In the brutality of his honesty, Mr. Gutierrez reminds one of Jean Genet and Charles Bukowski.” —New York TimesDirty Havana Trilogy chronicles the misadventures of Pedro Juan, a former journalist now living hand to mouth in and around Cuba, half disgusted and half fascinated by the depths to which he has sunk. Collecting garbage, peddling marijuana or black-market produce, clearing undesirables off the streets, whoring himself, begging, sacrificing to the santos, Pedro Juan scrapes by under the shadow of hunger—all the while surviving through the escapist pursuit of sex. Pedro Juan’s unsentimental, mocking, yet sympathetic eye captures a shocking underbelly of today’s Cuba.Banned in Cuba but celebrated throughout the Spanish speaking world, Gutierrez’s picaresque novel is a fierce, loving tribute to Havana and the defiant, desperate way of life that flourishes amid its decay.

    Volume One contains the following 48 short stories:- The Dead Past- The Foundation of S. F. Success- Franchise- Gimmicks Three- Kid Stuff- The Watery Place- Living Space- The Message- Satisfaction Guaranteed- Hell-Fire- The Last Trump- The Fun They Had- Jokester- The Immortal Bard- Someday- The Author's Ordeal- Dreaming Is a Private Thing- Profession- The Feeling of Power- The Dying Night- I'm in Marsport Without Hilda- The Gentle Vultures- All the Troubles of the World- Spell My Name with an S- The Last Question- The Ugly Little Boy- Nightfall- Green Patches- Hostess- Breeds There a Man…?- C-Chute- In a Good Cause—- What If—- Sally- Flies- Nobody Here But—- It's Such a Beautiful Day- Strikebreaker- Insert Knob A in Hole B- The Up-to-Date Sorcerer- Unto the Fourth Generation- What Is This Thing Called Love?- The Machine That Won the War- My Son, the Physicist- Eyes Do More Than See- Segregationist- I Just Make Them Up, See!- Rejection Slips.

    ‘Rashōmon’ and ‘In a Bamboo Grove’ inspired Kurosawa’s magnificent film and depict a past in which morality is turned upside down, while tales such as ‘The Nose’, ‘O-Gin’ and ‘Loyalty’ paint a rich and imaginative picture of a medieval Japan peopled by Shoguns and priests, vagrants and peasants. And in later works such as ‘Death Register’, ‘The Life of a Stupid Man’ and ‘Spinning Gears’, Akutagawa drew from his own life to devastating effect, revealing his intense melancholy and terror of madness in exquisitely moving impressionistic stories.A WORLD IN DECAY- Rashōmon- In a Bamboo Grove- The Nose- Dragon: The Old Potter's Tale- The Spider Thread- Hell ScreenUNDER THE SWORD- Dr. Ogata Ryōsai: Memorandum- O-Gin- LoyaltyMODERN TRAGICOMEDY- The Story of a Head That Fell Off- Green Onions- Horse LegsAKUTAGAWA'S OWN STORY- Daidōji Shinsuke: The Early Years- The Writer's Craft- The Baby's Sickness- Death Register- The Life of a Stupid Man- Spinning Gears

    He saw the skin peel from the rocket beehive, men thus revealed running, running, mouths shrieking, soundless. Space was a black mossed well where life drowned its roars and terrors. Scream a big scream, but space snuffed it out before it was half up your throat. Men scurried, ants in a flaming matchbox; the ship was dripping lava, gushing steam, nothing!Journey with the century's most popular fantasy writer into a world of wonder and horror beyond your wildest dreams.Contents:- The Fog Horn (1951)- The Pedestrian (1951)- The April Witch (1952)- The Wilderness (1952)- The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl (1948)- Invisible Boy (1945)- The Flying Machine (1953)- The Murderer (1953)- The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind (1953)- I See You Never (1947)- Embroidery (1951)- The Big Black and White Game (1945)- A Sound of Thunder (1952)- The Great Wide World Over There (1952)- Powerhouse (1948)- En la Noche (1952)- Sun and Shadow (1953)- The Meadow (1953)- The Garbage Collector (1953)- The Great Fire (1949)- Hail and Farewell (1953)- The Golden Apples of the Sun (1953)

    This collection of nearly fifty pieces brings together the contents of two published volumes, A Haunted House and Mrs. Dalloway’s Party; a number of uncollected stories; and several previously unpublished pieces. Edited and with an Introduction by Susan Dick.

