F. Freedman presents The Obstacle Course, a coming-of-age story that recounts the adventures of a colorful, profane, street-smart, and appealing fifteen-year-old boy growing up in 1957 on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Roy Poole has to be smart because he is almost always on his own. His father is a drinker, womanizer, and wife-beater. His mother can't cope with her husband or her children; Roy copes by running with his own gang, whose escapades sometimes border on the criminal. And this young man is eminently available when the girls come after him, which is often. But there is another side to Roy. He builds model ships and regularly hitchhikes to Annapolis to run the Naval Academy's grueling obstacle course. For Roy Poole's one ambition in life, his consuming dream, is to become a midshipman. One day, like a gift from heaven, Roy meets a retired admiral who also builds model ships. The admiral is immediately attracted to the youngster, and he becomes almost a second father to the boy. Admiral Wells arranges for Roy to be admitted to a military prep school that sends most of its graduates to the Naval Academy. And then, suddenly, Roy's innocence brings about an explosion in this exotic world he has entered. Embittered and lost, Roy strikes out blindly for parts unknown. And on that adventure, particularly in an encounter with members of a black church, people that he, a Southerner in the fifties, has never known except as stereotypes, he begins the process of understanding that offers him a chance for his own redemption. This powerful and gritty coming-of-age novel will evoke memories of Holden Caulfield and Huck Finn. It also bears comparison to the novels of Pat Conroy. Best of all, The Obstacle Course confirms Freedman's talent for telling a compelling story in a full and rich original voice that marks him as a novelist with a limitless future.

    G. Sebald's first novel, never before translated into English, is perhaps his most amazing and certainly his most alarming. Sebald—the acknowledged master of memory's uncanniness—takes the painful pleasures of unknowability to new intensities in Vertigo. Here in their first flowering are the signature elements of Sebald's hugely acclaimed novels The Emigrants and The Rings of Saturn. An unnamed narrator, beset by nervous ailments, is again our guide on a hair-raising journey through the past and across Europe, amid restless literary ghosts—Kafka, Stendhal, Casanova. In four dizzying sections, the narrator plunges the reader into vertigo, into that "swimming of the head," as Webster's defines it: in other words, into that state so unsettling, so fascinating, and so "stunning and strange," as The New York Times Book Review declared about The Emigrants, that it is "like a dream you want to last forever."

    After two years at the Russian front, Ernst Graeber finally receives three weeks’ leave. But since leaves have been canceled before, he decides not to write his parents, fearing he would just raise their hopes. Then, when Graeber arrives home, he finds his house bombed to ruin and his parents nowhere in sight. Nobody knows if they are dead or alive. As his leave draws to a close, Graeber reaches out to Elisabeth, a childhood friend. Like him, she is imprisoned in a world she did not create. But in a time of war, love seems a world away. And sometimes, temporary comfort can lead to something unexpected and redeeming. “The world has a great writer in Erich Maria Remarque. He is a craftsman of unquestionably first rank, a man who can bend language to his will. Whether he writes of men or of inanimate nature, his touch is sensitive, firm, and sure.”—The New York Times Book Review

    Though Samad attempts to persuade his mother to join them in Australia, she insists on remaining in Karachi even while Pakistan is facing turmoil. It's 1985. The mullahs and the generals are in control, and an insurgency is beginning in Kashmir. Meanwhile, Bilqis's servant girl, Mumtaz, enters a relationship with Omar, a young man caring for a neighboring house. Omar is an intense man who resents Pakistan's class system, and his frustration leads him to the freedom movement in Kashmir. But Mumtaz is in love and willing to sacrifice her honor to be with him. The intertwining stories of Bilqis, Samad, and Mumtaz offer a powerful and nuanced portrait of Pakistan in the modern era-a place of conflicting loyalties, rich with history and culture, and plagued by violence. Abidi's precise and elegant prose illuminates the struggle between a mother and son to reconcile their love for each other with their love for home.

    Adolf Hitler wakes up from a 66-year sleep in his subterranean Berlin bunker to find the Germany he knew entirely changed: Internet-driven media spreads ideas in minutes and fumes celebrity obsession; immigration has produced multicultural neighborhoods bringing together people of varying race, ethnicity, and religion; and the most powerful person in government is a woman. Hitler is immediately recognized . . . as an impersonator of uncommon skill. The public assumes the fulminating leader of the Nazi party is a performer who is always in character, and soon his inevitable viral appeal begets YouTube stardom, begets television celebrity on a Turkish-born comedian's show. His bigoted rants are mistaken for a theatrical satire--exposing prejudice and misrepresentation--and his media success emboldens Hitler to start his own political party and set the country he finds a shambles back to rights. With daring and dark humor, Look Who's Back skewers the absurdity and depravity of the cult of personality in modern media culture.

    Inside it is an old journal. Its writer, she discovers, was her father, a man who vanished mysteriously when Maya was an infant.As she reads through the brittle pages, his story is revealed — as is hers — but there's far more to this treasure than meets the eye. The journal presents a spiritual teaching he has developed specifically for her. As Maya delves into its wisdom, her life begins to change in remarkable ways...Across a rapidly changing physical and psychological landscape, Maya's journey becomes a cross-country adventure, She is swept up into a world of psychic visions, energy vortexes, secret government programs, and a spiritual underground that has revived an ancient meditation practice that may literally change the world. Along the way, Maya unravels the secrets of her past as she encounters the awesome power of a global change in the making.Waking Maya is a thrilling, wisdom-packed quest to understand the deepest principles of our reality.

