Mathias, a timorous, ineffectual traveling salesman, returns to the island of his birth after a long absence. Two days later, a thirteen-year-old girl is found drowned and mutilated. With eerie precision, Robbe-Grillet puts us at the scene of the...
When the Forrestals died in an explosion that wrecked their home and destroyed most of its contents, there survived a disjointed diary — or 'log book', as Susan Forrestal called it. She had suffered from an affliction of the eyes which, after...
Pierre is a veteran bartender in a café in the outskirts of Paris. He observes his customers as they come and go — the young man who drinks beer as he reads Primo Levi, the fellow who from time to time strips down and plunges into the nearby...
A dead man is brought back to life so he can support his family in "The Happy Man"; occasionally he slips into a zombielike state while his soul is tortured in Hell. In "Vanilla Dunk," future basketball players are given the skills of old-time stars...
Nell Zink’s debut novel follows a downwardly mobile secretary from Philadelphia who marries an ambitious soon-to-be-expat pharmaceutical researcher in hopes that she will never work again. They end up in Germany, where it turns out that her new...
Not since the debut of Hunter S. Thompson or Thomas Pynchon has there been a book to emerge that speaks so clearly to a generation. Jay Fox’s debut novel, THE WALLS, is arguably the first iconic book from the Millennials.
Set in...
A sweeper discovers a cache of black money and escapes to see the Taj Mahal with his underage mistress. An untouchable races to reclaim his life stolen by an upper-caste identity thief. A slum baby's head gets bigger and bigger as he gets smarter...
Compared by Time Out magazine to a contemporary Catcher in the Rye, Alexander Stuart’s The War Zone was chosen as Best Novel of the Year for Britain’s prestigious Whitbread Prize when it was first published, but was instantly stripped of the...
Enter — if you can bear it — the extraordinary private world of Frank, just sixteen, and unconventional, to say the least.
"Two years after I killed Blyth I murdered my young brother Paul, for quite different and more fundamental reasons...
A Russian woman named Lara arrives in Afghanistan at the house of Marcus Caldwell, an Englishman and widower living in the shadow of the Tora Bora mountains. Marcus' daughter, Zameen, may have known Lara's brother, a Soviet soldier who disappeared...