In a remote Polish village, Janina devotes the dark winter days to studying astrology, translating the poetry of William Blake, and taking care of the summer homes of wealthy Warsaw residents. Her reputation as a crank and a recluse is amplified by her not-so-secret preference for the company of animals over humans.
Then a neighbor, Big Foot, turns up dead. Soon other bodies are discovered, in increasingly strange circumstances. As suspicions mount, Janina inserts herself into the investigation, certain that she knows whodunit. If only anyone would pay her mind...
A deeply satisfying thriller cum fairy tale, Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead is a provocative exploration of the murky borderland between sanity and madness, justice and tradition, autonomy and fate. Whom do we deem sane? it asks. Who is worthy of a voice?
In his long-awaited first novel, American master George Saunders delivers his most original, transcendent, and moving work yet. Unfolding in a graveyard over the course of a single night, narrated by a dazzling chorus of voices, Lincoln in the Bardo is a literary experience unlike any other—for no one but Saunders could conceive it.
February 1862. The Civil War is less than one year old. The fighting has begun in earnest, and the nation has begun to realize it is in for a long, bloody struggle. Meanwhile, President Lincoln’s beloved eleven-year-old son, Willie, lies upstairs in the White House, gravely ill. In a matter of days, despite predictions of a recovery, Willie dies and is laid to rest in a Georgetown cemetery. “My poor boy, he was too good for this earth,” the president says at the time. “God has called him home.” Newspapers report that a grief-stricken Lincoln returned to the crypt several times alone to hold his boy’s body.
From that seed of historical truth, George Saunders spins an unforgettable story of familial love and loss that breaks free of its realistic, historical framework into a thrilling, supernatural realm both hilarious and terrifying. Willie Lincoln finds himself in a strange purgatory, where ghosts mingle, gripe, commiserate, quarrel, and enact bizarre acts of penance. Within this transitional state—called, in the Tibetan tradition, the bardo—a monumental struggle erupts over young Willie’s soul.
Lincoln in the Bardo is an astonishing feat of imagination and a bold step forward from one of the most important and influential writers of his generation. Formally daring, generous in spirit, deeply concerned with matters of the heart, it is a testament to fiction’s ability to speak honestly and powerfully to the things that really matter to us. Saunders has invented a thrilling new form that deploys a kaleidoscopic, theatrical panorama of voices—living and dead, historical and invented—to ask a timeless, profound question: How do we live and love when we know that everything we love must end?
Watson and Holmes: A match made in disaster. Jamie Watson and Charlotte Holmes are looking for a winter-break reprieve after a fall semester that almost got them killed. But Charlotte isn’t the only Holmes with secrets, and the mood at her family’s Sussex estate is palpably tense.
On top of everything else, Holmes and Watson could be becoming more than friends—but still, the darkness in Charlotte’s past is a wall between them. A distraction arises soon enough, because Charlotte’s beloved uncle Leander goes missing from the estate—after being oddly private about his latest assignment in a German art forgery ring.
The game is afoot once again, and Charlotte is single-minded in her pursuit. Their first stop? Berlin. Their first contact? August Moriarty (formerly Charlotte’s obsession, currently believed by most to be dead), whose powerful family has been ripping off famous paintings for the last hundred years.
But as they follow the gritty underground scene in Berlin to glittering art houses in Prague, Holmes and Watson begin to realize that this is a much more complicated case than a disappearance. Much more dangerous, too. What they learn might change everything they know about their families, themselves, and each other.
Oliver Marks has just served ten years in jail - for a murder he may or may not have committed. On the day he's released, he's greeted by the man who put him in prison. Detective Colborne is retiring, but before he does, he wants to know what really happened a decade ago.
As one of seven young actors studying Shakespeare at an elite arts college, Oliver and his friends play the same roles onstage and off: hero, villain, tyrant, temptress, ingenue, extra. But when the casting changes, and the secondary characters usurp the stars, the plays spill dangerously over into life, and one of them is found dead.
The rest face their greatest acting challenge yet: convincing the police, and themselves, that they are blameless.
Adam și Eva este un roman aparte, scris de Liviu Rebreanu în 1925. Tema principală este metempsihoza, credința în reîncarnare. Cuplul arhetipal se caută și se reîntregește în șapte perioade istorice extrem de diferite.
Romanul începe cu o scenă intrigantă pe strada Lăpuşneanu, într-o zi ploioasă, unde protagonistul întâlnește o femeie cu ochii verzi, mari, care îi par cunoscuți. Privirea lor se întâlnește cu o bucurie inexplicabilă, ca și cum s-ar fi revăzut după mult timp.
Acest moment declanșează o călătorie fascinantă prin timp, explorând diferite vieți și perioade istorice, în care sufletele pereche se întâlnesc și se regăsesc.
