Tertuliano Máximo Afonso é professor de História. Ao visionar um filme banal que um colega de matemática lhe recomendara descobre que um dos actores é um seu sósia. O argumento do livro é a sua demanda, e depois confronto com o actor que é seu duplicado. Uma história que se lê de um fôlego e na qual Saramago se revela mestre do suspense. Romance que nos faz lembrar um thriller onde o autor aborda questões ligadas à identidade (e a falta dela).

Na contracapa: "O caos é uma ordem por decifrar" Livro dos contrários

In the stories that make up Oblivion, David Foster Wallace joins the rawest, most naked humanity with the infinite involutions of self-consciousness-a combination that is dazzlingly, uniquely his. These are worlds undreamt-of by any other mind. Only David Foster Wallace could convey a father's desperate loneliness by way of his son's daydreaming through a teacher's homicidal breakdown ("The Soul Is Not a Smithy"). Or could explore the deepest and most hilarious aspects of creativity by delineating the office politics surrounding a magazine profile of an artist who produces miniature sculptures in an anatomically inconceivable way ("The Suffering Channel"). Or capture the ache of love's breakdown in the painfully polite apologies of a man who believes his wife is hallucinating the sound of his snoring ("Oblivion"). Each of these stories is a complete world, as fully imagined as most entire novels, at once preposterously surreal and painfully immediate.

In one of the first twenty-first century Russian novels to probe the legacy of the Soviet prison camp system, a young man travels to the vast wastelands of the Far North to uncover the truth about a shadowy neighbor who saved his life, and whom he knows only as Grandfather II. What he finds, among the forgotten mines and decrepit barracks of former gulags, is a world relegated to oblivion, where it is easier to ignore both the victims and the executioners than to come to terms with a terrible past. This disturbing tale evokes the great and ruined beauty of a land where man and machine worked in tandem with nature to destroy millions of lives during the Soviet century. Emerging from today’s Russia, where the ills of the past are being forcefully erased from public memory, this masterful novel represents an epic literary attempt to rescue history from the brink of oblivion.

Sergei Lebedev was born in Moscow in 1981 and worked for seven years on geological expeditions in northern Russia and Central Asia. His first novel, Oblivion, has been translated into many languages.

On January 26, 1948, a man posing as a public health official arrives at a bank in Tokyo. He explains that he’s there to treat everyone who might have been exposed to a recent outbreak of dysentery. Soon after drinking the medicine he administers, twelve employees are dead, four are unconscious, and the “official” has fled. Twelve voices tell the story of the murder from different perspectives including a journalist, a gangster-turned-businessman, an “occult detective,” and a well-known painter. Each voice enlarges and deepens the portrait of a city and a people making their way out of a war-induced hell. Told with David Peace’s brilliantly idiosyncratic and mesmerizing voice, Occupied City is a stunningly audacious work from a singular writer.

Winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award

The place is the chilly border between Russia and China. The time is the early 1970s when the two giants were poised on the brink of war. And the characters in this thrilling collection of stories are Chinese soldiers who must constantly scrutinize the enemy even as they themselves are watched for signs of the fatal disease of bourgeois liberalism.

In Ocean of Words, the Chinese writer Ha Jin explores the predicament of these simple, barely literate men with breathtaking concision and humanity. From amorous telegraphers to a pugnacious militiaman, from an inscrutable Russian prisoner to an effeminate but enthusiastic recruit, Ha Jin's characters possess a depth and liveliness that suggest Isaac Babel's Cossacks and Tim O'Brien's GIs. Ocean of Words is a triumphant volume, poignant, hilarious, and harrowing.

"A compelling collection of stories, powerful in their unity of theme and rich in their diversity of styles."-New York Times Book Review

"Extraordinary…[These stories are shot through with wit and offer glimpses of human motivation that defy retelling…Read them all."-Boston Globe

"An exceptional new talent, capable of wringing rich surprises out of austere materials."-Portland Oregonian

A pro softball player, an alcoholic husband, a drug deal out of town, and buried treasure — the postmodern and vibrantly pulpy debut novel from Hob Broun.

