The Stranger


Book Description

With the intrigue of a psychological thriller, Camus's masterpiece gives us the story of an ordinary man unwittingly drawn into a senseless murder on an Algerian beach. Behind the intrigue, Camus explores what he termed "the nakedness of man faced with the absurd" and describes the condition of reckless alienation and spiritual exhaustion that characterized so much of twentieth-century life. First published in 1946; now in translation by Matthew Ward.




Captain Ni'mat's Last Battle


Book Description

First published after the author’s death in 2008, this provocative novel charts the late-in-life sexual awakening of a retired air force pilot who begins a dangerous affair with a male servant. Captain Ni’mat, a reservist from the Egyptian army defeated by the Israelis in 1967, finds himself aging and idle, spending his days at a luxurious private club in Cairo with former comrades. One night, Captain Ni’mat has an exquisite, chilling dream: he sees pure beauty in the form of his Nubian valet. Awakened by these searing images, he slips into the hut where the young man sleeps. The vision of his naked body so deeply disturbs Captain Ni’mat that his monotonous existence is suddenly turned upside down. Unbeknownst to his wife, he comes to know physical love with his valet. In a country where religious fundamentalism grows increasingly prevalent every day, this forbidden passion will lead him to the height of happiness, at least for a time.




Bad Friends


Book Description

Included on Publishers Weekly’s Best of 2018 list! A story of the enduring quality of female friendship amid a gritty landscape of abuse. “Against gorgeous, starkly sketched city scenes of South Korean alleyways and hostess bars, the rebellions and secret longings of ’90s teenager Pearl and her group of “bad friends” play out in this imported debut discovery.”—Publishers Weekly Jinju is bad. She smokes, drinks, runs away from home, and has no qualms about making her parents worry. Her mother and sister beg her to be a better student, sister, daughter; her beleaguered father expresses his concerns with his fists. Bad Friends is set in the 1990s in a South Korea torn between tradition and Western modernity and haunted by an air of generalized gloom. Cycles of abuse abound as the characters enact violence within their power structures: parents beat children, teachers beat students, older students beat younger students. But at each moment that the duress verges on bleakness, Ancco pulls back with soft moments of friendship between Jinju and her best friend, Pearl. What unfolds is a story of female friendship, a Ferrante-esque connection formed through youthful excess, malaise, and struggle that stays with the young women into adulthood. Served by a dry and precise line, Bad Friends viscerally captures the adolescent years of two young women who want and know they deserve something different but, ultimately, are unable to follow through. In a culture where young women are at a systemic disadvantage, Ancco creates a testimonial to female friendship as a powerful tool for survival. Jinju forgets her worst adolescent memories, but she cannot ever shake the memory of her friendship with Pearl during her most tumultuous years.




The Last Brother


Book Description

In The Last Brother by Nathacha Appanah, 1944 is coming to a close and nine-year-old Raj is unaware of the war devastating the rest of the world. He lives in Mauritius, a remote island in the Indian Ocean, where survival is a daily struggle for his family. When a brutal beating lands Raj in the hospital of the prison camp where his father is a guard, he meets a mysterious boy his own age. David is a refugee, one of a group of Jewish exiles whose harrowing journey took them from Nazi occupied Europe to Palestine, where they were refused entry and sent on to indefinite detainment in Mauritius. A massive storm on the island leads to a breach of security at the camp, and David escapes, with Raj's help. After a few days spent hiding from Raj's cruel father, the two young boys flee into the forest. Danger, hunger, and malaria turn what at first seems like an adventure to Raj into an increasingly desperate mission. This unforgettable and deeply moving novel sheds light on a fascinating and unexplored corner of World War II history, and establishes Nathacha Appanah as a significant international voice.




The Vegetarian


Book Description

FROM HAN KANG, WINNER OF THE 2024 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE “[Han Kang writes in] intense poetic prose that . . . exposes the fragility of human life.”—from the Nobel Prize citation WINNER OF THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE • “Kang viscerally explores the limits of what a human brain and body can endure, and the strange beauty that can be found in even the most extreme forms of renunciation.”—Entertainment Weekly One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century “Ferocious.”—The New York Times Book Review (Ten Best Books of the Year) “Both terrifying and terrific.”—Lauren Groff “Provocative [and] shocking.”—The Washington Post Before the nightmares began, Yeong-hye and her husband lived an ordinary, controlled life. But the dreams—invasive images of blood and brutality—torture her, driving Yeong-hye to purge her mind and renounce eating meat altogether. It’s a small act of independence, but it interrupts her marriage and sets into motion an increasingly grotesque chain of events at home. As her husband, her brother-in-law and sister each fight to reassert their control, Yeong-hye obsessively defends the choice that’s become sacred to her. Soon their attempts turn desperate, subjecting first her mind, and then her body, to ever more intrusive and perverse violations, sending Yeong-hye spiraling into a dangerous, bizarre estrangement, not only from those closest to her, but also from herself. Celebrated by critics around the world, The Vegetarian is a darkly allegorical, Kafka-esque tale of power, obsession, and one woman’s struggle to break free from the violence both without and within her. A Best Book of the Year: BuzzFeed, Entertainment Weekly, Wall Street Journal, Time, Elle, The Economist, HuffPost, Slate, Bustle, The St. Louis Dispatch, Electric Literature, Publishers Weekly




