Zoë Wicomb's complex and deeply evocative fiction is among the most distinguished recent works of South African women's literature. It is also among the only works of fiction to explore the experience of "Coloured" citizens in apartheid-era South Africa, whose mixed heritage traps them, as Bharati Mukherjee wrote in the New York Times, "in the racial crucible of their country."Wicomb deserves a wide American audience, on a part with Nadine Gordimer and J.M.Coetzee." — Wall St. JournalWicomb is a gifted writer, and her compressed narratives work like brilliant splinters in the mind, suggesting a rich rhythm and shape."-Seattle Times"[Wicomb's] prose is vigorous, textured, lyrical. [She] is a sophisticated storyteller who combines the open-endedness of contemporary fiction with the force of autobiography and the simplicity of family stories."-Bharati Mukherjee, New York Times Book ReviewFor course use in: African literature, African studies, growing up female, world literature, women's studiesZoe Wicomb was born in 1948 and raised in Namaquland, South Africa. After 20 years voluntary exile, she returned to South Africa in 1991 to teach at the University of the Western Cape. She currently lives in Glasgow and teaches at the University of Strathclyde, Scotland. Marcia Wright is professor of history at Columbia University and a member of the executive committee for the Women Writing Africa series. Carol Sicherman is professor emerita of English at Lehman College, CUNY.

An unnerving and riveting psychological drama that challenges our notions of how we view others and how we construct our own sense of self.Mia is an elementary schoolteacher in Denmark, while her husband, Frederik, is the talented, highly respected headmaster of a local private school. During a vacation in Spain, Frederik has an accident and his visit to the hospital reveals a brain tumor that is gradually altering his personality, confirming Mia's suspicions that her husband is no longer the man he used to be. Now she must protect herself and their teenage son, Niklas, from the strange, blunted being who lives in her husband's body — and with whom she must share her home, her son, and her bed.When it emerges that one year ago Frederik had defrauded his school of millions of crowns, the consequences of his condition envelope the entire community. Frederick's apparent lack of concern doesn't help, and longstanding friendships with colleagues are thrown by the wayside. Increasingly isolated, Mia faces more tough questions. Had his illness already changed him back then when he still seemed so happy? What are the legal ramifications?In her support group for spouses of people with brain injuries, Mia meets a defense attorney named Bernhard. Together they help prepare for Frederik's court case by immersing themselves in the latest brain research and in classic philosophical questions of free will, while simultaneously navigating the uncertain waters of their growing mutual infatuation. Jungersen's clear, spare prose and ceaseless plot twists will keep readers hooked until the last page.

A frighteningly prescient novel of today’s America — one man’s story of a racially-charged real estate experiment in Detroit, Michigan.“You get in the habit of living a certain kind of life, you keep going in a certain direction, but most of the pressure on you is just momentum. As soon as you stop the momentum goes away. It’s easier than people think to walk out on things, I mean things like cities, leases, relationships and jobs.” —From You Don’t Have to Live Like ThisGreg Marnier, Marny to his friends, leaves a job he doesn’t much like and moves to Detroit, Michigan in 2009, where an old friend has a big idea about real estate and the revitalization of a once great American city. Once there, he gets involved in a fist-fight between two of his friends, a racially charged trial, an act of vigilante justice, a love affair with a local high school teacher, and a game of three-on-three basketball with the President — not to mention the money-soaked real estate project itself, cut out of 600 acres of emaciated Detroit. Marny’s billionaire buddy from Yale, Robert James, calls his project “the Groupon model for gentrification,” others call it “New Jamestown,” and Marny calls it home— until Robert James asks him to leave. This is the story of what went wrong.You Don’t Have to Live Like This is the breakout novel from the “fabulously real” (Guardian) voice of the only American included in Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists. Using the framework of our present reality, Benjamin Markovits blurs the line between the fictional and the fact-based, and captures an invisible current threaded throughout American politics, economics, and society that is waiting to explode.

Bestselling author Jonathan Lethem delivers a hilarious novel about love, art, and what it’s like to be young in Los Angeles. Lucinda Hoekke’s daytime gig as a telephone operator at the Complaint Line—an art gallery’s high-minded installation piece—is about as exciting as listening to dead air. Her real passion is playing bass in her forever struggling, forever unnamed band. But recently a frequent caller, the Complainer, as Lucinda dubs him, has captivated her with his philosophical musings. When Lucinda’s band begins to incorporate the Complainer’s catchy, existential phrases into their song lyrics, they are suddenly on the cusp of their big break. There is only one problem: the Complainer wants in.

