Computer Technology and Computer Programming

Inside a luxury housing complex, two misfit teenagers sneak around and get drunk. Franco Andrade, lonely, overweight, and addicted to porn, obsessively fantasizes about seducing his neighbor--an attractive married woman and mother--while Polo dreams about quitting his grueling job as a gardener within the gated community and fleeing his overbearing mother and their narco-controlled village. Each facing the impossibility of getting what he thinks he deserves, Franco and Polo hatch a mindless and macabre scheme. Written in a chilling torrent of prose by one of our most thrilling new writers, Paradais explores the explosive fragility of Mexican society--with its racist, classist, hyper violent tendencies--and how the myths, desires, and hardships of teenagers can tear life apart at the seams.

Welcome to the not-too-distant future as envisioned by the remarkable Yoko Tawada. Japan, having vanished into the sea, is now remembered as "the land of sushi." Hiruko, a former citizen of the land of sushi and a climate refugee herself, has a job teaching immigrant children in the Danish city of Odense with her invented language Panska (Pan-Scandinavian): "homemade language. no country to stay in. three countries I experienced. no time to learn three different languages. might mix up. insufficient space in brain. so made new language. homemade language most Scandinavian people understand.Hiruko soon makes new friends to join her in her travels as she searches for anyone who can still speak Japanese: Knute, a graduate student in linguistics, who is fascinated by her Panska; Akash, an Indian man who lives as a woman, wearing a red sari; Nanook, an Eskimo from Greenland, first mistaken as another refugee from the land of sushi; and Nora, who works at the Karl Marx House in Trier. All th