His aunt has recently committed suicide after losing her livestock in the foot-and-mouth epidemic and his uncle has turned, once again, to the bottle. The boy is an innocent, a spiritual savant; his uncle sees him as a shaman. An unwitting repository of folk memory, he is a boy from the margins: barely educated but possessed of extraordinary insights; barely literate but able to speak a language of his own - a poetry laden with Pagan and Christian myth. He is unaware that he is gifted, unaware of what he knows in general - which is probably for the best since the enormity of his knowledge, were it to be understood, would crush him. During one of his ecstatic trances the boy learns that he has an appointed role in the world, which he must discover for himself. During an episode of brutal and climactic violence, he does exactly that. Told through the boy's internal monologue of beauty and damage, "Runt" is a powerful, disturbing and moving novel that reinvigorates the language of fiction and illuminates domestic tragedy with a penetrating epic light.

    Traveling from his rural home in Freshwind to the city of Xi’an, Happy brings only an eternally positive attitude, his devoted best friend Wufu, and a pair of high-heeled women’s shoes he hopes to fill with the love of his life.In Xi’an, Happy and Wufu find jobs as trash pickers sorting through the city’s filth, but Happy refuses to be deterred by inauspicious beginnings. In his eyes, dusty birds become phoenixes, the streets become rivers, and life is what you make of it. When he meets the beautiful Yichun, he imagines she is the one to fill the shoes and his Cinderella-esque dream. But when the harsh city conditions and the crush of societal inequalities take the life of his friend and shake Happy to his soul, he’ll need more than just his unrelenting optimism to hold on to the belief that something better is possible.

    Seventeen-year-old Roddy, on the other hand, is a faltering student, and occasional shoplifter trying to make sense of his life. Their worlds collide one hot August afternoon when a fake robbery organised by Roddy and his friend Mike goes horribly wrong, leaving Isla with a bullet lodged in her spine. With Roddy 'immobilised' in gaol and Isla lying paralysed in the hospital, they both have lots of time to reflect upon where it all went wrong.

    With her newest collection, Nelson once again proves herself worthy of her stellar reputation, delivering seven taut, striking stories and a brilliant novella, all exploring the tensions of troubled family relations.Nelson is an extraordinary chronicler of the fraught relationships between parents and children and husbands and wives. With her particular understanding of the threats and vulnerabilities of wild adolescence, as well as the complicated, persistent love that often lies dormant beneath the drama of rebellion, she illuminates the hidden corners of her characters' lives.The shy, shoplifting sixteen-year-old protagonist in the title novella is trying to understand how to become an adult while going through a year of family disaster. We watch as she dabbles in the same adult behaviors that so repulse her about her parents (binge drinking, sex) while maintaining so much of her adolescent insecurity and confusion. "Dick" is a moving story about a mother who, having lost her daughter to the vicissitudes of adolescence, has a compulsion to protect her innocent, preadolescent son from the aggressive and encroaching post-9/11 adult world. The homeless teen at the heart of "Eminent Domain" is a pampered Houston rich girl who has, for her own reasons, taken to the streets.Radiating an emotional intensity that unifies the entire collection, each of Nelson's stories both captivates and unnerves. As her characters run the gauntlet of often bewildering family tensions and trauma, she alternates hope and despair, resentment and love, in perfectly recognizable proportions.Weaving wonderful observation with quick wit and striking insight, "Some Fun" is a timely and provocative inventory of the state of family in America -- and proof of why Nelson is one of the most important writers at work today.

    The town, from midnight to six, marked out in headlights and the flash-fire of a culture in War-time. Séance-messages written in the patterns of the road signs, and ghost-transmissions scrambled into the background noise of the traffic. Animal scent-signals from the fried food stands. All describing something, buried under the tarmac and the street-geometry.Down there, a girl in a fake-bone mask is working on a ritual to bring it to the surface. A popular performing artiste with a navel stud and serious identity problems is finding herself stalked — literally — by her own image. An ambulance crewman is about to find his own way of getting involved in the War.And bringing them all together, in one neat little urban mythology, there's Faction Paradox - part cult, part subculture, part pop phenomenon, and part criminal syndicate, either watching-without-being-seen or simply not existing at all (at least until someone invents it). Assuming they're not wholly imaginary, the archons of the Faction seem like the only ones who know what this town really is - what every town really is — and what's bound to happen when it wakes up.

