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...
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...
"Como en muchos de estos encuentros no acababa de convencerme de que eran reales, no estaba seguro si los habia imaginado, mas bien escritos, por lo menos en mi mente, o si habian pasado de verdad. Me sentia esquizofrenico y como en esas peliculas en las que de pronto el personaje principal se encuentra en una institucion mental y alli poco a poco le explican que todo lo que vivio en los ultimos anos, o en toda su vida, no fue mas que fruto de su mente. 'Pero entonces no estan todos los escritor...
The Flower Show and The Toth Family, two novellas in one volume by István Örkény (1912-79), introduce to an English-speaking audience a Hungarian writer with a keen sense of the absurdities of modern life. In the ’60s and ’70s, Örkény’s vein of black comedy earned him the epithet “master of the grotesque” for the popular dramatizations of these and other novels. The Flower Show (1977) is Örkény’s last novel and his most widely translated work of fiction. With consummate irony, the author exploit...
The Dairy of Anne Frank and More Wish Fulfillment in the Noughties
by Andrew Tonkovich
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...
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.
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...
BY THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF LONGBOURN 'Skillful . . . daring . . . extraordinary' The Guardian 'Beautifully written, empathetic and unflinching, it is very, very good' Daily Mail 'Insightful . . . beautifully paced . . . authentic’ The Irish Times Paris, 1939: The pavement rumbles with the footfall of Nazi soldiers marching along the Champs Elysees. A young writer, recently arrived from Ireland to make his mark, smokes one last cigarette with his lover before the city they know...
The man who wakes up in the extraordinary world of a bridge has amnesia, and his doctor doesn't seem to want to cure him. Does it matter? Exploring the bridge occupies most of his days. But at night there are his dreams. Dreams in which desperate men drive sealed carriages across barren mountains to a bizarre rendezvous; an illiterate barbarian storms an enchanted tower under a stream of verbal abuse; and broken men walk forever over bridges without end, taunted by visions of a doomed sexuality....
The linen besuited, white-booted barge of a man moving down the sidewalk was something to see, but the addition of the broad-brimmed straw fedora out of which protruded small antennae in four directions constituted another level of the unusual. The sight, augmented with Merlin's curious sidelong gait and frequent adjustment of knobs and rheostats alongside the hat's brim, would have been enough to induce in a hypothetical new-kid-on-the-block observer momentary catatonia, if not mild terror. Add...