Readings.com.au: St Kilda Recommends: Books

Faithful Ruslan

"A dog will never bite anyone who truly loves him. . . only man is capable of such a perverse act."

Set in a remote Siberian depot immediately following the demolition of one of the gulag’s notorious camps and the emancipation of its prisoners, Faithful Ruslan is an embittered cri de oeur from a writer whose circumstances obliged him to resist the violence of arbitrary power. “Every writer who writes anything in this country is made to feel he has committed a crime,” Georgi Vladimov said. Dissident, he said, is a word that “they force on you.” His mother, a victim of Stalin’s anti-Semitic policy, had been interred for two years in one of the camps from which Vladimov derived the wrenching detail of Faithful Ruslan. The novel circulated in samizdat for more than a decade, often attributed to Solzhenitsyn, before its publication in the West led to Vladimov’s harassment and exile.

A starving stray, tortured and abandoned by the godlike “Master” whom he has unconditionally loved, Ruslan and his cadre of fellow guard dogs dutifully wait for the arrival of new prisoners—but the unexpected arrival of a work party provokes a climactic bloodletting. Fashioned from the perceptions of an uncomprehending animal, Vladimov’s insistently ironic indictment of the gulag spirals to encompass all of Man’s inexplicable cruelty.

President

Restored to print for the first time in more than forty years, The President was hailed by the New York Times as a "tour de force"

At 82, the former premier lives in alert and suspicious retirement— self exile—on the Normandy coast, writing his anxiously anticipated memoirs and receiving visits from statesman and biographers. In his library is the self-condemning, handwritten confession of the premier’s former attaché, Chalamont, hidden between the pages of a sumptuously produced work of privately printed pornography—a confession that the premier himself had dictated and forced Chalamont to sign. Now the long-thwarted Chalamont has been summoned to form a new coalition in the wake of the government’s collapse. The premier alone possesses the secret of Chalamont’s guilt, of his true character—and has publicly vowed: “He’ll never be Premier as long as I’m alive . . . Nor when I’m dead, either.”

Inspired by French Premier Georges Clemenceau, The President is a masterpiece of psychological suspense and a probing account of the decline of power.

The Late Lord Byron A Biography

Whilst many biographies have attempted to enlighten readers on the iconic life of Lord Byron, this is the only biography devoted to the aftermath of his life. It is these first 20 posthumous years that have unearthed the most unexpected and exciting discoveries about the character and poet and the behaviour of his notorious family - wife, sister, friends and enemies. Drawing on a large archive of unpublished material from the Lovelace Papers, the Murray manuscripts and the Hobhouse archive, Langley presents a unique portrait of this iconic life.

After Midnight

In 1937, German author Irmgard Keun had only recently fled Nazi Germany with her lover Joseph Roth when she wrote this slim, exquisite and devastating book. It captures the unbearable tension, contradictions and hysteria of pre-war Germany like no other novel. Yet, even as it exposes human folly, After Midnight exudes a hopeful humanism. Full of humour and light, even as it describes the first moments of a nightmare, After Midnight is a masterpiece that deserves to be read and remembered anew.

The Train

Against all expectations Marcel Féron has made a "normal" life in a bucolic French suburb in the Ardennes. But on May 10, 1940, as Nazi tanks approach, this timid, happy man must abandon his home and confront the "Fate" that he has secretly awaited. Separated from his pregnant wife and young daughter in the chaos of flight, he joins a freight car of refugees hurtling southward ahead of the pursuing invaders. There, he meets Anna, a sad-looking, dark- haired girl, whose accent is "neither Belgian nor German," and who "seemed foreign to everything around her." As the mystery of Anna's identity is gradually revealed, Marcel leaps from the heights of an exhilarating freedom to the depths of a terrifying responsibility--one that will lead him to a blood-chilling choice. When it first appeared in English in 1964, British novelist and critic Brigid Brophy declared "The Train "to be "the novel his admirers had been expecting all along from Simenon." Until "The Train," she wrote, the dazzlingly prolific novelist had been "a master without a masterpiece.

The Rattler And Other Stories

In this wonderfully eclectic collection published by Spineless Wonders, A.S. Patric shows us a surreal side of Melbourne where anything can happen. A tram driver makes a mercy dash with a carriage full of show dogs, a boy smuggles a lizard onto an airplane and long-dead Anais Nin and June Miller are spending their twilight years squabbling in Australian suburbia. There are stories that explore the darker side of human nature and those that show us the beauty and the struggle of growing up, of identity and of relationships. There is humour, there is tragedy but above all there is the poetry that the generous hearted Patric manages to distill from everyday life.

The Inevitable: Contemporary Writers Confront Death

Birth is not inevitable. Life certainly isn't. The sole inevitability of existence, the only sure consequence of being alive, is death. In these eloquent and surprising essays, twenty writers face this fact, among them Geoff Dyer, who describes ghost bikes in memory of those who die in biking accidents; Jonathan Safran Foer, proposing a new way of punctuating dialogue in the face of a family history of heart attacks and decimation by the Holocaust; Mark Doty, whose reflections on the art-porn movie Bijou lead to a meditation on the intersection of sex and death epitomised by the AIDS epidemic; and Joyce Carol Oates, who writes about the loss of her husband and faces her own mortality. Other contributors include Annie Dillard, Diane Ackerman, Peter Straub, Brenda Hillman and Terry Castle.

A Graphic Cosmogony

It could not be said better than with the introductory words of acclaimed comics expert and organiser of Comica, Paul Gravett:

‘In the beginning…’

When it comes to the birth of comics, like the birth of the cosmos, it’s still open to speculation. The Book of Genesis might open with ‘In the beginning was the word’, but it seems more than likely that ‘In the beginning was the picture’. Or at least a picture which served as a word, a visual vehicle for representation and meaning. Mankind surely drew before we could write, but why make a distinction anyway? After all, the Chinese use the same word to mean both writing and drawing. And we know that many letter or word forms began as codified shorthand drawings of what they represented. We can only guess what the very first drawings looked like on the rocky walls of our very first art galleries, cinemas, decorated temples or stained-glass-windowed cathedrals, namely our earliest ancestors’ cosy, craggy caves. Most probably they included a life-size hand, daubed, smacked and printed straight onto the rock, and perhaps a simplified version of man himself, reduced to a symbolic, talismanic stick figure, the proto-cartoon or ur-comic.

There is something instinctual, almost primal about making and reading/viewing comics, especially highly graphic ones with few or no words. They spark a provocative clarity that taps into our inner caveman’s brain, our pre-literate child-self deciphering to make sense of the strange wonders of the everyday. And for all our scientific advances, here we are now, only a mere decade into this second millennium, and still finding fascination in the show-and-tell choreographies of pictures, lettering, balloons, captions and panels. So what better means than comics, the distillation of illuminated manuscripts, tapestries, meditational paintings and decorated scrolls and all of humanities’ narrative arts, to tell that oldest story of them all, the story of creation?

The Biblical creation myth proposes that God created the world in seven days, or six plus one day off to chill out, so in that spirit the two-dozen cartoonist-shamans corralled into this compendium were given just seven pages to devise their own version of how we all got here. Some draw on tales from ancient traditions, such as Norse or Ainu legends or a universal mother’s womb of all things. Some illustrate mainly in stylised profiles, harking back to Egyptian tomb walls or Grecian friezes. Others mostly ignore previous versions – ‘It’s been done to death. You have to make it up’ – and take more oblique or satirical stabs. They try explaining the origins of everything as a magician’s act, a simulation game, a failed school assignment, a yurt-dweller’s break from boredom, the tears of a grief-stricken stag or the contents of a cyclops’ vacuum-cleaner bag or the head of Derek. It’s up to you whether you believe such ‘dubious facts’ as ‘ghost energy’, ‘ether-juice’ or the heresies of the ‘Masters of the Universe’. Entire world faiths have been built on equally unlikely accounts. Perhaps if enough readers of this volume start believing in certain stories, they might cause a spate of new religions to spring up based upon them.

Pull up a rock and gather round the flickering fire - the universe is about to be born again…

This is a full list of contributors: Stuart Kolakovic, Mikkel Sommers, Brecht Vandenbroucke, Luke Best, Rob Hunter, Jon McNaught, Ben Newman, Andrew Rae, Luke Pearson, Jack Teagle, Jon Boam, Jakob Hindrichs, Clayton Junior, Daniel Locke, Isabel Greenberg, Mike Bertino, Nick White, Rui Tenreiro, Sean Hudson, Luc Melanson, Katia Fouquet, Yeji Yun, Matthew Lyons, Liesbeth De Stercke.

Hildafolk

Hilda is sitting in her tent at night listening to the rumble of the storm passing overhead when she hears a bell. As she hurtles towards the vanishing tinkling sound, Hilda unwittingly embarks on an adventure into strange worlds ruled by magical forces. Luke Pearson tells this exciting tale with his stunningly adept use of line and colour, demonstrating a grasp of graphic storytelling far past his years. Hildafolk is a stellar beginning to what is already a burgeoning UK comic talent.