"Sam Pink is dictator of the island of the bizarre." — As You Recognize Your Transience"Reading Sam Pink will make you recognize the reptile smuggler that has always been hiding out inside your brain." — Cameron Pierce, author of Ass Goblins of Auschwitz and The Pickled Apocalypse of Pancake Island

"Headlong, heartsick and footsore…Frisbee sentences that sail, spin, hover, circle and come back to the reader like gifts of gravity and grace…Nobody writes better than Dave Eggers about young men who aspire to be, at the same time, authentic and sincere." – The New York Times Book Review"You Shall Know Our Velocity! is the work of a wildly talented writer… Like Kerouac's book, Eggers's could inspire a generation as much as it documents it." – LA Weekly"There's an echolet of James Joyce there and something of Saul Bellow's Chinatown bounce, but we're carried into the narrative by a fluidity of line that is Eggers's own." – Entertainment Weekly"Eggers is a wonderful writer, bold and inventive, with the technique of a magic realist." – Salon"An entertaining and profoundly original tale." – San Francisco Chronicle"Eggers's writing really takes off – his forte is the messy, funny tirade, stuffed with convincing pain and wry observations." – Newsday"Often rousing…achieves a kind of anguished, profane poetry." – Newsweek"The bottom line that matters is this: Eggers has written a terrific novel, an entertaining and imaginative tale." – The Boston Globe"There are some wonderful set-pieces here, and memorable phrases tossed on the ground like unwanted pennies from the guy who runs the mint." – The Washington Post Book World"Powerful… Eggers's strengths as a writer are real: his funny pitch-perfect dialog; the way his prose delicately captures the bumblebee blundering of Will's thoughts;… and the stream-water clarity of his descriptions… There is genius here… Who is doing more, single-handedly and single-mindedly, for American writing?" – Time***Because of Dave Eggers' experiences with the industry when he released his first book, he decided to publish this novel on his own. It is only available online or at Independent Bookshops. If you enjoy this book, please buy a copy… this is one of the few cases where the author really will recieve his fair share of the proceeds, and you will be helping a fledgling publishing house. This e-copy was proofed carefully, italics left intact. There is no synopsis on the book, so here are excerpts from a Salon.com review:Will Chmlielewski, the hero and narrator of "You Shall Know Our Velocity," is seeking relief for his head, which, on the inside, has been badly affected by the death of a friend and, on the outside, has been beaten to a pulp by a band of toughs. Will moves through the novel with a badly bruised and scabbed face, which everyone keeps telling him – and he keeps telling everyone – will heal to its former condition. It's the same hope Will holds out for his mind. He can't sleep without alcohol or masturbation.The plot of "You Shall Know Our Velocity" is best recounted swiftly, since it hinges on motion and speed. Will has a friend called Hand. After Jack's death in a car crash, they agree to make a six-day trip around the world – "six, six and a half" – flying from country to country and dispersing $80,000 to strangers, money that Will has suddenly come into and which plagues him with white, Western guilt.On their way to nowhere in particular, Will and Hand cross paths and lock horns with a variety of exotics – peasants, prostitutes, elegant Frenchwomen in dark cafes – none of whom seem to want Will's money. He literally can't give it away. In the cities, it causes pandemonium and never less than a quick escape. In the country, among African subsistence farmers, it throws Will into confusion – about money, charity, justice, his motives and such. Sometimes he calls his mother, which is no help. In Senegal, a statuesque Parisian named Annette joins Will and Hand for a midnight swim and tells them that they live in "the fourth world," something Will can't understand.If it sounds a bit sophomoric, it is. So is "On the Road." So was "Emile." A certain crabbed critic for a paper of record has complained about Eggers' "shaggy-dog plot" and "self-indulgent yapping," but I think she's showing her age. A writer is among us, however imperfect, and he'll only get better if we leave him alone.

"Amy Gustine's You Should Pity Us Instead is a devastating, funny, and astonishingly frank collection of stories. Gustine can be brutally honest about the murky calculations, secret dreams and suppressed malice to which most of us never admit, not even to ourselves." — Karen Russell"You Should Pity Us Instead is an unbroken spell from first story to last, despite the enormous range of subjects and landscapes, sufferings and joys it explores." — Laura Kasischke"Amy Gustine's stories cross impossible borders both physical and moral: a mother looking for her kidnapped son sneaks into Gaza, an Ellis Island inspector mourning his lost love plays God at the boundary between old world and new. Brave, essential, thrilling, each story in You Should Pity Us Instead takes us to those places we've never dared visit before." — Ben StroudYou Should Pity Us Instead explores some of our toughest dilemmas: the cost of Middle East strife at its most intimate level, the likelihood of God considered in day-to-day terms, the moral stakes of family obligations, and the inescapable fact of mortality. Amy Gustine exhibits an extraordinary generosity toward her characters, instilling them with a thriving, vivid presence.

