Potatoes constitute the basis of his family's daily fare, and they share both bed and board with the sheep and pigs. A scathing satire on narratives of Gaelic Ireland, this work brought down on the author's head the full wrath of those who saw themselves as the custodians of Irish language and tradition when it was first published in Gaelic in 1941.

    Communists, socialists, and nationalists; thieves and black marketeers; servants and fading aristocrats; veteran terrorists and bands of murderous children bewitched by the lure of crime and adventure--all of these converge on a provincial town's chief hotel, a microcosm of an uprooted world.

    Andre Breton wrote Arcanum 17 during a trip to the Gaspe Peninsula in Quebec in the months after D-Day in 1944, when the Allied troops were liberating Occupied Europe. Using the huge Perce Rock--its impermanence, its slow-motion crumbling, its singular beauty--as his central metaphor, Breton considers issues of love and loss, aggression and war, pacifism, feminism and the occult, in a book that is part prose and part poetry, part reality and part dream.Translator Zack Rogow won the PEN-Book-of-the-Month Translation Prize for his co-translation of Breton's Earthlight.

    He dreams of one day making a film—a searing portrait of his times—that the authorities would never allow. When the communist regime collapses, Pavel finds himself unprepared for the new world of supposedly unlimited freedom, and unable to make the film he has always wanted to make. His dilemma—that of a man choosing between the ideals and temptations of freedom—informs every sentence of this important novel.

    Though nothing is as simple as it might appear to be, we could describe this as a story about Allen, who is married to Maud but having an affair with Elizabeth, who lives with Maud. Or say it is a story about fraud in the art world, horse racing, and sexual intrigues. Or, as one critic did, compare it to a Jane Austen creation, or to an Aldous Huxley novel - and be right and wrong on both counts.

    The first of Roussel's two major prose works, Impressions of Africa is not, as the title may suggest, a conventional travel account, but an adventure story put together in a highly individual fashion and with an unusual time sequence, whereby the reader is even made to choose whether to begin with the first or the tenth chapter.A veritable literary melting pot, Roussel's groundbreaking text makes ample use of wordplay and the surrealist techniques of automatic writing and private allusion.

    Galdós's Madrid, recast from his youthful wanderings through the city's slums and cafés, includes the egg sellers and faded bullfighters surrounding Fortunata as well as the quieter, sequestered milieu of Jacinta's upbringing. Through Juanito, the lover of both women, the writer reveals Spain as a variegated fabric of delicate traditions and established vices, of shaky politics and rich intrigue. In this vast and colorful world, resonant of Dickens's London and Balzac's France, Galdós presents his characters with a depth, ambiguity, and humor born of the multiplicity of his scene.Galdós's novels enjoyed, for a time, a wide and attentive readership in Spain. As his reputation grew, however, hostility toward his achievements, envy of his success, and political squabbling hampered his progress, stalling his election to the Royal Academy and, in 1912, thoroughly derailing his nomination as Spain's candidate for the Nobel Prize.Though the political controversies that surrounded Galdós's works have long been calmed, this translation by Agnes Moncy Gullón brings alive the tempestuous era in which he lived and wrote, allowing English readers to hear the percussive yet often melodic tones of nineteenth-century Madrid in the correct and casual speech of Jacinta, in the pretty but empty words of Juanito, and in the painfully proper, sometimes vulgar language of Fortunata.

    He saw the beauty of the Peruvian landscape, as well as the grimness of social conditions in the Andes, through the eyes of the Indians who are a part of it. Ernesto, the narrator of Deep Rivers, is a child with origins in two worlds. The son of a wandering country lawyer, he is brought up by Indian servants until he enters a Catholic boarding school at age 14. In this urban Spanish environment he is a misfit and a loner. The conflict of the Indian and the Spanish cultures is acted out within him as it was in the life of Arguedas. For the boy Ernesto, salvation is his world of dreams and memories. While Arguedas' poetry was published in Quechua, he invented a language for his novels in which he used native syntax with Spanish vocabulary. This makes translation into other languages extremely difficult, and Frances Horning Barraclough has done a masterful job, winning the 1978 Translation Center Award from Columbia University for her efforts.

    The assassination of "Z," a leftist delegate to Greece's Parliament, sparks an exploration into the lives of the hired killers, bourgeois witnesses and political figures behind the killing.

    In an idyllic setting of countryside and woods, Colette spent her childhood surrounded by a warm and loving family. Years later, her memories and experiences inspired her to create a series of snapshots of the innocence of provincial life. At once poignant and vividly alive, her recollections portray a magical world, filled with the beauty and the warmth of human relationships—and, above all, the lasting impressions made by her wonderful mother. French novelist Colette is most famous for her portraits of childhood in the Claudine books and for Gigi.

    The grieving family abandons its home and moves to another town, hoping to start afresh, but finds that its emotional burdens have emigrated with it.

    Having joined a cavalry unit during the Mexican Revolution, she finds herself at the Revolution's end in Mexico City, far from her native Oaxaca, abandoned by her husband and working menial jobs. So begins Jesusa's long history of encounters with the police and struggles against authority. Mystical yet practical, undaunted by hardship, Jesusa faces the obstacles in her path with gritty determination.Here in its first English translation, Elena Poniatowska's rich, sensitive, and compelling blend of documentary and fiction provides a unique perspective on history and the place of women in twentieth-century Mexico.

    A tetralogy containing "Spring Snow", a love story, "Runaway Horses", with a protagonist a right-wing terrorist, "The Temple of Dawn", where a Thai princess is mystically linked with the heroes of the preceding works and, written under the shadow of the author's death, "The Decay of the Angel".

    The two men discover that a quite different link already exists between them: it was Pye's strange, disturbed sister who once upon a time abducted Christopher and kept him in her room until Pye rescued the terrified child. In the apocalyptic atmosphere of the Blitz the relationship between the two men develops as each of them grapples with his own troubled emotional attachments, the one to his dead wife, the other to his unhappy sister. Inevitably matters come to a head when history shows signs of repeating itself. The subtle handling of relationships, the brilliance of the dialogue and description - including one of the best accounts ever written of London under the Blitz - established Caught as one of Henry Green's most powerful novels.

    When twenty-year-old Jane finds in the attic a packet of love letters written years ago by Guy, her mother’s one-time fiance who died in World War I, the discovery has explosive repercussions. It is not clear to whom the letters are addressed, and their appearance begins to lay bare the strange and unspoken connections between the adults now living in the house. Soon, a girl on the brink of womanhood, a mother haunted by love lost, and a ruined matchmaker with her own claim on the dead wage a battle that makes the ghostly Guy as real a presence in Montefort as any of the living.