This translation of his 1989 novel Nostalgia, writes Andrei Codrescu, "introduces to English a writer who has always had a place reserved for him in a constellation that includes the Brothers Grimm, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Bruno Schulz, Julio Cortazar, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Milan Kundera, and Milorad Pavic, to mention just a few." Like most of his literary contemporaries of the avant-garde Eighties Generation, his major work has been translated into several European languages, with the notable exception, until now, of English.Readers opening the pages of Nostalgia should brace themselves for a verbal tidal wave of the imagination that will wash away previous ideas of what a novel is or ought to be. Although each of its five chapters is separate and stands alone, a thematic, even mesmeric harmony finds itself in children's games, the music of the spheres, humankind's primordial myth-making, the origins of the universe, and in the dilapidated tenement blocks of an apocalyptic Bucharest during the years of communist dictatorship.

    For the first time in paperback--a volume of thirty-seven diabolically inventive stories, fables, and "impossible interviews" from one of the great fantasists of the 20th century, displaying the full breadth of his vision and wit.  Written between 1943 and 1984 and masterfully translated by Tim Parks, the fictions in Numbers in the Dark display all of Calvino's dazzling gifts: whimsy and horror, exuberance of style, and a cheerful grasp of the absurdities of the human condition.

    . . A book in which I shall spit out my bile." At the center of this book are Bouvard and Pécuchet, two retired clerks who set out in a search for truth and knowledge with persistent optimism in light of the fact that each new attempt at learning about the world ends in disaster.In the literary tradition of Rabelais, Cervantes, and Swift, this story is told in that blend of satire and sympathy that only genius can compound, and the reader becomes genuinely fond of these two Don Quixotes of Ideas. Apart from being a new translation, this edition includes Flaubert's Dictionary of Received Ideas.

    One by one he introduces, demonstrates and expounds the discoveries and inventions of his fertile, encyclopaedic mind. An African mud-sculpture representing a naked child; a road-mender's tool which, when activated by the weather, creates a mosaic of human teeth; a vast aquarium in which humans can breathe and in which a depilated cat is seen stimulating the partially decomposed head of Danton to fresh flights of oratory. By each item in Cantarel's exhibition there hangs a tale - a tale such as only that esteemed genius Roussel could tell. As the inventions become more elaborate, the richness and brilliance of the author's stories grow to match them; the flow of his imagination becomes a flood and the reader is swept along in a torrent of wonder and hilarity.

    First published in 1759, it was an instant bestseller and has come to be regarded as one of the key texts of the Enlightenment. What Candide does for chivalric romance, the other tales in this selection--Micromegas, Zadig, The Ingenu, and The White Bull--do for science fiction, the Oriental tale, the sentimental novel, and the Old Testament. The most extensive one-volume selection currently available, this new edition includes a new verse translation of the story Voltaire based on Chaucer's The Wife of Bath's Tale: What Pleases the Ladies and opens with a revised introduction that reflects recent critical debates, including a new section on Candide.

    The Mustache begins with a husband's playful question to his wife: "What would you say if I shaved off my mustache?" But, for the hero of The Mustache, that simple question catapults him into a metaphysical nightmare as his wife and friends not only fail to notice his newly clean-shaven appearance but deny the existence altogether of his former mustache. Is he the victim of some bad joke? Or have they all suddenly gone mad? In Class Trip, little Nicolas embarks on an ill-fated overnight excursion. Prone to lurid imaginings of kidnappings and organ thefts, Nicolas watches his fantasies grow horrifyingly real when a local child disappears. Nicolas takes it upon himself to investigate, fearlessly playing detective--until he uncovers the devastating truth. Dramatic, taut with intensity, Carrere's depictions of the terrifying anxieties and shifting realities of modern life are marvels of concentrated emotion.

    All she really wants to do is ride the metro, but finding it shut because of a strike, Zazie looks for other means of amusement and is soon caught up in a comic adventure that becomes wilder and more manic by the minute. In 1960 Queneau's cult classic was made into a hugely successful film by Louis Malle. Packed full of word play and phonetic games, 'Zazie in the Metro' remains as stylish and witty today as it did back then.

    Crevel explores the private worlds of children and their sexual imaginations in this important novel, now republished in the prestigious Sun & Moon Classics. A free-spirited young girl witnesses her father elope with a beautiful English cousin, the chambermaid run off with and then kill the gardener, her grandmother seduce her mother's new fiance, and her mother finally accept an arranged marriage with the bizarre Mac-Louf, darling of the Society for Protection by Rational Experience.

