Now available in paperback, this highly-acclaimed book is a playful and ingenious gathering of interwoven stories. "At once terribly moving and wildly funny".--A.S. Byatt.

    Chariton's Callirhoe, subtitled Love Story in Syracuse, is a fast-paced historical romance of the first century CE and the oldest extant novel.

    When her mother-in-law suddenly dies of a stroke, Akiko becomes the sole caregiver for her selfish father-in-law Shegezo.The Twilight Years raises important issues about the quality of life at the end of life, caregiving for the old, and the dilemma of women who have both career and family obligations.

    The Stechlin is Fontane's last book and his political testament. Like Effi Briest, his great work on the place of women in Bismarck's empire, it is set at the apex of the Wilhelmine era, both in Berlin and on the estate of a Prussian Junker on the shores of Lake Stechlin. It is a significant historical and cultural document, probably the finest chronicle of the lifestyle of the German upper classes in the late nineteenth century; Fontane portrays the best in the life and ways of the passing Prussian aristocracy, while describing his hopes for the future of Germany and its nobility, which were never to be fully realized. Although this novel has been translated into many languages, it has never before been available in English; this edition thus fills an important gap in the significant works of European literature accessible to English readers.

    Colambre travels incognito to Ireland to see the country that he still considers his home. When he returns to London he assists his father to pay off the debts, on condition that the Clonbrony family return to live in Ireland. Maria Edgeworth (1 January 1768 - 22 May 1849) was a prolific Anglo-Irish writer of adults' and children's literature. She was one of the first realist writers in children's literature and was a significant figure in the evolution of the novel in Europe. She held advanced views, for a woman of her time, on estate management, politics and education, and corresponded with some of the leading literary and economic writers, including Sir Walter Scott and David Ricardo.

    The five heroines are Onatsu, already wise in the ways of love the tender age of sixteen; Osen, a faithful wife until unjustly accused of adultery; Osan, a Kyoto beauty who falls asleep in the wrong bed; Oshichi, willing to burn down a city to meet her samurai lover; and Oman, who has to compete with handsome boys to win her lover's affections.But the book is more than a collection of skillfully told erotic tales, for "Saikaku…could not delve into the inmost secrets of human life only to expose them to ridicule or snickering prurience. Obviously fascinated by the variety and complexity of human love, but retaining always a sense of its intrinsic dignityhe is both a discriminating and compassionate judge of his fellow man."Saikaku's style, as allusive as it is witty, as abbreviated as it is penetrating, is a challenge that few translators have dared to face, and certainly never before with the success here achieved in a translation that recaptures the heady flavor of the original.

    We follow him from an orphaned childhood to the casual atrocities of occupying troops, through his own soldiering adventures, and up to his final vocation as a hermit alone on an island. Mike Mitchell's superb translation allows readers to enjoy more fully one of the great masterpieces of European literature and the first German bestseller.

    The title character is a papier mache bird that shares the front room of an apartment with a collection of bowling trophies that some time earlier were stolen from the home of the Logan brothers. The human tenants of this apartment are John and Pat, who have just returned from seeing a Greta Garbo movie in a local movie theater. Their neighbors are Bob and Constance, a married couple going through some rough times in their relationship. Because of their failing relationship, Bob becomes depressed. Meanwhile the Logan brothers are looking for their stolen trophies. The brothers have turned their happy life of bowling into a life of vengeance...

    Three appalling crimes leave all of Paris aghast: the Marquise de Langruen is hacked to death, the Princess Sonia is robbed, and Lord Beltham is found dead, stuffed into a trunk. Inspector Juve knows that all the clues point to one suspect: the master of disguise, Fantômas. Juve cleverly pursues him in speeding trains, down dark alleys, through glittering Parisian salons, obsessed with bringing the demon mastermind to justice. As thrilling to read now as it was when first published in 1915, Fantômas is not a puzzle but an intoxicant” (The Village Voice).

    It is generally regarded as the masterpiece of Conscience, which earned him the title "the man who taught his people to read".

    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.

    . . tells the story of Pedro Archanjo, mestizo, self-taught ethnologist, apostle of miscegenation, laborer, cult priest, and bon vivant. . . . Amado’s joyous, exuberant, almost magical descriptions of festivals, puppet shows, African rituals, local legends, fascinating customs, strange and wonderful characters . . . result in a richness and warmth that are impossible to resist.

    After shooting his brother's killer, young Gjorg is entitled to thirty days' grace - not enough to see out the month of April.Then a visiting honeymoon couple cross the path of the fugitive. The bride's heart goes out to Gjorg, and even these 'civilised' strangers from the city risk becoming embroiled in the fatal mechanism of vendetta.

    1008 at the height of the Heian period, Lady Sarashina (as she is known) probably wrote most of her work towards the end of her life, long after the events described. Thwarted and saddened by the real world with all its deaths and partings and frustrations, Lady Sarashina protected herself by a barrier of fantasy and so escaped from harsh reality into a rosier more congenial realm. She presents her vision of the world in beautiful prose, the sentences flowing along smoothly so that we feel we are watching a magnificent scroll being slowly unrolled.'It is like seeing a garden at night in which certain parts are lit up so brightly that we can distinguish each blade of grass, each minute insect, each nuance of colour, while the rest of the garden and the tidal wave that threatens it remain in darkness'--Ivan Morris

    Although known principally as a writer, he was closely associated with the tumultuous revolutionary period of his own country. Of all Gorky's novels, The Artamonov Business ('Decadence' in the USA edition) is the most impressive & dramatic. Here in concentrated form is the tragic failure of Russia's middle classes in the decades before the Revolution, seen in the small town microcosm of a family of textile manufacturers.