    The seven stories are all concerned with love, or rather with the complex erotic games and stratagems employed by women and especially men as they try to come to terms with needs and impulses that can start a terrifying train of events. Sexual attraction is shown as a game that often turns sour, an experience that brings with it painful insights and releases uncertainty, panic, vanity and a constant need for reassurance. Thus a young couple on holiday start a game of pretence that threatens to destroy their relationship, two middle-aged men go in search of girls they don't really want, a young man renews contact with an older woman who feels humiliated by her ageing body, an elderly doctor uses his beautiful wife to increase his attraction and minister to his sexual vanity. In Laughable Loves, Milan Kundera shows himself, once again, as a master of fiction's most graceful illusions and surprises.

    They present a wide spectrum of comic and serious themes and a variety of techniques. (His short novels, available in another Norton volume, Seven Short Novels by Chekhov, have been omitted.) Two of the stories have been translated for this edition by Professor Matlaw; the other translations, by Constance Garnett, Ivy Litvinov, and Marian Fell, have been revised in accordance with contemporary usage. Footnotes have been supplied wherever necessary to explain peculiarities of Russian life and the historical era in which Chekhov lived and wrote."Backgrounds" includes a rich selection of Chekhov's letters, in new translations by Professor Matlaw, and Gorky's celebrated essay on Chekhov, translated by Ivy Litvinov. The critical essays offer general views of Chekhov's art and achievement and detailed analyses of particular stories. The critics are D. S. Mirsky, A. B. Derman (whose essay has been translated from the Russian especially for this edition), Renato Poggioli, Gleb Struve, Donald Rayfield, Karl Kramer, Virginia Llewellyn Smith, and Nils Ake Nilsson.A Selected Bibliography directs readers to resources for further study.Chameleon (1884) --Oysters (1884) --A living chronology (1885) --The huntsman (1885) --Misery (1886) --The requiem (1886) --Anyuta (1886) --Agatha (1886) --Grisha (1886) --A gentleman friend (1886) --The chorus girl (1886)--Dreams (1886) --Vanka (1886)--At home (1887) --The siren's song (1887) --Sleepy (1888) --The grasshopper (1892) --In exile --Rothschild's fiddle (1894) --The student (1894) --The teacher of literature (1889-94) --Whitebrow (1895) --Anna on the neck (1895) --The house with the mansard (1896) --The pecheneg (1898)--A journey by cart (1897) --The man in a case (1898) --Gooseberries (1898) --About love (1898) --A doctor's visit (1902) --The darling (1899) --The lady with the dog (1899) --The bishop (1902) --The betrothed (1903).

    In this international classic, Paz has written one of the most enduring and powerful works ever created on Mexico and its people, character, and culture. Compared to Ortega y Gasset's The Revolt of the Masses for its trenchant analysis, this collection contains his most famous work, "The Labyrinth of Solitude," a beautifully written and deeply felt discourse on Mexico's quest for identity that gives us an unequalled look at the country hidden behind "the mask." Also included are "The Other Mexico," "Return to the Labyrinth of Solitude," "Mexico and the United States," and "The Philanthropic Ogre," all of which develop the themes of the title essay and extend his penetrating commentary to the United States and Latin America.

    Bellatin’s work, Beauty Salon is pithy, allegorical and profoundly disturbing, with a plot that evokes The Plague by Camus or Blindness by José Saramago."--New York Times"Including a few details that may linger uncomfortably with the reader for a long time, this is contemporary naturalism as disturbing as it gets."--BooklistA strange plague appears in a large city. Rejected by family and friends, some of the sick have nowhere to finish out their days until a hair stylist decides to offer refuge. He ends up converting his beauty shop, which he’s filled with tanks of exotic fish, into a sort of medieval hospice. As his “guests” continue to arrive and to die, his isolation becomes more and more complete in this dream-hazy parable by one of Mexico’s cutting-edge literary stars.Mario Bellatin, the author of numerous short novels, was born in Mexico City in 1960. In 2000, Beauty Salon was nominated for the Médicis Prize for best novel translated into French. This is its first translation into English.

