutating, everything?" laments an Oldener, "People, well all right, but the language, concepts, meaning! Huh? Russia! Everything gets twisted up in knots." The perils of a society in which "Freethinking" is a crime and where an indifferent populace can be "evil" are ably brought out by the gifted Tolstaya. "There is no worse enemy than indifference," she warns, "all evil in fact comes from the silent acquiescence of the indifferent." The scary "Slynx," in the novel, is a metaphor for all the evil that is waiting to rear its ugly head on a sleeping people.The Slynx's descriptions of a tyrannical society might be too simplistic to apply to Russia. Its reception in the country has been mixed. The newspaper Vechernaya Moskva commented: "After all that we have read and thought over about Russia during the last fifteen years, this repetition of old school lessons is really confusing. There is a surfeit of caricatures of the intellegentsia, of anti-utopias depicting the degradation and decay of the national consciousness, and postmodernistic variations on the theme of literary-centrism." That having been said, Tolstaya's haunting prose serves as a chilling reminder of the way things could be, especially when government censorship and other controls move silently back in. The "Slynx" is never too far away. History, as they say, does tend to repeat itself.

A masterful literary talent explores the treacherous, often violent borders between war and sex, love and art.With the flash of a camera, one girl’s life is shattered, and a host of others altered forever. .In a war-torn village in Eastern Europe, an American photographer captures a heart-stopping image: a young girl flying toward the lens, fleeing a fiery explosion that has engulfed her home and family. The image wins acclaim and prizes, becoming an icon for millions — and a subject of obsession for one writer, the photographer’s best friend, who has suffered a devastating tragedy of her own.As the writer plunges into a suicidal depression, her filmmaker husband enlists several friends, including a fearless bisexual poet and an ingenuous performance artist, to save her by rescuing the unknown girl and bringing her to the United States. And yet, as their plot unfolds, everything we know about the story comes into question: What does the writer really want? Who is controlling the action? And what will happen when these two worlds — east and west, real and virtual — collide?A fierce, provocative, and deeply affecting novel of both ideas and action that blends the tight construction of Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending with the emotional power of Anthony Marra’s A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Small Backs of Children is a major step forward from one of our most avidly watched writers.

With India's first rocket launch to the moon, the scenario is changing fast. It is this changing world of Mysore which Mahesh Rao's novel speaks about. In this story, Mysore is gearing for an international remake with the construction of HeritageLand, Asia's largest theme park. Citizens and government officials alike prepare themselves for a complete makeover, one that not everybody welcomes. An elderly widow finds herself forced into a secretive new life, and another woman is succumbing to the cancerous power of gossip as she tries to escape her past. Another woman must come to terms with reality as her husband's troubling behaviour steeps out of hand. In Mysore, where the modern and the eclectic fuse to become something else entirely, everyone must hang on to their own escapes or find themselves swept under the carpet of the sublime change called development.

Twenty-year-old Sharon Rabbitte is pregnant. She's also unmarried, living at home, working in a grocery store, and keeping the father's identity a secret. Her own father, Jimmy Sr., is shocked by the news. Her mother says very little. Her friends and neighbors all want to know whose ""snapper"" Sharon is carrying. In his sparkling second novel, Roddy Doyle observes the progression of Sharon's pregnancy and its impact on the Rabbitte familyespecially on Jimmy Sr.with wit, candor, and surprising authenticity.

Gregor von Rezzori was born in Czernowitz, a onetime provincial capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that was later to be absorbed successively into Romania, the USSR, and the Ukraine — a town that was everywhere and nowhere, with a population of astonishing diversity. Growing up after World War I and the collapse of the empire, Rezzori lived in a twilit world suspended between the formalities of the old nineteenth-century order which had shaped his aristocratic parents and the innovations, uncertainties, and raw terror of the new century. The haunted atmosphere of this dying world is beautifully rendered in the pages of The Snows of Yesteryear.The book is a series of portraits — amused, fond, sometimes appalling — of Rezzori’s family: his hysterical and histrionic mother, disappointed by marriage, destructively obsessed with her children’s health and breeding; his father, a flinty reactionary, whose only real love was hunting; his haughty older sister, fated to die before thirty; his earthy nursemaid, who introduced Rezzori to the power of storytelling and the inevitability of death; and a beloved governess, Bunchy. Telling their stories, Rezzori tells his own, holding his early life to the light like a crystal until it shines for us with a prismatic brilliance.

