A Stephen King novel telling of unfair imprisonment and escape.

Je me savais a present incapable de dire la verite de notre temps. Je n'etais ni un temoin objectif, ni un historien, ni surtout un sage moraliste. Je pouvais tout simplement reprendre ce recit interrompu alors par la nuit, par les routes qui nous attendaient, par les nouvelles guerres.» Un medecin militaire, engage par les services de renseignements sovietiques, retrace l'hallucinant destin de son grand-pere Nikolai et de son pere Pavel, les oppressions des annees 20, les purges, les violences nazies et la Seconde Guerre mondiale… Un chant pour les morts d'hier et aujourd'hui, une tragedie jalonnee de crimes, de viols et d'illusions perdues.

***

Complexe, la trame chronologique de cette fresque romanesque nous mène de la Russie des Rouges et des Blancs à la Floride en passant par l'Angola, I'Afghanistan, le Nicaragua… Le narrateur est un médecin militaire engagé par les services de renseignement soviétiques. Il a mission de recueillir des informations dans les pays où se cristallisent les tensions entre Américains et Russes, et de démanteler des réseaux de vente d'armes. L'Est dont Makine entonne le requiem est "cet écrasant empire, cette tour de Babel cimentée de rêves et de sang" qui s'est désagrégée, transformant ses "perspectives en impasses" et son Kremlin en "une grosse tumeur mafieuse dont les métastases minent le pays tout entier". L'écrivain charrie de concert la dénonciation politique (tirades contre le jeu pervers des puissances pour lesquelles la soif de pétrole et d'or compte plus que la vie des populations), le cri humanitaire, l'évocation des oppressions dont a souffert sa terre natale, et le roman d'espionnage.

ALEKSANDRS PUŠKINS

ROMĀNS VĒSTULĒS

tulkojis Valdis Grēviņš

izdevniecība Liesma 1969

Noskannējis grāmatu un FB2 failu izveidojis Imants Ločmelis

ALEKSANDRS PUŠKINS

ROSLAVĻEVS

tulkojusi Ārija Elksne

izdevniecība Liesma 1969

Noskannējis grāmatu un FB2 failu izveidojis Imants Ločmelis

Revidents

1836

Nikolajs Gogolis

No krievu valodas tulkojis Andrejs Upīts, 1948

FB2 failu izveidojis Imants Ločmelis

"A stunningly strange book about the rarest of fictional subjects: happiness." – Jonathan Lethem

"One of the great English novels of the past ten years." – Zadie Smith

***

Traumatized by an accident which ‘involved something falling from the sky’ and leaves him eight and a half million pounds richer but hopelessly estranged from the world around him, Remainder’s hero spends his time and money obsessively reconstructing and re-enacting vaguely remembered scenes and situations from his past: a large building with piano music in the distance, the familiar smells and sounds of liver frying and spluttering, lethargic cats lounging on roofs until they tumble off them… But when this fails to quench his thirst for authenticity, he starts re-enacting more and more violent events, as his repetition addiction spirals out of control.

A darkly comic meditation on memory, identity and history, Remainder is a parable for modern times.

Adriana jest młoda i olśniewająco piękna. Wychowana została przez matkę, która przeżyła całe swoje dorosłe życie w przekonaniu, że nawet jeżeli miała kiedyś szansę na szczęśliwe i dostatnie życie, straciła ją przez ciążę i małżeństwo z ojcem Adriany. Teraz chce by córka nie powtórzyła jej losu i nie utrzymywała się tak jak ona z bieliźniarstwa, ale została kurtyzaną.

DeLillo's Running Dog, originally published in 1978, follows Moll Robbins, a New York city journalist trailing the activities of an influential senator. In the process she is dragged into the black market world of erotica and shady, infatuated men, where a cat-and-mouse chase for an erotic film rumored to "star" Adolph Hitler leads to trickery, maneuvering, and bloodshed. With streamlined prose and a thriller's narrative pace, Running Dog is a bright star in the modern master's early career.

Nacido en un remoto lugar de Siberia, Rasputin podría haber llevado la existencia de un simple mujik semianalfabeto, de no haber sido por la curiosidad que en él despertaban la religión y sus enigmas, por su singular percepción de la realidad y los a veces extraños acontecimientos que le sucedieron. Dotado de un magnetismo extraordinario, comenzó a ejercer su influjo sobre los campesinos y lugareños, divulgando una nueva forma de entender la religión y de practicarla, hasta que representantes de la Iglesia ortodoxa vieron en él la encarnación de la sencilla y positiva sabiduría popular y lo ayudaron a introducirse en la mejor sociedad de San Petersburgo. En poco tiempo, Rasputín consiguió rodearse de un círculo de seguidores, la mayoría mujeres nobles dispuestas a seguir sus enseñanzas y a entregarse a él en cuerpo y alma. Cuando la zarina Alejandra, desesperada ante los estragos que la hemofilia causando en su hijo, conoce a ese iluminado, deposita en él todas sus esperanzas y lo convierte en médico del zarevich y consejero de Estado, y, con ello, en una de las piezas claves de la irrefrenable caída del gran imperio ruso.

In this novel of secret sorceries and forbidden desires, the mystic Cammon must put aside his personal feelings for Princess Amalie while he reads the souls of her suitors for any potential threats. But Cammon is unable to read Amalie, and he begins to suspect that she herself possesses magic powers-a revelation which would put her life in danger, and throw the kingdom into chaos.

From 'witty and endearing' to 'impossible to put down,' the critics have given elite marks to Diana Peterfreund's Secret Society Girl and Under the Rose. Now, in a wildly captivating new novel, Amy 'Bugaboo' Haskel and her fellow Rose & Grave knights are trading cold, gray, hyperintellectual New Haven for an annual rite of spring (well, early March) in Florida.

For Amy, a week of R&R on her secret society's private island should be all fun in the sun - and an escape from an on-campus feud with a rival society that's turned disturbingly personal. But along with her SPF 30 and a bikini, Amy is bringing a suitcase full of issues to remote Cavador Key. Graduation from Eli University looms, not to mention buckets of unfinished business with a former flame and - most pressing of all - the sudden, startling transformation of a mysterious Rose & Grave patriarch from sheerly evil to utterly.appealing?

Just when Amy thinks Spring Break can't get any less relaxing, a wacky 'accident' puts everyone on edge. And that's only the beginning, as Amy starts to suspect that someone has infiltrated the island. With some major Rose & Grave secrets to be exposed, and the potential fallout enough to take down one of America's most loathsome figureheads, what she can't know is that the party crasher is deadly serious about making sure 'Bugaboo' doesn't get back to Eli alive..

Dans cette nouvelle – tout à fait mineure dans l'oeuvre de l'auteur, et même d'une qualité assez «moyenne»… – deux joueurs de cartes s'unissent pour extorquer de l'argent à un jeune homme riche, Eugène. Le premier, Pierre Ivanovitch, a emprunté trois cent cinquante roubles au second pour monter cette supercherie et il évite de le rencontrer. Le second lui écrit de longues lettres en l'accusant de mauvaise foi. Enfin, complètement brouillés, chacun d'eux envoie à l'autre un billet doux écrit par la femme de l'autre…

En algo más de seis horas, desde la salida de la casa de Concepción cuando empezaba a anochecer hasta el alba del día siguiente, Barrios sentirá que el pasado, aunque reciente, es irrevocable. ¿Cómo habían sucedido las cosas? y, más aún, ¿por qué habían sucedido? El progresivo deterioro del sujeto, el autoritarismo del que es víctima y el peso de la conciencia van delineando a un personaje atravesado por una profunda precariedad: la existencia misma. Todos los núcleos de la escritura de Juan José Saer se anticiparon en esta obra imprescindible de su producción: la Historia del país como telón de fondo para relatar las historias individuales, la inestable relación entre el tiempo y el espacio, la memoria y la obsesiva descripción de lo mínimo hasta extrañar la percepción del lector (un parpadeo, un tintinear de la cuchara revolviendo en la taza de té). Responso, como esos rezos que se hacen por los difuntos, deja oír la lúcida voz narrativa de Saer, autor fundamental en el canon de la literatura argentina.

The stunning novella that concludes John Updike's acclaimed Rabbit series is now available on audio.

Set 10 years after Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom's death, Rabbit Remembered returns listeners to the small Pennsylvania town where Harry's widow, Janice, and his son, Nelson, still reside. They are faced with a surprise when Annabelle, Harry's 39-year-old illegitimate daughter, arrives on the scene, bringing with her ghosts from the past.

What happens to your life when everything you though you knew about your mother turns out to be an elaborate lie? During the long hot summer of 1976, Ruth Gilmartin discovers that her very English mother Sally is really Eva Delectorskaya, a Russian émigré and one-time spy.

In 1939 Eva is a beautiful 28-year-old living in Paris. As war breaks out, she is recruited for the British Secret Service by Lucas Romer, a mysterious, patrician Englishman. Under his tutelage she learns to become the perfect spy, to mask her emotions and trust no one. Even those she loves most.

Since then Eva has carefully rebuilt her life – but once a spy, always a spy. And now she must complete one final assignment. This time, though, Eva can't do it alone: she needs her daughter's help.

Restless is a tour de force. Exploring the devastating consequences of duplicity and betrayal, William Boyd's gripping new novel captures the drama of the Second World War and paints a remarkable portrait of a female spy. Full of suspense, emotion and history, this is storytelling at its very finest.

Considerada un clásico de la literatura moderna en lengua castellana, Rayuela (1963) es una de las obras más innovadoras de las últimas décadas. La clave de su ruptura con el orden clásico del relato radica en la postulación de una estructura inorgánica: el libro puede leerse en forma normal del capítulo 1 al 56 y terminar ahí, después están los capítulos?prescindibles?, del 57 al 155. Estos se leen alternadamente según un orden que el autor va dando, mezclados con los primeros. De esa manera la novela comienza en el Nº 73. Entre estos artículos prescindibles, algunos de difícil lectura, hay cosas que tienen que ver con la trama principal, pero también aparecen otros personajes, lugares y reflexiones. El capítulo 62, por ejemplo, dio luego origen a otra novela de Cortázar: 62/Modelo para armar. Amor, ternura, amistad, humor, geografía urbana, música, constituyen algunos de sus temas recurrentes, en un ámbito de de exploración estética que recuerda a la improvisación de los grandes maestros del jazz.

A rebours est un ouvrage étrange et assez déstabilisant au premier aspect. La couverture offre aux regards un tableau d'Odilon Redon, Les yeux clos, baigné de teintes douces, entre gris-parme et marron clair. Une notice nous présente le personnage principal – ou le personnage, tout simplement – en donnant quelques éléments de généalogie, des bouts d'enfance expédiés ça et là, et enfin donne l'image que notre héros garde du monde: un tableau amer et méprisant. Après un repas de deuil artificiel et surprenant, comme un rite de passage, il s'enferme dans sa demeure de Fontenay, coupé du monde, se créant des univers, cherchant les plaisirs les plus raffinés, s'enfermant lui-même dans l'art et la littérature. Des Esseintes est un personnage en quête d'absolu, qui cherche à fuir un réel malaise qu'il ne parvient pas à expliquer, malaise qui se matérialise physiquement en lui à grand renforts de vertiges et autres nausées. Chaque chapitre se tourne alors vers un des moyens de fuite, un des points de fuite du personnage: couleurs des tapisseries, bibliothèque, joaillerie, musique, parfumerie. Des Esseintes court partout après la lumière de l'art, se constituant chez lui un musée imaginaire, nourri de ses goûts et de ses idéaux, refusant les sages classiques pour se tourner vers les poètes décadents, les allumés du verbe, les belles maladresses. On ne peut pas dire qu'il se passe grand chose, concrètement, dans ce roman. Le héros revit sa vie à rebours, chaque expérience esthétique ou physique donnant lieu à un déferlement de pensées sans suite et de souvenirs, plus ou moins obsédants. Dans son mal-être, Des Esseintes revit un pénible épisode chez un dentiste de quartier, retrace les esquisses de ses premières "amours". On le suit, tant bien que mal, dans ces pérégrinations de l'esprit et de la mémoire, au fil des rêves, des énumérations érudites, des jugements péremptoires, des angoisses, des souvenirs à effacer…

Cet ouvrage est un véritable florilège, compilant de nombreux morceaux de bravoure, empli d'errances, de langueurs et de soliloques. Des Esseintes cherche à se fabriquer de toutes pièces une retraite à son image, lui permettant de fixer son attention sur de belles choses, et de fuir ce mal-être qui le hante. Seulement, par l'empiètement des arts sur les autres, cette construction réintroduit la dispersion et le doute au sein même de cet univers où le héros cherche à se retrouver. Le personnage jongle adroitement avec les arts et le plaisir qu'ils lui procurent, fait copier des poèmes de Baudelaire à la manière d'un manuscrit religieux, compose ou récrée des symphonies par ses mélanges d'alcool, cherche avec angoisse à accorder au mieux les différentes couleurs de l'appartement. Roman synesthésique (où les perceptions sensorielles ne cessent de se mêler et de s'entremêler), roman de l'errance et de la névrose, A rebours semble déjà relever du stream of consciousness.

A rebours, à travers son écriture, très poétique, très imagée, au vocabulaire recherché et surprenant, constitue un éloge de l'artifice et de la création. Le personnage qui s'est réfugié dans l'art propose une vision de la création esthétique qui correspond en grande partie à l'écriture même du livre. L'image du maquillage et du déguisement y sont par ailleurs prépondérantes, avec plusieurs occurrences de la figure du pierrot, figure pathétique et grotesque, que l'on retrouve souvent dans les œuvres décadentes. Certaines descriptions sont ici tout à fait étonnantes, dans leur recours aux images et dans leur façon d'utiliser la langue, m'évoquant bien plus un tableau impressionniste, voire un tableau fauve qu'un véritable paysage.

" Rétrécie par l'ombre tombée des collines, la plaine paraissait, à son milieu, poudrée de farine d'amidon et enduite de blanc cold-cream; dans l'air tiède, éventant les herbes décolorées et distillant de bas arfums d'épices, les arbres frottés de craie par la lune, ébouriffaient de pâles feuillages et dédoublaient leurs troncs dont les ombres barraient de raies noires le sol en plâtre sur lequel des caillasses scintillaient ainsi que des éclats d'assiette. En raison de son maquillage et de son air factice, ce paysage ne déplaisait pas à Des Esseintes."

Misanthrope fini, personnage hanté par un questionnement incessant, le héros que nous suivons est pathétique et ridicule à la fois. Dans un élan soudain, il fait tous les préparatifs nécessaires à un long voyage à l'étranger mais considère avoir vu ce qu'il voulait de l'Angleterre en buvant dans un bistrot peuplé d'anglais rue d'Amsterdam. C'est d'ailleurs l'occasion d'une description assez burlesque où je n'ai pu m'empêcher d'imaginer des anglais à tête de peintures d'Arcimboldo, les mots plus ou moins rattachés au légume étant assez nombreux dans le passage. On est souvent porté à sourire devant les excès de ce bonhomme étrange qui fait dorer et sertir de pierres la carapace de sa tortue pour l'assortir à son tapis et se ronge les ongles d'angoisse pour trouver les coloris appropriés pour les pierreries. Il ne nous en fait pas moins frissonner lorsqu'il se lance dans des réflexions désabusées sur le monde alentours: " Quelle singulière époque, se disait des Esseintes, que celle qui, tout en invoquant les intérêts de l'humanité, cherche à perfectionner les anesthésiques pour supprimer la souffrance physique et prépare, en même temps, de tels stimulants pour aggraver la douleur morale! " La fin du roman m'a paru arriver assez vite, finalement, j'ai été même surprise par cette conclusion en appel, ce cri d'angoisse en suspens, cet ultime appel à Dieu, nouvel absolu, face à un avenir plus qu'incertain.

