Scrounged from his notebooks and hearsay, this is the story of a schoolteacher named Konrad Zündel: a philosopher, a wanna-be writer; scattered, self-conscious, glum, anxious, unlucky, discontent . . . At the end of his rope, he decides to flee his workaday life at all costs, only to find escape always a little beyond his reach. First his tooth falls out in the sight of other travelers, then he finds a severed finger in a restroom on a train. In fact, Zündel seems on the verge of falling t...

A bracing and darkly comic novel about a disgraced priest who finds himself haunted by his dead and disapproving father, this little-known classic of Swiss literature is impossible to forget.In a small town in Switzerland, Franz—ex-clergyman, ex-husband, current counselor of locals at loose ends—is being haunted by his recently deceased father, Klement. In life, Franz was caught cheating on his wife and defrocked, after which Klement never spoke to him again. In de...

An intimate and lyrical consideration of what it means to be a fatherThis moment of meeting seemed to be a birth-time for both of us; her first and my second life. Nothing, I knew, would be the same again . . .Full of warmth and candor, this essay composed on the occasion of his daughter's birth is one of Laurie Lee's most delightful and inspiring works. From the moment Jessy is born, "purple and dented like a bruis...

**An NPR Best Book of the YearVulture • “15 Must-Read Translated Books From the Past 5 Years”Written during the height of the 1970s Italian domestic terror, a cult novel, with distinct echoes of Lovecraft and Borges, makes its English-language debut.**In the spare wing of a church-run sanatorium, some zealous youths create "the Library," a space where lonely citizens can read one another’s personal diaries and connect with like-minded souls in "dialogues across the e...

By the acclaimed author of The Copenhagen Trilogy, a startling and darkly funny volume of selected poetry, the first to be translated into English.*It was a meaningless daylike what you callloveIt was a ThursdayIn parentheses. The brackets around itHave already fadedLife tastes of ashAnd is bearable.*From one of Denmark’s most celebrated twentieth-century writers, the author of the acclaimed Cop...

A windfall for every reader: a trove of marvelous impossible-to-find Kafka stories in a masterful new translation by Michael HofmannSelected by the preeminent Kafka biographer and scholar Reiner Stach and newly translated by the peerless Michael Hofmann, the seventy-four pieces gathered here have been lost to sight for decades and two of them have never been translated into English before. Some stories are several pages long; some run about a page; a handful are on...

Writing, one of Marguerite Duras’s last works, is a meditation on the process of writing and on her need for solitude in order to do it. In the five short pieces collected in this volume, she explores experiences that had an emotional impact on her and that inspired her to write. These vary from the death of a pilot in World War II, to the death of a fly, to an art exhibition. Two of the pieces were made into documentary films, and one was originally a short film. Both autobiograp...

Love in late capitalism: Ivana Sajko takes us into a war between kitchen and bedroom. He, an unemployed humanist, is trying to change the world and write a novel. She, a passable actress, has given up her safe job at the theatre to care for their child. He is delirious, she is on edge. With the rent overdue and violence looming on all sides, the two of them circle one another in a dizzying dance towards the abyss.

From "a genuine American Dostoevsky" ( The Washington Post): a dazzling, funny, bittersweet exploration of the mysteries of relationship, both human and animal.When his favorite cat Biscuit goes missing, Peter Trachtenberg sets out to find her. The journey takes him 700 miles and many years into his past-- into the history of his relationships with cats and the history of his relationship with his wife F., who may herself be on the verge of disappearing. Wh...

WINNER OF THE 2014 VICTORIAN PREMIER'S UNPUBLISHED MANUSCRIPT AWARDWINNER OF THE 2016 VICTORIAN PREMIER'S LITERARY AWARDS PEOPLE'S CHOICEWINNER OF THE 2016 WESTERN AUSTRALIA PREMIER'S LITERARY AWARDS PEOPLE'S CHOICEFor nearly five years I have wanted to write something about the surrealist painter Emil Bafdescu: about his paintings, one of which hangs in a little restaurant in Melbourne, and about his disappeara...

Perhaps even more chillingly relevant today than it was thirty years ago, this gripping and deeply personal interrogation of fascism returns to print at last in a remarkable full-color anniversary edition.The Tunnel, William H. Gass’ colossal second novel, thundered onto the literary scene in 1995 after three decades at the typewriter. Hailed by many as an indisputable masterpiece, reviled by others as a suffocating and overwhelming experiment, The Tun...

"A final book like no other" from the Nobel Prize–winning author of The Tin Drum: poetry and meditations on writing, aging, and living until the end ( The Irish Times).In spite of the trials of old age, and with the end in sight, Günter Grass weaves his life's reflections together into a witty and elegiac swansong: love letters, soliloquies, jealous musings, social satire, and moments of happiness long to be shared.As the inimitable German...