In this spellbinding novel, written in Albania and smuggled into France a few pages at a time in the 1980s, Ismail Kadare denounces with rare force the machinery of a dictatorial regime, drawing us back to the ancient roots of tyranny in Western...
Deputy U.S. Marshal Custis Long is dispatched to a town near the city of El Paso to extradite a prisoner from Mexico. The authorities there, however, aren't too cooperative, and Longarm must bide his time on the American side of the city until...
From Publishers Weekly
Ha Jin, who emigrated from China in the aftermath of Tiananmen Square, had only been writing in English for 12 years when he won the National Book Award for Waiting in 1999. His latest novel sheds light on an...
An author (a version of Vila-Matas himself) presents a short history of a secret society, the Shandies, who are obsessed with the concept of portable literature. The society is entirely imagined, but in this rollicking, intellectually playful book,...
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
The Discomfort Zone is Jonathan Franzen’s tale of growing up, squirming in his own über-sensitive skin, from a “small and fundamentally ridiculous person,” into an adult with...
Always exploring the boundaries of race, identity, politics, memory, sexuality, and love with fearless insight and deep compassion, Nadine Gordimer has produced another masterpiece of short fiction. From a former anti-apartheid activist's search...