This illustrated international bestseller follows a young boy's thrilling exploration of mathematics in his dreams."A natural follow-up to Norton Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth and Jon Scieszka's Math Curse , covering more mathematical territory . . .[and] sharing the same daffy sensibility." — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE DIRECTED BY GREGG ARAKI AND STARRING BRADY CORBET, JOSEPH GORDON-LEVITT, ELISABETH SHUE, and MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG“Wrenching . . . powerfully sensuous.”—New York Times"As searing and unforgettable as an electric shock."—Kirkus ReviewsAs timely and compelling as when it was first published more than three decades ago, Scott Heim’s propulsive novel abou...

Often called “the Kafka of Romania,” Max Blecher died young but not before creating this incandescent novel.Adventures in Immediate Irreality, the masterwork of the Romanian writer Max Blecher, vividly paints the crises of "irreality" that plagued him in his youth: eerie and unsettling mirages wherein he would glimpse future events. In gliding chapters that move with a peculiar dream logic of their own, this memoiristic novel sketches the tremulous, fright...

An inside look at Michael Henry Heim—one of the most prolific and culturally important translators ever.

From the author of Baba Yaga Laid an Egg and Thank You for Not ReadingFrom the story of Steffie Cvek to "The Kharms Case," the pieces in Dubravka Ugresic's collection Lend Me Your Character are always smart and endlessly entertaining. The former story paints a picture of a harassed and vulnerable typist whose life is shaped entirely by cliches. She searches endlessly for an elusive romantic love in a narrative punctuated by threadbare adv...

Because Chekhov’s plays convey the universally recognizable, sometimes comic, sometimes dramatic, frustrations of decent people trying to make sense of their lives, they remain as fresh and vigorous as when they were written a century ago. Gathered here in superb new renderings by one of the most highly regarded translators of our time—versions that have been staged throughout the United States, Canada, and Great Britain—are Chekhov’s four essential masterpieces for the theater.

The world-famous masterpiece about a writer's obsessive pursuit of forbidden love by a Nobel Prize laureate.Translation by Michael Henry HeimPublished on the eve of World War I, a decade after Buddenbrooks had established Thomas Mann as a literary celebrity, Death in Venice tells the story of Gustave von Aschenbach, a successful but aging writer who follows his wanderlust to Venice in search of spiritual fulfillment that instead leads to h...

Far from home, a fractured community of Yugoslav outcasts struggle with their lives in award–winning author Dubravka Ugrešić's novel The Ministry of Pain.Having fled the violent breakup of Yugoslavia, Tanja Lucic is now a professor of literature at the University of Amsterdam, where she teaches a class filled with other young Yugoslav exiles, most of whom earn meager wages assembling leather and rubber S&M clothing at a sweatshop they call the "Ministry."

Never have two such important world figures collaborated in a biography: Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk (1850-1937), the original Philosopher-President who founded Czechoslovakia in 1918, and Karel Čapek (1890-1938), the leading Czech writer of the time. Čapek interviewed Masaryk over a number of years and produced a single narrative that tells Masaryk's incredible story in a voice as ordinary yet magical as the best of Čapek's fictional characters. The result is a biographical work like no other,...

The Book of Blam, Aleksandar Tišma’s “extended kaddish . . . [his] masterpiece” (Kirkus Reviews), is a modern-day retelling of the book of Job. The war is over. Miroslav Blam walks along the former Jew Street, and he remembers. He remembers Aaron Grün, the hunchbacked watchmaker; and Eduard Fiker, a lamp merchant; and Jakob Mentele, a stove fitter; and Arthur Spitzer, a grocer, who played amateur soccer and had non-Jewish friends; and Sándor Vértes, a lawyer who was a Communist. A...

A perceptive literary critic, a world-famous writer of witty and playful verses for children, a leading authority on children’s linguistic creativity, and a highly skilled translator, Kornei Chukovsky was a complete man of letters. As benefactor to many writers including Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Joseph Brodsky, he stood for several decades at the center of the Russian literary milieu. It is no exaggeration to claim that Chukovsky knew everyone involved in shaping the course of twentiet...

Rake, drunkard, aesthete, gossip, raconteur extraordinaire: the narrator of Bohumil Hrabal’s rambling, rambunctious masterpiece Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age is all these and more. Speaking to a group of sunbathing women who remind him of lovers past, this elderly roué tells the story of his life—or at least unburdens himself of a lifetime’s worth of stories. Thus we learn of amatory conquests (and humiliations), of scandals both private and public, of military adventure...