    Squirting across the sunburned landscape of Southern California, Body High is a journey marked by misplaced lust, mistaken fathers, lost semen, and the kidnapping of a sperm bank daughter, whose untainted kidneys may hold the key to redemption or, perhaps, the realization of its impossibility.

    A devastating wrong is done to her when she opposes a family scheme and her response is a battle cry of astounding violence and beauty.As haunting as Shirley Jackson or Thomas Bernhard, as enthralling as Nabokov or Joyce, Leland de la Durantaye's debut novel is a radical departure from contemporary storytelling. At once the story of a terrific act of vengeance and of a lifelong love, Hannah Versus the Tree, presents a new literary genre, the mythopoetic thriller.

    Here she marries a man who has survived a different war. He promises understanding and guidance, but the psychic consequences of his past soon hinder his relationships with the family. The children, for whom war is now a distant shadow, struggle to understand the world around them on their own terms.Strom’s characters viscerally experience the collision of cultures and the spiritual aftermath of war. Grass Roof, Tin Roof is a beautiful work of profundity and empathy, powerful emotion and rare insight.

    In their long-time talks, the former eunuch told his young friend lots of inside stories about the "last emperor" and the royal family. Sun allowed Jia to record these stories with a tape-recorder and a video-tape-recorder.Jia had already published the Chinese edition of the eunuch's biography and a Japanese-language edition.So far, Jia has written six books on the royal family. Jia said he wanted to translate his books into major foreign languages to help foreign readers better understand the history of China.(Xinhua News Agency February 28, 2009)http://www.china.org.cn/books&mag...Los Angeles Times Review - "Biography of last Chinese eunuch reveals a tumultuous life"http://www.latimes.com/news/nationwor...New Phoenix Intl LlcForeign Language Teaching &Foreign Language Teaching and Research P

    Encountering the wider world for the first time, the reluctant hero falls into a destructive love affair, is swept up into a fanatical religious movement, and finds himself a witness to racial hatred unlike anything he’s ever known. The boatmaker is tempted, beaten, and betrayed: his journey marked by chilling episodes of violence and horror while he struggles to summon the strength to make his own way. The Boatmaker is a fable for our times, a passionate love story, and an odyssey of self-discovery.

    In the story, a mother takes extreme measures to provide her four mentally disabled children with a normal life. She feeds them a medicinal soup made from the bones of her dead husband when she finds out that bones 'the closer from kin the better' can cure their illness. When she runs out of her husband's bones, she resorts to a measure that only a mother can take.

    After remaining hidden for more than 65 years, the story "Life in Provincetown" and the original, unedited version of "Marcel" were discovered after five copies were illegally printed in 1950 and sold to private collectors. Prime Nin erotica in its original form.

    Three epic Tank Girl stories, collected in one digest-sized volume!Tank Girl's back with a bang - and a helluva spine - in this Booga's-pouched-sized collection of three insane adventures!

    China's top martial arts novelist tells a thrilling story of an infamous bandit who allegedly kills without blinking, accentuated with a problematical romance filled with moral dilemmas.

    Their friendship, deepened through a love of basketball, becomes an obsession for Owen who is desperate to avoid the growing trouble at home between his parents. When Owen's father is arrested for a shocking and unexpected crime, his family is torn apart, and Owen's anger and fear are carefully manipulated by Carson’s mercurial and increasingly dangerous personality. Owen, who has fallen in love with Carson's beautiful but troubled sister, quickly finds himself caught up in a complex web of lies that threatens his once promising future.