Welcome to the world's worst pub! Deep in London's East End, Garry and Barry run a pub, and they're not very good at it. Things usually go from bad to worse when their mate, Dodgy Phil, comes up with increasingly hair-brained ideas to reinvent the local - often with explosive results.Could they make this the world's first environmentally friendly bar? Build the world's biggest pub named after the Titanic (but is it undrinkable)? What about booking Chas and Dave for the Queen's visit? Plus, there...
Fun and puns mingle with daring make-believe. Larger-than-life characters play out the crucial human questions: How do we live? How do we handle our demons?
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...
The Facades is one of the most remarkable and talked-about debut novels in recent memory. Set in the once-great Midwestern city of Trude a treacherous maze of convoluted shopping malls, barricaded libraries and elitist assisted-living homes Eric Lundgren s novel follows a disconsolate legal clerk named Sven Norberg, who sets out to investigate the disappearance of his wife, the city s most celebrated mezzo-soprano. To track her down, he must descend into Trude s underworld and confront the menac...
Reinhart in Love (Reinhart Trilogy) (Carlo Reinhart, #2)
by Thomas Berger
Boris Leonidovich, a North American professor who specializes in the history of prison architecture, has been invited to Buenos Aires for an academic conference. He’s planning to present a paper on Moscow’s feared Butyrka prison, but most of all he’s looking forward to seeing his enigmatic, fiercely intelligent colleague (and sometime lover) Ana again. As soon as Boris arrives, however, he encounters obstacle after unlikely obstacle: he can’t get in touch with Ana, he locks himself out of his re...
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...
An absurdly dark tragi-comedy of language and literature. Czeslaw Przesnicki is an Eastern-European immigrant writer who survived the long toilet paper lines of communist Poland, the loss of his lover Ernest Hemingway following a passionate affair, and the beatings of the Antarctic literary community for his forays into novel-writing in their native tongue. In The Palimpsests, we find him languishing in a Belgium asylum (a country, we are persistently reminded, that has had no government for the...
Winner of the Akutagawa Prize and the Kenzaburo Oe Prize, these eleven surreal tales, set in the offices, zoos, bus stops, boutiques, and homes of contemporary Japan "are reminiscent, at least to this reader, of Joy Williams and Rivka Galchen and George Saunders" (Weike Wang, The New York Times Book Review, Editors' Choice). In the English-language debut of one of Japan’s most fearlessly inventive young writers a housewife takes up bodybuilding and sees radical changes to her physique, which he...
Conversation of the Three Wayfarers is a tale overheard, rather than told directly. Abel, Babel, and Cabel, the wayfarers, carry on a three-sided monologue, each reporting curious incidents—the effect is of three capers rolled into one: a steeplechase performed on a floating pontoon. But are they really three distinct individuals? Why do their lives blend in such a fantastic manner? Weiss’s strikingly original prose has an impossibly contained quality, with each sentence doing a perfect double-d...
With an introduction by poet Andrew Motion. Eight residents in a home for the elderly sit down to dinner, along with the House Mother herself, and each takes it in turn to relay the proceedings of the evening from their own, individual perspective. By virtue of the novel's clever structure, the reader's comprehension of events is limited so as to allow them a powerful experience: Johnson's humorous yet deeply compassionate depiction of what it means to live life and grow old.In his heyday, durin...