'between the life we live and the life we feel...there is the invisible border, like a narrow gate' Set in a boarding school in a remote area of the Habsburg Empire at the turn of the last century, The Confusions of Young Törless is an intense study of...

Josep Pla’s masterpiece, The Gray Notebook, is one of the most colorful and unusual works in modern literature. In 1918, when Pla was in Barcelona studying law, the Spanish flu broke out, the university shut down, and he went home to his parents in...

Young Jawad, born to a traditional Shi’ite family of corpse washers and shrouders in Baghdad, decides to abandon the family tradition, choosing instead to become a sculptor—to celebrate life rather than tend to death. He enters Baghdad’s Academy of Fine...

From the sensational Chinese author who has been called “a new world master,” a Kafkaesque novel set in a fictional Western nationWinner of the 2015 Best Translated Book Award for fiction, presented by Three Percent, a resource for international...

The first collection of letters in English by one of the great writers of the twentieth centuryThis is the first collection in English of the extraordinary letters of one of the great writers of the twentieth century. Italy's most important postwar...

"Henry Mulcahy, a literature instructor at progressive Jocelyn College, is informed that his appointment will not be continued. Convinced he is disliked by the president of Jocelyn because of his abilities as a teacher and his independence of mass...

Mob-connected loan shark Chili Palmer is sick of the Miami grind—plus his “friends” have a bad habit of dying there. So when he chases a deadbeat client out to Hollywood, Chili figures he might like to stay. This town, with its dream-makers, glitter,...

From internationally bestselling crime writer Natsuo Kirino comes a mythical slice of feminist noir about family secrets, broken loyalties, and the search for truth in a deceitful world.In a place like no other, on a mystical island in the shape of tear...

This book by a major American poet is for poetry readers at all levels, academic and non-academic. It is a sequence of poems that will surprise and delight readers—in the voices of an old woman full of memories, a glamorous tulip, and an earthy dog who...

In late 1950s London, something uncanny besets a group of elderly friends: an insinuating voice on the telephone reminds each: Remember you must die. Their geriatric feathers are soon thoroughly ruffled, and many an old unsavory secret is dusted off.

The fraying fringes of 1950s literary London Rich and slim, the celebrated author Nancy Hawkins takes us in hand and leads us back to her threadbare years in postwar London, where she spends her days working for a mad, near-bankrupt publisher (“of very...

“Magnificent . . . poems to inspire [with] brief and brilliant, offhand notes about how to read them.”―Alan Cheuse, NPR Quick, joyful, and playfully astringent, with surprising comparisons and examples, this collection takes an unconventional approach to...

"At the center of Mayakovsky's Revolver is the suicide of Matthew Dickman's older brother. "Known for poems of universality of feeling, expressive lyricism of reflection, and heartrending allure" (Major Jackson), Dickman is a powerful poet whose new...

The Collected Stories of Colette beings together in one volume for the first time in any language the comprehensive collection of short stories by the novelist known worldwide as Colette, and now acknowledged, with Proust, as the most original French...

From a sequence, "The Countries Surrounding the Garden of Eden":Gihon, that compasseth the whole landAt the first frost we found our sheep with strangled hearts, lying on their backs in the frozen clover, their eyes wide open as if they were surprised by...

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s masterpiece, an iconic fable of guilt and redemption set in Puritan Massachusetts, has long been considered one of the greatest American novels. The story of Hester Prynne—found out in adultery, pilloried by her Puritan community,...

Set amidst the turbulence of 1950s Cairo, Beer in the Snooker Club is the story of Ram Bey, an over-educated, under-ambitious young Egyptian struggling to find out where he fits in. Ram’s favorite haunt is the fashionable Cairo Snooker Club, whose...

Not just another science book and not just another Discworld novella, The Science of Discworld is a creative, mind-bending mash-up of fiction and fact, that offers a wizard’s-eye view of our world that will forever change how you look at the universe.Can...

From the national bestselling author of Brother, I’m Dying and The Dew Breaker: a “fiercely beautiful” novel (Los Angeles Times) that brings us deep into the intertwined lives of a small seaside town where a little girl, the daughter of a fisherman, has...