    Millions of fans wept, while many critics claimed it was the inevitable result of a thugged-out lifestyle. The mystery surrounding the shooting-a suspect has yet to be named-has increased, and rumors of gang wars, disloyalty, and government conspiracies continue to linger. Only Frank Alexander, Tupac's bodyguard druing the last year of his life, knows the real story.Got Your Back details the exploits of one of the most famous rappers of all time. The drugs, the women, the violence, the money-all provided fuel to the fire that was Tupac's life. As his platinum-selling, posthumously released albums prove, Tupac lives on through his music. Complete with exclusive new interview material with Tupac's mother, Afeni, Got Your Back provides an insider's view of a life gone awry.

    A major hit in Germany that went on to become one of Europe’s biggest literary blockbusters in the last five years, Night Train to Lisbon is an astonishing novel, a compelling exploration of consciousness, the possibility of truly understanding another person, and the ability of language to define our very selves. Raimund Gregorius is a Latin teacher at a Swiss college who one day—after a chance encounter with a mysterious Portuguese woman—abandons his old life to start a new one. He takes the night train to Lisbon and carries with him a book by Amadeu de Prado, a (fictional) Portuguese doctor and essayist whose writings explore the ideas of loneliness, mortality, death, friendship, love, and loyalty. Gregorius becomes obsessed by what he reads and restlessly struggles to comprehend the life of the author. His investigations lead him all over the city of Lisbon, as he speaks to those who were entangled in Prado’s life. Gradually, the picture of an extraordinary man emerges—a doctor and poet who rebelled against Salazar’s dictatorship.

    Pur-sued by the police and drug traffickers the luckless Blum falls prey to the frenzied paranoia of the cocaine addict and dealer. This is a fast-paced thriller written with acerbic humour, a hardboiled evocation of drug-fuelled existence and a penetrating observation of those at the edge of German society.Having broken his addiction to on heroin at the age of thirty, Jörg Fauser spent much of the rest of his life dependent on alcohol. He died aged forty-three in 1987, run over by a truck at four am on a German highway.

    The novella tells the story of a day in the meticulously ordered life of bank security guard Jonathan Noel, who has been hiding from life since his wife left him for her Tunisian lover. When Jonathan opens his front door on a day he believes will be just like any other, he encounters not the desired empty hallway but an unwelcome, diabolical intruder . . .

    Once a year, when the famous New Year's Eve Ball takes place and guests from all over the world arrive, excitement returns to the vast hallways.Sophie, who works at the hotel as an intern, is busy making sure that everything goes according to plan. But unexpected problems keep arising, and some of the guests are not who they pretend to be. Very soon, Sophie finds herself right in the middle of a perilous adventure--and at risk of losing not only her job, but also her heart.

    The Claytons open a branch office of their business in Vienna, the center of that incredibly varied and complex universe that was the Austro-Hungarian Empire before World War I. Their ensuing social and personal entanglements furnish the materials of a superbly civilized family chronicle (quite the opposite from Sun & Moon's recent von Doderer novel, The Merowingians), whose central symbol is a gigantic, thundering mass of water -- a force that may be life-giving or terribly destructive. Beneath a staunchly bourgeois surface, von Doderer's story telling is heavily tinged with ironic social commentary and suffused with acute, post-Freudian psychology.

    Contains stories such as "The Goose Girl", "Hansel and Grethel", "Cinderella", "The Golden Goose", "The Frog Prince" and many more.

    At the war’s end, Frankfurt was a smoldering ruin, severely damaged by the Allied bombings. But that was two decades ago. Now it is 1963, and the city’s streets, once cratered are smooth and paved. Shiny new stores replace scorched rubble. Eager for her wealthy suitor, Jürgen Schoormann, to propose, Eva dreams of starting a new life away from her parents and sister. But Eva’s plans are turned upside down when a fiery investigator, David Miller, hires her as a translator for a war crimes trial.As she becomes more deeply involved in the Frankfurt Trials, Eva begins to question her family’s silence on the war and her future. Why do her parents refuse to talk about what happened? What are they hiding? Does she really love Jürgen and will she be happy as a housewife? Though it means going against the wishes of her family and her lover, Eva, propelled by her own conscience , joins a team of fiery prosecutors determined to bring the Nazis to justice—a decision that will help change the present and the past of her nation.

    These carpets are made from the hairs of wives and daughters; they are so detailed and fragile that each carpetmaker finishes only one single carpet in his entire lifetime.This art descends from father to son, since the beginning of time itself.But one day the empire of the God Emperor vanishes, and strangers begin to arrive from the stars to follow the trace of the hair carpets. What these strangers discover is beyond all belief, more than anything they could have ever imagined...Brought to the attention of Tor Books by Orson Scott Card, this edition of The Carpet Makers contains a special introduction by Orson Scott Card.