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Murphy, Samuel Beckett's first published novel, is set in London and Dublin, during the first decades of the Irish Republic. The title character loves Celia in a “striking case of love requited” but must first establish himself in London before his intended bride will make the journey from Ireland to join him. Beckett comically describes the various schemes that Murphy employs to stretch his meager resources and the pastimes that he uses to fill the hours of his days. Eventually Murphy lands a job as a nurse at Magdalen Mental Mercyseat hospital, where he is drawn into the mad world of the patients which ends in a fateful game of chess. While grounded in the comedy and absurdity of much of daily life, Beckett's work is also an early exploration of themes that recur throughout his entire body of work including sanity and insanity and the very meaning of life.

Written over the course of three days and three nights, The Subterraneans was generated out of the same kind of ecstatic flash of inspiration that produced another one of Kerouac's early classics, On The Road. Centering around the tempestuous breakup of Leo Percepied and Mardou Fox—two denizens of the 1950s San Francisco underground—The Subterraneans is a tale of dark alleys and smoky rooms, of artists, visionaries, and adventurers existing outside mainstream America's field of vision.

Henry Miller's famously banned book is “a matter-of-fact celebration of chucking one's dreary life and following your heart to Paris” (Richard Price). Now hailed as an American classic, Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller's masterpiece, was banned as obscene in this country for twenty-seven years after its first publication in Paris in 1934. Only a historic court ruling that changed American censorship standards, ushering in a new era of freedom and frankness in modern literature, permitted the publication of this first volume of Miller's famed mixture of memoir and fiction, which chronicles with unapologetic gusto the bawdy adventures of a young expatriate writer, his friends, and the characters they meet in Paris in the 1930s. Tropic of Cancer is now considered, as Norman Mailer said, “one of the ten or twenty great novels of our century.”

“Borges's composed, carefully wrought, gnarled style is at once the means of his art and its object—his way of ordering and giving meaning to the bizarre and terrifying world he creates: it is a brilliant, burnished instrument, and it is quite adequate to the extreme demands his baroque imagination makes of it.... Absolutely and most vividly original.”—Saturday ReviewThe seventeen pieces in Ficciones demonstrate the gargantuan powers of imagination, intelligence, and style of one of the greatest writers of this or any other century. Borges sends us on a journey into a compelling, bizarre, and profoundly resonant realm; we enter the fearful sphere of Pascal's abyss, the surreal and literal labyrinth of books, and the iconography of eternal return. More playful and approachable than the fictions themselves are Borges's Prologues, brief elucidations that offer the uninitiated a passageway into the whirlwind of Borges's genius and mirror the precision and potency of his intellect and inventiveness, his piercing irony, his skepticism, and his obsession with fantasy. To enter the worlds in Ficciones is to enter the mind of Jorge Luis Borges, wherein lies Heaven, Hell, and everything in between.

The “uproariously funny” second book in the Rosy Crucifixion trilogy, “may be Miller's masterpiece” (Choice). “Plexus is the core volume in The Rosy Crucifixion: the volume which has the most complete description of Henry Miller's basic values, beliefs, opinions, judgments, both at the time of his ‘Crucifixion'and at the later time when the trilogy was written. Plexus is simply the most marvelous volume of emotion and ideas and visions and nightmares about man and society in the twentieth century—with art as the link perhaps, or as the soul's refuge—that I have read in many a long year. There is absolutely no subject in the world that Henry Miller does not seem to know about, want to talk about, and to evaluate with the deep authority of wisdom. He is probably the most learned of all our American writers, the most open to ideas and feelings, and yes, the most worshipful of all the aspects of life, as well as the most critical literary spokesman of our time.” —Maxwell Geismar

This volume brings together three of Nobel Prize winner Samuel Beckett's major short stories and thirteen shorter pieces of fiction that he calls “texts for nothing.” Here, as in all his work, Beckett relentlessly strips away all but the essential to arrive at a core of truth. His prose reveals the same mastery that marks his work from Waiting for Godot and Endgame to Molloy and Malone Dies. In each of the three stories, old men displaced or expelled from the modest corners where they have been living bestir themselves in search of new corners. Told, “You can't stay here,” they somehow, doggedly, inevitably, go on.Includes:“The Expelled”“The Calmative”“The End”Texts for Nothing (1-10)

From the Nobel Prize–winning author: “One of the great short novels of the 20th century” (The Wall Street Journal). Internationally acclaimed as one of the world's most influential writers, Kenzaburō Ōe brings to the fore the post-WWII rage and anxiety of a decorous society in this “deathly black comedy... dripping with nuclear terror” (The Japan Times). Bird is an antisocial twenty-seven-year-old intellectual hanging on to a failing marriage with whiskey. He dreams of going to Africa where the sky sprawls with possibilities. Then, as though walloped by a massive invisible fist, Bird's Utopian fantasies are shattered when his wife gives birth to what he calls their “monster baby.” Now, Bird is left with one question: How can he and his wife spend the rest of their lives with this damaged thing clinging to their backs? As shameful, disgraceful, and unthinkable a desire as it is, Bird has an answer. Not sealed. Not just yet. Not before Bird flees on a bender of indiscriminate (and frustratingly impotent) sex, hard liquor, self-delusion, and most terrifying of all—self-discovery. “Very close to a perfect contemporary novel.” —The New York Times “An astonishing novel.” —Mother Jones

A quirky, brilliant novel starring Chauncey Gardiner, an enigmatic man who rises from nowhere to become a media phenomenon—“a fabulous creature of our age” (Newsweek). One of the most beloved novels by the New York Times–bestselling and National Book Award–winning author of The Painted Bird and Pinball, Being There is the story of a mysterious man who finds himself at the center of Wall Street and Washington power—including his role as a policy adviser to the president—despite the fact that no one is quite sure where he comes from, or what he is actually talking about. Nevertheless, Chauncey “Chance” Gardiner is celebrated by the media, and hailed as a visionary, in this satirical masterpiece that became an award-winning film starring Peter Sellers. As wise and timely as ever, Being There is “a tantalizing knuckleball of a book delivered with perfectly timed satirical hops and metaphysical flutters” (Time).