Cette écriture poétique, imagée, faisant sans cesse appel aux différents sens, cette écriture descriptive et très visuelle m'a beaucoup plu; ce livre m'a tour à tour amusée et transportée. Ce fut pour moi une réelle découverte de lecture, si bien que je ne parviens pas à cesser d'en parler. Cependant, une fois l'appareil critique terminé, ce billet publié, j'espère avoir assez "digéré" cet ouvrage pour en commencer un autre, tout à fait différent, qui attends sur ma bibliothèque. Il faut croire que j'entre dans une phase de boulimie de lecture…

Największym atutem "Rachatłukum" jest niewątpliwie główny bohater, który do końca pozostaje bezimienny, właściwie anonimowy. Przez całą książkę opowiada nam o miłości swojego życia – rudowłosej Oldze. Właściwie powieść nie ma wątków pobocznych, jedynie drobne epizody. Jeśli jednak ktoś myśli, że to kolejna mdła, romantyczna paplanina, jest w sporym błędzie. Wolkers operuje językiem jakby nieprzystającym do tej tematyki. Obrzydliwym i obscenicznym, właściwie momentami wulgarnym, gdyż po prostu ta…

Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)

Czy Elinor nauczy się okazywać uczucia, a Marianne powściągać temperament? Kapryśna miłość i subtelny humor w najsłynniejszej wiktoriańskiej powieści wszech czasów.

Rozważna i romantyczna to historia pełnej wdzięku i zdrowego rozsądku Elinor oraz uczuciowej i impulsywnej Marianne, która przez zamiłowanie do przygód nieomal ściąga na siebie hańbę i nieszczęście. Przedstawiając tak kontrastowo różne bohaterki, autorka ujawnia niepospolity zmysł komizmu i po raz kolejny daje wyraz przekonaniu, iż najwyższą zasadą w życiu młodej panny winien być umiar.

Rozważna i romantyczna, jedna z najbardziej lubianych powieści Austen, doczekała się wielu ekranizacji, w tym znakomitego filmu Anga Lee z Emmą Thompson, Kate Winslet i Hugh Grantem w rolach głównych.

Anchee Min, now a painter, film-maker, photographer and writer, left China for America in 1984. She had been a prize pupil and a model member of Mao Tse-tung's Red Guard. For her dutiful work for the Party, she was awarded a place at the arduous Red Fire Farm, where she experienced – at great personal risk – her sexual and emotional awakening with the female company leader. Selected from 20,000 candidates to be a star of propagandist films, she left behind the farm and her lover, for fame and an exotic affair with one of Madame Mao's leading emissaries. In this autobiography Anchee Min reveals, through a series of relationships, both a little-known China and her own character – independent, enquiring, and anxious to grasp every experience that comes within her reach. It is an erotic autobiography which, through the dialogue and characterizations of a novel, traces her life and relationships through the political and cultural upheavals of the era.

Marie, dite Rose-d'Amour, appelée ainsi pour sa gentillesse, est vouée aux malheurs de la terre… Sauvée par Bernard, dit Vire-Loup, de l'attaque d'un loup, elle lui en sera reconnaissante. Il deviendra son meilleur ami, puis son amoureux, Bernard doit partir faire son service militaire, mais ne reviendra que dans 7 ans: Rose d'Amour lui promet de l'attendre fidèlement. Elle écrit régulièrement à Bernard, sans jamais recevoir de réponse, pourquoi? L'a-t-il oublié? Marie finit par ne plus croire au retour de son amant qui, avant de partir, lui a laissé un cadeau, une charmante petite fille nommée Bernardine. Plus de mariage, les voisins, les amis l'abandonnent, qu'a-t-elle donc fait pour mériter un tel Destin?…

Deutschlands junger Hauptstadt.

In the year of the 150th anniversary of Origin of Species, set in a town where Jane Austen was a frequent visitor, Tracy Chevalier once again shows her uncanny sense for the topical. In the early nineteenth century, a windswept beach along the English coast brims with fossils for those with the eye! From the moment she's struck by lightning as a baby, it is clear Mary Anning is marked for greatness. When she uncovers unknown dinosaur fossils in the cliffs near her home, she sets the scientific world alight, challenging ideas about the world's creation and stimulating debate over our origins. In an arena dominated by men, however, Mary is soon reduced to a serving role, facing prejudice from the academic community, vicious gossip from neighbours, and the heartbreak of forbidden love. Even nature is a threat, throwing bitter cold, storms, and landslips at her. Luckily Mary finds an unlikely champion in prickly, intelligent Elizabeth Philpot, a middle-class spinster who is also fossil-obsessed. Their relationship strikes a delicate balance between fierce loyalty and barely suppressed envy. Despite their differences in age and background, Mary and Elizabeth discover that, in struggling for recognition, friendship is their strongest weapon. Remarkable Creatures is Tracy Chevalier's stunning new novel of how one woman's gift transcends class and gender to lead to some of the most important discoveries of the nineteenth century. Above all, it is a revealing portrait of the intricate and resilient nature of female friendship.

REĢENTA MEITA

Aleksandrs Dimā (tēvs)

Kopoti raksti piecpadsmit sējumos

Vienpadsmitais sējums

REĢENTA MEITA »

Izdevumu sagatavojusi SIA ,.IMPAKS" Rīgā 1994

Redaktors A.Mukāns

Ofseta papīrs. Formāts 60x90 1/16 Tirāža 5 000 eks. Līgumcena. Izdevējdarbības licence Nr.

ROBINS HUDS M. Geršenzons

Te nu ir stāsts par Robinu Hudu. Vēsturnieks maz ko var piebilst rakstnieka stāstījumam.

Vēsture gandrīz nekā nezina par Robinu. Ja var ticēt leģendai, viņš dzīvojis XII gadsimta otrajā pusē. Bet dziesmas, kas stāsta par viņu, pierakstītas vēlāk.

Vai tas nozīmē, ka Robins Huds un viņa strēlnieki ir izdomāti, ka viņu patiesībā nav bijis? Nē, Robins Huds ir bijis! Viņš dzīvoja viduslaiku angļu zemnieku apziņā, fantāzijā, viņi kā acuraugu glabāja stāstus un balādes par bezbailīgo brīvo strēlnieku, apspiedēju naidnieku, vien­kāršās tautas draugu un aizstāvi. Dzimtļaudīm — Vilaniem — Robins Huds bija reālāks nekā daudzi citi XII gad­simta angļi, par kuriem saglabājušās precīzas ziņas.

Tā nav nejaušība, ka tautas apziņā Robins Huds dzī­voja XII gadsimta Anglijā. Tolaik vairums Anglijas zem­nieku bija pilnīgi nospiesti dzimtbūšanā. Feodāļi ar ka­raļa atbalstu ieguva pilnīgu varu pār viņiem. Kungi — normaņu, franču feodāļu pēcteči, kuru senči 1066. gadā iekaroja Angliju, nicīgi izturējās pret vietējiem iedzīvo­tājiem un runāja franču valodā, bet vilani bija anglosakši un vēl atcerējās laikus, kad Anglija bija brīva un neat­karīga.

Lonely widow Sara Goldfarb nutures fantasies about appearing on prime-time television, while her son Harry, along with girlfriend Marion and buddy Tyrone C. Love, plans his break into big-time drug dealing.

El joven Arnljótur decide abandonar su casa, a su hermano gemelo autista, a su padre octogenario y los paisajes crepusculares de montañas de lava cubiertas de líquenes. Su madre acaba de tener un accidente y, al borde de la muerte, aún reúne fuerzas para llamarle y darle unos últimos consejos. Un fuerte lazo les une: el invernadero donde ella cultivaba una extraña variedad de rosa: la rosa cándida, de ocho pétalos y sin espinas. Fue allí donde una noche, imprevisiblemente, Arnljótur amó a Anna, una amiga de un amigo. En un país cercano, en un antiguo monasterio, existe una rosaleda legendaria. De camino hacia ese destino, Arnljótur está, sin saberlo, iniciando un viaje en busca de sí mismo, y del amor perdido.

Unlike Jack Ketchum's earlier novel, LADIES NIGHT, his newest one, RIGHT TO LIFE, definitely has the shoe on the other foot as a pregnant woman becomes the victim of a deranged married couple that kidnap her right off the street and hold her captive for several months while she's forced to endure their bizarre SM games. The 139-page novella starts off with Sara Foster on her way to an abortion clinic to do away with the unwanted child that she's now carrying. Before Sara can even enter the clinic, she's grabbed and sedated by Stephen and Katherine Teach-a couple who's unable to have children-and taken to their home where she's held as a prisoner. The couple intends to hold Sara until the baby is born and then kill her. Stephen, however, has other plans for his beautiful captive as well. He's going to get the most out Sara's luscious body by using her to fulfill his own perverted desires. Forcing her to submit in whatever sexual manner he chooses, she's mentally and physically tortured on almost a daily basis. Even Stephen's wife decides to get in on the action by making the prisoner her sex slave when the hubby begins to lose interest after a few months have past. Sara instinctively knows that she has to find a way out before it's too late, but time is her worse enemy as she grows bigger and more powerless with her pregnancy. She also understands that if she does manage to escape, the couple may very well come after her. This leaves her with just one option-to kill them first! RIGHT TO LIFE will shock you to the core as it depicts one's person's attempt to survive unimaginable torture and humiliation in order to keep from being killed. Mr. Ketchum never pulls his punches with the violence and craziness. His prose is fast moving and creates stark images that are mind numbing. The reader is quickly carried into this dark world of depravity and made to realize that anyone can be a potential victim when least expected. The characters are well drawn, but it's the Techs that really steal the show. This is one psychotic couple you wouldn't want to have as next-door neighbors! All in all, RIGHT TO LIFE delivers in full form. Strong in sexual content, it's not for the faint-hearted or those with a queasy stomach. One final note, this edition also contains two extra short stories. The first is "Brave Girl" and it deals with a four-year-old child whose mother has fallen in the bathtub and is now unconscious. The second short story is "Returns" which is slightly different from the author's normal subject matter. It centers on the spirit of a recently deceased man who returns home to his hateful wife, hoping to stop her from killing his loving cat. These two short stories are a nice bonus for the fans of Jack Ketchum.

A South African woman struggles to convince the police that she has murdered her black cook.

No deja de ser curioso y hasta sorprendente que, considerando la escasa atención que tradicionalmente el cuento ha merecido por parte de los estudiosos, un autor que, como Francisco Ayala, se ha dedicado con preferencia al relato breve y que es autor de únicamente dos novelas importantes, haya conseguido la nombradía de que disfruta.

Premio Eugenio Nadal 1983

Regocijo en el hombre es una documentada visión del mundo anglosajón y vikingo que nos ofrece tres relatos narrados en primera persona, cuyo resumen configura la historia en todos sus detalles. Un obispo, un rey y un príncipe. Tres protagonistas de un argumento común pero a la vez con una perspectiva propia. A lo largo del relato van surgiendo los conocimientos, las concepciones políticas, morales y religiosas de la mano de un escritor pródigo en recursos. El uso del lenguaje, los modos arcaicos de resonancias clásicas, mantiene su calidad a lo largo del libro, no desmayando su interés en ningún momento. Al final, es la solidaridad la que triunfa, la que enriquece a cada uno de nosotros, pues el hombre se regocija en el hombre, como canta el poema vikingo.

En Retahílas, el viaje que realiza una anciana al pazo familiar para morir, acompañada de su nieta Eulalia, y la llegada sorpresa de Germán, el sobrino de Eulalia, producirá durante esa noche un intenso diálogo entre los dos que dará lugar a seis monólogos, en los que cada uno reconstruirá y contará qué ha sido su vida hasta entonces.

La nueva novela de Susanna Tamaro es un tríptico narrativo en torno a la presencia dominante del mal en la sociedad de hoy. Traducida por Justo Navarro, Respóndeme recoge tres historias absolutamente contemporáneas marcadas por la violencia, la crueldad y el desamparo. Una violencia cotidiana que se manifiesta en la propia familia y se oculta tras una falsa imagen de respetabilidad. Sus personajes muestran una desesperación extrema, pero también, y siempre desde el filo, un extraordinario sentido del compromiso inherente al hecho de estar vivos. Rosa, una adolescente huérfana de una prostituta, evoca en «Respóndeme» el calvario de una vida transcurrida entre monjas sin corazón, parientes que la odian, y un perverso padre adoptivo. La joven no se detendrá en su carrera hacia la autodestrucción, entre alcohol, drogas y agresividad… «El infierno no existe» es el monólogo de una esposa que se dirige a su marido muerto, un tirano doméstico, psicótico y cruel, responsable de la muerte de su propio hijo. En «El bosque en llamas», un marido celoso y obsesivo no acepta que su esposa deje de depender emotivamente de él y supere un estado depresivo crónico mediante la fe.

The scene is England 50 years after its conquest by the Soviets. The plot is to turn the occupying government upside down.

A handsome and highly sexed young Russian cavalry officer, Alexander Petrovsky, joins the plot and learns to his regret that politics and playmates don't mix.

"Funny, cynical, captivating-Amis makes an implausible situation almost believable, then lets his characters worry their way out." (B-O-T Editorial Review Board)

In an endeavor similar to his debut novel, The Kitchen Boy, Alexander couples extensive research and poetic license, this time turning his enthusiasm toward perhaps the most intriguing player in the collapse of the Russian dynasty: Rasputin. This eyebrow-raising account of the final week of the notorious mystic's life is set in Petrograd in December 1916 and narrated by Rasputin's fiery teenage daughter, Maria. The air in the newly renamed capital is thick with dangerous rumors, many concerning Maria's father, whose close relationship with the monarchy-he alone can stop the bleeding of the hemophiliac heir to the throne-invokes murderous rage among members of the royal family. Maria is determined to protect her father's life, but the further she delves into his affairs, the more she wonders: who, exactly, is Rasputin? Is he the holy man whose genuine ability to heal inspires a cult of awed penitents, or the libidinous drunkard who consumes 12 bottles of Madeira in a single night, the unrestrained animal she spies "[eagerly] holding [the] housekeeper by her soft parts"? Does this unruly behavior link him to an outlawed sect that believes sin overcomes sin? The combination of Alexander's research and his rich characterizations produces an engaging historical fiction that offers a Rasputin who is neither beast nor saint, but merely, compellingly human.

Владимир Каминер родился в Москве в 1967 году. С 1990-го живет в Берлине, ведет на немецком телевидении и радио ряд передач, а также постоянную рубрику в крупнейшей газете «Франкфуртер Альгемайне». Кроме того, он является организатором так называемого Руссендиско — самой веселой дискотеки Берлина. Свои озорные рассказы, живописующие жизнь бывших российских граждан в Германии, Каминер пишет на немецком языке.

Redburn charts the coming-of-age of Wellingborough Redburn, a young innocent who embarks on a crossing to Liverpool together with a roguish crew. Once in Liverpool, Redburn encounters the squalid conditions of the city and meets Harry Bolton, a bereft and damaged soul, who takes him on a tour of London that includes a scene of rococo decadence unlike anything else in Melville's fiction.

