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Paperback. Etat : New. Annihilation is about a day in the life of a Polish-Jewish town shortly before World War II and the Holocaust, a town that soon will be annihilated by Nazi atrocities. With grace, wit, and love for the people and place that will be destroyed, Piotr Szewc creates a hymn to the victims of the Holocaust, as well as a literary masterpiece whose brilliance is evidenced on every page.

Paperback. Etat : New. In?"God Head," Scott Zwiren boldly and courageously records the terrifying, destructive experience of manic depression. From a promising young college student to mental hospitals to a confined, out-of-control, roller-coaster life on New York City's Upper West Side, Zwiren's narrator traces from the inside the horrors of an existence that swings between numbing depression and exalting highs.

Paperback. Etat : New. "Memories of My Father Watching TV" has as its protagonists television shows, around which the personalities of family members are shaped. The shows have a life of their own and become the arena of shared experience. And in Curtis White's hands, they become a son's projections of what he wants for himself and his father through characters in "Combat, " "Highway Patrol, " "Bonanza, " and other television shows (and one movie) from the 1950s and '60s. Comic in many ways, "Memories" is finally a sad lament of father-son relationship that is painful and tortured, displayed against a background of what they most shared, the watching of television, the universal American experience.

Paperback. Etat : New. On the night of a father's death, two women remember. Esther, the wife denied, and Sara, her corrupted daughter, look back at the father's overwhelming cruelty and ahead to their freedom from him. Finally liberated from his terrible physical and emotional abuse, they must decide whether they will accept new possibilities or conform to old values. The darkness, no matter how black, is not complete: "I don't hate being a woman," Sara tells herself. "I don't." Beautifully written and remarkably powerful, In Night's City extends the tradition of the lyrical, impressionistic Irish novel, turning it to the hard-edged story of two women's attempt to escape a terrifying past.

Paperback. Etat : New. Dorothy Nelson's first book to be published in the United States focuses on a demented, dysfunctional Irish family. The Crawford family is dominated by Da (Joe), a manic-depressive thief and liar who has spent two years in prison for exposing himself in the woods to young children and couples. Ma is a weak and downtrodden victim of her husband's violent temper who occasionally flirts with her son Benjee, an overly sensitive boy with little hope for future happiness. As the narrative passes back and forth between the members of the family (in a style reminiscent of Ann Quin), a compelling portrait of abuse and its consequences is constructed, one that contains both horror and humor in the sexual and social sicknesses of the characters.

Paperback. Etat : New. At the City Hall in a small town in the South of France, one man starts his campaign to correct the ills that have overtaken his proud nation by lecuring the town's inhabitants on the art of conversation. In the narrator's opinion, "coversation is a specialty that is most eminently French," an art that should be nurtured and practiced, and can help repair France's reputation. Not to mention being a good conversationalist is extremely useful for seducing women, which is how the narrator managed to attract Lucienne, his "superbly lumpish" wife who died two months before giving this lecture. One of the oddest characters in contemporary fiction, the lecturer in this novel can't help but digress about his sad life in the midst of his speech, giving the reader a view of a self-centered man trying to turn one of his greatest faults into a virtue to be forced on everyone else. By turns ironic, hilarious, pathetic, and mortifying, Salvayre's The Lecture is an exuberant example of the exciting fiction being written in France.

Paperback. Etat : New. In normal, everyday tones, a story is told by the perpetrator of triple incest: first with his mother as a child and a young man, then with his daughter as he grows into mature manhood, and finally with his sister in middle age. This primeval fairytale burns with an icy passion as the narrator switches roles along with familial relationships. The quasi-metaphysical lucidity with which he pursues his odd fate is eerie, particularly in light of his apparent innocence as to the perverse nature of his taboo attachments, and the theatrical artifice with which he pursues them. In the end, his passionate desire is so earnest that the reader is left to wonder if he is truly a monster or an innocent: who is directing whom?

Paperback. Etat : New. "Religion," this book begins, "is a mistrusted word now," and Nicholas Mosley, in this engaging meditation, seeks to repair that trust. Rather than trying to convince or compel the reader to accept his beliefs, he describes how religion functions in the modern world. Elsewhere, Mosley has written, "There is a subject nowadays which is taboo in the way that sexuality was once taboo, which is to talk about life as if it had any meaning." In this book, he describes religion as the source of that meaning. Despair is the fashionable attitude, but it is one Mosley, here and in his many novels, rejects in favor of a cautious optimism. He writes not to persuade, but to explain a worldview that is refreshing for the hope and intelligence it contains.

