Surrounded by the magic of beautiful women and literature, a boy must endure the deprivations of war as he suffers the hardships of growing up. His sleepy country has just thrown off centuries of tyranny, but new waves of domination inundate his city. Through the boy's eyes, we see the terrors of World War II as he witnesses fascist invasions, allied bombings, partisan infighting, and the many faces of human cruelty as well as the simple pleasures of life. Evacuating to the countryside, he expects to find an ideal world full of extraordinary things but discovers instead an archaic backwater where a severed arm becomes a talisman and deflowered girls mysteriously vanish. Woven between the chapters of the boy's story are tantalizing fragments of the city's history. As the devastation mounts, the fragments lose coherence, and we perceive firsthand how the violence of war destroys more than just buildings and bridges.

    It includes the harrowing novella Dzahn ("Soul"), in which a young man returns to his Asian birthplace to find his people deprived not only of food and dwelling, but of memory and speech, and "The Potudan River," Platonov's most celebrated story.In December 2007 The Fierce and Beautiful World will be superseded by Soul (978-159017-254-4), a new translation of eight of Platonov's stories.

    DC Books' catalog primarily includes books in Malayalam literature, and also children's literature, poetry, reference, biography, self-help, yoga, management titles, and foreign translations.

    In them we find loneliness, love, and the passage of time, demonstrating the range and complexity of a true master of short fiction.

    For example, "No Panties Tuesday" started as a harmless school prank; I could never have predicted that by lunchtime I would be kneeling splay-legged on the headmaster's desk, his hand (innocently?) between my thighs just moments away from discovering my nakedness and arousal. And the day was only half over...

    The seven stories in this collection capture Bernhard’s distinct darkly comic voice and vision—often compared to Kafka and Musil—commenting on a corrupted world.            First published in German in 1967, these stories were written at the same time as Bernhard’s early novels Frost, Gargoyles, and The Lime Works, and they display the same obsessions, restlessness, and disarming mastery of language. Martin Chalmer’s outstanding translation, which renders the work in English for the first time, captures the essential personality of the work. The narrators of these stories lack the strength to do anything but listen and then write, the reader in turn becoming a captive listener, deciphering the traps laid by memory—and the mere words, the neverending words with which we try to pin it down. Words that are always close to driving the narrator crazy, but yet, as Bernhard writes “not completely crazy.” “Bernhard's glorious talent for bleak existential monologues is second only to Beckett's, and seems to have sprung up fully mature in his mesmerizing debut.”—From Publishers Weekly, on Frost  “The feeling grows that Thomas Bernhard is the most original, concentrated novelist writing in German. His connections . . . with the great constellation of Kafka, Musil, and Broch become ever clearer.” —George Steiner, Times Literary Supplement, on Gargoyles

    Seierstad traveled extensively through Serbia between 1999 and 2004, following the lives of people from across the political spectrum. Her moving and perceptive account follows nationalists, Titoists, Yugonostalgics, rock stars, fugitives, and poets. Seierstad brings her acclaimed attention to detail to bear on the lives of those whom she encounters in With Their Backs to the World, as she creates a kaleidoscopic portrait of a nation made up of so many different-and often conflicting-hopes, dreams, and points of view.

    His consummately wrought short stories, with their worlds of deep shadows and achieved clarity, are less familiar. The dozen stories of Stained Glass Elegies, selected by the author together with his translator, display the full range of Endo's talents in short fiction.

    During Csáth's lifetime Sigmund Freud, the scrutineer of dreams, built up the enormous hypothesis of the unconscious in Vienna, the greatest city of the empire, which encompassed Hungary, Csáth's homeland, more and more uneasy. It is difficult to read Csáth, a specialist in 'nervous disorders' himself, without thinking of Freud's analysis of the subtext of human experience.... [An] opium addict and therefore a specialist in dreams, [Csáth] wrote short stories comfortless as bad dreams, sometimes decorating them languorously with art-nouveau impedimenta of lilies, lotuses, and sulphurous magic, at other times relating them in the cool, neutral language of the case-book. He was also a doctor. No real contradiction here; the medical profession not only offers a free access to narcotics but often, since it involves considerable exposure to human suffering, implicity invites their use" - From the Introduction by Angela Carter"A memorable volume, Csáth's depiction of the collapse of Central Europe, by way of magnification of the collapse of the individual, is uncannily prophetic." - Joyce Carol Oates, The New Republic. Originally published under the title The Magician's Garden and Other Stories.

    Nabokov's protagonist, Smurov, is a lovelorn, excruciatingly self-conscious Russian émigré living in pre-war Berlin, who takes his own life after being humiliated by a jealous husband, only to suffer even greater indignities in the afterlife.

    The second half of his life, after World War II and the Nazi occupation, he has spent in one of those houses, being looked after by his wife and a nurse, in hiding. Now, on the last day of his life, Negoyan has decided to go out at last to see what he has wrought.Negoyan is one of the great characters in modern fiction, a charming monster of selfishness and self-delusion. And for all his failings, his life poses a question for the rest of us: Where in the modern world is there a home except in illusion?

    Some stories have won awards; some have been included in various 'Year's Best' anthologies; some have been well reviewed by critics and readers; and some are simply Ken's personal favorites. Many of the authors collected here (with the obvious exception of Liu Cixin) belong to the younger generation of 'rising stars'.In addition, three essays at the end of the book explore Chinese science fiction. Liu Cixin's essay, The Worst of All Possible Universes and The Best of All Possible Earths, gives a historical overview of SF in China and situates his own rise to prominence as the premier Chinese author within that context. Chen Qiufan's The Torn Generation gives the view of a younger generation of authors trying to come to terms with the tumultuous transformations around them. Finally, Xia Jia, who holds the first Ph.D. issued for the study of Chinese SF, asks What Makes Chinese Science Fiction Chinese?.

    Set at the time of the Spanish Inquisition in the fifteenth century, Rose of Fire tells the story of the origins of the mysterious labyrinthine library, the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, which lies at the heart of Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s novels The Shadow of the Wind, The Angel’s Game, and now The Prisoner of Heaven.

    

    And in places what poetry! . . . I still haven't recovered."More than a century and a half later, Nikolai Gogol's stories continue to delight readers the world over. Now a stunning new translation--from an award-winning team of translators--presents these stories in all their inventive, exuberant glory to English-speaking readers. For the first time, the best of Gogol's short fiction is brought together in a single volume: from the colorful Ukrainian tales that led some critics to call him "the Russian Dickens" to the Petersburg stories, with their black humor and wonderfully demented attitude toward the powers that be. All of Gogol's most memorable creations are here: the minor official who misplaces his nose, the downtrodden clerk whose life is changed by the acquisition of a splendid new overcoat, the wily madman who becomes convinced that a dog can tell him everything he needs to know.These fantastic, comic, utterly Russian characters have dazzled generations of readers and had a profound influence on writers such as Dostoevsky and Nabokov. Now they are brilliantly rendered in the first new translation in twenty-five years--one that is destined to become the definitive edition of Gogol's most important stories.Contains:-St. John's Eve-The Night Before Christmas-The Terrible Vengeance-Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka and His Aunt-Old World Landowners-Viy-The Story of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich-Nevsky Prospect-The Diary of a Madman-The Nose-The Carriage-The Portrait-The Overcoat