From one of the most famous of the Beat writers, Kerouac's final novel of brotherhood and travel, now reissued in a standalone edition following his centenary celebration Pic—full name Pictorial Review Jackson—is a ten-year-old Black boy living in rural North Carolina with his grandfather in the 1940s. When Pic is forced to move in with his aunt after his grandfather's passing, his older brother Slim appears to rescue him. Together, they hitch a ride to New York City, where Slim lives with his pregnant girlfriend, but the city's poverty shocks young Pic. When Slim loses job after job, the brothers will pick up and head west, making their way to California across a country suffused with hardship, music, love, and danger. Kerouac's last published novel, Pic is an endearing portrayal of brotherhood and the classic American road trip, seen through the adventurous eyes of a child.

'First Love', a man's musings about his youth occasioned by his visit to his father's grave, was first written by Samuel Beckett in French in 1945, but it wasn't until 1973 that he completed this the English translation.

“Kathy Acker's writing is virtuoso, maddening, crazy, so sexy, so painful, and beaten out of a wild heart that nothing can tame. Acker is a landmark writer.” —Jeanette Winterson, New York Times–bestselling authorA masterpiece of surrealist fiction, steeped in controversy upon its first publication in 1984, Blood and Guts in High School is the book that established Kathy Acker as the preeminent voice of post-punk feminism. With 2017 marking the 70th anniversary of her birth, as well as the 10th year since her death this transgressive work of philosophical, political, and sexual insight—with a new introduction by Chris Kraus—continues to become more relevant than ever before.In the Mexican city of Merida, ten-year-old Janey lives with Johnny—her “boyfriend, brother, sister, money, amusement, and father” —until he leaves her for another woman. Bereft, Janey travels to New York City, plunging into an underworld of gangs and prostitution. After escaping imprisonment, she flees to Tangiers where she meets Jean Genet, and they begin a torrid affair that will lead Janey to her demise. Fantastical, sensual, and fearlessly radical, this hallucinatory collage is both a comic and tragic portrait of erotic awakening.“The girl in this story had more agency and voice than any girl I'd ever read or would read in my entire life.” —Lydia Yuknavitch, national bestselling author of Thrust“No writer I know is more audacious than Kathy Acker, whose anarchic wit drives a thoroughgoing attack on conventions and complacencies of all sorts. Not unlike Gertrude Stein in her day, Acker gives us a different way to look at the uses to which language is put.” —Lynne Tillman, author of Men and Apparitions

From the renowned Beat writer, Kerouac's colorful and meandering search for his family history, now reissued following his centenary celebrationSatori in Paris is the semi-autobiographical tale of Jack Kerouac's trip to France in search of his heritage. Beginning in Paris and moving west to Brittany, Kerouac traces the paths of his ancestors and explores his own understanding of the Buddhism that came to define his beliefs. From his familiar milieu of strangers and all-night conversations in seedy bars, to a pivotal cab ride in which he experiences Buddhism's satori—a feeling of sudden understanding—Kerouac's affecting and revolutionary writing transports the reader. Published at the height of his fame and showcasing his mature talent, Satori in Paris is a lyrical, rollicking tale of philosophy, identity, and the power and strangeness of travel.

The winner of the Prix des Critiques from the French avant-garde author of Jealousy. “Robbe-Grillet is the forerunner of a revolution in the novel” (Claude Mauriac, cultural critic for Le Figaro). Mathias, a timorous, ineffectual traveling salesman, returns to the island of his birth after a long absence. Two days later, a thirteen-year-old girl is found drowned and mutilated. With eerie precision, Robbe-Grillet puts us at the scene of the crime and takes us inside Mathias's mind, artfully enlisting us as detective hot on the trail of a homicidal maniac. A triumphant display of the techniques of the “new novel,” The Voyeur achieves the impossible feat of keeping us utterly engrossed in the mystery of the child's murder while systematically raising doubts about whether it really occurred. “The suspense... keeps us on tenterhooks.” —The New York Times Book Review “I can think of no other writer who can render the banal so fearfully fantastic. In the subtlest, slyest, and most sheerly delightful way he persuades us to look anew at the commonplace.” —Books and Bookmen Praise for Alain Robbe-Grillet “Robbe-Grillet's theories constitute the most ambitious aesthetic program since Surrealism.” —John Updike, Pulitzer Prize–winner “Robbe-Grillet is important because he has attacked the last bastion of the traditional art of writing: the organization of literary space.” —Roland Barthes, influential literary theorist “Robbe-Grillet was a master at conveying human misunderstanding.” —Bernard-Henri Lévy, public intellectual, author, and filmmaker “I doubt that fiction as art can any longer be seriously discussed without Robbe-Grillet.” —The New York Times

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize“A masterwork... the novel astonishes with its inventiveness... it is nothing less than a grand comic fugue.”—The New York Times Book ReviewA Confederacy of Dunces is an American comic masterpiece. John Kennedy Toole's hero, one Ignatius J. Reilly, is'huge, obese, fractious, fastidious, a latter-day Gargantua, a Don Quixote of the French Quarter. His story bursts with wholly original characters, denizens of New Orleans'lower depths, incredibly true-to-life dialogue, and the zaniest series of high and low comic adventures'(Henry Kisor, Chicago Sun-Times).

