. . Will stand by itself as one of our funniest, most telling anatomies of human love and vulnerability.” —The New York Times Book Review, cover).These eight masterly stories reveal Lorrie Moore at her most mature and in a perfect configuration of craft, mind, and bewitched spirit, as she explores the passage of time and summons up its inevitable sorrows and hilarious pitfalls to reveal her own exquisite, singular wisdom.In “Debarking,” a newly divorced man tries to keep his wits about him as the United States prepares to invade Iraq, and against this ominous moment, we see—in all its irresistible wit and darkness—the perils of divorce and what can follow in its wake . . .In “Foes,” a political argument goes grotesquely awry as the events of 9/11 unexpectedly manifest themselves at a fund-raising dinner in Georgetown . . . In “The Juniper Tree,” a teacher visited by the ghost of her recently deceased friend is forced to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” in a kind of nightmare reunion . . . And in “Wings,” we watch the inevitable unraveling of two once-hopeful musicians, neither of whom held fast to their dreams nor struck out along other paths, as Moore deftly depicts the intricacies of dead-ends-ville and the workings of regret . . .Here are people beset, burdened, buoyed; protected by raising teenage children; dating after divorce; facing the serious illness of a longtime friend; setting forth on a romantic assignation abroad, having it interrupted mid-trip, and coming to understand the larger ramifications and the impossibility of the connection . . . stories that show people coping with large dislocation in their lives, with risking a new path to answer the desire to be in relation—to someone . . .Gimlet-eyed social observation, the public and private absurdities of American life, dramatic irony, and enduring half-cracked love wend their way through each of these narratives in a heartrending mash-up of the tragic and the laugh-out-loud—the hallmark of life in Lorrie-Moore-land.--jacket

    Traven's remarkable short stories. Three of them are long stories: The setting of "The Night Visitor" is a hacienda deep in the Mexican bush where a lonely American recreates in his imagination an eerie world of Indian folk legend. "The Cattle Drive" is a vivid description of a cowboy's trek with a thousand head of cattle across the Mexican plains; it has all the authenticity that Hollywood Westerns lack. "Macario," which was made into a prize-winning motion picture, is a wry Mexican fable about an Indian woodcutter who makes a compact with the devil to save his family from starvation. Among seven shorter stories, some are based on incidents from contemporary Mexican life, others on ancient Indian folk legends. All have spontaneity, humor, and warmth. "B. Traven is coming to be recognized as one of the narrative masters of the twentieth century." New York Times Book Review.

    The powerful tales gathered here vividly evoke the turn-of-the-century colonial Pacific and its capricious tropical landscape, while also trenchantly observing the delicate interplay between imperialism and the exotic. And as Tony Horwitz asserts in his Introduction, “When London’s stories click, we are utterly there, at the edge of the world and the limit of human endurance.”

    The individual tales reveal a child s often nightmarish impressions of life in her village. Seamlessly mixing reality with dream-like images, they brilliantly convey the inner, troubled life of a child and at the same time capture the violence and corruption of life under an oppressive state. Herta Müller has been one of the most prolific and acclaimed German-language writers of the last decade. Born in 1953 in the Banat, a German-language region of Romania, she emigrated to West Berlin in 1987 and currently resides in Hamburg. She has received numerous literary awards, including the Kleist Prize. In 1998 her novel The Land of Green Plums was awarded the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

    Drawn to what lies beyond the range of reason, they all reach for the beautiful and fleeting, whether through humor, music, poetry, or unspoken words. Across his encounters with each of them, the narrator—a Guatemalan literature professor and writer named Eduardo Halfon—pursues his most enigmatic subject: himself.Mapping the geography of identity in a world scarred by a legacy of violence and exile, The Polish Boxer marks the debut of a major new Latin American voice in English.Eduardo Halfon has been cited as among the best young Latin American writers by the Hay Festival of Bogotá and is the recipient of Spain’s prestigious José María de Pereda Prize for the Short Novel. In 2011 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship to continue the story of The Polish Boxer, which is his first novel to be published in English. He travels frequently to his native Guatemala and lives in Nebraska.