In Makine's fifth novel, the memories of an unnamed narrator weave through the 20th century as he recalls episodes in the life of his family-experiences that include those of a battlefield doctor in Afghanistan who was also a KGB agent, a Russian villager who defied the Soviet regime, and a man who swears to avenge the death of his beloved.

This luminous, beautifully crafted new novel by much-praised Russian ‚migr‚ author Makine (Dreams of My Russian Summers, etc.) takes as its subject three generations of a Russian family, caught in the violent political struggles of the 20th century. The novel begins after the Russian revolution, when Pavel, a Russian farmer, refuses to comply with the demands of Stalin's government. The novel then jumps to late-20th-century Russia, where Pavel's son is swept into a murderous web of KGB espionage, falls in love and then loses his lover in the maelstrom of historical change. When he next hears of her, she has been murdered. The novel gradually becomes a tale of revenge, as the spy goes to Florida to find his lover's killer. The outcome, however, is not what he expects. Shortly after the novel introduces Pavel's son, we learn the story of Pavel's father, a deserter from the Red Army, followed by the story of Pavel himself. Each temporal leap the novel makes illuminates and defines its crucial events, rather than muddying the waters. Makine writes lyrically, baring his struggling characters' emotions and vivifying their oft-chaotic backdrops with equal brio. As the young spy's friends and family disappear from his life, his memories become the only things left for him; Makine renders these in brilliantly sharp detail. The arc of the novel shows, above all, that life patterns repeat themselves; we watch the same conflicts playing themselves out in the three life stories presented here. Throughout, Makine displays the sensitivity and honesty of his acclaimed previous works. Agent, Georges Borchardt. (Aug.)Forecast: Makine shows impressive staying power with this fifth novel to be published in English translation, and Arcade is demonstrating its faith with a first printing of 25,000 copies. Chances are good that the writer's reader base will continue to grow steadily.

Rabbit, now in his 50s and with a heart condition, is living in a condo in Florida. Nelson and his family come to stay and disaster unfolds. Rabbit has a serious heart attack after a boating accident with his granddaughter and Nelson has been embezzling the family firm to feed his cocaine habit.

***

Amazon.com Review

It's 1989, and Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom feels anything but restful. In fact he's frozen, incapacitated by his fear of death-and in the final year of the Reagan era, he's right to be afraid. His 55-year-old body, swollen with beer and munchies and racked with chest pains, wears its bulk "like a set of blankets the decades have brought one by one." He suspects that his son Nelson, who's recently taken over the family car dealership, is embezzling money to support a cocaine habit.

Indeed, from Rabbit's vantage point-which alternates between a winter condo in Florida and the ancestral digs in Pennsylvania, not to mention a detour to an intensive care unit-decay is overtaking the entire world. The budget deficit is destroying America, his accountant is dying of AIDS, and a terrorist bomb has just destroyed Pan Am Flight 103 above Lockerbie, Scotland. This last incident, with its rapid transit from life to death, hits Rabbit particularly hard:

Imagine sitting there in your seat being lulled by the hum of the big Rolls-Royce engines and the stewardesses bring the clinking drinks caddy… and then with a roar and giant ripping noise and scattered screams this whole cozy world dropping away and nothing under you but black space and your chest squeezed by the terrible unbreathable cold, that cold you can scarcely believe is there but that you sometimes actually feel still packed into the suitcases, stored in the unpressurized hold, when you unpack your clothes, the dirty underwear and beach towels with the merciless chill of death from outer space still in them.

Marching through the decades, John Updike's first three Rabbit novels-Rabbit, Run (1960), Rabbit Redux (1971), and Rabbit Is Rich (1981)-dissect middle-class America in all its dysfunctional glory. Rabbit at Rest (1990), the final installment and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, continues this brilliant dissection. Yet it also develops Rabbit's character more fully as he grapples with an uncertain future and the consequences of his past. At one point, for example, he's taken his granddaughter Judy for a sailing expedition when his first heart attack strikes. Rabbit gamely navigates the tiny craft to shore-and then, lying on the beach, feels a paradoxical relief at having both saved his beloved Judy and meeting his own death. (He doesn't, not yet.) Meanwhile, this all-American dad feels responsible for his son's full-blown drug addiction but incapable of helping him. (Ironically, it's Rabbit's wife Janice, the "poor dumb mutt," who marches Nelson into rehab.)

His misplaced sense of responsibility-plus his crude sexual urges and racial slurs-can make Rabbit seems less than lovable. Still, there's something utterly heroic about his character. When the end comes, after all, it's the Angstrom family that refuses to accept the reality of Rabbit's mortality. Only Updike's irreplaceable mouthpiece rises to the occasion, delivering a stoical, one-word valediction: "Enough."

The hero of John Updike's Rabbit, Run (1960), ten years after the hectic events described in Rabbit Redux (1971), has come to enjoy considerable prosperity as Chief Sales Representative of Springer Motors, a Toyota agency in Brewer, Pennsylvania. The time is 1979: Skylab is falling, gas lines are lengthening, the President collapses while running in a marathon, and double-digit inflation coincides with a deflation of national confidence. Nevertheless, Harry Angstrom feels in good shape, ready to enjoy life at last – until his son, Nelson, returns from the West, and the image of an old love pays a visit to his lot. New characters and old populate these scenes from Rabbit's middle age, as he continues to pursue, in his erratic fashion, the rainbow of happiness.

With the same wicked humor and delicious charm that have won her millions of devoted fans, Sophie Kinsella, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Shopaholic Baby, returns with an irresistible new novel and a fresh new heroine who finds herself in a life-changing and utterly hilarious predicament…

When twenty-eight-year-old Lexi Smart wakes up in a London hospital, she's in for a big surprise. Her teeth are perfect. Her body is toned. Her handbag is Vuitton. Having survived a car accident-in a Mercedes no less-Lexi has lost a big chunk of her memory, three years to be exact, and she's about to find out just how much things have changed.

Somehow Lexi went from a twenty-five-year-old working girl to a corporate big shot with a sleek new loft, a personal assistant, a carb-free diet, and a set of glamorous new friends. And who is this gorgeous husband-who also happens to be a multimillionaire? With her mind still stuck three years in reverse, Lexi greets this brave new world determined to be the person she…well, seems to be. That is, until an adorably disheveled architect drops the biggest bombshell of all.

Suddenly Lexi is scrambling to catch her balance. Her new life, it turns out, comes complete with secrets, schemes, and intrigue. How on earth did all this happen? Will she ever remember? And what will happen when she does?

El éxito de `Rosario Tijeras`

CARTAGENA DE INDIAS.- En Medellín tiene una lápida con foto. La última morada de Rosario Tijeras, el personaje creado por el escritor Jorge Franco, es visitada en la ciudad donde murió Gardel, que fue base de operaciones de uno de los más sangrientos carteles del narcotráfico en los años 80.

`Rosario Tijeras`, la novela que dio fama internacional a su autor, vendió en siete años más de 150.000 ejemplares sólo en Colombia. Es, además, canción en la música del cantautor Juanes, y film, de la mano del mexicano Emilio Maillé.

Con serenidad, Franco cuenta a LA NACION que, salvo los protagonistas y la historia de amor, todos los hechos son reales. `Los sicarios hervían las balas en agua bendita antes de matar y en el Museo de San Pedro, en Medellín, hay un mausoleo con unos narcos sepultados y 24 horas de música. Estos eran ritos del narcotráfico`, dice el escritor.

La novela de Franco es reclamada por `los muchachos como lectura en las escuelas. Es maravilloso que, en medio de tantas distracciones, a los jóvenes les interese leer una novela`, dice.

`No sé cuál es la clave del éxito de esta novela. El personaje es de carne y hueso. Y el lector lo siente, como yo sufrí escribiéndola`, cuenta Franco, nacido en Medellín. Novelas como la suya, o ` La Virgen de los Sicarios`, de Fernando Vallejo, reciben en Colombia un nombre curioso que ya acuña una tendencia cultural: narcorrealismo o sicaresca, por la mezcla de elementos del sicariato y la picaresca española.

`Los artistas de mi generación tenemos mucho para contar sobre el narcotráfico, porque todos nuestros problemas sociales y políticos como país están ligados a este asunto. Tenemos que contar lo que vemos, lo que oímos y lo que sabemos mientras esto nos afecte de manera tan fuerte. El otro tema en la literatura joven es la violencia urbana y la violencia política actual ligadas al mismo asunto`, dice el narrador. `Los políticos nos han decepcionado profundamente. Mi generación ha ido de la esperanza a la frustración. Por eso hay que apoyar toda iniciativa por la paz`. Franco lo dice una vez más con esperanza, en relación con la erradicación de cultivos de coca y la desmilitarización de Colombia que ocupa hoy al gobierno de Alvaro Uribe.

Para conocer a `Rosario Tijeras` hay que dejarla hablar: `¿Te has fijado que muerte rima con suerte? Es más difícil amar que matar`.

Główna bohaterka, Eulalia, jest reporterką telewizyjną, kocha góry i robienie filmów o nich. Ma pracę, dom, samochód, dwoje dzieci, nawet przyjaciół. Właściwie to Eulalia ma wszystko poza stałym mężczyzną. A że mimo wyraźnego postępu w umniejszaniu mężczyzny dzisiejsza kobieta wyzwolona nie zawsze radzi sobie bez onego i czasem nawet brakuje jej przyjemności z nim związanych, pani reporter zaczyna bystrzej spoglądać na otaczających ją panów. Okazuje się, że nie jest z nimi tak źle… ten i ów może by się nawet do czegoś nadawał.

RECOPILACIÓN DE REFLEXIONES Y LECTURAS INSPIRADORAS PARA QUE TE ACOMPAÑEN A DIARIO, COSAS BÁSICAS PERO QUE A VECES NECESITAMOS QUE ALGUIEN NOS LAS RECUERDE.

Es un proceso de aprender a desprenderse y humanamente se puede lograr porque, le repito, nada ni nadie nos es indispensable.

Solo es costumbre, apego, necesidad. Pero… cierre, clausure, limpie, tire, oxigene, despréndase, sacuda, suelte.

Hay tantas palabras para significar salud mental y cualquiera que sea la que escoja, le ayudara definitivamente a seguir para adelante con tranquilidad. PAULO COELHO

Los inolvidables personajes de esta novela, como la entrañable y desgarrada pareja formada por el adolescente David y su perro Chispa, el enamorado inspector Galván, o Rosa Bartra, la hermosa pelirroja embarazada, obedecen a una tristeza y una estafa histórica muy concretas, pero también a la estafa eterna de los sueños, encarnada aquí por las fantasmales apariciones de un padre libertario fugitivo y de un arrogante piloto de la RAF que, desde la vieja fotografía de una revista colgada en la pared, actúa como confidente del fantasioso David.

Con estos personajes, con un lenguaje directo y translúcido que contrasta con la honda carga emotiva y moral que discurre por debajo de la trama, Rabos de lagartija, dotada de una estructura narrativa tan sabia como imaginativa, y mostrando cuán frágiles y ambiguos son los límites entre la realidad y la ficción, la verdad y la mentira, el Bien y el Mal, el amor y el desamor, corrobora la condición de Juan Marsé como uno de los novelistas mayores, no sólo de las Letras Hispanas, sino de las actuales narrativas europeas.

Premio Planeta 2010

Esta novela obtuvo el Premio Planeta 2010, concedido por el siguiente jurado: Alberto Blecua, Ángeles Caso, Juan Eslava Galán, Pere Gimferrer, Carmen Posadas, Carlos Pujol y Rosa Regás.

Un inglés llamado Anthony Whitelands llega a bordo de un tren al Madrid convulso de la primavera de 1936. Deberá autenticar un cuadro desconocido, perteneciente a un amigo de José Antonio Primo de Rivera, cuyo valor económico puede resultar determinante para favorecer un cambio político crucial en la Historia de España. Turbulentos amores con mujeres de distintas clases sociales distraen al crítico de arte sin darle tiempo a calibrar cómo se van multiplicando sus perseguidores: policías, diplomáticos, políticos y espías, en una atmósfera de conspiración y de algarada.

Las excepcionales dotes narrativas de Eduardo Mendoza combinan a la perfección la gravedad de los sucesos narrados con la presencia, muy sutil, de su conocido sentido del humor, ya que toda tragedia es también parte de la comedia humana.

Рассказ вошёл в сборники:

Quicker Than The Eye (В мгновение ока)

Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales (Сборник ста лучших рассказов)

Seven o'clock on a Monday morning, five hundred years after the end of the world, and goblins had been at the cellar again… Not that anyone would admit it was goblins. In Maddy Smith's world, order rules. Chaos, old gods, fairies, goblins, magic, glamours – all of these were supposedly vanquished centuries ago. But Maddy knows that a small bit of magic has survived. The “ruinmark” she was born with on her palm proves it – and makes the other villagers fearful that she is a witch (though helpful in dealing with the goblins-in-the-cellar problem). But the mysterious traveler One-Eye sees Maddy's mark not as a defect, but as a destiny. And Maddy will need every scrap of forbidden magic One-Eye can teach her if she is to survive that destiny.

Karen Lord's debut novel, which won the prestigious Frank Collymore Literary Prize in Barbados, is an intricately woven tale of adventure, magic, and the power of the human spirit.

Paama's husband is a fool and a glutton. Bad enough that he followed her to her parents' home in the village of Makendha, now he's disgraced himself by murdering livestock and stealing corn. When Paama leaves him for good, she attracts the attention of the undying ones--the djombi--who present her with a gift: the Chaos Stick, which allows her to manipulate the subtle forces of the world. Unfortunately, a wrathful djombi with indigo skin believes this power should be his and his alone.

Bursting with humor and rich in fantastic detail, Redemption in Indigo is a clever, contemporary fairy tale that introduces readers to a dynamic new voice in Caribbean literature. Lord's world of spider tricksters and indigo immortals, inspired in part by a Senegalese folk tale, will feel instantly familiar--but Paama's adventures are fresh, surprising, and utterly original.

The collection of stories

Set at the time of the Spanish Inquisition in the fifteenth century, "Rose of Fire" tells the story of the origins of the mysterious labyrinthine library, the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, which lies at the heart of Carlos Ruiz Zafon's novels The Shadow of the Wind, The Angel's Game, and now The Prisoner of Heaven.

En el verano del año 43 d. C., la invasión romana de Britania se encuentra con un obstáculo inesperado: la desconcertante y salvaje manera que tienen los rudos britanos de enfrentarse a las disciplinadas tropas imperiales. La situación es desesperada, y quizá la inminente llegada del emperador Claudio para ponerse al frente de las tropas en la batalla decisiva sea el revulsivo que unos legionarios aterrados y desmoralizados necesitan.

Książka wchodząca w skład trylogii Nasi przodkowie. Bohaterem Rycerza nieistniejącego jest pusta zbroja, najlepszy paladyn Karola Wielkiego. I tak naprawdę nikogo to nie dziwi, ba nawet jedna z bohaterek tej książki kobieta-rycerz Bradamanta zakochuje się w nim…

Harry Angstrom was a star basketball player in high school and that was the best time of his life. Now in his mid-20s, his work is unfulfilling, his marriage is moribund, and he tries to find happiness with another woman. But happiness is more elusive than a medal, and Harry must continue to run–from his wife, his life, and from himself, until he reaches the end of the road and has to turn back....

