1Q84 #1-2


Haruki Murakami - 2009
    She has entered, she realizes, a parallel existence, which she calls 1Q84 —“Q is for ‘question mark.’ A world that bears a question.” Meanwhile, an aspiring writer named Tengo takes on a suspect ghostwriting project. He becomes so wrapped up with the work and its unusual author that, soon, his previously placid life begins to come unraveled. A love story, a mystery, a fantasy, a novel of self-discovery, a dystopia to rival George Orwell’s—1Q84 is Haruki Murakami’s most ambitious undertaking yet: an instant best seller in his native Japan, and a tremendous feat of imagination from one of our most revered contemporary writers

Talking to Ourselves


Andrés Neuman - 2012
    Two love stories. Three voices.Lito is ten years old and is almost sure he can change the weather when he concentrates very hard. His father, Mario, anxious to create a memory that will last for his son's lifetime, takes him on a road trip in a truck called Pedro. But Lito doesn't know that this might be their last trip: Mario is gravely ill. Together, father and son embark on a journey takes them through strange geographies that seem to meld the different parts of the Spanish-speaking world. In the meantime, Lito's mother, Elena, restlessly seeks support in books, and soon undertakes an adventure of her own that will challenge her moral limits. Each narrative--of father, son, and mother--embodies one of the different ways that we talk to ourselves: through speech, through thought, and through writing. While neither of them dares to tell the complete truth to the other two, their individual voices nonetheless form a poignant conversation.Sooner or later, we all face loss. Andrés Neuman movingly narrates the ways the lives of those who survive loss are transformed; how that experience changes our ideas about time, memory, and our own bodies; and how the acts of reading, and of sex, can serve as powerful modes of resistance. Talking to Ourselves presents a tender yet unsentimental portrait of the workings of love and family; a reflection both on grief and on the consolation of words. Neuman, the author of the award-winning Traveler of the Century, displays his characteristic warmth, bittersweet humor, and wide-ranging intellect, giving us the rich, textured, and strikingly different voices and experiences of three singular characters while presenting, above all, a profound tribute to those who have ever had to care for a loved one.

Cold Skin


Albert Sánchez Piñol - 2002
    When he arrives, the predecessor he is meant to replace is missing and a deeply disturbed stranger is barricaded in a heavily fortified lighthouse. At first adversaries, the two find that their tenuous partnership may be the only way they survive the unspeakably horrific reptilian creatures that ravage the island at night, attacking the lighthouse in their organized effort to find warm-blooded food. Armed with a battery of ammunition and explosives, the weather official and his new ally must confront their increasingly murderous mentality, and, when the possibility of a kind of truce presents itself, decide what kind of island they will inhabit. Equal parts Stephen King, a phantasmagorical Robinson Crusoe, and Lord of the Flies, Cold Skin is literary horror that deals with the basest forms of human behavior imaginable, while exploring why we so vehemently fear the Other.

Signs Preceding the End of the World


Yuri Herrera - 2009
    Yuri Herrera does not simply write about the border between Mexico and the United States and those who cross it. He explores the crossings and translations people make in their minds and language as they move from one country to another, especially when there’s no going back.Traversing this lonely territory is Makina, a young woman who knows only too well how to survive in a violent, macho world. Leaving behind her life in Mexico to search for her brother, she is smuggled into the USA carrying a pair of secret messages – one from her mother and one from the Mexican underworld.

Living With The Bad Boy


crazycliche
    With a charismatic and loveable personality and a drive to help anyone and everyone, it's easy to understand just why everyone loves her. That is, everyone except Blake Parker; the school's rude, arrogant, bad boy. But even that's not hard to understand why. While Blake is mean and cruel and egotistical, Bronte is kind, helpful and humble. So what happens when Bronte is forced to stay at Blake's house since her parents are off on a work trip around Africa? Well, with Bronte's sudden determination to befriend the arrogant Bad Boy, you can only imagine all the different possibilities. Yes, all the possibilities that involve the two ripping each other's throats out, that is. With late night conversations, ruthless pranks, constant bickering and secrets that are yet to unfold, its a miracle the two haven't killed each other... yet. Then again, opposites do attract.

