The short vignette-style tales in Troy James Weaver's literary debut, Witchita Stories, combine to make an evocative brew of small town melancholy, working class gloom, and coming of age charm. Told through the eyes of a young man who yearns to find excitement, truth, and a deeper family bond in his life, Weaver's approachable and revealing stories, lists, fragments, and memories delve into the weird, funny, and sometimes unsettling world of a midwest kid finding his own path."Thank god you can come across a writer like Troy James Weaver. In the future people will just say these stories are like Troy James Weaver stories and you'll know exactly what they mean." — Scott McClanahan"There are moments, reading Witchita Stories, where everything dropped away, and I was speechless, or at least whatever the equivalent of speechless is when you're not talking in the first place. There is a deep sadness to these stories, and humor, but most importantly, honesty. This feels real and heavy and it's just about the best thing I've read in a long time." — J. David Osborne

A short, stunning book by a Brazilian master of the avant-garde.Something has changed in Amos Keres, a university mathematics professor — his sentences trail off in class, he is disgusted by the sight of his wife and son, and he longs to flee the comfortable bourgeois life he finds himself a part of. Most difficult of all are his struggles to express what has happened to him, for a man more accustomed to numbers than words. He calls it "the clearcut unhoped-for," and it's a vision that will drive him to madness and, eventually, death.Written in a fragmented style that echoes the character's increasingly fragile hold on reality, With My Dog-Eyes is intensely vivid, summoning up Amos's childhood and young adulthood — when, like Richard Feynman, he used to bring his math books to brothels to study — and his life at the university, with its "meetings, asskissers, pointless rivalries, gratuitous resentments, jealous talk, meglomanias."Hilst, whose father was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, has created a lacerating, and yet oddly hopeful, portrayal of a descent into hell-Amos never makes sense of the new way he sees things, but he does find an avenue of escape, retreating to his mother's house and, farther, towards the animal world. A deeply metaphysical, formally radical one-of-a-kind book from a great Brazilian writer.

Казалось бы, мы все уже знаем о Харуки Мураками. А вот, оказывается, есть еще истории, которыми автор хочет поделиться.

О чем они? О любви и одиночестве, о поиске смысла жизни, в них мистические совпадения, музыка, бейсбол. Воспоминания, бередящие душу и то, что вряд ли кому-то сможешь рассказать. Например, о том, что ты болтал за кружкой пива с говорящей обезьяной.

Или о выборе пути: «Выбери я что-нибудь иначе, и меня бы здесь не было. Но кто же тогда отражается в зеркале?»

Вот такой он, Харуки Мураками — с ним хочется грустить, удивляться чудесам, быть честным с собой, вспоминать собственные мистические совпадения в жизни. Захочется опять послушать Beatles, джаз и «Карнавал» Шумана.

T.C. Boyle was first feted as a master of the short story for his critically acclaimed Greasy Lake. With these stories applauded by People magazine as "wickedly comical," he displays once again a virtuosity and versatility rare in literary America today. Without a Hero zooms in on American phenomena such as a center for the treatment of acquisitive disorders; a couple in search of the last toads on earth; and a real estate wonder boy on a dude safari near convenient Bakerfield, California. Sharp, guileful, and malevolently funny, Boyle's stories are "more than funny, better than wicked," says The Philadelphia Inquirer. "They make you cringe with their clarity."

An unforgettable fable about the brutality of war—and one girl’s quest for revenge and healing, from the author of the acclaimed international bestseller “Silk.”When—in an unnamed place and time—Manuel Roca’s enemies hunt him down to kill him, they fail to discover Nina, his youngest child, hidden in a hole beneath his farmhouse floor. After this carnage Tito, one of the murderers, discovers Nina’s trapdoor. Enthralled by the sight of Nina’s perfect innocence, he keeps quiet. By the time she has grown up, Nina’s innocence will have bloomed into something else altogether, and one by one the wartime hunters will become the peacetime hunted. But not until a striking old woman calls upon a familiar old man selling newspapers in town can we know what Nina will ultimately make of her brutal legacy.