Suicide

Suicide cannot be read as simply another novel it is, in a sense, the author s own oblique, public suicide note, a unique meditation on this most extreme of refusals. Presenting itself as an investigation into the suicide of a close friend perhaps real, perhaps fictional more than twenty years earlier, Leve gives us, little by little, a striking portrait of a man, with all his talents and flaws, who chose to reject his life, and all the people who loved him, in favor of oblivion. Gradually, through Leve s casually obsessive, pointillist, beautiful ruminations, we come to know a stoic, sensible, thoughtful man who bears more than a slight psychological resemblance to Leve himself. But Suicide is more than just a compendium of memories of an old friend; it is a near-exhaustive catalog of the ramifications and effects of the act of suicide, and a unique and melancholy farewell to life.

Last Novel

In recent novels, which have been called "hypnotic," "stunning," and "exhilarating," David Markson has created his own personal genre. In this new work. The Last Novel, an elderly author (referred to only as "Novelist") announces that since this will be his final effort, he has "carte blanche to do anything he damned well pleases." Pressed by solitude and age, Novelist's preoccupations inevitably turn to the stories of other artists--their genius, their lack of recognition, and their deaths. Keeping his personal history out of the story as much as possible, Novelist creates an incantatory stream of fascinating triumphs and failures from the lives of famous and not-so-famous painters, writers, musicians, sports figures, and scientists. As Novelist moves through his last years, a minimalist self-portrait emerges, becoming an intricate masterpiece from David Markson's astonishing imagination. Through these startling, sometimes comic, but often tragic anecdotes we unexpectedly discern the entire shape of a man's life.

Mule A Novel Of Moving Weight

From an award-winning "savvy storyteller"* comes a page-turning, zeitgeist-capturing novel of a young couple who turn to drug trafficking to make it through the recession. James and Kate are golden children of the late twentieth century, flush with opportunity. But an economic downturn and an unexpected pregnancy send them searching for a way to make do.A winter in the mountains of California's Siskiyou County introduces a tempting opportunity. A friend grows prime-grade marijuana; if James transports just one load from Cali to Florida, he'll pull down enough cash to survive for months.James navigates life as a mule, then a boss--from moneyhungry friends to gun-toting drug lords, from Sacramento to Tallahassee, from just making the weight move cross-country to making thousands of dollars a day.

Old Spring

Dawn and Frank wake up one wet morning in the flat above their pub, the Old Spring. Today they have to meet the brewery representative, creepy Tim Green, and track down an error in their books - or face the consequences. Dawn has something else on her mind, too: the anniversary of an old tragedy for which she has always felt responsible. Frank has a problem of his own - a secret that has ended his sex life with Dawn. Darren the cleaner, meanwhile, is haunted by the ghost of a long-dead landlord. The pub's 'chaplain', Father Thomas, tries to rediscover his faith under the sceptical scrutiny of his tormentor, Alan. And, in the local hospital, pub regular Romesh drifts towards death on his magic carpet, while back in the snug, the tattoed man faces up to a life and death crisis of his own.

The Seamstress And The Wind

The Seamstress and the Wind is a deliciously laugh-out-loud-funny novel. Aseamstress who is sewing a wedding dress for the pregnant local art teacher fears that her son, while playing in a big semitruck, has been accidentally kidnapped and driven off to Patagonia. Completely unhinged, she calls a local taxi to follow the semi in hot pursuit. When her husband finds out what s happened, he takes off after wife and child. They race not only to the end of the world, but to adventures in desire where the wild Southern wind falls in love with th eseamstress, and a monster child takes up with the truck driver. Intersperse dare Aira s musings about memory and childhood, and his hometown of Coronel Pringles, with a compelling view of the hard lot of this working-class town, situated not far from Buenos Aires.

Great Philosophers Who Failed At Love

Few people have failed at love as spectacularly as the great philosophers. Although we admire their wisdom, history is littered with the romantic failures of the most sensible men and women of every age, including: Friedrich Nietzsche: "Ah, women. They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent." (Rejected by everyone he proposed to, even when he kept asking and asking.)

Jean-Paul Sartre: "There are of course ugly women, but I prefer those who are pretty." (Adopted his mistress as his daughter.)

Louis Althusser: "The trouble is there are bodies and, worse still, sexual organs." (Accidentally strangled his wife to death.)

And dozens of other great thinkers whose words we revere—but whose romantic decisions we should avoid at all costs.

Dying

In this darkly playful novel, polymath Rene Belletto tells two complimentary stories: In one, a man finds himself paying a ransom demanded by the kidnappers of a woman he's never actually met; in the other, a second man makes plans to fake his own death to escape a woman whose devotion has begun to terrify him. Fast, funny, and sarcastic, partaking of the same vocabularies, imagery, and pitch-black sense of humor, these two variations on a single theme form a novel as much at home in the surreal as in everyday reality.from Dying "One evening, shortly before my departure (just hours before my departure, truth be told: I only set aside my quill to make my escape), I resolved to put the story of my sojourn at the Rats and Vermin Hotel down in writing. Alas, I didn't succeed. I learned that I wasn't master of my own hand. It was stronger than I, yes stronger than I . . ."

Hotel Europa

The author-narrator, a sarcastic Romanian e migre with a French wife, tells with great insight and humor the story of a young student s life and education as he passes from post-Ceausescu Romania through an unwelcoming Western Europe beset with dangerous problems of its own. Sex-and drug-traffickers are only one part of the strange and paranoid world in which the student and his fellow-countrymen become entangled, while the author s past in the form of post-communist gangsters begins to catch up with him in his retreat in rural France...

Night Soul And Other Stories

Best known for his complex and beautiful novels — regularly compared to those of Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, and Don DeLillo — Joseph McElroy is equally at home in the short story, having written numerous pieces over the course of his career that now, collected at last, serve as an ideal introduction to one of the most important contemporary American authors. Combining elements of classic McElroy with tantalizing stories pointing the way ahead (the spare and dangerous “No Man’s Land,” the lush and mischievous “The Campaign Trail”), Night Soul and Other Stories presents a wide range of work from a monumental artist.

Good Bye Angel

There are no heroes in Igna cio de Loyola Branda o's world, only victims: not only of violence, but of deceit, desire, and fear. In The Good-Bye Angel, Branda o returns to his great subject: the tyranny of the community versus the individual, the city versus its inhabitants. Large enough to develop its own mythology, yet small enough to be provincial and petty, the city of Arealva (standing in for Brazil, and the world at large) is itself a character in Branda o's latest novel, toying with and finally consuming its citizens with the innocent cruelty of a cat with its prey--it's nothing personal, but it needs the meat. A cross between a film noir and a Greek tragedy, with more than its share of sex and drugs (though no rock 'n' roll), The Good-Bye Angel begins with a murder and ends in a panorama of ambition, obsession, libido, hypocrisy, and loneliness.

Succubus

In an unnamed city shrouded in mist, Valent Kosmina is a retiree living quietly yet discontentedly with his doped-up, TV-addicted wife. To escape the claustrophobia of home and city, he masquerades as a man of means and takes to spending his nights strolling through an opulent suburb--but when news comes of a gruesome murder on his new turf, Kosmina fears that he may be a suspect. Increasingly anxious and paranoid, Kosmina begins to see a mysterious dark-haired girl following him everywhere--and as this succubus takes hold of him, Kosmina finds his familiar city becoming indistinguishable from the landscape of his own nightmares.from The Succubus This was hardly the first time Valent Kosmina had been unsettled by the thought that someone had pushed or seduced him--or that he had himself, perhaps out of clumsiness or carelessness, simply strayed--into a situation that would later be difficult to get out of. This idea, this fear, was in fact quite familiar to him, and naturally it unnerved him, but never to the degree that he couldn't shrug it off. A sensible person, after all, manages in one way or another to per- suade himself that he is all right, that he is sufficiently in control of himself, and that life will therefore run its course, peacefully and properly, to its bitter end.

Life On Sandpaper

A whirlwind of art, music, and lust, Life on Sandpaper is Yoram Kaniuk's overwhelming autobiographical novel detailing his years as a young painter in the New York of the '50s. Wounded and alienated, a war veteran at the age of nineteen, Kaniuk arrives in Greenwich Village at its peak period of artistic creativity, and finds his way among such giants as Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday, Willem de Kooning, and Frank Sinatra. In terse prose, inspired by the associative and breathless drive of bebop, Kaniuk's memories race between the ecstatic devotion of his beloved Harlem jazz clubs, through the ideological spats of the dying Yiddish world of the Lower East Side, to the volcanic gush of passion, pain, art, dance, alcohol, and drugs that was Greenwich Village. Kaniuk's stories roll and tumble here with hypnotic urgency, as if this were his last opportunity to remember, and tell, before all is obliterated.

Hellbound

"You look very confused when I say I'm just trying to help these lost souls make their way to Heaven," he said. "The reason you're confused is that you think I'm speaking metaphorically. Well, my dear friend, take it very literally. You see, I may have introduced myself as Asmodeus, but let me run off a few of my more well known aliases. Now, let's see, we have Mephistopheles, Beelzebub, Bafomet, Iblis, The Fallen One, Lucifer, The Morning Star, Lord of the Dark, The Devil, oh and my favorite; Satan." Face to face with Satan, Michael has awoken in the bowels of Hell with no memory of who he is, or why he has been damned. Hell, however, isn't what he expected. Rather than the fires of torment, he finds a hedonistic city of gambling, sex, murder and revenge. With the Devil as his guide, Michael embarks on a quest of self-discovery and self redemption. But will he get a second chance at salvation? And why is Satan helping him? Hellbound is a contemporary view of Hell, exploring today's idea of sin and religion, through witty dialogue and bursts of descriptive prose. Dark, funny and philosophical.

