The Favorite Game


Leonard Cohen - 1963
    Life for Breavman is made up of dazzling colour – a series of motion pictures fed through a high-speed projector: the half-understood death of his father; the adult games of love and war, with their infinite capacity for fantasy and cruelty; his secret experiments with hypnotism; the night-long adventures with Krantz, his beloved comrade and confidant. Later, achieving literary fame as a college student, Breavman does penance through manual labour, but ultimately flees to New York. And although he has loved the bodies of many women, it is only when he meets Shell, whom he awakens to her own beauty, that he discovers the totality of love and its demands, and comes to terms with the sacrifices he must make.

A Tale of a Ring


Ilan Sheinfeld - 2007
     The novel blends magic and history, passion and obsession into a rich and compelling book dealing with the tension between personal and collective memory. In 1870-1930, an organisation of Jewish pimps called Tzvi Migdal persuaded Jewish families in Poland and Lithuania to entrust them with their daughters, promising to find them Jewish husbands or domestic work in Jewish homes in Buenos Aires. The girls fell victim to a vicious and sophisticated network of pimps that, in collaboration with the police and the government, enslaved them for the rest of their lives. The Jewish community fought with all their might against this phenomenon, naming the pimps and their partners Las Impuros (The Unclean). When the organization was shut down, they also did their best to erase the entire affair from the collective memory.

Mr. Sammler's Planet


Saul Bellow - 1970
    Artur Sammler, Holocaust survivor, intellectual, and occasional lecturer at Columbia University in 1960s New York City, is a “registrar of madness,” a refined and civilized being caught among people crazy with the promises of the future (moon landings, endless possibilities).  His Cyclopean gaze reflects on the degradations of city life while looking deep into the sufferings of the human soul.  “Sorry for all and sore at heart,” he observes how greater luxury and leisure have only led to more human suffering. To Mr. Sammler—who by the end of this ferociously unsentimental novel has found the compassionate consciousness necessary to bridge the gap between himself and his fellow beings—a good life is one in which a person does what is “required of him.” To know and to meet the “terms of the contract” was as true a life as one could possibly live.  At its heart, this novel is quintessential Bellow: moral, urbane, sublimely humane. This Penguin Classics edition features an introduction by Stanley Crouch.

Prehistoric Times


Éric Chevillard - 1994
    The writing, with its burlesque variations, accelerations, and ruptures, takes us into a frightening and jubilant delirium, where the message is in the medium and digression gets straight to the point. In an entirely original voice, Eric Chevillard asks looming and luminous questions about who we are, the paths we’ve been traveling, and where we might be going – or not.

Futureproof


N. Frank Daniels - 2006
    No future. Only now.Originally a self-publishing success launched on N. Frank Daniels's MySpace page, the novel Futureproof tells the story of Luke and his friends as they navigate Atlanta’s subculture of delinquents. In short order, the seemingly harmless high from his first cigarette sends Luke on a downward spiral that ends only after years of self-abuse. It is an extreme cautionary tale told with sensitivity, ferocity, and grit.

Duet


Carol Shields - 2003
    Carol Shields' first novels, "Small Ceremonies" and "The Box Garden," each told from the viewpoint of a sister, published as one.

The Southwest Corner


Mildred Walker - 1981
    So, with great resourcefulness, she advertised for a companion and eventually staked out a corner of her own—one with a view. Mildred Walker's skill as a storyteller never falters in this portrayal of an elderly woman who won't give up.

Dearly


Margaret Atwood - 2020
    Her new poetry is introspective and personal in tone, but wide-ranging in topic. In poem after poem, she casts her unique imagination and unyielding, observant eye over the landscape of a life carefully and intuitively lived.While many are familiar with Margaret Atwood’s fiction—including her groundbreaking and bestselling novels The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments, Oryx and Crake, among others—she has, from the beginning of her career, been one of our most significant contemporary poets. And she is one of the very few writers equally accomplished in fiction and poetry.  This collection is a stunning achievement that will be appreciated by fans of her novels and poetry readers alike.