The writer Hari Kunzru says “made me feel better about the Apocalypse than I have in ages” is back — with a hilarious coming-of-age love story.The unruly undergraduates at Cambridge have a nickname for their new lecturer: Wittgenstein Jr. He’s a melancholic, tormented genius who seems determined to make them grasp the very essence of philosophical thought.But Peters — a working-class student surprised to find himself among the elite — soon discovers that there’s no place for logic in a Cambridge overrun by posh boys and picnicking tourists, as England’s greatest university is collapsing under market pressures.Such a place calls for a derangement of the senses, best achieved by lethal homemade cocktails consumed on Cambridge rooftops, where Peters joins his fellows as they attempt to forget about the void awaiting them after graduation, challenge one another to think so hard they die, and dream about impressing Wittgenstein Jr with one single, noble thought.And as they scramble to discover what, indeed, they have to gain from the experience, they realize that their teacher is struggling to survive. For Peters, it leads to a surprising turn — and for all of them, a challenge to see how the life of the mind can play out in harsh but hopeful reality.Combining his trademark wit and sharp brilliance, Wittgenstein Jr is Lars Iyer’s most assured and ambitious novel yet — as impressive, inventive and entertaining as it is extraordinarily stirring.

Wittgenstein's Mistress is a novel unlike anything David Markson — or anyone else — has ever written before. It is the story of a woman who is convinced, and, astonishingly, will ultimately convince the reader as well, that she is the only person left on earth. Presumably she is mad. And yet so appealing is her character, and so witty and seductive her narrative voice, that we will follow her hypnotically as she unloads the intellectual baggage of a lifetime in a series of irreverent meditations on everything and everybody from Brahms to sex to Heidegger to Helen of Troy. And as she contemplates aspects of the troubled past which have brought her to her present state, so too will her drama become one of the few certifiably original fictions of our time.

On Christmas Eve 1999, all the Jews in the world die in a strange, millennial plague, with the exception of the firstborn males, who are soon adopted by a cabal of powerful people in the American government. By the following Passover, however, only one is still alive: Benjamin Israelien; a kindly, innocent, ignorant man-child. As he finds himself transformed into an international superstar, Jewishness becomes all the rage: matzo-ball soup is in every bowl, sidelocks are hip; and the only truly Jewish Jew left is increasingly stigmatized for not being religious. Since his very existence exposes the illegitimacy of the newly converted, Israelien becomes the object of a worldwide hunt. .Meanwhile, in the not-too-distant future of our own, “real” world, another last Jew — the last living Holocaust survivor — sits alone in a snowbound Manhattan, providing a final melancholy witness to his experiences in the form of the punch lines to half-remembered jokes.

Gordon Foster’s activities took a sudden bounce off the track of his daily pattern of staid middle-class living when a girl asked him for a match in the lobby of a San Francisco hotel.In a matter of weeks the girl Ruby followed Gordon home to Channel City and injected a somewhat discordant note into his otherwise peaceful marriage. Gordon’s wife, a fiercely virtuous woman, fought all through the hot summer to hold her husband, while most of the rest of Channel City lay prostrate under the burning coastal sun.Yet Ruby’s all but hopeless love for Gordon is paralleled by other loves, equally poignant, equally real. Mrs. Millar’s novel shows, sometimes with biting humor, sometimes with warm compassion, how extraordinary the lives and loves of those around us can be.Since her writing debut fourteen years ago, Margaret Millar has had a brilliant and variegated career as a mystery writer, as a humorist and as a serious novelist. For nearly half of those fourteen years she has been working on Wives and Lovers. It is her first major attempt to deal with the lives and loves of “ordinary” middle-class people in contemporary society.