Patriotism

By now, Yukio Mishima’s (1925-1970) dramatic demise through an act of seppuku after an inflammatory public speech has become the stuff of literary legend. With Patriotism, Mishima was able to give his heartwrenching patriotic idealism an immortal vessel. Shinji Takeyama, a lieutenant in the Japanese army, comes home to his wife and informs her that his closest friends have become mutineers. Torn between his allegiances to the Emperor and his rebellious friends, Shinji and his beautiful, loyal wife Reiko decide to end their lives together. With an incredible eye for detail, Mishima describes Shinji and Reiko making love for the last time and the ritual suicide by seppuku that follows.

Bad Nature, Or With Elvis In Acapulco

A boiled-down gem of a Marías story about how Elvis (in Acapulco to film a movie) and his hard-drinking entourage abandon their interpreter in a seedy cantina full of enraged criminals after insults start to fly. When the local kingpin demands to be told what the Americans are saying, Elvis himself delivers an even more stinging parting shot–and who has to translate that?

Give My Regards To Eighth Street Collected Writings Of Morton Feldman

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Blue Octavo Notebooks

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Paris Peasant

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The Adventures Of Telemachus

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The Instructions

Beginning with a chance encounter with the beautiful Eliza June Watermark and ending, four days and 900 pages later, with the Events of November 17, this is the story of Gurion Maccabee, age ten: a lover, a fighter, a scholar, and a truly spectacular talker. Expelled from three Jewish day-schools for acts of violence and messianic tendencies, Gurion ends up in the Cage, a special lockdown program for the most hopeless cases of Aptakisic Junior High. Separated from his scholarly followers, Gurion becomes a leader of a very different sort, with righteous aims building to a revolution of troubling intensity. "The Instructions" is an absolutely singular work of fiction by an important new talent. Combining the crackling voice of Philip Roth with the encyclopedic mind of David Foster Wallace, Adam Levin has shaped a world driven equally by moral fervor and slapstick comedy--a novel that is muscular and exuberant, troubling and empathetic, monumental, breakneck, romantic, and unforgettable.

Bedside Guardian 2010

"The Bedside Guardian 2010" brings together the very best writing and photography from a tumultuous year in Britain and abroad. The centrepiece of the political year was an enthralling general election: the first televised leader debates, the Liberal Democrat surge, the scramble to assemble a government from a hung parliament, and the cuts agenda pursued by the new coalition. The highs and lows are all vividly documented and debated here by writers including Marina Hyde, Polly Toynbee, Jonathan Freedland, Andrew Sparrow, Larry Elliott, John Crace, Simon Hoggart and others. Ian Jack provides the narrative for Martin Argles' powerful and poignant last photographs of Gordon Brown. Further afield, the events in Copenhagen and a thorny year for environment policy are described by John Vidal, Mark Lynas and George Monbiot. Sixty years on, Tania Branigan talks to those who were at the heart of China's communist revolution. Gary Younge grapples with the deranged American right. Rory Carroll visits earthquake-shattered Haiti. Henning Mankell recounts his experience aboard the Gaza flotilla. David Leigh unpicks the leaked Afghanistan war logs. Stephen Moss reports from the demonstrations in Athens. Paul Hayward laments another early England exit at the World Cup in South Africa. Other highlights include a moving return to Derry by Simon Winchester, Hilary Mantel on the joys of stationery, Simon Hattenstone's jaw-droppingly candid interview with George Michael, Diana Athill on moving into an old people's home, Lionel Shriver on friendship, Simon Jenkins on volcano ash as the new swine flu hysteria, Steve Bell on the cartoonist's lot and Charlie Brooker on hateful columnists.

What Is All This Uncollected Stories

Stephen Dixon is one of the literary world's best-kept secrets. For the last thirty years he has been quietly producing work for both independent literary publishers (McSweeney's and Melville House Press) and corporate houses (Henry Holt), amassing 14 novels and well over 500 short stories. Dixon has shunned the pyrotechnics of mass market pop fiction, writing fiercely intellectual examinations of everyday life, challenging his readers with prose that rivals the complexities of William Gaddis and David Foster Wallace. Gradually building a loyal following, he stands now as a cult icon and a true iconoclast. Stephen Dixon is also the literary world's worst-kept secret. His witty, keenly observed narratives and sharply hewn prose have appeared in every major market magazine from Harper's to Playboy and have earned him two National Book Award nominations-for his novels Frog and Interstate-a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Pushcart Prize. He has also garnered the praise of critics and colleagues alike; Jonathan Lethem (Motherless Brooklyn) even admits to "borrowing a jumpstart from a few lines of Dixon" in his own work. In all likelihood, many of the students who have passed through his creative writing classes at Johns Hopkins University have done the same. Fantagraphics Books is proud to present his latest volume of short stories, What Is All This? The tales in the collection are vintage Dixon, eschewing the modernism and quasi-autobiography of his I trilogy and instead treating us to a pared- down, crystalline style reminiscent of Hemingway at the height of his powers. Centrally concerning himself with the American condition, he explores obsessions of body image, the increasingly polarized political landscape, sex-in all its incarnations-and the gloriously pointless minutiae of modern life, from bus rides to tying shoelaces. Dixon's stories are crafted with the eye of a great observer and the tongue of a profound humorist, finding a voice for the modern age in the same way that Kafka and Sartre captured the spirit of their respective epochs. using the canvas of his native New York (with one significant exception that affords Dixon the opportunity to create a furiously political fable) he astutely captures the edgy madness that infects the city through the neuroses of his narrators with a style that owes as much to Neo-Realist cinema as it does to modern literature. What Is All This? is an immense, vastly entertaining, and stunningly designed collection, that will delight lovers of modern fiction and serve as both an ideal introduction to this unique voice and a tribute to a great American writer.

Flash Fiction Forward 80 Very Short Stories

After publication of the first "Flash Fiction" anthology over a decade ago, "flash" became part of the creative writing lexicon for readers, writers, students, and teachers. In this follow-up collection, the editors once again tackle the question: "How short can a story be and truly be a story?" Determined to find the best flashes from America in the twenty-first century, James Thomas and Robert Shapard searched everywhere for stories that were not merely good but memorable. Moving, and certainly unforgettable, this collection includes stories from the best and most popular fiction writers of our time, including Ron Carlson, Robert Coover, Steve Almond, Amy Hempel, A. M. Homes, Grace Paley, and Paul Theroux. In addition, Rick Moody properly defines armoire, Lydia Davis delves into a world of cats, and Dave Eggers explores narrow escapes. Over and over, these stories prove that often less is more.

The New Yorker Stories

Collects every Beattie story published in The New Yorker magazine throughout a 35-year period, in an anthology that offers insight into her precise character creation and insight into modern American family life. By the award-winning author of Walks with Men.

A Visit From The Goon Squad

Winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Jennifer Egan's spellbinding interlocking narratives circle the lives of Bennie Salazar, an aging former punk rocker and record executive, and Sasha, the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Although Bennie and Sasha never discover each other's pasts, the reader does, in intimate detail, along with the secret lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs, over many years, in locales as varied as New York, San Francisco, Naples, and Africa. We first meet Sasha in her mid-thirties, on her therapist's couch in New York City, confronting her long-standing compulsion to steal. Later, we learn the genesis of her turmoil when we see her as the child of a violent marriage, then as a runaway living in Naples, then as a college student trying to avert the suicidal impulses of her best friend. We plunge into the hidden yearnings and disappointments of her uncle, an art historian stuck in a dead marriage, who travels to Naples to extract Sasha from the city's demimonde and experiences an epiphany of his own while staring at a sculpture of Orpheus and Eurydice in the Museo Nazionale. We meet Bennie Salazar at the melancholy nadir of his adult life--divorced, struggling to connect with his nine-year-old son, listening to a washed-up band in the basement of a suburban house--and then revisit him in 1979, at the height of his youth, shy and tender, reveling in San Francisco's punk scene as he discovers his ardor for rock and roll and his gift for spotting talent. We learn what became of his high school gang--who thrived and who faltered--and we encounter Lou Kline, Bennie's catastrophically careless mentor, along with the lovers and children left behind in the wake of Lou's far-flung sexual conquests and meteoric rise and fall."A Visit from the Goon Squad" is a book about the interplay of time and music, about survival, about the stirrings and transformations set inexorably in motion by even the most passing conjunction of our fates. In a breathtaking array of styles and tones ranging from tragedy to satire to PowerPoint, Egan captures the undertow of self-destruction that we all must either master or succumb to; the basic human hunger for redemption; and the universal tendency to reach for both--and escape the merciless progress of time--in the transporting realms of art and music. Sly, startling, exhilarating work from one of our boldest writers.