The Lost Writings


Book Description

A windfall for every reader: a trove of marvelous impossible-to-find Kafka stories in a masterful new translation by Michael Hofmann Selected by the preeminent Kafka biographer and scholar Reiner Stach and newly translated by the peerless Michael Hofmann, the seventy-four pieces gathered here have been lost to sight for decades and two of them have never been translated into English before. Some stories are several pages long; some run about a page; a handful are only a few lines long: all are marvels. Even the most fragmentary texts are revelations. These pieces were drawn from two large volumes of the S. Fischer Verlag edition Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente (totaling some 1100 pages). “Franz Kafka is the master of the literary fragment,” as Stach comments in his afterword: "In no other European author does the proportion of completed and published works loom quite so...small in the overall mass of his papers, which consist largely of broken-off beginnings.” In fact, as Hofmann recently added: “‘Finished' seems to me, in the context of Kafka, a dubious or ironic condition, anyway. The more finished, the less finished. The less finished, the more finished. Gregor Samsa’s sister Grete getting up to stretch in the streetcar. What kind of an ending is that?! There’s perhaps some distinction to be made between ‘finished' and ‘ended.' Everything continues to vibrate or unsettle, anyway. Reiner Stach points out that none of the three novels were ‘completed.' Some pieces break off, or are concluded, or stop—it doesn’t matter!—after two hundred pages, some after two lines. The gusto, the friendliness, the wit with which Kafka launches himself into these things is astonishing.”




Flowers of Mold


Book Description

Unsettling, haunting short stories in the vein of Yoko Ogawa and Brian Evenson.




Anton Chekhov: The Collected Novellas and Short Stories in Multiple Translations


Book Description

This carefully crafted ebook: "Anton Chekhov: The Collected Novellas and Short Stories in Multiple Translations" is formatted for your eReader with a functional and detailed table of contents. Excerpt: "Life is a vexatious trap; when a thinking man reaches maturity and attains to full consciousness he cannot help feeling that he is in a trap from which there is no escape."Ward No. Six (1892) Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) was a Russian physician, dramaturge and author who is often referred to as one of the seminal figures in the birth of early modernism in the theatre. He made no apologies for the difficulties he posed to the readers, insisting that the role of an artist was to ask questions, not to answer them. Contents: Living Chattel Joy Bliss At The Barber's Enigmatic Nature Classical Student Matter of Classics Death of A Government Clerk Daughter of Albion Trousseau Inquiry Fat and Thin Tragic Actor Slanderer Bird Market Choristers Album Minds in Ferment Chameleon In The Graveyard Oysters Swedish Match Safety Match The Marshal's Widow Small Fry In an Hotel Boots Nerves Country Cottage Malingerers Fish Horsey Name Gone Astray Huntsman Malefactor Head of the Family Dead Body Cook's Wedding In A Strange Land Overdoing It Old Age Sorrow Oh! The Public Mari D'Elle The Looking-Glass Art A Blunder Children Misery Upheaval Actor's End The Requiem Anyuta Ivan Matveyitch The Witch Story Without an End Joke Agafya Nightmare Grisha Love Easter Eve Ladies Strong Impressions Gentleman Friend Happy Man Privy Councilor Day in the Country At a Summer Villa Panic Fears Chemist's Wife Not Wanted Chorus Girl Schoolmaster Troublesome Visitor Husband Misfortune Pink Stocking Martyrs First-Class Passenger Talent Dependents Jeune Premier In The Dark Trivial Incident Tripping Tongue Trifle from Life Difficult People In the Court Peculiar Man Mire Dreams Hush Excellent People An Incident Orator Work of Art Who Was to Blame? On The Road Vanka Champagne Frost Beggar ...




Letter from an Unknown Woman and Other Stories


Book Description

These four Stefan Zweig stories, newly translated by the award-winning Anthea Bell, are among his most celebrated and compelling work. The titular tale is a devastating depiction of unrequited love, which inspired a classic Hollywood film, directed by Max Ophüls and starring Joane Fontaine. Elsewhere in the collection, a young man mistakes the girl he loves for her sister, two erstwhile lovers meet after an age spent apart, and a married woman repays a debt of gratitude to her childhood sweetheart. Expertly paced, laced with the acutely accurate psychological detail and empathy that are Zweig's trademarks, this is a powerful addition to Pushkin's growing collection of his work.




Chain of Iron


Book Description

A #1 New York Times Bestseller! The Shadowhunters must catch a killer in Edwardian London in this dangerous and romantic sequel to the #1 New York Times bestselling novel Chain of Gold, from New York Times and USA TODAY bestselling author Cassandra Clare. Chain of Iron is a Shadowhunters novel. Cordelia Carstairs seems to have everything she ever wanted. She’s engaged to marry James Herondale, the boy she has always loved; she has a new life in London with her best friend Lucie; and she bears the sword Cortana, a legendary hero’s blade. But the truth is far grimmer. Cordelia’s marriage is a lie, arranged to save her reputation, while James remains in love with the Grace Blackthorn. Cortana burns her when she touches it. And a serial murderer is targeting the Shadowhunters of London, killing under cover of darkness, then vanishing without a trace. Now Cordelia, James, and Lucie must follow the trail of the killer through the city’s most dangerous streets. All the while, each is keeping a shocking secret: Lucie, that she is attempting to raise the dead; Cordelia, that she has sworn a dangerous oath of loyalty to a mysterious power; and James, that he himself may be the killer they seek.