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.

    '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

    Inspired by Shakespeare's magic play The Tempest, prizewinning writer Marina Warner refashions the drama to explore the restless conflicts between the inhabitants of a Caribbean island and the English family who settled it. From that violent moment in the seventeenth century when the English buccaneer Kit Everard arrives at Enfant-Beate, the islanders' fate is intertwined, often tragically, with that of the Everards. The voices that map the fortunes of those born, raised, or landed on the island pass from the wise woman Sycorax in the past, a healer and a dyer of indigo, to the native nanny Serafine Killebree, who transforms them to fairy tales for the two little Everard girls in London in the 1950s. At the center of the modern-day story is the relationship between these two young women: Xanthe, the golden girl, brash and confident, and Miranda, self-conscious and uneasy, who struggles with her Creole inheritance. When Xanthe decides they should return to Enfant-Beate to restore their fortunes, she binds the family closer to its past and awakens a history marked with passions and portents that takes the two women on very different paths of discovery. Sensuous and earthy, humorous and magical, Indigo is a novel of powerful originality and imagination.

    Howard Halliday, the editor of the Midnight Examiner and the unlikely protagonist in William Kotzwinkle's latest novel, becomes embroiled with several shady characters, including a bloodthirsty crime lord and a porn queen in danger, who lead him into a bizarre escapade that rivals only the freakish headlines in the Midnight Examiner.

    Of the fragile love between the assured Englishman, Anthony, and the bright but sheltered young Bengali woman, Moni, Gupta weaves a provocative and utterly empathetic tale of awakening and hard discovery, steeped in cultural protocol and taboo, in Jane Austen and the verse of Tagore.

    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.

    As the nameless writer confronts his fears, he goes on with his life in one of the most original and provocative works from a contemporary writer.

    When word comes that her long-estranged daughter, Maud, has disappeared in Quebec City, she decides to return home, accepting the part of Winnie, the old crone in Samuel Beckett's Happy Days, at a local theatre. The visit unexpectedly turns into a devastating confrontation with her past and present illusions, as Flora finds she must come to terms with all the roles she has ever played in life, as actress, woman, mother, child, and lover.

    He dreams of one day making a film—a searing portrait of his times—that the authorities would never allow. When the communist regime collapses, Pavel finds himself unprepared for the new world of supposedly unlimited freedom, and unable to make the film he has always wanted to make. His dilemma—that of a man choosing between the ideals and temptations of freedom—informs every sentence of this important novel.

    A peasant boy, Balbino, tries to flee the repressive Galician society of the 30s and 40s by questioning, answering, and criticizing every aspect of social and religious restrictions.

    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.

    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.

    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.

    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.

    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.