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.

    Soon Siggi is stealing the paintings to keep them safe from his father. Against the great brooding northern landscape. Siggi recounts the clash of father and son, of duty and personal loyalty, in wartime Germany. “I was trying to find out,” Lenz says, "where the joys of duty could lead a people"

    Barabbas is a man condemned to have no god. "Christos Iesus" is carved on the disk suspended from his neck, but he cannot affirm his faith. He cannot pray. He can only say, "I want to believe."Translated from Swedish by Alan Blair.

    The Master is about his infective influence—on his younger, less attractive brother Henry; on Henry's wife Alison; and on those narrators whom Stevenson so skilfully employs to present their experiences of this charming, ruthless, and evil man.

    As the history progresses over three generations, Stein also meditates on her own writing, on the making of The Making of Americans, and on America.

    A twenty-five-year-old Aramaic scholar, Antoine has had it with being brilliant and deeply self-aware in today's culture. So tortured is he by the depth of his perception and understanding of himself and the world around him that he vows to denounce his intelligence by any means necessary in order to become stupid enough to be a happy, functioning member of society. What follows is a dark and hilarious odyssey as Antoine tries everything from alcoholism to stock-trading in order to lighten the burden of his brain on his soul.

    Before their journey ends, one of them will be hanged, one will vanish, and the others will face a murder trial. Out of the truths and lies that envelop these events, John Fowles has created a novel that is at once a tale of erotic obsession, an exploration of the conflict between reason and superstition, an astonishing act of literary legerdemain, and the story of the birth of a new faith.

    Since childhood, Knecht has been consumed with mastering the Glass Bead Game, which requires a synthesis of aesthetics and philosophy, which he achieves in adulthood, becoming a Magister Ludi (Master of the Game).

    Now he is an insurance agent on the fast track to forty. He gains a new lease on life, though, when he falls for the young and gorgeous Angiolina - except that his angel just happens to be an unapologetic cheat. But what begins as a comedy of infatuated misunderstanding turns darker, as Emilio's jealous persistence in his folly - against his friends' and devoted sister's advice, and even his own best knowledge - may lead to severe consequences in his other relationships. Marked by deep humanity and earthy humor, by psychological insight and an elegant simplicity of style, As a Man Grows Older (Senilità, in Italian; the English title was the suggestion of Svevo's great friend and admirer, James Joyce) is a brilliant study of hopeless love and hapless indecision. It is a masterwork of Italian literature, here beautifully rendered into English in Beryl de Zoete's classic translation.

    The narrator, an anonymous graduate student, sets off on the trail of a French novelist named Paul Michel, who is currently confined to an asylum. Engineering his hero's release, the narrator finds himself enmeshed in bizarre love triangle, of which the three vertices are himself, the novelist, and the late Michel Foucault. Sex, it seems, can be made safe, but the oddball intimacy of reading cannot.

    The first-person narrative is supplemented by forty-four photographs which form an integral part of the work -- pictures of various surreal people, places, and objects which the author visits or is haunted by in naja's presence and which inspire him to mediate on their reality or lack of it. The Nadja of the book is a girl, but, like Bertrand Russell's definition of electricity as not so much a thing as a way things happen, Nadja is not so much a person as the way she makes people behave. She has been described as a state of mind, a feeling about reality, k a kind of vision, and the reader sometimes wonders whether she exists at all. yet it is Nadja who gives form and structure to the novel.

    But his attempts to become a respected member of the community are constantly put under threat: by his own conscience, when, owing to a case of mistaken identity, another man is arrested in his place; and by the relentless investigations of the dogged Inspector Javert. It is not simply for himself that Valjean must stay free, however, for he has sworn to protect the baby daughter of Fantine, driven to prostitution by poverty.

    Closely Watched Trains is the subtle and poetic portrait of Miloš Hrma, a timid young railroad apprentice who insulates himself with fantasy against a reality filled with cruelty and grief. Day after day as he watches trains fly by, he torments himself with the suspicion that he himself is being watched and with fears of impotency. Hrma finally affirms his manhood and, with a sense of peace and purpose he has never known before, heroically confronts a trainload of Nazis.Milan Kundera called the novel "an incredible union of earthly humor and baroque imagination." After receiving acclaim as a novel, Closely Watched Trains was made into an internationally successful film that won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film of 1967. This edition includes a foreword by Josef Škvorecký.

    Written in two versions, male and female (both available in Vintage International), which are identical save for seventeen crucial lines, Dictionary is the imaginary book of knowledge of the Khazars, a people who flourished somewhere beyond Transylvania between the seventh and ninth centuries. Eschewing conventional narrative and plot, this lexicon novel combines the dictionaries of the world's three major religions with entries that leap between past and future, featuring three unruly wise men, a book printed in poison ink, suicide by mirrors, a chimerical princess, a sect of priests who can infiltrate one's dreams, romances between the living and the dead, and much more.

    The subject of major film and stage adaptations, the novel's prime movers, the Vicomte de Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil, form an unholy alliance and turn seduction into a game - a game which they must win. This new translation gives Laclos a modern voice, and readers will be able a judge whether the novel is as "diabolical" and "infamous" as its critics have claimed, or whether it has much to tell us about the kind of world we ourselves live in. David Coward's introduction explodes myths about Laclos's own life and puts the book in its literary and cultural context.