Translated from the Hungarian by Imre GoldsteinAn enquiry into the nature or eroticism, an unflinching exploration of the physical and psychological aspects of love bordering on sexual mysticism, Out of Oneself is a collection of two novellas that explore two different epochs in Hungarian history through the sexual relationships of its characters. One, an agonizing love triangle between an extraordinarily beautiful stage actress, a young Catholic priest, and a Jewish engin...

Tranquility is a living seismograph of the internal quakes and ruptures of a mother and son trapped within an Oedipal nightmare amidst the suffocating totalitarian embrace of Communist Hungary. Andor Weér, a thirty-six-year-old writer, lives in a cramped apartment with his shut-in mother, Rebeka, who was once among the most celebrated stage actresses in Budapest. Unable to withstand her maniacal tyranny but afraid to leave her alone, their bitter interdependence spirals into a Sartrian hel...

Following on the heels of his New York Times–bestselling novel Telegraph Avenue, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Michael Chabon delivers another literary masterpiece: a novel of truth and lies, family legends, and existential adventure—and the forces that work to destroy us.In 1989, fresh from the publication of his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Michael Chabon traveled to his mother’s home in Oakland, California, to visit his terminally ill gran...

The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis is an event in American letters.Lydia Davis is one of our most original and influential writers. She has been called "an American virtuoso of the short story form" (Salon) and "one of the quiet giants . . . of American fiction" (Los Angeles Times Book Review). Now, for the first time, Davis's short stories are collected in one volume, from the groundbreaking Break It Down (1986) to the 2007 Na...

A masterful new novel from the winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize, hailed for depicting the "landscape of the dispossessed" with "the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose" (Nobel Prize Committee)It was an icy morning in January 1945 when the patrol came for seventeen-year-old Leo Auberg to deport him to a camp in the Soviet Union. Leo would spend the next five years in a coke processing plant, shoveling coal, lugging bricks, mixing mortar, and battling the...

**FINALIST FOR THE WRITERS' TRUST FICTION PRIZEA GLOBE AND MAIL BEST BOOKThe perfect next read for fans of Ottessa Moshfegh and George Saunders, an electrifying debut about a woman who is transformed into a real life “flesh-and-blood Wailing Wall” as strangers unburden their sins to her at every turn.**Lucy is a lapsed Catholic whose adolescent pretensions to sainthood are unexpectedly revived following the disturbing deathbed confession of her cousin Zoltá...

“Absurdistan is not just a hilarious novel, but a record of a particular peak in the history of human folly. No one is more capable of dealing with the transition from the hell of socialism to the hell of capitalism in Eastern Europe than Shteyngart, the great-great grandson of one Nikolai Gogol and the funniest foreigner alive.”–Aleksandar HemonFrom the critically acclaimed, bestselling author of The Russian Debutante’s Handbook comes the uproarious and po...

Named a Top Ten Best Book of the Year by Time and PeopleNamed a Best Book of the Year by: Washington Post * Kirkus Reviews * New Yorker * Chicago Public Library * NPR * Oprah Daily * Philadelphia EnquirerA taut, groundbreaking, and highly acclaimed novel from bestselling and award-winning author Elizabeth McCracken, about a writer’s relationship with her larger-than-life mother—a...

National Book Award Finalist: "Wickersham has journeyed into the dark underworld inside her father and herself and emerged with a powerful, gripping story." — The Boston GlobeOne winter morning in 1991, Joan Wickersham's father shot himself in the head. The father she loved would never have killed himself, and yet he had. His death made a mystery of his entire life. Who was he? Why did he do it? And what was the impact of his death on the people who loved ...

In Sleepless Nights a woman looks back on her life—the parade of people, the shifting background of place—and assembles a scrapbook of memories, reflections, portraits, letters, wishes, and dreams. An inspired fusion of fact and invention, this beautifully realized, hard-bitten, lyrical book is not only Elizabeth Hardwick’s finest fiction but one of the outstanding contributions to American literature of the last fifty years.

'THE MOST IMPORTANT LIVING RUSSIAN WRITER' New YorkerMY HEAD SPINS. I'M LYING IN A BED. WHERE AM I? WHO AM I?A man wakes up in hospital. He has no idea who he is or how he came to be there. The doctor tells him his name, but he doesn't remember it. He remembers nothing.As memories slowly resurface, he begins to build a picture of his former life. Russia in the early twentieth century, the turbulence of the revoluti...

BONUS: This edition contains excerpts from Arthur Phillips's The Tragedy of Arthur, The Song Is You, The Egyptologist, and Angelica.A first novel of startling scope and ambition, Prague depicts an intentionally lost Lost Generation as it follows five American expats who come to Budapest in the early 1990s to seek their fortune—financial, romantic, and spiritual—in an exotic city newly opened to the West. They harbor the vague suspicion that their ...