A German cruise ship turned refugee carrier, it was attacked by a Soviet submarine in January 1945. Some 9,000 people went down in the Baltic Sea, making it the deadliest maritime disaster of all time. Born to an unwed mother on a lifeboat the night of the attack, Paul Pokriefke is a middle-aged journalist trying to piece together the tragic events. While his mother sees her whole existence in terms of that calamitous moment, Paul wishes their life could have been less touched by the past. For his teenage son, who dabbles in the dark, far-right corners of the Internet, the Gustloff embodies the denial of Germany's wartime suffering. "Scuttling backward to move forward," Crabwalk is at once a captivating tale of a tragedy at sea and a fearless examination of the ways different generations of Germans now view their past.Winner of the Nobel Prize

    A “luminous parable...a masterpiece” (New York Times Book Review). Translated by Geoffrey Skelton. Illustrations. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book

    The red-headed prostitute Rosina; the junk-dealer Aaron Wassertrum; puppeteers; street musicians; and a deaf-mute silhouette artist.Lurking in its inhabitants’ subconscious is the Golem, a creature of rabbinical myth. Supposedly a manifestation of all the suffering of the ghetto, it comes to life every 33 years in a room without a door. When the jeweller Athanasius Pernath, suffering from broken dreams and amnesia, sees the Golem, he realises to his terror that the ghostly man of clay shares his own face...The Golem, though rarely seen, is central to the novel as a representative of the ghetto's own spirit and consciousness, brought to life by the suffering and misery that its inhabitants have endured over the centuries. Perhaps the most memorable figure in the story is the city of Prague itself, recognisable through its landmarks such as the Street of the Alchemists and the Castle.

    His only friends are his neighbour,Åsleik, a traditional fisherman-farmer, and Beyer, a gallerist who lives in the city. There, in Bjørgvin, lives another Asle,also a painter but lonely and consumed by alcohol. Asle and Asle are doppelgängers – two versions of the same person, twoversions of the same life, both grappling with existential questions.In this final instalment of Jon Fosse’s Septology, the major prose work by ‘the Beckett of the twenty-first century’ (LeMonde), Christmas is approaching. Tradition has it that Åsleik and Asle eat lutefisk together, but this year Asle has agreedfor the first time to celebrate Christmas with Åsleik and his sister, Guro. On Christmas Eve, Åsleik, Asle, and the dog Bragitake Åsleik’s boat out on the Sygnefjord. Meanwhile, we follow the lives of the two Asles as younger adults in flashbacks:the narrator meets his lifelong love, Ales; joins the Catholic Church; starts exhibiting with Beyer; and can make a living bytrying to paint away all the pictures stuck in his mind. After a while, Asle and Ales leave the city and move to the house inDylgja. The other Asle gets married too, but his wedding ends with a sobbing bride and is followed soon after by a painfulbreakup.Written in melodious and hypnotic ‘slow prose’, A New Name: Septology VI-VII is a transcendent exploration of thehuman condition by Jon Fosse, and a radically other reading experience – incantatory, hypnotic, and utterly unique.

    Hermann, the manager of a paper mill, has decided that sexual gratification begins at home. Which means Gerti - his wife and property. Gerti is not asked how she feels about the use Hermann puts her to. She is a receptacle into which Hermann pours his juices, nastily, briefly, brutally. The long-suffering and battered Gerti thinks she has found her saviour and love in Michael, a student who rescues her after a day of vigorous use by her husband. But Michael is on his way up the Austrian political ladder, and he is, after all, a man.

    It opens with Inaia being born in 1500, at the moment when the Portuguese arrive in Brazil and continues through to the present, tracing this fascinating lineage of women against the historical backdrop of Brazil's ups and downs, challenges and triumphs.

    His search takes him to stormy mountaintops, an experimental military weapons lab, and an old Soviet science station. The more he learns, the more he comes to realize that ball lightning is just the tip of an entirely new frontier in particle physics. Although Chen’s quest provides a purpose for his lonely life, his reasons for chasing his elusive quarry come into conflict with soldiers and scientists who have motives of their own: a beautiful army major with an obsession with dangerous weaponry, and a physicist who has no place for ethical considerations in his single-minded pursuit of knowledge.Ball Lightning, by award-winning Chinese science fiction author Cixin Liu, is a fast-paced story of what happens when the beauty of scientific inquiry runs up against a push to harness new discoveries with no consideration of their possible consequences.The original Chinese version was published in 2004. In 2018 the English version, translated by Joel Martinsen, was published in the US by Tor Books.