Paperback. Etat : New. In Monstrous Possibility Curtis White creates a lucid perspective on what it means to be a writer and a human being in the so-called post-modern moment.

Paperback. Etat : New. An innovative satire on the process by which bureaucracy and official regimentation insidiously pervade society. In a deadpan, pseudo-scientific tone, the nameless narrator takes us on a tour of a bizarre village whose inhabitants lead such habitual, regulated lives that they resemble elements in a mathematical equation.

Paperback. Etat : New. -- First paperback edition.-- A ghost story unfolds simultaneously across three centuries and two continents; a young cannibal details the daily life and appetites of his clan; a man slowly, and without pain or blood, loses his limbs, his tongue, and his sight. A collection culled from Coleman Dowell's entire career, The Houses of Children displays the wide range of his talent in a dense and beautifully stylistic prose.-- Coleman Dowell is the author of five novels including Island People and Mrs. October Was Here, and a memoir, A Star-Bright Lie, which won an Editor's Choice Lambda Literary Award.-- First published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson (1987).

Paperback. Etat : New. Jason is a scriptwriter working on a film about Masada--the fortress where a thousand Jews killed themselves rather than be taken prisoner by the Romans in A. D. 73. He doubts that a film both honest and popular on such a subject can be made, and, while en route to the production site (Jason, producers and stars in first class--his wife and child in tourist), a dispute about the film and a crisis aboard the plane forces Jason to look at his life, his art, and the world around him in several different ways at once.

Paperback. Etat : New. In this collection of two novellas and seven short stories, Alf MacLochlainn comically reduces life's problems to the minute details of everyday existence. Socks, shoes, and trousers suggest perplexing difficulties: how best to put them on, the intricacies involved in keeping them on, the physical (as well as psychological) laws related to the interaction of body and clothing. All such speculations come to an absurd, crashing halt as the contemporary mind, filled with an overload of information, attempts but fails to make sense of some of the simplest, though of course complex, mundane facts of daily life.From Dublin to Central Illinois to Outer Space, MacLochlainn's stories embody the imaginative spirit of Samuel Beckett and Flann O'Brien.

Paperback. Etat : New. At once an ironic portrayal of contemporary Korea and an intimate exploration of heartache, alienation, and nostalgia, this collection of seven short stories has earned the author widespread critical acclaim.

Paperback. Etat : New. Like so many of Woolf's odysseys into the heart of America's subcultures, ?"Wall to Wall"?traces a modern?Ulysses?in reverse: from a West Coast asylum where he works as an attendant to a Boston asylum where he visits his mother, Claude Squires views roadside America from its weak side--the tough underbelly of the Southwest, Tucson, the Rio Grande, Nogales, The Border--before thrusting himself into Okie's sacred shrine, Oklahoma City, and into the staid Eastern Corridor that ends in Boston. Claude's vehicle is a '59 Thunderhead, a "female beast," which his father, a used-car dealer in L.A., has commissioned him to deliver to Oklahoma City. And like all of Woolf's cars, the Thunderhead is a "she," a domineering companion in Claude's cross-country picaresque "flight of passage." In "Wall to Wall" Woolf's view is evocative and is very much his own. First published by Grove Press in 1962, "Wall to Wall" has been an underground classic for over thirty-five years, a comic and satiric masterpiece.

Paperback. Etat : New. Aged twenty, and with no war experience, Nicholas Mosley found himself in charge of a platoon of men positioned along the Italian front during the Second World War. With his father in prison on charges of treason, he had enlisted primarily in an effort to improve his family image. But the war left Mosley a radically changed man: he had gone in out of personal convenience, and left with a sense of greater purpose. Saved from death by one of his men, holed up in barns and trenches and tents, and marching across Europe, Mosley found in war a certainty that eluded him in peacetime. "War is both senseless and necessary, squalid and fulfilling, terrifying and sometimes jolly," he writes. "This is like life. Humans are at home in war (though they seldom admit this). They feel they know what they have to do." In an interview conducted between 1977 and 1978, Nicholas Mosley said, "When I was young William Faulkner was my great love, not just because of the density of style, but because he seemed to be dealing with the question not of what will happen next but what is happening now. The first Faulkner novel I read was The Sound and the Fury, which I got hold of when we liberated a POW camp in Italy in 1944 and I liberated the Red Cross Library. I was about twenty. What in god's name, after all, was I doing aged twenty in Italy in a war?".