In exile for more than twenty years, Ngugi wa Thiong'o has become one of the most widely read African writers of our time, the power and scope of his work garnering him international attention and praise. His aim in "Wizard of the Crow" is, in his own words, nothing less than 'to sum up Africa of the twentieth century in the context of 2,000 years of world history.' Commencing in 'our times' and set in the 'Free Republic of Aburiria', the novel dramatises with corrosive humour and keenness of observation a battle for control of the souls of the Aburirian people. Fashioning the stories of the powerful and the ordinary into a dazzling mosaic, Ngugi reveals humanity in all its ceaselessly surprising complexity. Informed by richly enigmatic traditional African storytelling, "Wizard of the Crow" is a masterpiece, the crowning achievement in Ngugi wa Thiong'o's career thus far.

Opowieść paraboliczna o grupie młodych chłopców, którzy ocaleli z katatastrofy lotniczej w okresie nieoznaczonego konfliktu nuklearnego. Rozbitkowie znajdują schronienie na nieznanej, egzotycznej wyspie. Pomimo różnic charakterologicznych, podjęta zostaje przez nich próba rekonstrukcji cywilizacji w obcym zakątku świata. Niestety rozsądne i roztropne wysiłki części chłopców obracane są w niwecz, gdy grupa stopniowo upada w barbarzyństwo i dzikość.Książka opatrzona wstępem autorstwa Stevena Kinga, nagrodzona literackim Noblem w 1983 roku.

Begun in the 1980s and worked on until the author’s death in 2003, Woes of the True Policeman is Roberto Bolaño’s last, unfinished novel.The novel follows Óscar Amalfitano — an exiled Chilean university professor and widower — through the maze of his revolutionary past, his relationship with his teenage daughter, Rosa, his passion for a former student, and his retreat from scandal in Barcelona.Forced to leave Barcelona for Santa Teresa, a Mexican city close to the U.S. border where women are being killed in unprecedented numbers, Amalfitano soon begins an affair with Castillo, a young forger of Larry Rivers paintings. Meanwhile, Rosa, Amalfitano’s daughter, engages in her own epistolary romance with a basketball player from Barcelona, while still trying to cope with her mother’s early death and her father’s secrets. After finding Castillo in bed with her father, Rosa is forced to confront her own crisis. What follows is an intimate police investigation of Amalfitano that involves a series of dark twists, culminating in a finale full of euphoria and heartbreak.Featuring characters and stories from his other books, Woes of the True Policeman invites the reader more than ever into the world of Roberto Bolaño. It is an exciting, kaleidoscopic novel, lyrical and intense, yet darkly humorous. Exploring the roots of memory and the limits of art, Woes of the True Policeman marks the culmination of one of the great careers of world literature.

Wojna polsko-ruska… to pierwsza polska powieść dresiarska. W głównej warstwie narracyjnej opowiada o przygodach dresiarza Silnego z pięcioma kolejnymi dziewczętami. Jednocześnie stanowi nadrealistyczną alegorię polskiej tożsamości narodowej w rzeczywistości małego miasta w województwie pomorskim. Wątki kryminalne przeplatają się w niej z nadzwyczaj dojrzałą egzystencjalną refleksją. Trzeba tu dodać, że jest to utwór dość brutalny, uświadamiający jak wielkim zagrożeniem jest dla człowieka narkotyk (w tym wypadku amfetamina), niszczący osobowość i generujący niebezpieczne urojenia. Uwagę zwraca zwłaszcza doskonale stylizowany język podkultury marginesu społecznego.Książka ukazuje się z rekomendację znanego poety Marcina Świetlickiego, który podsumował ją następująco: Podejrzewam, że Masłowska jest ruskim szpiegiem. Książkę tę napisała po to, by bezkarnie poruszać się w naszej polskiej rzeczywistości i zamydlić nam, Polakom, oczy. Nigdy w życiu nie chciałbym się z nią osobiście spotkać, albowiem obawiam się, że wyssie ze mnie wszystko co najcenniejsze i na swój szpiegowsko-rosyjski sposób przetworzy to dla siebie. Z drugiej jednak strony, jeżeli chodzi o tę książkę, to jestem bardzo zadowolony. Tutaj nie nasuwa się pytanie, czy jest to proza kobieca, czy męska. Jest to kawał lekko nadpsutego literackiego mięsa i, zdaje się, warto było żyć 40 lat, aby wreszcie coś tak interesującego przeczytać.

