Kafka began writing what he had entitled Der Verschollene (The Missing Person) in 1912 and wrote the last completed chapter in 1914. But it wasn’t until 1927, three years after his death, that Max Brod, Kafka’s friend and literary executor, edited the unfinished manuscript and published it as Amerika. Kafka’s first and funniest novel, Amerika tells the story of the young Karl Rossmann who, after an incident involving a housemaid, is banished by his parents to America. Expected to redeem himself...
From bestselling, internationally acclaimed author Dorota Maslowska comes a hilarious and devastating satire of consumer culture. Set in a bizarro, all-too-real imaginarium of American pop culture, Honey, I Killed the Cats introduces us to two independent young women struggling to live the lives that television and glossy magazines have promised them. In a collision of street slang and mass-media sloganeering, Maslowska's electrifying prose drives a propulsive story about spiritual longing in a...
The Lady of the Shroud (Alan Rodgers Books) (Desert Island Dracula Library S.)
by Bram Stoker
Set in the early nineteenth century, Brams fiction The Lady of the Shroud is full of mystical and super-natural elements. A brilliant presentation of a lady who appears always in a shroud, this work engrosses the readers. The Balkan lands are presented and a slight political touch is also given towards the end. Mesmerizing!
The Late Mattia Pascal (Dedalus European Classics)
by Luigi Pirandello
Mattia Pascal endures a life of drudgery in a provincial town. Then, providentially, he discovers that he has been declared dead. Realizing he has a chance to start over, to do it right this time, he moves to a new city, adopts a new name, and a new course of life—only to find that this new existence is as insufferable as the old one. But when he returns to the world he left behind, it's too late: his job is gone, his wife has remarried. Mattia Pascal's fate is to live on as the ghost of the man...
Reinhart in Love (Reinhart Trilogy) (Carlo Reinhart, #2)
by Thomas Berger
In Montague Terrace, nothing is quite what is seems. Within its boundaries live an array of strange and extraordinary residents, including Paul Gregory, self-exiled pop crooner holed up in his Montague hovel for close to forty years, with only fading memories of a semi-successful music career and a bottle of JD for company. Mrs Beatrice Green, codename Babushka, an aged former special ops agent fighting a new war against overzealous council officials. Marvo the Magic Bunny and Mystical Marvin, a...