Spare Key

Rachel was cursed. She was sure of it. She always seemed to get the fruitcake neighbours. No matter where she went they were always the same: selfish and inconsiderate people who had no respect for anyone. But the last one had been the worst of all: rude and obnoxious, fond of loud music and endless parties. He'd made her life a living hell. Once he disappeared, she was certain no one could ever be that bad again.

She was wrong.

After two months of peace, a new tenant is moving in next door and Rachel is about to discover how bad a neighbour can be. Because even though her new neighbour is supposed to be starting a new life, even though he is planning to take the pills just like the doctor told him, Ben Fowler has a Red Room in his mind. A special, secret place he built where he takes revenge on the lady responsible for the horrors of his childhood. It's just unfortunate that Rachel looks exactly like her...

... And that a neighbourly gesture of good will years earlier could provide Ben with all the temptation he needs to slip back into his old habits.

The debut novella by R. Frederick Hamilton is a graphic and disturbing story of urban horror that is not for the faint of heart. Included in the volume are two short stories guaranteed to leave a bad taste in your mouth. The Filmmakers: a horrific portrayal of teens degenerating into sadism, and Writer's Block: a surreal trip into the world of a boy held captive by his body-building mother.

Snake Jaw

A girl is found, dead, with a dog wedged in her surgically enlarged throat, turning Detective Gill's missing persons case into something much darker.

Drug addict Vanessa has been gone for weeks. Her baby girl too. Gill was already fearing the worst but until he saw that dead girl with the snake jaw, he thought there were lines that people just didn't cross...

But surgeon Gerald Phalanx knows better. There are no limits to his obsession. No lines that he won't step over. Even if his latest patient is flawed - horribly flawed - Dr Phalanx is certain he can fix nature's mistakes. He knows he can transform her into his image of feminine perfection. Whether Vanessa likes it or not.

After all he does have her baby...

10 A Boot Stomping, 20 A Human Face, 30 Goto 10

One minute you've got a quiet life.

No friends except those in your record collection. Free from technological slavery. Just pizza for dinner and a job you love at the local record store...

Funny how things spiral out of control...

Next thing you know you're embroiled in some poorly thought out conspiracy. Cavorting with shady government officials, scientists and recently ressurrected music legends. A cog in a baffling plot that keeps getting stranger by the minute.

Dinner Bell For The Dream Worms

The technicolour fairytales of Jason Wuchenich's 'Dinner Bell for the Dream Worms' are a celebration of divine depravity. Marvel as clusters of vine-grown skanks turn the world into a sewer of dirty sex. Learn to sympathise with a love-stricken Incubus who can only materialise with the aid of flatulence. Delight at the magical song of anal-dwelling minstrels. Enter a mind set where scalping yourself is an understandable reaction to an impending television appearance.

The Place In Between

The Place in Between: When Del is sent pictures of his wife’s latest affair, he reasons a .45 caliber bullet will answer his problems. To Del’s dismay, that’s only the beginning of his time spent wedged in the place in between. Luci’s lover tortures Del relentlessly. Del wants to recover just enough to seek revenge on them both. Sure enough a demon shows up with her silky-sweet promises. Then the ambiance twists dark and cruel beyond anything any one of them could’ve imagined.

Blood and Bubblegum: It’s colder than frozen shit down here in the dangerous tunnels of The Harbor in the post-cataclysmic world (ACE). Juan and I find ourselves here, in this horrible place because of The Good Doctor. His organic narcotics trade is booming. Juan, Mary and I want in. We have to find TGD and the nocturne, see if they will let us. We are down. We are hungry. And we are bringing Blood and Bubblegum to sweeten the pot. All of our dreams will come true. The only uncertainty is Mary and Juan living long enough to reap the rewards.

Bad Notion, Traveling Potion: The second day of the fifth waxing moon, in the 24th year, ACE. The frozen earth of The Harbor is in the grips of a new Little Ice Age. The human populace is down to just one-third. They are forced to exist in long, dank tunnels and cramped domiciles underground with The Good Doctor and his creations of Halflings and other freaks and geeks. TGD’s latest organic narcotic discovery goes LIVE and becomes self-aware. The bad notion traveling potion makes meat puppet users do its unholy bidding. Then the monster decides to turn on TGD, the Creator. Not the best idea, this. But it sure is going to be fun to watch.

Archelon Ranch

In an overgrown, primeval, jungle-city state, Bernard is a test subject for science experiments. His father and Professor Sagramour have been injecting him with hallucinogenic mud and reality affirming drugs so that one day man will be immune to the insanity inducing, zombifying sentient green mud that is choking the suburbs. But Bernard is beginning to display side effects. Experiencing greater and greater levels of Objectivity cause his consciousness to become one with entities as diverse as pterosaurs and martinis. In the mind of the tyrannosaurus he hears the call of Archelon Ranch, a primal paradise like no other. Will Bernard’s unique talents be enough to get him out of the senseless prehistoric cyberpunk city or will dinosaurs, Sagramour’s Standardizers and the desire to lose himself in other entities be too much?

A Million Versions Of Right

Step into a world that defies all logic. One of Masturbatory headphones, diabolically toppled comb-jars, moustache-filled ejaculations, malfunctioning bookmarks, bricolage scrotums, wank fairies and a poorly conceived theory regarding wall stability. A world where ball popping is the only solution to the scrotum's poor aesthetic qualities and true love can lead a man to transpose menstruation across gender lines. Not to mention a blink so immensely powerful that mild abrasion can ensue. There’s also a lime.

Animals Of The Ocean In Particular The Giant Squid

Here is the third installment in a series of reference books, all written by Dr. and Mr. Doris Haggis-on-Whey, a team of highly energized and deeply focused scientists with over sixty-seven combined years of experience at their command, including six months spent lifting awkwardly-sized boxes. "Animals of the Ocean" advances many heretofore unexplored discoveries and opinions, including squid dating dos and don'ts, why squid are not at all able to watch television in black and white, the ways in which people who don't know any better might think fish are not animals, the long-term effects of salt water on musical theater, and also the adventure of Gunther. "Animals of the Ocean, in Particular the Giant Squid" comes with a foil-stamped and leather-inspired cover. Its pages are full color and illustrated without reserve. This book does not contain a warning label, but if it did, it would advise readers to enjoy its pages only in small and furtive doses, such as while waiting your turn at tetherball.

Agua

The year is 1920, and Luis Agua, an authorised representative of an electricity company, arrives in Vila Natal, an inhospitable village in Portugal. His objective is to convince the inhabitants of the benefits of artificial light. Before long Agua learns that the village and the castle that presides over it hide deep secrets. A noble widow in decline, a will that is both cruel and impertinent, a pioneer of aviation, an epidemic and an unexpected ending; these are the ingredients of this novel in which the themes of love, revenge, humour, death and greed come together to form an almost arithmetic narrative.

Primeval And Other Times

Translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. Tokarczuk's third novel, PRIMEVAL AND OTHER TIMES was awarded the Polityka Passport Prize in 1996 and the Koscielski Prize in 1997, which established the author as a leading voice in Polish letters. It is set in the mythical village of Primeval in the heart of Poland, which is populated by eccentric, archetypal characters. The village, a microcosm of the world, is guarded by four archangels, from whose perspective the novel chronicles the lives of Primeval's inhabitants over the course of the feral 20th century. In prose that is forceful and direct, the narrative follows Poland's tortured political history from 1914 to the present and the episodic violence that is visited on ordinary village life. Yet this is also a novel of universal dimension that does not dwell on the parochial. A stylized fable as well as epic allegory about the inexorable grind of time, the clash between modernity (the masculine) and nature (the feminine), it has been hailed across Europe as a contemporary classic.

I City

Fiction. Translated from the Czech by Joshua Cohen and Marketa Hofmeisterova. Winner of the Orten Prize and the State Prize for Literature in 2004. I, CITY is a story about the north Bohemian city of Most, an ancient city founded on a primeval wetland that was literally "relocated" to get to the brown coal beneath it. For Pavel Brycz, the youngest ever recipient of the Czech State Prize for Literature, Most is its varied inhabitants, and he as the city tell its own story through these inhabitants, who make their "appearances" in fleeting, ghost-like vignettes. As they emerge from the pollution, or from the swamp of the town's founding, we find not individuals but representatives. Theirs are historical lives that mistrust history, or that live it at least with typical irony. As Brycz makes fictional people say factual things and factual people (Kafka, the pope, Gustav Husak) say fictional things, post-modernity via magical realism makes its almost requisite--though noiseless--appearance in the best easterly European tradition of Danilo Kis or Isaac Babel

Aquamarine

Fiction. Translated from the German by Mark Kanak. AQUAMARINE is the result of two years' musings following the author's long and twisted journey (both in terms of pathways and encounters) to Mexico in 1993. After having been variously reworked, the volume was eventually published in German in 1998. Considered groundbreaking in form and style, the novel is composed of seven intertwining tales whose unsettling, exceptionally ambivalent female protagonists, "Aquamarine" and "Marine," crisscross diverse Mexican landscapes and cities of both external and internal geographies much like a madcap road movie plowing straight through historical episodes into present-day reality. Along the way we encounter the horrific tragedies of private and political worlds as the tales channel into a common stream of storytelling that is so immediate in its presentation it violently impacts the very language itself (and the immanent possibilities or impossibilities in the author's use of language). The reader is thus swept into a swirling dreamscape of words and images, a ramshackle narrative construct where every kind of reality that is, always was, and will continue to be exist simultaneously.

