The president of the Republican Council, wanting to "do something big," proposes building a 1,500-meter-high mountain as a monument to the nation's greatness. Employing political double-talk at its w
From the author of Billy and Girl, this collection of stories explores the emptiness at the center of the characters' lives and their attempts to fill this lack. In "Cave Girl" Cass goes through a sex
Including pieces on Gregory Bateson, William Faulkner, Philip Pullman, Sir Oswald Mosley's politics, religion and stammering, this diverse collection gathers essays written by Nicholas Mosley over the
A striking reassessment of the Don Juan myth. A literary tour de force, this extraordinary novel is told in single-minded pursuit of double meanings, but it is serious play. Larva is a rollicking acco
The self-possessed protagonist and narrator of Jean-Philippe Toussaint's novel is an acedemic on sabbatical in Berlin. He plans to write a groundbreaking study of Titian, but after a couple of months
Detailing the sexual education and adventures of the author, Infante's Inferno is a book about growing up in pre-revolutionary Havana. Viewing every girl as a potential lover, and the movies as a pla
Opening with a quote from Richard Brautigan -- "I've been examining half-scraps of my childhood. They are pieces of distant life that have no form or meaning" -- Scenes from a Receding Past constructs
These narrative essays combine seemingly disparate elements of poetry, philosophy, journalism, and prose in an attempt to investigate the complex workings of memory. Whether his subject is Gertrude S
Clutching a bouquet of flowers, hurrying to catch his bus, and arguing with the driver once he's on, a man rushes to a train station platform to meet a woman. This sequence of events occurs and recur
When French mafioso Oscar Lux saved Clovis Baccara from killing himself, he became the boss and something of a mentor to Clovis. Twenty years later, it is no surprise that Clovis is named best man whe
What if a man were so shallow that he couldn't believe his life had meaning unless he was loved and desired by millions of people? What if everything he learned from his television, from the movies, f
Mr. Optimus Oloop is a Finnish statistician living in Buenos Aires. His life runs according to a methodical and rigid schedule, with everything - from his meals down to his visits to the city brothels
A man murders a grocer over fifteen cents - but in the sharp, icy prose and detached tone that defines this collection, his crime seems neither sensational nor entirely reprehensible. Rosa Liksom pop
A modern-day Don Quixote and an exile in his own hometown, the protagonist of Teeth Under the Sun is kept from writing by a conspiracy (real? imagined?) designed to prevent him from revealing the tru
Exiled in Tangiers, cut off from home and country, the narrator of Count Julian rants against the homeland he was forced to leave: Spain. The second novel in Juan Goytisolo's trilogy (including Marks
This Naoki Prize–winning work is a personal yet precise account of the lives of working women in the Edo period (1600–1868).In the latter half of the Edo period, the warrior caste was finding itself p
In this strange and lovely hymn to Prague, Michal Ajvaz repopulates the city of Kafka with ghosts, eccentrics, talking animals, and impossible statues, all lurking on the peripheries of a town so fami
At some Parisian lost-and-found, a mysterious manuscript scribbled onto stray bits of hotel stationary and postcards and stuffed into an abandoned briefcase comes into the hands of an "editor," who c
An investigation into the problem of writing about matter in Nikolai Gogol's work and, indirectly, into the entire Neoplatonic tradition in Russian literature, this book is not intended to be an exha