“The mist beautiful book that Genet has written.” —Jean-Paul SartreThe Thief's Journal is perhaps Jean Genet's most authentically biographical novel, personifying his quest for spiritual glory through the pursuit of evil. Writing in the intensely lyrical prose style that is his trademark, the man Jean Cocteau dubbed France's “Black Prince of Letters” here reconstructs his early adult years—time he spent as a petty criminal and vagabond, traveling through Spain and Antwerp, occasionally border hopping across the rest of Europe, always one step ahead of the authorities

From the acclaimed Beat writer, Jack Kerouac's unique collection of personal travel writing, now reissued following his centenary celebrationIn his first directly autobiographical book, Jack Kerouac relates the exhilarating stories of the years he spent restlessly traveling and writing his acclaimed novels. He journeys from the California deserts crisscrossed by train tracks to the bullfights of Mexico to the Beat nightlife of New York City, and across the Atlantic to Paris, Morocco, and London. With echoes of landscapes that appear in his other novels, including The Dharma Bums and Desolation Angels, and featuring his distinctive exuberant style and “jazzy impressionistic prose” (New Yorker), Lonesome Traveler is a unique addition to Kerouac's body of work.Show Additional Fields

A National Book Critics Circle Award winner and New York Times Notable Book: “intelligent, versatile... profound” stories of migration in America (The Washington Post Book World). Illuminating a new world of people in migration that has transformed the essence of America, these collected stories are a dazzling display of the vision of this critically-acclaimed contemporary writer. An aristocratic Filipina negotiates a new life for herself with an Atlanta investment banker. A Vietnam vet returns to Florida, a place now more foreign than the Asia of his war experience. An Indian widow tries to explain her culture's traditions of grieving to her well-intentioned friends. And in the title story, an Iraqi Jew whose travels have ended in Queens suddenly finds himself an unwitting guerrilla in a South American jungle. Passionate, comic, violent, and tender, these stories draw us into a cultural fusion in the midst of its birth pangs, expressing a “consummated romance with the American language” (The New York Times Book Review).

The renowned novel of a young Indian woman's coming of age as her life takes her across Indian and the United States—with a new introduction by Mira Jacob.A New York Times Notable BookFollowing one woman through her numerous identities—from Jyoti in a small village in Punjab, to Jasmine in Jalandhar, to Jase in Manhattan, to Jane in Iowa—Bharati Mukherjee gives us an iconic character whose journey through shifting landscapes necessitates her shifting selves. What she encounters on this path, from India to America and from girlhood to womanhood, shows the beauty and darkness and revelation inherent in the journeys of all those who not only want to survive, but to grow.When Jasmine was first published in 1989, the New York Times called it “one of the most suggestive novels we have about what it is to become an American.” Thirty years later, Jasmine has only grown in its significance. With a new introduction by Mira Jacob for this thirtieth-anniversary edition, Jasmine is a masterful examination of identity, immigration, and sexuality from the “Matriarch of Indian-American literature” (Literary Hub).

When Jasmine is suddenly widowed at seventeen, she seems fated to a life of quiet isolation in the small Indian village where she was born. But the force of Jasmine's desires propels her explosively into a larger, more dangerous, and ultimately more life-giving world. In just a few years, Jasmine becomes Jane Ripplemeyer, happily pregnant by a middle-aged Iowa banker and the adoptive mother of a Vietnamese refugee. Jasmine's metamorphosis, with its shocking upheavals and its slow evolutionary steps, illuminates the making of an American mind; but even more powerfully, her story depicts the shifting contours of an America being transformed by her and others like her -- our new neighbors, friends, and lovers. In Jasmine, Bharati Mukherjee has created a heroine as exotic and unexpected as the many worlds in which she lives.'Rich…one of the most suggestive novels we have about what it is to become an American.'-- The New York Times Book Review

A collection of four short novels by the renowned, Prix Goncourt–winning author of The Lover.Long acknowledged as one of the most important literary figures in France, Marguerite Duras has garnered worldwide praise for her work, from the acclaimed screenplay Hiroshima Mon Amour to the best-selling novel The Lover.In these four short novels, Duras demonstrates her remarkable ability to create an emotional intensity and unity by focusing on the intimate details of the relationships among only a few central characters. From the park bench couple in “The Square” (1955) to the double love triangle in “10:30 on a Summer Night” (1960), each novel probes the depths and complexities of human emotion, of love and of despair. Exceptional for their range in mood and situation, these four novels beautifully showcase the poetic sensability that is uniquely Duras.