Pulp


Charles Bukowski - 1994
    Opening with the exotic Lady Death entering the gumshoe-writer's seedy office in pursuit of a writer named Celine, this novel demonstrates Bukowski's own brand of humour and realism, opening up a landscape of seamy Los Angeles.

Fever and Spear


Javier Marías - 2002
    With Fever and Spear, Volume One of his unfolding novel Your Face Tomorrow, he returns us to the rarified world of Oxford (the delightful setting of All Souls and Dark Back of Time), while introducing us to territory entirely new--espionage. Our hero, Jaime Deza, separated from his wife in Madrid, is a bit adrift in London until his old friend Sir Peter Wheeler retired Oxford don and semi-retired master spy recruits him for a new career in British Intelligence. Deza possesses a rare gift for seeing behind the masks people wear. He is soon observing interviews conducted by Her Majesty's secret service: variously shady international businessmen one day, would-be coup leaders the next. Seductively, this metaphysical thriller explores past, present, and future in the ever-more-perilous 21st century. This compelling and enigmatic tour de force from one of Europe's greatest writers continues with Volume Two, Dance and Dream."

Nocilla Dream


Agustín Fernández Mallo - 2006
    Further along U.S. Route 50, a lonely prostitute falls in love with a collector of found photographs. In Las Vegas, an Argentine man builds a peculiar monument to Jorge Luis Borges. On the run from the authorities, Kenny takes up permanent residence in the legal non-place of Singapore International Airport. These are some of the narrative strands that make up this arborescently structured novel, hailed as one of the most daring experiments in Spanish literature of recent years. Full of references to indie cinema, collage, conceptual art, practical architecture, the history of computers and the decadence of the novel, Nocilla Dream finds great beauty in emptiness and reveals something essential about contemporary experience.

American Moor


Keith Hamilton Cobb - 2020
    not necessarily in that order.Keith Hamilton Cobb embarks on a poetic exploration that examines the experience and perspective of black men in America through the metaphor of Shakespeare's character Othello, offering up a host of insights that are by turns introspective and indicting, difficult and deeply moving. American Moor is a play about race in America, but it is also a play about who gets to make art, who gets to play Shakespeare, about whose lives and perspectives matter, about actors and acting, and about the nature of unadulterated love.American Moor has been seen across America, including a successful run off-Broadway in 2019. This edition features an introduction by Professor Kim F. Hall, Barnard College.

Diary of a Zombie


Sergi Llauger - 2010
    The eternal promise of leaving as a peaceful spirit was never fulfilled; instead, I became a wandering soul, rooted to the entrails of this wasteland. You might think that smiling in the face of death should be something glorious, but there’s nothing glorious about this. There’s only a deep and sinister emptiness inside. Destiny made me walk among demons I didn’t need to be scared of. It allowed me to stare at the sun without looking away from dawn to dusk. It placed the burden of this world on my back and also forced me to remember the meaning of love…and of giving human beings a second chance. Was there ever a reason for so many broken laws? Who knows…Let me tell you about a fascinating journey and faraway lands, about unswerving loyalty and unimaginable creatures. My name is Erico Lombardo and I am doomed to be aware of myself. Maybe, after my death, I still had one last thing to do…” “Diary of a Zombie” transports us to a desolate world, a planet wiped out by a massive pandemic where human beings have almost become extinct. But what makes this story different from the rest is the fact that it is told from a very unusual point of view: that of a zombie who, for unknown reasons, keeps his human consciousness and free will after being transformed. This is a unique case. After a few chapters in which the character is introduced, we will witness a story of redemption, full of human values, that is centered around a peculiar friendship. Erico’s cold, cynical and unsociable behavior will gradually change as he meets a lonely and mysterious 8-year-old girl on whom humankind’s scarce chances of survival depend. During the whole of his epic adventure, Erico will be linked to his most human side again, as he recovers memories and feelings he had not experienced since the times when warm blood still coursed through his veins. “Diary of a Zombie”, set in a post-apocalyptic Barcelona, presents a pleasant story which will bring the reader both tears and laughter. It is a breath of fresh air that reinvents a genre which apparently had nothing new to offer.