"You bitch, you killed me. You suck!"Being dead sucks. Make that being undead sucks.Literally. Just ask Thomas C. Flood. Waking up after a fantastic night unlike anything he's ever experienced, he discovers that his girlfriend, Jody—the woman of his dreams—is a vampire. And surprise! Now he's one, too.For some couples, the whole biting-and-blood thing would have been a deal breaker. But Tommy and Jody are in love, and they vow to work through their issues. Like how much Jody should teach Tommy about his new superpowers (and how much he needs to learn on his own). Plus there's Tommy's cute new minion, sixteen-year-old goth girl Abby Normal. (Well, someone has to run errands during daylight hours!)Making the relationship work, however, is the least of Jody and Tommy's problems. Word has it that the vampire who nibbled on Jody wasn't supposed to be recruiting any new members into the club. Even worse, Tommy's erstwhile turkey-bowling pals are out to get him, at the urging of a blue-dyed Las Vegas call girl named (duh) Blue.

Following Like You’d Understand, Anyway—awarded the Story Prize and a finalist for the National Book Award — Jim Shepard returns with an even more wildly diverse collection of astonishingly observant stories. Like an expert curator, he populates the vastness of human experience — from its bizarre fringes and lonely, breathtaking pinnacles to the hopelessly mediocre and desperately below average — with brilliant scientists, reluctant soldiers, workaholic artists, female explorers, depraved murderers, and deluded losers, all wholly convincing and utterly fascinating.A “black world” operative at Los Alamos isn’t allowed to tell his wife anything about his daily activities, but he can’t resist sharing her intimate confidences with his work buddy. A young Alpine researcher falls in love with the girlfriend of his brother, who was killed in an avalanche he believes he caused. An unlucky farm boy becomes the manservant of a French nobleman who’s as proud of his military service with Joan of Arc as he’s aroused by the slaughter of children. A free-spirited autodidact, grieving her lost sister, traces the ancient steps of a ruthless Middle Eastern sect and becomes the first Western woman to travel the Arabian deserts. From the inventor of the Godzilla epics to a miserable G.I. in New Guinea, each comes to realize that knowing better is never enough.Enthralling and unfailingly compassionate, You Think That’s Bad traverses centuries, continents, and social strata, but the joy and struggle that Shepard depicts with such devastating sensitivity — all the heartbreak, alienation, intimacy, and accomplishment — has a universal resonance.

A woman known only as A lives in an unnamed American city with her roommate, B, and boyfriend, C, who wants her to join him on a reality dating show called That's My Partner! A eats mostly popsicles and oranges, watches endless amounts of television, often just for the commercials— particularly the recurring cartoon escapades of Kandy Kat, the mascot for an entirely chemical dessert — and models herself on a standard of beauty that exists only in such advertising. She fixates on the fifteen minutes of fame a local celebrity named Michael has earned after buying up a Wally's Supermarket's entire, and increasingly ample, supply of veal.Meanwhile, B is attempting to make herself a twin of A, who in turn hungers for something to give meaning to her life, something aside from C's pornography addiction. Maybe something like what's gotten into her neighbors across the street, the family who's begun "ghosting" themselves beneath white sheets and whose garage door features a strange scrawl of graffiti: he who sits next to me, may we eat as one.An intelligent and madly entertaining novel reminiscent of The Crying of Lot 49, White Noise, and City of Glass, Alexandra Kleeman's unforgettable debut is a missing-person mystery told from the point of view of the missing person; an American horror story that concerns sex and friendship, consumption and appetite, faith and transformation, real food and reality television; and, above all, a wholly singular vision of modern womanhood by a frightening, "stunning" (Conjunctions), and often very funny voice of a new generation.