The shattering novel of underground life the New York Times called “a cry of rapture and horror... the purest lyrical genius.” Jean Genet's debut novel Our Lady of the Flowers, which is often considered to be his masterpiece, was written entirely in the solitude of a prison cell. A semi- autobiographical account of one man's journey through the Paris demi-monde, dubbed “the epic of masturbation” by no less a figure than Jean-Paul Sartre, the novel's exceptional value lies in its exquisite ambiguity.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize: “Uncannily perceptive stories written by an American from the viewpoint of Vietnamese citizens transplanted to Louisiana” (People). A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain is Robert Olen Butler's Pulitzer Prize–winning collection of lyrical and poignant stories about the aftermath of the Vietnam War and its enduring impact on the Vietnamese. Written in a soaring prose, Butler's haunting and powerful stories blend Vietnamese folklore and contemporary American realities, creating a vibrant panorama that is epic in its scope. This new edition includes two previously uncollected stories—“Missing” and “Salem”—that brilliantly complete the collection's narrative journey, returning to the jungles of Vietnam to explore the experiences of a former Vietcong soldier and an American MIA. “Deeply affecting... A brilliant collection of stories about storytellers whose recited folklore radiates as implicit prayer... One of the strongest collections I've read in ages.” —Ann Beattie

This acclaimed novel by the Pulitzer Prize–finalist is “at once a story about a boy growing up in two cultures, a love story, and a mystery” (The Boston Globe). Winner of the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction, The Long Night of White Chickens announced Francisco Goldman's arrival as a major literary talent. It is both a suspenseful mystery and a tale of two worlds that plumbs the darkest depths of the relationship between the United States and Guatemala. Goldman tells the story of Roger Graetz, raised in a Boston suburb by an aristocratic Guatemalan mother and Jewish father, and Flor de Mayo, the beautiful young Guatemalan orphan who lives with the family as a maid. Similar in age, Roger and Flor become close, and remain so even after she leaves to attend college at Wellesley. After graduation, however, Flor returns home to Guatemala City, where she heads a local orphanage that arranges international adoptions. When she's murdered, Roger is stunned and can't believe the rumors he hears about her life. Years later, he travels to Guatemala to uncover the circumstances around Flor's mysterious death in this “wonderful book” that is as “complex as history, funny as love, painful as death” (The Washington Post Book World). “A richly layered, genre-busting novel that shuttles between suburban Boston and Guatemala City and devours everything in its path.” —Jay McInerney, author of Bright Lights, Big City

The New York Times–bestselling author interweaves the destinies of Napoleon's cook and an enigmatic Venetian woman in this “arresting, elegant novel” (Publishers Weekly). A faithful soldier of the Grande Armée, Henri is given the honor of serving meals to Napoleon himself. After all, Henri is short—and no one over five-foot-two ever serves the emperor. But when following his revered leader brings him to near-starvation in Russia's frozen winter, Henri is disillusioned and desperate for escape. The web-footed daughter of a Venetian boatman, Villanelle has long been acquainted with the advantages of dishonesty. Trust hasn't been her strong suit since her heart was stolen—literally—by a noblewoman she once loved. Soon these two will meet their shared destiny in the chaotic carnival that is early 19th century Venice. In The Passion, Whitbread Award-winning author Jeanette Winterson delivers a “historical novel quite different from any other” (Vanity Fair). “Recalls García Márquez... Magical touches dance like highlights over the brilliance of this fairy tale about passion, gambling, madness, and androgynous ecstasy.” —Edmund White

A sweeping novel of world war, migration, and the search for new beginnings in a new land, The Sound of One Hand Clapping was both critically acclaimed and a bestseller in Australia. Recognized with the Australian Booksellers'Book of the Year Award and the Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction, it now introduces to an international readership a young Australian who is emerging as one of our most talented new storytellers.In the winter of 1954, in a construction camp for a hydroelectric dam in the remote Tasmanian highlands, when Sonja Buloh was three years old and her migrant Slovenian father was drunk, her mother Maria walked off into a blizzard, never to return. Thirty-five years later, Sonja returns to Tasmania and a father haunted by memories of the European war and other, more recent horrors. As the shadows of the past begin to intrude ever more forcefully into the present, Sonja's empty life and her father's living death are to change forever. The Sound of One Hand Clapping is about the barbarism of an old world left behind, about the harshness of a new country, and the destiny of those in a land beyond hope who seek to redeem themselves through love.

Conceptually unique, hilarious and frightening, referred to as “pornography” in The New York Times Book Review's original review and as a “work of genius” in Newsweek's, a: A Novel is the perfect literary manifestation of Andy Warhol's sensibility. In the late sixties Warhol set out to turn a trade book into a piece of pop art, and the result was this astonishing account of the famously influential group of artists, superstars, addicts and freaks who made up the Factory milieu. Created from audiotapes recorded in and around the Factory, a: A Novel begins with the fabulous Ondine popping several amphetamines and then follows its characters as they converse with inspired, speed-driven wit and cut swaths through the clubs, coffee shops, hospitals, and whorehouses of 1960's Manhattan.

This classic work of world literature by the 1994 Japanese Nobel laureate is a devastating and moving blend of memoir and fiction. An uncanny blend of the real with the imagined, of memoir with fiction, A Quiet Life is narrated by Ma-chan, a twenty-year-old woman. Her father is a famous and fascinating novelist; her older brother, though severely brain-damaged, possesses an almost magical gift for musical composition; and her mother's life is devoted to the care of them both. Ma-chan and her younger brother find themselves emotionally on the outside of this oddly constructed nuclear family. But when her father accepts a visiting professorship from an American university, Ma-chan finds herself suddenly the head of the household and at the center of family relationships that “are movingly illuminated” (The New York Times) through Oe's unique and unpredictable genius.