Passive Vampire

Poetry. Art. Translated by Krzysztof Fijalkowski. Originally published in 1945 by Les Editions de l'Oubli in Bucharest, THE PASSIVE VAMPIRE caught the attention of the French Surrealists when an excerpt appeared in 1947 alongside texts by Jabes and Michaux in Georges Henein's magazine La part du sable. Luca, whose work was admired by Gilles Deleuze, attempts here to transmit the "shudder" evoked by some Surrealist texts, such as Andre Breton's Nadja and Mad Love, probing with acerbic humor the fragile boundary between "objective chance" and delirium. Impossible to define, THE PASSIVE VAMPIRE is a mixture of theoretical treatise and breathless poetic prose, personal confession and scientific investigation — it is 18 photographs of "objectively offered objects," a category created by Luca to occupy the space opened up by Breton. At times taking shape as assemblages, these objects are meant to capture chance in its dynamic and dramatic forms by externalizing the ambivalence of our drives and bringing to light the nearly continual equivalence between our love-hate tendencies and the world of things.

About the Author Gherasim Luca was born Salman Locker on July 23, 1913, into a liberal Jewish family in Bucharest. His father was a tailor. Luca, who spoke Yiddish, Romanian, German, and French, traveled frequently to Paris in the latter part of the 1930s and became acquainted with the French Surrealists. World War II and Romania's official anti-Semitism forced him into internal exile. During the short pre-Communist period of Romanian independence, he together with Gellu Naum, Paul Paun, Virgil Teodorescu, and Dolfi Trost founded the Romanian Surrealist Group. In 1945 Luca and Trost co-authored the group's principal text Dialetics of the Dialectic. Harassed and caught while trying to flee the country, the self-styled "etran-juif" was finally able to leave Romania in 1952, and moved to Paris via Israel. Frequently cited in the works of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Luca collaborated in Paris with many artists, including Jean Arp, Paul Celan, Francois Di Dio, and Max Ernst, producing numerous collages (he helped invent cubomania), drawings, objects, and text-installations. Starting in 1967, reading appearances took him to many cities in the US and around Europe, and a 1988 television portrait, Comment s'en sortir sans sortir by Raoul Sanglas, further widened his readership. Having spent forty years in France without papers, he was evicted from his apartment in 1994, along with all the building's tenants, officially for "urban renewal." Now 80 and unable to cope with his new situation, Luca committed suicide on February 9, 1994 by jumping into the Seine.

Short Letter Long Farewell

"Short Letter, Long Farewell" is one the most inventive and exhilarating of the great Peter Handke's novels. Full of seedy noir atmospherics and boasting an air of generalized delirium, the book starts by introducing us to a nameless young German who has just arrived in America, where he hopes to get over the collapse of his marriage. No sooner has he arrived, however, than he discovers that his ex-wife is pursuing him. He flees, she follows, and soon the couple is running circles around each other across the length of America--from Philadelphia to St. Louis to the Arizona desert, and from Portland, Oregon, to L.A. Is it love or vengeance that they want from each other? Everything's spectacularly unclear in a book that is travelogue, suspense story, domestic comedy, and Western showdown, with a totally unexpected Hollywood twist at the end. Above all, "Short Letter, Long Farewell" is a love letter to America, its landscapes and popular culture, the invitation and the threat of its newness and wildness and emptiness, with the promise of a new life--or the corpse of an old one--lying just around the corner.

Leviathan

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Shoplifting From American Apparel

In a work that’s sure to be controversial, the American Murakami describes a youth culture attacking the mainstream mindset with scathing wit and ferocious optimism

Set mostly in Manhattan—although also featuring Atlantic City, Brooklyn, GMail Chat, and Gainsville, Florida—this autobiographical novella, spanning two years in the life of a young writer with a cultish following, has been described by the author as “A shoplifting book about vague relationships,” “2 parts shoplifting arrest, 5 parts vague relationship issues,” and “An ultimately life-affirming book about how the unidirectional nature of time renders everything beautiful and sad.”

From VIP rooms in “hip” New York City clubs to central booking in Chinatown, from New York University’s Bobst Library to a bus in someone’s backyard in a college-town in Florida, from Bret Easton Ellis to Lorrie Moore, and from Moby to Ghost Mice, it explores class, culture, and the arts in all their American forms through the funny, journalistic, and existentially-minded narrative of someone trying to both “not be a bad person” and “find some kind of happiness or something,” while he is driven by his failures and successes at managing his art, morals, finances, relationships, loneliness, confusion, boredom, future, and depression.

Under Stones

Dip into the world of Bob Franklin‘s fiction at your own risk. The calm surface belies a swift undertow and snags galore. These are not horror stories in the traditional sense; they are more unsettling than that.

Under Stones are uneasy tales, set in familiar surrounds. They are journeys into the human psyche and powerful critiques of contemporary Australian society. Bob Franklin pokes and prods at human fears and foibles, revealing with forensic glee truths that you might prefer were, well, left under stones.

'What a bruising collection this is ... Franklin turns a coolly amused and beautifully composed eye on the darkest, saddest, oddest and most ordinary corners of the world.' - Sonya Hartnett

Point Omega

In the middle of a desert somewhere south of nowhere, to a forlorn house made of metal and clapboard, a secret war advisor has gone in search of space and time. Richard Elster, 73, was a scholar – an outsider – when he was called to a meeting with government war planners. They asked Elster to conceptualise their efforts – to form an intellectual framework for their troop deployments, counterinsurgency, orders for rendition. For two years he read their classified documents and attended secret meetings. He was to map the reality these men were trying to create. Bulk and swagger, he called it.

At the end of his service, Elster retreats to the desert, where he is joined by a young filmmaker intent on documenting his experience. Jim Finley wants to make a one-take film, Elster its single character – Just a man against a wall.

The two men sit on the deck, drinking and talking. Finley makes the case for his film. Weeks go by. And then Elster's daughter Jessie visits – an otherworldly woman from New York – who dramatically alters the dynamic of the story. When a devastating event follows, all the men's talk, the accumulated meaning of conversation and isolation, is thrown into question. What is left is loss, fierce and incomprehensible. Point Omega is a deeply unnerving and brilliant work from one of our greatest living writers.

The United States Of McSweeney's: 10 Years Of Accidental Classics

Since 1998 McSweeney's Quarterly Concern has been emerging from various kitchens, attics and an old laundromat roughly four times a year – or definitely at least three. In those ten years, almost 100,000 stories have been submitted, usually in manila envelopes, mostly from unknown names living in unfamiliar corners. Approximately 400 of those stories were selected for publication. Eighteen of them appear here, wildly diverse in style and subject, from some of the finest writers of today and tomorrow. Several typos have been removed.

'The whole thing is driven by a slightly crazed exuberance which makes other literary magazines look like phone directories' - Mark Haddon

'Groundbreaking . . . the only place to be seen for would-be cult US novelists . . . a forum for innovation as well as established talent' - Observer

Troubles

Winner of the Lost Man Booker Prize of 1970.

The first book in Farrell's Empire Trilogy.

Major Brendan Archer travels to Ireland - to the Majestic Hotel and to the fiancee he acquired on a rash afternoon's leave three years ago. Despite her many letters, the lady herself proves elusive, and the Major's engagement is short-lived. But he is unable to detach himself from the alluring discomforts of the crumbling hotel. Ensconced in the dim and shabby splendour of the Palm Court, surrounded by gently decaying old ladies and proliferating cats, the Major passes the summer. So hypnotic are the faded charms of the Majestic, the Major is almost unaware of the gathering storm. But this is Ireland in 1919 - and the struggle for independence is about to explode with brutal force.

Jenny Holzer

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Etchings Indigenous: Black And Sexy

Etchings Indigenous: Black and Sexy presents some of the best contemporary writing and art by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people from around Australia.

Discover the story of Payback Records, an Indigenous hip hop label founded by Essendon footballer Nathan Lovett-Murray. Some stunning photography by Wayne Quilliam, National NAIDOC Artist of the Year 2009. An interview with Kim Kruger, Project Manager of the famous Michael Long Walk. And artist/photographer Bindi Cole with writer Jirra Lulla Harvey, giving an insight into the stories of the Sista Girls from the Tiwi Islands, including Bindi's photograph that won the 2009 Deadly Art Award.

Exceptional stories and poetry from Tony Birch, Ali Cobby Eckermann, John Harding, Dennis Fisher, Brenda Saunders, Nellie Green, Shirley Morgan, Katie Wyatt and many more. And if that is not enough, turn to the book and music reviews for some real gems there as well.

Drowned Book

Sean O'Brien's new collection takes its emotional and imaginative cue from his recent and brilliant Inferno, and, for the larger part, occupies a dark, watery, subterranean world as dramatically compelling (and sometimes as frightening) as Dante's own.