Thurlow Dan is the founder of the Helix, a cult that promises to cure loneliness in the twenty-first century. With its communes and speed-dating, mixers and confession sessions, the Helix has become a national phenomenon — and attracted the attention of governments worldwide. But Thurlow, camped out in his Cincinnati headquarters, is lonely. And his ex-wife, Esme, is the only one he wants. They were a family once; they had a child together. For Esme’s part, she’s a covert agent who has spent her life spying on Thurlow, mostly in an effort to protect him from the law. Now, with her superiors demanding results, Esme recruits four misfits to botch a reconnaissance mission in Cincinnati. But when Thurlow abducts them, he ignites a siege of the Helix House that could keep him and Esme apart forever. With fiery, ecstatic prose, Maazel takes us on a ride through North Korea’s guarded interior, a city of vice beneath Cincinnati, and a commune housed in a Virginia factory, while Thurlow, Esme, and their daughter search for a way to be a family again. Woke Up Lonely is a sprawling and original novel that reminds us our Nation's deepest problems cannot be fixed by the simple formulas that so frequently beguile us.

Welcome to Trace Italian, a game of strategy and survival! You may now make your first move. Isolated by a disfiguring injury since the age of 17, Sean Phillips crafts imaginary worlds for strangers to play in. From his small apartment in Southern California, he orchestrates fantastic adventures where possibilities, both dark and bright, open in the boundaries between the real and the imagined. As the creator of Trace Italian — a text-based, roleplaying game played through the mail — Sean guides players from around the world through his intricately imagined terrain, which they navigate and explore, turn by turn, seeking sanctuary in a ravaged, savage future America. Lance and Carrie are high school students from Florida, explorers of the Trace. But when they take their play into the real world, disaster strikes, and Sean is called to account for it. In the process, he is pulled back through time, tunneling toward the moment of his own self-inflicted departure from the world in which most people live.Brilliantly constructed, Wolf in White Van unfolds in reverse until we arrive at both the beginning and the climax: the event that has shaped so much of Sean’s life. Beautifully written and unexpectedly moving, John Darnielle’s audacious and gripping debut novel is a marvel of storytelling brio and genuine literary delicacy.

An epic Chinese tale in the vein of The Last Emperor, Wolf Totem depicts the dying culture of the Mongols-the ancestors of the Mongol hordes who at one time terrorized the world-and the parallel extinction of the animal they believe to be sacred: the fierce and otherworldly Mongolian wolfPublished under a pen name, Wolf Totem was a phenomenon in China, breaking all sales records there and earning the distinction of being the second most read book after Mao's little red book. There has been much international excitement too-to date, rights have been sold in thirteen countries. Wolf Totem is set in 1960s China -the time of the Great Leap Forward, on the eve of the Cultural Revolution.Searching for spirituality, Beijing intellectual Chen Zhen travels to the pristine grasslands of Inner Mongolia to live among the nomadic Mongols-a proud, brave, and ancient race of people who coexist in perfect harmony with their unspeakably beautiful but cruel natural surroundings. Their philosophy of maintaining a balance with nature is the ground stone of their religion, a kind of cult of the wolf.The fierce wolves that haunt the steppes of the unforgiving grassland searching for food are locked with the nomads in a profoundly spiritual battle for survival-a life-and-death dance that has gone on between them for thousands of years. The Mongols believe that the wolf is a great and worthy foe that they are divinely instructed to contend with, but also to worship and to learn from. Chen's own encounters with the otherworldly wolves awake a latent primitive instinct in him, and his fascination with them blossoms into obsession, then reverence.After many years, the peace is shattered with the arrival of Chen's kinfolk, Han Chinese, sent from the cities to bring modernity to the grasslands. They immediately launch a campaign to exterminate the wolves, sending the balance that has been maintained with religious dedication for thousands of years into a spiral leading to extinction-first the wolves, then the Mongol culture, finally the land. As a result of the eradication of the wolves, rats become a plague and wild sheep graze until the meadows turn to dust. Mongolian dust storms glide over Beijing, sometimes blocking out the moon.Part period epic, part fable for modern days, Wolf Totem is a stinging social commentary on the dangers of China 's overaccelerated economic growth as well as a fascinating immersion into the heart of Chinese culture.

