A commonplace book, arranging works of criticism looking at Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo with fragments of memoir/fiction. Presented first as random notes on watching Hitchcock, the fragments soon take up multiple narratives and threads and, like a...
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...
From the author of the award-winning The Spinning Heart comes a heart-twisting tale of a lonely man struggling to make sense of a world moving faster than he is. Set over the course of one year of Johnsey Cunliffe's life, The Thing About December...
In the small town of Progrody, Nissen Piczenik makes his living as the most respected coral merchant of the region. Nissen has never been outside of his town, deep in the Russian interior, and fantasizes that a Leviathan watches over the coral...
Written on the twentieth anniversary of James Baldwin’s death, Letter to Jimmy is African writer Alain Mabanckou’s ode to his literary hero and an effort to place Baldwin’s life in context within the greater African diaspora.
Beginning...
The award-winning author Amit Chaudhuri has been widely praised for the beauty and subtle power of his writing and for the ways in which he makes “place” as complex a character as his men and women. Now he brings these gifts to a spellbinding...
Kleinzeit, Russell Hoban's second novel, is probably the funniest of his books. It's a stylized, completely unpredictable story about a man in search of reality, armed only with a Glockenspiel and a copy of Thucydides' The Peloponnesian War. The...
Victor, an eighty-year-old multimillionaire, surveys his empire from the remoteness of his cloud-capped penthouse. Expensively insulated from the outside world, he nonetheless finds that memories of his impoverished childhood will not be kept so...
Set in South Africa, this is the story of Vera Stark, a lawyer and an independent mother of two, who works for the Legal Foundation representing blacks trying to reclaim land that was once theirs. As her country lurches towards majority rule, so...