The Sojourn, finalist for the National Book Award and winner of both the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and inaugural Chautauqua Prize, is the story of Jozef Vinich, who was uprooted from a 19th-century mining town in Colorado by a family tragedy and returns with his father to an impoverished shepherd’s life in rural Austria-Hungary. When World War One comes, Jozef joins his adopted brother as a sharpshooter in the Kaiser’s army, surviving a perilous trek across the frozen Italian Alps and capture by a victorious enemy.A stirring tale of brotherhood, coming-of-age, and survival, that was inspired by the author’s own family history, this novel evokes a time when Czechs, Slovaks, Austrians, and Germans fought on the same side while divided by language, ethnicity, and social class in the most brutal war to date. It is also a poignant tale of fathers and sons, addressing the great immigration to America and the desire to live the American dream amidst the unfolding tragedy in Europe.The Sojourn is Andrew Krivak's first novel. Krivak is also the author of A Long Retreat: In Search of a Religious Life, a memoir about his eight years in the Jesuit Order, and editor of The Letters of William Carlos Williams to Edgar Irving Williams, 1902–1912, which received the Louis L. Martz Prize. The grandson of Slovak immigrants, Krivak grew up in Pennsylvania, has lived in London, and now lives with his wife and three children in Massachusetts where he teaches in the Honors Program at Boston College.

This is the story of two people living one life. Arthur and Waldo Brown were born twins and destined never to to grow away from each other. They spent their childhood together. Their youth together. Middle-age together. Retirement together. They even shared the same girl. They shared everything — except their view of things. Waldo, with his intelligence, saw everything and understood little. Arthur was the fool who didn't bother to look. He understood.

He had learned his lesson. Choices are made in a few seconds and paid for in the time that remains. A prime number is inherently a solitary thing: it can only be divided by itself, or by one; it never truly fits with another. Alice and Mattia also move on their own axes, alone with their personal tragedies. As a child Alice's overbearing father drove her first to a terrible skiing accident, and then to anorexia. When she meets Mattia she recognises a kindred spirit, and Mattia reveals to Alice his terrible secret: that as a boy he abandoned his mentally-disabled twin sister in a park to go to a party, and when he returned, she was nowhere to be found. These two irreversible episodes mark Alice and Mattia's lives for ever, and as they grow into adulthood their destinies seem irrevocably intertwined. But then a chance sighting of a woman who could be Mattia's sister forces a lifetime of secret emotion to the surface. A meditation on loneliness and love, "The Solitude of Prime Numbers" asks, can we ever truly be whole when we're in love with another?