The heroine of Odditorium is Tildy Soileau, a professional softball player stuck in a down-and-out marriage in South Florida. Leaving her husband to his own boozy inertia, she jumps at the chance to travel to New York with Jimmy Christo, only recently released from a mental institution, and make some much-needed cash on a drug deal.

Adventure is just as much a motivating force, though, and Tildy quickly gets involved with a charismatic drug dealer; meanwhile, in carrying out business, Jimmy is dangerously sidetracked in Tangier. By the time the two are back in Florida, a financial boon greets them, but here, too, trouble is in the wings. Formally daring and full of jolts of the unexpected, Odditorium is an addictive romp through shady realms.

A novel about fear of the future — and the future of fear.

New York City, the near future: Mitchell Zukor, a gifted young mathematician, is hired by a mysterious new financial consulting firm, FutureWorld. The business operates out of an empty office in the Empire State Building; Mitchell is employee number two. He is asked to calculate worst-case scenarios in the most intricate detail, and his schemes are sold to corporations to indemnify them against any future disasters. This is the cutting edge of corporate irresponsibility, and business is booming.

As Mitchell immerses himself in the mathematics of catastrophe — ecological collapse, war games, natural disasters — he becomes obsessed by a culture’s fears. Yet he also loses touch with his last connection to reality: Elsa Bruner, a friend with her own apocalyptic secret, who has started a commune in Maine. Then, just as Mitchell’s predictions reach a nightmarish crescendo, an actual worst-case scenario overtakes Manhattan. Mitchell realizes he is uniquely prepared to profit. But at what cost?

At once an all-too-plausible literary thriller, an unexpected love story, and a philosophically searching inquiry into the nature of fear, Nathaniel Rich’s Odds Against Tomorrow poses the ultimate questions of imagination and civilization. The future is not quite what it used to be.

From the widely acclaimed writer, a beguiling new novel, at once wistful and ribald, about a day in the life of two Indian men in London-a university student and his bachelor uncle-each coping in his own way with alienation, solitariness, and the very art of living.

It is 1985. Twenty-two-year-old Ananda has been in London for two years, practicing at being a poet. He's homesick, thinks of himself as an inveterate outsider, and yet he can't help feeling that there's something romantic, even poetic, in his isolation. His uncle, Radhesh, a magnificent failure who lives in genteel impoverishment and celibacy, has been in London for nearly three decades. Odysseus Abroad follows them on one of their weekly, familiar forays about town. The narrative surface has the sensual richness that has graced all of Amit Chaudhuri's work. But the great charm and depth of the novel reside in Ananda's far-ranging ruminations (into the triangle between his mother, father, and Radhesh-his mother's brother, his father's best friend; his Sylheti/Bengali ancestry; the ambitions and pressures that rest on his shoulders); in Radhesh's often artfully wielded idiosyncrasies; and in the spiky, needful, sometimes comical, yet ultimately loving connection between the two men.

A grieving son explores his father's identity as a quiet family man, traveling salesman, and World War II hero, and forms an understanding about human greatness in both war and peace times. By the Goncourt prize-winning author of Fields of Glory.

“Today an unusually gifted generation is entering Russian literature…. Literature has not seen such an influx of energy in a long time.”

—Olga Slavnikova, director of the Debut Prize

By and about Russian hitchhikers, these stories take the reader along the endless roads of central Russia, the Urals, the Altai, Siberia, and beyond. In energetic and vivid prose they depict all sorts of curious Russian types: exotic adventures in far-flung places, the complex psychological relationships that develop on the road, and these hitchhikers’ inexplicable passion for tramping. “In via veritas” is their motto. The authors are all winners of the Debut Prize, and will present the book at BEA in 2012 in New York.

Irina Bogatyreva lives in Moscow. She has won several prizes, including the Debut, for her novel AUTO-STOP. She has several published books to her credit.

Tatiana Mazepina is the latest Debut Prize winner. She is a member of the “Society of Free Travellers”. She works as a journalist and writes on religious matters.

Igor Savelyev lives in Ufa (Bashkiria) where he works as a crime reporter. He is the winner of the Debut Prize and several other prizes.

