an occasion for renewing our appreciation for Boll's genius" — Booklist"Terrifically on target with its series of tragic, ascetically drawn tableaux. a great document." — Kirkus

    Their quest: to track down the obscure, vanished poet Cesárea Tinajero. A violent showdown in the Sonora desert turns search to flight; twenty years later Belano and Lima are still on the run.The explosive first long work by “the most exciting writer to come from south of the Rio Grande in a long time” (Ilan Stavans, Los Angeles Times), The Savage Detectives follows Belano and Lima through the eyes of the people whose paths they cross in Central America, Europe, Israel, and West Africa. This chorus includes the muses of visceral realism, the beautiful Font sisters; their father, an architect interned in a Mexico City asylum; a sensitive young follower of Octavio Paz; a foul-mouthed American graduate student; a French girl with a taste for the Marquis de Sade; the great-granddaughter of Leon Trotsky; a Chilean stowaway with a mystical gift for numbers; the anorexic heiress to a Mexican underwear empire; an Argentinian photojournalist in Angola; and assorted hangers-on, detractors, critics, lovers, employers, vagabonds, real-life literary figures, and random acquaintances.A polymathic descendant of Borges and Pynchon, Roberto Bolaño traces the hidden connection between literature and violence in a world where national boundaries are fluid and death lurks in the shadow of the avant-garde. The Savage Detectives is a dazzling original, the first great Latin American novel of the twenty-first century.

    It remains as chilling and incisive today as it was at the time of its controversial debut. As World War II draws to a close, anti-Semitism is alive and well in Brooklyn, New York. Here, Newman, an American of English descent, floats through a world of multiethnic neighborhoods indifferent to the racism around him. That is, until he begins wearing glasses that render him "Jewish" in the eyes of others, making him the target of anti-Semitic persecution. As he and his wife find friendship and support from a Jewish immigrant, Newman slowly begins to understand the racial hatreds that surround him. "A strong, sincere book bursting with indignation." (The New York Times Book Review)

    Chastened and stifled by her marriage of convenience to a man twice her age, the young Katerina Lvovna goes yawning about the house, missing the barefoot freedom of her childhood, until she meets the feckless steward Sergei Filipych. Sergei proceeds to seduce Katerina, as he has done half the women in the town, not realizing that her passion, once freed, will attach to him so fiercely that Katerina will do anything to keep hold of him. Journalist and prose writer Nikolai Leskov is known for his powerful characterizations and the quintessentially Russian atmosphere of his stories.

    For Jim Nashe, it all started when he came into a small inheritance and left Boston in pusuit of "a life of freedom." Careening back and forth across the United States, waiting for the money to run out, Nashe met Jack Pozzi, a young man with a temper and a plan. With Nashe's last funds, they entered a poker game against two rich eccentrics, "risking everything on the single turn of a card." In Paul Auster's world of fiendish bargains and punitive whims, where chance is a shifting and powerful force, there is redemption, nonetheless, in Nashe's resolute quest for justice and his capacity for love.

    Written in the form of a diary by the leader of a group of five revolutionaries, the novel provides a straightforward and clinical account of the assassination and contains daring and vivid descriptions of the revolutionary underground and political conspiracy. Savinkov gives free reign to his dramatic impulses, the “inner feelings” of the conspirators, and the moral dimension of the plot. The book caused an immediate sensation both in Russia and abroad. Translated from Russian by Michael Katz, Pale Horse explores the psychological basis of terrorism and political adventurism.

    Includes: The Castle; The Trial; Metamorphosis and Other StoriesAlternate edition of ISBN-13: 9781840227260

    Four works by great 19th-century Russian author - "The Nose," a savage satire of Russia's incompetent bureaucrats; "Old-Fashioned Farmers," a pleasant depiction of an elderly couple living in rustic seclusion; "The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarrelled with Ivan Nikiforovich," one of Gogol's most famous comic stories; and "The Overcoat," widely considered a masterpiece of form.

    He is opposed by Niels Nielsen, a melancholy intellectual who hurls invective at the dictator and the hypocrisy and moral bankruptcy of society. Barutanski himself despises the sycophants beneath him and recognizes in Nielsen a genuine foe; but Nielsen, haunted by his own lapses of conscience, struggles to escape both the regime and the role of opposition leader that is thrust upon him.Miroslav Krleza is considered one of the most important Central European authors of the twentieth century. In his career he was a poet, playwright, screenwriter, novelist, essayist, journalist, and travel writer. He also suffered condemnation as a leftist and a practitioner of modernism and his books were proscribed in the 1930s. The first two books of the trilogy The Banquet in Blitva were written in the thirties and their comments on political, psychological, artistic, and ethical issues earned him the enmity of Yugoslavia's increasingly fascist government. He did not write and publish the third book in the trilogy until 1962.

    As the book cinematically moves from one character's perspective to another, events and characters move toward the convergence of the wedding--and a haunting dance of love and death.

    Just thirty, with a well-paid job, depression and no love life, the narrator and anti-hero par excellence of this grim, funny, and clever novel smokes four packs of cigarettes a day and writes weird animal stories in his spare time.Houellebecq's debut novel is painfully realistic portrayal of the vanishing freedom of a world governed by science and by the empty rituals of daily life.

    The speaker is David Kepesh, white-haired and over sixty, an eminent TV culture critic and star lecturer at a New York college - as well as an articulate propagandist of the sexual revolution. For years he has made a practice of sleeping with adventurous female students while maintaining an aesthete's critical distance. But now that distance has been annihilated.The agency of Kepesh's undoing is Consuela Castillo, the decorous, humblingly beautiful twenty-four-year-old daughter of Cuban exiles. When he becomes involved with her, Kepesh finds himself dragged helplessly into the quagmire of sexual jealousy and loss. In chronicling the themes of eros and mortality, licence and repression, freedom and sacrifice. The Dying Animal is a burning coal of a book, filled with intellectual heat and not a little danger.

    One of the results of its publication in the West was Pasternak's complete rejection by Soviet authorities; when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958 he was compelled to decline it. The book quickly became an international best-seller.Dr. Yury Zhivago, Pasternak's alter ego, is a poet, philosopher, and physician whose life is disrupted by the war and by his love for Lara, the wife of a revolutionary. His artistic nature makes him vulnerable to the brutality and harshness of the Bolsheviks. The poems he writes constitute some of the most beautiful writing featured in the novel.

    Ravi , son of a peasant, joins in the general exodus to the city, and, floating through the indifferent streets, lands into the underworld of petty criminals. He falls in love with pretty Nalini, and marries her against all odds. She tries to change his way of life but fate conspires against him . . And the story moves to a memorable and a haunting climax. MEDIA REVIEWS:From among the handful of Indo-Anglian women novelists, Kamala Markandaya stands out as one of the3 finest and most impassionate writers of fiction. Her greatest asset is her language - virile, vibrant and vigorous - with the right choice and turn of words and expressions. A Handful of Rice certainly makes an absorbing and enjoyable reading. - Sunday StandardThe picture of a joint family with its many psychological stresses and strains is deftly drawn, and so is the picture of the shady underworld. The novel is, in a sense, a saga of the triumph of human spirit over poverty's privations and predicaments. - The Indian PENAn overwhelmingly real book. It is about those parts of us, as human beings, which are permanent and universal - love, hunger, lust, passion, ambition, sacrifice, death. She is the best writer now writing who generally uses an Indian background. - John Masters

    Inexpensive and collectible, they are the first single-volume publications of these classic tales, offering a closer look at this underappreciated literary form and providing a fresh take on the world's most celebrated authors.