Two roughneck hockey players are kicked off the team and forced to join the drama club. A young bartender at a party of coastal aristocrats has to deal with the surreal request to put a rich old coot out of his misery. Can a father defend his family if the diver helping to free the tangled propeller of their boat turns out to be a real threat?With humor, a piercing eye, and a sense that danger often lies just around the corner, Robinson gives us a variety of vivid characters, wealthy and poor, delinquent and romantic, while illuminating the mythic, universal implications of so-called ordinary life. These stories are at once classic and modern; taken together, they bring the good news that an important, compassionate new voice in American fiction has arrived.

    VERA & LINUS is a series of short sketches. The book's theme is the love between the two protagonists, Vera and Linus. They are mischief makers and tricksters of the most daring sort, and they are constantly up to no good, but the language holds them with a clear restraint, a restraint born perhaps out of the peculiar nature of their love, a love both for each other and the things of the world. Their mastery, and shifting natures allow them to compel the workaday world as they see it, but not to rule over each other, and so their game begins, as Vera struggles to outwit Linus, and Linus to outwit Vera.

    

    Oddly alienated from the tenants, he is seduced by their pets, who are determined to revolt against humans and human society.

    Discussing everything from the leveling of the Twin Towers to the death of the sole survivor of that extraordinary match between British and German soldiers in 1915, one of South America’s greatest commentators issues forth on robotic soccer in Japan, the mass-production of the game as a sign of the decline of civilization, the amazing success of Senegal and Turkey, and how Nike beat Adidas.

    In the brutality of his honesty, Mr. Gutierrez reminds one of Jean Genet and Charles Bukowski.” —New York TimesDirty Havana Trilogy chronicles the misadventures of Pedro Juan, a former journalist now living hand to mouth in and around Cuba, half disgusted and half fascinated by the depths to which he has sunk. Collecting garbage, peddling marijuana or black-market produce, clearing undesirables off the streets, whoring himself, begging, sacrificing to the santos, Pedro Juan scrapes by under the shadow of hunger—all the while surviving through the escapist pursuit of sex. Pedro Juan’s unsentimental, mocking, yet sympathetic eye captures a shocking underbelly of today’s Cuba.Banned in Cuba but celebrated throughout the Spanish speaking world, Gutierrez’s picaresque novel is a fierce, loving tribute to Havana and the defiant, desperate way of life that flourishes amid its decay.

    How did he allow the other person to die? How did he help the other person to hang himself to death? He was terribly upset about this. The moment his eyes saw a rope in any form he used to remember everything.........

    His writing is at once comic and tragic as it explores the loneliness of life and disintegration of civilization.

    Now available in paperback, this highly-acclaimed book is a playful and ingenious gathering of interwoven stories. "At once terribly moving and wildly funny".--A.S. Byatt.

    Bonsai is accessible yet profound—as one critic in Chile’s Capital newspaper put it, “Brief as a sigh and forceful as a blow.”

    

    A girl sins and expects a thunder to strike her. Two grown up souls in the rain. The twist of heart of a heartbreak motel’s founder. A doctor prescribes daily dose of “I love you”s to cure Alzheimer. A boy gets hit by Ugg boots multiple times. A chocolate prince turns to ice. The ocean girl and her secret meetings with the desert boys mother.

    In these stories Highsmith is at her most scathing as she draws out the mystery and menace of her once ordinary subject.

    But then again, there aren't many writers with such irrepressible genius as John Fante.The John Fante Reader is the important next step in the reintroduction of this influential author to modern audiences. Combining excerpts from his novels and stories, as well as his never-before-published letters, this collection is the perfect primer on the work of a writer -- underappreciated in his time -- who is finally taking his place in the pantheon of twentieth-century American writers.

    He is a peculiar hero—bald since birth, intellectually and sexually precocious as a child, as a man passionate and warmhearted. He is also orgasmically clairvoyant, given at the moment of carnal release to apocalyptic visions of a world that he comes to recognize as the future. As he tries to reconcile the sanguine promises of the Enlightenment with the chilling prophecies of his visions, he comes to know virtually every important figure of his time: Diderot, Voltaire, Madame de Pompadour, Boucher, Lavoisier, the young Mozart, Hume, Rousseau, Robespierre, and Goya. But it is his love for a beautiful young widow from Mexico that transforms him and ultimately moves Rasero toward the wisdom he has long sought. In his prodigious first novel, Francisco Rebolledo brings to life a heady mix of eighteenth-century politics, desire, philosophy, science, and art, showing us in this vanished world, with all its contradictions and sorrows, a troubled counterpart to our own.