DRAW ONE— That’s waitress lingo. Means a cup of coffee. It’s a part of a language that Carrie Selden had spoken for a long time. Carrie was a hash-slinger. Lots of big business men ate at Karb’s just to watch her trim figure moving by their...
Désiré Cordier — mild-mannered former librarian, put-upon husband, lover of boules — is losing his mind. Or is he? Happily tucked away in the Winterlight Home for the Elderly, Désiré is looking forward to a quiet retirement with the other...
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...
"Czechoslovakia's greatest living writer." — Milan Kundera.
In this moving, absorbing novel, we meet the eccentric residents of a home for the elderly who reminisce about their lives and their changing country. Written with a keen eye for the...
It is 1958 and the Phelan clan has gathered to hear Peter Phelan's will, read by the living Peter himself, an artist whose paintings about members of the family have given him belated critical recognition. The paintings illuminate the lives of his...
The Relation of My Imprisonment is a work of fiction utilizing a form invented in the seventeenth century by imprisoned Puritan divines. Designed to be exemplary, works of this type were aimed at brethren outside the prison walls and functioned...
A breathtaking novel of passion and politics, set in the hotbed of Palestine in the 1940s, by a master of twentieth-century fiction.
It is the eve of Britain’s withdrawal from Palestine in 1948, a moment that will mark the beginning of a new...
This intricate, fast-paced story, whose many scenes and details fit together like so many pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, is Didion's incisive and chilling look at a modern world where things are not working as they should and where the oblique and...
There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. In Rawi Hage's unforgettable novel, winner of the 2008 IMPAC Prize, this famous quote by Camus becomes a touchstone for two young men caught in Lebanon's civil war. Bassam...