“A book of major historical importance—the first contemporary novel to chronicle gay life with unsparing honesty and wild humor.”—Erica Jong In print since its original publication in 1978, Larry Kramer's Faggots has become one of the bestselling novels about gay life ever written. The book is a fierce satire of the gay ghetto and a touching story of one man's desperate search for love there, and reading it today is a fascinating look at how much, and how little, has changed. “As a documentation of an era, as savage and savagely funny social parody, as a cry in the wilderness, and as a prescient, accurate reading of the writing on the wall, the novel is peerless and utterly necessary. It is brilliant, bellicose, contemptuous, compassionate and—as is true of everything Kramer writes—behind its delectable, entertaining, sometimes maddening harshness is a profoundly moving plea for justice and for love. There are few books in modern gay fiction, or modern fiction for that matter, that must be read. Faggots is certainly one of them.”—Tony Kushner “A Vesuvian explosion about the gay life that spares no one and no thing... there is much truth and honesty to be found here.”—Chicago Tribune “True comic brilliance—a vicious Swiftian satire that, like all satire, contains a strong moral voice.”—New York “Faggots, for all its excesses, is frequently right on target and, when it is on target, is appallingly funny.”—Edward Albee “Larry Kramer is one of America's most valuable troublemakers. I hope he never lowers his voice.”—Susan Sontag

Eleven short stories of the Cuban immigrant experience as characters adjust to life in the United Sates, from an award-winning author. From the prize–winning title story—a masterpiece of humor and heartbreak—unfolds a collection of tales that illuminate the landscape of an exiled community rich in heritage, memory, and longing for the past. In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd is at once “tender and sharp-fanged” as Ana Menéndez evocatively charts the territory from Havana to Coral Gables, Florida, and explores whether any of us are capable, or even truly desirous, of outrunning our origins (LA Weekly). “With the grace of Margaret Atwood and the sensuality of Laura Esquivel,” Menéndez makes an unforgettable debut “rich in metaphor, wisdom, and delicious subtlety” (St. Petersburg Times).

Since its original publication in Paris in 1959, Naked Lunch has become one of the most important novels of the twentieth century. Exerting its influence on the relationship of art and obscenity, it is one of the books that redefined not just literature but American culture. For the Burroughs enthusiast and the neophyte, this volume—that contains final-draft typescripts, numerous unpublished contemporaneous writings by Burroughs, his own later introductions to the book, and his essay on psychoactive drugs—is a valuable and fresh experience of a novel that has lost none of its relevance or satirical bite.

From the winner of the Man Booker Prize for The Gathering. “Clever, unsettling, and thoroughly modern... We can hear echoes of the Joyce of Dubliners.” —The New York Times Book ReviewThe second novel to be published in America by widely acclaimed Irish author Anne Enright, The Wig My Father Wore is a spry, hilarious novel about parents, love, religion, and the absurdities of them all.Grace is a young Dubliner who works on a television show called Love Quiz. Her father is going benignly senile, but her life otherwise seems fairly solid. When Stephen arrives on her doorstep, however, Grace has no idea what she's in for. Stephen explains that he is an angel, a former bridge builder who committed suicide in 1934. He has been sent back to earth (as all suicides are) to guide lost souls. Grace does not take this personally at first, but eventually she has to face the idea that things are not so easy, and that her greatest intimacy is with this supernatural creature. As Grace begins to take stock of her life and the prospect of caring enough about something to fight for it, The Wig My Father Wore takes us on a moving, surreal romp through Catholicism, parents, and the reclamation of love from the twin modern evils of cynicism and the detritus of pop culture.“Weird and wonderful... Enright beams out a vibrant and complex picture of religion, sex, love, and redemption united in a celestial blue, televisual glow of wit and linguistic sedition.” —The Guardian (London)“Mesmerizing.” —The Independent on Sunday (London)

These ten stories of “intensity and bravado” by the acclaimed Chicano author explore love, lust, and longing among people struggling to find their way (Jean Thompson, The New York Times Book Review). Featuring characters of Mexican American heritage, each of these haunting stories is crafted with Gilb's quintessentially spare yet evocative language and explores the lives of men and women at odds with each other. Steeped in an ethos of regimented gender roles, the men in these stories see the women in their lives as little more than woodcuts—crude variations of their actual complexity; symbols of seduction, mystery, and power that will ultimately bring about their undoing. At turns powerful and resonant, hopeful and humorous, Woodcuts of Women is a tour de force by one of America's foremost Latino writers. “Lonely, tough stories—stories that force us to confront what's difficult in us, and in the people we love.” —Esquire “The gritty passions of men for women—the grand delusions and tender mercies—are the jukebox songs playing through the 10 stories of Gilb's ‘Woodcuts of Women.'” —San Francisco Chronicle

Nobel Prize winner Samuel Beckett was one of the most profoundly original writers of the 20th century. He gave expression to the anguish and isolation of the individual consciousness with a purity and minimalism that have altered the shape of world literature. A tremendously influential poet and dramatist, Beckett spoke of his prose fiction as the'important writing,'the medium in which he distilled his ideas most powerfully. Here, for the first time, his short prose is gathered in a definitive, complete volume by leading Beckett scholar S. E. Gontarski.

