In "Mercury Rain" a soldier fighting a new enemy learns the importance of holding on to his memories. "Blackwater," the title story of the collection, is an homage to Stephen King's short story, "Graveyard Shift," and it tells the tale of Paul Hawkins, a mine worker who disturbs something terrifying in the Blackwater Hills of Durham, Pennsylvania, in the summer of 1976.

    In this short graphic novel, Sempé shows us a glimpse of life in a small Parisian bistro. The restaurant and its regulars are vividly brought to life in a series of drawings which, together with the handwritten speech bubbles and laconic texts, display Sempé’s usual unerring eye and ear for the telling details of human behaviour.

    This tale of seduction is itself a seduction, with a plot that could be said to slowly unveil itself before arriving at last at an unexpected consummation.Summoned by Madame de T—— to her country house, the young hero of Deion's novella is taken on a tour of the grounds, only the beginning of a night that not only will be full of unanticipated delights but will give rise to unforeseen, perhaps unanswerable, questions. Lydia Davis's definitive translation of Denon's slim masterpiece is accompanied by the French text. Peter Brooks's illuminating introduction explores the mysteries of No Tomorrow's original publication and the subtleties of Denon's ethics of pleasure.

    Texts are in the original Middle English, and each has an introduction, detailed notes and a glossary. Selected titles are also available as CD recordings.

    30-year-old Albert returns to Paris after six years away, during which time his mother has passed away, to find himself entangled in a complicated case centred around a woman he met at a restaurant whose husband's body appears in her lounge, but then disappears almost inexplicably.

    Taking place over a single unforgettable night, the novel documents everything from the pit-bull bouncer on the door, to the drugs, cocktails and wannabes who frequent the club, and Marc’s attempts to seduce a catwalk model – any one will do. A catalogue of degeneracy, drugs, sex and decibels, ‘Holiday in a Coma’ is written with a fury and passion that reflect the author's own relationship with a world and he both loves and loathes.In ‘Love Lasts Three Years’, Marc Marronnier has just been divorced and – shallow opportunist that he is – has decided to write a book about it. He has a theory that love lasts no more than three years, and here – recounting the highs and lows of his marriage and taking us through brash nightclubs, vainglorious offices and soulless designer apartments – he brings to bear the theoretical and the empirical to prove his point. Both frightening and funny, the book reads like a diary: sometimes tender and real, sometimes fantastical and cruel, peppered with Beigbeder’s acerbic one-liners and trademark wit.

    Understanding that history is nothing but a fable purged of grit and grime, Ruland transforms historical fiction into something slick, brutal and weird. Whether he's spinning a lurid yarn about the previous adventures of Popeye, imagining Dick Tracy as a San Fernando Valley police detective, or retelling the story of Little Red Riding Hood in Nazi Germany, Ruland's tales are full of crime and punishment. He isn't afraid to set a teenage mob story in St. Petersburg, Florida, or tell the story of an unlucky pair of pants in the style of a catechism--and every line resonates with the truth of lessons learned the hard way.

    Both exasperating and moving, cherished by its readers, it has its origins in the author's attempt to come to terms with the death of his young wife Alix, whose presence both haunts and gives meaning to every page. Having failed to write his intended novel (The Great Fire of London), instead Roubaud creates a book that is about that failure, but in the process opens up the world of the creative process. This novel stands as a lyrical counterpart of the great postmodern masterpieces by fellow Oulipians Georges Perec and Italo Calvino. First published by Dalkey Archive Press in 1991, now available again.

    A man vilified by society and condemned to death for his crime wakes every morning knowing that this day might be his last. With the hope for release his only comfort, he spends his hours recounting his life and the time before his imprisonment. But as the hours pass, he knows that he is powerless to change his fate. He must follow the path so many have trod before him—the path that leads to the guillotine.

    Nina, the heroine of the second novella, "Three Pigs in Five Days," is sent to Paris to write an article for her lover's travel journal -- a dizzying, erotic pilgrimage that forces her to see how sex has distorted her view of the world.