Paperback. Etat : New. The unnamed narrator of Francis Bacon's Armchair has just been released from an extended stay at a psychiatric hospital and now has only one objective: to shut himself away in his apartment and contemplate the best way to restart his life. But his obsession with Cathie, a young woman he met during his convalescence, drives him out of his bedroom one night in search of a telephone-which leads him two floors below into the apartment of his morbidly obese neighbor, Sauvage. Sauvage is a translator overwhelmed by his current project, The Dictionary of Rare and Incurable Diseases, and by the inherent difficulties of his profession. The narrator begins paying regular visits to his mysterious neighbor, and the two isolated men develop a bizarre relationship dominated by fear, jealousy, and mutual fascination. A hypnotic and philosophically dense novel, Francis Bacon's Armchair deftly weaves between explorations of loneliness, language, and obsession.

Paperback. Etat : New. The narrator of this novel begins by introducing himself not as a speaker but a listener, spellbound by his friend Caracala's yarns, which blend accounts of youthful mischief with casual references to Cervantes and Laurence Sterne. At first, the spotlight is entirely on Caracala, but the narrator soon begins to distrust his friend, concluding that Caracala is no more than a sham: a performer. Yet the reader will in turn come to doubt the narrator's own pretensions to honesty, until every source of information has become so unreliable as to make the very notion of a "true story" seem like blatant propaganda.

Paperback. Etat : New. In this nominally true story of an epic, transcontinental road trip, Jean Rolin travels to Africa from darkest France, accompanying a battered Audi to its new life as a taxi to be operated by the family of a Congolese security guard. The ghost of Joseph Conrad haunts Rolin's journey, as do memories of his expatriate youth in Kinshasa in the early 1960s--but no less present are W. G. Sebald and Marcel Proust, who are the guiding lights for Rolin's sensual and digressive attack upon history: his own as well as the world's. By turns comic, lyrical, gruesome, and humane, "The Explosion of the Radiator Hose" is a one-of-a-kind travelogue, and no less an exploration of what it means to be human in a life of perpetual exile and migration.

Paperback. Etat : New. Paradoxes of Peace continues the meditation of Mosley's Time at War, at the end of which he wrote that humans find themselves at home in war because they feel they know what they have to do, whereas in peace they have to discover this. But what should inform them--custom? need? duty? ambition? desire? Forces pull in different directions--fidelity versus adventurousness, probity versus fun. During the war, Mosley found himself having to combine fondness for his father, Oswald Mosley, with the need to speak out against his post-war politics. In times of peace, his love for his wife and children, too, seemed riddled with paradoxes. He sought answers in Christianity, but came to see organized religion as primarily a social institution. How does caring not become a trap?

Paperback. Etat : New. Hedyphagetica is a powerful political satire, a ribald comedy, and a desperate love letter to a woman named Aime? "Oh my, yes, I am afraid that in the beginning was the word." So begins the narrator's account of his homeland, Gron, a country whose militaristic and authoritarian government bombs its own people at air shows--to keep them awed--and leads them into pointless and interminable wars to keep them properly motivated Employing all the tools of modernity to achieve a medieval brand of repression, Gron is a grim place. The narrator, attempting a kind of history, tells his story through the life of Dr. Samuel Johnson (no relation), an everyman who suffers every indignity his government can offer (including having an eye removed to "cure" his migraines).

Paperback. Etat : New. The Flemish writer Dani?l Robberechts (1937-1992) refused to identify his books as novels, stories, or essays, according them all equal status as, simply, writing. This liberation from genre gives his work, for all its apparent simplicity, an elusive, hypnotic quality, and no more so than in his debut, "Arriving in Avignon," which records a young man's first encounter with that labyrinthine city, and his likewise meandering relationship with a girl from his home town-and indeed virtually every woman he meets. Hesistant and cautious, unable quite to enter nor turn away, the young man seems to circle Avignon endlessly, in the process attempting to delay his inevitable descent into maturity and monogamy. What seems at first like a cross between a memoir and a guidebook comes in time to be the story of a young man's dogged yet futile quest to know his own mind-unless it's the ancient city of Avignon itself that is our real protagonist: a mystery that can be approached, but never wholly solved.

Paperback. Etat : New. Half philosopher and half clown-prince, Gert Jonke is Austria s comic gift to contemporary fiction.