    In “Commuter Army” – a sly commentary on the ludicrousness of war – a weapons supplier whose rifles cease functioning after just one shot becomes an unwilling conscript in a war zone. “The World is Tilting” imagines a floating city that slowly begins to sink on one side, causing its citizens to reorient their daily lives to preserve a semblance of normality. In “Rumors About Me”, an ordinary office worker finds himself the subject of intense media scrutiny, his every action documented in the tabloids. And in the title story, we learn just how obscenely absurd the environment on Planet Porno can seem to a group of hapless research scientists.With a sharp eye towards the insanities of contemporary life, Yasutaka Tsutsui crafts in Salmonella Men on Planet Porno an irresistible mix of imagination, satiric fantasy, and truly madcap hilarity.Contents:- The Dabba Dabba Tree- Rumours About Me- Don't Laugh- Farmer Airlines- Bear's Wood Main Line- The Very Edge of Happiness- Commuter Army- Hello, Hello, Hello!- The World is Tilting- Bravo Herr Mozart!- The Last Smoker- Bad for the Heart- Salmonella Men on Planet Porno

    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

    Born in Paris in 1947, Redonnet taught for a number of years in a suburban lycée before deciding to pursue a writing career full time. Since her volume of poetry Le Mort & Cie appeared in 1985, she has published four novels, a novella, numerous short stories, and three dramatic works.In translator Jordan Stump's words, these three novels, "unmistakably fit together, although they have neither characters nor setting in common. Redonnet sees the three novels as a triptych: each panel stands alone, and yet all coalesce to form a whole." Each is narrated by a different woman. Hôtel Splendid recounts the daily life of three sisters who live in a decrepit hotel on the edge of a swamp; Forever Valley is about a sixteen-year-old girl who works in a dance-hall and looks for the dead; Rose Mellie Rose is the story of another adolescent girl who assembles a photographic and written record of her life in the dying town of Ôat.Redonnet's novels have been compared to those of Annie Ernaux, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Samuel Beckett. She has since acknowledged the crucial influence which Beckett's work has had upon her literary work. And yet she is also notably different from the great master of modern literature. "Where Beckett's characters slide almost inevitably toward extinction, resignation, and silence," Stump points out, "Redonnet's display a force for life and creation that borders on the triumphant. . . . [They] retain even in the darkest situations a remarkable persistence, openness, and above all hope, a hope that may well be, however unspectacularly, repaid in the end."

    Using a range of approaches from bitter realism to demented fantasy, Irvine Welsh is able to evoke the essential humanity, well hidden as it is, of his generally depraved, lazy, manipulative, and vicious characters. He specializes particularly in cosmic reversals--God turns a hapless footballer into a fly; an acid head and a newborn infant exchange consciousnesses with sardonically unexpected results--always displaying a corrosive wit and a telling accuracy of language and detail. Irvine Welsh is one hilariously dangerous writer and he is bound to create a sensation. Includes the following stories: "The Shooter""Eurotrash""Stoke Newington Blues""Vat '96""A Soft Touch""The Last Resort on the Adriatic""Sexual Disaster Quartet""Snuff""A Blockage in the System""Wayne Foster""Where the Debris Meets the Sea""Granny's Old Junk""The House of John Deaf""Across the Hall""Lisa's Mum Meets the Queen Mum""The Two Philosophers""Disnae Matter""The Granton Star Cause""Snowman Building Parts for Rico the Squirrel""Sport for All""The Acid House"A Smart Cunt: a novella

    In these stories, reminiscent of Shirley Jackson and Julio Cortázar, three young friends distract themselves with drugs and pain in the midst a government-enforced blackout; a girl with nothing to lose steps into an abandoned house and never comes back out; to protest a viral form of domestic violence, a group of women set themselves on fire. But alongside the black magic and disturbing disappearances, these stories are fueled by compassion for the frightened and the lost, ultimately bringing these characters—mothers and daughters, husbands and wives—into a surprisingly familiar reality. Written in hypnotic prose that gives grace to the grotesque, Things We Lost in the Fire is a powerful exploration of what happens when our darkest desires are left to roam unchecked, and signals the arrival of an astonishing and necessary voice in contemporary fiction.

    Collected in this chilling volume are some of the famous Japanese mystery writer Edogawa Rampo's best stories—bizarre and blood-curdling expeditions into the fantastic, the perverse, and the strange, in a marvelous homage to Rampo's literary 'mentor', Edgar Allan Poe.

    This is a place where a boy with keys for fingers is a hero, a woman's children are potatoes, and a little boy with an iron for a head is born to a family of pumpkin heads. With her singular mix of surrealism, musical prose, and keenly felt emotion, Bender once again proves herself to be a masterful chronicler of the human condition.