What is Not Yours is Not Yours is an enchanting and thought-provoking collection of intertwined stories cleverly built around the idea of keys, both literal and metaphorical. The key to a house, the key to a heart, the key to a secret—Oyeyemi’s keys not only unlock elements of her characters’ lives, they promise further labyrinths on the other side.
In “Books and Roses”, one special key opens a library, a garden, and clues to at least two lovers’ fates. In “Is Your Blood as Red as This?”, an unlikely key opens the heart of a student at a puppeteering school. “‘Sorry’ Doesn’t Sweeten Her Tea” involves a “house of locks,” where doors can be closed only with a key—with surprising, unobservable developments. And in “If a Book Is Locked There’s Probably a Good Reason for That Don't You Think”, a key keeps a mystical diary locked (for good reason).
Oyeyemi’s tales span multiple times and landscapes as they tease boundaries between coexisting realities. Is a key a gate, a gift, or an invitation? What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours captivates as it explores the many possible answers.
In One Person is a New York Times bestselling novel of desire, secrecy, and sexual identity. It is a story of unfulfilled love—tormented, funny, and affecting—and an impassioned embrace of our sexual differences.
Billy, the bisexual narrator and main character, tells the tragicomic story (lasting more than half a century) of his life as a "sexual suspect," a phrase first used by John Irving in 1978 in his landmark novel The World According to Garp.
This novel is a poignant tribute to Billy’s friends and lovers—a theatrical cast of characters who defy category and convention. Not least, it is an intimate and unforgettable portrait of the solitariness of a bisexual man who is dedicated to making himself "worthwhile."
To five-year-old Jack, Room is the entire world. It is where he was born and grew up; it's where he lives with his Ma as they learn and read and eat and sleep and play. At night, his Ma shuts him safely in the wardrobe, where he is meant to be asleep when Old Nick visits. Room is home to Jack, but to Ma, it is the prison where Old Nick has held her captive for seven years.
Through determination, ingenuity, and fierce motherly love, Ma has created a life for Jack. But she knows it's not enough... not for her or for him. She devises a bold escape plan, one that relies on her young son's bravery and a lot of luck. What she does not realize is just how unprepared she is for the plan to actually work.
Told entirely in the language of the energetic, pragmatic five-year-old Jack, Room is a celebration of resilience and the limitless bond between parent and child, a brilliantly executed novel about what it means to journey from one world to another.
Tragic, comic, and utterly honest, A Tale of Love and Darkness is at once a family saga and a magical self-portrait of a writer who witnessed the birth of a nation and lived through its turbulent history.
It is the story of a boy growing up in the war-torn Jerusalem of the forties and fifties, in a small apartment crowded with books in twelve languages and relatives speaking nearly as many. The story of an adolescent whose life has been changed forever by his mother's suicide when he was twelve years old.
The story of a man who leaves the constraints of his family and its community of dreamers, scholars, and failed businessmen to join a kibbutz, change his name, marry, and have children. The story of a writer who becomes an active participant in the political life of his nation.
Het huis van de moskee vertelt het verhaal van de familie van Aga Djan, die al eeuwenlang de belangrijkste familie is in de Iraanse stad Senedjan. Zij wonen in het huis naast de Djomè-moskee, de grootste moskee van een stad waar het vrijdaggebed wordt gehouden.
Van generatie op generatie komt de imam van de moskee uit de familie van Aga Djan; als het verhaal opent, is dit zijn neef Alsaberi. Als tapijtverkoper staat Aga Djan bovendien aan het hoofd van de bazaar en heeft economische macht.
Kader Abdolah zoomt in deze roman in op de invloed van de gebeurtenissen in Iran op deze familie. Wanneer de revolutie wordt voorbereid en uitbreekt, komt de samenleving onder druk te staan en verliest de familie langzaamaan al hun invloed en zekerheden.
From acclaimed novelist Mark Helprin, A Soldier of the Great War is a lush, literary epic about love, beauty, and the world at war. Alessandro Giuliani, the young son of a prosperous Roman lawyer, enjoys an idyllic life full of privilege: he races horses across the country to the sea, he climbs mountains in the Alps, and, while a student of painting at the ancient university in Bologna, he falls in love. Then the Great War intervenes.
Half a century later, in August of 1964, Alessandro, a white-haired professor, tall and proud, meets an illiterate young factory worker on the road. As they walk toward Monte Prato, a village seventy kilometers away, the old man—a soldier and a hero who became a prisoner and then a deserter, wandering in the hell that claimed Europe—tells him how he tragically lost one family and gained another. The boy, envying the richness and drama of Alessandro's experiences, realizes that this magnificent tale is not merely a story: it's a recapitulation of his life, his reckoning with mortality, and above all, a love song for his family.
