One morning late in May, between three and six A.M., a group of lonely men and women wait to be brought together, like the elements in an equation. Ernst Spengler is about to throw himself out his wi
Following the success of 2005's Europeana: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century, Patrik OurIOedniI?k again confounds expectations with what seems, on the surface, to be a detective novel...
Excitability collects the best of Diane Williams's bold, often hilarious, stories of love, sex, child-rearing, death, and space aliens -- stories that are (in the words of Bradford Morrow) "wry, sensu
The Engineer of Human Souls is a labyrinthine comic novelthat investigates the journey and plight of novelist Danny Smiricky, aCzech immigrant to Canada. As the novel begins, he is a professor ofAmer
No other contemporary novel provides such clear insight into the Russian mind and way of life as Andrei Bitov's Pushkin House. First published in the United States in 1987 and highly praised for its
The Polish Complex takes place on Christmas Eve, from early morning until late in the evening, as a line of people (including the narrator, whose name is Konwicki) stand and wait in front of a jewelr
Written in the years following the sudden death of Roubaud's wife, Some Thing Black is a profound and moving transcription of loss, mourning, grief, and the attempts to face honestly and live with th
It is December of 1944, and a detachment of American soldiers has been assigned to guard an ancient castle in Belgium inhabited by an elderly aristocrat, his young wife, and countless valuable artifac
In this, her first collection of stories, Christine Schutt gives exquisite and provocative form to feelings and memories. Nightwork is a masterful dreamwork, revealing with startling clarity the dark
Lucy Church Amiably was written in the summer of 1927. Lucey itself is a small village in central France, located over the hill from where Miss Stein was staying, and over another hill from where the
When The Best of Myles was published in 1968, it was hailed (by S. J. Perelman among others) as one of the supreme comic achievements of the English language. Now, in response to the clamorous demand
Hopeful Monsters is a tour de force of intellect and eros - one in which Albert Einstein taunts a lecture hall full of Nazis and Ludwig Wittgenstein is an awkward guest at an English garden party. It
Like its author, Grabinoulor has been rediscovered only in the last few decades. Originally published in SIC in 1919 and praised by such writers as Apollinaire, Celine, Max Jacob, and Raymond Queneau
So begins Ann Quin's first novel, which has been compared to the fiction of Samuel Beckett and Nathalie Sarraute. Against the backdrop of this gritty seaside town, an absurd and brutal plot develops
Paying homage to the Italian-American experience, Italian Stories celebrates an Italian neighbourhood in the Bronx during the 1930s and '40s, and mourns the loss of this ethnic identity with the migra
Conceived exactly nine months before the five-hundredth anniversary of Columbus's discovery of the New World, the narrator of Christopher Unborn spends the novel waiting to be born. But what kind of w
Set against the backdrop of an Arizona influenced by the Mexican Revolution and the westward expansion of the United States, Christ versus Arizona is a bravura performace by the 1989 Nobel Prize-winn
