By virtue of the novel’s clever structure, the reader’s comprehension of events is limited so as to allow them a powerful experience: Johnson’s humorous yet deeply compassionate depiction of what it means to live life and grow old.

    Matigari is in search of his family to rebuild his home and start a new and peaceful future. But his search becomes a quest for truth and justice as he finds the people still dispossessed and the land he loves ruled by corruption, fear, and misery. Rumors spring up that a man with superhuman qualities has risen to renew the freedom struggle. The novel races toward its climax as Matigari realizes that words alone cannot defeat the enemy. He vows to use the force of arms to achieve his true liberation. Lyrical and hilarious in turn, Matigari is a memorable satire on the betrayal of human ideals and on the bitter experience of post-independence African society.

    'In this new work by the foremost Portuguese novelist, the reunion of five men on the tenth anniversary of their battalion's return from Mozambique, Portugal's Vietnam, ends in a fatal stabbing - which ultimately serves as an act of liberation for the corrupt city of Lisbon.' Newsday

    Theirs has become almost an animal existence. Silvester, the husband, does not believe in love, beauty, God, or even in himself. His wife Margriet lives in constant fear of war. Whatever passion they once felt for each other has long withered into resentment, nagging, and inertia; sleep is the drug which enables them to shake off life's dreary monotony and escape the menacing world outside.Ruyslinck describes, often humorously, how they can never quite free themselves of society, and how, when spring comes, they momentarily regain some of their former vitality. But this revival is short-lived: suddenly the daydream is shattered. And yet the catastrophe, the violent twist that completes the cycle, gives the events leading up to it a fresh, unexpected aspect that is at once haunting and prophetic.

    Charles is a modern libertine, dedicated to vice and depravity, while his twin Robert is a priest so devout that he is nicknamed L'Abbé'. When the sexually wild Eponine intrudes upon their suffocating relationship, anguish, delirium, and death ensue.Other works by Georges Bataille published by Marion Boyars include Blue of Noon and My Mother Madame Edwarda and the Dead Man.

    His peaceful routine is disrupted by Madam Jeanne and Lise. In love with the former and loved by the latter, Bedros must reconcile his Armenian background with his Parisian lifestyle.

    Winner of the Egon Hostovský Prize as the best Czech book of the year, this epic novel powerfully captures the sense of dislocation that followed the Czechs’ newfound freedom in 1989. More than just the story of its young protagonist—who is part businessman, part gang member, part drifter—it is a novel that includes terrifying dream scenes, Czech and American Indian legends, a nightmarish Eastern European flea market, comic scenes about the literary world, and an oddly tender story of the love between the protagonist and his spiritual sister.

    As recounted in this haunting novel, the death of a young child of the Moolman tribe and the ensuing inquest transcend the conventions of the murder mystery, giving us a stark protrayal of a suicidally insular clan.

    A shell-shocked romantic—slow, distant, and dreamy—he begins to have trouble telling Rose's half-sister Nancy apart from Rose herself, now buried in the village churchyard. Coping and failing to cope with the quiet realities of daily life, Charley's delusions elevate his timid courtship of a practical and unremarkable young woman into an amnesiac love story both comic and disturbing. A contemporary of Anthony Powell and Evelyn Waugh, Henry Green was one of the greatest English novelists of the twentieth century, and Back is his most haunting and personal work.

    Broch's characters—an apathetic man who can barely remember his own name (Broch mostly refers to him as A.); a high-school teacher and his lover who return from the brink of a suicide pact to carry on a dishonest relationship; Zerline, the lady's maid who enslaves her mistresses, prostitutes the young country girl Melitta to gentleman A., and metes out her own justice against the "empty wickedness" of her betters—are trapped in their indifference, prisoners of a sort of "wakeful somnolence." These men and women may mention the "imbecile Hitler," yet they prefer a nap or sexual encounter to any social action. In Broch's mind this kind of ethical perversity and political apathy paved the way for Nazism.Broch believed that writing can purify, and by revealing Germany's underlying guilt he hoped to purge indifference from his own and future generations. In The Guiltless, Broch captures how apathy and ennui?very human failings—evolve into something dehumanizing and dangerous.About the Translator:Ralph Manheim translated Hourglass by Danilo Kis and numerous works by Gunter Grass, including The Tin Drum. He has edited and translated novels and plays by Bertolt Brecht, Hermann Hesse, and Erich Maria Remarque.

    Torn between a placid liaison with a southerner and a tortuous affair with a Frenchman, Isabelle's plans suddenly take an unexpected turn that will ultimately lead her to a love that will force her to reconsider the implications of her affluent existence. With her signature wit and wisdom, West presents a captivating ode to marriages depth and the romance of the bond between husband and wife.

    A peasant boy, Balbino, tries to flee the repressive Galician society of the 30s and 40s by questioning, answering, and criticizing every aspect of social and religious restrictions.

    He wins many academic prizes and his future seems promising. Then his Cockney uncle arrives intending to open an eating-house adjacent to the college. Godwin is mortified of being associated with 'trade' and leaves the college rather than face the scorn he expects to receive from his upper-class fellow students. This is indicative of his social aspirations (upwards) and snobbery (downwards).

    The first of Roussel's two major prose works, Impressions of Africa is not, as the title may suggest, a conventional travel account, but an adventure story put together in a highly individual fashion and with an unusual time sequence, whereby the reader is even made to choose whether to begin with the first or the tenth chapter.A veritable literary melting pot, Roussel's groundbreaking text makes ample use of wordplay and the surrealist techniques of automatic writing and private allusion.

    When twenty-year-old Jane finds in the attic a packet of love letters written years ago by Guy, her mother’s one-time fiance who died in World War I, the discovery has explosive repercussions. It is not clear to whom the letters are addressed, and their appearance begins to lay bare the strange and unspoken connections between the adults now living in the house. Soon, a girl on the brink of womanhood, a mother haunted by love lost, and a ruined matchmaker with her own claim on the dead wage a battle that makes the ghostly Guy as real a presence in Montefort as any of the living.