Brought to America at the age of two. Eighteen or 20 books of prose and poetry. Bukowski, after publishing prose in Story and Portfolio stopped writing for ten years. He arrived in the charity ward of the Los Angeles County General Hospital, hemorrhaging as a climax of a ten-year drinking bout. Some say he didn't die. After leaving the hospital he got a tyewriter and began writing again - this time, poetry. He later returned to prose and gained some fame with his column, Notes of a Dirty Old Man, which he wrote mainly for the paper, Open City. After 14 years in the Post Office he resigned at age 50, he says, to keep from going insane. He now claims to be unemployable and eats typewriter ribbons. Once married, once divorced, many times shacked, he has a seven-year-old daughter.These dirty and immortal stories appeared mainly in Underground newspapers, with Open City and Nola Express leading in the publication of them. Others have appeared in Evergreen Review, Knight, Pix, Berkeley Barb, Adam, and Adam Reader.With Bukowski, the votes are still coming in. There seems to be no middle ground - people seem either to love him or hate him. Tales of his own life and doings are as wild and weird as the very stories he writes. In a sense, Bukowski is a legend in his time...a madman, a recluse, a lover...tender, vicious...never the same...these are exceptional stories that come pounding out of his violent and depraved life...horrible and holy...you cannot read them and ever come away the same again.

    Enchanted by her father’s trade, M convinces him to take her along on his routes, selling hardware supplies against the backdrop of Pinochet-era Chile. As father and daughter trek from town to town in their old Renault, M’s memories and thoughts become tied to a language of rural commerce, philosophy, the cosmos, hardware products, and ghosts. M, in her innocence, barely notices the rising tensions and precarious nature of their work until she and her father connect with an enigmatic photographer, E, whose presence threatens to upend the unusual life they’ve created.María José Ferrada expertly captures a vanishing way of life and a father-daughter relationship on the brink of irreversible change. At once nostalgic, dangerous, sharply funny, and full of delight and wonder, How to Order the Universe is a richly imaginative debut and a rare work of magic and originality.

    The mysteries populating the novel open with the disappearance of one of the “special,” scholarship students. As the first part unfolds, it becomes clear that all is not well in Wybrany, and that something more sordid lurks beneath the surface.In the second part—a self-indulgent, wry diary written by an imposter who has infiltrated the school as a substitute teacher—the eerie sense of what’s happening in this space removed from society, becomes more acute and potentially sinister. An exploration of the relationship between the powerful and powerless—and the repetition of these patterns—Mesa’s "sophisticated nightmare" calls to mind great works of gothic literature (think Shirley Jackson) and social thrillers to create a unique, unsettling view of freedom and how a fear of the outside world can create monsters.Translated from the Spanish by Katie Whittemore

    Shortly after her arrival, her apartment is burglarized, and her collection of precious shells, shells that she had been collecting for a lifetime, is stolen. Meeting with indifference from the local police, she decides to investigate the crime on her own, with the help of her new friend from the Museum of Natural History, Sof. While investigating the crime, Helena reflects on the life she’s lived—her ex-husband, her daughter, her lovers, her childhood—and begins to fall in love with her married boss, Theo Verway.An alternately sublime and satirical meditation on love, loss, and obsession, Ingrid Winterbach's The Book of Happenstance is an emotionally affecting masterpiece from one of South Africa’s most exciting authors.

    Given surprising leeway by her family for her increasingly erratic behaviour, she nevertheless feels ever more stifled and repressed. Motherhood, womanhood, the banality of love, the terrors of desire, the inexplicable brutality of another person carrying your heart forever Die, My Love faces all this with a raw intensity. It's not a question of if a breaking point will be reached, but rather when and how violent a form will it take?

    His long suffering widow Dona Flor devotes herself to her cooking school and her friends, who urge her to remarry. She is soon drawn to a kind pharmacist who is everything Vadinho was not, and is altogether happy to marry him. But after her wedding she finds herself dreaming about her first husband’s amorous attentions; and one evening Vadinho himself appears by her bed, as lusty as ever, to claim his marital rights.

    Set in a tubercular sanatorium in Mallorca after the Spanish Civil War, it tells the story of three children sharing a gruesome secret who are brought together again by chance and illness — two patients and one nurse. A love triangle, a story of retribution, and an exploration of evil, The Sea is “a profound and radical descent into the depths of the human soul.” (Gerard de Cortanze)

    In 1988, she introduced the world to Eva Luna in a novel of the same name that recounted the adventurous life of a young Latin American woman whose powers as a storyteller bring her friendship and love. Returning to this tale, Allende presents The Stories of Eva Luna, a treasure trove of brilliantly crafted stories. Lying in bed with her European lover, refugee and journalist Rolf Carlé, Eva answers his request for a story "you have never told anyone before" with these twenty-three samples of her vibrant artistry. Interweaving the real and the magical, she explores love, vengeance, compassion, and the strengths of women, creating a world that is at once poignantly familiar and intriguingly new. Two words --Wicked girl --Clarisa --Toad's mouth --The gold of Tomás Vargas --If you touched my heart --Gift for a sweetheart --Tosca --Walimai --Ester Lucero --Simple María --Our secret --The little Heidelberg --The judge's wife --The road north --The schoolteacher's guest --The proper respect --Interminable life --A discreet miracle --Revenge --Letters of betrayed love --Phantom palace --And of clay are we created

