Paek Nam-nyong’s Friend is a tale of marital intrigue, abuse, and divorce in North Korea. A woman in her thirties comes to a courthouse petitioning for a divorce. As the judge who hears her statement begins to investigate the case, the story...
A couple, long married, are spending an unaccustomed week apart. Amotz, an engineer, is busy juggling the day-to-day needs of his elderly father, his children, and his grandchildren. His wife, Daniella, flies from Tel Aviv to East Africa to mourn...
Stephen Dixon is a very skillful storyteller. His grasp of the life of ordinary American citydwellers is such that he can shape it dramatically to meet the demands of his far from ordinary imagination, without for a moment sacrificing its essential...
A multi-layered and frequently hilarious family epic — Dixon combines interrelated novels, stories, and novellas to tell the story of Howard Tetch, his ancestors, children, and the generations that...
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...