From the Publisher

I read Rabbit, Run when I was in high school (and it wasn't even a school assignment!). Twenty years later (at least!), three very vivid scenes from that book still pop into my head from time to time. The first is the used-car lot, where Rabbit Angstrom, the former basketball star, works for his father-in-law. The second scene is in a very red Chinese restaurant that had changed over from a French restaurant only the week before. Rabbit is there with his old coach and two women that are not their wives, and they drink daiquiris and whiskey sours. This restaurant could have been (and was) in my small town. The third scene is the most harrowing, and I've repeated it as a cautionary tale to young mothers for years, telling the story as if it had happened to someone I know. Janice, Rabbit's wife, who slugs alcohol throughout her pregnancy, is drunk and bathing her newborn baby when something terrible happens. I won't ruin it by telling you more. I read hundreds of books a year, both for my job and for pleasure, so the fact that parts of this book are so indelibly etched in my mind is a testament to the talent and genius of John Updike.

P.S. all of the other books in the Rabbit series are equally unforgettable.

–Maureen O'Neal

The assumptions and obsessions that control our daily lives are explored in tantalizing detail by master novelist John Updike in this wise, witty, sexy story. Harry Angstrom – known to all as Rabbit, one of America's most famous literary characters – finds his dreary life shattered by the infidelity of his wife, Janice. How he resolves – or further complicates – his problems, makes for a novel of the first order.

Rabbit Redux is the second of five John Updike Rabbit novels, all of which focus on their central character Harry Angstrom. In Rabbit Redux, Harry Angstrom – known to all as Rabbit, one of America's most famous literary characters – finds his dreary life shattered by the infidelity of his wife, Janice. How he resolves or further complicates his problems makes for a novel of the first order. The assumptions and obsessions that control our daily lives are explored in tantalizing detail by master novelist John Updike in this wise, witty, and sexy story.

"Rozmowa w Katedrze" to niezwykła historia ludzi żyjących w Peru, w latach 50., w czasie dyktatury wojskowej, której przywódcą był generał Manuel Apolinario Odría.Akcja książki rozgrywa się na kilku płaszczyznach ujawniających kulisy i mechanizmy władzy dyktatora jak i jej wpływ na życie zwykłych ludzi. W popularnym barze o znaczącej nazwie Katedraa spotykają się Santiago Zavala, który wyrwał się spod władzy lojalnego wobec rządu ojca, Ambrosio człowiek ze społecznych nizin, znajomy Cayo Bemudeza bliskiego współpracownika prezydenta. Rozmowa, uznawana jest za najważniejsze dzieło Vargasa Llosy. Sam Autor mówi o niej w ten sposób: żadna inna powieść nie przysporzyła mi tak wiele trudu. Dlatego gdybym musiał kiedyś uratować coś z pożaru, wyniósłbym właśnie tę książkę.

Three Kingdoms is a classic historical novel. It was also the first Chinese novel with each chapter headed by a couplet giving the gist of the content. It describes the power struggles among the kingdoms of Wei, Shu and Wu, headed by Cao Cao, Liu Bei and Sun Quan, respectively, in the period known to Chinese history as that of the Three Kingdoms (220 – 280). It highlights the sharp and complicated political and military conflicts of that time, and had a far-reaching influence on the political and military strategies of later ages. The novel vividly portrays the individuality of the historical characters, including Cao Cao, Liu Bei, Guan Yu and Zhang Fei. Besides being a work of epic grandeur, its literary merit has had a great impact on China 's literature and art, and social life as well.

Three Kingdoms was first published in the period which saw the demise of the Yuan Dynasty and the rise of the Ming Dynasty. Many stories about the three kingdoms had circulated among the people before the appearance of the book. Many editions of Three Kingdoms have appeared, and the novel has been translated into foreign languages since the end of the 17th century. This English edition, by US sinologist Moss Roberts, is based on the Mao Zonggang edition published during the reign of Emperor Kangxi of the Qing Dynasty (1644 – 1911).

Three Kingdoms is a classic historical novel. It was also the first Chinese novel with each chapter headed by a couplet giving the gist of the content. It describes the power struggles among the kingdoms of Wei, Shu and Wu, headed by Cao Cao, Liu Bei and Sun Quan, respectively, in the period known to Chinese history as that of the Three Kingdoms (220 – 280). It highlights the sharp and complicated political and military conflicts of that time, and had a far-reaching influence on the political and military strategies of later ages. The novel vividly portrays the individuality of the historical characters, including Cao Cao, Liu Bei, Guan Yu and Zhang Fei. Besides being a work of epic grandeur, its literary merit has had a great impact on China 's literature and art, and social life as well.

Three Kingdoms was first published in the period which saw the demise of the Yuan Dynasty and the rise of the Ming Dynasty. Many stories about the three kingdoms had circulated among the people before the appearance of the book. Many editions of Three Kingdoms have appeared, and the novel has been translated into foreign languages since the end of the 17th century. This English edition, by US sinologist Moss Roberts, is based on the Mao Zonggang edition published during the reign of Emperor Kangxi of the Qing Dynasty (1644 – 1911).

Travelogue and observations of Russian culture through the eyes of an American traveller, first published in 1895.

Robert Merivel, who has studied to be a physician, is appointed, ironically, to be veterinarian for the spaniels of King Charles II, who has recently been restored to the throne following the death of Oliver Cromwell. Merivel enjoys the gaiety and frivolity of court life, and, a bit of a fool, he entertains the king. The king's decision to placate one of his lovers by marrying off his favorite mistress to Robert Merivel, spells the beginning of the end for Merivel's tenuous fortunes. Warned not to fall in love with his wife, Celia Clemence, since the king intends to continue seeing her, Merivel cannot help himself, and he is cast out, losing not only the king's affection, but also his house and, of course his wife.

Joining a group of men who work at an asylum for the insane, Merivel learns that there are deeper concerns in life than the hedonism of his life at court, and he develops genuine affection for several of the kindly Quaker men with whom he works. When he transgresses the society's rules, however, he is cast out from there, too, ending up in London at the time of the Great Plague and eventually the Great London Fire.

Painting vivid pictures of Merivel's life-at court, at the asylum in Whittlesea, and in the neighborhoods of London -author Rose Tremain brings the age, its customs, its science, and its social structure to life. The years of 1664 – 1666 are especially difficult, and as Merivel lives through the horrors of the Plague and the panic of the Great Fire, which Tremain recreates with the drama they deserve, the reader can see Merivel becoming less a fool and more a human. Like the restoration of the king to the throne, Merivel's "restoration" to dignity takes place after a period of dark reflection and self-examination, and both Merivel and the country learn from their travails.

Tremain develops Merivel's personal transformation with sensitivity, finesse, and much ironic humor, and when, at last, he is noticed again by the court, his understanding of himself and his role in the world is far more profound than it was before. Depicting the personal and the philosophical turmoils of these early Restoration years with a historian's eye for detail and a detached observer's sense of wit, Tremain illustrates the contradictions of this period realistically and often with dark humor. A fine historical novel, Restoration transcends its period, offering observations, themes, and lessons for the present day.

Mary Whipple

Una noche de 1987, alguien abandona a una niña recién nacida en el aeropuerto de Heathrow. Un año antes, tres chicas, Martha, Clio y Jocasta, se habían conocido por casualidad en un viaje y habían prometido volver a encontrarse, aunque pasará mucho tiempo antes de que cumplan la promesa. Para entonces, Kate, la niña abandonada, ya será una adolescente. Vive con una familia adoptiva que la quiere, aunque ahora Kate desea conocer a su madre biológica. Es decir, una de aquellas tres jóvenes, ahora mujeres acomodadas. Pero ¿qué la llevó a una situación tan desesperada?

La trama que desgrana este libro se sitúa allí donde confluyen entre estas cuatro vidas. Y es que Kate verá cumplido su deseo aunque, como enseñan algunas fábulas, a veces sea mejor no desear ciertas cosas…

«Relics. Раннее и неизданное» — сборник ранних произведений автора. Пелевин как всегда оригинален — не только в своем творчестве, но и в его преподнесении читателю: содержание книги повторяет хронологию событий, произошедших с Россией на стыке XX и XXI веков. Мы достаточно удалились от девяностых, чтобы разглядеть их без эффекта «лицом к лицу лица не увидать». Поэтому в наши дни выходят фильмы-медитации вроде «Жмурок».

"Relics — своего рода «жмурки духа», ностальгическое воспоминание о времени малиновых пиджаков в суровую эпоху оранжевых галстуков. Книга составлена таким образом, чтобы ее содержание примерно соответствовало хронологии событий: как мы туда прибыли (для этого включены несколько совсем ранних рассказов), во что вляпались и куда после этого делись… Эти тексты лежали не «в столе» — они публиковались в журналах и газетах, просто большая их часть не выходила в книжном формате. Многие гуляют по интернету в изувеченном виде, лучше издать их, наконец, по-человечески. Кроме того, там есть эссе, которые не печатались в России. А название я позаимствовал у своей любимой пластинки Pink Floyd."

В.О.Пелевин

В сборник вошли произведения: Психическая атака сонет • Колдун Игнат и люди • СССР Тайшоу Чжуань • Жизнь и приключения сарая номер XII • Водонапорная башня • Миттельшпиль • Музыка со столба • Откровение Крегера • Оружие возмездия • Бубен нижнего мира • Краткая история пэйнтбола в Москве • Нижняя тундра • Святочный киберпанк, или Рождественская ночь-117.DIR • Time out • Греческий вариант • Who by fire • Икстлан — Петушки • ГКЧП как тетраграмматон • Зомбификация Опыт сравнительной антропологии • Джон Фаулз и трагедия русского либерализма • Имена олигархов на карте Родины • Мост, который я хотел перейти

«Relics. Раннее и неизданное» – сборник ранних произведений автора. Пелевин как всегда оригинален – не только в своем творчестве, но и в его преподнесении читателю: содержание книги повторяет хронологию событий, произошедших с Россией на стыке XX и XXI веков.

Мы достаточно удалились от девяностых, чтобы разглядеть их без эффекта «лицом к лицу лица не увидать». Поэтому в наши дни выходят фильмы-медитации вроде «Жмурок». Relics – своего рода «жмурки духа», ностальгическое воспоминание о времени малиновых пиджаков в суровую эпоху оранжевых галстуков. Книга составлена таким образом, чтобы ее содержание примерно соответствовало хронологии событий: как мы туда прибыли (для этого включены несколько совсем ранних рассказов), во что вляпались и куда после этого делись…

Эти тексты лежали не «в столе» – они публиковались в журналах и газетах, просто большая их часть не выходила в книжном формате. Многие гуляют по интернету в изувеченном виде, лучше издать их, наконец, по-человечески. Кроме того, там есть эссе, которые не печатались в России. А название я позаимствовал у своей любимой пластинки Pink Floyd.

В.О.Пелевин

В сборник вошли произведения:

• Психическая атака сонет

• Колдун Игнат и люди

• СССР Тайшоу Чжуань

• Жизнь и приключения сарая номер XII

• Водонапорная башня

• Миттельшпиль

• Музыка со столба

• Откровение Крегера

• Оружие возмездия

• Бубен нижнего мира

• Краткая история пэйнтбола в Москве

• Нижняя тундра

• Святочный киберпанк, или Рождественская ночь-117.DIR

• Time out

• Греческий вариант

• Who by fire

• Икстлан – Петушки

• ГКЧП как тетраграмматон

• Зомбификация Опыт сравнительной антропологии

• Джон Фаулз и трагедия русского либерализма

• Имена олигархов на карте Родины

• Мост, который я хотел перейти

In the fall of 1993, Russia’s October revolution left the Ultra-nationalists in charge of a collapsing economy and a desperate people. With a disintegrating infrastructure and wounded pride, the Russian president makes a bold move to confront the United States.

Red Hammer 1994 is an exciting military thriller about nuclear war. This novel explores professionalism and extreme courage in impossible situations, while asking tough questions about how leaders can hope to function amid destruction and chaos. Action packed and thought provoking, this novel describes the complex nature of nuclear war.

Expertly crafted in its details, Red Hammer 1994 is for anyone interested in geo-political issues. Inspired by a career spent working on Air Force strategic weapon systems and a nuclear engineering and nuclear power background, Robert Ratcliffe wrote this novel after gaining a deep understanding of nuclear weapon effects and the composition and capabilities of the United States and Soviet arsenals. With a desire to write a book that explored the complexities and issues of nuclear war, Red Hammer 1994 was designed to provide thought-provoking realism while captivating readers. Crafted with expert accuracy, this amazing novel sets a new standard for military thrillers.

Rontel is the story of one man’s odyssey through Chicago. Follow him as he attempts to go to his last day of work. Follow him through the subway as he considers stealing chips from a dancing baby. Find him being threatened by a homeless man holding board games. Take his hand as he considers building a hydraulic cocoon for his cat out of a complimentary duffel bag. Walk the streets of Uptown as a cop-killer takes hostages to the roof of an apartment building. Meet his friends. Just kidding! Follow him to his neighbor’s apartment where he gets paid in pumpkin pie to watch a baby. Follow him through through the dull pains of never quite becoming an adult. Sit back, laugh, smile, hold your breath, because not even he knows how it ends.

“Funny as hell, searingly honest, and urgently real, Sam Pink’s Rontel puts to shame most modern fiction. His writing perfectly captures the bizarre parade that is Chicago, with all its gloriously odd and wonderful people. This book possesses both the nerve of Nelson Algren and the existential comedy of Albert Camus.” — Joe Meno

This is a daringly honest portrait of an angry young man on the make. His morals may shock you but you will not be able to deny or dismiss him.

In the fall of 1993, Russia’s October revolution left the Ultra-nationalists in charge of a collapsing economy and a desperate people. With a disintegrating infrastructure and wounded pride, the Russian president makes a bold move to confront the United States.

Red Hammer 1994 is an exciting military thriller about nuclear war. This novel explores professionalism and extreme courage in impossible situations, while asking tough questions about how leaders can hope to function amid destruction and chaos. Action packed and thought provoking, this novel describes the complex nature of nuclear war.

Expertly crafted in its details, Red Hammer 1994 is for anyone interested in geo-political issues. Inspired by a career spent working on Air Force strategic weapon systems and a nuclear engineering and nuclear power background, Robert Ratcliffe wrote this novel after gaining a deep understanding of nuclear weapon effects and the composition and capabilities of the United States and Soviet arsenals. With a desire to write a book that explored the complexities and issues of nuclear war, Red Hammer 1994 was designed to provide thought-provoking realism while captivating readers. Crafted with expert accuracy, this amazing novel sets a new standard for military thrillers.

Mines literary gold from the wind-scrubbed landscape of the American West — and from the guarded hopes and gnawing loneliness of the people who live there. This is a story collection about ordinary women, men and children.

Spanning three generations, Red Sorghum, a novel of family and myth, is told through a series of flashbacks that depict events of staggering horror set against a landscape of gemlike beauty, as the Chinese battle both Japanese invaders and each other in the turbulent war years of the 1930s.

A legend in China, where it won major literary awards inspired the Oscar-nominated film, Red Sorghum is a book in which fable and history collide to produce fiction that is entirely new and unforgettable.

A runaway bestseller in Quebec, with foreign rights sold to 15 countries around the world, Kim Thúy's Governor General's Literary Award-winning Ru is a lullaby for Vietnam and a love letter to a new homeland.