    A couple in their thirties live in a small rented cottage in a quiet part of Tokyo; they work at home, freelance copy-editing; they no longer have very much to say to one another. But one day a cat invites itself into their small kitchen. It leaves, but the next day comes again, and then again and again. Soon they are buying treats for the cat and enjoying talks about the animal and all its little ways. Life suddenly seems to have more promise for the husband and wife — the days have more light and color. The novel brims with new small joys and many moments of staggering poetic beauty, but then something happens….As Kenzaburo Oe has remarked, Takashi Hiraide’s work "really shines." His poetry, which is remarkably cross-hatched with beauty, has been acclaimed here for "its seemingly endless string of shape-shifting objects and experiences,whose splintering effect is enacted via a unique combination of speed and minutiae."

    But this coffee shop offers its customers a unique experience: the chance to travel back in time.In Before the Coffee Gets Cold, we meet four visitors, each of whom is hoping to make use of the café’s time-travelling offer, in order to: confront the man who left them, receive a letter from their husband whose memory has been taken by early onset Alzheimer's, to see their sister one last time, and to meet the daughter they never got the chance to know.But the journey into the past does not come without risks: customers must sit in a particular seat, they cannot leave the café, and finally, they must return to the present before the coffee gets cold . . .Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s beautiful, moving story explores the age-old question: what would you change if you could travel back in time? More importantly, who would you want to meet, maybe for one last time?

    It is published here with the short story The Retreat of Monsieur Bougran. M. Folantin is a government employee who is overwhelmed by the quotidian misery of life. The story follows his quixotic quest for enjoyment as he goes to a restaurant, to the cinema, and to a prostitute—but ultimately finds that nothing can relieve him of his disgust and boredom with the business of living. Joris–Karl Huysmans, art critic and author of Against Nature, is a leading figure in France’s Decadent Movement.

    But her perfect career and marriage start to unravel when her husband of twenty years suddenly leaves her for another woman. Devastated, Blanca is forced to question the life she once had and how well she truly knows herself. She leaves Madrid for San Francisco, where she becomes entrenched in the history of an enigmatic Spanish writer who died decades earlier. The more Blanca discovers about this man, the more she is enthralled by the ill-fated loves, half truths, and silent ambitions that haunted his life. With lush, imaginative prose and unforgettable characters, "The Heart Has Its Reasons "is a journey of the soul that takes readers from Spain to California, between the thorny past and all-too-real present. It is a story about the thrill of creating one's life anew.

    Here, brought together in one volume for the first time, in a masterly new translation by the award-winning translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.The Steppe—the most lyrical of the five—is an account of a nine-year-old boy’s frightening journey by wagon train across the steppe of southern Russia. The Duel sets two decadent figures—a fanatical rationalist and a man of literary sensibility—on a collision course that ends in a series of surprising reversals. In The Story of an Unknown Man, a political radical spying on an important official by serving as valet to his son gradually discovers that his own terminal illness has changed his long-held priorities in startling ways. Three Years recounts a complex series of ironies in the personal life of a rich but passive Moscow merchant. In My Life, a man renounces wealth and social position for a life of manual labor.The resulting conflict between the moral simplicity of his ideals and the complex realities of human nature culminates in a brief apocalyptic vision that is unique in Chekhov’s work.(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) From the Hardcover edition.

    It won’t be the last. He’s now arrived in Galicia. It’s where Álvaro died. It’s where the case has already been quickly closed as a tragic accident. It’s also where Álvaro hid his secrets.The man to whom Manuel was married for fifteen years was not the unassuming man he knew.Álvaro’s trail leads Manuel deep into one of Spain’s most powerful and guarded families. Behind the walls of their forbidding estate, Manuel is nothing but an unwelcome and dangerous intruder. Then he finds two allies: a stubbornly suspicious police lieutenant and Álvaro’s old friend—and private confessor—from seminary school. Together they’re collecting the pieces of Álvaro’s past, his double life, and his mysterious death.But in the shadows of nobility and privilege, Manuel is about to unravel a web of corruption and deception that could be as fatal a trap for him as it was for the man he loved.

    But if he can only find a way to buy a small house, maybe he can win her back . . . These are the obsessive thoughts that pervade the Translator's mind as he walks around an unnamed city in 1920, trying to figure out how to put his life back together. His employers aren't paying him, he's trying to survive a woman's unwanted advances, and he's trying to make the best of his desperate living conditions. All while he struggles with his own mind and angry and psychotic ideas, filled with longing and melancholy. Darkly funny, filled with acidic observations and told with a frenetic pace, "The Translator's Bride" is an incredible ride – whether you're a translator or not!This edition was translated from Portuguese by the author.