The Private Lives of Trees


Alejandro Zambra - 2007
    Each night, Julián has been improvising a story about trees to tell Daniela before she goes to sleep, and each Sunday he works on a novel about a man tending to his bonsai, but something about this night is different. As Julián becomes increasing concerned that Verónica won’t return, he reflects on their life together in minute detail, and imagines what Daniela—at twenty, at twenty-five, at thirty years old, without a mother—will think of his novel. Perhaps even more daring and dizzying than Zambra’s magical Bonsai, The Private Lives of Trees demands to be read in a single sitting, and it casts a spell that will bring you back to it again and again.

Too Loud a Solitude


Bohumil Hrabal - 1976
    In the process of compacting, he has acquired an education so unwitting he can't quite tell which of his thoughts are his own and which come from his books. He has rescued many from jaws of hydraulic press and now his house is filled to the rooftops. Destroyer of the written word, he is also its perpetrator.But when a new automatic press makes his job redundant there's only one thing he can do - go down with his ship.This is an eccentric romp celebrating the indestructability- against censorship, political opression etc - of the written word.

Mona


Pola Oloixarac - 2019
    She likes drugs and cigarettes, and when she learns that she's something of an anthropological curiosity herself--a "woman writer of color" treasured in her university for the flourish of rarefied diversity she brings--she pokes fun at American academic culture and its fixation on identity.When she is unexpectedly nominated for "the most important literary award in Europe," Mona sees a chance to escape her spiral of sunlit substance abuse and erotic distractions, and so she trades the temptations of California for small, gray village in Sweden close to the Artic. Now she's stuck in the company of all her jetlagged--and mostly male--competitors, arriving from Japan, France, Armenia, Iran, Colombia. Isolated as they are, the writers do what writers do: exchange compliments, nurse envy and private resentments, stab rivals in the back, and hop in bed together--and all the while, Mona keeps stumbling across the mysterious traces of a violence she cannot explain.As her adventures in Scandinavia unfold, Mona finds that she has not so much escaped her demons as locked herself up with them in the middle of nowhere. In Mona, Pola Oloixarac paints a hypnotic, scabrous and finally jaw-dropping portrait of a woman facing a hipster elite in which she both does and does not belong. A survivor of both patronization and bizarre sexual encounters, Mona is a new kind of feminist. But her past won't stay past, and strange forces are working to deliver her to the test of a lifetime.

The Body Where I Was Born


Guadalupe Nettel - 2011
    And survive she did, but not unscathed. This intimate narrative echoes the voice of the narrator's younger self, a sharp, sensitive girl keen to life's hardships.With bare language and smart humor, both delicate and unafraid, the narrator strings a strand of touching moments together to create a portrait of an unconventional childhood that crushed her, scarred her, mended her, tore her apart and ultimately made her whole.

The Immortal Collection


Eva García Sáenz - 2012
    Iago and his family are longevos—people who never seem to age after reaching adulthood. The ancient family is divided: Iago’s brother and sister seek the source of their longevity in hopes of creating more like themselves, while Iago and his father fear the repercussions of the true Fountain of Youth.A dangerous game of power and knowledge that has played out over eons becomes even more complicated when Adriana attracts both brothers’ attention—and learns their secret.Filled with science, history, and passion, The Immortal Collection transports the reader through time and space, from the days of cavemen, through the Roaring Twenties, to the charming plazas of contemporary Spain. Ancient history meets cutting-edge research in this modern love story and sweeping historical saga.