The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr


E.T.A. Hoffmann - 1819
    T. A. Hoffmann (1776-1822) who first explored many of the themes and techniques which were later used by writers from Dickens to Dostoyevsky, Poe to Kafka, Baudelaire to Marquez. His career reached a glorious climax in The Tomcat Murr, perhaps the strangest novel of the nineteenth century.. "Hoffmann was a follower of Cervantes and Sterne, a pioneering 'magic realist', fascinated by Gothic horror, extreme mental states and supernatural events occurring within sharply (and sometimes satirically) rendered social settings. A talented composer and painter, he portrayed himself in the guise of Johannes Kreisler - the hypochondriac, antisocial and moody but brilliant musician. In this astonishing book, a vain and very bourgeois tomcat sets out to write his memoirs, using a biography of Kreisler as a blotting pad. By a printer's error, the two lives get spliced together into a bizarre double narrative. A supreme example of literary bravado, The Tomcat Murr is also shot through with the warmth, humanity and almost uncanny ability to captivate his readers which make Hoffmann the greatest of German story-tellers.

The Double


José Saramago - 2002
    He is divorced, involved in a rather one-sided relationship with a bank clerk, and he is depressed. To lift his depression, a colleague suggests he rent a certain video. Tertuliano watches the film and is unimpressed. During the night, noises in his apartment wake him. He goes into the living room to find that the VCR is replaying the video, and as he watches in astonishment, he sees an actor who looks exactly like him - or, more specifically, exactly like the man he was five years before, moustachioed and fuller in the face. He sleeps badly.Against his own better judgement, Tertuliano decides to pursue his double. As he establishes the man's identity, what begins as a whimsical story becomes a dark meditation on identity and, perhaps, on the crass assumptions behind cloning - that we are merely our outward appearance rather than the sum of our experiences.

People in the Room


Norah Lange - 1950
    Intrigued, she begins to watch them. She imagines them as accomplices to an unknown crime, as troubled spinsters contemplating suicide, or as players in an affair with dark and mysterious consequences.Lange’s imaginative excesses and almost hallucinatory images make this uncanny exploration of desire, domestic space, voyeurism and female isolation a twentieth-century masterpiece. Too long viewed as Borges’s muse, Lange is today recognised in the Spanish-speaking world as a great writer and is here translated into English for the first time, to be read alongside Virginia Woolf, Clarice Lispector and Marguerite Duras.

Signs Preceding the End of the World


Yuri Herrera - 2009
    Yuri Herrera does not simply write about the border between Mexico and the United States and those who cross it. He explores the crossings and translations people make in their minds and language as they move from one country to another, especially when there’s no going back.Traversing this lonely territory is Makina, a young woman who knows only too well how to survive in a violent, macho world. Leaving behind her life in Mexico to search for her brother, she is smuggled into the USA carrying a pair of secret messages – one from her mother and one from the Mexican underworld.

Rituals


Cees Nooteboom - 1980
    But his inconsistencies are interrupted when he meets two men who are the epitome of order and regulation.

The Beautiful Mrs. Seidenman


Andrzej Szczypiorski - 1986
    With these, and a set of false papers, she has slipped out of the ghetto, passing as the wife of a Polish officer, until one day an informer spots her on the street and drags her off to the Gestapo. At times a dark lament, at others a sly and sardonic thriller, The Beautiful Mrs. Seidenman is the story of the thirty-six hours that follow Irma's arrest and the events that lead to her dramatic rescue as the last of Warsaw's Jews are about to meet their deaths in the burning ghetto.

Little Eyes


Samanta Schweblin - 2018
    They're following you. They're everywhere now. They're us.In Samanta Schweblin's wildly imaginative new novel, Little Eyes, "kentukis" have gone viral across the globe. They're little mechanical stuffed animals that have cameras for eyes, wheels for feet, and are connected to an anonymous global server. Owners of kentukis have the eyes of a stranger in their home and a cute squeaking pet following them; or you can be the kentuki and voyeuristically spend time in someone else's life, controlling the creature with a few keystrokes. Through kentukis, a jaded Croatian hustler stumbles into a massive criminal enterprise and saves a life in Brazil, a lonely old woman in Peru becomes fascinated with a young woman and her louche lover in Germany, and a motherless child in Antigua finds a new virtual family and experiences snow for the first time in Norway.These creatures can reveal the beauty of connection between farflung souls - but they also expose the ugly humanity of our increasingly linked world. Trusting strangers can lead to unexpected love and marvelous adventure, but what happens when the kentukis pave the way for unimaginable terror?

