Alberto Manguel praises the Hungarian writer László Földényi as “one of the most brilliant essayists of our time.” Földényi’s extraordinary Melancholy, with its profusion of literary, ecclesiastical, artistic, and historical insights,...
With wry humour and a deft touch, Butterfly Fish, the outstanding first novel by a stunning new writer, is a work of elegant and captivating storytelling. A dual narrative set in contemporary London and 18th century Benin in Africa, the book...
Summoned home to Egypt after a long European debauch (disguised as “study”), our hero Teymour — in the opening line of A Splendid Conspiracy—is feeling “as unlucky as a flea on a bald man’s head.” Poor Teymour sits forlorn in a...
Deep in Provence, a century ago, four stone houses perch on a hillside. Wildness presses in from all sides. Beyond a patchwork of fields, a mass of green threatens to overwhelm the village. The animal world — a miming cat, a malevolent boar —...
Building can be seen as a master metaphor for modernity, which some great irresistible force, be it fascism or communism or capitalism, is always busy building anew, and Houses is a book about a man, Arseniev Negoyan, who has devoted his life and...
A provocative novel about the fallout from a search for truth by the author of the national bestseller The Lifeboat.
For Maggie Rayburn-wife, mother, and secretary at a munitions plant-life is pleasant, predictable, and, she assumes, secure....
Cat and Mouse was the book Günter Grass wrote immediately after The Tin Drum, and it shares its setting with that earlier novel: Danzig during World War II. But while The Tin Drum achieves its extraordinary cumulative effect through the...
There shouldn’t be a Citrus County. Teenage romance should be difficult, but not this difficult. Boys like Toby should cause trouble but not this much. The moon should glow gently over children safe in their beds. Uncles in their rockers...
From the acclaimed author of The Girls from Corona del Mar, a sprawling, ambitious new novel about a young father who takes his teenage daughter to Europe, hoping that an immersion in history might help them forget his past mistakes and her...
Breytenbach composed this docu-dream during a period of incarceration. Mouroir (mourir: to die + miroir: mirror) is a ship of thought moving with its own hallucinatory logic through a sea of mythic images, protean characters and what the author...