    The garden burns with sunlight; the macaws laugh sweetly. Otilia, Ismail's wife, is ashamed of his peeping and suggests that he pay a visit to Father Albornoz. Instead, Ismail wanders the town visiting old friends, plagued by a tangle of secret memories. "Where have I existed these years? I answer myself; up on the wall, peering over." When the armies slowly arrive, the profesor's reveries are gradually taken over by a living hell. His wife disappears and he must find her. We learn that not only gentle, grassy hillsides surround San Joseacute; but landmines and coca fields. The reader is soon engulfed by the violence of Rosero's narrative that is touched not only with a deep sadness, but an extraordinary tenderness.

    These stories about love and death, truth and lies, myth and reality range across many epochs and settings. Brilliantly combining fact and fiction, epic and miniature, horror and comedy, this was Danilo Kiš final work, published in Serbo-Croatian in 1983.Kiš is one of the great European writers of the post-war period - GuardianCompulsively readable - Daily Telegraph Fantasy chases reality and reality chases fantasy. Pirandello and Borges are not far away. But these names are intended as approximate references. Kiš is a new, original writer - Times Literary Supplement Intense and exotic, his mysteries hint at unspeakable secrets that remain forever beyond the story-teller's grasp - Boyd TonkinDanilo Kiš was born in the then Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1935. After an unsettled childhood during the Second World War, in which several of his family members were killed, Kiš studied literature at the University of Belgrade where he lived for most of his adult life. He wrote novels, short stories and poetry and went on to receive the prestigious NIN Award for his novel Pešcanik. He died in Paris in 1989.

    And the discovery of her corpse—by a group of children playing near the irrigation canals—propels the whole village into an investigation of how and why this murder occurred. Rumors and suspicions spread. As the novel unfolds in a dazzling linguistic torrent, with each unreliable narrator lingering on new details, new acts of depravity or brutality, Melchor extracts some tiny shred of humanity from these characters that most would write off as utterly irredeemable, forming a lasting portrait of a damned Mexican village.Like Roberto Bolano’s 2666 or Faulkner’s greatest novels, Hurricane Season takes place in a world filled with mythology and violence—real violence, the kind that seeps into the soil, poisoning everything around: it’s a world that becomes more terrifying and more terrifyingly real the deeper you explore it.

    Juan knows little of the interior life of his father Ranz; but when Juan marries, he begins to consider the past anew, and begins to ponder what he doesn't really want to know. Secrecy—its possible convenience, its price, and even its civility—hovers throughout the novel. A Heart So White becomes a sort of anti-detective story of human nature. Intrigue; the sins of the father; the fraudulent and the genuine; marriage and strange repetitions of violence: Marías elegantly sends shafts of inquisitory light into the shadows and on to the costs of ambivalence. ("My hands are of your colour; but I shame/To wear a heart so white"—Shakespeare's Macbeth.)

    They span many fiction genres; jungle tale, Gothic horror story, psychological study, and morality tale- and possess a universality that has made him a classic Latin American writer.Horacio Quiroga was a master storyteller and author of over two hundred pieces of Latin American fiction that have been compared to the works of Poe, Kipling, and London. Like his stories, his own life from his birth in Uruguay to his suicide in Argentina was filled with adventure, tragedy, and violence.

    It tells of young Giovanni Drogo, who is posted to a distant fort overlooking the vast Tartar steppe. Although not intending to stay, Giovanni suddenly finds that years have passed, as, almost without his noticing, he has come to share the others' wait for a foreign invasion that never happens. Over time the fort is downgraded and Giovanni's ambitions fade until the day the enemy begins massing on the desolate steppe...