Spring Torrents


Ivan Turgenev - 1872
    Convinced that nothing can come in the way of everlasting happiness with his fiancee, Dimitry impetuously decides to begin a new life and sell his Russian estates. But when he meets the potential buyer, the intriguing Madame Polozov, his youthful vulnerability makes him prey for a darker, destructive infatuation. A novel of haunting beauty, "Spring Torrents" (1870-1) is a fascinating, partly autobiographical account of one of Turgenev's favourite themes - a man's inability to love without losing his innocence and becoming enslaved to obsessive passions.

Some Prefer Nettles


Jun'ichirō Tanizaki - 1928
    Misako's father believes their relationship has been damaged by the influence of a new and alien culture, and so attempts to heal the breach by educating his son-in-law in the time-honoured Japanese traditions of aesthetic and sensual pleasure. The result is an absorbing, chilling conflict between ancient and modern, young and old.

Blue of Noon


Georges Bataille - 1935
    One of Bataille’s overtly political works, it explores the ambiguity of sex as a subversive force, bringing violence, power, and death together in a terrifying unity.

Beauty Salon


Mario Bellatin - 1994
    Bellatin’s work, Beauty Salon is pithy, allegorical and profoundly disturbing, with a plot that evokes The Plague by Camus or Blindness by José Saramago."--New York Times"Including a few details that may linger uncomfortably with the reader for a long time, this is contemporary naturalism as disturbing as it gets."--BooklistA strange plague appears in a large city. Rejected by family and friends, some of the sick have nowhere to finish out their days until a hair stylist decides to offer refuge. He ends up converting his beauty shop, which he’s filled with tanks of exotic fish, into a sort of medieval hospice. As his “guests” continue to arrive and to die, his isolation becomes more and more complete in this dream-hazy parable by one of Mexico’s cutting-edge literary stars.Mario Bellatin, the author of numerous short novels, was born in Mexico City in 1960. In 2000, Beauty Salon was nominated for the Médicis Prize for best novel translated into French. This is its first translation into English.

God's Bits of Wood


Ousmane Sembène - 1960
    Sembène Ousmane, in this vivid and moving novel, evinces all of the colour, passion and tragedy of those decisive years in the history of West Africa.'Ever since they left Thiès, the women had not stopped singing. As soon as one group allowed the refrain to die, another picked it up, and new verses were born at the hazard of chance or inspiration, one word leading to another and each finding, in its turn, its rhythm and its place. No one was very sure any longer where the song began, or if it had an ending. It rolled out over its own length, like the movement of a serpent. It was as long as a life.'

Joseph and His Brothers


Thomas Mann - 1943
    He conceived of the four parts–The Stories of Jacob, Young Joseph, Joseph in Egypt, and Joseph the Provider–as a unified narrative, a “mythological novel” of Joseph’s fall into slavery and his rise to be lord over Egypt. Deploying lavish, persuasive detail, Mann conjures for us the world of patriarchs and pharaohs, the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Palestine, and the universal force of human love in all its beauty, desperation, absurdity, and pain. The result is a brilliant amalgam of humor, emotion, psychological insight, and epic grandeur.Now the award-winning translator John E. Woods gives us a definitive new English version of Joseph and His Brothers that is worthy of Mann’s achievement, revealing the novel’s exuberant polyphony of ancient and modern voices, a rich music that is by turns elegant, coarse, and sublime.--front flap

Billiards at Half-Past Nine


Heinrich Böll - 1959
    After being drawn into the Second World War to command retreating German forces despite his anti-Nazi feelings, Faehmel struggles to re-establish a normal life at the end of the war. He adheres to a rigorous schedule, including a daily game of billiards. When his routine is breached by an old friend from his past, now a power in German reconstruction, Faehmel is forced to confront both public and private memories.

A Dry White Season


André P. Brink - 1979
    A simple, apolitical man, he believes in the essential fairness of the South African government and its policies—until the sudden arrest and subsequent "suicide" of a black janitor from Du Toit's school. Haunted by new questions and desperate to believe that the man's death was a tragic accident, Du Toit undertakes an investigation into the terrible affair—a quest for the truth that will have devastating consequences for the teacher and his family, as it draws him into a lethal morass of lies, corruption, and murder.