    You read the newspaper and play cards with friends. Gradually—things start to change. You are told that brown is the only acceptable color: if you have a black dog, put it to sleep. Buy a brown one. Add "brown" at the end of each sentence. Books are being burned. But you don’t notice. People still go to cafes; you feel secure. You get a friendly new brown dog—how nice! Only later do you realize that you have been a willing victim to a government that demands your conformity in all things. And by the time realization hits—it’s too late. Franck Pavloff’s international best-selling allegory was written as a protest when the Rhone-Alps region of France leaned to the politics of the extreme right. Originally published in French, Brown Morning has now sold over 500,000 copies in Europe. It is a powerful wake-up call to all individuals to pay attention to what their governments are doing—and how they expect their citizens to think. Beautifully illustrated with brown-and-white graphics, this book also includes the original French text, Matin Brun.

    As she speeds through the south of France in a purloined Thunderbird on an errand for her employer and his wife, no one, including Dany herself, knows where she is headed--or why she is going there.

    The story begins when a paragraph in a newspaper plunges the narrator into his memories as a younger man. The perspective seems to shift back and forth between the past and present, so the reader is never entirely sure if the narrator is recounting past events from memory, or retelling current events as they happen. Critics have praised the writing for its lucid and lyrical style. The narrator, of noble status who has recently come into an inheritance, decides to leave Paris, where he is living a debauched life of theater and drink, and return to the love of his youth, a peasant girl named Sylvie who has classic features and brunette hair, a "timeless ideal". She sows gloves for a living and ends up marrying another man more equal to her class. The narrator also loves a seductive actress in Paris named Aurelia, who has many suitors who tell her empty idylls of love, but none love her for who she really is, including the narrator, who sees her as a lovely illusion that fades in the daylight of reality. The narrator also loves Adrienne, of noble birth, tall with blonde hair, she is an "ideal beauty", but she lives in a convent, and dies an early death. In the end he loves all three but obtains none, seemingly for reasons both beyond and within his making.

    From the moment he purchased his ticket, there was nothing left for him to do but watch men pass him by on the platform. An employee would let him know when the train would depart; but he was still clueless as to its final destination.”Before his death at the age of 27, Jean de La Ville de Mirmont left behind one undisputed classic, self-published a few months before he would meet his fate on the front lines of World War I: an understated, humorous tale of urban alienation that outlines the crushing mediocrity of bureaucratic existence.Jean Dezert is a young man living in a low-ceiling flat on the Rue du Bac, an office worker employed by the ministry who rounds out his regimented life with snippets of Eastern philosophy, strolls through the city, counting streetlamps—and strangely consumerist efforts at injecting some content into his life by structuring his Sundays through a rigorous use of advertising flyers that take him from saunas to vegetarian restaurants to lectures on sexual hygiene. Eventually his urban divagations lead him, as most lives do, to a romantic dalliance: with a young lady at the Jardin des Plantes. In his mortal boredom, his modernist engagement with the banality of the everyday, and his almost heroic resignation to mediocrity, Jean DŽezert emerges as something of a French counterpart to Herman Melville's own rebel bureaucrat, Bartleby the Scrivener. Save that when it comes to being an existential rebel, Jean Dezert goes even further in his will to prefer not to...“Had he lived, what would we have meant to one another? Would he have had a literary destiny? For the twenty-something de La Ville, just as for the forty-year-old Charles PŽeguy, the war was quite simply a relief. Yes, it was the most horrible war the world had ever seen, where millions of young men murdered one another, but they also saw it as their destiny’s final terminus, a means to suddenly give their dead-end, onerous lives some heroic meaning.”—Franois Mauriac“Jean DŽezert is like a brother to me, because of his ability to escape despair by means of emptiness.”—Michel Houellebecq

    Seventy years after that event, Harun, who has lived since childhood in the shadow of his sibling’s memory, refuses to let him remain anonymous: he gives his brother a story and a name—Musa—and describes the events that led to Musa’s casual murder on a dazzlingly sunny beach. In a bar in Oran, night after night, he ruminates on his solitude, on his broken heart, on his anger with men desperate for a god, and on his disarray when faced with a country that has so disappointed him. A stranger among his own people, he wants to be granted, finally, the right to die. The Stranger is of course central to Daoud’s story, in which he both endorses and criticizes one of the most famous novels in the world. A worthy complement to its great predecessor, The Meursault Investigation is not only a profound meditation on Arab identity and the disastrous effects of colonialism in Algeria, but also a stunning work of literature in its own right, told in a unique and affecting voice.