Ru. In Vietnamese it means lullaby; in French it is a small stream, but also signifies a flow — of tears, blood, money. Kim Thúy's Ru is literature at its most crystalline: the flow of a life on the tides of unrest and on to more peaceful waters. In vignettes of exquisite clarity, sharp observation and sly wit, we are carried along on an unforgettable journey from a palatial residence in Saigon to a crowded and muddy Malaysian refugee camp, and onward to a new life in Quebec. There, the young girl feels the embrace of a new community, and revels in the chance to be part of the American Dream. As an adult, the waters become rough again: now a mother of two sons, she must learn to shape her love around the younger boy's autism. Moving seamlessly from past to present, from history to memory and back again, Ru is a book that celebrates life in all its wonder: its moments of beauty and sensuality, brutality and sorrow, comfort and comedy.

In 1941, when she was turned into an armed merchant cruiser, the S.S. Benbencula was already old. Yet even she was needed to protect the vital Atlantic sea lanes. Commander Lindsay, her new captain, had to work desperately to mould the ship's company — raw recruits and old timers — into a fighting force. And better than anyone, Lindsay knew this could be his last command, his last chance.

In 1959, Liverpool Football Club were in the Second Division. Liverpool Football Club had never won the FA Cup. Fifteen seasons later, Liverpool Football Club had won three League titles, two FA Cups and the UEFA Cup. Liverpool Football Club had become the most consistently successful team in England. And the most passionately supported club. Their manager was revered as a god.Destined for immortality. Their manager was Bill Shankly. His job was his life. His life was football. His football a form of socialism. Bill Shankly inspired people. Bill Shankly transformed people. The players and the supporters.His legacy would reveberate through the ages.

In 1974, Liverpool Football Club and Bill Shankly stood on the verge of even greater success. In England and in Europe. But in 1974, Bill Shankly shocked Liverpool and football. Bill Shankly resigned. Bill Shankly retired.

Red or Dead is the story of the rise of Liverpool Football Club and Bill Shankly. And the story of the retirement of Bill Shankly. Of one man and his work. And of the man after that work. A man in two halves. Home and away. Red or dead.

Winner of the IMPAC Award and Booker Prize nominee.

In this rich and compelling novel, written in language of astonishing poise and resonance, one of Australia's greatest living writers gives and immensely powerful vision of human differences and eternal divisions. In the mid-1840s a thirteen-year-old British cabin boy, Gemmy Fairley, is cast ashore in the far north of Australia and taken in by aborigines. Sixteen years later he moves back into the world of Europeans, among hopeful yet terrified settlers who are staking out their small patch of home in an alien place. To them, Gemmy stands as a different kind of challenge: he is a force that at once fascinates and repels. His own identity in this new world is as unsettling to him as the knowledge he brings to others of the savage, the aboriginal.

RIGHT LIVELIHOODS begins with a cataclysmic vision of New York City after the leveling of 50 square blocks of Manhattan. Four million have died. Albertine, the "street name for the buzz of a lifetime," is a mind-altering drug that sets The Albertine Notes in motion. The collection's second novella, K & K, concerns a lonely young office manager at an insurance agency, where the office suggestion box is yielding unpleasant messages that escalate to a scary pitch. Ellie Knight-Cameron's responses to these random diatribes illuminate the toll that a lack of self-awareness can take. At the center of The Omega Force is a buffoonish former government official in rocky recovery. Dr. "Jamie" Van Deusen is determined to protect his habitat-its golf courses (and Bloody Marys), pizza places (and beers) from "dark-complected" foreign nationals. His patriotism and wild imagination are mainly fueled by a fall off the wagon. Only Rick Moody could lead us to feel affection for this man and the other misguided, earnestly striving characters in these alternately unsettling, warm, trio of stories.

Patrick White's brilliant 1961 novel, set in an Australian suburb, intertwines four deeply different lives. An Aborigine artist, a Holocaust survivor, a beatific washerwoman, and a childlike heiress are each blessed — and stricken — with visionary experiences that may or may not allow them to transcend the machinations of their fellow men. Tender and lacerating, pure and profane, subtle and sweeping, Riders in the Chariot is one of the Nobel Prize winner's boldest books.

Vikram Chandra's Red Earth and Pouring Rain is an unforgettable reading experience, a contemporary Thousand and One Nights — with an eighteenth-century warrior-poet (now reincarnated as a typewriting monkey) and an Indian student home from college in America switching off as our Scheherazades. Ranging from bloody battles in colonial India to college anomie in California, from Hindu gods to MTV, Chandra's novel is engrossing, enthralling, impossible to put down — a remarkable meditation on quests and homecomings, good and evil, storytelling and redemption.

Winner of the American Book Award and the Murray Morgan Prize, Sherman Alexie’s brilliant first novel tells a powerful tale of Indians, rock ’n’ roll, and redemption.

Coyote Springs is the only all-Indian rock band in Washington State — and the entire rest of the world. Thomas Builds-the-Fire takes vocals and bass guitar, Victor Joseph hits lead guitar, and Junior Polatkin rounds off the sound on drums. Backup vocals come from sisters Chess and Checkers Warm Water. The band sings its own brand of the blues, full of poverty, pain, and loss — but also joy and laughter.

It all started one day when legendary bluesman Robert Johnson showed up on the Spokane Indian Reservation with a magical guitar, leaving it on the floor of Thomas Builds-the-Fire’s van after setting off to climb Wellpinit Mountain in search of Big Mom.

In Reservation Blues, National Book Award winner Alexie vaults with ease from comedy to tragedy and back in a tour-de-force outing powered by a collision of cultures: Delta blues and Indian rock.

Revered Turkish novelist Hasan Ali Toptaş—“Turkey's Kafka”—weaves a mysterious and masterful tale of love and friendship, guilt and secrets in his first novel translated into English.

Thirty years after completing his military service, Ziya flees the spiraling turmoil and perplexing chaos of the city where he lives to seek a peaceful existence in a remote village — of which he has heard dreamlike tales. Greeted by his old friend from the army, Kenan, who has built and furnished a vineyard house for him, Ziya grows accustomed to his new surroundings and is welcomed by Kenan’s family. However, the village does not provide the serenity Ziya yearns for, and old memories of his military service on the treacherous Syrian/Turkish border flood his thoughts. As he battles specters of the past, his rejection of village life provokes an undercurrent of ill feeling among the locals, not least towards Kenan, who has incurred heavy debts by his generosity to the man who may have saved his life.

Toptaş masterfully blurs the borders between dreams and reality, truth and memory in this gripping tale. Like Turkey itself, the writer sits between the traditions of the East and the West, creating bold new literature. In his own country he sits comfortably on the shelf beside Orhan Pamuk, and his first novel in English is poised to enchant those same readers.

Ephram Jennings has never forgotten the beautiful girl with the long braids running through the piney woods of Liberty, their small East Texas town. Young Ruby Bell, “the kind of pretty it hurt to look at,” has suffered beyond imagining, so as soon as she can, she flees suffocating Liberty for the bright pull of 1950s New York. Ruby quickly winds her way into the ripe center of the city-the darkened piano bars and hidden alleyways of the Village-all the while hoping for a glimpse of the red hair and green eyes of her mother. When a telegram from her cousin forces her to return home, thirty-year-old Ruby finds herself reliving the devastating violence of her girlhood. With the terrifying realization that she might not be strong enough to fight her way back out again, Ruby struggles to survive her memories of the town’s dark past. Meanwhile, Ephram must choose between loyalty to the sister who raised him and the chance for a life with the woman he has loved since he was a boy.

Ring Roads, for which Modiano was awarded the French Academy's Grand Prix du Roman (1972), is the story of a young Jew, Serge, in search of his father, Chalva, who disappeared from his life ten years earlier. He finds him trying to survive the war years in the unlikely company of black marketeers, anti-Semites and prostitutes, putting his meagre and not entirely orthodox business skills at the service of those who have no interest in him or his survival.

Ring Roads is a brilliant, almost hallucinatory evocation of the uneasy, corrupt years of the Occupation and like The Night Watch is both cruel and tender †“ savage in its depiction of the anti-Semitic newspaper editor, the bullying ex-Foreign Legionnaire and the former prostitute, who treat Chalva with ever more threatening contempt; tender in its attempt to understand and identify with the Jew who cannot see the danger he courts.

T. C. Boyle's seventh novel transforms two characters straight out of history into rich mythic figures whose tortured love story is as heartbreaking as it is hilarious. It is the dawn of the twentieth century when the beautiful, budding feminist Katherine Dexter falls in love with Stanley McCormick, son of a millionaire inventor. The two wed, but before the marriage is consummated, Stanley experiences a nervous breakdown and is diagnosed as a schizophrenic sex maniac. Locked up for the rest of his life at Riven Rock, the family's California mansion, Stanley is treated by a series of confident doctors determined to cure him. But his true salvation lies with Katherine who, throughout her career as a scientist and suffragette, continues a patient vigil from beyond the walls of Riven Rock, never losing hope that one day Stanley will be healed.Blending social history with some of the most deliciously dark humor ever written, Boyle employs his hallmark virtuoso prose to tell the story of America's age of innocence-and of a love affair that is as extraordinary as it is unforgettable.

A trio of uncollected stories from early in T. C. Boyle’s career, Rock and Roll Heaven shows all of the qualities that had people excited about Boyle from the beginning — great ideas, dazzling writing full of wit, black humor, and wisdom. These three stories were published in journals but have not been included as of yet in any of Boyle’s short story collections. Combined here, all Boyle fans have easy access to reading them now.

Regeneration by Pat Barker is a classic exploration of how the traumas of war brutalised a generation of young — published as a Penguin Essential for the first time. 'I just don't think our war aims — whatever they may be — and we don't know — justify this level of slaughter.' The poets and soldiers Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen are dispatched to Craiglockhart War Hospital in Scotland in 1917. There, army psychiatrist William Rivers is treating brutalised, shell-shocked men. It is Rivers' job to fix these men and make them ready to fight again. As a witness to the traumas they have endured, can he in all conscience send them back to the horrors of the trenches?

The first novel by the acclaimed, brilliantly unconventional Nicola Barker, prize-winning author of The Yips.

Reversed Forecast is a vivid snapshot of pre-gentrification London and a tale of finding love in less-than-scenic places. Chance meetings between its cast of inimitably odd individuals — Ruby, the betting-shop cashier; violently disturbed (and disturbing) Vincent; Samantha, the would-be cabaret singer; and Little Buttercup, the never-quite-made-it greyhound — result in the unlikeliest of couples. There’s always the risk that it could all be disastrous as characters try — or don’t try — to make winning combinations. But as Ruby, the story’s soft-centered heroine, observes: “Losing, that’s the whole point of the gamble.”

Dazzling, gritty, and surprising, Reversed Forecast is the uniquely entertaining first novel by Nicola Barker, previously shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and winner of the Hawthornden Prize and IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. “Beautifully rendered — well written, clear and revelatory.” —The Times (London) “A capital fairy tale.” —The Guardian

“A strange and wonderful novel.” —The Sunday Times (London) “An imaginative lowlife tale, told with acuteness and verve.” —The Literary Review

Nicola Barker’s eight previous novels include Darkmans (short-listed for the 2007 Man Booker and Ondaatje prizes, and winner of the Hawthornden Prize), Wide Open (winner of the 2000 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award), and Clear (long-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2004). She has also written two prize-winning collections of short stories, and her work has been translated into more than twenty languages. She lives in East London.

Is it truth or fiction? Memoir or essay? Narrative or associative? To a writer like Michael Martone, questions like these are high praise. Martone’s studied disregard of form and his unruffled embrace of the prospect that nothing-no story, no life-is ever quite finished have yielded some of today’s most splendidly unconventional writing. Add to that an utter weakness for pop Americana and what Louise Erdrich has called a “deep affection for the ordinary,” and you have one of the few writers who could pull off something like Racing in Place. Up the steps of the Washington Monument, down the home stretch at the Indy Speedway, and across the parking lot of the Moon Winx Lodge in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Martone chases, and is chased by, memories-and memories of memories. He writes about his grandfather’s job as a meter reader, those seventies-era hotels with atrium lobbies and open glass elevators, and the legendary temper of basketball coach Bob Knight.Martone, as Peter Turchi has said, looks “under stones the rest of us leave unturned.” So, what is he really up to when he dwells on the make of Malcolm X’s eyeglasses or the runner-up names for Snow White’s seven dwarfs? In “My Mother Invents a Tradition,” Martone tells how his mom, as the dean of girls at a brand-new high school in Fort Wayne, Indiana, “constructed a nostalgic past out of nothing.” Sitting at their dining room table, she came up with everything from the school colors (orange and brown) to the yearbook title (Bear Tracks). Look, and then look again, Martone is saying. “You never know. I never know.”

A chilling, internationally acclaimed political thriller, Red April is a grand achievement in contemporary Latin American fiction, written by the youngest winner ever of the Alfaguara Prize — one of the most prestigious in the Spanish-speaking world — and translated from the Spanish by one of our most celebrated literary translators, Edith Grossman. It evokes Holy Week during a cruel, bloody, and terrifying time in Peru's history, shocking for its corrosive mix of assassination, bribery, intrigue, torture, and enforced disappearance — a war between grim, ideologically-driven terrorism and morally bankrupt government counterinsurgency.

Mother-haunted, wife-abandoned, literature-loving, quietly eccentric Felix Chacaltana Saldivar is a hapless, by-the-book, unambitious prosecutor living in Lima. Until now he has lived a life in which nothing exceptionally good or bad has ever happened to him. But, inexplicably, he has been put in charge of a bizarre and horrible murder investigation. As it unfolds by propulsive twists and turns — full of paradoxes and surprises — Saldivar is compelled to confront what happens to a man and a society when death becomes the only certainty in life.

Stunning for its self-assured and nimble clarity of style — reminiscent of classic noir fiction — the inexorable momentum of its plot, and the moral complexity of its concerns, Red April is at once riveting and profound, informed as it is by deft artistry in the shaping of conflict between competing venalities. As the New York Times declares, "Lima is once again one of Latin America’s brightest literary scenes."

A riveting white-water ride down a raging river in the Italian Alps, pitting people against Nature, in the novel Tim Parks was born to write.

In steel-tipped prose, Craig Davidson conjures a savage world populated by fighting dogs, prizefighters, sex addicts, gamblers, a repo man and a disappearing magician. The title of the lead story, “28 Bones”, refers to the number of bones in a boxer’s hands; once broken, they never heal properly, and the fighter’s career descends to bouts that have less to do with sport than with survival: no referee, no rules, not even gloves. In “A Mean Utility” we enter an even more desperate arena: dogfights where Rottweilers, pit bulls and Dobermans fight each other to the death. Davidson’s stories are small monuments to the telling detail. The hostility of his fictional universe is tempered by the humanity he invests in his characters and by his subtle and very moving observations of their motivation. In the tradition of Hemingway, "Rust and Bone" explores violence, masculinity and life on the margins. Visceral and with a dark urgency, this is a truly original debut.

Craig Davidson was born in Toronto and now lives in Iowa City. His novel The Fighter is also available from Penguin Canada.

