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,...
Maja was five years old when her black Cuban family emigrated from the Caribbean to London, leaving her with one complete memory: a woman singing — in a voice both eerie and enthralling — at their farewell party. Now, almost twenty years later,...
In the five novellas that comprise The Orange Tree, Carlos Fuentes continues the passionate and imaginative reconstruction of past and present history that has distinguished Terra Nostra and The Campaign. From the story of Columbus's arrival in...
An American classic, The Orchard Keeper is the first novel by one of America's finest, most celebrated novelists. Set is a small, remote community in rural Tennessee in the years between the two world wars, it tells of John Wesley Rattner, a...
This spare, unforgettable novel is Pierre Michon’s luminous exploration of the mysteries of desire. A young teacher takes his first job in a sleepy French town. Lost in a succession of rainy days and sleepless nights, he falls under the spell of...
While appraising the estate of a New Hampshire family descended from a North Dakota Indian agent, Faye Travers is startled to discover a rare moose skin and cedar drum fashioned long ago by an Ojibwe artisan. And so begins an illuminating journey...
The agents at the IRS Regional Examination Center in Peoria, Illinois, appear ordinary enough to newly arrived trainee David Foster Wallace. But as he immerses himself in a routine so tedious and repetitive that new employees receive...
Pa'nop'ti'con (noun). A prison so constructed that the inspector can see each of the prisoners at all times, without being seen.
Anais Hendricks, fourteen, is in the back of a police car, headed for The Panopticon, a home for chronic young...
Damien March hasn't thought of his eccentric uncle for almost twenty years when he receives a terse message by telegram. "Patrick dead. Father." Damien, a journalist for the BBC in London, is even more shocked to learn that he has inherited his...