because they're not sexy enough.A playful and biting critique, Ugresic's essays hit on all of the major aspects of publishing: agents, subagents, and scouts, supermarket-like bookstores, Joan Collins, book fairs that have little to do with books, authors promoted because of sex appeal instead of merit, and editors trying to look like writers by having their photograph taken against a background of bookshelves.Thanks to cultural influences such as Oprah, The Today Show, and Kelly Ripa, best-seller lists have become just a modern form of socialist realism, a manifestation of a society that generally ignores literature in favor of the next big thing.

    So when the British Secret Service asks him to become their ‘man in Havana’ he can’t afford to say no. There’s just one problem…he doesn’t know anything! To avoid suspicion, he begins to recruit nonexistent sub-agents, concocting a series of intricate fictions. But Wormold soon discovers that his stories are closer to the truth than he could have ever imagined… In Clive Francis’ adaptation, Graham Greene’s classic satirical novel becomes a wonderfully funny and fast-moving romp.

    The book covers three time periods, taking in the hero’s childhood before the war, the battle lines during the war, and his attempt to continue with normal life in a post-conflict society. Through his meditative prose, Šehić attempts to reconstruct the life of a man who is bipolar in nature; being both a veteran and a poet. At times, he manages to pick up the pieces of his life, but at other times it escapes him. His memories of the recent war and the killings are "dirty and disgusting", while he views his present as humdrum and his identity feels incomplete. With the help of his memories, he uses his mind and strength to look for a way out of the maze in which he is confined, acting as both archivist and chronicler of the past - roles that allow him the opportunity to rebuild everything again. In parallel to this story, the book’s passages on the town next to the river Una take on mythical and dreamlike dimensions. Here, the novel expands into a poetic description of nature, seasons, flora and fauna, as well as childhood memories not yet tainted by all that will happen after 1992.The book is dedicated to people who believe in the power and beauty of life in the face of death and mass destruction.

    However, on arriving in the promised land, he finds neither lots of willing leggy lovelies nor a warm welcome from his long-lost Greek cousins. Instead, he gets banged up in a detention center in a small border town. As Gazi and his fellow immigrants try to find jobs, they begin to plan their future lives in Greece, imagining riches and successes which always remain just beyond their grasp. The sheer absurdity of their plans and their new lives is overwhelming. Both detached and involved, ironic and emotional, Kapllani interweaves the story of his experience with meditations upon border syndrome—a mental state, as much as a geographical experience—to create a brilliantly observed, amusing, and perceptive debut.

    Its lyrical scenes still etch a portrait of Cyrano as a man of uncompromising bravery except in matters of the heart. They come off beautifully in the intimate off-Broadway-size Roundabout Theater. To the open minded, Langella's work will hardly seem felonious and it may be a breakthrough!" --David Patrick Stearns, U S A Today"Frank Langella has abridged the text and given the play a bare-bones production shorn of extravagance. CYRANO is compelling enough in its characterizations, dialogue and situations to withstand minimalism." --Frank Scheck, Hollywood Reporter"Frank Langella's adaptation is relatively short, fast and intimate. The speed of the shortened version allows the ideas behind the play to emerge with great force and clarity. The result is a terrifically enjoyable and surprising thought-provoking piece of theater." --Fintan O'Toole, Daily News, New York

    . . ." To create this work that strains against all constraints, László Krasznahorkai began from one of Max Neumann’s paintings; Neumann, spurred into action, created 14 more images, which unleashed an additional 13 texts from the author. Animalinside is the rare case of two matchless artists meeting across disciplines, and New Directions is very proud to publish a limited edition of this powerful novella, exquisitely produced by Sylph Editions and the Cahiers Series of the American University of Paris with a deluxe seven-stage printing process for the amazing Neumann images.

    Killed at the front in Tula Province in 1941." This is all that remains of Ivan Chistyakov, a senior guard at the Baikal Amur Corrective Labour Camp.Who was this lost man? How did he end up in the gulag? Though a guard, he is a type of prisoner, too. We learn that he is a cultured and urbane ex-city dweller with a secret nostalgia for pre-Revolutionary Russia. In this diary, Chistyakov does not just record his life in the camp, he narrates it. He is a sharp-eyed witness and a sympathetic, humane, and broken man.From stumblingly poetic musings on the bitter landscape of the taiga to matter-of-fact grumbles about the inefficiency of his stove, from accounts of the brutal conditions of the camp to reflections on the cruelty of loneliness, this diary is an astonishing record—a visceral and immediate description of a place and time whose repercussions still affect the shape of modern Russia, and modern Europe.

