The Donne family's move to the country is inspired by a wish to be close to their cousins, who are to be their nearest neighbours. It proves too close for comfort, however. For a secret switching of wills causes the most genteel pursuit of...
Caryl Phillips’s The Lost Child is a sweeping story of orphans and outcasts, haunted by the past and fighting to liberate themselves from it. At its center is Monica Johnson — cut off from her parents after falling in love with a foreigner —...
A community theater's production of Special Yearnings triggers a string of underground nuclear explosions from St. Louis to Worcester, Massachusetts. A man frantically swats at the blaze that his girlfriend has ignited in his trousers, while her...
A novel about fear of the future — and the future of fear.
New York City, the near future: Mitchell Zukor, a gifted young mathematician, is hired by a mysterious new financial consulting firm, FutureWorld. The business operates out of...
"You read Lydia Davis to watch a writer patiently divide the space between epiphany and actual human beings by first halves, then quarters, then eighths, and then sixteenths, into infinity," says The Village Voice. Indeed, Lydia Davis is...
A witty and erudite love letter to a bygone age, from one of Europe's last great humanists.
"A sparkling slice of eighteenth-century life" Paul Bailey, Independent
In August 1785 Paris buzzed with scandal. It involved an...
One of the most acclaimed young voices of his generation, Blake Butler now offers his first work of nonfiction: a deeply candid and wildly original look at the phenomenon of insomnia.
Invoking scientific data, historical anecdote,...
The nineteenth-century founding of “free settlements” in the Americas serves as a starting point for the new novel by popular Czech author Patrik Ouředník. Simultaneously satiric and philosophical, The Opportune Moment,...