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...

A psychological drama with a masterful, pulse-quickening plot revolving around two seemingly very different men, who have more in common than they know.Thomas Clarin is a divorce lawyer whose profession has fostered a deep and abiding distrust of marriage, preferring instead to "play the field." Thomas Loos is a somber widower intensely mourning his wife's death. With Clarin's flirtatious, roving eye and Loos's complete disenchantment with the world around him, it would seem these ...

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 bru...

**WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATUREA New York Times Notable Book**In her spare, stark style, Annie Ernaux documents the desires and indignities of a human heart ensnared in an all-consuming passion.Blurring the line between fact and fiction, an unnamed narrator attempts to plot the emotional and physical course of her 2 year relationship with a married foreigner where every word, event, and person either provides a connection with her beloved or ...

First in the series featuring three powerful men who have everything—except the perfect wife—from the USA Today –bestselling author.Merciless businessman Ciro D'Angelo knows an opportunity when he sees it—and Lily Scot's vulnerable sweetness and old-fashioned values are exactly what he needs in a wife. She's the complete opposite to the red-taloned gold diggers that relentlessly pursue him.But on their wedding nig...

**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...

She thought he was too big for his boots!Sister Charity Dawson loved her job, but there was one problem. Like the other members of St. Simon’s nursing staff, she had to put up with the arrogant Dr. Everard van Tijlen.When Charity discovered that the distinguished doctor’s exorbitant fees funded a playboy lifestyle, she hit the roof. Everard might have an engagingly boyish smile, but he needed to be taken down a peg or two. And Charity knew just how to do it...

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.

Almost no one gets through life without having their heart broken. Advice at such a dark moment tends to focus on letting time do the healing. But understanding and perspective also have a vital role. We sometimes make our situation far worse than it needs to be. We start to tell ourselves that we are not good enough, that we fail at everything, that this one rejection means we will always be maltreated …This is a book to help us get over heartbreak by offering some context, some h...

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...