Douglas Kennedy's new novel demonstrates once again his talent for writing serious popular fiction. The Pursuit of Happiness and A Special Relationship were both Sunday Times bestsellers in paperback.That was the year my life fell apart, and that was the year I moved to Paris.When Harry Ricks arrives in Paris on a bleak January morning he is a broken man. He is running away from a failed marriage and a dark scandal that ruined his career as a film lecturer in a small American university. With no money and nowhere to live, Harry swiftly falls in with the city's underclass, barely scraping a living while trying to finish the book he'd always dreamed of writing. A chance meeting with a mysterious woman, Margit Kadar, with whom Harry falls in love, is his only hope of a brighter future. However, Margit isn't all she seems to be and Harry soon has to make a decision that will alter his life forever.

Low-life writer and unrepentant alcoholic Henry Chinaski was born to survive. After decades of slacking off at low-paying dead-end jobs, blowing his cash on booze and women, and scrimping by in flea-bitten apartments, Chinaski sees his poetic star rising at last. Now, at fifty, he is reveling in his sudden rock-star life, running three hundred hangovers a year, and maintaining a sex life that would cripple Casanova.With all of Bukowski's trademark humor and gritty, dark honesty, this 1978 follow-up to Post Office and Factotum is an uncompromising account of life on the edge.

Beginning in childbirth and entered like a multiple dwelling in motion, Women and Men embraces and anatomizes the 1970s in New Yorkfrom experiments in the chaotic relations between the sexes to the flux of the city itself. Yet through an intricate overlay of scenes, voices, fact, and myth, this expanding fiction finds its way also across continents and into earlier and future times and indeed the Earth, to reveal connections between the most disparate lives and systems of feeling and power. At its breathing heart, it plots the fuguelike and fieldlike densities of late-twentieth-century life.McElroy rests a global vision on two people, apartment-house neighbors who never quite meet. Except, that is, in the population of others whose histories cross theirsbelievers and skeptics; lovers, friends, and hermits; children, parents, grandparents, avatars, and, apparently, angels. For Women and Men shows how the families through which we pass let one person's experience belong to that of many, so that we throw light on each other as if these kinships were refracted lives so real as to be reincarnate.A mirror of manners, the book is also a meditation on the languagesrich, ludicrous, exact, and also Americanin which we try to grasp the world we're in. Along the kindred axes of separation and intimacy Women and Men extends the great line of twentieth-century innovative fiction.

Back in the dog days of the early twenty-first century a pair of lovebirds fleeing a murder charge in Cairo pull in to Alexandria's main train station. Fugitives, friendless, their young lives blighted at the root, Ali and Injy set about rebuilding, and from the coastal city's arid soil forge a legend, a kingdom of crime, a revolution: Karantina.Through three generations of Grand Guignol insanity, Nael Eltoukhy's sly psychopomp of a narrator is our guide not only to the teeming cast of pimps, dealers, psychotics, and half-wits and the increasingly baroque chronicles of their exploits, but also to the moral of his tale. Defiant, revolutionary, and patriotic, are the rapists and thieves of Alexandria's crime families deluded maniacs or is their myth of Karantina-their Alexandria reimagined as the once and future capital-what they believe it to be: the revolutionary dream made brick and mortar, flesh and bone?Subversive and hilarious, deft and scalpel-sharp, Eltoukhy's sprawling epic is a masterpiece of modern Egyptian literature. Mahfouz shaken by the tail, a lunatic dream, a future history that is the sanest thing yet written on Egypt's current woes.