Fiction

Sisters Lili and Dori Ackerman are deaf. Their parents-beautiful, despondent Anna; fearsome and admired Alex-are deaf too. Alex, a scrap-metal collector and sometime prophet, opposes any attempts to integrate with the world of the hearing; to escape its destructive influence, the girls are educated at home. Deafness is no disability, their father says, but an alternative way of life, preferable by far to that of the strident, hypocritical hearing. Lili and Dori grow up semi-feral, living in a...

Nearly twenty years after Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf―and fifty years after the translation that continues to torment high-school students around the world―there is a radical new verse translation of the epic poem by Maria Dahvana Headley, which brings to light elements that have never before been translated into English, recontextualizing the binary narrative of monsters and heroes into a tale in which the two categories often entwine, justice is rarely served, and dragons live am...

Sofia, Bulgaria, a landlocked city in southern Europe, stirs with hope and impending upheaval. Soviet buildings crumble, wind scatters sand from the far south, and political protesters flood the streets with song. In this atmosphere of disquiet, an American teacher navigates a life transformed by the discovery and loss of love. As he prepares to leave the place he’s come to call home, he grapples with the intimate encounters that have marked his years abroad, each bearing uncanny reminders of...

Shirley Hazzard's Collected Stories is a work of staggering breadth and accomplishment. Taken together, these twenty-eight short stories are masterworks in telescoping focus, ranging from quotidian struggles between beauty and pragmatism to satirical send-ups of international bureaucracy, from the Italian countryside to suburban Connecticut. Hazzard's heroes are high-minded romantics who attempt to fit their feelings into the twentieth-century world of office jobs and dreary marriages. After ...

translated by Paulette Møller A page-turning novel that is also an exploration of the great philosophical concepts of Western thought, Sophie's World has fired the imagination of readers all over the world, with more than twenty million copies in print. One day fourteen-year-old Sophie Amundsen comes home from school to find in her mailbox two notes, with one question on each: "Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?". From that irresistible beginning, Sophie becomes obsessed with ...

Helen arrives in Appalachian Ohio full of love and eager to carry out her boyfriend's ideas for living off the land. Too soon, with winter coming, her boyfriend calls it quits. Helped by Rudy, her government-questioning, wisdom-spouting, seasonal-affective-disordered boss, and a neighbor couple, Helen makes it to spring. But Karen and Lily are expecting their first child, a boy, which means their time at the Women's Land Trust is over. So Helen invites the new family to throw in with her--the...

While the Australian master Gerald Murnane's reputation rests largely on his longer works of fiction, his short stories stand among the most brilliant and idiosyncratic uses of the form since Borges, Beckett, and Nabokov. Brutal, comic, obscene, and crystalline, Stream System runs from the haunting "Land Deal," which imagines the colonization of Australia and the ultimate vengeance of its indigenous people as a series of nested dreams; to "Finger Web," which tells a quietly terrifying, fracta...

Parrots own cafes and lemurs run the espresso machines. Badgers tend bar, raccoons write for The Post, and a racehorse is mayor. There are dogs on Wall Street and cats on Broadway. Sea creatures are viewed with fear and disgust. Maybe a big wall should be built to keep them out. It's New York City, now-ish. No big deal. Alfonzo is an alpaca. His hip friend Mitchell is a llama. They both work at City Hall and are trying to navigate the great furry city collapsing around them. Partly to meet gi...

translated by Michael Roloff The self-destruction of a soccer goalie turned construction worker who wanders aimlessly around a stifling Austrian border town after pursuing and then murdering, almost unthinkingly, a female movie cashier is mirrored by Handke's use of direct, sometimes fractured prose that conveys "at its best a seamless blend of lyricism and horror seen in the runes of a disintegrating world" (Boston Sunday Globe).Paperback: 133 pagesProduct Dimensions: 129 x 205 mmISBN: 97803...

Joshua Levin has a reasonably comfortable Chicago apartment, a mildly dysfunctional family sprinkled throughout the suburbs, a steady job teaching ESL, a devoted girlfriend who lives down the block, and a laptop full of screenplay ideas―one of which he thinks, might turn out to be good: Zombie Wars. But all it takes is a few unexpected events―his already unhinged army vet of a landlord experiencing something of a psychotic break, a moment of weakness (or two) with his sultry Bosnian student―f...

translated by Krishna Winston Mysteriously summoned to a houseboat on the Morava river, a few friends, associates, and collaborators of a former writer gather to hear him tell a story that will last until dawn: the tale of the once well-known writer's odyssey across Europe. As his story unwinds, he seeks out places that represent stages of his and the continent's past, many now lost or irrecoverably changed through war, death, and the subtler erosions of time. His wanderings take him from the...

Translated by Frank Wynne Vernon Subutex was once the proprietor of Revolver, an infamous music shop in Bastille. His legend spread throughout Paris. But by the 2000s his shop is struggling. With his savings gone, his unemployment benefit cut, and the friend who had been covering his rent suddenly dead, Vernon Subutex finds himself down and out on the Paris streets. He has one final card up his sleeve. Even as he holds out his hand to beg for the first time, a throwaway comment he once made o...

Translated by Frank Wynne Although it means leaving behind the community of disciples who have followed him on his travels and assembled at his raves and gatherings, Vernon Subutex is compelled to return to Paris to visit the dentist. Once back in the city, he learns that Charles, his old friend from his days on the Paris streets, has died and left him half of a lottery win. But when Vernon returns to his disciples with news of this windfall, it does not take long before his followers start t...

Translated by Frank Wynne Rock star Alexandre Bleach might be dead, but he has a secret. It's a secret that concerns several people, but the only person who can unlock it is Vernon Subutex, former record shop proprietor turned homeless messiah and guru, last seen hallucinating and feverish on a bench in the parc des Buttes Chaumont. Aicha wants to know the truth behind the death of her mother, Vodka Satana. And if she finds the bastards responsible, she wants to make them pay, whatever Celest...

Translated by Tess Lewis On a beautiful spring day, a small village wakes up to an omen: Selma has dreamed of an okapi. Someone is about to die. Luisa, Selma’s ten-year-old granddaughter, looks on as the predictable characters of her small world begin acting strangely. Though they claim not to be superstitious, each of her neighbors newly grapples with buried secrets and deferred decisions that have become urgent in the face of death. Luisa’s mother struggles to decide whether to end her marr...