The Invention of Morel


Adolfo Bioy Casares - 1940
    Set on a mysterious island, Bioy’s novella is a story of suspense and exploration, as well as a wonderfully unlikely romance, in which every detail is at once crystal clear and deeply mysterious.Inspired by Bioy Casares’s fascination with the movie star Louise Brooks, The Invention of Morel has gone on to live a secret life of its own. Greatly admired by Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez, and Octavio Paz, the novella helped to usher in Latin American fiction’s now famous postwar boom. As the model for Alain Resnais and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Last Year at Marienbad, it also changed the history of film.

The Lost Steps


Alejo Carpentier - 1953
    The Lost Steps describes his search, his adventures, and the remarkable decision he makes in a village that appears to be truly outside history.

Multiple Choice


Alejandro Zambra - 2014
    Now, at the height of his powers, Zambra returns with a book that is the natural extension of these qualities: Multiple Choice.   Written in the form of a standardized test, Multiple Choice invites the reader to complete virtuoso language exercises and engage with short narrative passages via multiple-choice questions that are thought-provoking, usually unanswerable, and often absurd. It offers a new kind of reading experience, one where the reader participates directly in the creation of meaning. Full of humor, melancholy, and anger, Multiple Choice is about love and family; privacy and the limits of closeness; how a society is affected by the legacies of the past; and the conviction that, rather than learning to think, we are trained to obey and repeat. Serious in its literary ambition but playful in its execution, Multiple Choice confirms Alejandro Zambra as one of the most important writers working in any language.

Aura


Carlos Fuentes - 1962
    There Felipe meets her beautiful green-eyed niece, Aura. His passion for Aura and his gradual discovery of the true relationship between the young woman and her aunt propel the story to its extraordinary conclusion.

Pillow Thoughts


Courtney Peppernell - 2016
    It is divided into sections to read when you feel you need them most. Make a cup of tea and let yourself feel.

Love & Misadventure


Lang Leav - 2013
    Awarded a coveted Churchill Fellowship, her work expresses the intricacies of love and loss. Beautifully illustrated and thoughtfully conceived, Love and Misadventure will take you on a rollercoaster ride through an ill-fated love affair- from the initial butterflies to the soaring heights- through to the devastating plunge. Lang Leav has an unnerving ability to see inside the hearts and minds of her readers. Her talent for translating complex emotions with astonishing simplicity has won her a cult following of devoted fans from all over the world.

Like Water for Chocolate


Laura Esquivel - 1989
    A sumptuous feast of a novel, it relates the bizarre history of the all-female De La Garza family. Tita, the youngest daughter of the house, has been forbidden to marry, condemned by Mexican tradition to look after her mother until she dies. But Tita falls in love with Pedro, and he is seduced by the magical food she cooks. In desperation, Pedro marries her sister Rosaura so that he can stay close to her, so that Tita and Pedro are forced to circle each other in unconsummated passion. Only a freakish chain of tragedies, bad luck and fate finally reunite them against all the odds.

Birthday Letters


Ted Hughes - 1998
    And few episodes in postwar literature have the legendary stature of Hughes's romance with, and marriage to, the great American poet Sylvia Plath.The poems in Birthday Letters are addressed (with just two exceptions) to Plath, and were written over a period of more than twenty-five years, the first a few years after her suicide in 1963. Some are love letters, others haunted recollections and ruminations. In them, Hughes recalls his and Plath's time together, drawing on the powerful imagery of his work--animal, vegetable, mythological--as well as on Plath's famous verse.Countless books have discussed the subject of this intense relationship from a necessary distance, but this volume--at last--offers us Hughes's own account. Moreover, it's a truly remarkable collection of poems in its own right.

Felicity


Mary Oliver - 2015
    Finally, in her stunning new collection, Felicity, we can immerse ourselves in Oliver’s love poems. Here, great happiness abounds.  Our most delicate chronicler of physical landscape, Oliver has described her work as loving the world. With Felicity she examines what it means to love another person. She opens our eyes again to the territory within our own hearts; to the wild and to the quiet. In these poems, she describes—with joy—the strangeness and wonder of human connection.  As in Blue Horses, Dog Songs, and A Thousand Mornings, with Felicity Oliver honors love, life, and beauty.

If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho


Sappho
    Carson presents all the extant fragments of Sappho's verse, employing brackets and white space to denote missing text - allowing the reader to imagine the poems as they were written.

Collected Poems


Edna St. Vincent Millay - 1956
    Compiled by her sister after the poet's death and originally published in 1956, this is the definitive edition of Millay, right up through her last poem, Mine the Harvest.

The Book of Embraces


Eduardo Galeano - 1989
    Parable, paradox, anecdote, dream, and autobiography blend into an exuberant world view and affirmation of human possibility.

No Matter the Wreckage


Sarah Kay - 2014
    No Matter the Wreckage presents readers with new and beloved work that showcases Kay's knack for celebrating family, love, travel, history, and unlikely love affairs between inanimate objects ("Toothbrush to the Bicycle Tire"), among other curious topics. Both fresh and wise, Kay's poetry allows readers to join in on her journey of discovering herself and the world around her. It's an honest and powerful collection.

Les Fleurs du Mal


Charles Baudelaire - 1857
    Tableaux Parisiens condemns the crushing effects of urban planning on a city's soul and praises the city's anti-heroes including the deranged and derelict. Le Vin centers on the search for oblivion in drink and drugs. The many kinds of love that lie outside traditional morality is the focus of Fleurs du Mal while rebellion is at the heart of Révolte.

The Complete Poems


John Keats - 1820