Arcanum 17: With Apertures


André Breton - 1945
    Andre Breton wrote Arcanum 17 during a trip to the Gaspe Peninsula in Quebec in the months after D-Day in 1944, when the Allied troops were liberating Occupied Europe. Using the huge Perce Rock--its impermanence, its slow-motion crumbling, its singular beauty--as his central metaphor, Breton considers issues of love and loss, aggression and war, pacifism, feminism and the occult, in a book that is part prose and part poetry, part reality and part dream.Translator Zack Rogow won the PEN-Book-of-the-Month Translation Prize for his co-translation of Breton's Earthlight.

The Case Worker


George Konrád - 1969
    The daily routine of a man in charge of children at a state welfare organization and the demands that are made upon him are depicted in this novel set in present day Hungary.

The Cathedral


Oles Honchar - 1968
    Official circles perceived "Sobor" sharply negatively, because the novel, rejecting the dogmatism of class ideas, affirmed universal, humanistic values.The Council is a philosophical novel that examines important social and national issues in terms of the eternal humanistic truths that human civilization must be guided by in order to avoid destruction and annihilation.

L'Abbé C


Georges Bataille - 1950
    Charles is a modern libertine, dedicated to vice and depravity, while his twin Robert is a priest so devout that he is nicknamed L'Abbé'. When the sexually wild Eponine intrudes upon their suffocating relationship, anguish, delirium, and death ensue.Other works by Georges Bataille published by Marion Boyars include Blue of Noon and My Mother Madame Edwarda and the Dead Man.

The Case of Sergeant Grischa


Arnold Zweig - 1927
    But the dead German was a deserter, and when Grischa is recaptured he is sentenced to be shot. He struggles to establish his true identity, but will it save him?

Wild Harbour


Ian Macpherson - 1936
    Faced with the threat of bombs, bacteriological warfare and poison gas, a married couple whose pacificism complels them to opt out of 'civilisation', take to the hills to live as fugitives in the wild.Plainly and simply told, Wild Harbour charts the practical difficulties, the successes and failures of living rough in the beautiful hills of remote Speyside. In this respect the book belongs to a tradition of Scottish fiction reflected in novels such as Stevenson's Kidnapped and Buchan's John MacNab. But it takes a darker and more contemporary turn, for although Hugh and his wife Terry learn to fend for themselves, they cannot escape from what the world has become. Their brief summer idyll is brought to an end as the forces of random and meaningless violence close over them.Written in 1936, Wild Harbour has lost none of its relevance in a post-nuclear age, nor its power to move and shock.

Retreat Without Song


Shahan Shahnour - 1929
    His peaceful routine is disrupted by Madam Jeanne and Lise. In love with the former and loved by the latter, Bedros must reconcile his Armenian background with his Parisian lifestyle.

Claudine's House


Colette - 1922
    In an idyllic setting of countryside and woods, Colette spent her childhood surrounded by a warm and loving family. Years later, her memories and experiences inspired her to create a series of snapshots of the innocence of provincial life. At once poignant and vividly alive, her recollections portray a magical world, filled with the beauty and the warmth of human relationships—and, above all, the lasting impressions made by her wonderful mother. French novelist Colette is most famous for her portraits of childhood in the Claudine books and for Gigi.

Ancestral Voices


Etienne van Heerden - 1986
    As recounted in this haunting novel, the death of a young child of the Moolman tribe and the ensuing inquest transcend the conventions of the murder mystery, giving us a stark protrayal of a suicidally insular clan.

The Commandant


Jessica Anderson - 1975
    His administration has been denounced by the liberal press in Sydney, but he scorns such criticism. How can it harm him when he had governed according to the rules?Flogged and brutalised, some convicts escape to the bush and take refuge with the Aborigines.Logan cannot continue to ignore the reaction to his harsh discipline after the arrival of his wife's younger sister, Frances. She cannot accept the brutality of chained and toiling men, punishment parades and the lash, and it is she who precipitates the crisis from which the final drama springs.

Fado Alexandrino


António Lobo Antunes - 1983
    'In this new work by the foremost Portuguese novelist, the reunion of five men on the tenth anniversary of their battalion's return from Mozambique, Portugal's Vietnam, ends in a fatal stabbing - which ultimately serves as an act of liberation for the corrupt city of Lisbon.' Newsday

The Green Hat


Michael Arlen - 1924
    Iris Storm, femme fatale, races around London and Europe in her yellow Hispano-Suiza surrounded by romantic intrigue, but beneath the glamour she is destined to be a tragic heroine. A perfect synecdoche, in fact: as the hat is to the woman, so the words of the title are to an entire literary style. The success of the novel when it was first published in 1924 led to its adaptation for the screen, with Greta Garbo starring as Iris Storm.

The Deadbeats


Ward Ruyslinck - 1957
    Theirs has become almost an animal existence. Silvester, the husband, does not believe in love, beauty, God, or even in himself. His wife Margriet lives in constant fear of war. Whatever passion they once felt for each other has long withered into resentment, nagging, and inertia; sleep is the drug which enables them to shake off life's dreary monotony and escape the menacing world outside.Ruyslinck describes, often humorously, how they can never quite free themselves of society, and how, when spring comes, they momentarily regain some of their former vitality. But this revival is short-lived: suddenly the daydream is shattered. And yet the catastrophe, the violent twist that completes the cycle, gives the events leading up to it a fresh, unexpected aspect that is at once haunting and prophetic.

The Busconductor Hines


James Kelman - 1984
    The compensations are a wife and child, and a gloriously anarchic imagination. The Busconductor Hines is a brilliantly executed, uncompromising slice of the Glasgow scene, a portrait of working-class life which is unheroic but humane.

Impressions of Africa


Raymond Roussel - 1910
    The first of Roussel's two major prose works, Impressions of Africa is not, as the title may suggest, a conventional travel account, but an adventure story put together in a highly individual fashion and with an unusual time sequence, whereby the reader is even made to choose whether to begin with the first or the tenth chapter.A veritable literary melting pot, Roussel's groundbreaking text makes ample use of wordplay and the surrealist techniques of automatic writing and private allusion.