Edward Hopper's painting "Office at Night" is open to endless interpretation. In this collaborative novella, Kate Bernheimer and Laird Hunt borrow from his practice of improvising on "the facts" of observation to create a work of art, imagining the lives of its characters: stenographer Marge Quinn and her boss, the sometimes painter Abraham Chelikowsky.

Мари-Од Мюраи – одна из наиболее интересных французских авторов литературы для юношества. Ни самого автора, ни ее произведения, – серьезные, беспокоящие и одновременно человечные и смешные до слез, – никак нельзя назвать политкорректными.

В романе для подростков «Oh, boy!» через историю трех детей, оставшихся сиротами, Мари-Од Мюрай талантливо и с юмором раскрывает сразу несколько тем, о которых обычно не принято говорить: сиротства, тяжелой болезни близкого человека, гомосексуализма, взаимосвязи между ответственностью и взрослением.

Best Books of Summer 2018 Selection

• Vulture • Time • New York Post •

The debut of a major talent; a lyrical and emotional novel set in an archetypal small town in northeastern Ohio—a region ravaged by the Great Recession, an opioid crisis, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—depicting one feverish, fateful summer night in 2013 when four former classmates converge on their hometown, each with a mission, all haunted by the ghosts of their shared histories.

Since the turn of the century, a generation has come of age knowing only war, recession, political gridlock, racial hostility, and a simmering fear of environmental calamity. In the country’s forgotten pockets, where industry long ago fled, where foreclosures, Walmarts, and opiates riddle the land, death rates for rural whites have skyrocketed, fueled by suicide, addiction and a rampant sense of marginalization and disillusionment. This is the world the characters in Stephen Markley’s brilliant debut novel, Ohio, inherit. This is New Canaan.

On one fateful summer night in 2013, four former classmates converge on the rust belt town where they grew up, each of them with a mission, all of them haunted by regrets, secrets, lost loves. There’s Bill Ashcraft, an alcoholic, drug-abusing activist, whose fruitless ambitions have taken him from Cambodia to Zuccotti Park to New Orleans, and now back to “The Cane” with a mysterious package strapped to the underside of his truck; Stacey Moore, a doctoral candidate reluctantly confronting the mother of her former lover; Dan Eaton, a shy veteran of three tours in Iraq, home for a dinner date with the high school sweetheart he’s tried to forget; and the beautiful, fragile Tina Ross, whose rendezvous with the captain of the football team triggers the novel’s shocking climax.

At once a murder mystery and a social critique, Ohio ingeniously captures the fractured zeitgeist of a nation through the viewfinder of an embattled Midwestern town and offers a prescient vision for America at the dawn of a turbulent new age.

"The new generation of twenty-first-century African writers have now come of age. Without a doubt Habila is one of the best." — Emmanuel Dongala

In the oil-rich and environmentally devastated Nigerian Delta, the wife of a British oil executive has been kidnapped. Two journalists-a young upstart, Rufus, and a once-great, now disillusioned veteran, Zaq-are sent to find her. In a story rich with atmosphere and taut with suspense, Oil on Water explores the conflict between idealism and cynical disillusionment in a journey full of danger and unintended consequences.

As Rufus and Zaq navigate polluted rivers flanked by exploded and dormant oil wells, in search of "the white woman," they must contend with the brutality of both government soldiers and militants. Assailed by irresolvable versions of the "truth" about the woman's disappearance, dependent on the kindness of strangers of unknowable loyalties, their journalistic objectivity will prove unsustainable, but other values might yet salvage their human dignity.

Arthur, un joven arquitecto californiano, vuelve a Los Ángeles después de pasar una larga temporada en París.

Sin embargo, durante todo este tiempo no ha conseguido olvidar a Lauren, el gran amor de su vida que le robó el corazón cuando, a raíz de un accidente, cayó en estado de coma.

Gracias a la insistencia y la valentía de Arthur, Lauren siguió viviendo, a pesar de la opinión del doctor y de la madre de desenchufar los aparatos que la mantenían con vida.