A farmer perishing under a fallen tractor makes a last stab at philosophizing: “There was nothing dead that was ever beautiful.” It is a sentiment belied not only by the strange beauty in his story but also in the rough lives and deaths, small and large, that fill these haunting tales. Pulp-fiction grim and gritty but with the rhythm and resonance of classic folklore, these stories take place in a world of shadowy figures and childhood fears, in a countryside peopled by witches and skinflints, by men and women mercilessly unforgiving of one another’s trespasses, and in nights prowled by wolves and scrutinized by an “agonized and lamenting” moon. Ervin D. Krause’s characters pontificate in saloons, condemning the morals of others as they slowly get sloshed; they have affairs in old cars on winter nights; they traffic in gossip, terrorize their neighbors, steal, hunt, and spy.This collection includes award-winning stories like “The Snake” and “The Quick and the Dead” as well as the previously unpublished “Anniversary,” which stirred a national controversy when it was censored by the University of Nebraska and barred from appearing in Prairie Schooner. Krause’s portrayal of the matter-of-fact cruelty and hopeful fragility of humanity is a critical addition to the canon of twentieth-century American literature.

"No one is smarter or funnier about the absurdities and agonies of modern love. Reading You is an affair to relish and remember." — Hilda WolitzerWith each new novel, Jonathan Baumbach nudges the parameters of the novel — this time his narrator remembers, or invents, or imagines, the life of a not easily defined woman known only as You. It's another great look at the idea of love and the many various holds it can take.Jonathan Baumbach is the author of fourteen books of fiction, and has also published over ninety stories in such places as Esquire and Boulevard.

Young Once is a crucial book in the career of Nobel laureate Patrick Modiano. It was his breakthrough novel, in which he stripped away the difficulties of his earlier work and found a clear, mysteriously moving voice for his haunting stories of love, nostalgia, and grief. It has also been called “the most gripping Modiano book of all” (Der Spiegel).Odile and Louis are leading a happy, bucolic life with their two children in the French countryside near the Swiss mountains. It is Odile’s thirty-fifth birthday, and Louis’s thirty-fifth birthday is a few weeks away. Then the story shifts back to their early years: Louis, just freed from his military service and at loose ends, taken up by a shady character who brings him to Paris to do some work for a friend who manages a garage; Odile, an aspiring singer, at the mercy of the kindness and unkindness of strangers. They move through a Paris saturated with the crimes and secrets of the past but breathing hopes for the future; they find each other and struggle together to create what, looking back, will have been their youth.

“A stunning debut…The timeless nature of each story means this collection can — and will — be read many years from now.”—The Sunday TimesMaking a remarkable entrance onto the Irish and UK literary scene with rave reviews in The Sunday Times and The Guardian, Colin Barrett’s Young Skins is a stunning introduction to a singular voice in contemporary fiction.Enter the small, rural town of Glanbeigh, a place whose fate took a downturn with the Celtic Tiger, a desolate spot where buffoonery and tension simmer and erupt, and booze-sodden boredom fills the corners of every pub and nightclub. Here, and in the towns beyond, the young live hard and wear the scars. Amongst them, there’s jilted Jimmy, whose best friend Tug is the terror of the town and Jimmy’s sole company in his search for the missing Clancy kid; Bat, a lovesick soul with a face like “a bowl of mashed up spuds” even before Nubbin Tansey’s boot kicked it in; and Arm, a young and desperate criminal whose destiny is shaped when he and his partner, Dympna, fail to carry out a job. In each story, a local voice delineates the grittiness of Irish society; unforgettable characters whose psychological complexities and unspoken yearnings are rendered through silence, humor, and violence.With power and originality akin to Wells Tower’s Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned and Claire Vaye Watkins’ Battleborn these six short stories and one explosive novella occupy the ghostly, melancholic spaces between boyhood and old age. Told in Barrett’s vibrant, distinctive prose, Young Skins is an accomplished and irreverent debut from a brilliant new writer.

“An urgent and deeply moving novel.”—Michiko Kakutani, The New York TimesThe US military is preparing to withdraw from Iraq, and newly-minted lieutenant Jack Porter struggles to accept how it’s happening — through alliances with warlords who have Arab and American blood on their hands. Day after day, Jack tries to assert his leadership in the sweltering, dreary atmosphere of Ashuriyah. But his world is disrupted by the arrival of veteran Sergeant Daniel Chambers, whose aggressive style threatens to undermine the fragile peace that the troops have worked hard to establish.As Iraq plunges back into chaos and bloodshed and Chambers’s influence over the men grows stronger, Jack becomes obsessed with a strange, tragic tale of reckless love between a lost American soldier and Rana, a local sheikh’s daughter. In search of the truth and buoyed by the knowledge that what he finds may implicate Sergeant Chambers, Jack seeks answers from the enigmatic Rana, and soon their fates become intertwined. Determined to secure a better future for Rana and a legitimate and lasting peace for her country, Jack will defy American command, putting his own future in grave peril.Pulling readers into the captivating immediacy of a conflict that can shift from drudgery to devastation at any moment, Youngblood provides startling new dimension to both the moral complexity of war and its psychological toll.