In this “witty, perceptive novel”, a young woman moves to Tokyo and encounters the world of university enrollment and impending adulthood (Elle). Banana Yoshimoto's novels of young life in Japan have made her an international sensation. Goodbye Tsugumi is an offbeat story of a deep and complicated friendship between two female cousins that ranks among her best work. Maria is the only daughter of an unmarried woman. She has grown up at the seaside alongside her cousin Tsugumi, a lifelong invalid, charismatic, spoiled, and occasionally cruel. Now Maria's father is finally able to bring Maria and her mother to Tokyo, ushering Maria into a world of university, impending adulthood, and a “normal” family. When Tsugumi invites Maria to spend a last summer by the sea, a restful idyll becomes a time of dramatic growth as Tsugumi finds love and Maria learns the true meaning of home and family. She also has to confront both Tsugumi's inner strength and the real possibility of losing her. Goodbye Tsugumi is a beguiling, resonant novel from one of the world's finest young writers.

Wise and illuminating, Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! is a masterpiece from one of the world's finest writers, Kenzaburo Oe -- winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. K is a famous writer living in Tokyo with his wife and three children, one of whom is mentally disabled. K's wife confronts him with the information that this child, Eeyore, has been doing disturbing things -- behaving aggressively, asserting that he's dead, even brandishing a knife at his mother -- and K, given to retreating from reality into abstraction, looks for answers in his lifelong love of William Blake's poetry. As K struggles to understand his family and assess his responsibilities within it, he must also reevaluate himself -- his relationship with his own father, the political stances he has taken, the duty of artists and writers in society. A remarkable portrait of the inexpressible bond between this father and his damaged son, Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! is the work of an unparalleled writer at his sparkling best.

The first new novel Oe has published since winning the Nobel Prize, Somersault is a magnificent story of the charisma of leaders, the danger of zealotry, and the mystery of faith.A decade before the story opens, two men referred to as the Patron and Guide of mankind were leaders of an influential religious movement. When a radical faction of their followers threatened to unleash an apocalypse, they recanted all of their teachings and abandoned their followers. Now, after ten years of silence, Patron and Guide begin contacting their old followers and reaching out to the public, assisted by a small group of young people who have come to them in recent months.Just as they are beginning this renewed push, the radical faction kidnaps Guide, holding him captive until his health gives out. Patron and a small core of the faithful, including a painter named Kizu who may become the new Guide, move to the mountains to establish the church's new base, followed by two groups from Patron's old church: the devout Quiet Women, and the Technicians, who have ties to the old radical faction. The Baby Fireflies, young men from a nearby village, attempt to influence the church with local traditions and military discipline. As planning proceeds for the summer conference that will bring together the faithful and launch the new church in the eyes of the world, the conflicting agendas of these factions threaten to make a mockery of the church's unity—or something far more dangerous.

This dreamlike dystopian novel “shines a dark spotlight on the modern allure of pharmaceuticals'seeming power to assuage all ills” (Booklist). Set in the very near future, this is the story of a traveling salesman floating from arid Arizona parking lots to steamy Bangkok bars and beyond to peddle the hottest new commodity for a group known only as The Company. What he has is a drug that erases memory. You can choose your oblivion, be it one mistake or a lifetime of pain. But things become hazy when our hero begins sampling the goods and reaches the point where he can't even remember what it is he cannot remember. A pitch-perfect piece for our times filled with hypnotic prose, Tokyo Doesn't Love Us Anymore is both a riveting story and a thoughtful exploration of the drug culture that surrounds us, the nature of forgetfulness, and the implacable tyranny of emotions—questioning what it means to be human when everything, including human identity, can be bought. “Part crime novel, part political allegory, part love story... Compelling.” —The New York Times Book Review

In this “slyly subversive, semi-autobiographical” novel “of Arab Israeli life,” a Palestinian man struggles against the strict confines of identity (Publishers Weekly). In Sayed Kashua's debut novel, a nameless anti-hero contends with the legacy of a grandfather who died fighting the Zionists in 1948, and a father who was jailed for blowing up a school cafeteria in the name of freedom. When the narrator is granted a scholarship to an elite Jewish boarding school, his family rejoices, dreaming that he will grow up to be the first Arab to build an atom bomb. But to their dismay, he turns out to be a coward devoid of any national pride; his only ambition is to fit in with his Jewish peers who reject him. He changes his clothes, his accent, his eating habits, and becomes an expert at faking identities, sliding between different cultures, schools, and languages, and eventually a Jewish lover and an Arab wife. With refreshing candor and self-deprecating wit, Dancing Arabs is a “chilling, convincing tale” of one man's struggle to disentangle his personal and national identities, only to tragically and inevitably forfeit both (Publishers Weekly). “Rings out on every page with a compelling sense of human truth” —Kirkus Reviews “Despite its dark prognosis, there is a lightness and dry humor that lifts it with the kind of wings its protagonist once hoped for.” —Booklist

