Before the Cultural Revolution, narrator Tadpole's feisty Aunt Gugu is revered as an obstetrician in her home township in rural China. Renowned for her sure hands and uncanny ability to calm anxious mothers, Gugu speeds around town on her bicycle...
Set in Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War, the nine stories in this glittering collection reflect on the foibles and dilemmas of human relationships. An English family goes to the south of France for the sake of the father’s health,...
The year is 1635. Iceland is a world darkened by superstition, poverty, and cruelty.
Men of science marvel over a unicorn's horn, poor folk worship the Virgin in secret, and both books and men are burnt.
Jonas Palmason, a poet and...
ANNOTATIONIan meets Death in a dream. He is promised the answer to any question. Failure to understand the answer will cost him his life. Unhappy Arlen gives up everything and moves halfway around the world and discovers the man she's been...
Robert Olen Butler, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, teaches graduate fiction at Florida State University — his version of literary boot camp. In From Where You Dream, Butler reimagines the process of writing as emotional rather than...
Want to know where Chuck Palahniuk's tonsils currently reside? Been looking for a naked mannequin to hide in your kitchen cabinets? Curious about Chuck's debut in an MTV music video? What goes on at the Scum Center? How do you get to the...
Hallucinatory and darkly comic, these 19 stories of paranoia, pursuit, sensory deprivation, amnesia, and retribution rattle the cages of the psyche. And through the illustrations of graphic novelist Zak Sally, this unsettling world is brought to...
Fiction. Told in monologues, speeches, soliloquies, sermons, letters, cards, and lists, FUN CAMP is a freewheelin summer camp novel smashed to bits. Spend a week with the young inhabitants of a camp bent on molding campers into fun and interesting...
In Fun with Problems, Robert Stone demonstrates once again that he is "one of our greatest living writers" (Los Angeles Times). The pieces in this new volume vary greatly in length — some are almost novellas, others no more than a page — but all...
Journalist Daniel Mandelkern leaves Hamburg on assignment to interview Dirk Svensson, a reclusive children's book author who lives alone on the Italian side of Lake Lugano with his three-legged dog. Mandelkern has been quarreling with his wife...