An award-winning writer delivers a poignant and provocative novel of identity, race and the search for belonging in the age of globalization.One afternoon, not long after Kelly Thorndike has moved back to his hometown of Baltimore, an African American man he doesn’t recognize calls out to him. To Kelly’s shock, the man identifies himself as Martin, who was one of Kelly’s closest friends in high school — and, before his disappearance nearly twenty years before, skinny, white, and Jewish. Martin then tells an astonishing story: After years of immersing himself in black culture, he’s had a plastic surgeon perform “racial reassignment surgery”—altering his hair, skin, and physiognomy to allow him to pass as African American. Unknown to his family or childhood friends, Martin has been living a new life ever since.Now, however, Martin feels he can no longer keep his new identity a secret; he wants Kelly to help him ignite a controversy that will help sell racial reassignment surgery to the world. Kelly, still recovering from the death of his wife and child and looking for a way to begin anew, agrees, and things quickly begin to spiral out of control.Inventive and thought-provoking, Your Face in Mine is a brilliant novel about cultural and racial alienation and the nature of belonging in a world where identity can be a stigma or a lucrative brand.

In a return to the British setting of his much loved novel All Souls, Javier Marias embarks on a remarkable 'novel in parts', set in the murky world of surveillance and espionage. Fever and Spear is the first volume. In it Marias begins to weave a web of intrigue, both narrative and intellectual, that will entice the reader to follow him into the labyrinth of the novel's future books. Recently divorced, Jacques Deza moves from Madrid to London in order to distance himself from his ex-wife and children. There he picks up old friendships from his Oxford University days, particularly Sir Peter Wheeler, retired don and semi-retired spy. It is at an Oxford party of Wheeler's that Jacques is approached by the enigmatic Bertram Tupra. Tupra believes that Jacques has a talent: he is one of those people who sees more clearly than others, who can guess from someone's face today what they will become tomorrow. His services would be of use to a mysterious group whose aims are unstated but whose day-to-day activities involve the careful observation of people's character and the prediction of their future behaviour. The 'group' may be part of MI6, though Jacques will find no reference to it in any book; he will be called up to report on all types of people from politicians and celebrities, to ordinary citizens applying for bank loans. As Deza is drawn deeper into this twilight world of observation, Marias shows how trust and betrayal characterise all human relationships. How do we read people, and how far can the stories they tell about themselves be trusted when, by its very nature, all language betrays? Moving from the intimacy of Jacques' marriage to the deadly betrayals of the Spanish Civil War, Your Face Tomorrow is an extraordinary meditation on our ability to know our fellow human beings, and to save ourselves from fever and pain.

Few books in recent decades have excited the interest of readers and the raves of reviewers like Javier Marías's Your Face Tomorrow: 'This brilliant trilogy must be one of the greatest novels of our age' (Antony Beevor, The London Sunday Telegraph). Now available complete – all three paperback volumes in a shrinkwrapped set – Your Face Tomorrow in its full trilogy, one of the greatest literary masterpieces of our time.

Your Face Tomorrow, Javier Marías's daring novel in three parts culminates triumphantly in this much-anticipated final volume. Poison, Shadow, and Farewell, with its heightened tensions between meditations and noir narrative, with its wit and and ever deeper forays into the mysteries of consciousness, brings to a stunning finale Marías's three-part Your Face Tomorrow. Already this novel has been acclaimed 'exquisite' (Publishers Weekly), 'gorgeous' (Kirkus), and 'outstanding: another work of urgent originality' (London Independent). Poison, Shadow, and Farewell takes our hero Jaime Deza – hired by MI6 as a person of extraordinarily sophisticated powers of perception – back to Madrid to both spy on and try to protect his own family, and into new depths of love and loss, with a fluency on the subject of death that could make a stone weep..

From Dave Eggers, best-selling author of The Circle, a tightly controlled, emotionally searching novel. Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever? is the formally daring, brilliantly executed story of one man struggling to make sense of his country, seeking answers the only way he knows how.In a barracks on an abandoned military base, miles from the nearest road, Thomas watches as the man he has brought wakes up. Kev, a NASA astronaut, doesn't recognize his captor, though Thomas remembers him. Kev cries for help. He pulls at his chain. But the ocean is close by, and nobody can hear him over the waves and wind. Thomas apologizes. He didn't want to have to resort to this. But they really needed to have a conversation, and Kev didn't answer his messages. And now, if Kev can just stop yelling, Thomas has a few questions.