Schreiben, um zu überleben, um weiterleben zu können - nach Buchenwald, nach Auschwitz. Imre Kertész zählt zu den wenigen Autoren, denen Literatur nach Auschwitz noch möglich ist. Sein "Roman eines Schicksallosen" gilt als eines der wichtigsten Zeugnisse des Holocaust. Gemeinsam mit dem Jugendlichen György wird der Hörer in die Welt der Vernichtungslager gestoßen, lebt und erlebt die Naivität des Beteiligten, der seinem kindlichen Leben entrissen wird und in die Maschinerie der Vernichtungslager gerät. Kindlich naiv erlebt er als immerfort Glücksuchender Deportation, Zwangsarbeit und Vernichtung, erlebt den Verlust an Naivität und die allmähliche Erkenntnis der Realität.

The Relation of My Imprisonment is a work of fiction utilizing a form invented in the seventeenth century by imprisoned Puritan divines. Designed to be exemplary, works of this type were aimed at brethren outside the prison walls and functioned primarily as figurative dramatization of the test of faith all true believers must endure. These "relation," framed by scripture and by a sermon explicating the text, were usually read aloud in weekly or monthly installments during religious services. Utterly sincere and detailed recounting of suffering, they were nonetheless highly artificial. To use the form self-consciously, as Russell Banks has done, is not to parody it so much as to argue good-humoredly with the mind it embodies, to explore and, if possible, to map the limits of that mind, the more intelligently to love it.

When we first meet him, Chappie is a punked-out teenager living with his mother and abusive stepfather in an upstate New York trailer park. During this time, he slips into drugs and petty crime. Rejected by his parents, out of school and in trouble with the police, he claims for himself a new identity as a permanent outsider; he gets a crossed-bones tattoo on his arm, and takes the name "Bone." He finds dangerous refuge with a group of biker-thieves, and then hides in the boarded-up summer house of a professor and his wife. He finally settles in an abandoned schoolbus with Rose, a child he rescues from a fast-talking pedophile. There Bone meets I-Man, an exiled Rastafarian, and together they begin a second adventure that takes the reader from Middle America to the ganja-growing mountains of Jamaica. It is an amazing journey of self-discovery through a world of magic, violence, betrayal and redemption.

Nominated for the American Book Award, 'Ray' is the bizarre, hilarious, and consistently adventurous story of a life on the edge. Dr. Ray- a womanizer, small-town drunk, vigilante, poet, adoring husband- is a man trying to make sense of life in the twentieth century. In flight from the death he dealt flying over Vietnam, Dr. Ray struggles with those bound to him by need, sickness, lunacy, by blood and by love.

Joan Didion's electrifying first novel is a haunting portrait of a marriage whose wrong turns and betrayals are at once absolutely idiosyncratic and a razor-sharp commentary on the history of California. Everett McClellan and his wife, Lily, are the great-grandchildren of pioneers, and what happens to them is a tragic epilogue to the pioneer experience, a story of murder and betrayal that only Didion could tell with such nuance, sympathy, and suspense.

Tyrone Meehan, damned as an informer, ekes out his days in Donegal, awaiting his killers. ‘Now that everything is out in the open, they will all speak in my place — the ira, the British, my family, my close friends, journalists I’ve never even met. Some of them will go so far as to explain how and why I ended up a traitor… Do not trust my enemies, and even less my friends. Ignore those who will say they knew me. Nobody has ever walked in my shoes, nobody. The only reason’I’m talking today is because I am the only one who can tell the truth. Because after I’m gone, I hope for silence. Return to Killybegs is the story of a traitor to Belfast’s Catholic community, emerging from the white heat of a prolonged war during the 1970s and 1980s in Northern Ireland. This powerful work, lauded by critics, shortlisted for the Prix Goncourt and awarded the Grand Prix de Roman de l’Académie Française, deals with a subject that touches a nerve for most Irish people: the all- too-human circumstances of betrayal and survival. It is an extraordinary read. Sorj Chalandon is a novelist who spent formative years on assignment in Northern Ireland as a reporter for Libération during the Troubles. He is the author of two works: My Traitor was first published to acclaim in France in 2007 and winner of the Prix Joseph Kessel and the Prix Jean Freustié. Return to Killybegs was originally published in France in 2011.

We think about it every day, sometimes every hour: Money. Who has it. Who doesn’t. How you get it. How you don’t.

In Refund, Bender creates an award-winning collection of stories that deeply explore the ways in which money and the estimation of value affect the lives of her characters. The stories in Refund reflect our contemporary world — swindlers, reality show creators, desperate artists, siblings, parents — who try to answer the question: What is the real definition of worth?

In “Theft,” an eighty-year-old swindler, accustomed to tricking people for their money, boards a cruise ship to see if she can find something of true value — a human connection. In “Anything for Money,” the creator of a reality show is thrown into the real world when his estranged granddaughter reenters his life in need of a new heart; and in the title story, young artist parents in downtown Manhattan escape the attack on 9/11 only to face a battle over their subletted apartment with a stranger who might have lost more than only her deposit.

Set in contemporary America, these stories herald a work of singular literary merit by an important writer at the height of her power.

The new novel from internationally acclaimed author José Manuel Prieto, Rex is a sophisticated literary game rife with allusions to Proust and Borges, set in a world of wealthy Russian expats and mafiosos who have settled in western Europe.

J. is a young Cuban man who, thanks to his knowledge of Russian and Spanish, has become the tutor of the young son of a wealthy Russian couple living in Marbella, in the part of southern Spain that the Russian mafia has turned into its winter quarters. As he stays with the family, J. becomes the personal secretary of the boy’s father, Vasily, an ex-scientist that J. suspects is on the run from gangsters. Vasily’s wife, Nelly, a seductive woman always draped in mind-boggling quantities of precious stones, believes the only way to evade the gangsters is an extravagant plan linking Vasily to the throne of the czars. As J. attempts to give Vasily’s son a general grade-school education by exclusively reading him Proust, the paranoid world of Vasily’s household comes ever closer to its unmasking.

In this enchanting and evocative novel, Antonio Tabucchi takes the reader on a dream-like trip to Portugal, a country he is deeply attached to. He spent many years there as director of the Italian Cultural Institute in Lisbon. He even wrote Requiem in Portuguese; it had to be translated into Italian for publication in his native Italy.

Requiem's narrator has an appointment to meet someone on a quay by the Tagus at twelve. But, it turns out, not twelve noon, twelve midnight, so he has a long time to while away. As the day unfolds, he has many encounters — a young junky, a taxi driver who is not familiar with the streets, several waiters, a gypsy, a cemetery keeper, the mysterious Isabel, an accordionist, in all almost two dozen people both real and illusionary. Finally he meets The Guest, the ghost of the long dead great poet Fernando Pessoa. Part travelog, part autobiography, part fiction, and even a bit of a cookbook, Requiem becomes an homage to a country and its people, and a farewell to the past as the narrator lays claim to a literary forebear who, like himself, is an evasive and many-sided personality.

"Will put Allen in the company of writers such as James Joyce, August Wilson, and Ralph Ellison." — The Philadelphia Inquirer.

When it was first published fifteen years ago, Jeffery Renard Allen's debut novel, Rails Under My Back, earned its author comparisons to some of the giants of twentieth-century modernism. The publication of Allen's equally ambitious second novel, Song of the Shank, cemented those lofty claims. Now, the book that established his reputation is being restored to print in its first Graywolf Press edition. Together, the two novels stand as significant achievements of twenty-first-century literature.

Rails Under My Back is an epic that tracks the interwoven lives of two brothers, Lucius and John Jones, who are married to two sisters, Gracie and Sheila McShan. For them, their parents, and their children, life is always full of departures; someone is always fleeing town and leaving the remaining family to suffer the often dramatic, sometimes tragic consequences. The multiple effects of the comings and goings are devastating: These are the almost mythic expression of the African American experience in the half century that followed the Second World War.

The story ranges, as the characters do, from the city, which is somewhat like both New York and Chicago, to Memphis, to the West, and to many "inner" and "outer" locales. Rails Under My Back is a multifaceted, brilliantly colored, intensely musical novel that pulses with urgency and originality.

Seemingly the simplest of stories — a passing anecdote of village life — Rock Crystal opens up into a tale of almost unendurable suspense. This jewel-like novella by the writer that Thomas Mann praised as "one of the most extraordinary, the most enigmatic, the most secretly daring and the most strangely gripping narrators in world literature" is among the most unusual, moving, and memorable of Christmas stories. Two children — Conrad and his little sister, Sanna — set out from their village high up in the Alps to visit their grandparents in the neighboring valley. It is the day before Christmas but the weather is mild, though of course night falls early in December and the children are warned not to linger. The grandparents welcome the children with presents and pack them off with kisses. Then snow begins to fall, ever more thickly and steadily. Undaunted, the children press on, only to take a wrong turn. The snow rises higher and higher, time passes: it is deep night when the sky clears and Conrad and Sanna discover themselves out on a glacier, terrifying and beautiful, the heart of the void. Adalbert Stifter's rapt and enigmatic tale, beautifully translated by Elizabeth Mayer and Marianne Moore, explores what can be found between Christmas Eve and Christmas Day — or on any night of the year.

Amit Chaudhuri's stories range across the astonishing face of the modern Indian subcontinent. From divorcees about to enter into an arranged marriage to the teenaged poet who develops a relationship with a lonely widower, from singing teachers to housewives to white-collar businessmen, Chaudhuri deftly explores the juxtaposition of the new and old worlds in his native India. Here are stories as sweet and ironic as they are deft and revealing.

Klasické dílo české literatury. Banální historky třech pánů, nudících se v dešti, změnila květnatá spisovatelova čeština v dobrodružství ještě předtím, než přijel Arnoštek se svou krásnou společnicí.

Insubstantial but charming, William Kennedy's Roscoe seems to unintentionally resemble many of the politicians it depicts. The seventh novel in Kennedy's Albany series, Roscoe follows Roscoe Conway, a quick-witted, charismatic lawyer-politician who has devoted much of his life to helping his Democratic Party cohorts achieve and maintain political power in 1930s and `40s Albany, New York. It's 1945, and Roscoe has decided to retire from politics, but a series of deaths and scandals forces him to stay and confront his past. Kennedy takes the reader on an intricate, whirlwind tour of (mostly) fictional Albany in the first half of the 20th century. He presents a mythologized, tabloid version of history, leaving no stone unturned: a multitude of gangsters, bookies, thieves, and hookers mingle with politicians, cops, and lawyers. In the middle of it all is Roscoe, the kind of behind-the-scenes, wisecracking, truth-bending man of the people who makes everything happen-or at least it's fun to think so. Kennedy shows an obvious affection for his book's colorful characters and historic Albany, and he describes both with loving specificity. Though the book often works as light comedy, its clichéd plot developments and stereotypical characters undermine its serious concerns with truth, history, and honor. "You've never met a politician like Roscoe Conway," promises the book's jacket blurb. But we have, through his different roles in countless films and TV series. As with its notoriously deceitful hero, Roscoe is likeable as long as you don't take it too seriously. -Ross Doll

Resistance is a beautifully written and powerful story set during an imagined occupation of Britain by Nazi Germany in World War II.

In a remote and rugged Welsh valley in 1944, in the wake of a German invasion, all the men have disappeared overnight, apparently to join the underground resistance. Their abandoned wives, a tiny group of farm women, are soon trapped in the valley by an unusually harsh winter — along with a handful of war-weary German soldiers on a secret mission. The need to survive drives the soldiers and the women into uneasy relationships that test both their personal and national loyalties. But when the snow finally melts, bringing them back into contact with the war that has been raging beyond their mountains, they must face the dramatic consequences of their choices.

A reimagination of one of the most famous stories in all of literature — Achilles’s slaughter and desecration of Hector, and Priam’s attempt to ransom his son’s body in Homer’s The Iliad—Ransom is the first novel in more than a decade from David Malouf, arguably Australia’s greatest living writer. A novel of suffering, sorrow, and redemption, Ransom tells the story of the relationship between two grieving men at war: fierce Achilles, who has lost his beloved Patroclus in the siege of Troy; and Priam, king of Troy, whose son Hector killed Patroclus and was in turn savaged by Achilles. Each man’s grief demands a confrontation with the other’s if it is to be resolved: a resolution more compelling to both than the demands of war. And when the aged father and the murderer of his son meet, “the past and present blend, enemies exchange places, hatred turns to understanding, youth pities age mourning youth.”

Ransom is a tour de force, incandescent in its delicate and powerful lyricism and in its unstated imperative to imagine our lives in light of fellow feeling.

In 1983, Ma Jian turned 30 and was overwhelmed by the desire to escape the confines of his life in Beijing. Deng Xiaoping was introducing economic reform but clamping down on 'Spiritual Pollution'; young people were rebelling. With his long hair, jeans and artistic friends, Ma Jian was under surveillance from his work unit and the police. His ex-wife was seeking custody of their daughter; his girlfriend was sleeping with another man. He could no longer find the inspiration to write or paint. One day he bought a train ticket to the westernmost border of China and set off in search of himself.

His journey would last three years and take him to deserts and overpopulated cities. The result is a compelling and utterly unique insight into the teeming contradictions of China that only a man who was both an insider and an outsider in his own country could have written.

Replacement, his only novel, published two years before Ulven’s suicide, is a miniature symphony, wherein the perspectives of fifteen unrelated characters are united into what seems a single narrative voice: each personality, having reached a point of stasis in their lives, directing the book in turn. These people reminisce, dream, reflect, observe, and talk to themselves; each stuck in their respective traps, each fantasizing about how their lives might have turned out differently. A masterpiece of compression and confession, Replacement dramatizes the tension between the concrete realities we think we cannot alter, and our interior lives, where we feel anything might still be possible.

When originally published in 1993, Ruined City (Fei Du) was promptly banned by China’s State Publishing Administration, ostensibly for its explicit sexual content. Since then, award-winning author Jia Pingwa’s vivid portrayal of contemporary China’s social and economic transformation has become a classic, viewed by critics and scholars of Chinese literature as one of the most important novels of the twentieth century. Howard Goldblatt’s deft translation now gives English-speaking readers their first chance to enjoy this masterpiece of social satire by one of China’s most provocative writers.

While eroticism, exoticism, and esoteric minutiae — the “pornography” that earned the opprobrium of Chinese officials — pervade Ruined City, this tale of a famous contemporary writer’s sexual and legal imbroglios is an incisive portrait of politics and culture in a rapidly changing China. In a narrative that ranges from political allegory to parody, Jia Pingwa tracks his antihero Zhuang Zhidie through progressively more involved and inevitably disappointing sexual liaisons. Set in a modern metropolis rife with power politics, corruption, and capitalist schemes, the novel evokes an unrequited romantic longing for China’s premodern, rural past, even as unfolding events caution against the trap of nostalgia. Amid comedy and chaos, the author subtly injects his concerns about the place of intellectual seriousness, censorship, and artistic integrity in the changing conditions of Chinese society.

Rich with detailed description and vivid imagery, Ruined City transports readers into a world abounding with the absurdities and harshness of modern life.

Novelist Bohumil Hrabal (1914-97) was born in Brno, Czechoslovakia, and spent decades working at a variety of laboring jobs before turning to writing in his late forties. From that point, he quickly made his mark on the Czech literary scene; by the time of his death he was ranked with Jaroslav Hašek, Karel Capek, and Milan Kundera as among the nation's greatest twentieth-century writers. Hrabal’s fiction blends tragedy with humor and explores the anguish of intellectuals and ordinary people alike from a slightly surreal perspective. His work ranges from novels and poems to film scripts and essays.

Rambling On is a collection of stories set in Hrabal's Kersko. Several of the stories were written before the 1968 Soviet invasion of Prague but had to be reworked when they were rejected by Communist censorship during the 1970s. This edition features the original, uncensored versions of those stories.

