Honey, I Killed the Cats


Book Description

From bestselling, internationally acclaimed author Dorota Masłowska comes a hilarious and devastating satire of consumer culture. Set in a bizarro, all-too-real imaginarium of American pop culture, Honey, I Killed the Cats introduces us to two independent young women struggling to live the lives that television and glossy magazines have promised them. In a collision of street slang and mass-media sloganeering, Masłowska's electrifying prose drives a propulsive story about spiritual longing in a dispirited world. Masłowska’s novel examines the ways we attempt to exist and find meaning in lives defined by what we buy. In this warped world saturated by advertising and materialism, where everything can be bought, from personality and physical traits to religion and self-fulfillment, Joanne and Farah, two very different women form a friendship both bonded in and ultimately destroyed by the manipulations of consumer culture. Joanne has everything the commercials say you should want—confidence, a carefree life, happiness to excess. Farah is a self-loathing, envious, germophobic malcontent. Through a shared metaphysical dream experience that spills over into their increasingly troubled day-to-day lives, these best friends find themselves consumed by their equal-and-opposite obsessions. Widely regarded as Polish literary sensation Masłowska’s best novel yet, Honey, I Killed the Cats is a powerfully emotional, hilariously grotesque satire of Western consumer culture and the trends that go along with it.




All My Cats


Book Description

A literary master’s story about the aggravations and great joys of cats, from “a most sophisticated novelist, with a gusting humor and a hushed tenderness of detail” (Julian Barnes) In the autumn of 1965, flush with the unexpected success of his first published books, the Czech author Bohumil Hrabal bought a cottage in Kersko. From then until his death in 1997, he divided his time between Prague and his country retreat, where he wrote and tended to a community of feral cats. Over the years, his relationship to cats grew deeper and more complex, becoming a measure of the pressures, both private and public, that impinged on his life as a writer. All My Cats, written in 1983 after a serious car accident, is a confessional memoir, the chronicle of an author who becomes overwhelmed. As he is driven to the brink of madness by the dilemmas created by his indulgent love for the animals, there are episodes of intense brutality as he controls the feline population. Yet in the end, All My Cats is a book about Hrabal’s relationship to nature, about the unlikely sources of redemption that come to him unbidden, like a gift from the cosmos—and about love.




Clandestinity


Book Description

In this four-story suite, a modern master of Italian literature delves into the wonder, grotesquery, strangeness, and desire of the human condition. Combining and distorting elements of fables, fairy tales, and the alienating force of society, each of Moresco’s stories features the central character at a different time of his life: childhood, adolescence, young adulthood. In these beautiful and unsettling narratives, a vivid physical world can’t hide the strangeness of surroundings and the dream-like logic governing events. In “Blue Room,” the adolescent protagonist carries on a voyeuristic relationship with a blind old woman in a mysterious clinic. In the title story, a stunning act of violence deepens the nightmarish tones and the protagonist’s disorientation. Moresco’s stories, full of bodily parts, functions, and desires, present a world where physical curiosity competes with shame, and the price of watchfulness is the secrecy and loneliness of isolation.




Mystery Tribune / Issue No11


Book Description

Our 240 page Issue No11, Fall 2019 edition of Mystery Tribune is a must-have featuring Brendan DuBois, SJ Rozan, William Soldan, and more. Issue No11: Fall 2019 features A curated collection of short fiction including stories by Brendan DuBois, SJ Rozan, Ewa Mazierska, Nick Kolakowski, Richie Narvaez, Todd Robinson, Chris McGinley, and William R. Soldan. Interviews and Reviews by Daniel Kraus, Scott Adlerberg, Tobias Carroll, Kristen Lepionka, and Charles Perry. Art and Photography by Jessica Almeida, Sergey Nehaev, and more. This issue also features a preview of the new graphic novel Rivers of London Volume 7: Action at a Distance by Ben Aaronovitch (Author), Andrew Cartmel (Author), and Brian Williamson (Illustrator). NY Times Bestselling author Reed Farrel Coleman has called Mystery Tribune “a cut above” and mystery grand masters Lawrence Block and Max Allan Collins have praised it for its “solid fiction” and “the most elegant design”. An elegantly crafted quarterly issue, printed on uncoated paper and with a beautiful layout designed for optimal reading experience, our Fall 2019 issue will make a perfect companion or gift for avid mystery readers and fans of literary crime fiction.