Best European Fiction 2010

Historically, English-language readers have been great fans of European literature, and names like Franz Kafka, Gustave Flaubert, and Thomas Mann are so familiar we hardly think of them as foreign at all. What those writers brought to English-language literature was a wide variety of new ideas, styles, and ways of seeing the world. Yet times have changed, and how much do we even know about the richly diverse literature being written in Europe today? Best European Fiction 2010 is the inaugural installment of what will become an annual anthology of stories from across Europe. Edited by acclaimed Bosnian novelist and MacArthur "Genius-Award" winner Aleksandar Hemon, and with dozens of editorial, media, and programming partners in the U.S., UK, and Europe, the Best European Fiction series will be a window onto what's happening right now in literary scenes throughout Europe, where the next Kafka, Flaubert, or Mann is waiting to be discovered.

Travels With Herodotus

Ryszard Kapuscinski was the greatest traveller-reporter of our time. Travels with Herodotus depicts his beginnings as an inexperienced young Polish journalist and reveals what drove him throughout his extraordinary life. At every encounter with a new culture - whether India, China or Africa - he plunges in, curious and observant, thirsting to understand its history and its people. Everywhere and always, he has with him his travelling companion, The Histories by Herodotus. Here in his final book the thoughts of Kapuscinski and Herodotus, though separated by twenty-five centuries, are intertwined to produce a unique work of reportage and insight.

Going Down Swinging 29

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Aesthetics Of Resistance Volume One

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Look Who's Morphing

This is a collection of brilliant stories about transformation, with the storyteller and his family shifting through identities drawn from comics, video games, daytime TV, porn flicks and movies, in fantasies of sexual and physical power which reach their (literal) climax with one final morph, into a fifty-foot tall ‘cock rock’ hero with a striking resemblance to Lemuel Gulliver. Influenced by the young adult book series Sweet Valley High, Tom Cho began writing fiction in his mid-teens, and has published widely in zines, blogs and literary journals. This is his much anticipated first collection.

Take Care Of Yourself

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Sum: Forty Tales From The Afterlives

In the afterlife you may find that God is the size of a microbe and unaware of your existence. Or you may find the afterlife contains only those people whom you remember. In some afterlives you are split into all your different ages, in some you are recreated based on your credit card records, and in others you are forced to live with annoying versions of yourself that represent what you could have been.

In these wonderfully imagined tales – at once funny, wistful and unsettling – Eagleman kicks over the chessboard of traditional notions and offers us a dazzling lens through which to see ourselves here and now. His stories are rooted in science and romance and awe at our mysterious existence: a mixture of hope, love and death that cuts through human nature at innovative angles.

Homer and Langley

E.L. Doctorow's new novel follows the fascinating lives of Homer and Langley Collyer, two orphaned brothers who live reclusively in a massive 4-storey townhouse on Fifth Avenue. After their mother and father succumb to the Spanish Flu pandemic that hit the city in 1918, Homer, a talented young piano player and artist, slowly loses his sight and is stricken blind. At the same time, Langley is deployed to Europe to fight in the war. There on the western front, he is exposed to mustard gas which subsequently sears his lungs, forcing him to recuperate in an army hospital. He eventually returns to his brother and their home. This brilliant, touching story takes place and is shaped by the epic events of the 20th Century - from the Jazz Age of the 20s to the hippies of the 60s. It is a book of profound intelligence and humanity which will delight E.L Doctorow's many fans.

The Best Australian Stories 2009

In The Best Australian Stories 2009, Delia Falconer collects the year's most outstanding short fiction, showcasing the strength and diversity of Australian writing today. There are masterful stories from some of the country's best-loved authors, as well as exciting new work from up-and-coming young writers. This is a perfect book for summer and a delightful introduction to Australia's best contemporary writing.

Previous contributors include David Malouf, Kate Grenville, Nam Le, Frank Moorhouse, Peter Goldsworthy, Mandy Sayer, Marion Halligan, Nicholas Shakespeare, Carmel Bird, Venero Armanno, Cate Kennedy, Sophie Cunningham and many others.

Sons Of The Rumour

Sons of the Rumour is nothing short of a dazzling and genre-defying work of genius. Foster retells the tale of the legendary eighth-century King Shahrban of Persia who, furious at his wife's infidelity, has decided to marry and then behead a fresh virgin every day. But then the king meets Scheherazade, a beauty of such wiles and storytelling gifts she manages to entertain the him for 1001 nights, staving off death for both herself and her countrywomen. In the process, she also bears him three sons, wisely educates him in morality and kindness, and eventually convinces him to take her as his lawful wife.

Intersecting with the historical tale is the story of Al Morrisey – a middle-aged, Anglo-Irish, former jazz-drumming everyman, on the run from a failed marriage, and cursed with Freudian daydreams of his mother and peculiar nightmares of all things Persian – as he vainly attempts to reconcile the past with the present and reclaim some of his youthful vigour.

Ingeniously manipulating the frame tale of the Arabian Nights, and utilising all his narrative gifts of adventurous satire, David Foster has produced a work of fiction like no other. Sprawling, ambitious, explicit but frequently hilarious, Sons of the Rumour is a modern masterpiece, an utterly original novel by one of Australia's greatest living writers, a man who the Sydney Morning Herald critic Andrew Riemer has called Patrick White's worthy successor.

The Book Of Other People

A HOST OF EXTRAORDINARY CHARACTERS IN ALL NEW STORIES BY OUR BEST CONTEMPORAY WRITERS

INCLUDING:

David Mitchell – 'Judith Castle'
'A masterpiece' Scotland on Sunday

A.L. Kennedy – 'Frank'
'Brilliantly melancholic' Spectator

A.M. Homes – 'Cindy Stubenstock'
'Amusing' Guardian

Nick Hornby with Posy Simmonds – 'J. Johnson'
'Clever' Metro

Andrew O'Hagan – 'Gordon'
'Elegant' Scotland on Sunday

Adam Thirlwell – 'Nigora'
'Dazzling' Spectator

Miranda July – 'Roy Spivey'
'Quirky and breathtaking' Financial Times

George Saunders – 'Puppy'
'Scintillating' Metro

Zadie Smith – 'Hanwell Snr'
'Stellar' Irish Times

Jonathan Safron Foer – 'Rhoda'
'Exudes tenderness and melancholy' Financial Times

Alexksandar Hemon – 'The Liar'
'Powerful' The Times

Hari Kunzru – 'Magada Mandela'
'A delight' The Times

Daniel Clowes – 'Justin M. Damiano'
'Wonderfully drawn' Sunday Times

Vendela Vida – 'Soleil'
'Demands our sympathy' Financial Times

Edwidge Danticat – 'Lele'
'Arresting' The Times

Colm Toibin – 'Donal Webster'
'A revelation' Observer

'Astonishing, witty and wistful. If you wanted to be introduced to just how good contemporary writing can be, then there's no other choice than this book'
Scotland on Sunday

'A readable, often comic but seriously weighty anthology'
Spectator

'Few can match this for variety, currency, star contributions or sheer scope of imagination'
Irish Times

Memories, Dreams And Reflections

In his later years, C. G. Jung sums up the meaning of his life in the light of his own psychological researches, partly in conversations recorded, amplified and edited by his secretary and partly in chapters written by himself on "Childhood and Youth", a trip to Kenya and Uganda, "Life after Death", and "Late Thoughts". The influence he ascribes to manifestations of the unconscious on his own inner development, on the turning-points of his career, and on his theoretic affirmations will inevitably tend to widen the rift between him and those who see the unconscious chiefly as the repository of repressed instincts. To those open to his concept of the fruitful interaction of the conscious and unconscious, the book, especially the account of his dreams during his nearly fatal illness in 1944, will be of tremendous interest. The writing is simple and direct and makes easy reading wherever the subject permits. The translation is excellent. Certainly for initiates, a classic confession from a psychoanalytic pioneer whose concepts have been largely displaced in modern therapeutic application, but whose stature remains undiminished.

More Things Like This

Curated by the editors of McSweeney's, this unconventional book explores the intersection of text, humor, and illustration in art created by cartoonists, writers, musicians, and fine artists. A refreshing mixture of high, low, and sideways, the selection features nearly 300 images from dozens of contributors, including David Shrigley, Kurt Vonnegut, Leonard Cohen, Chris Johnson, David Mamet, and many more. Insightful interviews with the artists further illuminate the shared and divergent approaches they take in creating this smart, funny, and engaging work.

Distant Star

From Chile's finest contemporary writer.

An unnamed narrator attempts to piece together the life and works of an enigmatic would-be poet turned military assassin during Pinochet's regime in Chile. In the early 1970s Alberto Ruiz-Tagle was a little-known poet living in southern Chile. After the military coup of 1973 that brought in the dictatorship of General Pinochet, he embarked upon a new career that involved him in committing murder and other brutalities, and subsequently led to his emergence as a lieutenant in the Chilean air force under his actual name, Carlos Wieder. Some time later the narrator, now held in a prison camp, looks up and sees a World War II airplane writing the first words of the Book of Genesis in smoke in the sky. The aviator is none other Carlos Wieder, launching his own version of the New Chilean Poetry-Roberto Bola-o's novel is a chilling investigation of the fascist mentality and the limits of evil, as seen in its effects on a literary sensibility, as well as a gripping intellectual thriller. It shows a great writer at the height of his powers.

