As a playwright and novelist, Michael Frayn has managed not only to keep comedy alive but to raise it to a slyly subversive art. The New York Times called his last novel, The Trick of It, "wonderfully satiric", while Time hailed it as "a swift little breeze of a book". His new work is more like a typhoon of comedic invention.
Against the urging of his friends and his lover, Franz, a young officer in the Xhystos government, is sent on a mission to the remote and elusive city of Samaris to investigate the disappearance of several of his colleagues. After weeks of travel, Franz reaches Samaris, to find a practically deserted city of enveloping and deceptive architecture. He is immediately bewitched by a mysterious young woman, drawing the suspicion of the other residents. Can Franz escape the impending doom of this spr...
The Absolute at Large (Classics of Science Fiction) (Bison Frontiers of Imagination)
by Karel Capek
In this satirical classic, a brilliant scientist invents the Karburator, a reactor that can create abundant and practically free energy. However, the Karburator's superefficient energy production also yields a powerful by-product. The machine works by completely annihilating matter and in so doing releases the Absolute, the spiritual essence held within all matter, into the world. Infected by the heady, pure Absolute, the world's population becomes consumed with religious and national fervor, th...
How to Conquer the World on a Shoestring Budget (How to Conquer the World, #1)
by Æ Æ
Born in the small town of Ten Sleep, Wyoming, The Haircutter-or H.C.- murders an enigmatic "Jenny" and flees to the glittering anonymity of New York City. Eight years later, after a series of odd jobs and lonely meals, H.C. is charged with driving a wolf from New York back to Wyoming, where it was captured for use in a conceptual art show. While back out West, he has a chance encounter with the girl he could never forget-slightly cross-eyed Carol. Now shacked up with H.C. in the city, Carol dis...
Robinson (New Directions Classic, #0) (The Collected Muriel Spark Novels)
by Muriel Spark
January Marlow, a heroine with a Catholic outlook of the most unsentimental stripe, is one of three survivors out of twenty-nine souls when her plane crashes, blazing, on Robinson's island. Presumed dead for months, the three survivors must wait for the annual return of the pomegranate boat. Robinson, a determined loner, proves a fair if misanthropic host to his uninvited guests; he encourages January to keep a journal: as "an occupation for my mind, and I fancied that I might later dress it up...
The Vicar's Knickers (The Mildly Catastrophic Misadventures of Tony Vicar, #2)
by Vince R. Ditrich
Dawn is the story of the man as he crawls through his, quote, life, close quote, through what he sees as an ever ugly world, encountering characters along the way, all of whom he very much wishes he had never encountered at all...except for one. Right away it is evident something is amiss as the man eventually finds his way back home only to find he in no way knows the people inside and recognizes none of the belongings within it. At some point he encounters the woman who is upon a beach that is...
The definitive collection of a twentieth-century master of the short story, whose unforgettable inventions revolutionized the form The short stories of Donald Barthelme, revered by the likes of Thomas Pynchon and George Saunders, are gems of invention and pathos that have dazzled and delighted readers since the 1960s. Here, for the first time, these essential stories are preserved as they were published in Barthelme's original collections, beginning with Come Back, Dr. Caligari (1964), a book t...
An Enevedo� dleet gant tourello� glas war zerveno� gwer ha smaragd. (Poesía En DOS Vías, #1)
by Enrique García Guasco
From the remote forests of northern Ontario to a Neolithic burial chamber on the coast of north Wales, from a frozen lake in the Canadian wilderness to a mysterious Welsh heath, Shattercone takes the reader on a strange, compelling and sometimes heart-breaking journey through the blurry junctures that bind together landscapes and lovers. Including buried elephant bones, explorers gone astray, hidden histories, secret islands, loves found and lost, these subtly linked stories explore the curious...