It was not until their first date that Bridger Martin learned that Dana Halter's deafness was profound and permanent. By then he was falling in love. Not she is in a courtroom, accused of assault with a deadly weapon, auto theft, and passing bad...
"McClanahan's prose is miasmic, dizzying, repetitive. A rushing river of words that reflects the chaos and humanity of the place from which he hails. [McClanahan] aims to lasso the moon… He is not a writer of half-measures. The man has purpose....
It's Jake's birthday. He is sitting in a small plane, being flown over the landscape that has been the backdrop to his life — his childhood, his marriage, his work, his passions. Now he is in his early sixties, and he isn't quite the man he used...
Hailed by the San Francisco Chronicle as “one of the most revelatory novels in recent memory. . Cleverly conceived and executed brilliantly,” The Children’s Hospital is the story of a hospital preserved, afloat, after the Earth is flooded...
In Ways of Dying, Zakes Mda's acclaimed first novel, Toloki is a "professional mourner" in a vast and violent city of the new South Africa. Day after day he attends funerals in the townships, dressed with dignity in a threadbare suit, cape, and...
Gould Bookbinder, the protagonist of Stephen Dixon's novel, Gould: A Novel in Two Novels is not a nice man. When we first meet him, he is an opportunistic college freshman in the process of seducing a girl whom he later impregnates. This is just...
With his debut novel, Samedi the Deafness, Jesse Ball emerged as one of our most extraordinary new writers. Now, Ball returns with this haunting tale of love and storytelling, hope and identity.
When Selah Morse sees a young woman get...
Journalist Daniel Mandelkern leaves Hamburg on assignment to interview Dirk Svensson, a reclusive children's book author who lives alone on the Italian side of Lake Lugano with his three-legged dog. Mandelkern has been quarreling with his wife...
From one of our most imaginative and inventive writers, a crystalline collection of perfectly modulated, sometimes harrowing and often hilarious investigations into the multifaceted ways in which human beings perceive each other and themselves. A...
Considered by critics to be Barth's most distinguished masterpiece, The Sot-Weed Factor has acquired the status of a modern classic. Set in the late 1600s, it recounts the wildly chaotic odyssey of hapless, ungainly Ebenezer Cooke, sent to the New...