A pair of thematically linked novellas from the acclaimed author of Lizard, Amrita, and Goodbye Tsugumi. In cherished novels such as Kitchen and Goodbye Tsugumi, Banana Yoshimoto's warm, witty, and heartfelt depictions of the lives of young Japanese have earned her international acclaim and bestseller status. Her insightful, spare vision returns in two novellas possessed by the ghosts of love found and lost. In Hardboiled, the unnamed narrator is hiking in the mountains on an anniversary she has forgotten about, the anniversary of her ex-lover's death. As she nears her hotel—stopping on the way at a hillside shrine and a strange soba shop—a sense of haunting falls over her. Perhaps these eerie events will help her make peace with her loss. Hard Luck is about another young woman, whose sister is dying and lies in a coma. Kuni's fiancé left her after the accident, but his brother Sakai continues to visit, and the two of them gradually grow closer as they make peace with the impending loss of their loved one. Yoshimoto's voice is clear, assured, and deeply moving, displaying again why she is one of Japan's, and the world's, most beloved writers. “A sparkling book.” —The Washington Post

Tom Stoppard's first novel, originally published in 1966 just before the premiere of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, is an uproarious fantasy set in modern London. The cast includes a penniless, dandified Malquist with a liveried coach; Malquist's Boswellian biographer, Moon, who frantically scribbles as a bomb ticks in his pocket; a couple of cowboys, one being named Jasper Jones; a lion who's banned from the Ritz; an Irishman on a donkey claiming to be the Risen Christ; and three irresistible women.

A wounded Confederate soldier treks across the ruins of America in this National Book Award–winning novel: “A stirring Civil War tale told with epic sweep.” —People Sorely wounded and fatally disillusioned in the fighting at Petersburg, a Confederate soldier named Inman decides to walk back to his home in the Blue Ridge mountains to Ada, the woman he loves. His journey across the disintegrating South brings him into intimate and sometimes lethal converse with slaves and marauders, bounty hunters and witches, both helpful and malign. Meanwhile, the intrepid Ada is trying to revive her father's derelict farm and learning to survive in a world where the old certainties have been swept away. As it interweaves their stories, Cold Mountain asserts itself as an authentic odyssey, hugely powerful, majestically lovely, and keenly moving.

“A classic Romeo and Juliet love story” spanning decades from the World War II Caribbean to modern-day Vancouver (The Washington Post Book World). At the dawn of the Second World War on the island of Guanagaspar, Harry, the son of a widowed maid, and Rose, the daughter of his mother's well-to-do employer, are inseparable as children. Blissfully unaware, they form a connection that knows nothing of race or class hierarchies defining their society. Then one night, after American troops occupy Guanagaspar, their deep friendship is exposed and severed. When Harry and Rose meet again in Canada years later, the gulf separating them is not so apparent. As a passion long repressed is rekindled, Rose takes it upon herself to reroute their destinies. A “transcendent tale of souls wounded by circumstance and rehabilitated by love” (Booklist, starred review), He Drown She in the Sea is a lyrical, sensuous, and suspenseful story about the origins of desire and the sacrifice and euphoria that come with defying the life one is born into. With a “narrative pacing verg[ing] on genius... The worlds revealed are lush and brilliant. The journey is delightful” (Edmonton Journal).

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Man Booker Prize: An “extraordinary” novel “lit by a moral intelligence at once fierce and tender” (The New York Times Book Review). In a crumbling, isolated house at the foot of Mount Kanchenjunga in the Himalayas, an embittered old judge wants only to retire in peace. But his life is upended when his sixteen-year-old orphaned granddaughter, Sai, arrives on his doorstep. The judge's chatty cook watches over the girl, but his thoughts are mostly with his son, Biju, hopscotching from one miserable New York restaurant job to another, trying to stay a step ahead of the INS. When a Nepalese insurgency threatens Sai's new-sprung romance with her tutor, the household descends into chaos. The cook witnesses India's hierarchy being overturned and discarded. The judge revisits his past and his role in Sai and Biju's intertwining lives. In a grasping world of colliding interests and conflicting desires, every moment holds out the possibility for hope or betrayal. Published to extraordinary acclaim, The Inheritance of Loss heralds Kiran Desai as one of our most insightful novelists. She illuminates the pain of exile and the ambiguities of postcolonialism with a tapestry of colorful characters and “uncannily beautiful” prose (O: The Oprah Magazine). “A book about tradition and modernity, the past and the future—and about the surprising ways both amusing and sorrowful, in which they all connect.” —The Independent

The acclaimed debut of Japan's “master storyteller” (Chicago Tribune). With the publication of Kitchen, the dazzling English-language debut that is still her best-loved book, the literary world realized that Banana Yoshimoto was a young writer of enduring talent whose work has quickly earned a place among the best of contemporary Japanese literature. Kitchen is an enchantingly original book that juxtaposes two tales about mothers, love, tragedy, and the power of the kitchen and home in the lives of a pair of free-spirited young women in contemporary Japan. Mikage, the heroine, is an orphan raised by her grandmother, who has passed away. Grieving, Mikage is taken in by her friend Yoichi and his mother (who is really his cross-dressing father) Eriko. As the three of them form an improvised family that soon weathers its own tragic losses, Yoshimoto spins a lovely, evocative tale with the kitchen and the comforts of home at its heart. In a whimsical style that recalls the early Marguerite Duras, Kitchen and its companion story, Moonlight Shadow, are elegant tales whose seeming simplicity is the ruse of a very special writer whose voice echoes in the mind and the soul. “Lucid, earnest and disarming... [It] seizes hold of the reader's sympathy and refuses to let go.” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