Paperback. Etat : New. A retired academic and writer is becoming a media celebrity of sorts, appearing on various talk shows to voice his controversial views on human nature and war. While in New York to make such an appearance, he becomes the victim of a hit-and-run--set up by the CIA? the FBI? terrorists?--and ends up confined to a hospital bed. This forced inactivity allows him to reflect on his life--the work he has done, the women he has known--as various people from his life gather around him, including both his first and second wives. Reminiscing about his past while dealing with his present, the man begins to see his provocative ideas about fidelity, sin, and grace play themselves out in a virtuosic way that could only be conceived by Nicholas Mosley.

Paperback. Etat : New. Though best known now for his novels, this collection of pre-exile short stories by the renowned Romanian author and "onirist" not only show Dumitru Tsepeneag at his best, but provide a glimpse into the secret history of surrealism uunder the brutal regime of Nicolae Ceausescu. In these stories, life is both banal and bizarre, on the verge of breaking down, like a film loop played once too often, with the hot glare of irrationality always waiting to burn through. Looking forward to "Vain Art of the Fugue" and back to Breton, "Waiting" is a subversive delicacy.

Paperback. Etat : New. "Marriage kills love. That's why people get married." The unmarried and unemployed narrator of A Fool's Paradise is seeing a married man and must, because of her social security, apply and interview for jobs she does not want. Her life is founded on unsustainable contradictions. As her lover considers recommitting to his wife and as her poverty becomes increasingly dire, she confronts the temptations and contradictions of conventional success, but she is also overcome by jealousy and dissatisfaction. She travels to Russia and spies on her lover's wife. She takes a job that she hates. This precise and intensely personal novel describes the narrator's growing sense that freedom becomes, itself, a kind of routine, and shows her burgeoning desire to break out of it.

Paperback. Etat : New. "Originally published in Italian as Il Sogno di Walacek by Guilio Elinaudi Editore S.p.A., 1991.".

Paperback. Etat : New. The tale is simple, if grim: a disenfranchised teenage boy from the housing projects on the outskirts of Paris rapes and murders the manager of the supermarket where his mother works. But Gerard Gavarry is a writer who knows how literary inventiveness can shed new light on a serious subject, and Hoppla! tells its story three times, in three separate sections, each in a different tone or mode and with different sets of images and vocabularies. The first relies on tropical images and the characters speak in a lexicon borrowed from the coconut industry--as if the Parisian suburbs had been transported to an exotic shore; the second is nautical in nature; the third invokes the mythology of the centaur, and ancient Greece butts up against modern-day France. Gavarry's bloody and poetic narrative takes dead aim at the social, political, and personal roots of violence, and argues for the transformative power of fiction.

Paperback. Etat : New. Including pieces on Gregory Bateson, William Faulkner, Philip Pullman, Sir Oswald Mosley's politics, religion and stammering, this diverse collection gathers essays written by Nicholas Mosley over the past forty years. Resembling the behaviour of slime mould - a strange organism made up of separate amoebae that temporarily form a single pillar which then bursts in order to scatter its seeds across the forest floor - the ideas found in these essays converge and disperse, crossing over into other disciplines, and creating a unique way of looking at the world, one echoed in Mosley's fictional writings.

Paperback. Etat : New. The Squatters' Gift is a poetic travelogue through numerous languages and locales, both real and imaginary. Like Miron Bialoszewski, Paul Celan and Tristan Tzara before him, Rybicki excavates syllable and song, mind and muck, to invent a transnational poetry pointedly unapologetic and utterly unique. Karol Maliszewski observes that Rybicki has taken over from the Surrealists and the Dadaists: "the hero of these poems is language -- escaping from a man and suddenly returning in flashes and dazzles."The opening lines of The Squatters' Gift, is reminiscent of a sort of vagabond Jack Gladney from Don DeLillo's acclaimed White Noise, wandering the supermarket aisles in a consumerist haze: "The supermarket / melts / like a chocolate bar: / a dendrite stack." But the comparison is short-lived and far too simplistic. It is only tenable if the comforts of ritualized shopping are multi-lingual and multi-dimensional, Greek mythology intersecting with 1980s Polish punk music, poetic string theory and time travel and psychedelic dumpster diving all rolled into one. It is this wanderlust and these sorts of imaginative leaps that animate much of The Squatters' Gift and make it so incredible.