Some years ago a reliable friend told me I should read José Saramago's Blindness. Faced with pages of run-on sentences and unparagraphed dialogue without quotation marks, I soon quit, snarling about literary affectations. Later I tried again,...
Set in 1930s China, this is a true but tragic tale of romance, sexual desire, and untimely death. Beautiful, intelligent, and schooled in the Daoist arts of love, Lin is married to a provincial university professor. Julian Bell, son of Vanessa Bell,...
Amazon.com Review
Who hasn't dreamed, on a mundane Monday or frowzy Friday, of chucking it all in and packing off to the south of France? Provençal cookbooks and guidebooks entice with provocatively fresh salads and azure skies, but is it...
From Publishers Weekly
Mayle's breezy, uncomplicated fifth novel (Chasing Cezanne, etc.) and ninth book follows 30-something Max Skinner from a sabotaged financial career in London to his adoption of the Provençal...
– WINNER OF FRANCE'S PRIX RENAUDOT -
"A book of exceptional literary quality… it has the kind of intimacy found in the diary of Anne Frank."-The Times Literary Supplement
"Heroic… a novel about a nightmare in which the author is entirely...
A surprised Southern matriarch is confronted by her family at an intervention… A life-altering break-in triggers insomniac introspection in a desperate actor… Streetwise New York City neighbors let down their guard for a naïve puppeteer and...
"Touching as well as hilariously lewd…Roth is vibrantly talented…as marvelous a mimic and fantasist as has been produced by the most verbal group in human history." Alfred Kazin, New York Review of Books
"Deliciously funny…absurd and...
In an era when everything is an event, and nothing just happens naturally, it's hard not to be suspicious of the a novel that is the first ever to win both the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Medicis, by a Russian émigré who has been compared...
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...
A 35-year-old architect is driving home from his London office when his car swerves and crashes onto a traffic island lying below three converging motorways. Uninjured, he climbs the embankment to seek help, but no one will stop for him and he is...