The definitive compilation of texts from “a great, horrifying, but also vastly illuminating figure... one of the most radical minds in Western history” (Newsweek). The Marquis de Sade, vilified by respectable society from his own time through ours, apotheosized by Apollinaire as “the freest spirit that has yet existed,” wrote The 120 Days of Sodom while imprisoned in the Bastille. An exhaustive catalogue of sexual aberrations and the first systematic exploration—a hundred years before Krafft-Ebing and Freud—of the psychology of sex, it is considered Sade's crowning achievement and the cornerstone of his thought. Lost after the storming of the Bastille in 1789, it was later retrieved but remained unpublished until 1904. In addition to The 120 Days, this volume includes Sade's “Reflections on the Novel,” his play Oxtiern, and his novella Ernestine. The selections are introduced by Simone de Beauvoir's landmark essay “Must We Burn Sade?” and Pierre Klossowski's provocative “Nature as Destructive Principle.” “Imperious, choleric, irascible, extreme in everything, with a dissolute imagination the like of which has never been seen, atheistic to the point of fanaticism, there you have me in a nutshell, and kill me again or take me as I am, for I shall not change.” —Marquis de Sade's last will and testament

This classic comic novel about a midlife man whose life is spiraling out of control is a “heartbreaking delight... Nothing less than a joy” (The Washington Post Book World). Screenwriter Harry Towns, a bicoastal playboy with a broken marriage and a child he rarely sees, has been reveling in the freewheeling atmosphere of the early 1970s. But when cracks start to appear in his perfectly constructed life, he has no option but to pick up the scattered pieces of his past and begin anew. From a New York Times–bestselling author and veteran Hollywood screenwriter, About Harry Towns is both a portrait of a particular era and a timeless look at the wrong turns that make up a life—featuring “ a character unique, haunting, and completely memorable” (The Washington Post Book World). “Brilliant.” —The New York Times Book Review

Winner of the PEN/Malamud Award, Airships is a “strong, original, tragic and funny” story collection of “the creative Southern tradition” (Alfred Kazin). One of the most revered short story collections of the past fifty years, Airships remains a vital text in the history of the American short story. The award-winning contemporary classic features twenty wildly original, exuberant, often hilarious stories that celebrate the universal peculiarities of the new American South—a land of high school band contests where good old boys from Vicksburg are reunited in Vietnam, and petty nostalgia and the incessant pain of disappointed love prevail in spite of our worst efforts. Hailed by none other than Larry McMurtry as “the best young writer to appear in the South since Flannery O'Connor,” Barry Hannah's immense storytelling gifts are on striking display in this essential work. “Hannah takes fiction by surprise—scenes, shocks, sounds and amazements: an explosive but meticulous originality.” —Cynthia Ozick

“An amazing novel” that plunges into the all-too-gray area between the public and private in contemporary American life (Los Angeles Times Book Review). Michael Tolkin's acclaimed second novel, Among the Dead, is an arresting examination of public and private grief in the wake of unspeakable disaster, a slow-burning tour de force of psychological fiction. When Frank Gale writes a passionate letter to his wife confessing an affair, he hopes all can be forgiven on the warm beaches of Mexico. But the farewell kiss of his girlfriend causes him to miss the flight carrying his wife and daughter, and when he learns that their plane has crashed in a crowded city, his life changes in the course of seconds. Suddenly one man's struggle to comprehend his loss becomes consumed in a media circus of legal drama, family quarrels, and public scandal. Tolkin is a masterful chronicler of contemporary America, and Among the Dead is “fascinating... ingenious... brilliantly sustained... full of nasty surprises... like Ian McEwan and Martin Amis, Tolkin portrays the squalid downside of life very well” (San Francisco Chronicle). “Startlingly original... morbidly amusing... truly terrifying.” —Allen Barra, Los Angeles Times Book Review

The World Fantasy Award–winning author of Doctor Rat offers “an entertaining trip through an exotic future” as the rich and powerful pursue immortality (Booklist). Deep in the bowels of Junk Moon, the finest scientists of Planet Immortal are nearing completion of Project Amphora, which aims to unlock the secret of life everlasting. The Project is run by the Consortium, twelve of the planet's most influential movers and shakers, but they aren't the only ones after immortality. Commander Jockey Oldcastle, a wise-cracking space pirate, has heard about the Amphora Project from a banished scientist who is convinced it will lead to the end of the world. Oldcastle sets off to find the project, only to find himself unraveling a strange mystery: It seems the Amphora Project is turning the citizens of Planet Immortal into crystal. As time runs out, it is up to Oldcastle, his botanist partner Link—and Link's exotic, unlikely love interest—to stop an extradimensional enemy before their world is lost forever. The Amphora Project “twists along at breakneck pace”, combining elements of science fiction and fantasy while transcending the boundaries of both (Publishers Weekly). “Full of weird tech and plenty of heroics and adventure in the company of bizarre creatures.” —Booklist

As a riot rages outside a bar, patrons barricaded inside face their own battle in a “brilliant and twisted” novel by the author of Leaving Las Vegas (The Kansas City Star). Completed posthumously, The Assault on Tony's is an unapologetic, unsentimental, and at times exuberant examination of the joys and sorrows of intoxication, written with the same unflinching eye and grim wit that made John O'Brien's Leaving Las Vegas an instant classic. Barricaded in a bar called Tony's while a race riot rages outside, five affluent white men—all strangers—are united by their desire to drink to the end, no matter what. Social alliances are forged and challenged as each member of this macabre party ignores his fears in favor of keeping his tumbler full to the brim. As time goes on and the liquor supply starts to dwindle, the novel reaches a gritty intensity that explores the highs and lows of the human spirit.