    Her works dwell on obsessions: erotic love, evil, purity, perversion, prostitution, tragic separation, and death. Most of her characters are involved in ill-fated searches for the Absolute through both excessively passionate and sadomasochistic relationships. Inevitably, the perfect, pure dyad of two youthful lovers is interrupted or corrupted through the interference of a third party (a rival lover or a child), aging, death, or public morality. Set at the beginning of the twentieth century in the tropical northwestern Mexican state of Sinaloa, the stories collected in Underground River and Other Stories focus on female subjectivity. Arredondo’s adult male characters are often predators, depraved collectors of adolescent virgins, like the plantation owners in “The Nocturnal Butterflies” and “Shadows in the Shadows” and the dying uncle in “The Shunammite,” who is kept alive by incestuous lust. Since the young female protagonists rarely have fathers to protect them, the only thing standing between them and these lechers are older women. Perversely, these older women act as accomplices–along with the extended family and the Roman Catholic Church–in the sordid age-old traffic in women.Underground River and Other Stories is the first appearance of Arredondo’s stories in English.

    La magia y la literatura lo han conseguido, pero pocos privilegiados logran ejercerlas con la suficiente autoridad, y en nuestro tiempo ninguno de modo tan divertido y conmovedor como Alfredo Bryce Echenique. Este libro es una excelente muestra de su reconocido talento para recrear el mundo, nos entrega catorce historias en las que suprime limpiamente las barreras entre las que fue y lo que pudo o debió ser. English Translation: To abolish the border that separates the reality of the fiction has been, from always, one of the most expensive yearnings of the human being. The magic and Literature have obtained it, but few privileged people manage to exert them with the sufficient authority, and in our time no of way so amused and stirring as Alfredo Bryce Echenique. This book is an excellent sample of his recognized talent to recreate the world, it gives fourteen histories to us in which it cleanly suppresses the barriers between which it was and what it could or it had be.

    Like his later works, First Snow on Fuji is concerned with forms of presence and absence, with being, with memory and loss of memory, with not-knowing. Kawabata lets us slide into the lives of people who have been shattered by war, loss, and longing. These stories are beautiful and melancholy, filled with Kawabata’s unerring vision of human psychology. First Snow on Fuji was originally published in Japan in 1958, ten years before Kawabata received the Nobel Prize. Kawabata selected the stories for this collection himself, and the result is a stunning assembly of disparate moods and genres. This new edition is the first to be published in English.

    In "Rattlesnakes" three young Americans, lost in the desert, are accosted by two armed Mexicans. A Korean chef and a Chicago socialite find themselves connected through the disappearance of a pooch named Toto in "The D.O.G.S. of Lincoln Park." And in the title story, Mickey Baker—an ex-pat English bar owner living on the Costa Brava—tries to keep all of his balls in the air: maintaining his barmaid's weight at the sexual maximum, attending to the youthful Persephone, and dodging his ex-wife and Spanish gangsters.In typically Welshian fashion, the characters and settings are anything but typical. These stories will make you laugh and gasp.

    Now our hero is resident in a retirement home, where fending off boredom is far more gruelling than making tacos. Plagued by the literary salon that bumps about his building’s lobby and haunted by the self-pitying ghost of a neglected artist, Villalobos’s old man can’t help but misbehave. He antagonises his neighbours, tortures American missionaries with passages from Adorno, flirts with the revolutionary greengrocer, and in short does everything that can be done to fend off the boredom of retirement and old age . . . while still holding a beer. A delicious take-down of pretensions to cultural posterity, I’ll Sell You a Dog is a comic novel whose absurd inventions, scurrilous antics and oddball characters are vintage Villalobos.

    Through these realist short stories, humorous sketches, mysteries, fantastic stories, poems, autobiographical segments, etc, we are witnesses to the world of a writer who never forgets his responsibility to his readers and who prizes, above any artifice or ostentation, his human and literary authenticity.

    Jacobs, H.G. Wells, Arthur Machen, Horacio Quiroga and H.P. Lovecraft.

    They are a map of that dark highway that leads out of life towards unknown destinations. Few will have to take it. Most will go peacefully along lamplit streets, ushered out of living with prayers and caresses. But for a few, the horrors will come, skipping, to fetch them off to the highway of the damned ...From the brilliant World Fantasy Award winner Clive Barker come fourteen spine-chilling stories of darkness unleashed, gathered together in one volume for the first time. These are visionary tales of terror which will curdle the very marrow in your bones ...

    Family Happiness (Russian: Семейное счастье [Semeynoye Schast'ye]) is an 1859 novella written by Leo Tolstoy, first published in The Russian Messenger.

    M. Homes writes with terrifying compassion about the things that matter most. Homes's distinctive narrative illuminates our dreams and desires, our memories and losses, and demonstrates how extraordinary the ordinary can be. With Uncanny emotional accuracy, wit, and empathy, Homes takes us places we recognize but would rather not go alone.