So when he meets a down-at-heel stranger in the park one day and finds himself being accused of ruining the man's life, he half believes it.

    Told from the viewpoints of three different women, this is a story of the psychological impact of illicit love. First viewed through the eyes of Shoko, who learns of the affair through reading her mother's diary, then through the eyes of Midori, who had long known about the affair of her husband with Saiko, and finally through the eyes of Saiko herself.

    It is based in a prodigious imagination, a very curious sense of humor and a rare command of irony.The short stories included are:- Gogol's Wife- Pastoral- Dialogue on the Greater Harmonies- The Two Old Maids- Wedding Night- The Death of the King of France- Giovanni and His Wife- Sunstroke- A Romantic's Letter on Gambling

    The maid comes to the bedroom to clean. She inevitably forgets something -- the soap, fresh sheets, a bucket -- or does something wrong. The master has had a nightmare he can't quite recall that had something to do with when he was in school: lectures, or was it lechers? No matter, the maid must be reprimanded for her neglect, and out comes the handy paraphernalia -- a hairbrush, a cat-o'-nine-tails, a rod, a cane -- and the spanking begins.Included in Harold Bloom's The Western Canon and named by Daphne Merkin in The New Yorker as one of her "favorite" S/M books, Spanking the Maid is a spare, tantalizing, and perfect book by an American master.

    But Bunin's other stories and novellas are not to be missed. Over the last several years a great many of them have been freshly and brilliantly translated by Graham Hettlinger. Together, along with four new pieces, they are now published in a one-volume paperback collection of Bunin's greatest writings. In Mr. Hettlinger's renderings readers will see why Bunin was regarded by many of his contemporaries as the rightful successor to Tolstoy and Chekhov as a master of Russian letters.

    Life was absurd, and nobody truly understood anybody else. Even his friends tend to agree that Barney is a 'wife-abuser, an intellectual fraud, a purveyor of pap, a drunk with a penchant for violence and probably a murderer'. But when his sworn enemy threatens to publish this calumny, Barney is driven to write his own memoirs, rewinding the spool of his life, editing, selecting and plagiarising, as his memory plays tricks on him - and on the reader. Ebullient and perverse, he has seen off 3 wives - the enigmatic Clara, whom he drove to suicide in Paris in 1952; the garrulous Second Mrs Panofsky; and finally Miriam who stayed married to him for decades before running off with a sober academic. Houdini-like, Barney slides from crisis to success, from lowlife to highlife in Montreal, Paris and London, his outrageous expolits culminating in the scandal he carries around like a humpback - the murder charge that he goes on denying to the end.

    Exceptional for their range in mood and situation, these four novels are unparalleled exhibitions of a poetic beauty that is uniquely Duras.

    Through him Marquand reveals lives of quiet desperation lived by successful people with the "right" background. A deft dissection of the Ivy League milieu and an absorbing read.

    Set against the political upheavals of Italy in the 1860s, it focuses on Don Fabrizio, a Sicilian prince of immense sensual appetites, wealth, and great personal magnetism. Around this powerful figure swirls a glittering array of characters: a Bourbon king, liberals and pseudo liberals, peasants and millionaires.

    Readers of J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace, Bernhard Schlink's The Reader and Kafka will be captivated by Brodeck.Forced into a brutal concentration camp during a great war, Brodeck returns to his village at the war’s end and takes up his old job of writing reports for a governmental bureau. One day a stranger comes to live in the village. His odd manner and habits arouse suspicions: His speech is formal, he takes long, solitary walks, and although he is unfailingly friendly and polite, he reveals nothing about himself. When the stranger produces drawings of the village and its inhabitants that are both unflattering and insightful, the villagers murder him. The authorities who witnessed the killing tell Brodeck to write a report that is essentially a whitewash of the incident. As Brodeck writes the official account, he sets down his version of the truth in a separate, parallel narrative. In measured, evocative prose, he weaves into the story of the stranger his own painful history and the dark secrets the villagers have fiercely kept hidden.

    Her mother, grandmother and great-grandmother are overjoyed, because the birth of a healthy boy means that the curse against the women of the family has been broken. They tell Amal the story of those "foremothers": Mazal, the orphan, whose ill-fated marriage initiates the curse; her daughter Sara, whose golden hair is a symbol for her power to heal; Sara's daughter Pnina-Mazal, the unwanted child whose talent for knowing others' thoughts brings both joy and sorrow; and her daughter Geula, Amal's mother, whose sharp intellect is her gift and her burden.

    Across the chessboard of Europe, from the German plains to the flourishing Dutch cities and down to Venice, the gateway to the East, our hero, a 'Survivor', a radical Protestant Anabaptist who goes under many names, and his enemy, a loyal papal spy and heretic hunter known mysteriously as "Q" play a game in which no moves are forbidden and the true size of the stakes remain hidden until the end. What begins as a personal struggle to reveal each other's identity becomes a mission that can only end in death.

    He’s carrying a briefcase whose contents he’s selling to a representative from the Vatican; the briefcase contains a wealth of information about the violent history of the Zone—the lands of the Mediterranean basin, Spain, Algeria, Lebanon, Italy, that have become Mirković’s specialty.Over the course of a single night, Mirković visits the sites of these tragedies in his memory and recalls the damage that his own participation in that violence—as a soldier fighting for Croatia during the Balkan Wars—has wreaked in his own life. Mirkovic´ hopes that this night will be his last in the Zone, that this journey will expiate his sins, and that he can disappear with Sashka, the only woman he hasn’t abandoned, forever . . .One of the truly original books of the decade—and written as a single, hypnotic, propulsive, physically irresistible sentence—Mathias Énard’s Zone provides an extraordinary and panoramic view of the turmoil that has long deviled the shores of the Mediterranean.

    It's the tale of Bobby Pickens, assistant manager of Sonny Boy Bargain Store, who gains a new lease on life, though he almost comes to regret it. Bobby's handsome half brother F.X.-ex-con, ex-actor, and ex-husband three times over-moves in, and things go awry all over town. Mistaken identities; entangled romances with Burma, Toinette, and Donna Lee; assault and battery; charges of degeneracy; a nervous breakdown-it all comes to a head at a Christmas Eve party in a cabin on a poisoned swamp. This is sly, madcap romp that offers readers the gift of abundant laughter.

    Traveling through Italy and France, Camenzind is increasingly disillusioned by the suffering he discovers around him; after failed romances and a tragic friendship, his idealism fades into crushing hopelessness. He finds peace again only when he cares for Boppi, an invalid who renews Camenzind's love for humanity and inspires him once again to find joy in the smallest details of every life.