Reality Hunger: A Manifesto

Reality Hunger is a manifesto for a burgeoning group of interrelated but unconnected artists who, living in an unbearably artificial world, are breaking ever larger chunks of 'reality' into their work. The questions Shields explores – the bending of form and genre, the lure and blur of the real – play out constantly around us, and Reality Hunger is a radical reframing of how we might think about this 'truthiness': about literary licence, quotation, and appropriation in television, film, performance art, rap, and graffiti, in lyric essays, prose poems, and collage novels.

Drawing on myriad sources, Shields takes an audacious stance on issues that are being fought over now and will be fought over far into the future. Converts will see Reality Hunger as a call to arms; detractors will view it as an occasion to defend the status quo. It is certain to be one of the most controversial and talked about books of the season.

'Provocative and stimulating - like all the best polemics' Jon Savage

'I've just finished reading Reality Hunger and I'm lit up by it – astonished, intoxicated, ecstatic, overwhelmed.' Jonathan Lethem

'A manifesto on behalf of a rising generation of writers and artists, a 'Make It New' for a new century, an all-out assault on tired generic conventions.' J.M. Coetzee

'A rare and very peculiar thing: a wake-up call that is a pleasure to hear and respond to. A daring combination of montage and essay, it's crammed full of good things.' Geoff Dyer

Generosity

When Russell Stone becomes the teacher of a young Algerian woman with a disturbingly luminous presence, he is both entranced and troubled. How can this refugee from terror radiate such bliss? Is it possible to be so open and alive without coming to serious harm? Soon, Thassa's joyful personality comes to the attention of the notorious geneticist and advocate for genomic enhancement, Thomas Kurton, whose research has enabled him to announce his discovery of the genetic underpinnings of happiness. Thassa's congenital optimism is severely tested by the growing media circus. Devoured by the public as a living prophecy, her genetic secret will transform both Russell and Kurton, as well as the world at large.

Generosity is fast, funny and finally magical. In his most exuberant and exhilaratingly brilliant book yet, Richard Powers asks his readers to consider the big questions facing humankind as it learns of the genetic map underlying every aspect of our existence.

Principles Of Uncertainty

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A High Wind In Jamaica

Richard Hughes's celebrated short novel is a masterpiece of concentrated narrative. Its dreamlike action begins among the decayed plantation houses and overwhelming natural abundance of late nineteenth-century Jamaica, before moving out onto the high seas, as Hughes tells the story of a group of children thrown upon the mercy of a crew of down-at-the-heel pirates. A tale of seduction and betrayal, of accommodation and manipulation, of weird humor and unforeseen violence, this classic of twentieth-century literature is above all an extraordinary reckoning with the secret reasons and otherworldly realities of childhood.

Meaningful Life A

L. J. Davis's A Meaningful Life is a blistering black comedy about gentrification and its discontents, a gritty picture of the collapsing New York of the 1970s, a prophetic send-up of middle-class anxieties and ambitions. Just out of college, Lowell Lake heads to New York, where he plans to make it big as a writer. Instead he finds a job as a technical editor, at which he toils away while passion leaks out of his marriage to a nice Jewish girl. Then Lowell discovers a beautiful crumbling mansion in a decaying and crime-ridden section of Brooklyn, and against all advice, sinks his every penny into buying it. He quits his job, moves in, and spends all his time on demolition and construction. His mission in life is to restore this house to its past grandeur. This American boy wants to fix what's gone wrong with his life. He wants to make good, and he will even murder to do it.

Soul And Other Stories

The Soviet writer Andrey Platonov saw much of his work suppressed or censored in his lifetime. In recent decades, however, these lost works have reemerged, and the eerie poetry and poignant humanity of Platonov's vision have become ever more clear. For Nadezhda Mandelstam and Joseph Brodsky, Platonov was the writer who most profoundly registered the spiritual shock of revolution. For a new generation of innovative post-Soviet Russian writers he figures as a daring explorer of word and world, the master of what has been called "alternative realism." Depicting a devastated world that is both terrifying and sublime, Platonov is, without doubt, a universal writer who is as solitary and haunting as Kafka. This volume gathers eight works that show Platonov at his tenderest, warmest, and subtlest. Among them are "The Return," about an officer's difficult homecoming at the end of World War II, described by Penelope Fitzgerald as one of "three great works of Russian literature of the millennium"; "The River Potudan," a moving account of a troubled marriage; and the title novella, the extraordinary tale of a young man unexpectedly transformed by his return to his Asian birthplace, where he finds his people deprived not only of food and dwelling, but of memory and speech. This prizewinning English translation is the first to be based on the newly available uncensored texts of Platonov's short fiction.

A Sleep And A Forgetting

Nowhere in the prodigious output of William Dean Howells is there an example more poignant of his heartfelt dedication to the realist movement than this achingly suspenseful novella.

The story centers on a young “alienist”—a psychologist—at an Italian resort, where he meets a young woman who, at subsequent encounters, has no recollection of him. Asked by her frightened father to help her overcome her incapacitating memory problems, the doctor launches a psychological investigation that appears to be based upon the most painful memories of the author himself_Howells had recently experienced the loss of a beloved adult daughter (from what appears to have been anorexia) and the institutionalization of another for "emotional collapse."

The story's surprising ending reveals not only the author's deft sense of craftsmanship, but speaks movingly to his enduring faith in the sublime power of literature.

Contemporary Fables Volume 1

Contemporary Fables Volume One is the first publication of a series of three from Gilgamesh Connections. It is a compilation of the shortlisted entrants from their first worldwide fable competition, with its base in our very own St Kilda.

Gasoline

For the first time in his life, Heribert Juliá is unable to paint. On the eve of an important gallery exhibition, for which he’s created nothing, he’s bored with life: he falls asleep while making love with his mistress, wanders from bar to bar, drinking whatever comes to his attention first, and meets the evidence of his wife Helena’s infidelity with complete indifference. Humbert Herrera, an up-and-coming artist who can’t stop creating, picks up the threads of Heribert’s life, taking his wife, replacing him at the gallery, and pursuing his former mistress. Heribert is finally undone by a massive sculpture, while Humbert is planning the sculpture to end sculpture, the poem to end poetry, and the film to end film, all while mounting three simultaneous shows.

A fun-house mirror through which he examines the creative process, the life and loves of artists, and the New York art scene, Gasoline confirms Quim Monzó as the foremost Catalan writer of his generation.

Season Of Ash

The Soviet biologist Irina Granina has experienced the worst of Communism, struggling to free her husband from the gulag for years. Following the rise of Gorbachev, her husband finally emerges a changed man, but then Irina is forced to witness the worst of capitalism, as her daughter Oksana disappears into the newly rapacious consumer society and she loses her husband again, this time to greed and a lust for power.

In the West, Jennifer Moore, the scion of blue-blooded American wealth, takes a high-ranking job at the International Monetary Fund, where she hopes to bring the tough love of the free market economy to the unenlightened masses the world over. But she also has to deal with a philandering husband, Jack Wells, whose pharmaceutical company is a market wonder built on a house of cards, and her sister Allison, a free-spirited anti-globalization activist.

Jorge Volpi's Season of Ash puts a human face on earth-shaking events of the late twentieth century: the Chernobyl disaster, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of Soviet communism and the rise of the Russian oligarchs, the cascading collapsing of developing economies, and the near-miraculous scientific advances of the Human Genome Project. A scientific investigation, a journalistic exposé, a detective novel, and a dark love story, Season of Ash is a thrilling exploration of greed and disillusionment, and a clear-eyed examination of the passions that rule our lives and make history.

The Pets

Back in Reykjavik after a vacation in London, Emil Halldorsson is waiting for a call from a beautiful girl, Greta, that he met on the plane ride home, and he’s just put on a pot of coffee when an unexpected visitor knocks on the door. Peeking through a window, Emil spies an erstwhile friend—Havard Knutsson, his one-time roommate and current resident of a Swedish mental institution—on his doorstep, and he panics, taking refuge under his bed and hoping the frightful nuisance will simply go away.

Havard won’t be so easily put off, however, and he breaks into Emil’s apartment and decides to wait for his return—Emil couldn’t have gone far; the pot of coffee is still warming on the stove. While Emil hides under his bed, increasingly unable to show himself with each passing moment, Havard discovers the booze, and he ends up hosting a bizarre party for Emil's friends, and Greta.

An alternately dark and hilarious story of cowardice, comeuppance, and assumed identity, the breezy and straightforward style of The Pets belies its narrative depth, and disguises a complexity that grows with every page.

Death In Spring

Considered by many to be the grand achievement of her later period, Death in Spring is one of Mercè Rodoreda's most complex and beautifully constructed works. The novel tells the story of the bizarre and destructive customs of a nameless town—burying the dead in trees after filling their mouths with cement to prevent their soul from escaping, or sending a man to swim in the river that courses underneath the town to discover if they will be washed away by a flood—through the eyes of a fourteen-year-old boy who must come to terms with the rhyme and reason of this ritual violence, and with his wild, child-like, and teenaged stepmother, who becomes his playmate. It is through these rituals, and the developing relationships between the boy and the townspeople, that Rodoreda portrays a fully-articulated, though quite disturbing, society.

