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...

'He was blamed for endless disasters, from failed exams to a bridge collapse, an avalanche, even a shipwreck: all due, in the stupid opinion of, first, his fellow-students and, later, his colleagues, to the penetrating power of his evil eye...'Profound and compassionate, Primo Levi was one of the most astonishing literary voices to emerge from the twentieth century. Whether describing the most beautiful poem ever composed or an invention gone horribly wrong, these ...

'Reading Brodsky's essays is like a conversation with an immensely erudite, hugely entertaining and witty (and often very funny) interlocutor' Wall Street JournalWatermark is Joseph Brodsky's witty, intelligent, moving and elegant portrait of Venice. Looking at every aspect of the city, from its waterways, streets and architecture to its food, politics and people, Brodsky captures its magnificence and beauty, and recalls his own memories of the place he called hom...

**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...

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...

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...

Charlie Fairburn, successful screenwriter, ex-husband and absent father, has been given six months to live. He resolves to stake half his fortune on a couple of turns of the roulette wheel and, to his agent's disgust, to write a novel – about death. In the casino he meets his muse. Charlie grows as addicted to writing fiction as she is to gambling.His novel is set on a train and involves a group of characters who are locked in a debate about the nature of consciousness. As this tra...

'Like rotting stakes in a forest clearing'The great journalist of conflict in the Third World finds an even stranger and more exotic society in his own home of post-War PolandPenguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and G...

Stark, brooding, and enormously controversial when first published in 1905, this astonishing novel juxtaposes impressions of fin–de–siècle Stockholm against the psychological landscape of a man besieged by obsession. Lonely and introspective, Doctor Glas has long felt an instinctive hostility toward the odious local minister. So when the minister's beautiful wife complains of her husband's oppressive sexual attentions, Doctor Glas finds himself contemplating murder. A masterpiece of enduri...

The launch of Dalkey's Best European Fiction series was nothing short of phenomenal, with wide-ranging coverage in international media such as Time magazine, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune, Financial Times, and the Guardian; glowing reviews and interviews in print and online magazines such as the Believer, Bookslut, Paste, and the Huffington Post; radio interviews wi...

"A very funny sendup of Italian-cooking-holiday-romance novels" ( Publishers Weekly).Gerald Samper, an effete English snob, has his own private hilltop in Tuscany where he whiles away his time working as a ghostwriter for celebrities and inventing wholly original culinary concoctions––including ice cream made with garlic and the bitter, herb-based liqueur known as Fernet Branca. But Gerald's idyll is about to be shattered by the arrival of Marta, on the run...