Ready to Burst follows the lives of two young men and their individual attempts to make sense of the deeply troubled society surrounding them. An informed critique of the “brain drain” prompted by the Duvalier dictatorship, Ready to Burst is, in Frankétienne’s words, a portrait of “the extreme bitterness of doom in the face of the blind machinery of power.” Widely recognized as Haiti’s most important literary figure and an outspoken challenger of political oppression, Frankétienne was a candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009. The New York Times has called Frankétienne “the Father of Haitian Letters.”

During China's collectivist era in the late 1950s, a rural work team responsible for building an important floodgate receives a strange new recruit: Hei-hai, a skinny, silent and almost feral boy. Assigned to assist the blacksmith at the worksite forge, Hei-hai proves superhumanly indifferent to pain or suffering and yet, eerily sensitive to the natural world. As the worksite becomes a backdrop to jealousy and strife, Hei-hai's eyes remain fixed on a world that only he can see, searching for wonders that only he understands. One day, he finds all that he has been seeking embodied in the most mundane and unexpected way: a radish.

'That dark-skinned boy with the superhuman ability to suffer and a superhuman degree of sensitivity represents the soul of my entire fictional output. Not one of all the fictional characters I've created since then is as close to my soul as he is.' Mo Yan, 2012 Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech

'Pungent, potent, absurd, moving, and alive, this early Mo Yan novella carries his unmistakable stamp. Survival is ignoble, and power blunt, but glimpses of the transcendent are possible: Radish captures the human condition with aching force.' Gish Jen, author of Mona in the Promised Land

Dieser Roman erzählt die Fabel vom letzten Robinson in einer Welt nicht mehr vorhandener Freiräume. In Grevesmühlen, in blauer Südsee, im Londoner Kerker, im Spiegelhaus auf dem Wyman Tower. Es gibt einen hochpolierten Freitag, eine Dame mit Schritt, es gibt eine abgesoffene Kirche, ein Imperium von Besenkammern und es gibt Luxus, illuminierte Zahnbürsten, Tangomusik, bernsteinfarbenes Licht. Vor allem gibt es eine Unmenge virtuellen Geldes, mit dem man das alles kaufen kann und das sich auf Knopfdruck «löscht». Und der beste Freund erweist sich dann als der tödlichste.

Racz has come to Bratislava to make money so that he can be a suitable suitor for the woman from his village he loves. He gets work as the stoker in the Hotel Ambassador, one of the most prestigious hotels in Bratislava, and in his single-mindedness soon discovers that he can take advantage of his position. People will pay to have the heat on and, in short, Racz learns that he who puts the heat on can control things. He rises quickly from stoker in the Ambassador to its owner and much else. Those who oppose him (small-time money changers, former secret police, professional classes) knuckle under while those whose dreams have foundered in the new world order have to make do or become, like academics, increasingly irrelevant. Peter Pišt'anek’s reputation is assured by Rivers of Babylon and by its hero, the most mesmerizing character of Slovak literature, Rácz, an idiot of genius, a psychopathic gangster. Rácz and Rivers of Babylon tell the story of a Central Europe, where criminals, intellectuals and ex-secret policemen have infiltrated a new ‘democracy’. Slovak readers acknowledge Peter Pišt'anek as their most flamboyant and fearless writer, stripping the nation of its myths and false self-esteem. The novel has been translated by Peter Petro of British Columbia University, in close collaboration with author and publisher.

Über fünfzig Jahre quälte sich Peter Wawerzinek mit der Frage, warum seine Mutter ihn als Waise in der DDR zurückgelassen hatte. Dann fand und besuchte er sie. Das Ergebnis ist ein literarischer Sprengsatz, wie ihn die deutsche Literatur noch nicht zu bieten hatte.

Ihre Abwesenheit war das schwarze Loch, der alles verschlingende Negativpol in Peter Wawerzineks Leben. Wie hatte seine Mutter es ihm antun können, ihn als Kleinkind in der DDR zurückzulassen, als sie in den Westen floh? Der Junge, herumgereicht in verschiedenen Kinderheimen, blieb stumm bis weit ins vierte Jahr, mied Menschen, lauschte lieber den Vögeln, ahmte ihren Gesang nach, auf dem Rücken liegend, tschilpend und tschirpend. Die Köchin des Heims wollte ihn adoptieren, ihr Mann wollte das nicht. Eine Handwerkerfamilie nahm ihn auf, gab ihn aber wieder ans Heim zurück.

Wo war Heimat? Wo seine Wurzeln? Wo gehörte er hin?

Dass er auch eine Schwester hat, erfuhr er mit vierzehn. Im Heim hatte ihm niemand davon erzählt, auch später die ungeliebte Adoptionsmutter nicht. Als Grenz sol dat unternahm er einen Fluchtversuch Richtung Mutter in den Westen, kehrte aber, schon jenseits des Grenzzauns, auf halbem Weg wieder um. Wollte er sie, die ihn ausgestoßen und sich nie gemeldet hatte, wirk lich wiedersehen?

Zeitlebens kämpfte Peter Wawerzinek mit seiner Mutterlosigkeit. Als er sie Jahre nach dem Mauerfall aufsuchte und mit ihr die acht Halbgeschwister, die alle in derselben Kleinstadt lebten, war das über die Jahrzehnte überlebens groß gewordene Mutterbild der Wirklichkeit nicht gewachsen. Es blieb bei der einzigen Begegnung. Aber sie löste — nach jahrelanger Veröffentlichungspause — einen Schreibschub bei Peter Wawerzinek aus, in dem er sich das Trauma aus dem Leib schrieb: Über Jahre hinweg arbeitete er wie besessen an Rabenliebe, übersetzte das lebenslange Gefühl von Verlassenheit, Verlorenheit und Muttersehnsucht in ein großes Stück Literatur, das in der deutschsprachigen Literatur seinesgleichen noch nicht hatte.

This irresistible debut, set in contemporary New York, provides a sharp, insightful look into how the relationship between two best friends changes when they are no longer coming of age but learning how to live adult lives.

As close as sisters for twenty years, Sarah and Lauren have been together through high school and college, first jobs and first loves, the uncertainties of their twenties and the realities of their thirties.

Sarah, the only child of a prominent intellectual and a socialite, works at a charity and is methodically planning her wedding. Lauren — beautiful, independent, and unpredictable — is single and working in publishing, deflecting her parents’ worries and questions about her life and future by trying not to think about it herself. Each woman envies — and is horrified by — particular aspects of the other’s life, topics of conversation they avoid with masterful linguistic pirouettes.

Once, Sarah and Lauren were inseparable; for a long a time now, they’ve been apart. Can two women who rarely see one other, selectively share secrets, and lead different lives still call themselves best friends? Is it their abiding connection — or just force of habit — that keeps them together?

With impeccable style, biting humor, and a keen sense of detail, Rumaan Alam deftly explores how the attachments we form in childhood shift as we adapt to our adult lives — and how the bonds of friendship endure, even when our paths diverge.

From the brilliant mind of the author of The Sound of Things Falling, a powerful novel about a legendary political cartoonist.

Javier Mallarino is a living legend. He is his country's most influential political cartoonist, the consciousness of a nation. A man capable of repealing laws, overturning judges' decisions, destroying politicians' careers with his art. His weapons are pen and ink. Those in power fear him and pay him homage.

At sixty-five, after four decades of a brilliant career, he's at the height of his powers. But this all changes when he's paid an unexpected visit from a young woman who upends his sense of personal history and forces him to re-evaluate his life and work, questioning his position in the world.

In Reputations, Juan Gabriel Vásquez examines the weight of the past, how a public persona intersects with private histories, and the burdens and surprises of memory. In this intimate novel, Vásquez plumbs universal experiences to create a masterful story, one that reverberates long after you turn the final page.

LE POINT DE VUE DES ÉDITEURS

C’est un jeune Marocain de Tanger, un garçon sans histoire, un musulman passable, juste trop avide de liberté et d’épanouissement, dans une société peu libertaire. Au lycée, il a appris quelques bribes d’espagnol, assez de français pour se gaver de Série Noire. Il attend l’âge adulte en lorgnant les seins de sa cousine Meryem. C’est avec elle qu’il va “fauter”, une fois et une seule. On les surprend : les coups pleuvent, le voici à la rue, sans foi ni loi.

Commence alors une dérive qui l’amènera à servir les textes — et les morts — de manières inattendues, à confronter ses cauchemars au réel, à tutoyer l’amour et les projets d’exil.

Dans Rue des Voleurs, roman à vif et sur le vif, l’auteur de Zone retrouve son territoire hypersensible à l’heure du Printemps arabe et des révoltes indignées. Tandis que la Méditerranée s’embrase, l’Europe vacille. Il faut toute la jeunesse, toute la naïveté, toute l’énergie du jeune Tangérois pour traverser sans rebrousser chemin le champ de bataille. Parcours d’un combattant sans cause, Rue des Voleurs est porté par le rêve d’improbables apaisements, dans un avenir d’avance confisqué, qu’éclairent pourtant la compagnie des livres, l’amour de l’écrit et l’affirmation d’un humanisme arabe.

Mathias Énard est l’auteur de quatre romans chez Actes Sud : La Perfection du tir (2003, prix des Cinq Continents de la francophonie), Remonter l’Orénoque (2005 ; adapté au cinéma en 2012 par Marion Laine sous le titre À cœur ouvert avec Juliette Binoche et Edgar Ramirez), Zone (2008, prix Décembre 2008 ; prix du Livre Inter 2009) et Parle-leur de batailles, de rois et d’éléphants (2010, prix Goncourt des lycéens 2010).

"Rodmoor is, unusually for a John Cowper Powys novel, set in East Anglia, Rodmoor itself being a coastal village. The protagonist, Adrian Sorio, is a typically Powys-like hero, highly-strung with only precarious mental stability. He is in love with two women — Nance Herrick and the more unconventional Phillipa Renshaw.

This was Powys second novel, published in 1916. It deploys a rich and memorable cast of characters.

In his new, long-awaited novel, Shashi Tharoor, the acclaimed author of The Great Indian Novel and Show Business, whom the Independent (London) called "one of the finest novelists writing in English today", once again experiments masterfully with narrative form. The story revolves around a young American volunteer in India and the mystery surrounding the circumstances of her death. Like the Japanese classic Rashomon, in RIOT there are disturbingly different versions of the events, and everyone is convinced they hold the truth. In plot, style, and characterization, Shashi Tharoor's latest novel is a brilliant tour de force.

An expatriate professor, Vega, returns from exile in Canada to El Salvador for his mother’s funeral. A sensitive idealist and an aggrieved motor mouth, he sits at a bar with the author, Castellanos Moya, from five to seven in the evening, telling his tale and ranting against everything his country has to offer. Written in a single paragraph and alive with a fury as astringent as the wrath of Thomas Bernhard, Revulsion was first published in 1997 and earned its author death threats. Roberto Bolano called Revulsion Castellanos Moya’s darkest book and perhaps his best: “A parody of certain works by Bernhard and the kind of book that makes you laugh out loud.”

In many ways, Jack is a typical 5-year-old. He likes to read books, watch TV, and play games with his Ma. But Jack is different in a big way—he has lived his entire life in a single room, sharing the tiny space with only his mother and an unnerving nighttime visitor known as Old Nick. For Jack, Room is the only world he knows, but for Ma, it is a prison in which she has tried to craft a normal life for her son. When their insular world suddenly expands beyond the confines of their four walls, the consequences are piercing and extraordinary. Despite its profoundly disturbing premise, Emma Donoghue’s Room is rife with moments of hope and beauty, and the dogged determination to live, even in the most desolate circumstances. A stunning and original novel of survival in captivity, readers who enter Room will leave staggered, as though, like Jack, they are seeing the world for the very first time.

Chinese literature published in the United States has tended to focus on politics — think the Cultural Revolution and dissidents — but there's a whole other world of writing out there. It's punk, dealing with the harsh realities lived by the millions of city-dwellers struggling to get by in the grey economy. Dunhuahg, recently out of prison for selling fake IDs, has just enough money for a couple of meals. He also has no place to stay and no prospects for earning more yuan. When he happens to meet a pretty woman selling pirated DVDs, he falls into both an unexpected romance and a new business venture. But when her on-and-off boyfriend steps back into the picture, Dunhuahg is forced to make some tough decisions. Running Through Beijing explores an underworld of constant thievery, hardcore porn, cops (both real and impostors), prison bribery, rampant drinking, and the smothering, bone-dry dust storms that blanket one of the world's largest cities. Like a literary Run Lola Run, it follows a hustling hero rushing at breakneck speed to stay just one step ahead. Full of well-drawn, authentic characters, Running Through Beijing is a masterful performance from a fresh Chinese voice.

Who hasn't, at one time or another, considered killing a billionaire?

Following on the critical success of his novel Polyamorous Love Song (BookThug, 2014; finalist for the Fence Modern Prize in Prose and one of The Globe and Mail's 100 best books of 2014), Canadian writer and performer Jacob Wren picks up the mantle of the politically and economically disenfranchised in Rich and Poor-the story of a middle-class, immigrant pianist who has fallen on hard times, and now finds himself washing dishes to make ends meet.

Wren capably balances personal reflections with real-time political events, as his protagonist awakens to the possibility of a solution to his troubles and begins to formulate a plan of attack, in which the only answer is to get rid of "the 1 %."

Rich and Poor is rare work of literary fiction that cuts into the psychology of politics in ways that are off-kilter, unexpected, and unnerving. In drawing comparisons to fiction that focuses on "the personal as political" (including Chris Kraus's Summer of Hate and Roberto Bolano's The Savage Detectives), Rich and Poor is a compelling, fast-paced, and energizing read for adventure-seeking, politically active and/or interested readers who rowdily question their position among "the 99 %."

« L'art a une tendance naturelle à privilégier l'extraordinaire. »

Amélie Nothomb

Une rentrée littéraire ne serait plus une rentrée littéraire digne de ce nom sans un nouveau roman d'Amélie Nothomb comme elle seule en a le secret. Avec Riquet à la houppe, elle nous revient avec un conte pour adultes où le laid et brillant Déodat va rencontrer la belle et contemplative Trémière. On y retrouve tous les ingrédients qui font la saveur des livres de la plus Belge de nos auteurs : cruauté, humour noir, personnages improbables et même un cours d'ornithologie. Amélie n'a pas fini de nous surprendre.

Amélie Nothomb est née à Kobé en 1967. Dès son premier roman Hygiène de l'assassin paru en 1992, elle s'est imposée comme un écrivain singulier. En 1999, elle obtient avec Stupeur et tremblements le Grand Prix de l'Académie française. Riquet à la houppe est son 25^ème roman.

Cet ouvrage de La Rochefoucauld est l’œuvre d’un esprit très pénétrant qui paraît systématiquement occupé à une considération exclusive des aspects négatifs de la nature humaine, qui lui ont valu la qualification de philosophe de l’amour-propre, c’est que le pessimisme dont il est imprégné doit beaucoup à la doctrine de Port-Royal qui a marqué la littérature de l’époque classique. La dénonciation de la vanité humaine, la réfutation du libre arbitre, la mise à nu de la faiblesse de l’être et des feintes dont il use vis-à-vis de lui-même, ou la peinture de son insignifiance, doivent être pris comme autant de témoignages de cet esprit janséniste qui traverse les Maximes.