The horrific rituals, however, stand in stark contrast to the novel’s stunningly poetic language and lush descriptions. Written over a period of twenty years—after Rodoreda was forced into exile following the Spanish Civi War—Death in Spring is musical and rhythmic, and truly the work of a writer at the height of her powers.

A book for the ages, Death in Spring can be read as a metaphor for Franco's Spain (or any oppressed society), or as a mythological quest novel. Similar to Shirley Jackson’s work (especially The Lottery), and featuring the imaginative qualities of Raymond Roussel’s Impressions of Africa, Rodoreda’s last novel is a bold, ambitious statement, and a fitting capstone to her remarkable career.

Landscape In Concrete

Sergeant Gauthier Bachmann is the perfect Nazi soldier. But after a horrifying defeat at Voroshenko, where most of his Eighth Hessian Infantry Regiment was slaughtered in a single instant, Bachmann was declared mentally unfit to serve. Incapable of accepting this judgment, and of returning to his girlfriend and a quiet life as a gold- and silversmith, Bachmann wanders the war-ravaged countryside, trying to find a way to rejoin his regiment, or any regiment, and return to the front.

While trying to find his regiment and come to terms with the horrors he has seen and committed, the increasingly unstable Bachmann is manipulated by a series of figures from the underbelly of war’s underbelly—deserters and collaborators, corrupt officers and sexual predators—who induce him to carry out their venal missions, which they’ve justified against the background of institutionalized murder going on all around them.

Containing dark echoes of Jaroslav Hašek's The Good Soldier Švejk, Jakov Lind's Landscape in Concrete is an "astonishing and highly original imagining of (the) dimensions of evil including sadistic cruelty, of the condition of being a victim and the madness abroad which constitutes the virtual victory of Hitler if we fail to translate survival into freedom" (Anthony Rudolf).

The North Of God

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The Death Of The Author

Part murder mystery and all jet-black satire, and based on a real life scandal, this edgy novella tells the story of Léopold Sfax, world-renowned as the creator of "The Theory"—a bizarre literary theory that grew from an intellectual folly to a dominant school of criticism that enslaved college campuses across the country.

However, The Theory, which holds that the text of any piece of writing tells us all that we need to know about its author (as if the author himself is "dead") takes on extra perversity when the revered—or is it feared?—Sfax is found to have once written something that seems...well, murderously revealing.

In the hands of Gilbert Adair, it's a dexterously wrought and hysterically devilish look at academic cultishness. It's also a taut metaphysical murder mystery that confounds the reader's expectations on almost every page and reserves its most stunning surprise—the ultimate whodunit twist—for the very last page.

"Funny, gripping, and very clever... A brilliant black satire on cultural cultishness... It also works brilliantly as a detective story with apparently motiveless murders."

—Philip Howard, The Times

Benito Cereno

With its intense mix of mystery, adventure, and a surprise ending, Benito Cereno at first seems merely a provocative example from the genre Herman Melville created with his early best-selling novels of the sea. However, most Melville scholars consider it his most sophisticated work, and many, such as novelist Ralph Ellison, have hailed it as the most piercing look at slavery in all of American literature.

Based on a real life incident—the character names remain unchanged—Benito Cereno tells what happens when an American merchant ship comes upon a mysterious Spanish ship where the nearly all-black crew and their white captain are starving and yet hostile to offers of help. Melville's most focused political work, it is rife with allusions (a ship named after Santo Domingo, site of the slave revolt led by Toussaint L'Ouverture), analogies (does the good-hearted yet obtuse American captain refer to the American character itself?), and mirroring images that deepen our reflections on human oppression and its resultant depravities.

It is, in short, a multi-layered masterpiece that rewards repeated readings, and deepens our appreciation of Melville's genius.

What's Wrong With Anzac? The Militarisation Of Australian History

In recent years Anzac – an idea as much as an actual army corps – has become the dominant force within Australian history, overshadowing everything else. The commemoration of Anzac Day is bigger than ever, while Remembrance Day, VE Day, VP Day and other military anniversaries grow in significance each year. Pilgrimages to Gallipoli, the Somme and Kokoda are commonplace and popular military history dominates the bestseller lists. Anzac has seemingly become a sacred, untouchable element of the nation. In this brave and controversial book, some of Australia’s leading historians dare to criticise Anzac. They show that the Anzac obsession distorts the rest of Australia’s history. They investigate official sponsorship of Anzac through commemoration and education and show that this has mobilised it as a conservative force, often for political ends. Finally—and perhaps most devastatingly—they ask whether the grief and loss associated with bloodshed on foreign shores was all worth it.

Roadside Dog

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Fear Factor

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Curved Planks Poems

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Grendel

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I Was Behind You

Here is a story of self-discovery, entering adulthood and freeing oneself. The tone is sarcastic, lucid, cruel yet realistic. On a background of R&B and electronic music, Nicolas Fargues gives us an impressive and subtle account of gender relations and examining the choices one has made in the past.

"Ero dietro di te: you know what that means in English? It means I was behind you. She was actually sitting at a table behind us for the entire meal and she spent the whole time watching me without me realising. It’s funny, but I’m starting to think that it wouldn’t be stretching it to read something really symbolic into that phrase. It could also mean: “For all this time, all these years, I’ve been right behind you, as close as can be, and you didn’t notice me. It’s obvious you and I were meant to be together, but we screwed it up every time. Still, I’m right here, right now, and I want you to know it, the ball’s in your court, you won’t be able to say no one told you and complain you let the chance of a lifetime slip through your fingers.” See what I mean?"

Jakob Von Gunten

The Swiss writer Robert Walser is one of the quiet geniuses of twentieth-century literature. Largely self-taught and altogether indifferent to worldly success, Walser wrote a range of short stories, essays, as well as four novels, of which "Jakob von Gunten" is widely recognized as the finest. The book is a young man's inquisitive and irreverent account of life in what turns out to be the most uncanny of schools. It is the work of an outsider artist, a writer of uncompromising originality and disconcerting humor, whose beautiful sentences have the simplicity and strangeness of a painting by Henri Rousseau.

The Death Of Ivan Ilych

Written eight years after the publication of Anna Karenina—a time during which, despite the global success of his novels, Leo Tolstoy renounced fiction in favor of religious and philosophical tracts—THE DEATH OF IVAN ILYCH represents perhaps the most keenly realized melding of Tolstoy’s spirituality with his artistic skills.

Here in a vibrant new translation, the tale of a judge who slowly comes to understand that his illness is fatal was inspired by Tolstoy’s observation at his local train station of hundreds of shackled prisoners being sent off to Siberia, many for petty crimes. When he learned that the sentencing judge had died, Tolstoy was roused to consider the judge’s thoughts during his final days—a study on the acceptance of mortality only deepened by the death, during its writing, of one of Tolstoy’s own young children.

The final result is a magisterial story, both chilling and beguiling in the fullness of its empathy, its quotidian detail, and the beauty of its prose, and is, as many have claimed it to be, one of the most moving novellas ever written.

Freya Of The Seven Isles

This little-known novella from one of the masters of the form is so unusual for Joseph Conrad's work in several respects, although not in its exotic maritime setting or its even more exotic prose—it is unusual in that it is one of his very few works to feature a woman as a leading character, and to take the form of a romance.

Still, it's a Conradian romance: a sweeping saga set in the Indian Ocean basin, against a turbulent background of barely suppressed hostilities between Dutch and British merchant navies, told by one of Conrad's classically detached narrators. In the end, the unique perspective of the sharply etched character of Freya is one of Conrad's most piercing studies of how the lust for power can drive men to greatness—or its opposite.

Pathseeker

From the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature for “writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history.”

The acclaimed Hungarian Holocaust survivor Imre Kertész continues his investigation of the malignant methodologies of totalitarianism in a major work of fiction.

In a mysterious middle–European country, a man identified only as “the commissioner” undertakes what seems to be a banal trip to a nondescript town with his wife—a brief detour on the way to a holiday at the seaside—that turns into something ominous. Something terrible has happened in the town, something that no one wants to discuss. With his wife watching on fearfully, he commences a perverse investigation, rudely interrogating the locals, inspecting a local landmark with a frightening intensity, traveling to an outlying factory where he confronts the proprietors ... and slowly revealing a past he's been trying to suppress.

In a limpid translation by Tim Wilkinson, this haunting tale lays bare an emotional and psychological landscape ravaged by totalitarianism in one of Kertész's most devastating examinations of the responsibilities of and for the Holocaust.

Private Lives Of Trees

The Private Lives of Trees tells the story of a single night: a young professor of literature named Julián is reading to his step-daughter Daniela and nervously waiting for his wife Verónica to return from her art class. Each night, Julián has been improvising a story about trees to tell Daniela before she goes to sleep, and each Sunday he works on a novel about a man tending to his bonsai, but something about this night is different. As Julián becomes increasing concerned that Verónica won’t return, he reflects on their life together in minute detail, and imagines what Daniela—at twenty, at twenty-five, at thirty years old, without a mother—will think of his novel.

Perhaps even more daring and dizzying than Zambra’s magical Bonsai, The Private Lives of Trees demands to be read in a single sitting, and it casts a spell that will bring you back to it again and again.