The acclaimed author of American Rust, returns with The Son: an epic, multigenerational saga of power, blood, and land that follows the rise of one unforgettable Texas family from the Comanche raids of the 1800s to the border raids of the early 1900s to the oil booms of the 20th century.Part epic of Texas, part classic coming-of-age story, part unflinching portrait of the bloody price of power, The Son is an utterly transporting novel that maps the legacy of violence in the American West through the lives of the McCulloughs, an ambitious family as resilient and dangerous as the land they claim.Spring, 1849. The first male child born in the newly established Republic of Texas, Eli McCullough is thirteen years old when a marauding band of Comanche storm his homestead and brutally murder his mother and sister, taking him captive. Brave and clever, Eli quickly adapts to Comanche life, learning their ways and language, answering to a new name, carving a place as the chief's adopted son, and waging war against their enemies, including white men-complicating his sense of loyalty and understanding of who he is. But when disease, starvation, and overwhelming numbers of armed Americans decimate the tribe, Eli finds himself alone. Neither white nor Indian, civilized or fully wild, he must carve a place for himself in a world in which he does not fully belong-a journey of adventure, tragedy, hardship, grit, and luck that reverberates in the lives of his progeny.Intertwined with Eli's story are those of his son, Peter, a man who bears the emotional cost of his father's drive for power, and JA, Eli's great-granddaughter, a woman who must fight hardened rivals to succeed in a man's world.Phillipp Meyer deftly explores how Eli's ruthlessness and steely pragmatism transform subsequent generations of McCulloughs. Love, honor, children are sacrificed in the name of ambition, as the family becomes one of the richest powers in Texas, a ranching-and-oil dynasty of unsurpassed wealth and privilege. Yet, like all empires, the McCoulloughs must eventually face the consequences of their choices.Harrowing, panoramic, and vividly drawn, The Son is a masterful achievement from a sublime young talent.

Set in post-World War II Shanghai, "The Song of Everlasting Sorrow" follows the adventures of Wang Qiyao, a girl born of the "longtong," the crowded, labyrinthine alleys of Shanghai's working-class neighborhoods.Infatuated with the glitz and glamour of 1940s Hollywood, Wang Qiyao seeks fame in the Miss Shanghai beauty pageant, and this fleeting moment of stardom becomes the pinnacle of her life. During the next four decades, Wang Qiyao indulges in the decadent pleasures of pre-liberation Shanghai, secretly playing mahjong during the antirightist Movement and exchanging lovers on the eve of the Cultural Revolution. Surviving the vicissitudes of modern Chinese history, Wang Qiyao emerges in the 1980s as a purveyor of "old Shanghai"-a living incarnation of a new, commodified nostalgia that prizes splendor and sophistication-only to become embroiled in a tragedy that echoes the pulpy Hollywood noirs of her youth.From the violent persecution of communism to the liberalism and openness of the age of reform, this sorrowful tale of old China versus new, of perseverance in the face of adversity, is a timeless rendering of our never-ending quest for transformation and beauty.

One of only two survivors of a plane crash, Nell Slattery wakes in the hospital with no memory of the horrific experience-or who she is, or was.

Now she must piece together both body and mind, with the help of family and friends, who have their own agendas. She filters through photos, art, music, and stories, hoping something will jog her memory, and soon, in tiny bits and pieces, Nell starts remembering. . . .

It isn't long before she learns to question the stories presented by her mother, her sister and business partner, and her husband. In the end, she will discover that forgiving betrayals small and large will be the only true path to healing herself-and to finding happiness.

Considered by critics to be Barth's most distinguished masterpiece, The Sot-Weed Factor has acquired the status of a modern classic. Set in the late 1600s, it recounts the wildly chaotic odyssey of hapless, ungainly Ebenezer Cooke, sent to the New World to look after his father's tobacco business and to record the struggles of the Maryland colony in an epic poem.On his mission, Cooke experiences capture by pirates and Indians; the loss of his father's estate to roguish impostors; love for a farmer prostitute; stealthy efforts to rob him of his virginity, which he is (almost) determined to protect; and an extraordinary gallery of treacherous characters who continually switch identities. A hilarious, bawdy tribute to all the most insidious human vices, The Sot-Weed Factor has lasting relevance for readers of all times.

As a graduate student in upstate New York, Nathaniel Mason is drawn into a tangle of relationships with people who seem to hover just beyond his grasp. There's Theresa, alluring but elusive, and Jamie, who is fickle if not wholly unavailable. But Jerome Coolberg is the most mysterious and compelling. Not only cryptic about himself, he seems also to have appropriated parts of Nathaniel's past that Nathaniel cannot remember having told him about. In this extraordinary novel of mischief and menace, we see a young man's very self vanishing before his eyes.