    For after winning acclaim with this novel—awarded the Robert Walser Prize in 1978—she embarked on a 10,000-page literary project called “The Fortress,” creating over her lifetime elaborate colorful diagrams and typescripts so complicated that her publisher had to print them straight from her original documents. A project as brilliant as it is ambitious and as bizarre as it is brilliant, it earned her cult status, comparisons to James Joyce no less than Henry Darger, and admirers including Elfriede Jelinek and W. G. Sebald.Yet in this, her first novel, we discover not an eccentric fluke of literary nature but rather a brilliant and masterful satirist, philosophically minded yet raging with anger and wit, who under the guise of a domestic horror story manages to expose the hypocrisy and deep abiding cruelties running parallel, over time, through the society and the individual minds of a century.

    The protagonist, a writer, is at a publisher-sponsored retreat to finish his novel. The beauty of the location however cannot compensate for the anxiety and hallucinations he experiences while watching a flock of brown birds pass by his window, and his sense of temporal disorientation is further compounded by the appearance of a strange woman who calls him Ge Fei. Fiction and reality blend into one as the story unfolds. Ge Fei’s prose renders in exquisite detail the fragility of time."It is impossible to enter the deeper aspects of contemporary Chinese literature without also entering the world of Ge Fei." - Enrique Vila-Matas

    He was one of the colonels closest to the Supreme Commander. When they meet, years later, far from their country of birth, a strange, equivocal relationship develops between them. Both their shared past of suffering and old romantic passions come rushing back accompanied by recollections of the perverse logic of violence that dominated the dicatorship under which they lived. The Man Who Snapped His Fingers is a novel of ideas, exploring power and memory by an important female writer from a part of the world where female voices are routinely silenced.

     Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer and her husband, the playwright Carl Zuckmayer, lived at the heart of intellectual life in Weimar, Germany, counting among their circle Stefan Zweig, Alma Mahler, and Bertolt Brecht. After Carl's work fell afoul of the Nazis, however, the couple and their two daughters were forced to flee Europe. Los Angeles didn't suit them and neither did New York, but then a chance stroll in the Vermont woods led them to Backwoods Farm, the eighteenth-century house where they would live for the next five years. In Europe, the Zuckmayers were accustomed to servants; in Vermont, they found themselves joyfully building chicken coops and refereeing fights between unruly ducks. Despite the endless work a new farm required and brutal winters that triggered bouts of melancholy, Alice discovered that in America she had found her native land.

    Reflecting on his experiences as a smoker from a young age, Gregor Hens investigates the irreversible effects of nicotine on thought and patterns of behaviours. He extends the conversation with other smokers to meditations on Mark Twain and Italo Svevo, the nature of habit, the validity of hypnosis, and the most insignificant city in the United States, where he lived for far too long. With comic insight and meticulous precision, Hens deconstructs every facet of the dependency and offers a brilliant disquisition on the psychopathology of addiction.

    This collection focuses upon the land he knew and loved so well—Normandy. Its people and its countryside are portrayed here in vivid colour and with great warmth. Amusing, saucy, and sometimes even farcical they may be, but they are also capable of great pathos, often branching off to end tragically. It is this skilful and affecting blend of tragedy and comedy, of tears and laughter, which make Maupassant's Normandy Stories the enduring favourites they are today.11 stories:Disc 1. In the country - Pierrot - A Normandy joke - A cock crowed - Old Boniface's crime - The confession - Disc 2. An apparition - The little cask - The castaway - Bombard - Master Belhomme's beast.

    He lives on Felix Ventura's living-room wall, Felix, the lizard's friend and hero of the story, is a man who sells pasts - if you don't like yours, he can come up with an new one for you, a new past - full of better memories, with a complete lineage, photos and all."

    In a brilliant translation by Rose-Myriam Réjouis and Val Vinokur, Love, Anger, Madness is a scathing response to the struggles of race, class, and sex that have ruled Haiti. Suppressed upon its initial publication in 1968, this major work became an underground classic and was finally released in an authorized edition in France in 2005.In Love, Anger, Madness, Marie Vieux-Chauvet offers three slices of life under an oppressive regime. Gradually building in emotional intensity, the novellas paint a shocking portrait of families and artists struggling to survive under Haiti’s terrifying government restrictions that have turned its society upside down, transforming neighbors into victims, spies, and enemies.In “Love,” Claire is the eldest of three sisters who occupy a single house. Her dark skin and unmarried status make her a virtual servant to the rest of the family. Consumed by an intense passion for her brother-in-law, she finds redemption in a criminal act of rebellion.In “Anger,” a middle-class family is ripped apart when twenty-year-old Rose is forced to sleep with a repulsive soldier in order to prevent a government takeover of her father’s land.And in “Madness,” René, a young poet, finds himself trapped in a house for days without food, obsessed with the souls of the dead, dreading the invasion of local military thugs, and steeling himself for one final stand against authority. Sympathetic, savage and truly compelling with an insightful introduction by Edwidge Danticat, Love, Anger, Madness is an extraordinary, brave and graphic evocation of a country in turmoil.