Grâce à la précision et à la netteté originales de son style, relevé par des ornements dont la distinction égale la sobriété, La Rochefoucauld a décrit son temps et une société pleine d’intrigues et de révolutions perpétuelles pour laisser, de modèles passagers envisagés dans une perspective pessimiste, une image immortelle.

«C’est un des ouvrages qui contribuèrent le plus à former le goût de la nation, et à lui donner un esprit de justesse et de précision… Il accoutuma à penser et à renfermer des pensées dans un tour vif, précis et délicat.»

Voltaire

François de La Rochefoucauld naît le 15 septembre 1613 à Paris sous le titre de prince de Marcillac en tant qu’héritier du duc de la Rochefoulcauld. Il est marié à l’âge de 14 ans à Andrée de Vivonne avec qui il a huit enfants. A l’âge de 16 ans, il rejoint l’armée avant de s’intégrer dans l’entourage de Marie de Rohan, femme très influente qui va jouer dans sa vie un grand rôle. Il devient en effet grâce à elle attaché à la reine d’Autriche. Il prend part au complot de madame Chevreuse contre Richelieu et une fois que celui-ci décède en 1642, il revient à la Cour où il jouit des faveurs de Louis XIV. Mazarin succède à Richelieu. Lors de la Fronde parlementaire en 1648, il défend les intérêts de la Cour même si l’entente avec Mazarin ne se passe pas au mieux.

Durant la seconde fronde, la fronde des Princes, il joue un rôle important en se montrant brave et en manquant de perdre la vue. Il se retire alors sur ses terres en 1653 à Verteuil et se met à l’élaboration de ses Mémoires (1662) qu’il consacre à la régence d’Anne d’Autriche durant les années 1624–1659. Il commence également en 1657 ses premières maximes ponctués d’aphorismes philosophiques qui vont faire de lui l’un des plus grands hommes de lettres. Il se lie d’amitié avec la marquise de Sévigné, Madame de Sablé et surtout avec Madame De La Fayette. Beaucoup ont cru pendant longtemps que La princesse de Clèves fut écrit de la main de La Rochefoucault, l’un des premiers romans célèbres qui fit connaître Madame de La Fayette.

Il met un terme à sa carrière militaire en 1667 et après avoir reçu l’extrême-onction des mains de Bossuet, il meurt le 17 mars 1680.

The Nazi Civil War rages on…

The Provisional Government has scored a significant victory, driving the Waffen-SS back from Berlin and winning itself time to plot a counteroffensive. But Karl Holliston — the self-declared Führer of the Greater German Reich — isn’t about to give up so easily. As mighty armies prepare for the final campaign, winter sweeps down from the east and both side prepare their ultimate weapons, the fate of the world hangs in the balance…

…And if the Reich burns, the rest of the world may burn too.

Ceci est l'histoire d'un faible qui décide de combattre sa faiblesse.

Mais c'est contre les autres qu'il lutte, parce que ce sont les autres qui en portent le témoignage.

Alors, pour tenter de s'affranchir, le faible s'enfonce lentement, presque voluptueusement, dans l'horreur jusqu'à ce qu'il comprenne qu'on ne devient pas plus beau parce qu'on brise les miroirs.

Deux coqs vivaient en paix… Une petite bourgeoise vient troubler l'existence de François Givet, un peintre homosexuel en ménage avec Riton, garçon sympathique, qui le protège farouchement. Ce jeune prolo, mi-voyou, mi-ange gardien, feint de s'amuser de cette liaison naissante et, à ses yeux, contre nature, entre son ami et cette doctoresse trop séduisante pour être honnête. En réalité, Riton a peur et pressent un drame imminent. Une lutte sourde se déclare entre ces trois personnages. Et voilà la guerre allumée… Derrière l'intrigue criminelle, les doubles jeux et les mensonges, Frédéric Dard dévoile avec une extraordinaire acuité le drame intime d'un homme qui n'aime pas les femmes et fait preuve d'une intuition pénétrante dans un domaine qui lui est, a priori, étranger.

When Nazi forces occupy the beautiful coastal city of Yalta, Crimea, everything changes. Eighteen-year-old Filip has few options; he is a prime candidate for forced labor in Germany. His hurried marriage to his childhood friend Galina might grant him reprieve, but the rules keep shifting. Galina’s parents, branded as traitors for innocently doing business with the enemy, decide to volunteer in hopes of better placement. The work turns out to be horrific, but at least the family stays together.

By winter 1945, Allied air raids destroy strategic sites; Dresden, a city of no military consequence, seems safe. The world knows Dresden’s fate.

Roads is the story of one family lucky enough to escape with their lives as the city burns behind them. But as the war ends, they are separated and their trials continue. Looking for safety in an alien land, they move toward one another with the help of refugee networks and pure chance. Along the way, they find new ways to live in a changed world—new meanings for fidelity, grief, and love.

‘The black earth was already baking and the sun was just rising when they mounted their horses and rode across the grasslands towards the horizon on fire…’

Imprisoned in the Gulags for a crime he did not commit, Benya Golden joins a penal battalion made up of Cossacks and convicts to fight the Nazis.

He enrols in the Russian cavalry, and on a hot summer day in July 1942, he and his band of brothers are sent on a desperate mission behind enemy lines.

Switching between Benya’s war in the grasslands of southern Russia, and Stalin’s plans in the Kremlin, between Benya’s intense affair with an Italian nurse and a romance between Stalin’s daughter and a journalist also on the Eastern Front, this is a sweeping story of passion, bravery and human survival where personal betrayal is a constant companion, and death just a hearbeat away.

1993-й год. Россия. Деревня. Разухабистые школьники захватывают школу… Им помогают не менее разухабистые фермеры… Германика отдыхает, да она пока что если и родилась, то под стол пешком ходит: текст и написан 16-летним автором-хроникёром в лихие 93—94-е годы!

«В этой книге Шепелёв – первооткрыватель некоторых психологических состояний, которые до него в литературе, по-моему, ещё не описывали, либо описывали не настолько точно, либо не верили, что подобные состояния существуют». Сайт: chaskor.ru

WWII sniper Caje Cole embarks on a rescue mission behind the new Iron Curtain for American POWs held as political pawns by Russian forces. To free them, he will have to defeat his deadliest adversary yet, the Red Sniper. The brutal Russian believes that he can outgun anyone, but he hasn't met the likes of this backwoods hunter and marksman.

A girl’s 11th birthday always brings big changes to her world, but for Katya Dubko, it is truly the end of the world as she knows it. In the northern Ukraine, an area of dense forests, abundant wild life, and sparkling rivers, Katya’s little village of Yanov has been a fairytale home. Her family life is rich with ancient traditions and magical beliefs, and her father has a good job working for the government at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station, a complex bigger than her whole village.

Steeped in the imagery of her people, Katya believes that the station is a magical factory, and she looks for men in white robes, the angels she has heard push buttons to create electricity. When she asks her father about the station, he reassures her that it is safe: “so safe I would let you and Mama sleep there. I’d let a baby sleep there.” Yet when Katya is sent into the forest to play while her family prepares her birthday dinner, she meets Vasyl, a mysterious otherworldly boy who tells her the agonizing truth: her world will be destroyed in an explosion. What is she to believe?

On April 26, 1986, the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded, and the Soviet government refused to acknowledge the extent of the disaster. As Katya struggles to survive in the aftermath, Vasyl reenters her life and helps her to realize that there can be no healing without truth, however difficult it may be to face. As she reconnects with her friends from before the explosion, she begins to learn more about the scientific concepts that have changed their world, and she discovers that blind patriotism like her father’s can be the undoing of a country as well as a man. With the help of friends she could have never imagined in her old life, Katya begins to understand that the things that are most important about her homeland and herself have survived the disaster. Combining the mythological truths of her ancestors with an understanding of the science behind the Chernobyl explosion, Katya finds the strength to fulfill a promise she made to herself many years before. And from her new vantage point she realizes that she is no longer the little girl in the fairy tale, she has become the author of her own story.

Radiant Girl weaves history, fantasy, photographs and illustrations together to create a fictional coming of age tale that offers readers insight on surviving the powerful forces of change that rock their own lives, both from within and without.

Red Sniper is the story of a rescue mission for American POWs held captive by the Russians at the end of World War II.

For these American POWs, the war is not over. Abandoned by their country, used as political pawns by Stalin, their last hope for getting home again is backwoods sniper Caje Cole and a team of combat veterans who undertake a daring rescue mission prompted by a U.S. Senator whose grandson is among the captives. After a lovely Russian-American spy helps plot an escape from a Gulag prison, they must face the ruthless Red Sniper, starving wolves, and the snowy Russian taiga in a race for freedom.

In a final encounter that tests Cole’s skills to the limit, he will discover that forces within the U.S. government want the very existence of these prisoners kept secret at any price.

Red Sniper is the story of a rescue mission for American POWs held captive by the Russians at the end of World War II.

For these American POWs, the war is not over. Abandoned by their country, used as political pawns by Stalin, their last hope for getting home again is backwoods sniper Caje Cole and a team of combat veterans who undertake a daring rescue mission prompted by a U.S. Senator whose grandson is among the captives. After a lovely Russian-American spy helps plot an escape from a Gulag prison, they must face the ruthless Red Sniper, starving wolves, and the snowy Russian taiga in a race for freedom.

In a final encounter that tests Cole’s skills to the limit, he will discover that forces within the U.S. government want the very existence of these prisoners kept secret at any price.

The Akutagawa Prize-winning stories from one of the most highly regarded and provocative contemporary Japanese writers: part of our Japanese novella series, showcasing the best contemporary Japanese writing.

In these three haunting and lyrical stories, three young women experience unsettling loss and romance.

In a dreamlike adventure, one woman travels through an apparently unending night with a porcelain girlfriend, mist-monsters and villainous monkeys; a sister mourns her invisible brother whom only she can still see, while the rest of her family welcome his would-be wife into their home; and an accident with a snake leads a shop girl to discover the snake-families everyone else seems to be concealing.

Sensual, yearning, and filled with the tricks of memory and grief, Record of a Night Too Brief is an atmospheric trio of unforgettable tales.

Literary Awards

• Akutagawa Prize 芥川龍之介賞 (1996)

• Warwick Prize for Women in Translation Nominee for Longlist (2017)

Joseph loved life, his farm and his wife. Until he was torn away to fight in the war. His easy going attitude quickly died as he became a cold blooded killer for the Russian Army. His main objective remained of wanting to return to his simple life, but was this even possible?

Panoramic, sweeping, monumental, haunting: a story of four families which spans the centuries of Russia from Edward Rutherford, the author of Paris, London and New York.

In this vast and gorgeous tapestry of a novel, serf and master, Cossack and tsar, priest and Jew are brought together in a family saga which unrolls through centuries of history to reveal that most impenetrable and mysterious of lands – Russia. Through the life of a little town east of Moscow in the Russian heartland, Edward Rutherfurd creates a sweeping family saga from the baffling contradictions of Russia’s culture and her peoples – bleak yet exotic, brutal but romantic, land of ritual yet riddled with superstitious fears. From Russia’s dawn and the cruel Tatar invasions to Ivan the Terrible and the wild Cossacks, from Peter, Catherine and the days of War and Peace to the drama of the Revolution and the extraordinary events of today – here is Russia’s story in a spellbinding novel – history recreated with breathtaking detail and passion.

Coenraad de Buys was the most dangerous man around in the Cape of the late 1700s. At eight he crossed his first frontier and left his mother’s house behind. Left his home (the first of many); left the Cape; left civilisation. From the Langkloof Buys roves – a giant, a legend, polygamist and swindler; the bane of government, father to chieftains and a Buysvolk of his own.

Everywhere his wild oats are sown; everywhere renegades and criminals join his band of outcasts. He interprets between Xhosa and English but speaks only his own words. And everywhere on his travels, always there is the pack of dogs and the earless red leader that put Buys on his restless path. In Buys’ tracks, in his head, around his camp fires the slavering jaws snap. He was born in the Langkloof. He died on the banks of the Limpopo. But Buys is not dead.

Red Dog is a novel about frontiers and borders. The Afrikaans original Buys was hugely acclaimed in 2014. Now it has been masterfully translated by Michiel Heyns.

With swift, bold and powerful writing, debut author Alison Littman tells the story of a family ripped apart by revolution, illuminating a time when news, rock ‘n’ roll and underground journalism forever changed the lives of those living behind the Iron Curtain.

After years of suffering under the communist regime in Cold War Hungary, Eszter Turján—fanatical underground journalist—would sacrifice anything, and anyone, to see the government fall. When she manipulates news broadcasts on Radio Free Europe, she ignites a vicious revolution, commits a calamitous murder and is dragged away screaming to a secret underground prison.

Her daughter Dora, then a teenager, cowers in her bedroom as the secret police arrest her mother. Haunted and hurt, Dora vows to work against everything Eszter believes in. But, it’s not that simple.

After nine years, Dora meets a strapping young fan of Radio Free Europe and is unwittingly drawn back into Eszter’s circle. She finds her mother, driven mad by years of torture, is headed for death.

On the brink of losing Eszter again, Dora must decide if she should risk her life to save the mother who discarded her—or leave it to fate.

Radio Underground is a beautiful, relevant novel that explores the lengths and limits of love, family and the power of expression.

THE UNDEAD NAZI ARMY CONTINUES ITS MARCH ACROSS EUROPE IN THE THRILLING SEQUEL TO SCREAMING EAGLES!

The German stranglehold on the town of Bastogne has been released, only for the living dead to rise up and take their place. A ragtag group of men fight their way out of the chaos and make a frantic escape from the rubble and ruin. One of them, British soldier Lieutenant Robert Wilkins, uncovers crucial information about the source of the zombie scourge. Along with a crack team, Wilkins is dispatched to where the outbreak began – the ominously silent concentration camp at Polonezköy, Poland – to try and find a way to halt the undead advance.

The fate of the entire world rests on the shoulders of just a handful of men.

Багатьом із нас про В’єтнам майже нічого не відомо — хіба що ми знаємо кілька в’єтнамських ресторанів, де смачно готують, або ж бачили американські фільми про нескінченну криваву війну. Але ХТО вони — головні герої цього маловідомого конфлікту?

Кім Тхюї — одна з цих «людей із човна», які втекли з пекла, щоб знайти порятунок в іншому білому краї. І невеличкими оповідями, історійками, афоризмами вона помалу малює образ квебекської пані з в’єтнамським акцентом, якій вдалося (чи, радше, яка мусила) пристосуватися до вторгнення комуністів, вижити у переповненому таборі для біженців, навчитися західному способу життя і, зрештою, звикнути до материнства. Через поетичність і гумор читати цю книжку — суцільне задоволення.

Французькою RU означає «струмочок», у переносному значенні «витікання, потік, циркуляція» (сліз, крові, грошей) (Le Robert historique). В’єтнамською RU означає «колискова», «колисати». І це досконала назва для цього невеликого, однак сильного роману.

Усі права застережені. Жодну частину цього видання не можна переви­да­ва­ти, перекладати, зберігати в пошукових системах або передавати у будь-якій формі та будь-яким засобом (електронним, механічним, фотокопіюванням або іншим) без попередньої письмової згоди на це ТОВ «Видавництво Анетти Антоненко».

ISBN 978-617-7192-88-5

Copyright © Les Éditions Libre Expression, 2009

© Зоя Борисюк, український переклад, 2017

© «Видавництво Анетти Антоненко», 2018