Oracle Night is a mesmerizing novel by Paul Auster that reads like an old-fashioned ghost story. But there are no ghosts here—only flesh-and-blood human beings, wandering through the haunted realms of everyday life.
Several months into his recovery from a near-fatal illness, thirty-four-year-old novelist Sidney Orr enters a stationery shop in the Cobble Hill section of Brooklyn and buys a mysterious blue notebook. It is September 18, 1982, and for the next nine days, Orr will live under the spell of this blank book, trapped inside a world of eerie premonitions and puzzling events that threaten to destroy his marriage and undermine his faith in reality.
Why does his wife suddenly break down in tears in the backseat of a taxi just hours after Sidney begins writing in the notebook? Why does M. R. Chang, the owner of the stationery shop, precipitously close his business the next day? What are the connections between a 1938 Warsaw telephone directory and a lost novel in which the hero can predict the future?
At once a meditation on the nature of time and a journey through the labyrinth of one man's imagination, Oracle Night is a narrative tour de force that confirms Auster's reputation as one of the boldest, most original American writers.
The Captain is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship is a book-length collaboration between two underground legends, Charles Bukowski and Robert Crumb. Bukowski's last journals candidly and humorously reveal the events in the writer's life as death draws inexorably nearer, thereby illuminating our own lives and natures, and giving new meaning to what was once only familiar.
Crumb has illustrated the text with 12 full-page drawings and a portrait of Bukowski, adding a visual depth to the raw and iconoclastic nature of Bukowski's words. These journals alternate between generous accounts of his gambling jaunts and the bizarre intrusions of fame: the interviewers, Hollywood glitterati, TV producers — odd counterpoints to "the racetrack crowd... the world brought down to size, life grinding against death and losing."
Disarmingly candid, and salted with a particularly wry and gritty wisdom, this book offers a unique glimpse into the mind of one of America's most influential writers.
A Fine Balance, by Rohinton Mistry, is a compelling narrative that captures the essence of India during a turbulent period. Set in 1975, an era marked by political unrest, the book introduces us to four diverse individuals: a spirited widow, a displaced student, and two tailors escaping caste violence. Fate intertwines their lives as they are thrown together in a cramped apartment amidst the chaos of a State of Emergency.
The story unfolds as the characters evolve from mutual distrust to friendship, and eventually, love. Through their journey, A Fine Balance paints a vivid panorama of human resilience and the indomitable spirit confronting an oppressive regime. Mistry's work is a testament to the enduring human spirit in the face of societal and political upheaval.
The Feast of Love is a sumptuous work of fiction about the thing that most distracts and delights us. In a re-imagined A Midsummer Night's Dream, men and women speak of and desire their ideal mates; parents seek out their lost children; adult children try to come to terms with their own parents and, in some cases, find new ones.
In vignettes both comic and sexy, the owner of a coffee shop recalls the day his first wife seemed to achieve a moment of simple perfection, while she remembers the women's softball game during which she was stricken by the beauty of the shortstop. A young couple spends hours at the coffee shop fueling the idea of their fierce love. A professor of philosophy, stopping by for a cup of coffee, makes a valiant attempt to explain what he knows to be the inexplicable workings of the human heart.
Their voices resonate with each other—disparate people joined by the meanderings of love—and come together in a tapestry that depicts the most irresistible arena of life.
Charles Arrowby, leading light of England's theatrical set, retires from glittering London to an isolated home by the sea. He plans to write a memoir about his great love affair with Clement Makin, his mentor both professionally and personally, and to amuse himself with Lizzie, an actress he has strung along for many years.
None of his plans work out, and his memoir evolves into a riveting chronicle of the strange events and unexpected visitors—some real, some spectral—that disrupt his world and shake his oversized ego to its very core.
In exposing the jumble of motivations that drive Arrowby and the other characters, Iris Murdoch lays bare the truth of untruth—the human vanity, jealousy, and lack of compassion behind the disguises they present to the world.
Played out against a vividly rendered landscape and filled with allusions to myth and magic, Charles's confrontation with the tidal rips of love and forgiveness is one of Murdoch's most moving and powerful novels.
The Engineer of Human Souls is a labyrinthine comic novel that investigates the journey and plight of novelist Danny Smiricky, a Czech immigrant to Canada. As the novel begins, he is a professor of American literature at a college in Toronto. Out of touch with his young students, and hounded by the Czech secret police, Danny is let loose to roam between past and present, adopting whatever identity that he chooses or has been imposed upon him by History.
As adventuresome, episodic, bawdy, comic, and literary as any novel written in the past twenty-five years, The Engineer of Human Souls is worthy of the subtitle Skvorecky gave it: An Entertainment on the Old Themes of Life, Women, Fate, Dreams, The Working Class, Secret Agents, Love and Death.
