A suicidal father looks to an older neighbor — and the Cookie Monster — for salvation and sanctuary as his life begins to unravel. A man seeking to save his estranged, drug-addicted brother from the city's underbelly confronts his own mortality....
Set in New York City and Prague in 1992, Kafka’s Son follows a first-person narrator who is a documentary filmmaker. In a New York synagogue, he meets an elderly Czech Jew named Jiri, once the head of the famous Jewish Museum in Prague, with whom...
A shy and apolitical herpetologist-in-training finds the weight of history bearing down on him as the effects of repression ramp up in his country.
In an unspecified country that combines elements of Chile under its military regime, South Africa...
Bellow's second novel charts the descent into paranoia of Asa Leventhal, sub-editor of a trade magazine. With his wife away visiting her mother, Asa is alone, but not for long. His sister-in-law summons him to Staten Island to help with his sick...
Dude, Where's My Stethoscope? is a delightful, vivid and eclectic collection of true-life medical short stories. The adventure begins during the author's formative years in medical school and takes the reader through two decades of...
Winner of the Whitbread Prize for Best First Novel.
Agnes Day is mildly discontent. As a child, she never wanted to be an Agnes — she wanted to be a pleasing Grace. Alas, she remained the terminally middle class, hopelessly romantic...
From preface: In naming this second part of The Forsyte Chronicles "A Modern Comedy" the word Comedy is stretched, perhaps as far as the word Saga was stretched to cover the first part. And yet, what but a comedic view can be taken, what but...
Cat and Mouse was the book G?nter 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 sprawling...