The Last Demon


Isaac Bashevis Singer - 2011
    The three collected here, about a girl who pretends to be a man in order to study the Torah, a frustrated demon, and a writer trying to understand the confusion of a holocaust survivor, illuminate the great themes of human suffering with supernal grace.

American Apocalypse Wastelands


Nova - 2010
    Federal troops, commissioned to protect the homeland, have turned their guns on the lawless population. Citizens find shelter in government safe zones while ruthless gangs enforce their will outside the camps. When the military transforms Washington’s life-saving food bank into a gun collection center in order to disarm all but the soldiers themselves, riots ensue. Weary of the militaristic government’s intent to render the citizens defenseless, America’s remaining patriots begin a mass migration out of the camps in search of refuge. American Apocalypse Wastelands tells of a young man discovering the role he must play to defend himself, others and his country as everything around him crumbles. It is a revised edition of American Apocalypse II: Refuge.

No Evil Star: Selected Essays, Interviews, and Prose


Anne Sexton - 1985
    Collects the best of Anne Sexton's memoirs and prose reflections on her development as a poet

One Hundred and Forty Five Stories in a Small Box: Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape, How the Water Feels to the Fishes, and Minor Robberies


Dave Eggers - 2007
    Manguso’s Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape is a series of crystalline recollections of her childhood misadventures; Eggers’ How the Water Feels to the Fishes brings a deadpan absurdism to the intimacy and vision of his earlier work; and Unferth’s rollicking Minor Robberies unleashes a horde of off-kilter characters and their indelible misadventures. Each author’s work comes in its own hardcover, foil-stamped volume, and the three volumes are housed in an elegant slipcase.

St. Urbain's Horseman


Mordecai Richler - 1971
    Urbain’s Horseman has now been adapted into a high-profile two-part CBC drama. The attention this star-studded and heavily promoted mini-series will receive will renew interest in the book among Richler fans and introduce many new readers to this modern classic, now available in this attractive tie-in edition.St. Urbain’s Horseman is a complex, moving, and wonderfully comic evocation of a generation consumed with guilt – guilt at not joining every battle, at not healing every wound. Thirty-seven-year-old Jake Hersh is a film director of modest success, a faithful husband, and a man in disgrace. His alter ego is his cousin Joey, a legend in their childhood neighbourhood in Montreal. Nazi-hunter, adventurer, and hero of the Spanish Civil War, Joey is the avenging horseman of Jake’s impotent dreams. When Jake becomes embroiled in a scandalous trial in London, England, he puts his own unadventurous life on trial as well, finding it desperately wanting as he steadfastly longs for the Horseman’s glorious return. Irreverent, deeply felt, as scathing in its critique of social mores as it is uproariously funny, St. Urbain’s Horseman confirms Mordecai Richler’s reputation as a pre-eminent observer of the hypocrisies and absurdities of modern life.

Tevye the Dairyman and Motl the Cantor's Son


Sholom Aleichem - 1894
    Through the workaday world of a rural dairyman, his grit, wit, and heart, his daughters' courtships and marriages, and the eventual menace of the pogroms, Sholem Aleichem reveals the fabric of a now-vanished world.Motl is the clear-eyed, spirited, mischievous boy who narrates Motl the Cantor's Son, a comic novel about his emigration with his family from Russia to America. It is a journey that mirrors a larger exodus, telling the story of the disintegration of traditional Jewish life and the beginning of a new chapter of Jewish history in America.

Like a Charm


Karin SlaughterPeter Robinson - 2004
    In Like A Charm, the cream of British and American crime writers combine for a must-have collection. From nineteenth-century Georgia, where the bracelet is forged in fire, to wartime Leeds, a steam train across Europe, the violent backstreets of 1980s Scotland, present-day London, a Manhattan taxi, the Mojave desert and back to Georgia, each writer weaves a gripping story of murder, betrayal and intrigue.