Ted Hughes, formerly Poet Laureate to Queen Elizabeth II, is recognized as one of the few contemporary poets whose work has a mythic scope and power. Few episodes in postwar literature have the legendary stature of Hughes's romance with, and marriage to, the great American poet Sylvia Plath.
The poems in Birthday Letters are addressed (with just two exceptions) to Plath and were written over a period of more than twenty-five years, the first a few years after her tragic suicide in 1963. Some are love letters, others haunted recollections and ruminations. In them, Hughes recalls his and Plath's time together, drawing on the powerful imagery of his work—animal, vegetable, mythological—as well as on Plath's famous verse.
This volume offers us Hughes's own account of their intense relationship. Moreover, it's a truly remarkable collection of poems in its own right.
Ryder, a renowned pianist, arrives in a Central European city he cannot identify for a concert he cannot remember agreeing to give. As he traverses a landscape by turns eerie and comical – and always strangely malleable, as a dream might be – he comes steadily to realize he is facing the most crucial performance of his life.
Ishiguro's extraordinary and original study of a man whose life has accelerated beyond his control explores themes of identity and self-discovery. This surrealistic journey is both a mesmerizing and a thought-provoking adventure.
Dr. Harivanshrai Bachchan is India's leading Hindi poet, a confidante of the Nehrus. His son is India's best-known cinema superstar, Amitabh Bachchan.
The core of this book is a long sequence called Madhushala (the house of wine), which could be compared to the Rubaiyat in imagery and metre.
Sessiz Ev is a captivating narrative set in a crumbling mansion in the quaint village of Cennethisar, near Istanbul. Here, three grandchildren visit their grandmother, Fatma, for a week. Each grandchild has their own aspirations: Faruk is a historian, Nilgün is a sensitive leftist, and Metin dreams of wealth.
Amidst this familial gathering, the past begins to unravel. The house is filled with memories, and the presence of Recep, Fatma's faithful servant and her late husband’s illegitimate son, adds layers to the story. As the family navigates through their personal histories, the arrival of Recep’s cousin, Hasan, introduces a political dimension, reflecting Turkey’s ongoing struggle for modernity.
Sessiz Ev, Orhan Pamuk's second novel, was met with enthusiasm upon its release and has been translated into numerous languages, earning accolades worldwide. Through vivid storytelling, Pamuk bridges generations, blending personal and political narratives into a rich tapestry of Turkish life.
Zami: A Carriacou name for women who work together as friends and lovers.
Zami is a fast-moving chronicle. From the author’s vivid childhood memories in Harlem to her coming of age in the late 1950s, the nature of Audre Lorde’s work is cyclical. It especially relates the linkage of women who have shaped her life.
Lorde brings into play her craft of lush description and characterization. It keeps unfolding page after page, revealing the evolution of a strong and remarkable character.
Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest of his life he, too, will be trying to fly. With this brilliantly imagined novel, Toni Morrison transfigures the coming-of-age story as audaciously as Saul Bellow or Gabriel García Márquez. As she follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his family’s origins, Morrison introduces an entire cast of strivers and seeresses, liars and assassins, the inhabitants of a fully realized black world.
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Other Stories is a delightful collection of tales that transport readers into a world of fantasy and imagination. Join Alice as she embarks on whimsical adventures, encountering peculiar characters and exploring magical realms.
These stories, penned by the imaginative Lewis Carroll, are celebrated for their playful language, fantastical elements, and clever wordplay. From the Mad Hatter's tea party to the Queen of Hearts, each tale is enchanting and timeless.
Immerse yourself in a literary journey that has captivated audiences for generations, sparking curiosity and wonder in both young and old alike.
Desde su aparición en 1953, este libro de relatos del mexicano Juan Rulfo se ha traducido a más de veinticinco lenguas y ha dado lugar a múltiples y permanentes reediciones en los países de lengua hispana.
Esta edición, única revisada y autorizada por la Fundación Juan Rulfo, debe ser considerada como la definitiva.
Steppenwolf is a poetical self-portrait of a man who felt himself to be half-human and half-wolf. This Faust-like and magical story is evidence of Hesse's searching philosophy and extraordinary sense of humanity as he tells of the humanization of a middle-aged misanthrope. Yet his novel can also be seen as a plea for rigorous self-examination and an indictment of the intellectual hypocrisy of the period.
Hermann Hesse himself remarked, "Of all my books Steppenwolf is the one that was more often and more violently misunderstood than any of the others."
Amateurs is a captivating collection of stories by Donald Barthelme, a master of deadpan wit and magical mockery.
This collection showcases Barthelme's unique style, blending humor with a sharp critique of modern life. Each story is a miniature masterpiece, exploring the absurdities and contradictions of the human experience with a deft touch and a keen eye for detail.
Barthelme's work is both entertaining and thought-provoking, making Amateurs a must-read for fans of literary fiction and those who appreciate the art of the short story.