Éstos, avergonzados, le hicieron jurar que jamás confesaría la verdad a la joven, que no recuerda nada de aquellos meses. Arthur cumple su palabra, desaparece de su vida e intenta olvidarla. Cuando vuelve a Los Ángeles el destino hará que se reencuentren.

Basada en esta novela (y con importantes variaciones en el guión), se ha estrenado recientemente una película con el mismo título, dirigida por Mark Waters.

Jedna z wielkich powieści XX wieku, sprzedana w ponad 20 milionach egzemplarzy, wsławiona obsypanym Oscarami filmem Francisa Forda Coppoli z genialną rolą tytułową Marlona Brando. Opowieść o honorze i nienawiści, szacunku i pogardzie, miłości i śmierci. Motto książki stanowi cytat z Balzaca – Za każdą wielką fortuną kryje się zbrodnia. Don Vito Corleone jest Ojcem Chrzestnym jednej z sześciu nowojorskich Rodzin mafijnych. Tyran i szantażysta (słynne powiedzenie "mam dla Ciebie propozycję nie do odrzucenia"), a zarazem człowiek honoru, sprawuje rządy żelazną ręką. Jego decyzje mają charakter ostateczny. Wśród swoich wrogów wzbudza respekt i strach, wśród przyjaciół – zasłużony, choć nie całkiem bezinteresowny szacunek. Kiedy odmawia uczestnictwa w nowym, intratnym interesie – handlu narkotykami – wchodzi w ostry, krwawy konflikt z Cosą Nostrą. Honor rodziny może uratować tylko Michael – najmłodszy, ukochany syn Vita, bohater wojenny. Czy okaże się godnym następcą Ojca Chrzestnego?

Otra faz en la narrativa de Gabriel García Márquez. Casi todas las obras de este gran autor se caracterizan por la presencia simultánea de ámbitos aparentemente alejados entre sí. -Además de lo onírico y de la rareza individual- escribe Mario Vargas Llosa a propósito de García Márquez- en este mundo en que lo social, lo político y otros niveles objetivos (como el sexo) parecen arrolladores, tienen cabida hechos y situaciones que por su carácter insólito y pintoresco contrastan con los hechos opresivos, obvios y monótonos que constituye en la vida cotidiana… y sugieren la existencia de "otra" realidad, menos previsible, en la que reinan la fantasía, la extravagancia, cierto tipo de humor. "En ojos de perro azul" el buceo de García Márquez en esa "otra" realidad es hondo y vertiginoso. Ya no se trata de revelarnos un aspecto de realidad placentero y risueño. García Márquez nos enfrenta con esa presencia inevitable que es la muerte, descubriéndola como una parte gemela de nuestro vivir. la muerte vislumbrada en los sueños y luego conocida como experiencia total del alma y del cuerpo la muerte como una constante inminencia que nos revela hasta qué punto nuestro propio ser está formado por aspectos distintos y nunca imaginados.

Weißrussland im 21. Jahrhundert. Ein aufwühlendes Buch über die Liebe, über Träume, über Macht und Missbrauch.

Weißrussland im Jahr 2004. Präsident Lukaschenka regiert das Land seit zehn Jahren mit harter Hand nach der Devise: »Mehr Ordnung anstelle von Demokratie.« Zeitungen werden verboten, oppositionelle Politiker verschwinden. Die Bevölkerung hat sich mit allem abgefunden, ertrinkt in einer Mischung aus Wodka und Fatalismus. Und Wasil, der Held des Romans, will seine Tante Alezja loswerden – und zwar für immer!

»Oktoberplatz« erzählt von der persönlichen und politischen Frustration, die den 30-jährigen Kulturjournalisten Wasil in Betrügereien, Inzest und Mord treibt.

Ein aufschlussreiches Buch über die letzte Diktatur Europas, über kapitalistische und sozialistische Verirrungen, über das Scheitern des Einzelnen am Kollektiv. Ein Coming-of-Age-Roman, der von den Leiden eines jungen Menschen erzählt, der in postkommunistischen Zeiten seinen Weg ins Leben sucht - und immer wieder gegen ein unverrückbares System anrennt.