The Other Extreme


Book Description

THERE'S A THIN LINE BETWEEN LOVE AND HATE … For Jay Hutchin, the line blurs on a sultry night in a cheap motel on Tango Key. One moment's jealous rage is all it takes for the esteemed judge to murder Diane Jackson, a beautiful starlet whose fatal mistake was to underestimate her married lover's devotion—and the depth of his jealousy. BETWEEN SUCCESS AND RUIN … Having made a name for herself taking on high-profile cases, defense attorney Kit Parrish has everything to lose this time around. Hired to defend the innocent suspect in the Jackson murder, Kit grows increasingly distracted by her brother's unsolved disappearance a decade ago—and her young son's bizarre behavior, triggered by voices only he can hear. BETWEEN LIFE AND DEATH … On the verge of becoming U.S. attorney general, Jay Hutchin is quietly frantic, bent on keeping Kit Parrish from clearing her client's name—and determined to avoid the accusing gaze of Kit's son. The little boy can't possibly know what really happened that night on Tango Key … or can he? As the truth closes in, Jay will do anything to safeguard his future and cover his tracks. Anything. Even kill again …




Lost Cat


Book Description

'Last year I lost my cat Gattino. He was very young, at seven months barely an adolescent. He is probably dead but I don't know for certain.'




A Slice of the Dark and Other Stories


Book Description

​If you got a mysterious box that said, Do Not Open, would you open it? If your fingers revolted and wanted a different job, would you agree? If you came from a race of giants, or thought about becoming Death’s lover, or couldn’t get rid of a lover no matter how hard you tried, what would you do? These stories contain unusual problems, like finding your world growing dark after eating a piece of cake—and maybe wanting more cake. It’s not hard to find yourself one step outside the normal, as these characters do. The trick is to make it work.




The Starless Sea


Book Description

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the bestselling author of The Night Circus, a timeless love story set in a secret underground world—a place of pirates, painters, lovers, liars, and ships that sail upon a starless sea. Zachary Ezra Rawlins is a graduate student in Vermont when he discovers a mysterious book hidden in the stacks. As he turns the pages, entranced by tales of lovelorn prisoners, key collectors, and nameless acolytes, he reads something strange: a story from his own childhood. Bewildered by this inexplicable book and desperate to make sense of how his own life came to be recorded, Zachary uncovers a series of clues—a bee, a key, and a sword—that lead him to a masquerade party in New York, to a secret club, and through a doorway to an ancient library hidden far below the surface of the earth. What Zachary finds in this curious place is more than just a buried home for books and their guardians—it is a place of lost cities and seas, lovers who pass notes under doors and across time, and of stories whispered by the dead. Zachary learns of those who have sacrificed much to protect this realm, relinquishing their sight and their tongues to preserve this archive, and also of those who are intent on its destruction. Together with Mirabel, a fierce, pink-haired protector of the place, and Dorian, a handsome, barefoot man with shifting alliances, Zachary travels the twisting tunnels, darkened stairwells, crowded ballrooms, and sweetly soaked shores of this magical world, discovering his purpose—in both the mysterious book and in his own life.




Negotiations with the Sniper


Book Description

Mason Allyon Dwennon is mad- both angry with the world mad and strapped in a rubber room while wearing a Napoleon hat mad. Diagnosed as a manic-depressive schizophrenic, Mason exists as a self-exiled pariah, skirting the fringes of humanity as the sole member of his Square Peg Society. Divorced, alone, bitter, depressed, haunted by voices and visions and on the verge of suicide, Mason experiences a major psychotic episode and is hospitalized. There he is finally diagnosed as having dissociative identity disorder and found to have at least eight different and distinct personalities. Negotiations with the Sniper is a first person account of Mason's ordeal. The story details a three-year free association session with his imaginary psychiatrist (A wise-cracking, life-size plastic Barbie head who speaks with a thick German accent and refers to himself as Dr. Carl). As the story progresses, each of Mason's eight personalities reveals him or herself in their own voices as they search for the elusive something responsible for all of his suffering. To compound his problems, Mason continuously floats in and out of fugue states and has to reconcile missing periods of time. All too frequently, his habitués are less-than well behaved during his mental lapses. In Mason's own words, "Many's the time I've had to stand before a screaming, slavering, red-faced employer, manager, shop foreman, neighbor, police officer, parent, sibling, spouse, in-law, teacher, first sergeant, nun, etc. and bear the tirade meant for one of my compadres, while unable to offer any reasonable excuse for my actions." Despite the sinister allusion to a concealed killer, the title actually refers to the cruel, thoughtless and ofttimes well-intentioned actions of those persons most influential in young Mason's life, responsible for triggering his psychotic responses.




Brothers Huxten


Book Description

Theo and Buddy Huxten: happy, respectable, decent-but is there more to these two? Is there more than even the brothers themselves know about themselves? Someone has all the answers; but.who?