A novel mingling mysticism, madness, sadistic cruelty and nascent sexuality, it gives a scathing insight into the effects of forced vocations and the unnatural life of the convent. A succès de scandale at the end of the eighteenth century, it has attracted and unsettled readers ever since. For Diderot's novel is not simply a story of a young girl with a bad habit; it is also a powerfully emblematic fable about oppression and intolerance.This new translation includes Diderot's all-important prefatory material, which he placed, disconcertingly, at the end of the novel, and which turns what otherwise seems like an exercise in realism into what is now regarded as a masterpiece of proto-modernist fiction.

    It is three hundred years since it was actively at war with its traditional enemy two days' sail across the water, the savage land of Farghestan - a slumbering but by no means extinct volcano. The narrator of this story, Aldo, a world-weary young aristocrat, is posted to the coast of Syrtes, where the Admiralty keeps the seas constantly patrolled to defend the demarcation between the two powers still officially at war. His duties are to be the eyes and ears of the Signory, to report back any rumours of interest to the State. Goaded, however, by his mistress, Vanessa Aldobrandi, he takes a patrol boat across the boundary to within cannon-shot of the Farghestani coastal batteries. The age-old undeclared truce is no more than a boil ripe to be lanced.

    Out of the last hours of Virgil's life and the final stirrings of his consciousness, the Austrian writer Hermann Broch fashioned one of the great works of twentieth-century modernism, a book that embraces an entire world and renders it with an immediacy that is at once sensual and profound.Begun while Broch was imprisoned in a German concentration camp, The Death of Virgil is part historical novel and part prose poem - and always an intensely musical and immensely evocative meditation on the relation between life and death, the ancient and the modern.

    Together they set out to conquer Dublin and the world. Under the big city’s bright lights, they spin their lives into a whirl of comic and touching misadventures, wild flirtations, and reckless passions. But love changes everything. And as their lives take unexpected and separate turns, Baba and Kate must ultimately learn to go it alone.A beautiful portrait of the pain and joy of youth, the ruin of marriage gone wrong, and the ache of lost friendship and love, this trilogy of Edna O’Brien’s remarkable early novels is more than just a harbinger of the stunning and masterly writer she has become.

    This renowned Internet blogger, daytime sleeper, and dedicated hedonist is yanked into family business matters when the president of the business, his older, accomplished brother, disappears. Thus begins The Best Thing That Can Happen to a Croissant, an easy-riding, reluctant-detective story. Tusset's prodigious talents as both a satirist and creator of one of the most hilarious underachievers in recent memory make this an exquisitely entertaining read.

    But tourists and opportunists are making inroads into the area, and the balance of nature is making a dangerous shift. Translated by Peter Bush.

    Based on the story of the third-century saint who lived on an isolated mountaintop in the Egyptian desert, it is a fantastical rendering of one night during which Anthony is besieged by carnal temptations and philosophical doubt.

    Set in the steamy monsoon heat of Calcutta, it brings together three suffering characters. There is Anne-Marie Stretter, beautiful wife of the French ambassador, seeking the love of younger men as if desperate for a carefree youth she never had. One of those men who falls for her is the former Vice-Consul of Lahore, an awkward, solitary man prone to irrational, violent rages. And there is a mysterious Cambodian beggar woman whose presence in India intrigues the Europeans, just as the woman herself seems drawn to them. Excerpted from a review at Amazon.com

    In time she becomes his lover—then she inexplicably disappears. When Michael next sees her, he is a young law student, and she is on trial for a hideous crime. As he watches her refuse to defend her innocence, Michael gradually realizes that Hanna may be guarding a secret she considers more shameful than murder.

    In Oran, a coastal town in North Africa, the plague begins as a series of portents, unheeded by the people. It gradually becomes an omnipresent reality, obliterating all traces of the past and driving its victims to almost unearthly extremes of suffering, madness, and compassion.

    Set on a mysterious island, Bioy’s novella is a story of suspense and exploration, as well as a wonderfully unlikely romance, in which every detail is at once crystal clear and deeply mysterious.Inspired by Bioy Casares’s fascination with the movie star Louise Brooks, The Invention of Morel has gone on to live a secret life of its own. Greatly admired by Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez, and Octavio Paz, the novella helped to usher in Latin American fiction’s now famous postwar boom. As the model for Alain Resnais and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Last Year at Marienbad, it also changed the history of film.

    One is Flo, practical, suspicious of other people's airs, at times dismayingly vulgar. The other is Rose, Flo's stepdaughter, a clumsy, shy girl who somehow leaves the small town she grew up in to achieve her own equivocal success in the larger world.

    Mistaken for a holy man, he plays the part and succeeds so well that God himself intervenes to put Raju's newfound sanctity to the test. Narayan's most celebrated novel, The Guide won him the National Prize of the Indian Literary Academy, his country's highest literary honor.

    It tells of the life and opinions of Reger, a 'musical philosopher', through the voice of his acquaintance Atzbacher, a 'private academic'.The book is set in Vienna on one day around the year of its publication, 1985. Reger is an 82-year-old music critic who writes pieces for The Times. For over thirty years he has sat on the same bench in front of Tintoretto's White-bearded Man in the Bordone Room of the Kunsthistorisches Museum for four or five hours of the morning of every second day. He finds this environment the one in which he can do his best thinking. He is aided in this habit by the gallery attendant Irrsigler, who prevents other visitors from using the bench when Reger requires it.

    Borges sends us on a journey into a compelling, bizarre, and profoundly resonant realm; we enter the fearful sphere of Pascal's abyss, the surreal and literal labyrinth of books, and the iconography of eternal return. To enter the worlds in Ficciones is to enter the mind of Jorge Luis Borges, wherein lies Heaven, Hell, and everything else in between. Part One: The Garden of Forking Paths Prologue Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (1940) The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim (1936, not included in the 1941 edition) Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote (1939) The Circular Ruins (1940) The Lottery in Babylon (1941) An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain (1941) The Library of Babel (1941) The Garden of Forking Paths (1941) Part Two: Artifices Prologue Funes the Memorious (1942) The Form of the Sword (1942) Theme of the Traitor and the Hero (1944) Death and the Compass (1942) The Secret Miracle (1943) Three Versions of Judas (1944) The End (1953, 2nd edition only) The Sect of the Phoenix (1952, 2nd edition only) The South (1953, 2nd edition only)