    Two brothers and a sister, summoned by their father and reunited at the hospital where their mother lies on her deathbed, must come to grips with their relationships with both their parents.

    Schmid, Neue Zürcher Zeitung (Germany)This remarkable debut novel by a unique young Russian voice portrays the influence of political intolerance and religious violence in the lives of people forced to choose between evils.The Mountain and the Wall focuses on Shamil, a young local reporter in Makhachkala, and his reactions, or lack thereof, to rumors that the Russian government is building a wall to cut off the Muslim provinces of the Caucasus from the rest of Russia. As unrest spreads and the tension builds, Shamil's life is turned upside down, and he can no longer afford to ignore the violence surrounding him.With a fine sense for mounting catastrophe, Alisa Ganieva tells the story of the decline of a society torn apart by its inherent extremes.Alisa Ganieva, born in 1985, grew up in Makhachkala, Dagestan. Her literary debut, the novella Salaam, Dalgat!, won the prestigious Debut Prize in 2009. Shortlisted for all of Russia's major literary awards, The Mountain and the Wall is her first novel, and has already been translated into several languages. Ganieva lives in Moscow, where she works as a journalist and literary critic.Carol Apollonio, PhD, is a professor of Slavic and Eurasian studies at Duke University. Her most recent translations include German Sadulaev's The Maya Pill (Dalkey Archive, 2014) and new versions of Anton Chekhov stories.

    If you don’t have a particular ingredient to hand, don’t be afraid to experiment – who knows, you may come up with something new and delicious! (If you do, be sure to write and let me know!) I’ve included a selection of my favourites – simple, tasty and wholesome treats that never fail to please. Oh, and of course, I couldn't resist writing a story to accompany the recipes... Enjoy! Sara Alexi

    Information for Foreigners is a drama of disappearance, an experimental work dealing with the theme of random and meaningless punishment in which the audience is led through darkened passageways to a series of nightmarish tableaux. The collection also includes The Walls and Antigona Furiosa.

    Growing up after World War I and the collapse of the empire, Rezzori lived in a twilit world suspended between the formalities of the old nineteenth-century order which had shaped his aristocratic parents, and the innovations, uncertainties, and raw terror of the new century. The haunted atmosphere of this dying world is beautifully rendered in the pages of The Snows of Yesteryear. The book is a series of portraits—amused, fond, sometimes appalling—of Rezzori’s family: his hysterical and histrionic mother, disappointed by marriage, destructively obsessed with her children’s health and breeding; his father, a flinty reactionary, whose only real love was hunting; his haughty older sister, fated to die before thirty; his earthy nursemaid, who introduced Rezzori to the power of storytelling and the inevitability of death; and a beloved governess, Bunchy. Telling their stories, Rezzori tells his own, holding his early life to the light like a crystal until it shines for us with a prismatic brilliance

    Maya Abramovna Klotsvog has had quite a life, and she wants you to know all about it. Selfish, garrulous, and thoroughly entertaining, she tells us where she came from, who she didn't get along with, and what became of all her husbands and lovers.In Klotsvog, Margarita Khemlin creates a first-person narrator who is both deeply self-absorbed and deeply compelling. From Maya's perspective, Khemlin unfurls a retelling of the Soviet Jewish experience that integrates the historical and the personal into her protagonist's vividly drawn inner and outer lives. Maya's life story flows as a long monologue, told in unfussy language dense with Khemlin's magnificently manipulated Soviet clich�s and matter-of-fact descriptions of Soviet life. Born in a center of Jewish life in Ukraine, she spent the war in evacuation in Kazakhstan. She has few friends but several husbands, and her relationships with her relatives are strained at best. The war looms over Klotsvog, and the trauma runs deep, as do the ambiguities and ambivalences of Jewish identity. Lisa Hayden's masterful translation brings this compelling character study full of dark, sly humor and new perspectives on Jewish heritage and survival to an English-speaking audience.

    It is the story of John MacLennan, a Canadian sailor who is left behind by his ship, stranded on the northeastern tip of Siberia and the story of the Chukchi community that adopts this wounded stranger and teaches him to live as a true human being. Over time, John comes to know his new companions as a real people who share the best and worst of human traits with his own kind. Tragedy strikes, and wounds are healed with compassion and honesty as tensions rise and fall. Rytkheu’s empathy, humor, and provocative voice guide us across the magnificent landscape of the North and reveal all the complexity and beauty of a vanishing world.

    This play, first staged at the Leicester Haymarket Theatre, is based on a tenth-century Jain myth about a king who finds his queen involved with an elephant-keeper.